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And it was not Aunt Gabriele's fault if the dear child was not convinced how wholly indispensable his gift was. But Louise still turned over her things. "Here," said she, "I have a waistcoat-piece for Bergström, and here a neck-kerchief for Ulla, as well as this little brush with which to dust mirrors and tables. Is it not superb? And see, a little pair of bellows, and these trifles for Brigitta."
Peggy put the invisible items on the belt of the counter that remained still. Peggy tilted up her chin toward nothing and smiled affectedly as if she were responding to a nonexistent cashier. "I'm very well. Thank you," said Peggy. Then her face tilted back toward the invisible items and the smile deadened. Gabriele felt the slapping of her back. Peggy put her mouth toward Gabriele's ear.
They seemed to shoot up of themselves under Gabriele's feet. The mother, white herself as a lily, went about softly in her fine morning-dress, with a cloth in her hand, wiping away from mirror or table the smallest particle of dust.
She sensed a kindness in this smashing of ignorance and innocence the way she had seen Aunt Peggy smash a horse fly on one of her uncle's stallions. "In a way, I am glad you brought this up," continued Gabriele's mother in German. "There are some things that will be changing soon."
Jacobi. You will not hear me, will not understand me; you play with my distress! Ah, Louise! Louise. The family is assembled in the library; tea is just finished. Louise, at Petrea's and Gabriele's urgent request, has laid out the cards on a little table to tell them their fortunes.
The lost and again-found-one has come home, in order to begin a new life, and her charming child is quite established on the knees of the grandfather. "I hear Gabriele's guitar accompanied by a song. I fancy now they dance. Louise's eight boys make the floor shake. Jacobi's voice is heard above all. The good, ever-young man.
Thuc nodded her Vietnamese face at Gabriele's ostensible translations when really Gabriele was only giving a synopsis of what was being said with commentary disparaging of the YMCA treatment of its refugees and a system that was generally f
He relaxed on one of the leather sofas in the lounge with other smokers and those limp individuals in between engagements. Visions came unto him and he almost felt holy writing out aspects of Gabriele's life within the fog of his smoke. Naked bodies in contrast to his, that was now clothed in underwear, did not distract him.
And she worried that she would resent Gabriele's return since it would inevitably pry away this maternal fusion.
There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job: having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers; and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the girl were real ones.
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