A Deadly Affection Read Online Free Page B

so reassured that I felt myself truly relaxing for the first time that day. Perhaps I would show the article to Father in the morning, I thought as I dropped the journals onto the floor. It might help him understand what I was trying to accomplish. Comforted by the thought, I settled lower on my pillow and gave in to the pull of gravity on my eyelids.
    â€¢ • •
    Sometime later, I awoke to the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Though it was still dark outside, the furnace had burned low enough to let frost form inside the windowpanes, leading me to guess it was an hour or two before dawn. I pushed off my bedcovers and crossed to the door, pulling it open just in time to see my parents round the second-floor landing and start up the next flight to their bedrooms. My father was behind Mama, with one hand under her elbow and the other against the small of her back. In the dim light, he appeared to be almost levitating her up the stairwell. I started to call out but stopped, feeling like an intruder. I waited until they had disappeared around the newel post and then softly closed the door.
    When next I awoke, it was to the sound of the bread truck door slamming beneath my window. I quickly washed and brushed my teeth and ran shivering back to my room, where I hopped from foot to foot in front of the wardrobe as I decided what to wear for my meeting with Professor Bogard. I finally selected a warm, green plaid suit with a fitted jacket and heavy, flared skirt and laid it on the bed. Stripping off my nightgown, I pulled on my chemise, corset, corset cover, drawers, hose, petticoat, and shirtwaist, shivering a little less with each layer. I stepped into the skirt, buttoned on my jacket, and laced up my boots, then grabbed some pins from the dresser tray and piled my hair into a knot.
    Turning to check the total effect in the standing mirror, I saw a large-eyed young woman who hardly looked old enough to be out of secondary school, let alone have a degree in medicine, gazing back at me. The long, straight nose described as “patrician” on my mother, on me had grown only long enough to be called “pert,” while the wide set of my mouth suggested more childish stubbornness than the droll sophistication I would have preferred. I pushed my bangs to one side. If only I could grow out my unfashionable fringe, I might look more my age. But then, of course, the scar would show. I turned away from my reflection and went to find Mama.
    She was sitting at the dressing table in her boudoir with her back turned partially toward me, sifting through her mail. I paused in the doorway, struck by the angle of her face, remembering how I used to watch her in just such a pose as she prepared to go out for the evening, years ago when she cared about such things. I would sit on the little tufted stool behind her, giddy with the smells of potpourri and cologne, watching her reflection in the amber mirror like a youthful apprentice witnessing the secrets of some ancient trade. As if it were a scene from one of the flickering moving pictures I’d watched on Broadway, I recalled the quick movement of her head as she slipped on a dangling earring, the illicit dabs of rouge on her cheeks and the hollows of her shoulders—“just a dot,” she’d whisper conspiratorially, eyes shining at me in the mirror—and the sprinkle of white powder over her skin, fine as fairy dust.
    Inevitably, just after she’d applied the last spritz of gardenia-scented cologne behind her ears, we’d hear the knock. As Mama swiveled on her chair, the hallway door would open, and into this bastion of femininity would step the tall, dark, cherry-tobacco-redolent figure of my father, his mustache freshly clipped and his high, starched collar pressing against the bath-pinkened skin of his throat. At this moment, I always felt as if two worlds were colliding, sparking a strange, mysterious charge that made me long to dot rouge on my