Father Divine's Bikes by Steve Bassett

Author:Steve Bassett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2018-02-22T13:26:41+00:00

It pained Margaret that she didn’t photograph well. Besides her wedding portrait with Walter, there were few photos of her around the house. Instead there were two large paintings, one in a dominant position at the end of the entrance hall, and the other over the fireplace in the living room.

Each was a gift, actually a payment of sorts, from an artist friend of the family who had been down on his luck during the Depression, and had asked Margaret to model for two of his commercial art commissions.

She got to keep the originals.

Visitors entering the Spratlin home were treated to a brown-haired, bare-shouldered beauty in a satin burgundy nightgown who gazed from her bedroom window at a rolling green landscape. The soap people liked it so well, they used it to kick-off a three month nationwide magazine advertising assault for their new product, LUSH.

Above the living room fireplace was the second portrait of a disheveled beautiful woman sitting up in her rumpled bed. Snowflakes could be seen falling outside the bedroom window. This was the image that the Radiance Corporation hoped would entice well-heeled prospects to purchase their heating system.

Walter and Margaret got a big kick when friends began mailing them the magazine ads. Margaret kept two of them under the glass top of her dressing room table. They were the first things to catch Commander Jacob Feinberg’s eye after he and Margaret completed their first sexual bout. They agreed it was a draw, with each of them giving and taking as much as the other. To her surprise, there was no remorse or shame, only a sense of well-earned satisfaction. After all, it had been more than a year since Walter had left for the Pacific.

Billy could hear the soft sound of his mother’s bedroom slippers as she glided toward him across the kitchen floor. He braced himself for what he knew was coming. His mother reached the sink just as he was turning off the water and reaching for a towel.

He did not want his mother’s attention.

Billy had known about the Navy commander and his Pontiac staff car for some time. His initial reaction to the first night, the night he couldn’t force himself up the stairs to see for sure, was self-pity.

He had returned to his room and sobbed into the early morning hours. He wished his grandmother had been there to hold him.

His pity gave way to rage. He thought of killing them both. He would then write to his father. Tell him that everything was okay. That they could begin fresh—father, son, and grandmother.

Why was his mother doing it? This question tortured him for weeks. It was his grandmother who flushed out the answer, the morning after she came home unexpected from New York and surprised the lovers in bed.

That Saturday, Sylvia and Eugenie Kerrigan, a Bryn Mawr classmate and her best friend, had gone to New York for the opening of an off-Broadway comedy. The show was feeble and they left after the first act.

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