While My Pretty One Sleeps Read Online Free PDF

Pontici he’d gone into a church that seemed to be deserted. The next moment he’d heard an explosion, and blood had gushed from his forehead. He’d spun around and seen a German soldier crouched behind the altar in the sacristy. He managed to shoot him before he passed out.
    He came to, feeling a small hand shaking him. “Come with me,” a voice whispered in his ear in heavily accented English. He could barely think through the waves of pain in his head. His eyes were crusted with dried blood. Outside it was pitch black. The sounds of gunfire were far away, to the left. The child—he realized somehow it was a child—led him down deserted alleys. He remembered wondering where she was taking him, why she was alone. He heard the scraping of his combat boots against the stone steps, the sound of a rusty gate opening, then an intense, rapidly speaking whisper, the child’s explanation.Now she was speaking Italian. He couldn’t understand what she was saying. Then he felt an arm supporting him, the feeling of being lowered onto a bed. He passed out and awoke intermittently, aware of gentle hands bathing and bandaging his head. His first clear recollection was of an army doctor examining him. “You don’t know how lucky you were,” he was told. “They drove us back yesterday. It wasn’t good for the ones who didn’t make it out.”
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    After the war, Myles had taken advantage of the GI Bill of Rights and gone to college. The Fordham Rose Hill campus was only a few miles from where he’d grown up in the Bronx. His father, a police captain, had been skeptical. “It was all we could do to get you through high school,” he’d observed. “Not that you weren’t blessed with a brain, but you never chose to place your nose between the covers of a book.”
    Four years later, after graduating magna cum laude, Myles went on to law school. His father had been delighted but warned, “You’ve still got a cop in you. Don’t forget that cop when you get all your fancy degrees.”
    Law school. The DA’s office. Private practice. It was then he’d realized it was too easy for a good lawyer to get a guilty defendant off. He didn’t have the stomach for it. He’d jumped at the chance to become a U.S. Attorney.
    That was 1958. He’d been thirty-seven. Over the years he’d dated plenty of girls and watched them marry off, one by one. But somehow anytime he’d come close, a voice had whispered in his ear, “There is more. Wait a bit.”
    The notion of going back to Italy was a gradual one. “Being shot at through Europe is not the equivalent of the grand tour,” his mother told him when, at a dinner home, he tentatively mentioned his plans. And then she’d asked, “Why don’t you look up that family that hid you in Pontici? I doubt you were in any condition to thank them at that time.”
    He still blessed his mother for that advice. Because when he knocked at their door, Renata had opened it. Renata who was now twenty-three, not ten. Renata tall and slender, so that he was barely half a head over her. Renata who incredibly said, “I know who you are. I brought you home that night.”
    â€œHow could you have remembered?” he asked.
    â€œMy father took my picture with you before they took you away. I’ve always kept it on my dresser.”
    They were married three weeks later. The next eleven years were the happiest of his life.
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    Myles walked over to the window and looked out. Technically, spring had arrived a week ago, but nobody had bothered to pass on the word to Mother Nature. He tried not to remember how much Renata had loved to walk in the snow.
    He rinsed the coffee cup and the salad plate and put them into the dishwasher. If all the tunas in the world suddenly vanished, what would people