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Readings

My Childhood

The following document, ostensibly by Sybil Joines, has been much discussed in the critical literature. It was sent to me as a .pdf file by a representative of the school, rather late in my researches, when I had already begun compiling this book. I subsequently offered it up to the larger community, with my own commentary and modest fanfare. It made a great stir, of course, as contributing a new and more intimate perspective on the early life of the Headmistress, and my reputation as a scholar was such that few questioned its provenance, but after its swift elevation to canonical status, questions began to arise about certain subtle anachronisms in the text, and it was finally condemned as a forgery by several major scholars in concert, in a rather hurtful public demonstration on the occasion of my presentation with an honorary degree from the University of Göttingen.

Flushed, still holding my parchment scroll with its little tassel (which had somehow got caught in my reading glasses), and somewhat the worse for champagne, I was forced to hastily defend the document’s authenticity and, implicitly, my scholarly integrity, while at the same time aware of a highly unpleasant sensation in the pit of my stomach, not entirely attributable to Schnitzel mit Spaetzle, as I awoke to inchoate but long-standing doubts of my own.

Finally, a Dutch research team took the obvious step of asking to see the handwritten original—as I should have done at the start—and resolved the debate at a stroke, for they found that it was written with a ballpoint pen. (As we know, Laszlo Biro did not file his patent until June 1938, well after Joines’s death.) I quickly issued a handsome retraction, making no reference to hurt feelings. Yet questions remained. If I had been the victim of a hoax, what on earth was its objective? Was the SJVS less enthusiastic about my project than it seemed? If so, why had they gone to such lengths to appear accommodating? Why was the fraud so cunning in one respect (whoever wrote it knew his SJVSeana) and so careless in another (how difficult would it have been to procure an inkwell and quill)? Finally, should we not accept as plausible

hypotheses, if not facts, the explanations the counterfeit supplied for the many hitherto inexplicable references in the legitimate texts? I found myself unable to “roll back” the changes in my understanding of the Headmistress’s story; the fiction had folded in the facts and made them its own.

I took these issues to the community at large, and after much consternation and internal debate we penned a collective e-mail to the Vocational School that was a masterpiece of tactful circumspection, requesting more information on the provenance of the contested document, and offering the dubious “out” that they had themselves been victims of a trickster among their own ranks. The response was quick and disconcerting in its honesty.

Of course the document was modern! It had been completed just days before they sent it to me! The Headmistress had perceived that the book would be the better for an autobiographical overview and had undertaken to provide one. The new headmistress? Well, yes! And also no. It was meaningless to speak of new and old in this context; the new headmistress was the old headmistress. Only insofar as the ghost of Sybil Joines spoke through her was she the headmistress at all.

That this not only discredited the document in question but cast retrospective doubt on all the supposedly historical materials they had been supplying me with, I could not make them see. Concerns of plagiarism they brushed aside with an emoticon. How pointless to insist on verifiable authorship when “We are NONE of us in possession of ourselves,” when “We are ALL mere mouthpieces for the dead.” (Emphasis theirs.) Indeed, insofar as my extremely “STUPID” persistence betrayed a skepticism that the dead can speak, I risked souring our relationship and thus losing this priceless connection to the fount of all SJVSeana.

I backed off.

I have since decided that as a document of the contemporary Vocational School, this text is just as revealing as if it were exactly what it purports to be, and I would no longer contemplate omitting it from any serious study of the legacy. I leave it to the reader, however, to decide whether it reveals more about this headmistress, that one, or we scholars. —Ed.

I had a fierce, unthinking certainty that I was exceptional. Once a bone had struck the road beside me and bounced up almost as far as my head, having fallen from, as it appeared, a great height. I turned around and around but saw only an old horse grazing on the far side of a field. The bone was therefore a sign. Not from God, not from anyone, just a sign: that I was special, that uncommon things were going to happen to me. Once, too, a hummingbird intent upon a trumpet flower had trustingly curled its claws around my finger—until then I had not been quite sure that hummingbirds had feet—while I inhaled with my eyes the pulsing iridescent neck, the finely thatched crown, the liquid eye. Even after it tensed and flew away I continued to feel its warm, bony grip, like an invisible ring, as if I were betrothed to the extraordinary now. I felt not wonder, but vindication. This was what I expected life to contain. This, and an unending series of similar marvels, like brightly colored glass beads on a string.

“Excuse me, what was your name again?” Susannah says, as Mary coughs behind her plump and freckled hand. Susannah is my next-door neighbor (it is over the fence that dissociates our lush lawn from her seedy one that we conduct this interview). Her father works in my father’s factory. So does Mary’s. She knows my name.

My breath turns to glass in my throat. I gag; again; again. At the front of my mouth, my tongue (with a pressure slightly, maddeningly off-center) seems to be trying to stub itself out against my teeth.

