When the Diamonds Were Gone by Julian Padowicz

Author:Julian Padowicz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2015-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Thanksgiving at the Szyks was as spirited as Christmas, though I doubt that my aunt knew exactly what we were celebrating. A couple days after our turkey feast during my second year at Millbrook, my aunt invited me to join them on a social visit. “Vy don’t you come vit us,” she said. “Dere is a girl your aitch.”

My heart immediately began to beat faster—not from lust, but from terror. I had never been in the company of a strange girl before. In Rio, when I was eight, I had been infatuated with a beautiful woman in her twenties whom Mother had engaged to take me to the beach, but other than Ann Marr and my cousin Anita, I had never as much as spoken to a female anywhere near my own age.

Aunt and Uncle’s friends were a family named Davidoff who lived a ten-minute ride away. Dr. Leo Davidoff, it turned out, was a renowned neurosurgeon, and there were three daughters and a son. The girl who was my age was the middle daughter, named Leonore. The boy, Frank, was a year or so younger.

There was music coming from somewhere when Dr. Davidoff met us at the door, and it stopped as we entered the living room. The girl he introduced to me as Leonore had been playing a flute, if I remember correctly, while her younger sister, Mary Libby, played a cello and their mother, the piano. There was a fire in the fireplace. Frank was playing backgammon across the room with Leonore’s best friend. Out of concern for her privacy, I will call her Susan.

I have no memory of what we talked about. I can’t imagine that I had anything to talk about other than boarding school life. But Leonore seemed very interested in what I had to say. And when she toasted a marshmallow in the fireplace, blew on it with her own breath, and gave it to me to eat, I was smitten.

Leonore was my height with straight, shoulder-length dark hair and dark eyes. In her presence, I never ran out of things to say, and she met everything I said with either a thoughtful response or the most beautiful laugh I had ever heard. Her older sister, Helen, and Mary Libby were courteous to me as well. In fact, the entire family seemed interested in me and my life in boarding school.

It was soon evident to me that the Davidoff family had been alerted to this teenage boy who knew no one in New Canaan and whose mother had sloughed him off on relatives because she had no room for him in her life. While I was not aware of actually suffering any pain due to this condition I knew how it might tug at one’s heartstrings, and this caring family was clearly responding.

I was invited to come back the following day but unfortunately my vacation was over and I would be heading back to Millbrook. “Then we must get together when you come home for Christmas,” Leonore said.

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