Gentlehands Read Online Free Page A

talk, congratulating myself for bringing her there. I remembered an English teacher we had once describing something called “borrowed glory” to us. Borrowed glory was when you couldn’t think of a way to say something, so you got out Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , looked up “love” or “fear” or “patriotism”—whatever subject you had on your mind—and you copied down what Shakespeare or Emerson or someone famous had said about it, and put that into your composition as a quote. This teacher used to say just because you could find a quote about something didn’t mean you’d really expressed yourself . It just meant you’d borrowed glory. He said there were all sorts of ways to borrow glory. If your family was rich and you were conceited about it—that was borrowing glory, too, because you hadn’t done anything to make them rich—you were just coasting on their abilities.
    So that night I was borrowing glory by letting my grandfather make the impression on Skye Pennington, instead of trying to impress her with my own personality.
    Well, thank God for borrowed glory, I thought. Thank God I had someone in my family to borrow it from, because all the while I sat there watching Skye, I told myself I wasn’t going to lether slip through my fingers. Whatever it took to keep her in my life, I was going to do it…even if it meant learning about opera, which had always sounded to me like a lot of people screeching around in German or Italian with music drowning them out until they could get their breaths again.
    We spent a lot of that evening—or they did—talking about animals. My grandfather was this great animal lover. He had a whole pot of plain spaghetti cooked which he put out on his back patio for raccoons to have. He had a light fixed so we could see them sneaking in from the woods, one by one, taking the spaghetti in their little hands and winding it all around themselves while they sucked it into their mouths. They looked like little masked bandits, and a few of them stretched out on their backs like clowns and fed the spaghetti into their mouths in long strings. They took marshmallows from his hand, and he let Skye feed a few to them, and she looked over her shoulder at me with this expression of sheer joy on her face, as though she’d never done anything so fantastic in all her life.
    About eleven o’clock I said we’d better leave, remembering Mr. Pennington’s order that Skye was to be home by midnight. Skye got up and went into the bathroom, leaving me with my grandfather, the first time in my life I’d everbeen alone with him. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and we just sat there for a moment while he took a sip of his wine and looked across at me.
    “Do you think you impressed her, Buddy?” he finally said.
    “Well, you did.” I mumbled, and his remark had made my face red.
    He didn’t say anything, so I said, “It was borrowed glory, I guess.”
    “I’m happy to lend it to you,” he said.
    “Thanks.”
    “How is your mother?”
    “She’s fine,” I said. “We’re all fine.”
    I was hoping he wasn’t going to try and make some excuse about what he did to my mother, what he didn’t do for her, or try to explain it, and I needn’t have worried. He didn’t mention her again. He sat there sipping his wine while I drank what was left of my ginger ale and wondered how anyone could stand opera—there was another one playing, some woman shrieking, then a man bellowing some sort of answer.
    “You know, Buddy,” my grandfather finally said, “you can get there on your own, once you’re pointed in the right direction.”
    “Get where?” I said, but I knew what he was talking about. He knew I knew, too, and didn’t even bother explaining where.
    “I’d be happy to point you, if that’s what you want,” he said.
    “What do you think of her?” I said.
    “She’s very beautiful,” he answered. “ Very .”
    “But beauty’s only skin deep, huh?” I said.