3. Reading. Gap-filling.

    

     That Monday in October 1943. A beautiful day (0)  __J__  of a bird. We wandered towards Fifth Avenue, where there was a parade. The flags in the wind, the thump of military bands and military feet, seemed to (1) _____, but to be, rather, a fanfare arranged in my personal honor.

     We ate lunch at the cafeteria in the park. Afterwards, avoiding the zoo (Holly said she couldn’t bear to see anything in a cage), we giggled, ran, sang (2) _____ towards the old wooden bathhouse, now gone. Leaves floated on the lake; on the shore, a park-man was fanning a bonfire of them, and the smoke, rising like Indian signals, was the only (3) _____. Aprils have never meant much to me, autumns seem that season of beginning, spring; which is how I felt sitting with Holly (4) _____ of the bathhouse porch. I thought of the future, and spoke of the past. Because Holly wanted to know about my childhood. She talked of her own, too; but it was elusive, nameless, placeless, an impressionistic recital, though the impression received was (5) _____, for she gave an almost voluptuous account of swimming and summer, Christmas trees, pretty cousins and parties: in short, happy in a way that she was not, and never, certainly, the background of a child who had run away.

     Or, I asked, wasn’t it true that she’d been out (6) _____ since she was fourteen? She rubbed her nose. “That’s true. The other isn’t. But really, darling, you made such a tragedy out of your childhood I didn’t feel I should compete.”

     She hopped off the railing. “Anyway, it reminds me: I ought to send Fred some peanut butter.” The rest of the afternoon we were east and west worming out of reluctant grocers cans of peanut butter,  (7) _____; dark came before we’d rounded up a half-dozen jars, (8) _____. It was near the antique shop with the palace of a bird cage in its window, so I took her there to see it, and she enjoyed the point, its fantasy: “But still, it’s a cage.”