The Delicate, Passionate World of Gregory Morgan and Vivien Prevette / Book 1: The Accident

The Pepperton Press

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Scotch Plains, NJ  07076-9998

First printing, November 2018

Copyright © Mia Marko, 2018

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Visit the website of The Delicate, Passionate World at www.delicatepassionateworld.com.

ISBN:  978-1-7325546-1-0

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2018909302

Art elements and frontispiece drawing by Milagro Bethel Rivera.

Book Layout by Michal Marko. 

Printed by Thomson-Shore in the United States of America

Gore, M. (1987) Sacred [Recorded by Depeche Mode].  On Music for the Mases [vinyl record]. London, England: Sire Records.

Hooker, Brian, Trans. (1923) Cyrano de Bergerac New York, New York:  Modern Library (Original work Edmond Rostand, 1897, in French).

To my Angel, in all his mortal and immortal forms,

to the greater glory of His unspoken name.

Sacred – holy - to put it in words, to write it down, that is walking on hallowed ground but it’s my duty, I’m a missionary … Trying to sell the story of love’s eternal glory.

-Depeche Mode, Sacred

The Delicate, Passionate World

of Gregory Morgan and Vivien Prevette

Book 1 – The Accident

MEDITATION

W

hat was it like to fall in love for the first time?  It is not so much a biographical question as a spiritual one.  Love opens us vulnerably, pulls us outside of our shells, and exposes us, doesn’t it?  Were we not afraid when it happened for the first time?  Or were we too caught up in the enchantment of it all to notice?  What was it like, to come closer by degrees until it seemed that we had become of one mind, of one heart with another?  As even a simple story shows, falling in love is a kind of other-worldly magic.  How is it different, then, to fall in love for the second time, after our hearts have gotten broken and we have sustained injury?  The sweetness and the glory is still there, but the fear is much stronger.  To expose what has long been hidden involves a deeper intimacy than anything that we experienced in that first affection.  These next pages show both of these stages of love.

Any love story itself, however, is only something on the surface.  We have to set the story aside every now and then, go off to be alone and in quiet, and think ourselves deeper.  The contemplation of love in all its breathtaking joy as well as its fear, hesitating whether we will still be accepted by the other if we open further and reveal our true nature, is a rich topic for meditation.  How often do we really get to look at our own hearts in this intimate way and see what is really there?

You can try it – try to sit motionless, eyes closed, thinking of this and of other things, intimately tracing your own emotional outline, and then after a while who knows but you might just feel an angel come to stand beside you, or perhaps behind you as if the two of you were riding together through the farmlands of the South.  You can feel your angel’s hands on your shoulders and feel yourself inhaling and exhaling, and in the release of the breath is every calm and sweet relief, a satisfied peace.  And then thinking ceases to be the paramount thing and you sit in companionable silence for a time, until two disappear and only one is left, and then your bliss is complete, and your angel is here, and at the same time you are alone, and that is meditation.

******

In mythology, characters often represent something greater than just their individual identities.  For example, Psyche represents all of us mortals and Eros represents that which is godlike.  The Delicate, Passionate World presents a love story between two people but it really is intended to help the reader push beyond the story and to engage in contemplations that lead to self-betterment and to making us finer, kinder, more balanced, and more empathetic people.  From Rainer M. Rilke telling us that art conveys the message that we must change our lives, to someone like Stephen Covey who famously pulled together the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in his best-selling self-help book, we see how what we read can directly lead to changes and improvements of our person.  Just because this book is written in the format of a fairy tale does not mean that it cannot be used like a self-help or motivational book.  That is in fact the greater intent.

