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Show Moon - 97 your cheeks in lovely tendrils and you were smiling. The man was handsome, maybe in his thirties, with perfect teeth and wonderful long legs. He sat you in a deck chair, tucked a robe around you and brought you a cup of tea, hovered over you like a seabird. The next day from your deck chair you nodded towards the approaching steward and said to me, "I think he looks at me." The rest I must infer. I say things for you, in the voice of Anne-imperfectly, perhaps inaccurately, but it is better, I hope, than to say nothing and let you slip into the oblivion of silence like an anchor broken from its chain. Anne could see that James liked to dance with his daughter. She was his daughter, really. No one could remember a time when she wasn't. He swept her through the foxtrot, cheek to cheek, and did not let go as he should have when the music stopped. Anne would have to say something to him about that, though she was not sure just what. Shipboard ballrooms made people a little strange-the parties, the funny hats, the costume contests, the way the floor tilted unexpectedly when a wave hit broadside and strangers tumbled against one another. Anne wished her husband would sit with her sometimes to listen to the music, touch hands. Sometimes he wept as he drank into the evening, great tears rolling silently out of his eyes like beads of glass, but he would not talk. What was bothering him might be about what the doctor in Germany had said about her in secret, as if she were a child. She could not bring herself to ask him, for she wasn't ready to make it real, and she feared that his sadness was not for her, but for himself. |
