Fresno Stories by William Saroyan

Author:William Saroyan
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780811226509
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2016-03-31T04:30:00+00:00

THE INSCRIBED COPY OF THE

KREUTZER SONATA

GASPAR BASHMANIAN, who understood the enormity and majesty of the human experience, who loved children (the human race of tomorrow, he called them), suddenly became engaged to a girl of seventeen who lived on a muscat vineyard in Reedley with her father and mother, the Apkar Apkarians. These good people threw a great party in honor of the groom-to-be, Gaspar the gentleman, Gaspar the reader of Tolstoy, Gaspar the twenty-seven-year-old philosopher and personal friend of trees.

And everybody was invited.

By horse and buggy, by Ford and Chevrolet, by Dodge and Dort, and by Moon and Kissel Kar, the relatives of both sides began to arrive at the vineyard in Reedley, and I myself, twelve years old, riding with Gaspar in his Overland, arrived there too, just at dusk, at that most somber moment of the day.

And the first thing I heard was the laughter of an unseen girl, a laughter that made me believe everything was worthwhile. Gaspar sat behind the wheel of his open car and listened. The laughter came again, and all I knew was, I loved her, whoever she was, but Gaspar said, “Who is that laughing?”

“Some girl at the party,” I said.

“That kind of laughter is no good.”

“It sounds good.”

“It is the laughter of the animal.”

We heard the laughter again, and then from around the neat white farmhouse, where the lilac and rose trees stood together like ladies and gentlemen, came running a dark girl dressed all in white, still laughing, herself prettier than her laughter. Chasing the girl were three more girls of her own age, or perhaps a little older, in dresses of green, blue, and red, who were making the sign shame, shame, at her, scraping one forefinger upon the other.

“My God,” Gaspar said, and I thought he meant how beautiful, how charming, but he went on to say, “how vulgar.”

“Who is that girl in the white dress?” I asked God, or anybody.

“I don’t know,” Gaspar said, “but God help the man who marries her.”

Around the house they disappeared, and out of the house came Apkar Apkarian himself, straight to the car, straight to my uncle Gaspar. “Come, my son, come into the house,” he said. “What took you so long?”

“‘Slowly to the wedding, slowly to the grave,’” Gaspar said.

“The old sayings are wise sayings,” Apkar said, “but there may be sayings we have never heard and shall never hear that may be even wiser. ‘Swiftly to the wedding, swiftly away from the killer.’”

“Swiftly away from what killer?” Gaspar said.

“Loneliness, my boy,” Apkar said. “It is better to be in a lifelong fight with somebody one can see—one’s wife, one’s children—than to live in the empty peace of the killer who can never be seen. Come along, I’ll have her mother bring her to you.”

The parlor was a shambles of loud people drinking, singing, talking, and dancing, and after the cheers and the jeers—“Ah, why should you be so lucky, and I so unlucky?”—the girl’s father took Gaspar to a far room, followed by her mother, several very old men and women, and four or five boys and girls.

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.