Read Online Sarah's Window by Janice Graham - Free Book Online

was, after all, of no importance.
    But it was.
    There had always been that other distinguishing feature about John, a sense of heightened spirituality that no memorized creed could ever invoke. Hortense played to that audience in him, and he took her quite seriously. Her look, filtered through blue netting, lingered with John, and with time the netting faded and there were just those eyes, and soon those eyes began to have a cunning resemblance to his own eyes when he leaned close to the mirror every morning to inspect his stub-bled jaw.
    He was a little at a loss as to how to proceed at this point in his life. His doctoral studies were very important, but Hortense had reawakened in him that intuitive streak, and he turned his mind inward and listened.
    Only the idea of the Peace Corps truly appealed to him, but for the wrong reasons: its romance and slightly faded splendor, its association with the Camelot of the Kennedy presidency, its nobility of purpose, the lure of far-off, exotic places. But Peace Corps work generally involved teaching of some sort, and John's previous attempts at teaching had been, if not quite disastrous, then less than successful. During his undergraduate years he had taken an occasional tutoring job to earn pocket money, but most of his pupils left after only a few sessions, and always with the same complaint: instead of toiling on their level, clarifying the steps as they went along, he would wander off into complex theory, leaving his pupils thoroughly confused. Yet there was an intoxicating quality about him, and some students, particularly the girls, returned time after time just to be in his presence. When he spoke he would grow animated, the words tumbling out, his eyes deepening in hue, and whether or not they understood him became irrelevant.
    He filled out the Peace Corps application almost as a lark, believing his responses to the questions would be far too vague. He floundered when it came to justifying his motive. He could not very well explain that Hortense Potter's ghost had told him to do this, but he was able to sound plausibly determined, and he sent off all the papers and the recommendations he had so stealthily solicited, and then tried to forget about it. Like some shameful misdeed committed in absolute secrecy.
    A month later he was accepted.
    To Kenya.
    He had a choice now. He could act on his intuition, fly against the conventional winds that had directed his life until now, and it frightened him down to the marrow of his bones. At the same time, paradoxically, a kind of peace settled over him, and when he stared at his face in the morning he saw Hortense's eyes twinkle back at him, and he felt a release from all their expectations. As the weeks went by he began to see Africa as more than a mere experience or an interlude, but as a powerful determinant of his destiny.
    A lightheartedness seized him during those last weeks before final exams, and it was undeniably this effervescence that had sent him off with a carload of friends to the Cicada Club up in Kansas City. John sat in the backseat with his roommate, Robert, a young Scottish physics major with a shank of greasy black hair and black-rimmed glasses, the two of them drinking straight gin from the bottle and feeling reckless and decadent.
    It was Robert who brought Susan over to their table, because Robert didn't dance but he loved to show off his Anglican wit, and Susan was a good audience. With her long scarlet nails curled around a glass of scotch, she shot dry repartee right back at him. But Susan had her eye on John, even though he didn't pay her much heed that evening, was too busy moonwalMng across the dance floor with a black-haired gamin to appreciate her many qualities. She called him a few days later, and the next time he saw her, in her own natural setting, sitting in a booth at the Ritz grill with a vase of lilies towering over her shoulder, glancing impatiently at the slender Rolex dangling from her wrist, he