Miss Lizzie Read Free Page B

now.”
    â€œIn an airplane,” I said.
    â€œAn airplane?” She smiled.
    I nodded. “I want to be a flyer.”
    â€œAn aviatrix.” She nodded. This was the first time I had heard the word, which would not, and then only because of the remarkable Miss Earhart, come into common usage until the next decade. Pouring tea into my cup, she said, “Would you be carrying the mail?”
    â€œPassengers,” I said. “Father says that one day airplanes will carry more passengers than the railroads do.”
    â€œCream or lemon?” she asked me.
    â€œWhich one are you having?”
    â€œI’m having cream.”
    â€œI’ll have cream too. He says that one day it’ll be possible to go from New York to California in a single day.”
    â€œI’m sure he’s right,” she said, “but whyever would one want to?”
    Caught off guard for a moment—why indeed?—I frowned. “Well,” I said finally, “they might be in a hurry.”
    â€œNo, dear, I meant why would anyone want to go to California at all. From everything I’ve read, it’s a dreadful place. All cowboys and oranges. Sugar?”
    â€œYes, please. He says they’ll cross the Atlantic too. People will be able to fly from New York to London and Paris.”
    â€œNow that would be nice,” she said. “I’d love to see Paris again.”
    â€œYou’ve been there, you mean?” This summer’s trip to the shore had been my farthest journey away from Boston.
    She waved a hand dismissively. “A lifetime ago.”
    Somehow I knew immediately that, despite her easy dismissal, the trip to Paris was something about which she would enjoy talking. Certainly it was something I would enjoy hearing. “What was it like?”
    â€œIt was,” she said, and smiled, “very French.”
    We talked for over an hour, sipping at our tea and nibbling at the sandwiches (cream cheese and watercress, the bread crusts neatly manicured away), and she told me about Paris, about strolling down the sun-dappled Champs-Elysées and sitting at a sidewalk café and talking, through a drunken and probably unreliable interpreter, to a bearded red-haired painter from Holland who reeked of absinthe and despair. Miss Lizzie had expressed, in passing, a liking for the work of Constable; the painter, furious, indignant, had leaped from his chair, knocking it over in the process. In a few raging moments he had dashed off a sketch of her, torn it from his notebook, and hurled it spinning to the table. Then, scowling and mumbling, his arms conducting an invisible orchestra, he had staggered off toward the river. As a memento of her Grand Tour, she said, she had kept the sketch with her ever since.
    She left the porch to fetch it, returned with it in a small but elegantly wrought silver frame. The hair was darker and fuller; and the smile, slightly bemused by the antics of this mad Dutchman, seemed more an integral part of the younger face than, as it was to the older, a pleasant afterthought. But she was recognizable, this other Miss Lizzie; the artist had gotten the large gray expectant eyes exactly right. He had been a talented man: despite the manic swiftness of the pencil he had captured a quality that was at once innocent and mischievous. Down in the right-hand corner he had scrawled his name and underlined it with a flourish that had nearly rent the paper: Vincent .
    We were eating the scones, and very good they were too with the Irish marmalade and the English jam, when all at once Miss Lizzie leaned forward and asked me, “Do you like card tricks, Amanda?”
    I had never once seen a card trick. I said, “Of course.”
    She smiled, sat back, reached into the side pocket of her dress, and pulled out a deck of playing cards. With a practiced thumbnail she split the cellophane wrapper, flicked open the package. She adjusted her pince-nez, shook out the