A list of key themes for contemplation precedes each chapter, and some Thoughtful Questions for each chapter are available online at www.delicatepassionateworld.com

PROLOGUE – THE BEGINNING OF LOVE

Friendship, grief, trust, empathy, tenderness, bliss, time

I

f it were possible to plot onto a map the varying patterns, storms, and eddies of emotional weather of all the places on earth, the result would be a fascinating view into the ever-changing sea of emotions from the most passion-infused to the most calm areas in the world.  And if it were possible to look at this emotional map as it was on a certain summer day of a certain bygone year, then that map would clearly show that on that day, for the space of a few hours, the calmest and most blissful place on earth was in Metairie, Louisiana.  There, outside a large old building which served as a medical clinic and which was surrounded by an old brick creeper-covered wall, was a beautiful tree-shaded courtyard in which two unlikely people sat,  right in the center of the strongest eye of calm to be found anywhere in that moment.

A young man and a small girl were sitting together on a bench and drifting in a quiet world of their own.  As he smiled down benignly at the top of her little girl’s head, the young man’s attention was briefly diverted by the shine of her young child’s hair, light brown and a silverish grey-blue flash here and there in the early summer sunlight like a poet might ascribe to the wings of a fairy.  The wariness that he had become accustomed to exhibiting with adults seemed unnecessary here, and he leaned towards her without any reservations.  Her innocence hung in the humid air between them like the scent of an exotic flower, and it drew him innocently also, like a bee.  He hardly spoke to many adults besides the handful of people he knew well, and he hadn’t spoken to any children in a very long time, in fact he couldn’t remember the last child that he had spoken to more than once.  This didn’t necessarily mean it hadn’t happened; his memory was a notoriously unreliable thing and it certainly wasn’t getting any better.  He had mentioned something to this effect to his aging landlady.  She had peeled off an attempt at a girlish laugh and told him that surely he was much too young to have trouble with his memory.  The small girl had no trouble at all remembering the days that he visited - Wednesdays - and he could see her pale, eager little face every Wednesday morning through the glass door leading into the room where she and the other children slept in high-railing, oversized cribs.  She couldn’t get out of the crib without help but he was always ready to help her escape its confines, despite his better judgment.  Her child’s body was light in his arms as he lifted her down.  She didn’t look sick, only frail, and her eyes held a hungry, feverish glimmer that seemed to make them even bigger in her small child’s face.

She sat next to him on the bench, her tiny bare feet sticking out from her ankle-length white nightgown and hanging loosely in the air.  He sat beside her in his dark suit, vest, tie, and starched white shirt, ear tilted towards her to catch her small voice.  She was carefully explaining about how dinner was served each evening, how no one could get dinner without taking their medicines first, and how there were only two choices for dinner:  a little bit more or a little bit less of whatever it happened to be.  But it’s always disgusting so I always ask for less, she said.

He looked at her with an amused expression.  Don’t you think you should ask for a little bit more next time?  You weigh about as much as a cat! he said, and he playfully poked at her bony shoulder.  She shrank back, perhaps because she didn’t like to be poked or perhaps out of shyness, but her grey green eyes never left his face.  He gave her a thoughtful look.  So is today the day you will tell me your name, Little One?

No, she said, kicking a bare foot through the air.  If I tell you then maybe I won’t get to see you anymore.  They had this conversation every week.  She gave him different reasons each time for not telling him her name, like that he would tattle on her to the nurses and get her in trouble, or that her mother would not let her give her name to strangers, or that her name was ugly, but although the reasons varied, she was stubborn and wouldn’t bend, and it had been weeks now.  She could easily have given a false name, but she seemed reluctant to lie to him.  How strange a thing, he thought.  Surely children this small did not withhold secrets so strongly?  Perhaps she sensed there was something unusual and almost ghost-like about him; sometimes people did … but she did not seem afraid.  She just seemed stubborn and refused to give her name.  It would have been easy enough to steal a glance at her charts and learn her name, but as he knew how it was to have things one didn’t want to share, he respected her right to reticence.  In payback, though, he had withheld his own name also.

