Acceptable Losses Read Online Free PDF

even picked up the car. She just sat in the sun in the Borghese Gardens, not looking or speaking to anyone until it got dark and then went back to her place and got into bed and fell dead asleep and didn’t wake up until nine o’clock the next morning.” Mrs. Lacey sighed, her face marked by sorrow, as though she felt guilty of not having been able to comfort her daughter on a day like that. She tried to smile and went on. “Whatever it was that she’d been suffering from the day before had passed and she felt fine and rested and went down to get the morning newspaper on the way to the library where she was working. Then she saw the headlines. There had been a dreadful fire in the old wooden building where the fair was being held and all the doors had been locked and thirty people died.” She exhaled a long breath as though the telling of the story had exhausted her.
    There was silence in the room for several moments.
    “Do you believe in precognition, Mr. Damon?” Franklin asked. He was a proper, businesslike man, who dealt in known quantities. From his tone Damon could tell he did not wish to make too much of the story of the daughter.
    “Well,” Damon said, shaken more than he wished to show by the woman’s recital, “of course Jung and then Arthur Koestler …”
    “Still, they never proved anything,” Franklin said. “How about you, Gregor?”
    “I believe in anything that can’t be proven,” Gregor said. “I think we all need another drink.”
    As he went into the kitchen to get another cold bottle of wine, Mrs. Lacey said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to spoil Gregor’s party. Naturally, whatever it was, I’ll raise my thanks to God for it the rest of my days.”
    There was a small uncomfortable silence after she had spoken, the holiday mood broken for a moment. “What’s this about a celebration?” Damon asked, as much to keep himself from speculating about the troubling meaning of Mrs. Lacey’s daughter’s behavior as to lighten the level of conversation.
    “We’ve got joint foundation grant,” Gregor said, “Ebba and me. For year in Europe. Generous. To refresh our talents at fountain of culture.” He grinned. “Museums, opera, churches, rich dinners, French wines. It is better than food stamps. America is bountiful place. Oil companies, Congress, the new Medicis. Except no strings attached. I do not have to paint pictures of oil derricks or portraits of corporation presidents or their wives. And Ebba does not have to design costumes for debutante daughters. I assure you, we will be good capitalists, we will not give them money’s worth. We leave in a week. What’s matter, Roger, you don’t look happy.”
    “Of course I’m happy,” Damon said. “For you. But I hoped you’d look at a script I’m representing. The play’s due to be put on in the fall and I’d hoped you might be interested.”
    “Play is one set, two characters, am I right?” Gregor asked.
    Damon laughed. “Three,” he said.
    Gregor nodded. “Shakespeare had maybe thirty, forty characters, twenty different scenes.”
    “Shakespeare didn’t have to deal with the Shuberts, the banks, the unions.”
    Gregor nodded again. “Poor Shakespeare. Denied valuable experience. Showed in his work, didn’t it? Roger, my dear friends, the theatre in New York has shrunk to size dehydrated walnut. Sidewalk tie salesman. Get yourself a carpenter or interior decorator. Describe to me the set when play opens. I’ll be at La Scala watching The Magic Flute. Bedrooms, streets, cast of hundred, statues, hell-fire. When you find play with trains pulling into stations, cathedrals, palaces, forests, armies marching, mob scenes, two hundred costumes, all different, call us. America, richest country in world, one-set plays, psychiatrist’s couch, doctor there and patient. Act One, I am in trouble, Doctor. Act Two, I am still in trouble, Doctor. Finish.”
    Damon laughed. “You’re a little hard on your contemporaries,