Gender Readings. Top Ten. Ренц Т.Г - 47 стр.

  5          LAURIE COLWIN
             MR PARKER

       Mrs Parker died suddenly in October. She and Mr Parker 1ived
in a Victorian house next to ours, and Mr Parker was my piano
teacher. He commuted to Wall Street, where he was a securities ana-
lyst, but he had studied at Juilliard and gave lessons on the side — for
the pleasure of it, not for money. His only students were me and the
church organist, who was learning technique în a double-keyboard
harpsichord Mr Parker had built one spring.
       Mrs Parker was known for her pastry; she and my mother
were friends, after a fashion. Every two months or so they spent a day
together in the kitchen baking butter cookies and cream puffs, or
rolling out strudel leaves. She was thin and wispy, and turned out her
pastry with abstract expertness. As a girl, she had had bright-red hair,
which was now the colour of old leaves. There was something smoky
and autumnal about her: she wore rust-coloured sweaters and heather-
coloured skirts, and kept dried weeds in ornamental jars and pressed
flowers in frames. If you borrowed a book from her, there were petal
marks on the back pages. She was tall, but she stooped as if she had
spent a lifetime looking for something she had dropped.
       The word “tragic” was mentioned in connection with her death.
She and Mr Parker were in the middle of their middle age, and
neither of them had ever been seriously ill. It was heart failure, and
unexpected. My parents went to see Mr Parker as soon as they got the
news, since they took their responsibilities as neighbours seriously,
and two days later they took me to pay a formal condolence call. It was
Indian summer, and the house felt closed in. They had used the
fireplace during a recent cold spell, and the living-room smelled faint-
ly of ash. The only people from the community were some neigh-
bours, the minister and his wife, and the rabbi and his wife and son.
The Parkers were Episcopalian, but Mr Parker played the organ in
the synagogue on Saturday mornings and on High Holy Days. There
was a large urn of tea, and the last of Mrs Parker’s strudel. On the sofa
were Mrs Parker’s sisters, and a man who looked like Mr Parker ten
years younger leaned against the piano, which was closed. The con-
versation was hushed and stilted. On the way out the rabbi’s son tried

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