Free The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt Page B

door that separated the living room from the kitchen and disappeared from her.
    In the kitchen, now, eating eggs, this same Philip stared at her.
    "It sounds wonderful, really fascinating to me," he said, and she smiled. "What?" she said.
    "Your dissertation. I'd love to read it."
    She looked toward the window, smiling away her life. "Just the tedious pontifications of a graduate student," she said. "Nothing earth-shattering. I wouldn't waste your time with it if I were you."
    "Oh, I wouldn't say that," he said. He took another bite of his eggs and turned back toward Eliot.
    Jerene was adopted. She believed that her earliest memory—of a swatch of light bisecting a pink rabbit-patterned blanket—came from before her adoption, from some moment in the first three months of her life, if for no other reason than because she could find no such blanket among her baby relics, stowed for years by her mother in a cedar-scented trunk in the attic. Her adoptive parents were a wealthy lawyer and his wife who in 1957 held the distinction of being the only black couple to own a home in Westport, Connecticut. Jerene had a photograph of herself that was taken just after the adoption, her hair done up with pink velvet ribbons, posed between her father and her mother in front of an absurdly overdecorated, white-frosted Christmas tree. In the picture, Sam looks out at the camera, unsmiling, dressed as usual in a tie and black pin-striped suit, while Margaret, her hair piled on her head in puffed whorls, holds her baby daughter up on a table, clinging to her tiny knees as if for dear life. Jerene has just barely learned to stand, but she is standing in the picture. Her mouth is open, her legs buckling, as if she might topple any second. All three of them are stiff with discomfort, like people posed in costumes from another century for comic effect. When Jerene looked at the picture these days, she felt sorry for all of them.
    If she knew anything about her parents' past, it was that they had fought hard to get to where they were. They told her so all the time, hoping, she supposed, to instill in her the kind of respect for hard work that would ensure that she never slip back into the poverty from which they had pulled her. About their own origins they were evasive, as if they feared that too much exposure to a less privileged world would lead to its engulfing her. Only rarely would they take her to visit her grandparents and aunts and uncles in the city and then only for the afternoon. When Jerene was seven, Margaret's mother, Irene, came to visit them in Westport, and Sam and Margaret took her to tea at an elegant restaurant, where elderly black women in white aprons served crumpets and petits fours from silver trays. The four of them sat there not speaking, and Irene, dressed in an out-of-style velvet hat with flowers on it, eyed the pastries suspiciously and refused to touch them. Everyone—the waitresses as well as the other patrons—gave the family curious, condescending glances, as if to question whether they belonged there. Still, for two hours they stuck it out, sitting stiff-backed in their chairs, smiling, pretending enjoyment as if their lives depended on it, and in certain ways their lives did depend on it. And even though she was just a child, Jerene sensed how unfair it was, that after all they had gone through, her parents should still be considered outsiders at that restaurant and in the town. Sometimes, on weekends, Sam and Margaret socialized with other wealthy black couples they had sought out or met through business. They drove to Larchmont or Noroton Heights, or the other couples came to their own big Tudor house and exclaimed over the reproduction Louis Quatorze furniture, the wall-to-wall carpeting, the new washer and dryer. These elaborate, formal dinner parties, presided over by a maid hired for the night, and full of the clinking of glasses and the peal of shy female laughs at gruff male jokes, confirmed Jerene's