The Son by Gina Berriault

Author:Gina Berriault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

13

In the summer of the third year of their marriage they bought an old, large house near Clearlake on four acres planted with fruit trees. They invited two and three couples for weekends and spent the time in boats on the lake, over elaborate breakfasts and buffet suppers, drinking at the bars to survey the patrons and reclining at home in the sun or under the trees if the sun was too hot.

David was off on his own all day. He was twelve, that year, and although she knew that his distance from them all was due, in part, to a dislike of their friends, it was also, she felt, a sullen and almost violent resistance to any tracing of him, either the tracing of him in his roaming during the day or of his present self into the past, as the eyes of their friends traced him into childhood, and as hers did, and Russell’s. They saw him cruising around on the lake with another boy in somebody else’s motorboat, or laughing with another boy as the two bailed out a dinghy, or they did not see him for an entire day. Sometimes he did not come in for meals and ate leftovers up in his room, wanting more privacy than was given him in the kitchen where the guests went in and out and tried to talk with him.

One night, however, he came to watch them dance in their bare feet in the parlor. He sat on a kitchen chair near the door, his arms crossed over his chest and his legs stretched out toward the dancers. The women tugged at his shirt to persuade him to dance with them, and one drew up another chair by his and stroked his hair and called him shy. When at last he danced with the woman, he danced without the hesitation and clumsiness and deafness to the beat of the music that were signs of shyness. He danced with the woman almost instructively, a glide of insinuation in his hips and a contempt and an urging of her in his gaze that he kept on her belly and legs.

The night was warm, the house warmer than the night, containing in all its rooms the heat from the day. The women wore no more than they had worn during the day, cotton shorts and halters. The woman he was dancing with, the wife of the bank manager, had loosened her high pile of red hair so that it fell in strands along each side of her face. That she was short and stocky, that her long hair and bare feet made her almost comically squat, she was apparently not aware. They danced a foot apart, each flattering the other, seductively, with every move. The days of his avoiding them, of crossing to the other side of the road, of eating alone in his room at night—all were cast off in an eruption of melancholy desire. His eyes appeared almost black, they

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