The Oasis: A Novel (Neversink) by Mccarthy Mary

Author:Mccarthy, Mary [Mccarthy, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612192291
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2013-06-11T04:00:00+00:00

Taub woke up the next morning in a singularly good mood. A strawberry picnic was planned for noon in the high meadow. A holiday had been declared from the fields, and the company was to spend the morning in the woods picking the small wild strawberries, and then converge at twelve on the meadow, where they grew in the greatest abundance, and with the sun-warmed flavor of wine. A prize would be awarded to the person with the fullest basket. The discovery of these little berries had been an event of the richest significance to Taub. He recalled having gathered such berries with his mother in the dark forests of the Carpathians, and his first instinctive reaction had been one of startled unbelief when one of the children had come running into the kitchen, where he was meditatively drying the dishes, with the news that there were strawberries in the woods. “Impossible!” he had exclaimed to Susan, but he had gone out to see for himself, and confronted with the tiny, half-ripe fruit, he had stood agog with the coincidence, turning a berry over and over doubtfully in his big fingers, like a jeweler appraising a diamond. The minuteness of the fruit and its rarity, together with the memory of himself, small and uniquely valued by the guardian presence of his mother, had struck him with awe and reverence. He felt his character soften and an unwonted tenderness invade him, as tactfully and even piously he wrapped the little fruit in his handkerchief to take home and show to his wife. A sense of restored continuity soothed his locative anxiety; Utopia appeared as the sequel to a story begun in his childhood, and the fact, which he slowly ascertained after many surreptitious woodland strolls, that the colony not only had these wild strawberries but had them in a greater plenitude than he had ever known in his homeland topped off nostalgic sentiment with the creamy self-satisfaction of the well-pleased entrepreneur.

The season being a tardy one, the fruit had reached its peak on this Fourth of July weekend. It had not rained for some days, so that the kitchen garden needed no weeding, and the berries were in perfect condition. In the main kitchen, Katy and Eleanor Macdermott were frying great pans full of chicken, and Nelly Boardman, the illustrator, was preparing a freezer of vanilla ice cream for Haines and the young veteran to crank. Taub and Cynthia, with their basket, set off rather late to the forest, arms interlinked, and leaning slightly on one another, with an air of mutual solicitude, like a fond elderly couple who have supported life’s trials together. The strawberries had drawn them closer; for Cynthia, too, they held memories of a lost idyllic period when, during a summer at Fontainebleau as a young lady, she would eat fraises des bois on a Sunday in an upper dining room of Lapérouse and dream of the career ahead of her in the great world of fashion.

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