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

“You’re just a baby,” she said, “to care. There’ll be others.”
    “Mamma, that smell is the pear trees,” Joan said softly.
    “It’s my perfume,” said Alabama impatiently, “and it cost six dollars an ounce.”
    *   *   *
    From Mobile, Harlan sent Joan a bucket of crabs for Acton’s supper. They crawled about the kitchen and scurried under the stove and Millie dropped their live green backs into a pot of boiling water one by one.
    Everybody ate them except Joan.
    “They’re too clumsy,” she said.
    “They must have arrived in the animal kingdom just about where we have in mechanical development. They don’t work any better than tanks,” said the Judge.
    “They eat dead men,” said Joan.
    “Joey, is that necessary at table?”
    “They do, though,” Millie corroborated distastefully.
    “I believe I could make one,” said Alabama, “if I had the material.”
    “Well, Mr. Acton, did you have a nice trip?”
    Joan’s trousseau filled the house—blue taffeta dresses and a black and white check, and a shell-pink satin, a waist of turquoise blue and black suede shoes.
    Brown and yellow silk and lace and black and white and a self-important suit and sachet pads of rose filled the new trunk.
    “I don’t want it that way,” she sobbed. “My bust is too big.”
    “It’s very becoming and will be so useful in a city.”
    “You must come to visit me,” Joan said to her friends. “I want you all to come to see me when you come to Kentucky. Someday we’ll move to New York.”
    Joan held excitedly to some intangible protestation against her life’s purpose like a puppy worrying a shoestring. She was irritable and exacting of Acton, as if she had expected him to furnish her store of gladness with the wedding ring.
    They put them on the train at midnight. Joan didn’t cry, but she seemed ashamed that she might. Walking back across the railroad tracks, Alabama felt the strength and finality in Austin more than ever. Joan was produced and nourished and disposed of; her father, in parting with his daughter, seemed to have grown the span of Joan’s life older; there was only Alabama’s future now standing between him and his complete possession of his past. She was the only unresolved element that remained of his youth.
    Alabama thought of Joan. Being in love, she concluded, is simply a presentation of our pasts to another individual, mostly packages so unwieldy that we can no longer manage the loosened strings alone. Looking for love is like asking for a new point of departure, she thought,another chance in life. Precociously for her age, she made an addendum: that one person never seeks to share the future with another, so greedy are secret human expectations. Alabama thought a few fine and many skeptical thoughts, but they did not essentially affect her conduct. She was at seventeen a philosophical gourmand of possibilities, having sucked on the bones of frustration thrown off from her family’s repasts without repletion. But there was much of her father in her that spoke for itself and judged.
    From him, she wondered why that brisk important sense of being a contributory factor in static moments could not last. Everything else seemed to. With him, she enjoyed the concision and completion of her sister’s transference from one family to another.
    It was lonesome at home without Joan. She could almost have been reconstructed by the scraps she’d left behind.
    “I always work when I’m sad,” her mother said.
    “I don’t see how you learned to sew so well.”
    “By sewing for you children.”
    “Anyway, won’t you please let me have this dress without sleeves at all, and the roses up here on my shoulder?”
    “All right, if you want. My hands are so rough nowadays, they stick in the silk and I don’t sew so well as I did.”
    “It’s perfectly beautiful, though. It’s better on me than it ever was on Joan.”
    Alabama pulled out the full, flowing silk to see how it would blow