Dead Languages Read Online Free PDF

and writing on the bag how much it all came to, so I took my loot and said goodbye to my friend, who asked me to bring him one more glass of water, and to his parents, who didn’t have time to glance up from their galleys. I walked through Los Angeles in the dark. Halfway home I caught my foot in a grate and spilled $ 47.21 down the sewer. I listened to a storm of money on a pool of mud. The sewer was a wishing well. I’d lost so much money I was entitled to at least one wish. I wished Charles would whisper to me forever.

4
    A COUPLE of years ago I got talked into attending the premiere of a movie in which the lost daughter, leaving St. Louis for Hollywood to make her debut in dirty pictures, was named Flora del Presto. This kind of overt nominal symbolism we now find offensive since it fell out of fashion shortly after the publication of
The Faerie Queene.
But the first girl I ever knew and loved was named Faith. I didn’t make that up. That was just her name.
    Faith and I were preschool painters. Our parents drove us to studio openings, gallery shows, museum exhibits; bought us oversized, overpriced art books and triple overstock in paint supplies: chemically treated rice paper for work in watercolor, palettes round and rectangular, tubes of tempera, tiny brushes for oil touch-ups, high wooden easels, charcoal pencils, pure white smocks, sketch pads.
    We took these sketch pads everywhere we went, painted what we saw, and immediately exchanged pages so we knew what we’d seen. We mailed purple finger paintings to each other. After school at her house, we’d eat cookies her mother made for us and do still lifes of the bowl of fruit on the dining room table, the bottles of liquor in the den cabinet. She was much better than I was; it would have been impossible to be much worse. When she won a newspaper contest by drawing a likeness of Abraham Lincoln better than any six-year-old in Los Angeles County, she used part of the prize money to buy me a paint-by-numbers set, which I nevertheless accepted with appreciation because it came straight from her heart.
    Father had been offered a job as public relations director for the Jewish Welfare Fund of San Francisco, and Mother had convinced
The Nation
she’d be able to carry out her duties as West Coast correspondent just as well, perhaps even better, in Northern California, so we were moving to the Bay Area. Faith knew I was leaving—she kept painting pictures of cable cars on the Golden Gate Bridge to help herself imagine what my new neighborhood would be like—but I had put off telling her goodbye until the actual day of departure. Father parked across the street from her house and told me to run in and out real quick with my rolled-up painting because he wanted to be well on the way north before the five o’clock rush.
    Faith’s mother told me she was at work in her studio and wasn’t to be disturbed, but I banged on the garage door and told her who had come to visit. Her hands and lower arms were covered with various colors, her hair was pulled back, and she was wearing jeans and a white smock, so she didn’t look her best, but I could have watched her forever as she glided around the garage, mixing paints. She’d thrown a sheet over the front of the easel. Brandishing my painting like a baton, intimating a trade, I asked if I could take a peek.
    “No,” she said.
    “What are you working on?” I asked.
    “Nothing. Just a little landscape.”
    I took a deep breath, concentrated on the cobwebs in the corner, and said, “I came to say goodbye.”
    “You’re really going?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Really, really going, forever and ever?” “Yes.”
    She threw up her hands, splattering paint on my traveling pants, and said, “Well, goodbye.”
    I couldn’t take much more of this without volunteering to be her life-long apprentice. I said goodbye and turned to go, but she wrapped her purple-green arms around my neck, kissed my cheek, and said, “I love you,