Laura Shapiro Read Online Free PDF Page A

support the family by teaching and performing, and received good reviews for her appearances with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Handel and Haydn Society. Meanwhile, the boys studied violin and cello, and their sister took piano lessons. As soon as they could all manage their instruments, Bertha booked the quartet for salon performances as “Mrs. Child and the Children.” Music was only the first of Paul’s numerous careers. After high school he worked in a stained-glass shop, learning to cut and glaze, and then he headed out west. Over the next few decades, he was a waiter in Hollywood, a tutor for an American family in Italy, a woodcarver in Paris, and a teacher at a couple of private schools in New England. Along the way he acquired a black belt in judo and became an avid photographer, painter, gardener, and poet. At the OSS he worked in the visual presentation unit, which prepared maps, charts, and graphic displays, and he was setting up the war room in Kandy when he met Julia on the veranda of the tea plantation.
    Setting up war rooms was exactly the sort of thing Paul did best. In fact, he would do it many times in his life with Julia, organizing her high-performance kitchens at home and in the television studio. He was passionately analytical and took deep pleasure in trying to pin down the unwieldy universe in images, designs, and language. One of the many subjects that fascinated him was general semantics, a philosophy of language that he studied for years. Followers of general semantics, which emphasized the perpetually inexact relation between words and things, were fond of the abbreviation etc., because it implied that however much had been expressed, there was always something left unsaid. Paul tried to say it, all of it. He wrote constantly to his brother, Charlie, page after page of graceful calligraphy describing his days, his thinking, and his work with such dedication that he might have been the Homer of his own lifelong odyssey.
    Paul was largely unsentimental, but his emotional life was always in full gear, and during the war years, he was deeply absorbed in the problem of women. He had lived for seventeen years, in Paris and in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a woman named Edith Kennedy, who was some twenty years older than he. Widely accomplished, brilliant, and sophisticated, Kennedy had died of cancer in 1942. Three years later, Paul was still longing hopelessly for her. “I am really spoiled for other women and I realize it over and over,” he wrote mournfully to Charlie. Before he left the United States, an astrologer in whom he put considerable faith had revealed his future to him. “Sometime after April 1945” was the predicted time frame; at that point he could expect to fall in love with a woman who would be, according to the astrologer, “intelligent, dramatic, beautiful, a combination of many facets, can keep house, yet is a modern woman.” By the spring of 1945, Paul was lonely, grieving, sexually deprived, and waiting impatiently for the prediction to come true.
    There certainly were enough candidates. Was it Nancy, code-named Zorina in his letters? Zorina was the name he and Charlie gave to certain women who physically resembled the famous ballet dancer while exuding a kind of essential female quality that greatly appealed to both twins. “They possess what is lacking in this warring, man-ridden world: a sense of the continuity of life and perpetual sympathy, fellow-feeling and consolation,” Paul once said about their Zorinas. But Nancy was in love with another man, and Paul finally gave up on her. Perhaps Janie? “ Une Bohémienne, of a fine sort. She adores animals and people, draws with great style and is worldly and often witty. She speaks Malay and French, both well.” But it didn’t last. “The woman could be Rosamond,” he wrote excitedly. “No Zorina she, but a wonderfully interesting and alive person,