Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan

Author:Kira Henehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2010-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

40

Dame Uppal herself greeted me at the door on my next trip to the Uppal estate. She offered a bright smile after subtly glancing about my person for satchels filled with serpents or otherwise equivalently disorderly items I might be intending to introduce into the household. Finding none, she, as I said, offered a bright smile and invited me in.

She was the Dame Uppal of the Study, right from the get-go: hair neatly bunned, clothing kempt, finely drawn kohl about the eyes. The picture of propriety. Not a shred of her sloppy sitting-room doppelganger lingered, lintlike, to indicate that she’d ever existed at all, even when we sat in that sitting room to wait for her perpetually late husband.

Dame Uppal offered me tea, which I accepted gratefully. Leaving Lavendar at the Tiki Barn always caused me some consternation, which only well-steeped chamomile leaves could set to rights. As we waited for the man to bring our tea, Dame Uppal confided that the Professor had in fact gone out that morning, with Odille, on some sort of secret errand, but that he’d been well aware when he left of the time of our appointment and was sure to be back presently. She confided further that soon would be her, Dame Uppal’s, fiftieth birthday, and she suspected that the errand concerned this occasion.

Dame Uppal was quite girlish for a handsome woman of fifty.

She confided then that there had been some peculiarity afoot in the household of late, but that it had recently occurred to her that the cause of the confusion, of the seeming lapses in her husband’s attentions, could be attributed to festive birthday surprises. She confessed that she enjoyed nothing so much as a fête, and that it was she who traditionally prepared the fêtes, and that the Professor was sure to be finding the task a touch overwhelming, although of course he had many of his own talents which were at least as—if not perhaps more—important than those in the arena of party planning.

She was not in fact as handsome as I’d first judged. There was something lovely in her face, something softer than had initially been conveyed, and though her dressing gown of days of yore had been truly magnificent, the Dame Uppal of this second visit would have blown the old Dame Uppal away in, for instance, a beauty pageant for Women of a Certain Age.

Day of yore, singular, would perhaps be more accurate a sentence fragment.

I congratulated Dame Uppal on her upcoming birthday and then our tea was brought and the Professor followed quickly on the heels of the manservant into the room.

—I’ve kept you waiting, he said.—Finley, he said.

Was it my imagination in finding him brusque.

Though I recalled that my last visit had not ended well for him and his household, and perhaps he carried some coolness toward me. Could I fault him for his brusqueness.

I could fault him mildly. I was, after all, still a guest.

Dame Uppal had, after all, gotten past it.

I nodded brusquely at the Professor.

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