Read Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy for Free Online

extinguished, with her husband breathing steady beside her and the
barest flicker on the bedside monitor assuring her of Lucy’s midnight silence,
she reaches out once again for the book that’s been waiting for her—the book no
one asked her to read, that is party to no discussion group, that no teacher or
talk show host recommended, that was patient it seems for years since she read
the first chapter standing up in the town’s last bookstore, yes years ago, that
joined a stack of books propping up the frame of her lover’s futon, the year
she thought she was pregnant every month and every month read the single uncrossed
blue bar of the pregnancy test with blank disbelief, saying nothing to her
lover or her mother or her friends but firmly believing in her own changed life
metastasizing inside her, years before Ben and forgetful striving and Lucy,
little yolk with legs. The book was waiting. Not like her mother’s books, grim
and watchful on the shelves of the den, shadowing ordinary nights of
television, books with pictures and without, objects of an impersonal terror
inseparable from M’s never-to-be-spoken sorrows, unthinkable documents of an
unthinkable past that M carried mutely into the present, in the tense pose of
her body at the kitchen table, in the spiral of cigarette smoke. Papa’s books
pleased her more: orderly rows of print or specifically riven with white space,
the science fiction novels and popular histories and even the dense lightless
volumes of mathematics; these pleased her, simply to touch them, rocking them
back on their spines to feel their heft in her hand. The best of them were
never on shelves but spread profligate throughout that house, as now in her
house: scattered on tables and under chairs and on top of both stereo speakers
and piled high on her bedside table so that there’s scarcely room for a glass
of water: more books even then that, stacked in the basement on shelves and in
boxes, some perched precariously near the sump pump, the oldest books in her
life, the thickest and most lightweight, scanned with a flashlight under
blankets prickling with static electricity so that the hair on her arms rose in
the aftermath of a thump on the door and a voice shouting Lights out and the
battery dying with her still reading, still a girl, and life on the horizon in
the form of the raked distant skyline, clouds imported from Europe, the destiny
written decades ago waiting for her to collect it.
    But the letters are real:
documents. Someone wrote them, bought borrowed or stole the unremarkable paper
they are printed on, or written on. The letters change. Some are printed,
coldly stippled in black by the head of an inkjet, streaked. Some are
handwritten, in a sometimes erratic but always legible script, with broad
looping L’s and G’s striding across the paper. The ballpoint pen leaves a
groove in the stationery that her fingertips can almost read when they brush
its surface, the papers stacked against her knees in bed or tucked
surreptitiously underneath it, where Ben never goes. The ink is dark blue,
almost black; the pen in question is not generous enough to dot some of the
hastier I’s. One letter was typewritten without the benefit of correction tape
and some of the letters are crossed out with small or capital X’s. Only the
signature does not vary: at the bottom right corner of the last page, almost in
the margin, the rapid illegible squiggle that resembles an M. M with a dash in
front of it: M and em dash: M as interruption. The pages are folded and
carefully matched with envelopes without return addresses, each stamped or
labeled Air Mail / Par Avion. It is this latter French phrase that moves her
lips, each time, a kind of mantra as she folds or unfolds each letter, perusing
its surfaces for clues since the words, she knows, are all lies. Par avion, par avion. It sounds to her like the name of a
long-limbed bird, a crane, unfolding itself for flight across a marshy plain,