Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [38]
But the house with its bay windows and beveled corners and three dormers loomed out of the yard like a ship. The rolled awnings were lashed to the windows. He stood on the sidewalk in the morning of a brilliant November day. The fallen leaves were covered with frost and lay like lapping waves about the house. The wind blew. He had come back with a slight limp. He thought about preparing his homecoming lecture for the New York Explorers Club. He found he preferred to sit in the parlor, his feet near a small electric heater. Everyone in the family treated him like a convalescent. His son brought him beef tea. The boy had grown taller. He had lost some of his fat. He was becoming competent and useful. He intelligently discussed Halley’s Comet. Father felt childlike beside him.
In the paper was the news of Teddy Roosevelt’s African safari. The great conservationist had bagged seventeen lions, eleven elephants, twenty-one rhinos, eight hippos, nine giraffes, forty-seven gazelles, twenty-nine zebras, and kudu, wildebeest, impala, eland, waterbuck, wart hog and bushbuck, beyond number.
As for the business during Father’s absence, it seemed to have got on well. Mother could now speak crisply of such matters as unit cost, inventory and advertising. She had assumed executive responsibilities. She had made changes in certain billing procedures and contracted with four new sales agents in California and Oregon. Everything she had done stood up under his examination. He was astounded. On Mother’s bedside table was a volume entitled The Ladies’ Battle by Molly Elliot Seawell. He found also a pamphlet on the subject of family limitation and the author was Emma Goldman, the anarchist revolutionary. Down in the shop, under a translucent window, he discovered his brother-in-law hunched over a drawing table. Mother’s Younger Brother was losing his blond hair. He was pale, and thin, and more uncommunicative than ever. Most remarkable was the time he now spent at work, twelve and fifteen hours a day. He had taken for his province the fireworks division of the business and had designed dozens of new rockets, firewheels, and an unusual firecracker packed not cylindrically but in a spherical container. With its fuse looking like a stem it was named a Cherry Bomb. The two men went one morning to Younger Brother’s testing ground at the end of the trolley line, in the salt marshes. They wore heavy black coats and bowlers. Father stood on a slight rise at the edge of the tall grass. On a dried mud flat fifty yards away Younger Brother bent down and prepared his demonstration. He had arranged with Father that the first combustion would be that of the standard firecracker and the second of the cherry bomb design. He suddenly stood up, held one arm aloft and backed away a few paces. Father heard the faint pop of the firecracker after he saw a wisp of smoke erased by the wind. Younger Brother now moved forward again, bent down and backed away, this time more quickly. He held up two arms. An explosion then occurred like a bomb. Sea gulls were suddenly wheeling through the air and Father felt the after-concussion as a ringing in his ears. He was quite alarmed. When Younger Brother rejoined him, his face was flushed and his eyes glistened. Father suggested that perhaps the charge was too powerful and might do injury. I don’t want