We can’t go on like this forever, you know, without names.  Maybe I have a solution for us, he said, stretching his long legs out in front of him and enjoying the warmth of the sun through his dark-colored trousers.  We can stick to first letters.  You can tell me the first letter of your name, and I can tell you the first letter of my name.  We’ll be like two spies then!  You want to guess which letter my name starts with?

I don’t know, she said uncertainly.  That could take a while.  Maybe just tell me.

Alright.  It’s G, he said, smiling again.  Now it’s your turn.

Well, it’s … V, she replied, having to first think about it and then shifting uneasily in her spot beside him.  And I really don’t even like my name and I’d much rather have a name that starts with G, too.

G1 and G2, that would be a bit confusing, even for two smart spies like us, he said.  V is a fine letter.  So, Agent V, how are your roommates treating you this week?  His tone was light, but in fact he was concerned.  In one of their first conversations the girl had mentioned a very frail boy who was taken away in the night and no one ever saw him again.

He’s probably dead, she had said, and he gulped and wondered how much she actually understood what that meant.  But now she just said Alright, I guess.  The volunteer aid society ladies brought us new books to look at.  It would be good if we could look at whatever books we wanted rather than just the one that the nurse hands us in the morning.  It is boring to only have one book.  When I grow up, I want to have many, many books!  And a bird that talks!  And a dress made with real satin!

Birds, dresses, and books, is it?  Those sound like swell things to me, he told her. You need to tell your mother when she comes to visit you next.  They had already covered in an earlier conversation that her mother was a seamstress and that although the girl had a father, she never saw him and he never came to visit.  Each time the young man looked at her, it puzzled him again how someone could have a daughter like her and not visit her even in the hospital.  He thought if he ever came across that sorry louse of a father, he would blacken both of his eyes for starters.  It amazed him how deeply and paternally he had come to care for the girl in the very short time that he had known her.  Against all odds with his eternally lonely heart, they had become something rarer than rare in his world – unlikely friends.

Mama says I’m to say my prayers more often and not ask for so many things.  And I do pray more now that I’m stuck in that crib all the time with nothing to do.  I pray for better food, but mostly I pray for it to be Wednesday.  She said it simply, like she was making a matter-of-fact statement that required no further explanation, and she was right.  It didn’t.  He knew exactly what she meant, and it made his heart feel warm.  He had started to anticipate his Wednesday visits to the clinic as well.  The young man was not technically there to visit with the girl.  He was there to see his ailing friend Karl.  Despite the special care of a physician who had him moved to the clinic from Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Karl never seemed to be feeling any better, so that part of the visit was always tough, but then walking down to the large children’s ward (it was primarily a pediatric clinic) and looking for her pale, eager face through the glass door was like a sudden splash back into summer after having looked the grimness of death and winter directly in the face.  The truth was Karl looked terrible.  There was no point in telling the girl, but it was only a matter of time which came first:  either Karl would let go, or the girl would get better and leave the clinic and go back home.  Either way, the number of Wednesdays still ahead of them all was finite.  It made the young man feel incredibly sad, this certain knowledge that he would soon lose both of them.  Karl he had known for several years now, of course, and the girl he had only known for a short time, but both losses would be felt, he was now sure of it.

Karl had given up a long time ago.  It was a wonder it had gone on as long as it had.  The girl, on the contrary, was full of a restless energy and a hunger for living that one would expect to find in the very young.  Karl made him feel as young and as immature as he looked, whereas the girl made him feel infinitely older and parental.  Yes, that must be the name for this strange, warm new feeling, he thought:  parental concern.  He knew with certainty that children were not in his own future, and sometimes now when he looked at her, that knowledge gnawed at him in a way that it never had before.  He looked at her there beside him and wondered how he could make time stop so that he wouldn’t have to live through what he knew was coming.  Well, there were things that could be stopped, but everyone knew that time was not one of them.  The girl would grow older, she would grow up, and then he might meet her on the streetcar one day and never even realize that it was her, both because he probably wouldn’t remember her and because she would be unrecognizable by then.  There was no way to hold on to a moment, even a very good and sweet moment like this.  There was only the opportunity to try to fill it with as much goodness as possible, and so each Wednesday that is what he tried to do.

