After the Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

much. You really shouldn't.”
    “Why not? You're worth it, I think. I'll go get your father.”
    They had planned to walk to the great pond this afternoon, but snow had already started to whirl in the wind, and it had been a better idea to be here where they were, while it whirled on the other side of the window. The chess game proceeded in the usual silence of deep concentration. For a while, Hy looked toward the two bent heads, the black and the mottled gray. And watching them, she began to feel a soft, almost sleepy contentment.
    An odd thought came, one of those foolish images that pop up out of nowhere: this one, for instance, of colored marbles in a jug. Shake the jug, and they all change places! Now what if I had not been reared by
that
particular man—would I be what I am? Very probably not. Almost surely I would not have met
that
man! And here we are, each linked in some fashion to the other two, as well as to Francine, who is upstairs making calls for one of her charities. A jug of marbles…
    She opened the book and read half a chapter about the neo-Impressionists. But she was reading the same words over and over without absorbing their sense; she was leafing through the rich illustrations without seeing them. Her mind had veered away from the room and the moment.
    A few months from now, a major turning point wouldbe reached. Gerald was seeking a hospital residency. Where was it to be? And what of her? Nothing definite had yet been said about their future. Was it not strange that nothing had been said?
    Yet they had been making full and free confessions to each other, had spoken of painful and sad things, of embarrassing and confidential things dredged up from the secret corners of memory.
    Gerald had told her about his mother, who had died of Alzheimer's disease after long suffering. She knew that he too had suffered this tragedy, along with the family's poverty, and that he had perhaps not been brave enough, as he put it, “to take things more like a man.”
    She had felt free to tell him the most silly trivia, laughing at herself while she described Martha, down the street, as her “nemesis” ever since the fourth grade, when Martha had taunted her about her name. “You surely don't look like any flower,” she had said. Martha had had waist-length braids and no braces on her teeth.
    They had even talked about past lovers, of whom Hyacinth had had none. “I've never loved anybody before you. They were all only friends, the boys I knew.”
    And he had replied, “I've had my share of women, maybe more than my share, but they were none of them like you. They were all meaningless. Can there be anyone like you, Hyacinth?”
    Simultaneously now, the two men rose from the chessboard.
    Gerald bowed. “I bow to a master,” he said gallantly.
    “Nonsense! We're not halfway to the end, and I'mfighting hard. I only got up because Francine's standing in the doorway. That means dinner's ready and we have to break.”
    Hyacinth had made most of the dinner. Francine had done the marketing, set the table, and peeled the vegetables; it was a fair division of labor today, since the one loved to cook and the other did not. The season's first tulips flopped gracefully, as tulips do, in a blue glass bowl. The fragrance of herbs rose from a beef ragout that was surrounded by browned potatoes and carrots. A green salad lay at each place, and twin decanters were filled with a fine red wine.
    “A feast!” exclaimed Gerald.
    “Hyacinth is not only an artist but a first-rate cook.”
    She flushed. A person might think that this father was trying to advertise his daughter, for goodness' sake! But no, Jim was too forthright for that, and too innocent of wiles. He was merely being affectionate.
    Now he amended his remark. “Not depriving my wife of any laurels, either.”
    Francine smiled. The smile was almost too small to be called a smile, being merely a touch at the corners of her mouth, merely enough to make a dimple in