Read Online The Vagabonds by Nicholas DelBanco - Free Book Online Page A

stood. The thought of Harry alone with her daughter was not one she wanted to have while away.
    “
Stick to your own kind,
” the girl was singing, doing her Anita- accent. Then her face grew grave again and she kissed her mother on both cheeks. “I’m sorry.
Desolée.
”
    “Maisie knows. Both Maisie and Tom know where I’m going, and you call them if you need to, right?”
    Leah collected the teacups, nodding. She turned on hot water and washed out the cups, rinsing twice and settling the white porcelain into the dish drain carefully. “Don’t worry, Mom, we’ll be fine . . .”
    “I love you. Break a leg.”
    Now she finishes her cigarette and drops the stub in the fireplace ash. Above her head Joanna hears her sister and her brother moving, settling in their rooms to sleep, but she herself will stay here and watch the fire die. She can remember Claire when young, defiant in a party dress, refusing to come to the party. “You can’t
make
me do it, you can’t,” Claire would say, then throw herself back on the bed. Why can’t we just be friends, Joanna wonders, why should it be so difficult? She herself has always had the gift of friendship, an easy back-and-forth with strangers at her B&B. But Claire resists her, adamant; Claire is having none of it and drinking ice water, not wine . . .
    The fire is red embers now; Joanna shuts her eyes. She tries to remember this living room full, the noise and bustle of guests when she was five or six years old and wanting to serve canapés or, later, drinks. She would go from visitor to visitor and do her little curtsy or simply stand there waiting till they looked down and noticed and she’d ask, “Would you like another canapé? Can I freshen up your drink?”
    This was the expression her father taught her for parties, and it always got a smile. If a guest said, “Thanks, I’m fine,” there would be nothing else to do, but if the guest said, “Thank you, yes” then Joanna had to ask what kind of drink was in the glass and remember which was which. “She’s the life of the party,” they said to her parents. “A real little charmer, that one. I bet you two are proud.”
    They were, they said, they both were proud, and Joanna can remember her parents in the living room, standing together and greeting the guests and making people welcome turn by turn. Then she would play her waitress-game and try to be a charmer, a real little firecracker, that one, and then be sent upstairs. If she couldn’t fall asleep she’d creep to the heat register, and with her ear against the grate would listen to laughter, the chattering adults and din of the party beneath. Or, later, on the top stair of the stairwell, wearing the nightgown with the red cherry pattern and trying to determine from the noise below whose voice belonged to whom . . .
    On the screen of her shut eyelids, now, she sees her father lounging in the doorway, resplendent in his white jacket and bow tie and straw hat. He has just returned from—or perhaps is just about to leave for; in the instant of this memory Joanna cannot tell—the track. She catches the faint whiff of gin. She does not recognize it yet, will only learn years later that the high sweet acid odor of his breath is the tang of gin and bitters, or gin with just a splash of vermouth or gin straight up with a twist. She cannot remember him falling-down drunk or anything other than courtly, ever, but always with a flask or cocktail shaker near to hand. “The juniper berry,” he tells her, “it’s the gift God gave to men. That, and the apple,” he says. “Nothing like them for sweetness,” he says.
    He smells of lilac vegetal and talcum powder and, if he is returning, sweat; he bends down toward her and holds out his arms and scoops her up while she wriggles and giggles and kisses her smack on the cheek. “How’s my precious J-J girl?” he asks her. “How’s my little firecracker? Have you been behaving yourself?” If he’s leaving she