Sometimes when it was not Wednesday and he was somewhere else, he would suddenly find himself thinking back to how he had met her that first day so unexpectedly in the hallway of the clinic.  That horrible, careless nurse (who now was a blessing of sorts since her sloppiness and lack of attention enabled him to spend time with the girl without disruption until eleven o’clock in the morning on Wednesdays) had left a chair pushed too close to her crib-like bed and the girl had climbed out and made a run for it.  She was pelting full-tilt down the hallway on small bare feet, probably a streak of white in her hospital nightgown, but he had never seen her coming before she rounded the corner and collided full-speed with his shins.  The impact had sent them both sprawling.  Temporarily breathless (in his case with shock and surprise, and in her case with effort), they had both regarded each other warily as they pulled themselves to their feet.  She was almost as fast as he was.  Are you alright? he had asked, and she had nodded, eyes wide.  Her expression had made him wonder for a moment whether she recognized him.  Because his memory was not the best, it happened not infrequently that people looked at him with recognition while he struggled to place their face.  He was thinking of whether he should apologize or not when a nurse appeared.

There you are! she said to the girl.  It was very disobedient of you to run off like that!  Then the nurse noticed him.  Oh, she said casting an appreciative glance in his direction.  It was a look that the young man knew well and had tired of long ago.  Have you been bothering this gentleman?  Sir, I am so sorry!  Are you alright? 

He nodded.  You should worry more about your patient, he had remembered thinking with annoyance. Yes, I am quite alright, he answered stiffly as he picked up his hat and brushed it off.

The nurse smiled at him.  Then, almost reluctantly, she looked down at the girl.  Well, come back with me then, she said. We can’t have you bothering strangers here.

He isn’t a stranger, said the girl in her child’s voice, and her eyes caught his for the briefest moment.  It was a strange feeling, like a spark passing between them.

Oh, so you know each other, said the nurse.  Are you here to visit her then?  She looked to him for confirmation.

He remembered hesitating a moment, but only a very brief moment, to catch the girl’s gaze again before replying that yes, he was.  The look on the girl’s face could only be described as gratitude.  Small but cunning, he thought at the time.  It was also entirely a surprise that she was not afraid of him. Certainly babies and very young children were always afraid of him, on instinct, and not because he was in any way violent or inappropriate with children.  On the contrary, he was full of an almost childlike innocence himself, but there are many other sources of fear than just the seedy ones of morally bankrupt mortals.  Well, either this child was very fearless or very cunning or else she was just very, very unhappy and determined to be free of the nurse.  To back up his reply with some hard evidence of legitimacy, he had reached a hand over to the girl to lay on her shoulder, but she shrank away from his fingers.  The oblivious nurse seemed not to notice, just like she did not notice that the girl had no shoes.  From many years of experience with the world of adults, the young man strongly suspected that he – or at least his face – may have had something to do with the young nurse’s obliviousness.

Well, don’t be out too long, she said to the girl and then, tossing another hopeful smile in his direction, the nurse was gone.  He and the girl were left alone in the hallway facing each other.  He was acutely aware of the still ongoing unpleasant tingling in his shins where he had absorbed the impact of their collision.

Are you hurt? he asked her.  She shook her head.  He bent down on one knee to bring his face to a level with hers, looking into her eyes.  She stared back and did not blink.  You know, that was not a very good thing to do, he said to her in a quiet voice but with the most serious face he could muster.  Everyone knows you shouldn’t lie.  Why did you do that?

I saw the chair and climbed out, the girl answered, evading the matter entirely but acting as if that explained everything.  Then she added I am so tired of just sitting in that bed all day!