“Sssssssss . . .” I say, if you call that saying.

Susannah tilts her shining head, and I burn. Not just for the barbaric sound I am making—a spiccato sizzle—but for the hair stuck to my cheek, the stinging spot where my frock chafes, my index finger, twisting my skirt into a garrote. For my whole, objectionable person. It is as if I have been precipitated out of fumes and intimations only now, when the thick, wet, rubbery fact of tongue and lip makes itself felt.

The shock disacquaints me with myself. I feel no loyalty toward that wretch, only alarm and aversion. I would like to signal to my prosecutors, watching my evidentiary mouth with forensic curiosity, that I am on their side, against me. But to do that I would need to speak.

“Sssssssssss . . .”

I lean forward, lean back, tilt my head one way and then the other, as if I were explaining something complicated, in complete sentences. Turn out one hand (while the other still strangles in my skirt). The idea may be to convince myself that I am already speaking and then, as it were, chime in with myself. It does not work. I just keep on saying nothing, the nothing that is my name.

The girls are giggling. The back door opening. With a little shriek they flee.

“Sybil, come inside,” says my father.

You may imagine me nine or ten years old, chubby, with horrible hair, the stiff, tubular bodice of a pus-yellow organdy dress riding up under my arms where damp circles were spreading, and silk stockings subsiding into the heels of my pigskin boots. I stuttered so violently that I wet my chin, when I spoke at all. This factor combined with my family’s high social standing to deprive me of the fellowship of other children, and it did not endear me to my parents either. My father was personally offended by it, as if I were a walking if not always talking rebuke to his ambitions. He had hoped and indeed expected to engender a perfect boy-child to step into his shoes one day. That he did not, he blamed on my mother’s unpedigreed uterus and general weakness of character. I remember her sorrowful acquiescence.

Nor were my surroundings such as would compensate in beauty and interest for the shortcomings in my society. Cheesehill was and is a dreary little town. It is located on the rather marshy, thicketed banks of a small, flat, shallow, sluggish river that swells improbably, every ten years or so, into an implacable brown behemoth, sweeping houses off their foundations all down Common Place Road, a town whose architectural history is wiped out at regular intervals, so that it then boasted no very old, no very distinguished buildings except one (now there are none), the piano factory inherited by my father as the last of his line (my insufficient self excepted), built by his great-uncle on bedrock and furthermore on a little rise that may have been the hill for which the town was named (where the cheese comes in I have no notion), though it was scarcely elevated enough to earn the name.

Perhaps they had agreed to call it a hill to promote themselves in their own esteem, to which that hill or rather the factory that stood on it was central, being the only business concern of any significance in the entire area, and employing most of the locals, so you can imagine how they felt when it burned down, and again when I declined to use the insurance money, which was considerable, to rebuild, but instead (after an interval of some years) sank it into the purchase and rehabilitation of the derelict buildings of the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, which, contrary to local tradition, had been built above the flood plain and far enough out in the countryside (among bona fide hills, in fact) that in theory its tenants could not infect with waywardness the good girls of Cheesehill proper, or lure with waywardness the good boys, though this did not stop said boys from making pilgrimages out to the fascinating property in hopes of espying some sample of waywardness, which is how my parents met, an event that I can only regard as unfortunate in the extreme, my mother spending her entire subsequent existence in failing to make amends to my father for the very waywardness that had initially drawn him to her, since what was alluring in a sweetheart he deplored in a wife, such that she was by the time I knew her a subdued creature, colorless, except for the bruises.

Cheesehill center is also colorless (see by what contrived means I yank myself out of the lachrymose, as out of the Slow River in spate!)—literally, in its builders’ unimaginative preference for white clapboard, but also figuratively: still, today, depressed by the loss of its main employer, its main street empty of foot traffic, its small library nearly bare of books, its public house kept in business by a handful of sots who stare dully at the occasional strangers who make the mistake of entering it in hopes of enjoying a sample of quaint country cheer, only its firehouse boasting a gleaming modern engine and a recent coat of paint, though I would call that, not the paint but the engine, a case of closing the barn door after the, after what, I forget, after the cows come home, the chickens hatch.

I believe that there is something about Cheesehill that does not altogether disgust me, but I can’t remember what it is.

Oh, yes, the snails. Cheesehill has a lot of them. They are some of its liveliest inhabitants, rioting in the kitchen gardens all night, then sleeping it off the next day, buttoned up in their shells, halfway up a clapboard wall. Snails are not universally admired, I know, but I do like a sleek young snail stretching out his shining neck, optimistic eyestalks playing nimbly over the possibilities, and dragging a silver ribbon behind him. My father, mindful of his tomatoes and his salad greens, for he fancied himself a gentleman farmer and often wrote off for seeds of new hybrids that promised to combine exceptional flavor and hardiness, did his best to slaughter the Cheesehill snails. Unlike my rabbits and my mother, the snails—as a race, if not individually—came back, full of enthusiasm and heirloom lettuces.

