Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

thought.
    Supper was fun; there was toast with a taste of charcoal and sometimes chicken, warm, like a breath of the air from beneath a quilt, and Millie and the Judge talking ceremoniously of their household and their children. Family life became a ritual passed through the sieve of Austin’s strong conviction.
    “I want some more strawberry jam.”
    “It’ll make you sick.”
    “Millie, in my opinion, a respectable girl does not engage herself to one man and permit herself to be interested in another.”
    “There’s no harm in it. Joan’s a good girl. She is not engaged to Acton.”
    Her mother knew that Joan was engaged to Acton because one summer night when it poured with rain and the vines swished and dripped like ladies folding silken skirts about them, and the drains growled andchoked like mournful doves and the gutters ran with foamy mud, Millie had sent Alabama with an umbrella and Alabama had found the two of them clinging together like moist stamps in a pocketbook. Acton said to Millie afterwards that they were going to be married. But Harlan sent roses on Sundays. Lord knows where he got the money to buy so many flowers. He couldn’t ask Joan to marry him, he was so poor.
    When the town gardens began to bloom so prettily, Harlan and Joan took Alabama with them on their walks. Alabama, and the big japonicas with leaves like rusting tin, viburnum and verbena and Japanese magnolia petals lying about the lawns like scraps from party dresses, absorbed the quiet communion between them. The presence of the child held them to trivialities. By her person, they held at bay the issue.
    “I want one of those bushes when I have a house,” Joan pointed out.
    “Joey! I can’t afford it! I’ll grow a beard instead,” expostulated Harlan.
    “I love little trees, arborvitae and juniper, and I’m going to have a long walk winding between like featherstitching and a terrace of Clotilde Soupert at the end.” Alabama decided that it didn’t much matter whether her sister was thinking of Acton or Harlan—certainly the garden was to be very nice, for either or neither or both, she amended confusedly.
    “O, Lord! Why can’t I make money?” protested Harlan.
    Yellow flags like anatomical sketches and pools of lotus flowers, the brown and white batik of snowball bushes, the sudden emotional gush of burning brush and the dead cream of Joey’s eggshell face under her leghorn hat made up that spring. Alabama understood vaguely why Harlan rattled the keys in his pockets where there was no money and walked the streets like a dizzy man traversing a log. Other people had money; he had only enough for roses. If he did without the roses he would have nothing for ages and ages while he saved until Joan was gone or different or lost forever.
    When the weather was hot they hired a buggy and drove through the dust to daisy fields like nursery rhymes where dreamy cows saddled with shade nibbled the summer off the white slopes. Alabama stood up behind and brought back the flowers. What she said in this foreign world of restraint and emotion seemed to her especially significant, as a person will imagine himself wittier than usual in an unfamiliar tongue. Joan complained to Millie that Alabama talked too much for her age.
    Creaking and swaying like a sail in a swelling gale, the love story breasted July. At last the letter from Acton came. Alabama saw it on the Judge’s mantelpiece.
    “And being able to support your daughter in comfort and, I believe, in happiness, I ask your sanction to our marriage.”
    Alabama asked to keep it. “To make a family document,” she said.
    “No,” said the Judge. He and Millie never kept things.
    Alabama’s expectations for her sister envisaged everything except that love might roll on using the bodies of its dead to fill up the craters in the path to its line of action. It took her a long time to learn to think of life unromantically as a long, continuous exposition of isolated events, to think