Seductive Poison Read Online Free PDF

that she was worried about me and desperately wanted to protect me, but I had no idea from what. In return, from a very young age, I felt protective of her.
    Every evening she would lie next to me and read aloud. I loved the sound of her voice, soothing and warm. My favorite poem was Walter de la Mare’s “Sleepyhead.” The way in which Mama pronounced each word lulled me into a trance. I begged her to read it over and over again, especially one segment:
“ Come away,
Child, and play
Light with the gnomies;
In a mound
Green and round,
That’s where their home is.
“Honey sweet,
Curds to eat,
Cream and frumenty,
Shells and beads,
Poppy seeds,
You shall have plenty.”
But as soon as I stooped in the dim moonlight
To put on my stocking and my shoe,
The sweet sweet singing died sadly away,
And the light of the morning peeped through …
    After the fifth reading, when we’d finished saying the Lord’s Prayer, I’d plead with her not to leave me. When she finally rose and kissed me gently on the cheek, then closed the door behind her, believing I was asleep, I would cry. She seemed so sad, like a fairy princess in a moated castle, and I grieved for her.
    My mother, Lisa, was born to Anita and Hugo Philip in 1915. Although she shared few of her childhood stories with me, I had glimpses into her past. It was my father who bragged about her life. I knew she was proud and had grown up in Hamburg surrounded by vast amounts of art and culture. Concert musicians used to play in her extraordinarily modern home that was designed and built by her cousin through marriage, Ernst Hochfeld, a pioneer of the Bauhaus architectural era. There were built-in cabinets for their extensive art collection, a humidity-controlled vault for Grandpa’s tobacco and cigars, and the beloved music room where Mama’s Steinway and her father’s Guadagnini violin were kept.
    Mama explained on several occasions that the bronze nude in our living room was not an object to snicker at but a famous sculpture, Die Erwachende (“The Awakening”) by Klimsch and that she loved it. I understood that her father had packed it together with a few other valuables and brought it from Germany. Why her parents hadn’t hired a moving company to ship all their belongings from Hamburg was a question that never seemed to be answered. There was the beautifully shaped silver cutlery we used daily, some exquisite jewelry Mama kept in her silk-embroidered jewelry box, and several large pieces of art, paintings and sculptures that Grandpa Hugo and Grandma Anita had personally carried to America.
    I loved hearing the story attached to each one. There was an etching of Albert Einstein, signed by the genius himself, his hands so dirty his fingerprints showed clearly next to his signature, and an etching of Pablo Casals tuning his cello, signed by the maestro. Beatrice d’Este of Ferrara, the painting commissioned by my grandfatherin Italy that stared away past me in the library, wore a headdress of leather and pearls and was covered in a maroon dress with a luxurious black velvet cape. I often wished the statue on the table, a beautiful bronze woman, her bared breasts firm, her long, sleek legs taut as she stretched upward on her toes, had considered wearing clothes on the day of her posing. My mother’s legs were beautiful, too. I loved to sit on her bed each morning and watch her pull her stockings up over her ankles, then point her toes and extend her legs into the air as she attached the silk to her black garter. My mother was what I wanted to be: an enchanting enigma.
    I sensed that my mother missed her life in Germany. The past seemed to consume and console her. When I was a little older I wondered what it must have been like to leave a place one deeply loved, all one’s friends and relatives, and never see them again. But it was many years before I grasped that my mother’s world was filled with sorrow, guilt, and regret. And it wasn’t until years after