Miss Fuller by April Bernard

Author:April Bernard [Bernard, April]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781586421960
Publisher: Steerforth
Published: 2012-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Same day, night

The voyage is smooth now; my Nino sleeps. (He is nearly two years old!) At night my husband sits with the men in the rough parlor below decks & plays a kind of Italian patience called “Qui Sace” (Who Knows?), which the Brownings tell me is called in England “The Idle Year.” Do you know it? I cannot take an interest in card games, but I see my Giovanni night after night, ever since the war, with his especial deck of cards — these are no ordinary cards but disks with the numerals or faces in the middle & the hearts or spades, the figures, arranged around the circle. These cards have soft tooled-leather backs, reddish, with a figure of a dragon on them. Like so many homely objects I have seen in Italy, they have a charm about them incommensurate with their monetary value, a happy charm of style. Most of them have been so handled that the dragon, black against the red, can scarcely be made out any more.

Giovanni sits for hours, laying out the cards, stacking them backwards into a single pile. He often “makes” the game — because, I believe, he does not truly shuffle the cards.

I run ahead of my tale, again, but I must say how my dear husband is no longer quite the man I married. He was never a man of letters, his English is halting & he cannot read a word of it, but he is withal a graceful & sensitive man with many gentle jests & niceties of manner, a true “swain,” whose attentions astonished & gratified me, & with whom I have known a deep, sweetly domestic love. The sadness is that he has been damaged by an injury to his head he received during the last month of the fighting. For a time we feared he would be blind, but his vision has returned only slightly dimmed. His understanding & conversation have narrowed, but how he loves the boy! He can sit with him, playing at tops or cards & cat’s-cradle, for hours.

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