"Anything you want?"
"No ... I'll let Annette know."
Orville walked about the elegant room. Yes, it had been seven years since his last visit: he and his mother had stayed several weeks during that summer. During those seven years he had ample time to finish high school, enroll at Cornell, make the crew, go to war!
In front of the alabaster bust of Chopin he shoved his hands into his pockets. Chopin's face seemed more poetical than he remembered it. The man's eyes stared absently into his eyes. The lips had their absinthe smile.
No, the furniture had not been changed; of course the settees, sofa and chairs had been reupholstered with the identical pattern of pomegranate flowers: that was Therèse's way. The woodwork had been dusted and polished two thousand times and Claude had waxed the parquet--over and over. Parchment lamp shades seemed to be new. He bent over a cloisonné vase: its birds and flowers were in the same Kyoto greenery. He glanced up: ah, it was there, the gold and silver and green fresco of oak and laurel leaves, twined in their ceiling wreath.
Dark red curtains ...
Tired, he dumped himself on a settee, his thoughts reverting to his trip, a sick and quarrelsome woman, the SS troopers playing poker, a boy begging for food ... a half hour slipped away.
He absorbed the quiet. Had the rain stopped? He hoped so. The fires in the twin fireplaces spread their warmth. Maybe the war was ending ... maybe it would end while he was home; certainly it was the right place. Yet assurances were missing.
Shall I go upstairs, to my room?
He closed his eyes as he sensed the firelight.