переклад текста
Old Folks’ Christmas


Ring Lardner


Tom and Grace Carter sat in their living-room on Christmas Eve, sometimes talking, sometimes pretending to read and all the time thinking things they didn’t want to think.
Their two children, Junior, aged nineteen, and Grace, two years younger, had come home that day from their schools for the Christmas vacation.
Junior was in his first year at the university and Grace attending a boarding-school that would fit her for college.
I won’t call them Grace and Junior any more, though that is the way they had been christened.
Junior had changed his name to Ted and Grace was now Caroline, and thus they insisted on being addressed, even by their parents.
This was one of the things Tom and Grace the elder were thinking of as they sat in their living-room Christmas Eve.
Other university freshmen who had lived here had returned on the twenty-first, the day when the vacation was supposed to begin.
Ted had telegraphed that he would be three days late owing to a special examination which, if he passed it, would lighten the terrific burden of the next term.
He had arrived at home looking so pale, heavy-eyed and shaky that his mother doubted the wisdom of the concentrated mental effort, while his father secretly hoped the stuff had been non-poisonous and would not have lasting effects.
Caroline, too, had been behind schedule, explaining that her laundry had gone astray and she had not dared trust others to trace it for her.
Grace and Tom had attempted, with fair success, to conceal their disappointment over this delayed home-coming and had continued with their preparations for a Christmas that would thrill their children and consequently themselves.
They had bought an imposing lot of presents, costing twice or three times as much as had been Tom’s father’s annual income when Tom was Ted’s age, or Tom’s own income a year ago, before General Motors’ acceptance of his new weather-proof paint had enabled him to buy this suburban home and luxuries such as his own parents and Grace’s had never dreamed of, and to give Ted and Caroline advantages that he and Grace had perforce gone without.

Behind the closed door of the music-room was the elaborately decked tree.
The piano and piano bench and the floor around the tree were covered with beribboned packages of all sizes, shapes and weights, one of them addressed to Tom, another to Grace, a few to the servants and the rest to Ted and Caroline.
A huge box contained a sealskin coat for Caroline, a coat that had cost as much as the Carters had formerly paid a year for rent.
Even more expensive was a “set” of jewelry consisting of an opal brooch, a bracelet of opals and gold filigree, and an opal ring surrounded by diamonds.

Grace always had preferred opals to any other stone, but now that she could afford them, some inhibition prevented her from buying them for herself;
she could enjoy them much more adorning her pretty daughter.
There were boxes of silk stockings, lingerie, gloves and handkerchiefs.
And for Ted, a three-hundred dollar watch, a de-luxe edition of Balzac, an expensive bag of shiny, new steel-shafted golf-clubs and the last word in portable phonographs.
But the big surprise for the boy was locked in the garage, a black Gorham sedan, a model more up to date and better-looking than Tom’s own year-old car that stood beside it.