The Marble Quilt Read Free Page A

“I get claustrophobic.”
    â€œI hope you don’t get seasick!” Mrs. Warshaw laughed. “But never mind. Whenyou’ve been through the St. Gotthard as often as I have, you shall sleep right through, as I intend to do.”
    â€œHow long is it again?”
    â€œNine miles!” Grady shouted. “The longest in the—” He winced. He had broken his vow.
    â€œNine miles! Dear Lord! And it will take half an hour?”
    â€œMore or less.”
    â€œHalf an hour in the dark!”
    â€œThe gas jets will be lit. You needn’t worry.”
    The conductor, having finished with the ventilators, stood to examine the window latches. In securing the one on the right he pressed a wool-covered leg against Harold’s knees.
    â€œVa bene,”
he said next, yanking at the latch for good measure. (It did not give.) Then he turned to face Harold, over whose head the oil lamp protruded; raised his arms into the air to light it, so that his shirt pulled up almost but not quite enough to reveal a glimpse of what was underneath (what
was
underneath?); parted his legs around Harold’s knees. Harold had no choice but to stare into the white of that shirt, breathe in its odor of eau de cologne and cigar.
    Then the lamp was lit. Glancing down, the conductor smiled.
    â€œMerci, mesdames,”
he concluded merrily. And to Harold:
“Grazie, signore.”
    Harold muttered,
“Prego,”
kept his eyes out the window.
    The door shut firmly.
    â€œI shall be so happy to have my first glimpse of Milan,” Irene said.
    Why French for the women and Italian for him?
    They had been traveling forever. They had been traveling for years: Paris, the gaslit platform at the Gare de Lyon, a distant dream; then miles of dull French farmland, flat and blurred; and then the clattery dollhouse architecture of Switzerland, all that grass and those little clusters of chalets with their tilted roofs and knotty shuttered windows, like the window the bird would have flown out on the cuckoo clock … if it had ever worked, if Uncle George had ever bothered to fix it. But he had not.
    Really, there was nothing to do but read, so Harold read.
    Orpheus: having led Eurydice up from the Underworld, he turned to make sure she hadn’t tired behind him. He turned even though he had been warned in no uncertain terms not to turn; that turning was the one forbidden thing. And what happened? Exactly what Orpheus should have expected to happen. As if his eyes themselves shot out rays of plague, Eurydice shrank back into the vapors and died a second death, fell back down the dark well. This story of Orpheus and Eurydice Harold had read a hundred times, maybe even five hundred times, and still it frustrated him; still he hoped each time that Orpheus would catch on for once, and not look back. Yet he always looked back. And why? Had love turned Orpheus’s head? Harold doubted it. Perhaps the exigencies of story, then: for really, if the episode had ended with the happy couple emerging safely into the dewy morning light, something in every reader would have been left slavering for the expected payoff.
    Of course there were other possible explanations. For instance: perhaps Orpheus had found it impossible not to give in to a certain self-destructive impulse; that inability, uponbeing told “Don’t cross that line,” not to cross it.
    Only God has the power to turn back time
.
    Or perhaps Orpheus, at the last minute, had changed his mind; decided he didn’t want Eurydice back after all. This was a radical interpretation, albeit one to which later events in Orpheus’s life lent credence.
    Harold remembered something—
Huck Finn
, he thought—you must never look over your shoulder at the moon.
    Something made him put his book down. Stephen had woken up. He was rubbing his left eye with the ball of his fist. No, he did not look like his brother, did not look like any Pratt, for that