Bread Upon the Waters by Irwin Shaw

Author:Irwin Shaw
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Contemporary Fiction, Psychological Thrillers, Maraya21, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9781480413313
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Strand’s hand trembled and he stopped writing and stared at the last paragraph. His usual neat handwriting had suddenly degenerated into an almost unreadable scrawl. He put the pen down and pushed away from the desk. Time, he realized, had not immunized him against the almost intolerable rage that had first swept over him in the hospital corridor when Hazen had told him about Caroline’s confession to Dr. Laird.

Jimmy would say he was overreacting. Parents are made to overreact. He stood up and went to the French door that opened onto the garden. He went out and breathed deeply, trying to calm himself, taking in great gulps of the fragrant night air. He wished he had had the foresight to buy himself a bottle of whiskey.

He looked up at the sky. The stars in the pure darkness above him were bright. A crescent moon was rising and the old trees at the bottom of the garden, their foliage rustling in the light breeze, cast flickering shadows on the dew-damp lawn. If I can forget the past, he thought, or at least manage it, I can be happy in this gentle place.

The next morning he woke early enough to have breakfast in the dining room at the main hall with the rest of the faculty, but he didn’t want to try fitting half a hundred faces to the names he had heard the evening before. He walked into town, enjoying the freshness of the morning and the sight of children playing with dogs on the lawns of the neat houses he passed on the way. He bought a copy of The New York Times, but a glance at the headlines made him fold the paper and keep it for later reading. The morning, with its sunshine and nature’s profligate promise of hope, was no time for this year’s news. The evening, with the melancholy of growing darkness and its hint of mortality and endings, was more suitable for the reports from Washington, Iran, Moscow, Jerusalem, and the southern hemisphere.

When he got back to the Malson Residence, trying to curb his natural fast lope out of deference to Dr. Prinz’s advice, he found a huge black man sitting on the front steps. The man—no, he thought, he couldn’t be more than eighteen, despite his size—stood up politely. “Mr. Strand?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m Alexander Rollins,” the boy said. “I’m assigned to this house.”

They shook hands and Rollins smiled shyly. “I’m on the football team and I’ve been sleeping in the Worthington Dormitory with the rest of the team, but I thought, if you didn’t mind, I’d move in a day earlier. It gets pretty riotous on moving day, they tell me, with mamas and papas messing around and all.” He had a rich, slurry voice and a proper New England enunciation and it occurred to Strand that perhaps he should be encouraged to take up singing seriously. He would tell Leslie about him.

“Of course,” Strand said. “You’re in room number three on the top floor.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.