The Magnificent Ambersons - Booth Tarkington (top novels of all time TXT) 📗

what the doctors wanted him to, I wasn’t able to back up brother George as I should in his difficulty with Sydney and Amelia. I’m so sorry! George is more upset than I’ve ever seen him⁠—they’ve got what they wanted, and they’re sailing before long, I hear, to live in Florence. Father said he couldn’t stand the constant persuading⁠—I’m afraid the word he used was “nagging.” I can’t understand people behaving like that. George says they may be Ambersons, but they’re vulgar! I’m afraid I almost agree with him. At least, I think they were inconsiderate. But I don’t see why I’m unburdening myself of all this to you, poor darling! We’ll have forgotten all about it long before you come home for the holidays, and it should mean little or nothing to you, anyway. Forget that I’ve been so foolish!

Your father is waiting for me to take a walk with him⁠—that’s a splendid sign, because he hasn’t felt he could walk much, at home, lately. I mustn’t keep him waiting. Be careful to wear your mackintosh and rubbers in rainy weather, and, as soon as it begins to get colder, your ulster. Wish you could see your father now. Looks so much better! We plan to stay six weeks if the place agrees with him. It does really seem to already! He’s just called in the door to say he’s waiting. Don’t smoke too much, darling boy.

Devotedly, your mother

Isabel.

But she did not keep her husband there for the six weeks she anticipated. She did not keep him anywhere that long. Three weeks after writing this letter, she telegraphed suddenly to George that they were leaving for home at once; and four days later, when he and a friend came whistling into his study, from lunch at the club, he found another telegram upon his desk.

He read it twice before he comprehended its import.

Papa left us at ten this morning, dearest.

Mother.

The friend saw the change in his face. “Not bad news?”

George lifted utterly dumbfounded eyes from the yellow paper.

“My father,” he said weakly. “She says⁠—she says he’s dead. I’ve got to go home.”

… His Uncle George and the Major met him at the station when he arrived⁠—the first time the Major had ever come to meet his grandson. The old gentleman sat in his closed carriage (which still needed paint) at the entrance to the station, but he got out and advanced to grasp George’s hand tremulously, when the latter appeared. “Poor fellow!” he said, and patted him repeatedly upon the shoulder. “Poor fellow! Poor Georgie!”

George had not yet come to a full realization of his loss: so far, his condition was merely dazed; and as the Major continued to pat him, murmuring “Poor fellow!” over and over, George was seized by an almost irresistible impulse to tell his grandfather that he was not a poodle. But he said “Thanks,” in a low voice, and got into the carriage, his two relatives following with deferential sympathy. He noticed that the Major’s tremulousness did not disappear, as they drove up the street, and that he seemed much feebler than during the summer. Principally, however, George was concerned with his own emotion, or rather, with his lack of emotion; and the anxious sympathy of his grandfather and his uncle made him feel hypocritical. He was not grief-stricken; but he felt that he ought to be, and, with a secret shame, concealed his callousness beneath an affectation of solemnity.

But when he was taken into the room where lay what was left of Wilbur Minafer, George had no longer to pretend; his grief was sufficient. It needed only the sight of that forever inert semblance of the quiet man who had been always so quiet a part of his son’s life⁠—so quiet a part that George had seldom been consciously aware that his father was indeed a part of his life. As the figure lay there, its very quietness was what was most lifelike; and suddenly it struck George hard. And in that unexpected, racking grief of his son, Wilbur Minafer became more vividly George’s father than he had ever been in life.

When George left the room, his arm was about his black-robed mother, his shoulders were still shaken with sobs. He leaned upon his mother; she gently comforted him; and presently he recovered his composure and became self-conscious enough to wonder if he had not been making an unmanly display of himself. “I’m all right again, mother,” he said awkwardly. “Don’t worry about me: you’d better go lie down, or something; you look pretty pale.”

Isabel did look pretty pale, but not ghastly pale, as Fanny did. Fanny’s grief was overwhelming; she stayed in her room, and George did not see her until the next day, a few minutes before the funeral, when her haggard face appalled him. But by this time he was quite himself again, and during the short service in the cemetery his thoughts even wandered so far as to permit him a feeling of regret not directly connected with his father. Beyond the open flower-walled grave was a mound where new grass grew; and here lay his great-uncle, old John Minafer, who had died the previous autumn; and beyond this were the graves of George’s grandfather and grandmother Minafer, and of his grandfather Minafer’s second wife, and her three sons, George’s half-uncles, who had been drowned together in a canoe accident when George was a child⁠—Fanny was the last of the family. Next beyond was the Amberson family lot, where lay the Major’s wife and their sons Henry and Milton, uncles whom George dimly remembered; and beside them lay Isabel’s older sister, his Aunt Estelle, who had died, in her girlhood, long before George was born. The Minafer monument was a granite block, with the name chiseled upon its one polished side, and the Amberson monument was a white marble shaft taller than any other in that neighbourhood. But farther on there was a newer section