Free The Sea Star by Jean Nash Page B

know if I’m explaining myself properly.” Flustered by his steady gaze, she said hastily, “Please go on with what you were saying. I’m enormously interested.”
          “There’s not much more to tell, Susanna. After my father sold the house, it completely broke his spirit. He never once thought of looking for some means of sustenance. The truth is, he wasn’t much suited for anything but what he was, a gentleman of leisure, an amateur horticulturist, a connoisseur of art. Even when my mother and brother contracted consumption....”
          Jay fell silent all of a sudden, and a look crossed his face that made Susanna want to reach out and take his hand in hers.
          “My father,” he went on in a low, recollective tone, “knew there was no way he could raise the money for the care they needed. We were living on what he managed to borrow from friends and business associates. I was twelve or thirteen at the time, working at various jobs that paid nothing really, but I was determined to earn enough money to send my mother and brother to a good hospital in a healthful climate. That never happened, of course. I seldom made more than a dollar or two a week. My father was finally forced to send them to the state sanatorium in Albany . They died there.”
          Jay looked down at his wine glass, and his hand tightened on the stem. He looked up after a moment, saw the grave look on Susanna’s face, and gave her a reassuring smile.
          “When I was sixteen,” he said in a more conversational tone of voice, “I started working at the old Metropolitan Hotel. The rest, as they say, is history.”
          Susanna was too moved to comment. How dreadful for him to have lost his mother and brother in that way. How old had he been? Twelve or thirteen? That was the same age Susanna had been when Augusta abandoned her.
          Jay picked up the menu. “Shall we order? You must be famished.”
          Oddly, Susanna’s hunger was gone. An emotion unclear to her had taken hold of her senses and had dulled them to anything but Jay. She wanted to know more about him, all about him, though she didn’t stop to wonder why. She picked up her menu. The words were a meaningless jumble. All she saw, all she felt was Jay’s intensely compelling presence. And as strange as it seemed to her, all she wanted was that this day with him should never end.
     
          Lunch was a Lucullan feast. They began with fried clams with parsley, followed by a savory blanquette of pullet with mushrooms. The entrée was a butter-tender Chateaubriand with souffléd potatoes. For dessert they chose an angel cake so heavenly light that Susanna was strongly tempted to ask for the recipe.
          What a refreshing change this day had been. Susanna couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a meal outside her own hotel. When she mentioned this astonishing fact to Jay, he said with a smile, “Then I shall see to it that you do so more often.”
          After lunch, they took a leisurely drive to Absecon Inlet, beyond Maine Avenue , where there were no hotels, no houses, only nature in its element. Sea grass undulated in the gentle ocean breeze. Periwinkles clung to the reeds in the salt marshes. Sandpipers and plovers strutted arrogantly at the shoreline. Gulls, sleek and beautiful, flew joyously overhead. It was Atlantic City as few people saw it now, a magnificent primitive wilderness, a sun-drenched expanse of sand and sea and limitless blue sky.
          As they walked along the water’s edge, Susanna breathed deeply of the tangy air and lifted her face to the warm late-summer sun. She and Jay were bareheaded. They had left their hats in the automobile. Jay kept glancing over at her as they walked. Once, when her eyes met his, she felt the strangest sensation in the pit of her stomach.
          A quartet of haughty sandpipers strutted directly across their path. Jay took her arm and deftly