unattractive expression. Her eyes were deep-set and brown and looked at objects as though photographing them in her memory. Her coppery arms and face glowed in the late afternoon topaz and, though daydreaming, she radiated adolescent intensity. Her straight brown hair, parted on the side, had been rolled neatly back over her ears into a long braid, but sprouting new hairs in a fertile scalp escaped to frame with tendrils the curve of her cheeks.
Cherry juice stained the white spot where her heart had been struck by Keats' shafts from the shining pages of the library book in her lap.
A thing of beauty is a joy forever
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness …
The green stripes on her white percale dress bunched like grasses around her round budding body.
Waiting. Waiting.
Microscopic apricot bloom on her skin sent electric messages of teeming cell life into the world. Her throat swelled with confined love. Love even for her parents for whom it was a constant struggle to feel affection. Her flesh crawled at the thought of the obbligato of belching, spitting, nail scraping, and beery sweat of her father. Her mother was a blanket of graham cracker dust erupting orders of chores and conduct.
Summer vacation had been a period of waiting. Waiting for the beginning of graduation year—and Mr. Carson. Mr. Carson who loved Keats too and put on the senior class play.
Then, for the first time in her life, the outside world penetrated Twelfth Street. A bad woman and her sick child were'coming to live next door. A delicious prickle tingled her all over. She envisioned Mae Welland with that foreign married name now—Claudel—enveloped in a shabby black shawl, leading a threadbare child to shelter. The Orphans of the Storm—like a Lilian Gish movie. She was debating which dress she would donate to poor little Lucy Claudel when her mother's strident call shattered the daydream.
On Twelfth Street visiting relatives arrived in full daylight amid a hubbub of greetings and preparations for a gala meal. From the beginning, however, there was a tantalizing intangibility about Mae and Lucy Claudel. Twelfth Street was kept on tenterhooks
