Read Online Tolstoy and the Purple Chair by Nina Sankovitch - Free Book Online

wealth, and, most important, security. Wharton enveloped her insights on human nature within page-turning plots of love, intrigue, and betrayal. The Touchstone is perfect storytelling and was a quick and good read.
    I finished the book easily by dinnertime, in turn laughing at Wharton’s hilarious passages about wedded bliss (“The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson ramble mounted to the nursery window of a baby who never cried”) and shaking at her insight into the role of beneficence, where “the happiness of giving” offers satisfaction to both parties, the one in need and the one bestowing what is needed. I promised myself that the evening would be reserved for Jack, my kind and giving husband, who had taken care of three meals to allow me all the time I needed to both read my book and coddle a sick child. Saturday night, book finished, boys in bed, and inspired by Wharton, I went to give Jack my own overdue messages of love and marriage. But he was asleep on the couch, and I soon joined him, passed out on the other couch, television on but unwatched. The messages would have to wait.
    Monday morning, Martin was completely recovered. I had four boys getting on buses, with only moderate grumbling and no last-minute dashes for anything. I showered and dressed, poured a fresh cup of coffee, and sat down in front of my computer, ready to write up a quick review of Silks , the new Dick Francis mystery I’d read on Sunday. Sundays were my mystery days, the day I allowed myself candy and soda in the form of fast-paced, gripping novels of detection, sleuthing, and resolution.
    Silks had been great fun to read, but the review was harder to write than I had anticipated. How to convey the sheer entertainment value of a good Francis, while also acknowledging its formulaic unfolding? I struggled through for more than two hours and then sat back to do a spell-check. The phone rang, and in my urgency to see if another stomach bug had come to plague me, I hit the wrong button on my computer. When I came back from a call asking about my satisfaction with my cable service (Damn! I reminded myself to look at the caller ID number every time), I found an empty screen before me—total erasure of what I had spent the morning writing.
    By the time I stopped yelling like an idiot at the blank screen and pounded out another review, it was lunchtime. I wasn’t hungry. I was frustrated. Forget lunch, forget the laundry I’d planned on getting started this morning, forget my plan to fumigate the big green couch/sickbed. I had to start reading my book of the day, and I had to start now. I grabbed The Master of Petersburg by J. M. Coetzee off the shelf, shoved myself down into my purple chair, and began to read. In what seemed like only minutes, the back door swung open. The shouts of returning boys echoed through the house.
    Another night up until midnight. Real life had kept me from the book all afternoon. I thought of Edith Wharton’s “happiness of giving” as I drove boys here and there, did a slapdash grocery run (bread, bananas, milk, orange juice—my daily mantra of what we always seem to need more of), scooted to the train to pick up Jack, and pushed loads of laundry through the washer. Everyone wanted dinner—surprise! I overcooked some chicken cutlets and tossed a premade salad. I cleaned up from dinner, folded laundry, and began straightening up the house and getting kids ready for bed. When I finally could sit down again with Coetzee and Dostoyevsky, it was ten o’clock. I was tired, bone-tired. I was downstairs alone, while my husband slept alone upstairs: messages of love out the window, we’d have to try again tomorrow.
    The happiness I got from giving to family was getting all mixed up with my scheduling. I could schedule reading, writing, cooking, and cleaning. But how to schedule caring and loving? The “happiness in giving” would have to