The Translator by John Crowley

Author:John Crowley
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

II

1.

When her first semester at the University was over in May, Kit collected her grades (they were sent home too, on little slips printed for the first time by a computer): a B+ in Psychology, A’s in the rest except for her A-in Falin’s class: the highest grade he gave anyone, she learned.

Fran wanted her to come to New York with her for a while, stay at her mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive, go hear some music, sit in dark coffeehouses in the Village. But Kit had to say no (Fran nodding solemnly as though she expected nothing more); had to go home for a while, spend time with George and Marion, if her plan, her new plan, was to come off.

“You are crazy about him,” Jackie said when she told him about the plan. “Maybe just crazy altogether.” He wished he could be around the University in the summer, instead of working; taking some courses, getting some credits maybe toward his second major (economics) or maybe just some education courses, something to fall back on.

“Like a sword,” Kit said.

She packed her paperbacks and her papers and Ben’s letters, Ben’s typewriter too, hers forever now (it would be in her attic thirty years later, in its case), and the clothes she’d brought, which seemed now to belong mostly to somebody else: she had lived the semester in three sweaters, her straight skirts and Capezios, and the black ballet leotards and tights that Fran had got her mother to send out from New York. The rest filled her laundry case, amazing contraption of beaverboard and canvas straps. Marion had carried this case with her to Vassar, and the ghosts of old postage were still perceptible on it. Back then you filled such a case with your laundry and belted it up, then turned over the little address card in its windowed holder, and back it went for Mom to empty and fill again with washed and ironed clothes smelling of home.

Home. Kit sat in the lounge, waiting again for her father to come and carry her and her bags home.

Her parents were moving again. This time back East, outside Washington, D.C., where they had lived years ago, and where George would (he said) be designing bomb shelters for computers—“electronic bomb shelters,” he said, smiling at a joke that only he could get. Marion looked out at her June garden, and the pretty mosaic table she had made especially for it, in grief and exasperation. Kit was exasperated too: why did her mother always think they were going to stay where they went, when they never did? And only that night, in her own old bed and in the suffocating warmth and familiarity of being home again, did she see that it wasn’t the garden or the house that Marion was torn to leave behind. Her son’s grave was here, in this city, in the raw new part of the old Catholic cemetery, and always would be.

They treated Kit like visiting royalty,

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