Read Online The Girl With the Glass Heart: A Novel by Daniel Stern - Free Book Online Page B

and she squinted ecstatically at the window. That was the wonderful thing about light. You could turn it on and off and manipulate it, not artificially with a wall switch, but with your own actual body, your eyes. She loved bright natural light or, if at night, brilliant electric light. “I’m a completely modern person in that sense,” she had once told Roz. “I can’t imagine myself when they had only gaslight. Maybe in the great ballrooms in Vienna—that might be, with millions of candles in a chandelier.”
    Pleased about her decision to play hooky from her piano lesson, Elly bubbled at breakfast, scrambling through her food, taking her time only when the coffee arrived. She and her mother were alone in the kitchen, her father having left long before. He was to be in Indianapolis for the day. Lang had apparently left after a quick cup of coffee.
    “You ready for your lesson?”
    “Yes, Mother,” she said with the lowered eyes and preoccupied voice which sometimes discouraged further discussion.
    “You came in pretty late last night, didn’t you?”
    “Pretty.”
    “Where were you?”
    “Out.”
    “Out where?”
    “For God’s sake leave me alone! I was out with friends, that’s all.” She was still feeling pretty good, but under the barrage of questions she felt her good spirits withering.
    “All right,” Mrs. Kaufman said, “take it easy.” She had no real purpose in asking these questions; she meant only to let Elly know that it was not too easy to do anything she wanted to do.
    “Don’t forget to pick up your taffeta dress. The wedding’s tomorrow night.”
    “I don’t understand what any girl would see in my cousin Lester.”
    “That’s the trouble with you. You can’t see the things other people see. You’re a bright girl, Elly. You just don’t see what you don’t want to see. Lester is a lovely boy. He’s got success marked on his forehead in indelible ink.”
    “Did Daddy have success written on his forehead? Seems to me we were miserably poor for an awfully long time.”
    Mrs. Kaufman mopped up some spilled coffee near Elly’s saucer. “We always tried to make you feel you weren’t poor. But I don’t know—it seems like you could never wait to get out of the house. All right, so it wasn’t the-the , but it was a clean, nice place to bring your friends.”
    Elly was silent, thinking about what to tell her piano teacher that afternoon.
    “Well, now you’ll have a home like nothing anyone around here has ever seen before.”
    Elly nodded, thinking, The girl in the house in the hill.
    Mealtimes were usually just an ordeal of her mother talking and herself giving the illusion of listening. Frequently she placed a book beside her plate, at which she could glance from time to time when it became necessary to avoid a particularly unpleasant recrimination.
    “Mom, when did Dad say we’re moving?”
    “It’s not up to your father. It’s my decision to make.”
    “When do you say we’re moving, then?”
    “Next week, sometime. All the furniture will have arrived by then.”
    “Isn’t it marvelous, Mom! And the custom-built phonograph is finished. I took up an album of records the other day, the Brahms Violin Concerto, and tried the machine out. It sounded terrific.”
    “Try not to talk so that you sound so excited all the time, dear. You’re a young lady now. A little poise.”
    “Yes, Mom,” she answered absently and left the house.
    Elly trailed her hand in the water, which flowed slowly over the mud and stone which blocked its path. This little trickle, Elly knew from her recent explorations on their property, widened to a vigorous riverlet, some two acres or so behind the house, flowing through, as if it had lost itself temporarily, a pine forest, so that the little muddy splash in which she dipped her fingers carried at some later time and some other place a richness of green pine needles embellished with rough, crumbly brown pine cones.
    She was not far from the