The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove by Paul Zimmer Read Free Book Online Page B

and one time she convinced him to make a stand with his guards and save Byzantium from some bozos who were attacking the city. Everybody else had run away, but Justinian’s guards were able to hold off the attackers. Theodora’s advice had saved the most beautiful city in the world from being sacked. The Empress Theodora—that’s who you look like, Bonnie. That’s not too bad.”
    Bonnie listened to me carefully—not like some other people who get nervous or suspicious when I put a life on them—and she liked what she heard. I started calling her Theodora when she came into my room, and it always made her smile.
    I told her lots of other lives and she always listened carefully as she checked my IV or took my temperature. Sometimes I’d be asleep when she came into my room to give me a treatment, and she would brush her fingertips on my cheek or the back of my hand. When I opened my eyes—there would be the sparkling face of Theodora. What a way to wake up! It was like a Sinatra song.
    I started to act kind of strange. Lovesick is probably more accurate. A warmth in my cold body. A crush. By God, I had a senior crush! I didn’t know what to do, but it was damned exciting, I was thinking fast, and I always think in lives.
    Theodora especially liked to hear the lives of women, so one day I told her about Nila Mack: “She was born in a little town in Kansas around the turn of the twentieth century. She lost her parents early and got married to an actor when she was a very young woman. He taught her a lot about the stage. She went to New York with him and eventually got a job with the Columbia Broadcasting System. She impressed people and they decided they wanted to put her in charge of children’s shows, and she became the first woman director at CBS. She put together a show using kid actors, called, Let’s Pretend. She broadcast it on Saturday mornings; it became famous and ran for twenty years.
    “When I was a kid I used to hide from my parents while they nursed their Saturday morning hangovers, and I’d listen to Let’s Pretend on the white Philco in my room. Nila Mack had one story that she produced every year that became my favorite, about a big talking toad who loved a beautiful princess. That toad was so hideous the princess would run away whenever she saw him. But one day he managed to tell her that if she kissed him on the forehead something wonderful would happen. It took her awhile to work up to this—but one day the princess gave the toad a cautious kiss on his horny old forehead and he turned instantly into a handsome, rich prince who began praising her and proposing marriage.”
    I could tell that Theodora felt a little wary about what I was getting at with this story, so I held off for a couple of weeks. Then one Saturday morning, I said, “Theodora, it’s time for Let’s Pretend . All you have to do is give me a little smacker on my forehead, just to see what happens then.”
    She thought about this. Surely it was against the rules, and I’m not sure she really wanted to do it—but, God bless her, Bonnie bent her beautiful face down to mine and planted a light kiss on my forehead. I felt like I was being visited by the Holy Ghost.
    “Well,” she said, smiling down on me. “You’re still Cyril.”
    “Look again,” I said. “I’m happy and rich. I’ve got $50,000, and I’ve been kissed by the Empress Theodora of Byzantium! How many old guys can claim such stuff? I’m now a prince—but alas, too aged to propose marriage to you.”
    It almost broke my heart a few weeks later when Bonnie told me that she was moving to Milwaukee to go to graduate school.
    But all of this was good preparation for my meeting Louise. But I’ll tell more about this later.
    When they finally let me out of that hospital, I’m still wearing bandages, and my skin looks like rancid cheese. I have to use two canes because of the toes I’d lost, and I can only hear out of my left ear. I’d always had a touch of