The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

his head. “Be logical. Saved it from what? Saved itfrom going toward the mortgage for the house you live in? Saved it from going to pay our taxes?”

“Now, if you could bring your brothers to Rome with you, that might be a different story,” her mother said.

Her father cracked the spine of the sports section and folded it back. “Now,” he asked Jane brightly, “how about those Bills?”

This was the line her father used to declare a conversation over, that it would be tawdry and dark-minded to continue it.The Bills had won their first four games of the season, and the division title was plausible, her father pointed out. O. J.Simpson had run eighty-eight yards in one go, in the game against Pittsburgh. The Juice. O.J. was something good, someonethey could all agree on.

Jane knew her father would relent eventually. She could make him. He was a certified public accountant, an orderly and logical man, attentive to numbers, stats, formulae. Watching sports suited him because he seemed to approach it like a monthslong word problem. On the day of the home game against the Broncos, if O. J. Simpson misses his train out of Syracuse and has to run all the way to Buffalo, what pace per mile would he have to maintain— Her father struck Jane as a person who had freed himself from interiority, from psychology and foibles and God; he believedin his platitudes, took them literally, and his life was simpler and better for it. He edited out choice wherever possible,a tendency he had in common with Jane. He built his cell. His need for order and logic in his day-to-day life would be thwartedby the fury of Jane and the Rome trip, fury for days, his youngest and most obedient child, the one who helped around thehouse without complaint or prompting, the one who always agreed. She wept for hours from the moment she arrived home fromschool in the afternoons, so violently she choked on her own spit. One vessel in her eye broke the surface, then another,each the width and color of the little red string on a Band-Aid. She flung herself against walls and onto linoleum. She bitthe backs of her wrists and scratched at her forearms and yanked at her hair.

“Stop acting!” Jane’s mother shrieked at the height of these fits, fleeing into another room. The admonition further incensed Jane forbeing correct, because she did feel an actorly distance from her tantrums; she hesitated, measuring arcs and wingspans, beforeshe threw her books against the wall; her fingernails raised red runes on her forearms that flattened and faded after a quickshower. Even in the fullest grip of her saintly convulsions, Jane felt more pity for her mother than righteous, levitatingrage. Pity or resentment. How fiercely Jane resented her now, how desperately she wished she could bite down hard enough onher arm to drain the resentment forever, to burst it open with the sweet pain of God. Because God could see all the way insideher mother.

God could also see all the way inside Jane’s resentment. Sometimes she thinks he can even now.

 

So Jane fought and cried until her candy tins were handed back to her. First time on an airplane, first time in a hotel. Shesigned up to room with Elise Davis, pale-freckled and dun-haired, scholarly and sarcastic. Assiduously Catholic. A girl whobased her constantly exercised moral judgments on a bedrock of rueful compassion. Jane suspected that her own life would beeasier if Elise were her best friend and thus her steadiest influence, if she could mold her opinions and the management ofher time solely according to Elise’s preferences, even if Jane herself was too high-strung and daydreamy, too often half swooningunder the spell of devotion and semistarvation, to lock perfectly into Elise’s orbit of scholar-athletes: Christy Torres,who had regional honors in both violin and chess; Sonja Spiegelman, the only girl on the Mathletes team and the only cross-countryrunner with a shot at qualifying for States; Geeta Banerjee, a varsity gymnast who was already taking premed classes at thelocal Jesuit college. Jane made straight As, but generic ones, Regents and the occasional AP. It seemed cosmically unfairthat Jane was ranked fifth in their class, right behind Geeta, who should have been valedictorian but who had tanked her GPAas a junior when she tried to take calculus and AP Physics a year early, at the same time.

“I don’t really know how they calculate the rankings, but you shouldn’t be punished for having ambition,” Jane remarked toher mother. She was surprised by her ranking and happy with it, and hoped her mother would be, too.

“That Geeta—what is she?” Jane’s mother asked, not for the first time.

“Geeta is Geeta,” Jane replied, as she had before.

“But where is she from?” Jane’s mother asked.

“She was born at Children’s Hospital, like me,” Jane replied.

“You know what I mean,” Jane’s mother said. “Where did your other friends land?”

“Elise, Christy, and Sonja went one-two-three,” Jane said.

“That Sonja,” her mother said. “She is so Jewish-looking.” She had said this before.

“Whatever that means,” Jane replied. As she always did.

“Well, not all of them look like it,” her mother said. “You don’t always know for sure.”

Jane was puzzled yet again by her own habit of trying to chat with her mother about her friends.

Although Jane often joined Elise’s Friday-night homework parties and tagged along to cheer Geeta and Sonja at their competitions,the people with whom Jane spent the most time were children. The children she babysat were why she made it to Rome. The Vinegirls, those sweet sparrows. Jane fantasized about living with the Vines, sleeping on the gold couch beneath the skylight.She could be their governess, swooshing around them in hoop skirts, running conjugation drills in multiple European languages.

The children were why she made it to Santa Maria della Vittoria, where the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa hung too high in a chapel shrine for Jane to see it closely. Jane logged her disappointment as a minor entry in that day’scatalog of saintly pain.