Clair De Lune Read Online Free PDF

added on, had become an apartment house. In this one Miss Liles rented an apartment, tacked onto the existing roof rather like a martin house. She preferred to think of it as a penthouse. To reach it, one turned in from the side street, proceeded a few steps into the alley, and climbed an outside stairway three flights. From the rooftop landing, one entered the apartment through the kitchen and thence into a sitting room with a couch for a bed. A bathroom adjoined the kitchen. A somewhat shabby little place, but it came cheap, and the kitchen had an electric refrigerator.
    This was her first apartment. At school she had always lived in a dormitory or a certified rooming house for young women. Mother, who had driven down with Dalton to bring Allen and her belongings, had been dubious when she saw it. “It’s too secluded,” she said, “way up here away from anybody. You’d be a lot better off in a nice rooming house with a landlady.”
    â€œFor Pete’s sake, Mother, I don’t need any fussy old landlady poking around. Anyway, we’ve looked at four places today with rooms for rent, and I couldn’t stand any of them. Neither could you.”
    â€œWell, we can just look some more.”
    â€œI like it here. It’s sunny and quiet and roomy. I can spread out all my stuff and work without interruptions.”
    â€œWell, yes,” Mother said. But there were more arguments before she would give in. “Well, all right,” she finally said grudgingly, “if you’re determined. But you behave yourself, up here so private.” She shook her head. “That long, rickety stairway is a mighty peculiar way to get into a place. How’s your brother going to make it up all these steps with your things?”
    â€œI’ll make it.” Dalton appeared on the landing, suitcases in hand.
    To Allen the three flights of steps were one of the attractions. Like climbing to the top of a tree or up the ladder to the barn loft. Much better than being earthbound. From the landing at the top of the stairs you could look over roofs and treetops and see the Presbyterian steeple, two blocks over, pointing the way to heaven. The steeple chimes rang sweetly on the quarter hour. She sat there often during the fall, under yellow moons in foggy Prufrock nights, far away in her thoughts.
    When we are young, particularly when young and lonely, we imagine a future and dwell in it, as later we dwell in a past we also have imagined. So, on those fall nights, she dreamed herself forward into Italy as she knew it from the English poets, and the Paris of Hemingway, and the New York City of Katherine Anne Porter. It was a rich improbable future, made up of other people’s pasts. Such fantasies were her entertainment, the pageants of a thoroughgoing romantic, and she invented within them, projected and plotted course, until the steeple clock, striking the late hour, brought her back to reality and the grudging acknowledgment that, far as she was from Paris or New York, she had a job and she could damn well be contented. As Mother said, she was lucky.
    And after a time, as she got into the work, she had to admit that she almost liked it. Though her colleagues were a colorless lot, they were pleasant. Faculty meetings were tiresome and, as far as she could see, useless. But college classes were no harder to teach than high school and a lot more fun. It was very gratifying to teach Shakespeare in some depth and be able to dwell at length on the English poets, Romantic and Victorian, with a little modern thrown in now and then if she took a notion. She even enjoyed grammar and composition classes. And she liked the students. They were bright kids, most of them, happy and alert and funny. All of them were polite. There were a few who were older, working men in their twenties, enrolled late in college. Like the others, they came regularly to class and sat, attentive, faces tilted respectfully.