Anio Szado Read Online Free

from the French Air Force, without a posting or a plane. By now, surely, he was airborne again. I was certain he would not still be in New York. There was nothing for him in New York.
    I had no cause to think I’d run into him, especially not in the Garment District, yet I looked for him as I had looked for him in the cafés of Old Montreal. I had checked for his letters daily. I’d looked for news of his departure from America in
Le Journal
and for his obituary in the
Gazette
: it was there that I expected to see him if I was ever to see him again.
    I had reread his books in my bedroom at Mother’s, though I’d made a point of leaving my own copies behind in New York.
Southern Mail
, which I had first read in French as
Courrier sud. Night Flight
, the story of a pilot fated to disappear.
Terre des hommes
—a title I would have translated as
Land of People
, not
Wind, Sand and Stars
or Expo’s “Man and His World.” Yet
Terre des hommes
was indeed the story of a man. They were all of them restless dramas of men, romantic loners in search of fulfillment, men who put duty above all.
    I had sought Antoine in his novels. I had recalled them as adventure tales. But what I found in rereading them was his testament that the noble man was condemned to wander unprotected and alone, his duties denying him a peaceful existence with a loving wife and the joys of settling in a community for longer than the span between missions or mail drops. By the time I received a letter from Antoine—the only letter he would send me in Montreal—I was half in love with his airborne doppelgängers, with their heart-wrenching ideals and their artless bravery. I wept for them and for myself—for I’d let Antoine go. I had forfeited my chance to ease him away from his pursuit of danger and into a quiet, comfortable life with me.
    New York, October 11, 1941
    Dear Mignonne,
    My pen wishes to speak of your beauty that presents itself to me in poignant images as I lie in bed and cannot sleep: your blond hair that tries charmingly to conceal the emotions of your eyes; your slender fingers that hold your pencil gracefully and loosely even when your mind fights the productivity of your hand; your nose and lips that pout so prettily that I can hardly take seriously your frustrations and your anger.
    My pen wishes, but I coax it to behave responsibly. A girl who has left a man should not be subjected to his morose and heartless nostalgia.
    I will admit to this, my sweet Mignonne, and damn me for it if you must: not once did I believe that you did not care for me, nor did I anticipate you would leave me here, stranded, alone in New York. Never mind whether or not you expressed discomfort or misgivings about our friendship. It is a young woman’s fate to be taken lightly. It is the role of her respectableolder gentleman to dismiss his pretty friend’s concerns and to give her a little frou-frou to diminish her worries and calm her nerves.
    I am not one for frou-frous. I do not play the role you might expect me to play. And you, too, have admirably broken the rules. You claimed that you were leaving to visit your mother because Madame Lachapelle had requested it and a short jaunt was due. When you then posted a letter within the week, from afar, to sever any expectation that our very tender friendship might continue as it had been, this seemed to me to be beyond comprehension. It has taken me months to understand.
    But such is man. To find the grain of fault in another being, he will dig as tirelessly as a child with a sand shovel. (A weak analogy, for the child labors only to see what he might discover. Today’s man digs in the hope of laying bare a core of ugliness at another’s heart.)
    Forgive my blindness, Mignonne. It has taken me this long, a full half year of your absence, to understand that the fault lies not in your expectations of me or in my failure to live up to the same, nor in your stubbornness (which I might more graciously call