The Sunken Cathedral Read Online Free Page B

military man stationed somewhere in Egypt or, possibly, Algeria. She loved the blue of the sea but didn’t like the heat and so left, Abe said, much to the despair of the children, whom she had abandoned without a moment’s hesitation or, rather, only a moment’s: she had been a debutante in Newport and then the wife of a scion; or a woman who dressed as a man to wander the markets of Zanzibar. In less than a day, Marie had hauled Very Grand back up the basement stairs to hang her in her old place, apologizing to the hollow air of the impossibly empty bedroom. “I’m sorry,” she had said. “You can stay.”

V
    M arie serves the leftover stew, better days old, they both agree, and sherry. A sunny afternoon and the snow, still white in the backyard save pigeon scrawls and Roscoe’s paw prints zigzagging in a hunter’s trail, melts and drips from the back gutters, a ping ping ping sound they hear through the open kitchen windows. So bright this noonday light on the yellow walls; Marie never tires of it. As a little girl she dreamt she would live on a rooftop, or perhaps in a greenhouse. Now her bedroom faces south, better for Very Grand, Abe had said, though lousy for traffic. Oh well. There wasn’t so much traffic then, not like now, with the tourists and the tourists. She’s not heard this much French, she joked to Jules, since France!
    “It would be easier for both of us,” Jules says. “I wouldn’t worry, you wouldn’t need to look after yourself.”
    “I’m fine, darling. I have Simone. I have the butcher around the corner. I’m fine.”
    “Are you?” he says.
    She would like to sprout wings and fly to him, like in that children’s story where Mother is everywhere. What was that one? She flies to him and in his sleep he will not push her away, complain; she strokes his hair as she would when he felt feverish. She blows on his eyelids, tucks the blankets tight. Tighter, he says, in his sleep or maybe he has waked and sees her. He’s a feverish boy and Mother is here and she will stay until he sleeps, again. Then she flaps home but first she circles the Empire State Building, resting on its spire, balancing as she deciphers the grid of the City to see where Abe has gone. Is this where Abe has gone? He loved it so. Maybe she will find him here. Maybe she will find them all, Mother and Father and Rose and Sylvie. Little Ernest with his spectacles, his pudgy hands and arms too short to reach the family sugar bowl she knew the hiding place of though she would never tell. I
    *  *  *
    “A little boy,” Marie says.
    “What?” Simone says. She puts down her fork. “Who?”
    “I’m sorry,” Marie says. “I was thinking.”
    “Were you listening? I was saying about Sid. Did you hear that?”
    “What?”
    “He’s asked me now to dinner .”
    “Yes?”
    “Dinner.”
    “I heard.”
    “I said I’d think about it. I didn’t want to seem too eager. I don’t really know anything about him,” Simone says.
    “No,” Marie says.
    Simone sits back, scrapes her plate. She looks at Marie in the way she will at times, as if Marie is already a ghost, transparent. “Jules called my Katherine. Apparently he’s worried. Thinks you shouldn’t be rambling around this house on your own.”
    “Not to mention its property value,” Marie says, immediately wishing she had not. Out back Roscoe stalks one of the pigeons in the flock beneath her bird feeder. Sparrows, too, an occasional brave cardinal, blue jay; once even a Baltimore oriole though Abe said impossible. But she had seen it: a flash of bright orange and black perched high in the neighbor’s mulberry, its call unlike anything she had ever heard before. The bird sang its heart out, she told Abe. You should have heard, she told him. It sang like nothing.
    The sun lights a square shadow across the snow, a box to climb down to, to fall into, or perhaps a box in which to hide.
    “I guess Katherine mentioned our class. I’ve told her about Sid. You