Wherever There Is Light by Peter Golden Page B

traveler. Today they picnicked on a hilltop from where they could see the ocean beyond the campus with its palms standing like swaybacked sentinels among the brick rectangles of buildings and vibrant plantings of flowers.
    Garland said, “When Daddy saw this view, he told me he was going to build the prettiest college anyone’s ever seen.”
    â€œAnd he did.”
    â€œI did. He watched.”
    â€œDid he live to see it?”
    â€œHe only passed four years ago. Around the time Kendall started here.” Ezekiel had spent his final month reading the King James Bible. Garland was astounded: save for her wedding, she’d never seen him in a church. Spotting her astonishment, Ezekiel sighed. “I been tryin’ to forgive that peckerwood Scales who sold my mother. Can’t forgive that man nohow.” Garland said, “Don’t trouble yourself about it, Daddy.” Ezekiel lay back on his pillows. “Ain’t rightly clear why, but it done took all the willpower God give me not to poison the highfalutin Philadelphia trash that ate my food. If I hadn’t had to take care of you, I sure nuff woulda done it.”
    Elana said, “Did you always want to run a college?”
    â€œWasn’t raised to want for myself.”
    â€œAll the good you’ve done—for the students and the farm families.”
    â€œThe families I do for my mother.”
    â€œYou’ve never mentioned her.”
    Garland retreated into a glum silence as they ate slices of ham folded into buttered biscuits and drank sweet tea from Mason jars. Ever since she and Elana had started visiting the tenant farmers, she’d been tempted to tell her about Ezekiel and her mother, certain that an orphan would appreciate her feelings. Yet Garland had never been one to cultivate close friendships. She was mortified by her father’s behavior and loath to admit her mortification to a stranger, let alone a refugee Jew who could’ve passed for a Protestant daughter of the Main Line and who rekindled Garland’s envy of those Penn coeds in all their ethereal beauty.
    Garland stretched forward and rubbed her left ankle.
    â€œYou hurt yourself,” Elana said.
    â€œTwisted it, back by the stream.”
    â€œHere, let me.”
    Garland hesitated, then moved her hand.
    Elana, scooping some ice cubes from the cooler, folded them into a napkin and pressed it against Garland’s ankle.
    Garland gazed off toward the college. “My mother was a young girl—poor, illiterate—that Daddy got pregnant, and after I was born, he sent her away. I do for those farm families, it’s like I’m making up for what Daddy done.”
    Garland turned toward Elana, expecting to see traces of pity or contempt on her face, but all she saw were blue eyes wide with curiosity and compassion. “I told Kendall, but that girl doesn’t believe a thing I say. Ask her, she’d swear her granddaddy invented starlight.”
    Elana could feel Garland looking at her as if she were expected to tell her a secret in return. Elana didn’t mind, but which one should she tell her? That after Theodor completed his yearlong tour of America and they went to Berlin with their new baby, her husband brought less ardor to their bed than he did to their Sunday strolls on Unter den Linden, leaving Elana with a throbbing in her back, a yearning for the rapture that she had once thought was every wife’s reward, and a bottomless guilt about her own desires? That she became infatuated with men she didn’t know—shopkeepers, trolley-car conductors, policemen, any man who even glanced at her as she passed him on the sidewalk? That in the mornings after Theodor left for the university, she daydreamed about these men and touched herself until the clenching and unclenching of her body wrung the gloominess from her and she was able to face the day? That her loneliness had once become so unendurable she had