The Promise by Chaim Potok Page A

said.
    Abraham Gordon laughed and wiped his brow again with his forearm.
    “No Geneva Conventions here,” Joseph Gordon said.
    Michael and I walked back across the lawn and the patio to the lake. Just before we started down the slope I turned and saw Ruth Gordon still standing on the lawn, watching us. She turned quickly and went toward the net.
    We sailed for close to two hours and had a fine time. Michael was awkward for a while with the mainsail sheet and the tiller but the breeze was mild and we did not capsize and finally he caught on to it and we sailed smoothly. We did not go into any of the coves; we sailed, tacking back and forth in the warm breeze. I lay near the center board but the water was smooth and I did not have much to do. I closed my eyes and felt the gentle rolling of the Sailfish and the sun on my face. I felt myself drowsy and fallingasleep and opened my eyes and looked up at Michael. It seemed his own private sun shone out from behind his eyes. He looked at me and smiled, then looked up at the clouds. I saw him looking at the clouds and I closed my eyes and lay very still. I opened my eyes and saw him still looking at the clouds.
    “What do you see?” I asked him.
    “Clouds.”
    “Only clouds?”
    “Clouds and things.”
    “What things?”
    “Stars.”
    “Clouds and stars in the daytime?”
    “I had a dream last Monday night. We were sailing and we sailed off the lake and into the sky and there were clouds and stars and I showed you the constellations. We sailed between the stars along the outlines of the constellations. It was a good dream.”
    “Do you have many dreams?”
    “Yes. But I don’t like to talk about them.”
    “Why?”
    “I just don’t.”
    “All right.”
    “Is a friend of yours coming up tomorrow for a visit?”
    I looked at him.
    “I heard them talking. They said a friend of yours would be coming over tomorrow.”
    “Yes.”
    “I’d like to meet him. But they want me to go to a movie or something. Why won’t they let me meet him?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “There’s something going on. I don’t know what it is. But they’re planning something.”
    I was quiet.
    “That was a good dream,” he said. “I really liked that dream.”
    We sailed smoothly and in silence and off in the distance was the faint line of the horizon and about one hundred yards to starboardwere the trees of the shoreline, the woods through which I walked from the cottage to Rachel’s house, and the lake glistened like satin in the sunlight and Michael being ill seemed unreal. Later, tacking toward shore, I looked up and saw a figure in white on the dock. We were very far away and I could not tell who it was. It went quickly along the dock and up the stairway and into the house.
    Afterward, we all sat in the living room and there were cold drinks and pleasant talk and much joking about the volleyball game in which Rachel’s parents had been trounced, and Ruth Gordon smoked a cigarette and talked about the museums they had seen in Europe—she talked about art as if she might be able to take over one of her sister-in-law’s courses at Brooklyn College—and the indecent way the French had of ignoring you unless you spoke French, and thank heaven they both spoke French, and the poverty in the back alleys of Rome and the rooted aristocratic loveliness—those were her words—of Oxford and Cambridge. The living room was large, rambling, with brightly colored Navajo rugs on the floor and a high vaulted ceiling. Bookcases covered part of one wall and Sarah Gordon’s huge abstract paintings hung on the wall opposite. The side of the room facing the lake was all glass, sliding doors opening onto the porch. Sunlight streamed through the wide expanse of glass, and the bright summer furniture and the rugs and the paintings gave depth and brilliance to the room—and the talk gave it warmth. They were a close family, and, of course, not awed, as I was, by the fame and notoriety of Abraham