Here at the Vocational School we do not poison the snails that frequent our kitchen garden, nor dunk them in soapy water. The children peel them gently off the cabbages and set them free on the edge of our land. That the spot I have chosen is only a short distance from the vegetable patch of our nearest neighbor is not my concern, though I have recommended that the children wait until dark to give the captives their liberty, to avoid misunderstandings.

I mentioned floods. You might think that, being the wealthiest family in town (the only wealthy family in town), we would have had the means and the desire to build above the high-water mark, but although our house was bolted to its foundations, a measure rarely taken in fatalistic Cheesehill, my father deemed it a point of pride to flaunt our eminence in the very center—such as it was—of town, so we too suffered the rising waters. My father refused to evacuate, choosing to repose his faith in his precautions, and I well remember staring out the upstairs window, while my mother wept quietly on the bed, at a satin-sleek expanse of brown that would have appeared almost stationary were it not for the branches, planks, dead chickens, and other debris that whipped by at a startling clip, occasionally clobbering the keel of our vessel (as I pictured it) with a force that I felt in my bones. How exciting it was to sit at the top of the stairs—for I was not much afraid, feeling dismally and correctly (in this instance) that my father would not let anything really interesting happen to us—and see the dirty water swirling around the banister a few feet below me, carrying, still upright, its lips just above water, a cheap enameled vase that my father had not considered worth rescuing, though my mother was fond of it, and bumping it against the rails, whereupon it tipped, filled with water, and sank. I found it later, buried in the mud, and squirreled it away.

The bolts held that time and another time and once more still and then failed, but that was after my parents were dead and I a young headmistress occupied with my school, whose outbuildings had been menaced by the selfsame flood. Still, I went to look at the sundered house. It had slid sideways off its foundations and was striking on its former lawn a defiantly jaunty pose, one side stove in and the other thrust out like a hip. I could see a muddy settee through a gap in the wall and, disposed upon it, what appeared to be the head of a moose, not a drowned moose but a moose that had been shot for its spread of horns, decapitated, and affixed, the head I mean, to a plaque, and the plaque to a wall, but had made its escape and was now resting from its exertions.

I have often wondered whether dead animals, too, have their ghosts. I would gladly give that moose a pulpit. But I suspect that merely dying would not suffice to teach a mute to speak, so that if animals do visit our throats it is only in the odd sad-sounding yap or bellow.

When I first heard about the waywardness, I pictured a flounced patchwork skirt, such as I believed Gypsies to wear, and began to watch my mother for signs that she was preparing for a trip, since I supposed that to be wayward was to be on the way somewhere, as by repute the tribe of Romany generally were. I saw this skirt so clearly that I dug through her chest of drawers and the old brass-bound Jenny Lind trunk in the attic in confident expectation of finding it and was disappointed to unfold nothing that was not white, peach, pink, beige, or blue.

Whether because I was looking for it, or because there really was something forever yondering in her, my mother always seemed to me on the verge of departure. One morning I awoke to an empty house and the conviction that she had gone at last. I ran all the way down Common Place Road in nightgown and slippers, eyes wide and wet, but turned back when I reached the factory drive, perceiving that she would never have gone that way, and sped back again, in at our front door (standing open), and straight through the house to the back porch, where, on the steps, staring off toward the river, my mother sat. I sank down beside her, she put her arm around me without taking her eyes off the swatch of sliding silk, and I never asked if she had decided to come back to me or never left in the first place.

When I understood better what waywardness was, I looked for that, too, in my mother but could not find any more evidence of it than I had of the flounced skirt, though my father seemed to detect the taint of it even in the way she kept house or received the mail, while her familiar way with a grocer’s lemons once occasioned weeks of recriminations.

But I saw with what hopeless hopefulness she adjusted the lay of a doily or straightened her chairs and her skirts when he was due home and, dismayed, thought hers an all too strait and narrow waywardness. Only, sometimes, when my father was out, did she take off her shoes and go out to stand awhile under the trees in her bare feet, very still and expressionless, and I saw that here was the flounced skirt at last, or what remained of it.

I recall that after what my father deemed to be her indelicate pronunciation of “leg of lamb” at the butcher’s he struck her as I watched through the bedroom door, left ajar. “Marrying you was the ruin of me!” He fell on the floor and began pulling his beard and hitting himself in the face, a thing I was always happy to see. I heard him groan, “Bea, Bea, I wanted it to be different! You’ll forgive me, Bea!”

I couldn’t help it, I laughed.

