On Green Dolphin Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

visitor.
    She hung up quickly. “Did you sleep all right? How’s your hand?”
    Frank shifted around the room uneasily. “I had no idea what time it was. Did I keep you from doing anything?”
    “No. No, I was just doing a little work and then … I’m going out in about half an hour. Can I get you some breakfast?”
    Frank sat at the table while she made coffee. He leaned back in the chair and looked through the paper. He opened it only a few inches and held it at arm’s length, as though worried that he might be blinded by the glare of its contents.
    “What are these?” he said, picking up a pile of woven nametapes.
    “They’re for the children’s clothes. We’re sending them to boarding school in England.”
    Mary turned back to the electric percolator. She was wearing a shirt-waisted catalog dress just back from the cleaner; it was part of the family’sagreed economy measures that she should cut back that year on new clothes, though she felt a little self-conscious about it as Frank scrutinized her from behind.
    “You don’t sound too happy about that,” he said. “The school thing.”
    “I’m not really.” Mary put the cups on the table and sat down. “It’s another economy measure. It’s one of the perks of the job that when you go abroad your children get subsidized schooling in England. They’ve been too young until now, and anyway I wanted to keep them here. But Charlie says we can’t afford the private schools here so they have to go back home.”
    “You’ll miss them.”
    “I think I will.”
    “You could send them to the public schools here.”
    “We could …” Mary felt uneasy, as though she were implying some criticism of American education. In fact, it was Charlie who had been against it: beyond the diplomatic vacuum, he pointed out, Washington was not an easy place.
    “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
    “Why?”
    “High school I went to in Chicago you just hoped to get out alive at the end of the day. My father made the mistake of settling his family in an all-colored neighborhood. Jesus.” Frank lit a cigarette and folded up the newspaper. “It’s not as if there weren’t enough Italian families in town. There were whole streets you’d think you were in Naples. You been to Chicago?”
    “Not yet. But Charlie travels a lot, and when the children have gone off to school I’m hoping to go with him.”
    “Nice guy, your husband.”
    Mary smiled. “Well, I think so.”
    “So do I.” Frank stood up. “I’d better get back to the hotel, get a change of clothes. No taste in music, though. Don’t tell him I said so.”
    When Frank had gone, Mary went back to sewing nametapes onto Richard’s socks (six pairs, gray, woolen, knee-length, the printed clothes list specified). She loved looking at his name in print: Richard van derLinden—so solid, so real. It was ridiculous: he was a creation of her and Charlie’s imagination, an idea they had fancifully invested with a character, not a proper person with a grown-up printed name. Someone was bound to find them out sooner or later.
    Charlie was due to have lunch with two congressional aides and had booked a table in the upstairs room at a recently fashionable Italian restaurant on 17th near the junction with L Street. The venue was convenient for one of his favorite bars, the tall sitting room of the Hay-Adams Hotel, where the price of drinks was offset by the discretion of the assiduous staff. At twelve-thirty, he set himself down in a wing chair by the vast fireplace and lit a cigarette while the waiter brought his dry martini, straight up, with no risk of alcohol displacement by ice, and no olive or twist. With both hands, he raised the trembling meniscus to his lips and sucked; he closed his eyes as he rested his head against the back of the chair.
    The bar with its exalted ceilings reminded him of childhood Gothic, the illustrations to fairy tales or the castle home of a sinister uncle. Logs crackled in the