He wondered why she was in the clinic and if she perhaps carried some sort of contagion, but then he realized that he didn’t feel too concerned about it.  He couldn’t really become physically ill … well, at least not anymore.  It was one of the positive attributes that had come to him with the acquisition of his unusualness.  Well, do you want to walk through the building together before I take you back to your bed? he asked, standing up and brushing at the fabric of his trousers at the knee in case he had picked up any floor dust, as he had been taught from his boyhood days to do.  She nodded quickly.  Do you have any shoes then?  She shook her head no.  Very well, a brief circle through this floor, but then it’s back to bed.  He reached out a hand, wondering if she would take it, and to his surprise she did, her fingers tiny and clammy in his grip.  What was it about this particular child, that she was willing to trust him when he was hardly willing to trust himself?  It was one of the most unexpected and surprising things to happen to him in years.  He felt deeply awed. They walked silently through the halls, and he wondered at the strangeness of suddenly having this small person by his side.  He had no similar experience with which to compare it.  He tried awkwardly to adjust his steps so that she wouldn’t have to take two rapid steps to catch up with his larger stride.  He wondered if he should say anything.  The girl said nothing.  They walked down one hall, then along another, then another.  The moments seemed motionless and frozen in time.  The two of them had almost passed the glass door to one of the children’s rooms before it caught his attention that she had slowed her pace.

Is that your room? he asked her.  She seemed reluctant to answer but then nodded.  Well, in you go.  I don’t want to get in trouble for anything.

The disappointment was written large all over her small face but she moved towards the door.  The children in the other high-walled crib-like cots sat up and looked at them as they entered.  There were several empty cots in the room, and he had to ask her which one was hers.  She pointed to a cot along the far wall.  They approached and stood next to it for a few moments before he realized that she was unable to climb back in by herself.  He gave her an uncertain glance.

Should I help you up? he asked.  Why am I asking her, he remembered thinking afterwards?  He looked to her for a nod, but she just bit her lower lip and stuck out her chin.  He thought he might have to call for the nurse again, but then the girl seemed to reconsider and she quietly said Yes, please. 

He looked down at her, at a loss for how to pick her up.  How were children to be properly lifted off the ground?  He hadn’t the slightest idea.  Awkwardly, he knelt down and put his arm behind her shoulders and another arm behind her knees and lifted her up.  It seemed to him she couldn’t have weighed much more than a bird, and he could hear the quick pitter-patter of her heart.  He placed her carefully over the railing and into the crib-like cot.  Well, there you are, he said, looking at her for a moment.  Her eyes had a panicked look.  He wondered whether she was afraid to be left alone there.  Well, what could he do about that?  He was about to turn around and walk away when her fingers reached through the bars of the railing and grabbed hold of his sleeve and pulled, pulling on his heart with it.

Will you come back again to see me? she asked in a voice so quiet that he had to lean forward and ask her to repeat herself. 

Well, I am usually here on Wednesdays now, so I suppose I could, he said.

She looked at him as if evaluating whether he was telling the truth.  Had she often been lied to by adults, he wondered?  Then she released her grip on his jacket.  Don’t forget. she said.

I won’t, he said, hoping his memory would not fail him.  I have to go now.

And that was the first time.

******

Karl had been at the clinic approximately a month by then and looked worse at every visit.  How much longer would he have?  As Karl’s loyal friend, the young man of course came by every week to visit, but it was hard to do and took its emotional toll.  He hadn’t known him as long as Wolf had, of course, but even so he remembered happier times with Karl, Karl full of dreams and plans for the future, Karl when he had been so buoyant, before this last year took all the happiness away.  The bitterest part was knowing that Karl, who was not all that old yet and who had once looked to be a handsome man in his mid-thirties, had brought this on himself out of a desire to bring on the end.  Had Karl known it would take this long and be this uncomfortable?  I will never hit such despair that I will want to kill myself, thought the young man, and even if I do, I will never, ever bungle it like Karl has.  They spoke together carefully now about the past.  Unlike the young man’s, Karl’s memory was free of cobwebs and pulled forth highly detailed scenes from memory with the freshness of a painting.  They spoke about loss and about Karl’s unfinished architectural work. 

