Free Everybody Loves Somebody by Joanna Scott Page A

Clara’s own boys—fathers themselves
     now—lob a football back and forth in the yard. Amid the mayhem, Gabriella will drift quietly, her silence giving her beauty
     an ethereal lightness, as though her true self existed in heaven and the form she took in this world were just a reflection.
    Beautiful, serene Gabriella, with nothing to say. The aunts like to compare her to a feather hidden underneath corn kernels
     in a popping machine—lovely and soft and silent. With thick black hair and black lashes shading penny-colored eyes, all she
     has to do is blink at a man and he’ll melt. The trick, the aunts agree, will be to help her find the suitor with the deepest
     pockets and the best disposition. But there is time for all that, plenty of time. Gabriella is still a precious girl, as marvelous
     as a fairy child with gauzy wings hidden inside her dress.
    “And remember, don’t let on,” Clara says to the aunts, for the party tonight is supposed to be a surprise.
    “Don’t spill the beans, sister,” says the elder aunt.
    “Don’t let the cat out of the bath,” remarks the other.
    “The bag!” the first corrects, and the two old women snort merrily.
    R EADING ABOUT ONESELF is comparable to dining on frogs’ legs and calves’ brains, Sir Maxwell thinks as he rolls his newspaper into a tube. The
     idea of such exposure might be distasteful in theory, but in fact it makes him feel that the effort of life has been worth
     the trouble. He is deservedly proud. But pride, when it goes unfed, is a poor defense against impatience. A hungry man cannot
     remain a proud man for long. How long has he been waiting for service in this New York chophouse? Too long. Yet the restaurant
     is half empty. With the aplomb so typical of the serving class in this country, the waitress assigned to his table gazes right
     past him every time he raises his hand.
    He is just about to complain to the maître d’ when the girl arrives with a pitcher of fresh water laced with lemon slices.
     All right, then—he will complain directly to her, and he is about to do just that, in his severest baritone, but he stops
     short. She is looking at him in a puzzled way, apparently anticipating a reprimand that will only baffle her. He is looking
     at her in awe.
    He knows what he’s feeling, what is happening, for it has happened before, but each new time the feeling strikes him as starkly
     unfamiliar. He wants to look down to assure himself that the floor is still beneath his feet, but he can’t tear his eyes from
     the face of this chophouse waitress, who is, without a doubt, the prettiest girl he has ever seen, at least since the last
     prettiest girl he’d ever seen, who was...he can’t even remember who the last one was, in the face of this present beauty.
    Immortal lady born to live in blazing glory...
    He becomes aware that his jaw is hanging stupidly. As he snaps his mouth closed, he snaps his desire into focus. In the brown
     pools of the girl’s eyes he sees two foolish graybeards, himself doubled into a knight doomed to be spurned and yet loving
     her all the more for her poisonous indifference, a man who in that instant experiences the most profound humility he’s ever
     felt—or so it seems, bound as he is by the intensity of the moment, this emotion supplanting any sense of repeated history
     so he understands as if for the first time his terrible insignificance, sixty-seven years adding up to nothing.
    He is known as a man with a romantic disposition. But he keeps forgetting the meaning of love and feels it now as a confusing
     external pressure, a force that will flatten him at the moment when he allows himself to give up hope. He doesn’t have the
     wherewithal to think about his potential for self-deception. He can only believe that he has never before truly loved another
     human being. Truthfully, his wife had been no more than an ornament. Even Magdalena, his Sevillan joy, had meant little to
     him in the end—the pain