As Bright as Heaven(22)
“But that doesn’t mean her feelings aren’t real. Helping me might distract her from her troubles.”
“Or intensify them.”
“She just wants to fix something that will stay fixed, Tom. She told me this.”
He ponders my words for a moment. “All right,” he finally says. “We can give it a try. She can assist you from time to time if her other chores are done and she has no schoolwork.”
As I leave the room, Fred reminds me in his most parental tone yet that the embalming fluid is dangerous and that Maggie must be careful around it.
With all that has recently complicated her young life—losing Henry, moving from Quakertown, having to say good-bye to one of only two friends she’s made here in Philadelphia—I understand her desire to repair something that will stay repaired.
She doesn’t yet realize what eventually happens to the candle. She surely will come to understand when she is older, as we all do. Sooner or later she will learn time changes everything, takes everything: sometimes in a blink, and sometimes so slowly you can’t even see it happening.
CHAPTER 13
? July 1918 ?
Evelyn
The long summer days used to be filled with walking the tobacco rows and pinching flowers off the plants, rolling cigars made of last year’s leaves, making afternoon trips to the swimming hole, filling up the salt and pepper shakers at Grandma and Grandpa Adler’s café, and reading books under the locust tree until the evening mosquitoes chased us inside.
The summer recess is different here in the city. The days are long and hot like they were in Quakertown, but nothing else is similar. Always before, we girls spent our days together and everything we did was the same. But here in Philadelphia a person can be more of who she is individually. I can go to the library every day, practice sketching the human body, and volunteer to read to the children who are patients in the hospital. Those things don’t interest Maggie. She’d rather be helping Mama with the bodies or trying to teach Charlie how to play chess or writing letters to Jamie. Willa is at her friend Flossie’s every day or Flossie is here. The only thing we girls do together now is visit Philadelphia’s many parks. There are four large ones close enough to walk to, all of them planned by William Penn and his surveyor back in Colonial times. They are lovely places where the thrum of the city seems far away even though it is still right there behind you and ahead of you, just on the other side of the trees. Still, even at the parks, Willa and Flossie go off on their own, and Charlie and Maggie search out something he doesn’t know about and that Maggie thinks she can teach him, and that leaves me to read on a bench in the shade.
Today I did not mind in the least that when we got to the park at Rittenhouse Square, everyone left me. As I settled onto a bench with David Copperfield—I am rereading all of Dickens this summer—I heard someone say my name. I looked up and there was Gilbert Keane from school walking toward me with a panting spaniel on a leash. My heart jumped inside my chest. I hadn’t seen him since classes let out the first of June. I’d seen some of the girls from the academy over the past weeks—one invited me to a birthday celebration where many of the girls were in attendance, and another invited me to a poetry reading, but none of the boys was at those two events. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed hearing Gilbert’s voice and seeing his face until that moment.
“It’s you!” I said, and then after remembering my manners, “How very nice to see you.”
“May I?” he said, motioning to the bench.
“Of course.”
He settled down next to me. The dog plopped down at his feet, obviously ready for a rest.
“You didn’t mention you had a dog,” I said, wanting to say something brilliant and coming up with only that.
“It’s my aunt’s. She’s visiting from Cincinnati and unfortunately feeling under the weather today. I offered to take Pansy for a walk. I think I may have overestimated the dog’s stamina.”
We looked down at the little spaniel, and we both laughed. She was resting her snout on his boot, eyes closed, pink tongue peeking out of her huffing mouth.
“I’ve not seen you at this park before. Do you come often?” he said.
“Do you?” I hadn’t pictured him as a strolling-the-park kind of fellow. I’m happy to imagine that maybe he is.
He laughed. “No.”
“Oh. My sister Willa and her friend like this one best because of the fountain. It’s their favorite. We come here sometimes.”
He looked down at my book. “Haven’t read that one. Should I?”
“You might like it. What other of Dickens’s books have you read?” I said, thinking that I’d compare it for him to A Tale of Two Cities or Oliver Twist. I was also thinking how immensely wonderful it was to be having a conversation about literature in the park with Gilbert Keane.
Gilbert’s grin widened. “Will you still like me if I say I haven’t read any Dickens?”
Something in the way he said this filled me with warmth and instant joy. It was as though I had been sipping hot cocoa and the liquid was sliding down my throat and into my tummy on the coldest winter day. The feeling was lovely and exhilarating, even though it was surely ninety degrees in the park. It was of no consequence to me that he hadn’t read Dickens. He knew I liked him. It mattered to him that I liked him.