“‘... and after April,’” she was quoting, “‘when May follows, and the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!’ Okay, we all live in the big bad city, we don’t see too many whitethroats or swallows or buttercups waking anew at noontide, but do any of you find those images evocative? Do any of you even know what a whitethroat is? Or a chaffinch? ‘While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough.’ Sally? What’s a chaffinch?”
Sally Hawkins, looking like a chaffinch herself, whatever that was, tall and spindly with stringy brown hair and bulging brown eyes, a true chaffinch if ever Luretta saw one.
“Some kind of bird,” Sally said. “I guess.”
“Any idea what it looks like?”
“No.”
“Is it blue? Yellow? Red? Any idea?”
“No.”
“Well, isn’t it important for a poet to give us images we can visualize? How about a melon-flower? Anyone here know what a melon-flower looks like? Alyce? Any idea?”
“It’s something like a squash, I guess.”
Alyce Goldstein. Cute little girl with dark hair and darker eyes, burdened with the “y” in her name because her mother thought it was more stylish.
“‘Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!’ That’s the last line of the poem. Where is he, anyway? Browning? The poem is titled ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad.’ So where is he? Is the melon-flower where he happens to be at the time? Or does it grow in England?”
“It must be where he is.”
Jenny Larson, thick glasses, freckles all over her face, shy as a butterfly.
“And where’s that?”
“Probably Italy.”
“What makes you say Italy?”
“The melon-flower makes it sound like Italy. I don’t know why. It just sounds like Italy.”
“Also he wrote ‘My Last Duchess,’” Amy Fiske said, “and that was about Italy, wasn’t it?”
“Well, he also wrote ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,’ so how do we know this isn’t Spain? If we know nothing at all about a melon-flower...”
Luretta found Browning a total bore, even when Mrs. Welles was teaching him. Yesterday, she’d read them the T. S. Eliot poem that began with the words “April is the cruellest month,” and those five words had said more to her than all the words Browning had ever...
The bell rang.
“Nuts!” Sarah said.
Luretta clutched her books to her chest, ran to the front of the classroom, took a deep breath, and said, “Mrs. Welles,” I have to...
“Honey, can it wait till tomorrow?” Sarah said. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
She was gone almost before the words left her mouth, snapping her attaché case shut, snatching her handbag out of the bottom drawer of the desk, grabbing her topcoat out of the closet near the door, and waving a brief farewell to Luretta as she ran out.
Luretta supposed it would have to wait till tomorrow.
She ran the three blocks from Sixtieth to Fifty-Seventh, sure Billy would be gone by now, knowing she would first have to call Andrew, tell him she was on the way, and then try to catch a rush-hour taxi. But miracle of miracles, the car was still there, waiting for her at the curb outside Dunhill’s, where it waited for her every Wednesday at four ten, four fifteen, except that today it was closer to four thirty because of the assembly and the fire drill.
The poem she’d written was in her handbag.
She hadn’t seen Andrew in two weeks. She could not wait to be alone with him. She yanked open the back door, slid onto the black leather seat, pulled the door closed behind her, caught her breath, and said, “I thought you’d be gone, Billy, thank you for...”
“My orders are to wait till the cows come home,” Billy said, and turned the ignition key.
“That doesn’t sound like him.”
“Ma’am?”
“Mr. Farrell,” she said. “Till the cows come home.”
“Mr. Farrell, huh?” Billy said.
His eyes met hers in the rearview mirror.
There was a faint smile on his mouth.
“Well, those weren’t his exact words,” he said. “Mr. Farrell,” Still smiling. “What he said is I should wait for however long it takes. I just wait, and that’s it.”
“Does that go for everyone you drive?”
“No, ma’am, it doesn’t.”
He had turned the car onto Park Avenue now, heading downtown. The traffic was heavy. She was beginning to think the assembly and fire drill would cost her a lot more than the twenty minutes they’d added to the school day.
“How long do you wait for other people?” she asked.
“Depends. If it’s the airport, I wait till the plane gets in, however long it takes.”
“Do you pick up many people at the airport?”
“Oh sure.”
“What if it isn’t the airport?”
“Twenty minutes, half an hour. I call in, ask if...” He hesitated and then said, “Ask if Mr. Farrell wants me to wait longer or what I should do. Whatever he wants me to do, I do. He’s the boss.”
She wanted to ask him if he drove many other women. Wanted to ask if his instructions were to wait for as long as it took with any other women but herself. She did not ask. She settled back against the soft black leather, instead, losing herself in the steady drone of the traffic, closing her eyes, lulled almost to sleep until Billy tooted the horn at another car, jolting her immediately back to her senses.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Brooklyn, he wants me to bring you to the Buona Sera,” Billy said, and paused, and grinned into the rearview mirror again. “Mr. Farrell.”
“The what?”
“Buona Sera. It’s a restaurant.”
“A rest—?”
“Very good one, in fact. Right around the corner, in fact.”
“A restaurant? I can’t...”
She was suddenly panicked. A restaurant? Was he crazy? Even in Brooklyn, was he crazy?
“It’s very nice,” Billy said, “you’ll like it.”
He was pulling the car up to the curb in front of what looked like the sort of cheap little Italian joint you passed in Queens on the way to Kennedy if there was traffic and you got off the parkway and took the backstreets. Green awning out front, plastic stained-glass windows in the two entrance doors, big ornate metal door pulls that were supposed to look like bronze, a frayed red carpet stretching under the awning, from the curb to the entrance doors. Billy was out of the car already, coming around it now, opening the back door for her. She would not get out of the car, this was ridiculous. Why had he...?
Andrew suddenly came through one of the twin entrance doors, stepping out onto the sidewalk, walking swiftly toward the curb.
“Hi,” he said.
“Andrew, what...?”
“Time we broke out,” he said, and grinned.
The moment they were seated, Andrew reached across the table to take her hands. Both hands. He was making no effort to hide. This both frightened her and thrilled her.
“I have things to tell you,” he said.
“Couldn’t you have said them in...?”
“I wanted to be with you in public.”
“Why?”
“To show you off.”
“Andrew...”
“To show everyone how beautiful you are. To show everyone how much I love you.”
“This is very dangerous,” she whispered.
“I don’t care.”
“I know we’re in Brooklyn...”
“That’s why I chose it.”
“But even so...”
“Don’t worry.”
“I do worry.”