It is so ironic. Karl said, sitting propped up against a veritable mountain of pillows and looking toward the window.  I took on that project because I felt so confident that I would see it through to the end, and now it turns out that I was wrong.  His face, its skin almost translucent, shone with the incandescence of pent-up emotion. They talked about many things, but they never spoke of Marie.  It was the unvoiced shadow in the room that hung between them.  Karl had suggested only once-weekly visits, and sometimes it seemed as if the reason was to make sure that his determination not to mention Marie would hold, since fewer visits meant less temptation to open that topic.

It was a bit like bending a paper clip back in the other direction to straighten it, for the young man to then go see the girl after he had spent time sitting by Karl’s bedside.  The first time he came to see her after their initial walk together around the clinic, her face lit up with surprise and delight.  It was clear she had not expected him to remember, and it made him wonder if she had had a childhood thus far filled with broken promises and disappointments.  He pulled a chair up to her crib and they talked.  The fool idiot of a nurse came by and tried to join the conversation, never once bothering to inquire what sort of family member he might actually be.  Both he and the girl ignored her until she got the hint and went away.

They spoke about why she was in the clinic (German measles plus some additional complications, he gathered) and about how much she disliked it there.  They spoke about her mother and the fact that her father never came.  Once her tongue got untied, she could talk a blue streak, her high child’s voice skipping through the air between them like a rock skimming over the top of a lake.  On his third visit it was a beautiful summer day and so he hung his hat on the corner of her crib-like bed, picked her up, and smuggled her outside to the courtyard, her small body curled against him, half hidden under his jacket like some kind of a house pet.  She had trembled as the warm breeze touched her and, unaccustomed to children, he worried if he was holding her too tightly.  Unsure, he loosened his grip so suddenly then that he almost dropped her on the bricks.  The mere thought of how he would explain any bruises to the nurse made him shiver with unease.  He inherently understood that it was unusual and ripe for misunderstandings of the most grotesque nature for a grown man to befriend a child, but friendship demanded loyalty and so he tried to get himself past his unease about what others might think.  They had now spent the past couple of visits sitting outside, and through trial and error they discovered that as long as the girl was back in her crib by eleven o’clock, when a strict nurse took over the shift, they could spend time talking together without anyone bothering them.  Last week he had brought her a bag full of freshly-pulled daisies and helped her make a long daisy chain.  This time he had brought her a fresh peach that he had bought at a street stand.  She was grateful for anything he brought and always thanked him politely.  He watched her bite into the peach with little, white teeth and tried to recall the last time that a piece of fruit had given him as much enjoyment as it seemed to give her.  Probably never, he thought.

Will you have one, too? she asked with her mouth full.  Her appetite seemed healthy enough.  Why was she so small, then?

No, Agent V, he said, teasing her.  I am fine just sitting here watching you eat yours.  The food this week is still just as bad as last week?

Maybe worse, she replied.  Randall took my afternoon biscuit yesterday.  The afternoon biscuit, he knew, was the culinary highlight of the day.  He thought he knew which one was Randall – most likely the anemic-looking pale boy with freckles in the adjacent crib.  The poor lad was probably more hungry than malicious.

A terrible thing, he said in sympathy.  Did you report this crime, Agent V?

No.  The last time one of us complained, no one got biscuits for the next two days, she said.

