The Celestials by Karen Shepard Page A

had not even met the foreman, but Sampson ushered her out the apartment door telling her to stop being so silly. Introduce herself. Inquire as to the man’s health. If he could not trust her opinion, whose could he trust?
    Julia ventured into the sickroom during a break in the lessons. “Hello,” she said. Charlie looked like a man who had spent the last week bedridden. Rumpled and limp as well-used sheets. She recognized the state all too easily. His mouth, she knew, would be sour and dry, his bones filled with ache. Yet his face was calm and smooth, his good hand quiet against the sheets. “Would you like me to read to you?” she asked.
    Charlie was sitting up with his back against the wall, his feet crossed at the ankles. His bandaged hand was restingon a pillow in an eternal salutation. He regarded her. “Who are you?” he asked.
    I am Mrs. Sampson , she thought, but did not say. Perhaps because she felt her life to be one of placation and compromise and perhaps because she wished, just for once, to get away with something brisk and startling if only to herself, she held out her hand and said, “I am Julia.” And so, a secret, at least for the moment.
    His eyes went from her hand to his own bandaged one and back again. He settled for a bow of his head. She reached over and took his left, healthy hand into a brief, firm shake, though because she’d taken him by surprise, and because his hand was at an awkward angle, the gesture was one of girlfriends rather than first-time acquaintances. He reacted the way he always reacted to surprise—as if inside his body the tide was on its way out.
    â€œOh,” she said, taking note of how his face had gone still and away from her. “Apologies.”
    He barely knew this woman and she was already apologizing. Strange Americans with their strange ways.
    It was his strangeness that would always allow the most uncharacteristic of behaviors from her. The sense she had that he wasn’t quite of this world allowed her interactions with him to be unfettered by this world’s rules. How else to account for her brazenness even on this, their first meeting?
    Charlie closed his eyes. Perhaps when he opened them, she would be gone.
    â€œAre you worn out?” she asked. “Being bedridden is harder work than it appears.”
    Perhaps it was his strangeness that also guaranteed her lifelong misreadings. She was not a stupid woman. If anything, she enjoyed healthier observational powers than most. About him she noted no less than usual, perhaps even more, but his foreignness meant that what she made of those observations was almost always determined by her own feelings and, therefore, almost always faulty in some crucial way.
    â€œNo,” he said, opening his eyes.
    She stood there.
    â€œYou want to read, then read,” he said, without rudeness.
    â€œDo you want me to?” she asked.
    â€œI want nothing from you,” he said. He had heard Sampson use that phrase the previous week when firing a white man and had filed it away. He depended, in terms of his use of the English language, on imitation. It made the imitated feel flattered and as though interacting with one of his own. Charlie would have been most proud to know that there would come a point in his life when his command of the language would no longer prompt surprise.
    â€œThen I won’t read,” she said.
    â€œOkay,” he said, enjoying the roll of American slang in his Middle Kingdom mouth.
    She held his eyes with her own. Later, they would tease each other about which of them had looked away first.
    That second Sunday school session ended with what would become a tradition: the exchange of song.
    Julia and Ida, Baptist church acquaintances, led the instructors in “There Is a Happy Land,” “God Bless OurNative Land,” and a few other simple songs of that sort and of equal relevance. Sampson, having arrived in time for the end of