September Song Read Free Page B

with, but that, if you can believe it, was one of my reasons for wanting to know it. It would have been something all my own. I might have written my diary in it. I expect you think that’s silly.”
    He looked at her so closely and for so long that she said, “What is the matter?”
    â€œWhat you just said,” he said. “You might have been speaking for me.”
    Studying French had been his one deviation from the straight and narrow path he plodded down—or rather up. He ought instead to have elected Spanish. He might in time have some Spanish-speaking clients. But he wanted to know a language unknown to anybody around him, to belong to a select, almost a secret society. Institutionalized all his life, he had never known privacy. His very name seemed something conferred upon him for the convenience of his keepers. “I suppose you think that’s silly,” he said.
    She did not even bother to answer. They understood each other, the only ones who could. French was a folly they shared.
    â€œSpeak some to me,” she said.
    He hesitated for a moment, then he intoned:
    â€œLes sanglots longs
    Des violons
    De l’automne
    Blessent mon coeur
    D’une langueur
    Monotone .”
    The singsong cadence, the rhymes, the pitch of it brought to her mind the melancholy call of the mourning dove.
    When the recitation ended, the words—if words they were and not musical notes—lingered on in a withdrawing echo. Wrapped in revery, she could say nothing for a while. Then she said, “Beautiful. That is beautiful. To think there is a country where people sound like that! Tell me now, what does it mean?”
    He translated.
    Again she was silent for a while before saying, “How sad. How beautiful.”
    She had him recite it so many times over the next weeks that she learned it by heart.
    He was impatient to get on with his studies. He had no time to lose. He would soon be going back to school. He could not just lie idle.
    But, “I don’t understand what I’m reading,” he said.
    She took the book from him and scanned a page.
    â€œWho could?” she said.
    Then she regretted her flippancy. His expression was one of despair.
    â€œWhen I fell off that pole I fell a long way,” he said. “I was reaching for the stars.”
    She was the first person to whom he had ever confided his aspirations, and he could do so now only because they had been dashed. He had kept them to himself for fear that in him they would be thought presumptuous, preposterous. He was ashamed of being an orphan and beholden to all the world. She was flattered to be singled out as his confidant.
    As a boy he had delivered groceries after school and on Saturdays. He had mowed lawns in summer, raked leaves in the fall. He ran errands for shut-ins. All that he earned he saved. He had neither time nor money for amusements. He came to be well known and he made himself well liked. Dependent upon charity, he learned early in life the worth of a smile. “That young fellow will go far,” he overheard said of him.
    He had a long way to go to reach the goal he had set for himself. But he believed then that nothing could stop him.
    She listened to the story of his poor and joyless life, his lack of affection, of any true childhood, of a home, even a room of his own, and though she was years younger than he it appealed to her motherly feelings. She could see before her the earnest, unsmiling boy dressed in ill-fitting castoff orphanage clothes.
    By dint of hard work he stood near the head of his class, and when he graduated this earned him a scholarship to college. He supported himself by working nights as a janitor, during the summer vacation as a telephone linesman. He had fixed his sights on a distant target, and he never lifted his eyes from it. Law school, the bar exam, legal practice, then …
    He blushed for his immodesty. “Would you believe, I had dreams of someday being