Read Online A Peculiar Grace by Jeffrey Lent - Free Book Online Page A

lives together that she’d seen from the start and held to finally tumbled and came to rest about their feet. Around them as sure as the frothing tide-rise.
    But before this, long before this, she learned what had to be learned and then a lid clamped forever, nothing more. There came the dawn they’d been up all night when suddenly the wave of high energy she’d almost gotten used to came over him and he ordered that they dress and go out into the fog-drift of morning and hiked up to the bridgeto Brooklyn and walked across it as the sun began to burn through and he led her up toward Clinton Hill and then down a small side street where they stood looking at a three-story brick building and as they had walked there he told her not only where they were going and what to expect but also where they were going in the past. To that evening distant and immediate as this spring morning. Which did not stop her from sitting on the curb across the street when his account trailed to nothing and he stood gazing upon what was not there, would never be there again, and she left him and sat facedown into the fabric of her gay spring dress and wept.
    As if describing events happened to another, he told her. How he’d rented the third floor apartment while still a student at the nearby Pratt Institute and how it was not long after that he met his wife not in Brooklyn but Manhattan, a student of ballet, of galvanic personality and ambition but when the two met both knew their destinies with each other and he knew he was the perfect foil for her acerbic stringent wit and laced fury, believed she was as necessary as oxygen, and it was in these early days when he began to be noticed, to be taken a bit apart from his own crowd—a place he admitted he’d always thought himself to be. And still she danced and he loved that she danced, was happy to see her off mornings to classes and wait expectantly and braced late afternoons when she returned from auditions and what he did not say but the young Irish woman knew was that this woman was lovely and lithe, athletic and demanding and very likely angry also as his recognition grew as hers did not for then there came the baby, the little girl. And it was here and only here that his account faltered before he gathered and went on. How his love for Celeste and hers for him was instantaneous and ferocious but the morning Susan was born and he held the newborn looking down at her he was then and there flooded with a love he’d never dreamed existed, never expected from himself or thought possible in any human being. And how that never changed, as Celeste resumed her now more daunting efforts at the barre, and he took much care of Susan so very quickly a toddler and then a littlegirl who was he said in a voice as if recounting the previous day’s weather the only thing, human or otherwise and especially human, who was never ever an interruption to his work, who he’d hold on one hip as he worked on the canvas before him, learning to rethink his actions and speed as a one-handed man. How she knew the names of the colors and could find the right tube by the time she was three. How she’d go with him down to the naval yard or the piers or further south to the leather tanning yards, the boatyards, the ironworks and manufacturing blocks, the warehouses of goods bound for the ships or across the river to Manhattan, or setting up on the rocky shoreline of the East River within view of the magnificent bridge as he sketched boats and barges and tugs and freighters of all manner and size. The little girl leaning against his side so she could watch the pencil work on the paper. How Celeste slowly and without apparent bitterness retreated from auditions but never the classes and how the phonograph was in constant play ranging from the great ballets, primarily the Russians, to swing records but also music Celeste found and brought home and introduced him to—the older Negro jazz and race records of music she called