THE POORHOUSE FAIR by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub

BUDDY, feeling jilted--especially so when, less than an hour after Conner left, sunlight drained it seemed forever from the windows of the cupola--became unable to bear his solitude, and started downstairs, in Conner's cold tracks. The twin had an unspoken terror of being alone, terror so keen that, abandoned, he unwillingly animated dead things --the green steel cabinets, the buried piano, the upright objects on Conner's desk top. These summoned presences intimidated him; he expected at every moment the window to smack its lips and the water cooler to gurgle uproariously. The stairs themselves had a dreadful capacity of closing, the walls meeting the instant before he gained the broad landing. The bannister uprights and their shadows rapidly criscrossed in a secret conversation that grew shriller as the speed of his descent increased. He broke into the open air of the porch flushed, under the eyes of several inmates, with the pink blank beauty of a Greek sculptor's boy.

Happily Conner was looking for him. His superior was walking down the porch, beside the receding bright-tagged chairs. "Buddy. Good. Are you busy?"

"I came down ... the soft drink truck might arrive. He came last year before noon."

"There's a diseased cat on the grounds. The thing's in pain and should be killed."

"You're sure?"

"That's a curious question; I'm fairly sure of what I see, yes." He glanced up nervously at the blackened half of the sky. "I'm going back up until noon."

To Buddy it seemed that today Conner was always escaping him. It was the work of the fair; the decrepits had everything their way today. He protested aloud, "What do these people want a holiday for, every day is a holiday for them?"

Conner didn't answer him, except by describing where last he had seen the animal, and the direction in which it had run.

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