A Splendid Gift Read Online Free PDF

say to him, so she could now pepper her sentences with a little French.
    “What are you going to call him?” she asked, as she led him inside the apartment. The dog was now busy teething at his shoelaces.
    “Hannibal,” he said, half joking. He knelt down to pet the dog, and his palm was so large it nearly enveloped the animal.
    “I wanted you to have something from me that you could still love when we’re apart,” Silvia told him.
    He put his satchel down and approached her.
    She felt the dog licking at her ankle and tried to suppress an urge to giggle.
    “Stephen?” he whispered in her ear. “Is he asleep?”
    “My parents took him to the Catskills for the weekend.”
    He understood enough to know the boy was away. She welcomed his hand traveling underneath her skirt.
    That evening, the fans blew hot air around the apartment and they lay in bed with his papers spread across the coverlet. She would pick one up and slowly try to make out what she could of the text, and he’d watch her face to gauge her reaction.
    With the story nearly complete, he could see how much it pleased her. When she had looked at the last illustration, he took it from her hands and placed it on the nightstand.
    When he leaned over to kiss her, he saw her eyes were wet with tears.
    She didn’t need to say anything. He understood that she had seen herself as the fox, forever captured in the book, even if she didn’t understand the exact meaning of the story’s every word.
    “
Mon petit renard
,” he whispered into her ear. “My little fox.”
    That morning, after she had slept tightly in his arms, she pulled herself out from his embrace and went to the nightstand to take another look at his pages. Then she quietly slipped out to the kitchen table to transcribe each word he had written.
    She wrote out the French in careful, clear lines so Louise could translate exactly what he had said. But when the tutor eventually translated the words into English for her, Silvia realized she had wasted her money in paying Louise for this task. For she, like the fox, had already known their meaning.
    ***
    He brought Hannibal home to Eaton’s Neck and began housetraining him at once. But the dog had a mind of its own and continued to gnaw on every pair of shoes he could find.
    “Horrible Hannibal . . . he’ll be the tiger in the book,” he grumbled to Silvia over the telephone one night. When he heard her laughter on the other end, it always soothed him.
    He amused her by telling her that he now had his own prim tutor, a local girl who was adamant she could succeed in teaching him English where all the others had failed.
    By mid-October, with the book now completed, he found himself once again awash by the restlessness and depression that had plagued him before he became immersed in
The Little Prince
. As he felt when he first arrived in New York, the sense of powerlessness to help the French war effort overtook him.
    He began to write angry tirades to the newspapers and to demand more meetings in Washington with government officials. Silvia began to feel that she was losing him, for he no longer seemed to be soothed by anything, not even her.
    Even when he was beside her, he seemed far away. “Tell me again about the desert,” she’d say, hoping to coax him back into her arms. But he could think of little except the German occupation. And he worried about his friend Leon Worth, a Jew who he feared even in hiding couldn’t be kept safe from the Nazis.
    She noticed even in his slumber that he never seemed to rest. He slept fitfully, sometimes crying out names she did not know in a language that was almost impossible to decode.
    She knew that, though his body was in New York, he was already halfway across an ocean, his heart anchored to France.
    Instead of speaking about his past travels, he began to speak of war planes and plans for a North African invasion, or of missions and alliances that would work toward a greater goal. He continued to