Among my fondest memories of those years are our suppers together where she would tell me about the books she had read. I cannot quite remember how it first happened, but gradually we fell into somewhat of a ritual. After finishing a novel she liked she would retell it to me over dinner. Her memory was prodigious, and she had the sagacity of Miss Marble. No detail was small enough to escape her attention. The way she parsed every scrap of information would have put the most meticulous detective imaginative to shame. From the first course to the dessert she would narrate a whole book back to me, footnoted with conjectures and predictions. I must say I learned to enjoy those little mysteries. But only in her passionate rendition. It was so lovely to look at her, lit up, lost in her storytelling. She was so captivated by the plot and I was so captivated by her that the food on our plates would go cold. How we would laugh when we noticed! She always asked me to guess who the killer was, and it was never the butler or the secretary I offered up as prime suspects. This made us laugh even harder, while I pretended to reprimand her for having made our food cold.
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