Read After the Fire for Free Online Page B

I?”
    “Well, what else would we be doing?”
    “Staying together. Being together.”
    “No. I'm not going out to any hospital like that. I go either singly or with a proper wife, like everyone else there. No halfway measure.”
    “So then this is a proposal?”
    “Very definitely a proposal, with a proviso. We'll have to wait.”
    She looked at him in dismay, in despair.
    “Here,” Gerald said, taking a notebook and pen from his pocket. “Let me show you in dollars and cents so you'll see what I'm talking about.”
    She watched his moving hand with its delicate blue veins and fine oval nails, this hand that knew every curve of her body. Her mind, in panic, was already leaping ahead of his additions and subtractions. Dad, she thought, he will help. He's not a rich man, but he will.
    “There has to be a way,” she said. “I'll ask my father.”
    “For money, you mean?”
    “Of course.”
    “I can't do that. I can't ask for money from him, of all people.”
    “I don't expect you to do the asking. It's only natural for me to be the one. And why do you say, ‘from him of all people’?”
    “I should think the answer is obvious. The humiliation—”
    “—will be mine, not yours.”
    “Well, I'll feel it. It's about me, after all.”
    “You weren't humiliated when you accepted the money from the medical school.”
    “There's no comparison. That was a loan.”
    “Then make this a loan. You can repay it when you start your practice.”
    There was a long silence, until with great reluctance Gerald responded, “I really don't like the idea.”
    “But I like it.”
    He smiled. “So now I'm finding out why they say you're stubborn.”
    She smiled back. “All of a sudden, I'm feeling normal again, now that I know this has only been about money. I thought—oh God, I thought you had changed your mind about me.”
    He laughed. “You're crazy. You're really crazy.” Then seriously: “This whole business may not be as easy as you seem to think it will be. You can't have forgotten your mother's opinion of me.”
    “That was months ago! Besides, if Dad wants to do it for us, he'll do it, no matter.”
    There was another silence until Gerald broke it again. “Well, ask then. I certainly can't.”
    Often that spring, Hyacinth thought how on some far day she would look back on this time as old people do, as Granny did, endlessly reminiscing about that season of hopes fulfilled, when everything—kisses, tears, champagne, good wishes, white dresses, and flowered hats— all come into bloom.
    “I'm very thankful that I can do this for you,” Jim declared on that night when it all happened. “It will free your spirit, Gerald, to forge ahead with your work. There's nothing like a too-thin wallet to distract a man.”
    “So it is an established fact,” Francine observed. “Engagement, commencement, wedding, and off to Texas?”
    “Two weeks after graduation,” Hyacinth said, now flushed and pink with a joyful heat.
    They were in the living room. The fire was low, and the music, to which Jim had been listening when she had come to interrupt him, was also low; the Verdi
Requiem
would be forever afterward linked to this event.
    “I would like both of you to know,” Gerald said at once, “besides how grateful I am, more than I can ever say, that I shall not be taking Hyacinth away from you. She's told me how you miss your sons, so I promise that after my training, we will come back here and we will stay. Doctors don't move around. I'm going to remember,” he added, this time speaking directly to Francine, “or at least I'm going to try to remember, not to call Hyacinth ‘Hy.’ She tells me you hate it.”
    “That's all right, Gerald. You must call her whatever she wants. I'm really not such an ogre, you know.”
    Her smile this time was gracious, and her embrace warm. What she was thinking, Hyacinth could not imagine. Certainly she could not have been taken too much by surprise. And too, very probably, she