Eighth Day, The by Wilder Thornton

Author:Wilder, Thornton [Wilder, Thornton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, Fiction, Novel
ISBN: 9780060088910
Google: E9NwMW8DikIC
Amazon: 0060088915
Barnesnoble: 0060088915
Goodreads: 126630
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Published: 1967-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

There was a knock at the door. The Maestro was called to the telephone. Roger turned his back on the objects and went to the window—the lights of the city. He said to himself, “He’s missed something. He’s forgotten something. I’ll find it. I must find it.”

On Sundays Roger called for his sister at the church where she had been singing. They had dinner together at the Alt-Heidelberg restaurant and spent the rest of the afternoon in the country with little Giovannino, who, by July at nine months, was on the threshold of walking and of talking Italian. He lived in a household of adoring women and took to his uncle with clamorous delight. He seemed to have the idea that only a man could teach a man to walk. He crawled ten miles a day and was becoming thoroughly impatient with it.

Sunday dinners at the Alt-Heidelberg (June, 1905):

“My clothes? I’m a pirate. There’s a girl at the club who sells them at Towne and Carruther’s. I go into her department and try on a lot of dresses. She pretends she doesn’t know me and says, ‘Yes, madam’ or ‘No, madam.’ And I steal the ideas and we make them at home. The materials are awfully expensive, but we know where to get mill ends. We have lots of fun. We help all the girls in the club dress and they help us. Roger, a girl alone has to be awfully bright just to live.” (Roger wrote a “pudding” called “Take a Letter, Miss Spencer.”)

“Roger, sometimes I think I’ll go crazy because I don’t know anything. I want to learn every language in the world. I want to know how women thought a thousand years ago—and what electricity is and how the telephone works—and about money and banks. I don’t understand why Papa never thought about better schools for us. All sorts of people ask me to tea and dinner, but I tell them I have a sore throat. I stay home and read. Even when we’re making dresses one of the girls reads aloud to us. Last night there were eight of us working until midnight. We were all crowded together in my tiny room and we took turns reading an English lady’s Letters from Turkey. What do you read?”

Another Sunday (July):

“Oh, yes, I’ll sing opera, but I won’t really like it. Most of the heroines in opera are such geese. I’m really a concert singer and an oratorio singer. But I’ll sing opera to make money.”

“You could make enough money singing what you want to. Why should you make more?”

Lily looked up at him in surprise. “Why, for my children.”

“Your husband would support your children, wouldn’t he?”

“Roger! Roger! Don’t talk to me about husbands! I’m going to have a dozen children and I’m going to love every one of their fathers, but I’m never going to be married to anyone. Marriage is a worn-out old custom like owning slaves or adoring royal families. I believe that there won’t be any marriages in a hundred years.

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