Beggar of Love Read Online Free

Then the Episcopalians, never to be outdone, swung theirs in the old stone bell tower while the Catholics played their taped bells across town. The air-raid siren switched on for its weekly test, its mournful wail transformed in Jefferson’s ears to a nasal bellow of glee. The boats on the river bleated and tooted, loosed from their winter moorings this first warm day of the year. The ferry across the Hudson was loudest of all, as if the captain knew there was a first kiss to celebrate. The owners of Mercurys and Buicks, British sports cars and ugly French Citroens beeped greetings at one another and rolled down their windows.
    The grown-ups called to one another and lifted toddlers from strollers. Older children, excited by the festival, shrieked and shrilled and squealed with excitement until the old cannon in the little park at the end of Cannon Street boomed once to celebrate the day. The town caretaker had been keeping it ready for their kiss, whispered Angela, even as Jefferson wondered why no one had noticed or objected to two girls kissing.
    It could not have been a more momentous kiss. When she opened her eyes she saw bright streamers lifting in the breeze and colorful beer pennants waving, or perhaps that was before she opened her eyes. For sure, when she opened her eyes, there was Angela, holding both of her hands, her best friend since Angela had moved to town six months earlier. Angela’s parents had taken over Hiram’s Soda Fountain in Dutchess.
    Poor Angela had obviously been bored after living in the city where adventure awaited her on every corner, jingling the change in its pockets. Angela was a lush girl at fifteen, five months younger than Jefferson, a gorgeous eligible girl whose family was making sure their daughter would have every frill imaginable at a glorious wedding.
    Angela Tabor didn’t seem interested in her eligibility. She told Jefferson that boys were boring pigs. Jefferson had seen her slap one who’d grabbed for her at school. Perhaps for the daughter of immigrants in a town that seemed well content to be separated from the melting pot of New York City by a forty-five-minute northbound train ride, it was her sense of herself as a stranger that inclined her to Jefferson, who also felt she fit nowhere. Pledging allegiance to the American flag, she’d confided to Jefferson, turned her insides to grateful, inspired mush, and she said she had learned, on assembly days, to brazenly bear her teachers’ sympathetic looks when they noticed her stealthily wipe tears from her eyes after singing “America, the Beautiful.” Jefferson found her slight accent electrifying.
    Was this why Angela first spoke to Jefferson—could she tell that Jefferson was different too? Had Angela noticed that Jefferson never giggled about boys, never thrust out a newly swelled chest to provoke them? Jefferson herself slouched, as if to emphasize that whatever treasures lay beneath her blouse were not being cultivated for male adolescent riffraff. Then again, it may have been Jefferson’s name itself, so very American.
    Angela had already erased most traces of her first languages, Greek and a smattering of her father’s native Czech. She wanted to be really American, so no one could tell she’d been conceived in no country but on a freighter—conceived by a father fed up with a homeland that didn’t like Jews and a mother whose family had always survived by smuggling off the coast of Greece. Why not smuggle people? The family had never before lost a daughter to one of their refugees.
    Maybe a Jefferson, her eyes seemed to plead, maybe a Jefferson from the big house that looked down on the river, whose aunt owned that classic beauty right in town, set back from Main Street, with an iron gate out front and a sign that said it was built in 1889, maybe a Jefferson could give her what she had not inherited in her blood: the American arrogance and matter-of-factness about having—having freedom, having possessions,