The Words of Every Song by Liz Moore

Author:Liz Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767927932
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2007-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

“Welcome,” says Abraham, receiving the bottles of wine delightedly. “Pacifica will be down in a moment.”

The Plasseys and the Harcourts and the Blandes and Georgina Thompson, widowed five years ago, are all seated in the Powers-Klines’ living room. Naomi Plassey wrinkles her nose slightly at the smell of smoke and thinks with hope that perhaps something has gone wrong with dinner—something that rarely happens at these affairs. She looks around the room. There is a fire in the fireplace, which runs nearly constantly from October through April. It is kindled every hour by the housekeeper, Maris, when she is there, and by Abraham when she is not. It throws heat and light and the mustiness of a more rural place into the room, and throughout the house itself, so that inside the Powers-Kline brownstone there is a feeling at once of the country or a farmhouse or any cozy place. It is only the decor that places the home as a child of New York.

Though Naomi Plassey has been here many times, she never tires of taking in the rooms in this home. Here in the living room there is a stately photograph of Abraham, Pacifica, and their daughter, done in black and white, taken perhaps twenty-five years ago; their daughter must have been fifteen, thinks Naomi. It was taken on Shelter Island, where the Powers-Klines summer. In the photograph, a brown-haired, bespectacled Abraham stares straight at the camera, his arms wrapped about his wife. Pacifica looks down and to the left—a shame, thinks Abraham, who loves her eyes—and she might be looking at the water, or she might be looking at the sand. Their daughter stands to their right, one hand placed tentatively on her father’s shoulder, the only one smiling in the portrait. One might describe it as serious but for her.

Naomi is contemplating the photograph when two things happen simultaneously.

“Hello!” says Pacifica, descending the stairs like a dancer.

“Hello,” says Jax, coming in through the door, left un-latched by the Blandes, and locking eyes with her mother. She too holds a bottle of wine in her hands. “Happy birthday, Mother.”

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