Read Online Harriet Doerr by The Tiger in the Grass - Free Book Online

of the house next door. Then the three went on together, two who spoke only Spanish and one who spoke none.
    That afternoon Stevie, dressed in a caftan of her mother’s, washed all her clothes and spread them on the terrace, where they dried flat like poorly cut dresses of a paper doll.
    “Seven-thirty,” Morgan had reminded her daughter, but at eight o’clock, long after the six Americans and the two English, the Frenchman and the Danes, had gathered in the sala, Stevie was still upstairs. Morgan invented things to say to the guests. My daughter is ill, you are not the sort of people that interest her, she washed her clothes and they’re still wet. Instead, she asked Carlos to knock on Stevie’s door.
    Five minutes later the girl appeared, and suddenly the lights in the room burned brighter of their own accord. The guests turned. Morgan turned. Stevie came toward them.
    At first Morgan thought she was seeing an apparition, one who had braided blue ribbons into her cornsilk hair. Where had all this come from? The narrow white skirt that hung straight to white-sandaled feet, The fitted top, cut so low it barely contained Stevie’s high young breasts.
    From the bedroom window of the house next door, Lalia reported the party to Fliss. The long windows of Morgan’s sala revealed the guests moving about, and all through the moonlit evening there was activity on the terrace. The gentlemen, one at a time, took Stevie outside and, each according to the degree of his longing, kissed her.
    Lalia described all this to Fliss, who lay against three pillows on the bed.
    “That is the dress from the shop at the market. Those are the ribbons we found. The eyes and the ribbons, the same blue. Now Estefania is outside with one of the American husbands,” Lalia went on. “Now with the English. She is back in the sala again, standing next to her mother. Two beautiful women, one old, one young. Carlos is passing wine and pastries on a tray. He is serving Estefania again and looking at her dress. The Danish gentleman has come up to lead her to the terrace. He is kissing her hands, her neck, her eyes. He loves her.”
    “How do you know that?” said Fliss.
    Lalia made a correction. “He tells her he loves her.”
    “Go on,” said Fliss.
    The party ended at midnight. Half an hour later Morgan and her daughter, with a wall between them, lay in their beds, ringed about outside by the rainbow of splintered glass.
    In an unfamiliar room, on an unaccustomed bed, Morgan waited for sleep. For an hour she listened to the night. Wind on the magnolia leaves, an owl, a frog, and once, from the zoo, the distant protest of the lion. She was still awake when Carlos entered the house. She heard the watchman’s whistle and soon after that the mozo’s familiar footstep on the stairs. She held her breath in the silence that followed. Then the door of the large bedroom opened and closed. Morgan suffered a brief attack of lunacy. He has made a mistake, he has forgotten, he believes I am there in my bed.
    Returned seconds later to sanity, she heard, in this order: Stevie’s light cry of surprise, the mozo’s reassurance, laughter, silence, a gasp, laughter again, a long silence. The bedsprings creaked. Stevie spoke. The carved mermaids knocked against the tapestried wall and knocked again.
    Morgan covered her ears with pillows.
     
     
    “How did you sleep?” they asked each other at breakfast.
    “Perfectly,” they both said.
    They passed butter and spoke of the fine day. Stevie spooned honey onto her toast. “My bus leaves at two,” she said.
    “Carlos will drive you to meet it.”
    Sun slanted the length of the table. Morgan saw everything turn gold: the tangerines in a bowl, the toast, the honey, her daughter’s hair and skin. Time telescoped. Stevie could have been eight years old, pristine, forgivable.
    On the same wide panel of sunlight, Carlos entered the room from the terrace. His long shadow fell across the plates and cups as he