Crescent City (58 page)

“Pride, Papa. A man’s pride, and he’s got too much of it. It’ll take a deal of talking to talk him out of it.”

Ferdinand put a warm hand on his daughter’s shoulder. His forehead wrinkled in distress. “I’m so sorry, dearest girl. You’ve been through too much in your short years.”

“A lot of it was my own fault, Papa, though some of it wasn’t.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Do? I’m going to talk him out of it. But right now
I think, if you don’t mind, I’d just like to be by myself awhile.”

He stood aside to let her pass, and she went downstairs, out to the old side garden, that little spot where so much had happened in her life.

There, still, Aphrodite stood. The dove at her feet had been smashed, but Ferdinand had cleaned out the pool himself, and the water fell now as it always had, in two curving tiers, like flounces on a skirt. And she sat there, without moving, until her heartbeat slowed and her breath came quietly again. The water rippled and trilled; voices and noises came from the other side of the wall, as the life of the street resumed, the life of the old, old city on the brown enduring river.

Here her children had taken their first steps. Here she had made her first trembling visit to this house where her years as a woman had begun. And she remembered her father’s house before that, lofty in her sight as a palace, when, clinging to David’s hand and awkward in her fine new dress, she had come to this strange country. She remembered the strange languages learned on the heaving ocean, and the ship, and Gabriel the boy standing drenched on the deck with the shivering dog in his arms.

It had been a long, long way: up in the world and down, up again and down again.

“But I can do things,” she said aloud. There was a thickness in her throat which she swallowed, and then went on talking to the air. “I can do things. I’ve done so much I never thought I could. And I can make him change his mind. Yes, Gabriel, I can.”

A butterfly had settled on her wrist; its resting wings, erect as sails, were opalescent mauve. The common wood nymph, probably, she thought, surprising herself with this recollection from the frontispiece in one of David’s enormous books. The lovely substance
of the living wings was patterned like Oriental silk. All is pattern, all life, but we can’t always see the pattern when we’re part of it.

She was able to smile. Hadn’t Fanny always said it was a good omen when a butterfly lights on you?

The little creature quivered, lowering its wings and fluttering from her outstretched arm. It flickered toward the shrubbery, wavered away, and was lost in the gold and silver dazzle of the afternoon.