The Saffron Gate Read Online Free PDF Page A

class, I'd never had the patience to sit too long, preferring to be outside.
My parents brought me a coppery kitten. I named her Cinnabar, and quickly realised that she was deaf, for she didn't turn at any sound, small or large. But it didn't matter; perhaps it made me love her more. The rumble of her purring and her warm fur under my fingers gave me comfort when I read or just lay, staring at the small window on the wall across from my bed, trying to recall the sensation of walking, of running.
My parents also bought a gramophone and phonograph cylinders of Grieg's Peer Gynt, with its two four-movement suites. My father would play one of the cylinders each morning as he got ready for work, and I would awaken to the strains of 'Anitra's Dance' or 'In the Hall of the Mountain King' or 'Solveig's Song'.
At some point my mother directed my father to bring in the old daybed from the porch and put it in the kitchen, so that we could be together during the day while she worked at her sewing machine on the kitchen table.
Every morning before he left for work, my father carried me to the makeshift bed. My mother put the small table holding the gramophone and cylinders beside me; I could reach it should I want to listen to Grieg's music. She also arranged my books and painting supplies on the table, and set Cinnabar on my bed. Then she pulled a straight wooden chair up to the table where she worked the hand-operated sewing machine, adding pockets and inserting sleeves and hemming men's suit jackets, piecework for a small company. I read and painted and played with Cinnabar. After a while she had me do the basting for her, and if she made a mistake, I picked out the incorrect stitches. In this way she was able to complete more jackets than usual.
If I wasn't playing the gramophone my mother sang while she worked, French songs learned as a child in Quebec. At other times she asked me to read aloud. It took me a while to realise, after my reading to her became a routine, that the books she was now bringing home from the library were books she would have read if she'd had time. Some of them were in French. I had to speak in a loud voice, to be heard over the rhythmic clicking of the sewing machine, and to make it more enjoyable I began reading in the tone of the voice of the character. Sometimes, when I read a particularly moving or exciting or humorous passage, my mother's hands would stop, and she would look at me, her head tilted to one side, with a surprised or worried or pleased expression, depending on the novel.
'You have such a lovely speaking voice, Sidonie,' she said one day. 'So expressive and melodic. You could have been—' She stopped abruptly.
'I could have been what?' I asked, carefully setting the book on my lap.
'Nothing. Go on, please. Keep reading.'
But suddenly I couldn't continue. The phrase 'you could have been' hit me with an enormity that shook me.
You could have been. What was she about to say? Did she remember that when I was young, perhaps ten years old, I had announced that I would become a famous actress, and they would come to see me on a Broadway stage? I thought of the long-ago plans Margaret and Alice Ann and I had made: how we might one day move to New York City, and live together in a walk-up apartment and find jobs at Saks Fifth Avenue, selling fine leather gloves or heavenly perfume to the beautifully dressed ladies who strolled the wide aisles of the store. Margaret went to New York with her mother regularly, and it was she who had told me about Broadway plays and the department stores.
But of course now none of those dreams could become reality. Not for a girl who couldn't rise from a bed. Not even if that girl became a woman who sat in a pushchair. I could never live in a walk-up. I could never even five in a house with stairs. I could never stand behind a counter and sell gloves or perfume.
Now what would I be? What would I become? A small, cold voice entered me; it was similar to the black,