Read Online What Love Sees by Susan Vreeland - Free Book Online

separated her from the others. She drew her mouth inward.
    “What’s wrong, Jean?”
    It startled her even though Miss Weaver’s voice had a rare softness. She hadn’t known anyone was in the room. “I can’t remember. Mother taught me the whole thing. It took most of the summer. And now I can’t get beyond that measure.” She tried to make her voice sound casual.
    “I’ll investigate a professional teacher. I think I know of one in Manhattan who will take you. Maybe she can come once a week.”
    Miss Weaver’s thick heels clomped down the hall. “Thank you,” Jean said after her. But her words sounded weak. Just a fumbling thank you wasn’t enough. She knew Miss Weaver would find someone, too. When that woman made a decision, she always got results.
    At dinner the girls made up for what they didn’t say in French at lunch. Miss Reynolds—the girls called her Rene—sat at one table, Miss Weaver at the other.
    “LCW will start another book tonight, don’t you think?” Dody said to Rene. They had fallen into the habit of calling Miss Weaver by her initials. She didn’t seem to mind.
    “What a bore,” Sally Anne whispered. “Pinch me if I fall asleep.”
    “It’s not a bore,” Jean answered, keeping her voice low. “I love it.” After dinner in the library, Francisco, the Filipino butler, served coffee in demitasse cups on a silver tray and they all listened to Miss Weaver read novels or plays in her throaty voice. It was a warm, animated time. The room seemed peopled by characters living out their triumphs and defeats, with Miss Weaver’s raspy voice unraveling the struggles of all humanity. Through language alone, she could see a boy selling newspapers on a bridge in the rain, a mother sitting by the roadside weeping over a sick child, an immigrant’s chest heaving in anxiety and excitement as he stepped off a train in a strange city. She always imagined herself the female lead and felt anguish at her fictional choices. Through stories she could, momentarily, live more broadly.
    “I don’t care if you think I’m silly. I don’t ever want her to stop.”
    “Well, she will tonight,” Rene said, “because I’m reading!”
    “You?” Sally Anne’s spoon clanked on her plate.
    Served her right to be embarrassed.
    “What’ll you read?” Jean raised her spoon to her mouth. The beef broth dribbled off and splashed into the bowl. Her cheeks flushed hot. Rats. Just when they were probably looking at her. She dipped in again and concentrated on holding her spoon flat. When she touched it to her lips the spoon was empty. The thin, clear soup didn’t weigh enough for her to tell if she’d gotten any. Beef broth nights were always humiliating.
    “Ibsen’s The Doll’s House . It’s a play.”
    “Sounds like a nursery. What’s it about?”
    “A young wife who’s unhappy with her perfect, narrow, protected married life. It brought a storm of protest when it came out about fifty years ago in Norway and now a new production of it is opening on Broadway.”
    Every night that week Jean listened intently, her eyes watering in empathy for Nora. When Rene got to the end of Act III, the room was quiet for a few minutes. Jean heard people shift their positions in the tall wingback chairs. “I feel for her,” she said. “She wanted a real life so desperately, not some phoney, prepared little world.” No one else said anything. “I can hardly believe she did it, though. Left just like that, walked right out the door.” Jean’s voice dropped. “I wonder if any of our lives will be that narrow.”
    “Not mine,” Polly declared.
    “Of course not yours, but you’re a westerner. For us in New England, it’s different.”
    “How?”
    “More stuffy. More controlled.”
    At the end of that week, they all went to see the Ibsen opening on Broadway. Jean cried in the darkness during the third act.
    Most of their evening reading was related to theater they saw: Katherine Cornell as Shaw’s St. Joan