A Splendid Gift Read Online Free

break all the china and glass in the house.
    “Tonio,” she would cry out his name as soon as she entered the house. She never arrived without an entourage. Aside from her coterie of friends, she brought trunks of clothing and hat boxes, and, on one memorable afternoon, even a parakeet in a bright red cage.
    “What have you bought today?” he would inquire, cringing. No matter how much money his publisher advanced him, he could never keep up with her spending habits.
    “You’d be happier if you just stopped counting,” she snapped. She was even smaller than Silvia, but her deep red lips and dark hair gave her an air of authority. She swallowed up nearly all the air in the room.
    On his own, he lived simply and stayed focused on his work. Coffee and cigarettes sustained him long into the night. But once Consuelo arrived, he invariably felt unsettled, and in need of reassurance and praise. He would think nothing of waking his household of sleeping guests to force them to look at his latest drawing or to use them as models. When the Swiss writer Denis de Rougemont came for yet another of his visits to the Bevin House, Saint-Exupéry enlisted the handsome young man as a model to create an illustration of his little prince in a bout of despair.
    When Saint-Exupery’s own sadness became too much, he escaped his house and sped to the Upper East Side, parking his little green car on the street.
    When he knocked at the door of Silvia’s apartment, using the lightest rap so as not to awaken young Stephen, he was greeted by the loveliest woman wrapped in a silk kimono. No matter how late he arrived, her eyes were never swollen with sleep, but rather fluttering with life and sheer happiness just to see him. They reminded him of dancing fireflies, their wings beating within a glass jar.
    ***
    He slept late the following morning, his long body extending over the edge of her bed. She was careful not to disturb him, removing herself from the tangle of white sheets that he had twisted around him like a parachute as he fell into his dreams. She wrapped herself in her kimono, tying the sash tightly around her waist and shutting the door of the bedroom firmly behind her so that her son wouldn’t see the pilot asleep in her bed.
    The first hours of the daylight were hers alone. She walked into the living room and picked up the plates and wineglasses from the night before. Aside from the hum of the fans she had placed through the apartment, the city was quiet. Most of her neighbors had already fled the heat for their summer homes in Connecticut or Long Island.
    By the time she had washed the last dish, Stephen was sitting at the kitchen table in his pajamas. His favorite pair, which she constantly had to keep washing so they’d always be ready in his drawer, were the ones with airplanes printed on the cotton.
    “What would you like for breakfast, lovey?” she asked him, though she already knew his answer.
    “Scrambled eggs and English muffins,” he replied, his voice hoarse from sleep.
    She knotted her apron around her waist and began to whisk the eggs. Only a few hours before she had performed the same ritual for her pilot, who was now fast asleep in her bed. The preparation for both was filled with love.
    ***
    She got ready to take Stephen to her parents after breakfast, packing a towel, a swimsuit, and a change of clothes in a canvas rucksack Saint-Exupéry had bought him for his birthday. “Now all you need is a set of goggles and a pilot hat to pull over your ears,” she had told him that afternoon after he opened the present, “and you’re ready to go to the stars.”
    She looked at Stephen and smiled.
    “A perfect day for Coney Island,” she said as she kissed the boy on top of his head, inhaling the scent of his hair.
    “Why can’t you come along, too?” Stephen’s eyes were focused on his plate and his fork gently prodded at the eggs.
    “Oh, how I wish I could . . .” As the words tumbled out, she felt a sharp