The Saffron Gate Read Online Free PDF

tightly written words of Sister Marie-Gregory, calling me a cripple. I suddenly knew that my life might not move beyond this daybed, beyond this kitchen, beyond this house and yard.
For the next week I told my mother I had headaches and didn't wish to come out of my bedroom. I had her pull the curtain over the window, saying the light hurt my eyes, and that the music from the cylinders pierced my ears. She sat beside me, her hand with its slightly twisted fingers cool on my forehead. 'Shall I have the doctor come? What is it, Sidonie? Do you have pain in your back again?'
I turned away from her touch. What was making me sick? Only the fact that I had seen the door close on my future. Only that.
I suddenly blamed her for making me understand this, with those four simple words: you could have been. The cold, unemotional voice I heard in my head now told me there was little point in anything: I stopped painting, saying it no longer interested me. I stopped helping my mother, saying that picking out tiny stitches was difficult; perhaps my eyes had been weakened by the polio. I stopped reading to her, telling her it hurt my throat. I turned from her gaze, thoughtful and intelligent.
It wasn't her fault; I understood that fully and I didn't want her to know the truth. I didn't want to hurt her further by telling her that she had inadvertently held a mirror to my life. Surely I would have held up that mirror at some time — maybe the next week, or the next month.
But I hadn't. She had, and for this I was angry with her.
When twice a day my mother pulled back the blankets and massaged my useless legs, pushing them into the exercise positions shown to her by the health nurse, I stared at the ceiling. She bent and pulled, bent and pulled. I knew there was no use, but I saw it gave her some purpose to believe she was keeping my legs from atrophying, her mouth firm and her arthritic hands —- which surely ached even more than usual from the additional movement — seeming to find new strength.
Now when I told her I needed to use the metal pan kept under the bed — and with her help, and me doing my best to lift my legs with their new and frustrating dead weight, we managed — I couldn't look at her. I thought I saw pity in her face, a false cheeriness, as if she didn't mind carrying the noxious pan away to dispose of. I thought of her doing this for the rest of her life.
Eventually I resumed my spot on the daybed in the kitchen, for the boredom of my bedroom made me want to scream with frustration. I said I felt well again, and went back to the old routines of helping my mother and reading aloud, for it was better than lying alone in my room.
I don't know whether my parents were aware that something had changed, had perhaps broken, inside me. They acted in the same way as always.
When my father returned at dinner time and he and my mother sat at the kitchen table, cleared of the sewing machine and the piles of jackets and sleeves and pockets, I ate my supper from a tray on my lap. But now, instead of giving Cinnabar small nibbles of my food, or taking part in my parents' conversation, I silently watched them. I looked at my father's greying head, bent slightly forward over his plate, and the mark at the back of his neck where the stiff collar of his chauffeur's uniform had formed a dark band of red. The rest of his neck looked vulnerable against the darker welt of skin.
My mother clutched her knife and fork awkwardly because of her swollen, knobby knuckles. As before, they spoke of small events, of local gossip and the latest price of pork or tea. They also spoke of the ongoing horrors of the Great War, and the fear that our boys might soon be going to join the fight. But when they tried to bring me into the conversation, asking what I'd been reading, or making unimportant conversation about the weather, or which of my friends they'd seen, I answered only in syllables and phrases.
They spoke as if the world was the same place it had