Read Online The O'Briens by Peter Behrens - Free Book Online Page A

It was a warm, emotional afternoon. Girls who over three years had barely spoken to Iseult hugged and kissed her.
    Mother Power attended High Mass with the other nuns, but sometime during the strawberry tea she disappeared before Iseult had a chance to say goodbye to her. It was a Saturday, after all.
    That evening Iseult’s parents took her to dinner at Delmonico’s, where she drank her first glass of champagne. The next morning they boarded a Pullman and travelled up to Maine, where her father had taken a big, breezy cottage at Kennebunkport for the summer. With her mother she joined a ladies’ art club and spent many afternoons trying to paint seascapes that were no worse and no better than anyone else’s. That fall she started at Smith, but a wicked bout of asthma weakened her and her parents would not allow her to return to college after Christmas; she was confined to bed for most of the winter. The next year her father died, and a few months later she and her mother left New Hampshire for good and moved to Pasadena.
    Iseult never saw Mother Power again but often thought of her. Bold, awkward, lit up by something inside herself, the nun was the first woman Iseult had met who possessed a powerful vision of herself operating in the world.
    ~
    She felt the California sun hot on her bare neck. She was wearing one of her day dresses, cotton poplin in crisp blue and white stripes. Her New England relations would have been annoyed that she wasn’t in mourning.
    No one she knew would ever have thought of settling in Venice, California. The Boston relations somehow had the idea that now her mother was dead she would go back and live with them in their narrow, dark Back Bay houses. She wasn’t going to, not in a million years.
    Colonnades — surely a Venetian touch — shaded the sidewalks along Windward Avenue, though the columns were plaster, not Italian stone, and sounded hollow when she tapped them. There were half a dozen raucous saloons. In Pasadena and L.A., saloons and pretty much everything else had to close on Sundays, but Venice had its own laws.
    She found the real estate office a block back from the beach, in a storefront between a seafood restaurant and a shop that sold Indian moccasins, ships in glass bottles, and striped beach towels. Peering into the office through the plate-glass window, she saw empty desks and a potted plant of gigantic proportions. She wondered if the office was closed, then noticed a man with his feet up on a desk in the back of the room, reading a newspaper. A bell jingled as she opened the door. The man lowered his newspaper. Seeing her, he took his feet off the desk and stood up.
    â€œMay I help you?”
    â€œI’d like to see some properties.”
    â€œOh. Well. I can certainly help you with that.”
    He was maybe a year or two younger than she was. His skin was tanned, eyes blue, and teeth very white.
    â€œPerhaps you’d like to finish your lunch first.” There was half a chicken sandwich on his desk.
    â€œOh, no. Wasn’t all that good anyhow.” He came forward, picking up his hat. “I’d be happy to show you what’s on the market. Not a lot of houses, but there are some choice lots. I’m Grattan O’Brien.”
    Some men seized Iseult’s hand and squeezed as if it were a bird they wanted to crush before it could escape. Her mother had disapproved of men and women shaking hands, considering it a vulgar Americanism. Grattan’s handshake was firm and quick, but she felt something intimate in his touch. As though he had rubbed some bone of herself. She felt her cheeks flushing with thoughts that weren’t words, just burrs of feelings, inchoate, startling.
    But one could ignore feelings; one didn’t need to let them show.
    ~
    On Windward Avenue, in the shadows of the colonnade, voices were keyed up and the air smelled of fried food. People spooned ice cream from paper cups. A man in front of a