Maybe the peach makes up for it then, he suggested, and then he sat back and rested his arm along the top of the bench.  The warm sun filled the courtyard with its heat and made the girl’s nightgown appear almost blindingly white as he watched her.  It had taken him longer to buy the peach than he had thought, and so in a reshuffling of the schedule, he had decided to visit the girl first and then stop up to see Karl.  He pulled his pocket watch out of his vest pocket and was amazed at how hopelessly quickly time had passed.  Soon he would be in that small, closed-in room sitting next to the metal bed rail and searching for something he could say to Karl that would not upset them both, nothing too direct about his illness, nothing about why Wolf wouldn’t come to visit, and of course never anything that might bring up a memory of Marie.  It was like traversing a minefield, which happened to be something that the young man himself had actually done.  Spending time with women was another kind of minefield for the young man, what with the inevitable innuendos and expectations that he could no longer indulge in since, well … since he had become what he was now.  With the girl, there was no minefield.  There was nothing except a kind of pure calm, like gazing out on a field of flowers being gently moved in waves by the wind.  Here, there was only respite.  Nothing was expected of him except his presence, and his innocent, lonely heart reveled in it.

She had seen his absent gaze, he knew, because she asked How is your friend doing today?

I don’t know because I haven’t been over there yet, but I think he is getting weaker and not stronger, he replied.

She frowned.  Then he should eat more so he can get stronger.  That is what Nurse says to me.

That certainly is sound advice, he agreed.  He was not about to explain that not everybody left the clinic one day feeling better.  I will tell him when I see him.  Then, looking to change the subject, he asked her So, what are your special skills?  Everyone is good at something.  What are you good at?

He watched as she took another bite of the peach, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and her bare feet swinging off of the bench as she thought about her reply.  I don’t know, she said.  I can roll up the sides of my tongue, like this, and she demonstrated, pieces of semi-chewed orange-colored peach flesh still in her small mouth.

He laughed.  A great skill to have, I’m sure, and something that I cannot do at all, although I think I may have spent some time as a boy trying to learn it.  His memories of his own early boyhood were far away in his mind, but he seemed to recall something of the sort, or perhaps it was whistling through his fingers that he had practiced.  Whichever it had been, it turned out that he had no aptitude for it.  Anything else you do well? he asked.

At school, my teacher always says I draw well.  I draw mostly princesses and animals.  Buildings don’t come out too well, though, she said.

Oh, an artist then, he said.  Let me see if I have my pencil and paper with me.  He started checking his pockets.  Pencil and paper were important accessories for someone with a poor memory.  Before he started writing everything down, the number of times that he had to return to the store and get Wolf to repeat a delivery address to him was more than he could count.  His fingers felt around in his suit jacket until they closed around his pocket notebook, and the slim and smooth length of the pencil.  A nurse’s handwritten summary from last week of Karl’s medical status was also in his pocket, and when he unfolded it he found that the back was blank and would serve well as a much larger sheet for the girl to draw on.  There was no need to take this dismal report to Wolf since there was nothing in it that Wolf didn’t already know.  Here, he said, straightening out the paper and handing it to her together with the pencil.  Draw something for me.

Alright, she said, taking a last bite of her peach and handing its few mushy remains to him in exchange.  He set it on the bench next to him and watched as she took the paper and pencil and went to work.  In her little hands, the paper seemed much larger suddenly, and she laid it across her lap.  He offered her his pocket notebook to place under it so that she could draw more easily.  The pencil she took in her right hand.  She worked with deep concentration, her teeth biting on her lower lip, her eyes following her cautious pencil strokes across the page.  Time hung seemingly suspended.  A bee flew an erratic lap around them both before buzzing off again into the large orange lilies that filled much of the center of the courtyard. He felt a drowsiness come over him as the heat of the sun, already considerable by now, made its way through the dark fabric of his suit, and he closed his eyes.  What an unusual sensation this was.  It was hard to both analyze it and give himself over entirely to feeling it at the same time, but something here felt so right when he was with her, so in-its-right-place.  Had he ever felt something so sheltering and uncomplicatedly wholesome and good?  The myriad sufferings of his childhood and adult life seemed swept away, like the memories of winter seem far away in the midst of summer’s comforts.  He breathed in air that seemed fragrant and warmed by the nearness of her small person, and when he closed his