Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland Read Free Book Online Page A

of her and bought a bagful, spun around and popped one in her mouth." He chuckled softly. "Powdered sugar stuck on her nose."
    He longed to steal a glance at his wife, to see if she could imagine the scene to be as sweet and in nocent as he remembered it.
    The flow of memory as they walked kept him thinking out loud. "We used to go out walking. Along the dunes and in the heather. In the woods too. She loved Haarlemmer Hout, knew its paths as well as Johanna knows the lanes of Vreeland. I kissed her palm once, in those woods, under a fir tree where we'd gone for shelter from a rain."
    "Were you in love with her?"
    He'd said too much. He was sorry he'd men tioned anything.
    "With her I was . . . I was like Fritz." He turned from her so she would not see on his face the hap piness he had with Tanneke so long ago.
    A gust of memory shivered him. "I was foolish. I didn't keep a rendezvous with her, so that I would appear independent, I suppose. To make her long for me, when it was really I who longed for her. When I went to see her some time later, she had left Zandvoort, and had told her parents not to tell me where she'd gone." A pang at his own stu pidity, his passivity or lethargy, shot through him with surprising sharpness, which he hoped his voice had not revealed.
    Staring ahead, he felt rather than saw Digna move away.
    And now, stupid again, to hurt his wife. They went the rest of the way in silence, and he felt her trying to imagine her way into his past.
    They passed the train of skiffs, and the wish bone shapes, inverted now, were to him only his neighbors' old rowboats. They passed their neigh bor's vegetable garden, and he had to call Dirk back from trampling through the rows of purple cabbages sitting in enviable order. They passed the windmill of Vreeland, turning faithfully, grinding water out of the soil to keep their tiny island of the universe afloat forever. And they passed a place in their lives, he thought, where all these things— skiffs, gardens, dry land, love—could be main tained without conscious effort.
    Dirk ran in wide circles around them, leaping, splashing through seeping puddles. When they got back to the house, his paws would be muddy and would have to be cleaned. Digna usually saw to that. Today he'd do it.
    It was strange: When you reduced even a fledg ling love affair to its essentials—I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered—it be came vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments.
    He wanted to remind Digna of some moment from their life together equally tender as the kiss in the woods, equally important. There'd been many, as when they skated far out on Loodrechtse Plassen, so that voices of the other skaters were only rustlings of thrushes and they were swirling alone in a white, pure universe, and he had told her he had now known her half his life, twenty-two years, his breath heralding that miracle with clouds of fog, and he had kissed her there on the ice, twenty-two times, in gratitude. He longed to have her think of this, but how she walked, so erect and self-contained, staunched his throat.
    As they approached the house he saw that be fore they'd left she had lit an oil lamp in the parlor for their return. The warm yellow light through the window beckoned them to a cozy house. She al ways thought of things like that. If he mentioned it now, or the skating memory, it would seem propi tiatory.
    In the house they stayed out of each other's way while knowing precisely each other's every move. The air between them felt charged.
    He wanted her to come to him so he could stroke the smooth skin of her temple, a favorite part of her, right there by her hairline, hold her by the shoulders first, then draw her close to him, and say he was wholly hers and ever would be all his