Age Read Online Free

way; I understand that. Or else cut her off—which for Gemma is impossible. Even now.
    And I approved. In spite of outbursts of temper, my dear one, I knew I had to. Logic could not be urged. But more than that, you wouldn’t have been what you were to me if you had been able to cut people off. The girl herself—lingering on with us for weeks after that first wedding on the excuse that it had snatched her sister from us—I could scarcely address politely. It was her mischief and then her scheme, to make advances to me, in corridors, on picnics, and finally by sneaking into my study nude. I scared her, before I threw her out. ‘You will pretend to like me—just enough,’ I said. ‘From now on. No mischief. No stepfather enmity even, you poor slut. Your mother has had enough to bear.’
    But a good kind friend we don’t see anymore had already come to Gemma to report. ‘That girl is driving Rupert crazy; he can’t get away from her. In your small house.’ The friend, who is rich, is said still to hear from Arturo, who at the time was her informant, writing her that Francesca had taunted him that she would get to me. ‘ Nonno ’ — she called her father Grandfather because of his years—‘want to bet?’ She was his favorite. She tortured him too.
    So you, Gemma, came to me, to let me hold you, not to reassure you—our faith in each other has been blind, some would say, if well warranted—but to reassure me. ‘You needn’t pretend about her anymore. To like her. Or to conceal from me what she is. I’ve told her. Be decent when you’re here. Or I will cut you off. And I will.’ And maybe it would have come to that by now if not because of me—if that stony-faced lifer now in Lubeck prison for her murder hadn’t done it for you, never revealing why. Her countries confused us until the end.
    But that day I said: ‘You needn’t. I’ve scared her off
    ‘How? Tell me. You smiled your saddest maternal smile, unaware you wore it. ‘It might help me.’
    It wouldn’t have. You were never in the army—where killing becomes possible to people like us. Perhaps you knew that. You didn’t press. And knew I spoke the truth, and never asked her.
    ‘Hate her for me,’ was all you said, shivering into me. ‘I cant.’
    So, for that second wedding of her sister’s, Francesca brought her own equipment—a short white dress you were awed to find was from Fortuny—in whose spiral she moved like its black-eyed core, and the slippery young Roman, with a fat Hapsburg lip and a patrimony to match, who had bought it for her.
    ‘She wants to outshine the bride,’ I said to you. ‘She never will.’ She never could, though Christina was not to blame.
    We watched the two of them, each with her chosen man, each of those as different as the two daughters. I saw that you were praying, your eyes blemished with hope. For Francesca was trying to make her friend see the analogy. Of weddings.
    But he was watching Christina, straightforward in her gray second wedding-dress, accepting her ring with an upward look that was adornment enough, and I fear he did see what weddings were, his eyes on Christina, his fat lip wet with delight.
    ‘Today—I don’t hate,’ I said.
    By then I was older. Who says the middle-aged don’t grow? Only the middle-aged themselves, who see that period of their lives as stuck in a swathe of life whose broad ribbon will merely advance, bearing them on. Age knows better. But who will speak for age? Do we only regress? Or do we grow too?
    I began this entry intending to talk about the two of us as we are. Instead, all this wandering in the past, telling you what you already know. And telling myself. Do I hope that the story will change, mutate, in the telling? Or do I fear that the aged no longer have events—worth the telling?
    You and I inhabit a present in which fewer and fewer are intimate enough with us to write or phone. Or if so, not forgetful of it. How does one chronicle that? The phone is