Three Short Novels by Gina Berriault Page A

birds except they’ve all got feathers and go peep-peep. Go on and tell me about them. Because birds are the greatest miracle. God really outdid Himself when He made a bird. Say you and I were God, could we think up something like a bird? Never in a million years. It took God to think them up, and even for Him it was something. You go on, tell me more about birds.”
    â€œIt says about migration,” he began again, “that millions of them never get there, where they’re going. It says it’s really a big risk to a bird, the biggest risk in his life. It says that hundreds of millions of them never get there.”
    â€œIsn’t that funny? I thought they all made it,” she said.
    For a time he read to her about the perils of migration. She recrossed her ankles, while she listened, observing the arches of her bare feet. Then, because she heard a murmur of voices in the glassed-in porch below, where the bank manager and his wife slept, and knew that the rest would be coming up the stairs and that only a short time was left her in her son’s room, she lost her feigned reverence for birds. “Listen, Davy baby,” she began. “I don’t want you to get vain about being a good dancer or looking like the great lover Gable just becauseyou stirred up those women down there. You’re neither. You want to know what it is?” She tilted her head back, lifting her gaze to the ceiling. “It’s your youth. It’s because you’re so young, baby.” She laughed. “You look at them as if you’re seeing women for the first time, and what it does to them is make them feel they’re being seen for the first time by any man. You make them feel fabulous—oh, as if they’ve got a thousand secrets they could tell you.” She laughed again, still toward the ceiling. “You know what Russell is going to say? When everybody is asleep, he’ll say in a whisper, he’ll say, ‘Davy got out of hand tonight, didn’t he? Those women will be creeping around the house all night long.’ ” She brought her gaze down, a humorously warning gaze. “You want to put a chair against your door?”
    She saw in his expressionless face that he did not want to understand her joke. He did not want to suspect that she had come up the stairs and away from the others not to tell him about the other women but to tell him, by her presence, that nobody else could claim his enticing youth except herself, if it were to be claimed at all. He was her son; she had given him his life and his youth, his present and his future, his elusiveness, and, by telling him she knew his effect upon the other women, she was reminding him of her claim to him, if she had a claim. “Go on,” she said, settling farther into her chair. “Read to me, read to me.”
    She heard Duggan and his wife come up the stairs and enter their bedroom quietly, while the murmuring below was borne out on the still air into the dark yard. After a time she heard Russell come up. Then the murmuring ceased and the house was silent. David read to her for a while longer and when he was tired of reading she told him to turn off the light, and she sat in darkness, reluctant to go to her husband, to lie down beside him. She was struck by the years of her accumulated contempt for her husband as by an unexpected blow to her body. Their voices muted by the darkness, she and her son talked together, finding inconsequentialthings to talk about. He told her about a boy he had made friends with a few days before and how far around the lake they went with the boy’s uncle in his motorboat, and as he talked she listened more to the sound of his voice than to the words, feeling the sound of his young voice, his faltering, low, slightly hoarse voice reverberate in her body.
    Her husband was sitting on the bed in the darkness. The light from the hallway, as she opened the door, revealed him half