Listening to Billie Read Online Free PDF Page A

Possibly her daughter Catherine? Then she said, “I suppose you mean that I should get married—again?”
    What else could he possibly mean? Smith nodded.
    Having judged that he considered her crazy, and that quite possibly he was right, Eliza decided that she would confirm his view; she would make him see her as really mad.
    “I’m not really convinced about marrying,” she said. “Isn’t it perhaps done too often? Look at Josephine. Once might be enough. Really, why should I marry again? Why would marriage make me more
appropriate?
” She was unable not to italicize the word.
    “Well, I do see that your first experience was unfortunate,”Smith managed to say. “But I’m sure next time it will all work out.”
    She was off. “Unfortunate! Poor Evan, he never should have married anyone, especially not me. But I was pregnant, and he felt guilty about me, we both felt guilty. What a way to marry!” She realized that she was speaking too loudly. She stopped, and in the silence that followed she crazily imagined that a ghostly Billie Holiday was singing; she could hear that solitary mourning voice.
    “I didn’t know all that,” said Smith. Could this possibly be true? Surely everyone knew she was pregnant; even Daria at that age could count.
    “There’s more,” Eliza said wildly; she was on the verge of saying to him what she had not said to anyone in her family, especially not to Daria: Evan fell in love with someone else, a boy.
    Now she did not say that to Smith, either; she felt that Smith could handle such information even less than Daria could.
    “I’m not even very interested in money,” Eliza feebly said, instead. “Why marry?”
    He laughed in a small dismissing way. “That’s easy for you to say.”
    Eliza experienced a curious sense of elation: having meant to sound insane, to shock Smith, she felt herself instead coming into focus, as sometimes words did when she was writing.
    She stood up. “Well, actually I came down to walk on the beach, but I guess I won’t.”
    He stood, too. He said, “You know, you’re really crazy.”
    “You’re probably right.”
    Eliza had a photographic memory, of a certain kind: certain scenes flashed across her mind like slides. Earlier, talking to Daria, she had
seen
Billie enter the night club on Fifty-second Street, and this short space of time with Smith was another scene that she remembered and reviewed in years to come. Butfor a long time that moment of elation was missing from the picture; she might as well have been drunk, or high. Nor, remembering Smith’s pale serious young face, was she sure what made him think that she was crazy.
    The wedding was just as Josephine intended: beautiful and conclusive Episcopal words were spoken, and then it was a party, in an orchard on a brilliant, deep blue afternoon. Fall was somehow suddenly in the air, along with smells of apples and of freshly mown grass, of sweet dry hay, and wind. Goldenrod stood beside the road, and Indian paintbrush, beside the low stone fences. And behind the orchard the long house lay low against the land, its long windows reflecting the lowering sun, its shingles silver in that fading light.
    All afternoon Eliza had watched the joyously innocent faces of Daria and Smith. Together they looked even younger than either separately did. And, juxtaposed to Smith’s soft face, Daria’s features were finer, sharper and more poignant than before.
    To Eliza the sight was terribly sad. But after all, there was always the chance that what happened would be unusual—a good marriage. It was she, Eliza, who was crazy, not Smith Worthington.
    Fat and happy and pretty in her flowered dress, Catherine, who was the flower girl, loved everything about this wedding. “I love weddings!” she cried out to her mother, to Eliza. “How many times are people allowed to marry? I’d like to be a bride a dozen times.”
    The other guests were mostly old—old friends of Josephine’s, old neighbors. Gently