The Lake on Fire by Rosellen Brown

Author:Rosellen Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781946448248
Publisher: Sarabande Books
Published: 2018-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

23

GREGORY HAD a surprise for her. “This will please you, I think, Chaya. Just you wait!” He handed her up to a seat in a hack and told the cabman to go a few blocks north and another few west. Like her own block, the houses here were sad, wooden fronts sagging, brick fronts grimy, chipped and unadorned. What a decadent city this was. It was a rigged game, whether one chose to play or not. There ought to come a huge wave off the lake to drown it all, sinners and saints and especially the ones who owned their souls, to even the score.

“Here,” Gregory called to the driver, and the horse stopped as suddenly as if his nose had hit a wall. Chaya saw a plain brick building, three stories tall, its front stoop and cornices half fallen in, most of its windows gaping uncovered. She followed Gregory into its murky hallway, where the rankling smell of mildew mixed with the residue of some cooking disaster that must have charred the bottom out of a good-sized pot.

Then, after a long climb, with an exclamation of triumph, he managed, by feel alone, to find the keyhole, and with a click and a push, the door opened and he made a bow of welcome. “Dear lady, my new abode.”

Oh, Gregory. Her eyes welcomed the light, though the windows were shadowed with old grime. In that light she saw a room as worn and decrepit as Mrs. Gottlieb’s parlor, but rescued, incongruously, by a few furnishings he must have carted from home: a solid, shining, mahogany breakfront with silver drawer-pulls, two commodious leather chairs in a luscious forest green, a round table with the scalloped feet of a lion. On a scuffed pine dresser, a nicked enamel pitcher, a nicked enamel bowl. Such effort to abandon his fate, which would not abandon him! Such desperation to belong. She was embarrassed for him.

He was as proud as a poor man who had moved up to better rooms. They were passing each other, Chaya saw, bitterly amused, one rising while the other fell.

Gregory bounced gently on the bed like a boy, grinning. Lifted a dented kettle he might have bought from a junkman on Maxwell Street, then remembered he had no water unless he went downstairs to pump it. Only the pile of papers and the shiny maroon pen on the table betrayed his difference from his neighbors. He didn’t ask her what she thought about it, only combed her face for a response. Had he known her true opinion, he’d have been more surprised than he was when she came into his arms as if to congratulate him.

How strange that she found this folly endearing—that he could be so earnest and so entirely wrong. He was no prince after all. He was more flawed, he was more human, and, it seemed, he needed her approval more than he needed his comfort. How vulnerable he felt when she took his head to her

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