My mother came to the door. Before she closed it she met my eyes and shook her head slightly. One of her cheekbones was higher than the other and something was strange about her eye on that side. At dinner I saw that a glossy cherry-red spot was rising from behind the lower lid, like a second, devilish pupil. I was afraid to see it watching me and kept my own eyes on my plate. I remember the meal as the very hypostasis of dread: a thin brown sauce spreading from under the slab of lamb as if it were leaking, a gray pile of one of father’s healthful grains, and some peas. When my mother came to put me to bed that night I shrank away from her.

In my fear there was also an element of disgust, for like my father I was revolted by weakness. I was offended by my mother’s apologetic submission to my father, for it seemed obvious to me that she was the superior being, and I indicated my partisanship when I dared, hoping to inspire her to revolt. For instance, understanding that the incident at the butcher’s had enraged my father, though not exactly why, I subsequently made of leg of lamb my chief epithet. How clearly I remember shouting “L-leg of lamb leg of lamb leg of L-L-LAMB!” as the ruler came down on my thighs.

To this day I do not greatly savor lamb.

Then, of course, I returned to writhing, sobbing, and patting his feet in wordless entreaty. This may seem chicken-hearted but was in fact a sort of defiance, because he regarded groveling with such disgust, and I wonder now whether the same logic might not excuse my mother’s obsequiousness. “I would have expected more pluck from a whelp of mine,” he would say, and interrupt my “education,” as he called it, to page through a pamphlet on the principles of heredity: criminality, imbecility, and pauperism traced through several generations of tenement dwellers, mollusks, or pea plants; a cat who lost its forepaw in a steel trap, whose grandchild had a limp; and so on.

It will be perceived that my father was a scientific American, and indeed he was a faithful subscriber to the periodical of that name, as also to Popular Science Monthly, The Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review, The Medico-Chirurgical Review, The American Journal of Dental Science, Practical Sanitation, The Water-Cure Journal, and the like, with whose aid he proposed to manage his life, his business, my mother, and me. The books on our shelves were scientific and were ordered scientifically. Our house was kept clean by science, or so father supposed, though my mother often crept around with a dustpan and whisk-broom to make up for the deficiencies of our hand-pumped Whirlwind Sweeping Machine. We ate scientific food that we chewed scientifically as Father counted aloud, pausing (but holding the bolus ready for resumed hostilities) when he interrupted his count to tender us scientific descriptions of the activities in his corpus as the wholesome ingredients purged his system of impurities.

You begin, perhaps, to get a sense of the range of my father’s interests. Some of his other enthusiasms were photography; telegraphy; the mixing of perfumes; the raising of silkworms; modern sanitation; antique dessert spoons; mesmerism; hydropathy; and novel methods of extracting sugar from melons. In some cases his interest did not extend beyond that of a critical onlooker, but he was often inspired to wholesale enterprise by the articles he read, and would write off for the equipment and materials to set him up in a new line of work, for to husband an inherited manufactory did not suit his impatient and choleric temperament. That same temperament rebelled at any sustained effort, however, so very few of these enterprises lasted beyond his initial infatuation. In some cases simply writing out an order satisfied the appetite aroused in him by the article or advertisement in one of his periodicals, and by the time a thousand packets of dung-colored, spiky seeds or a lump of waxy material arrived in a bumped, scuffed, stained, and belabeled carton, he had forgotten why he wanted them and sometimes even what exactly they were.

More often he lost momentum only after he met the first serious obstacle, by which time half the house was given over to dyestuffs, say, or the grinding of lenses, and then my mother would enter the field to try to recoup at least some of his expenses. Far more practical than he, she became pretty knowledgeable about the various ways available to a lady entrepreneur to unload a very odd range of goods, and sometimes even turned a profit, though to my disgust she did not ever hold back any of the money she made to supplement the small allowance from which she supplied all her own needs and mine, as she might easily have done, but turned it in to my father, submitting meekly to his grumbling, for of course although he thought “peddling” beneath him, he nonetheless believed that if he turned his hand to it, he would do it better than anyone, always asked what he believed to be very canny questions about the deals she had struck, and invariably concluded by lamenting her sad want of acumen, when the truth was that without her acumen he would have been emphatically out of pocket and perhaps ruined us with his many nonsensical investments.

His extravagances were never more flagrant than when he could style them research. For my father planned a great work, whose particulars were yet to be determined. Above all else he admired inventors, knew their names and stories, often spoke, though always in vague terms, of the inventions that he himself would unveil when he was ready, and pored over the official reports of new Patents and Claims with occasional exclamations of annoyance at those who, to hear him tell it, had anticipated ideas for which he had just been on the verge of filing a patent himself. His conversation at dinner was really a monologue on the latest discoveries, many of them of no utility in his line of work, such as a new method for ventilating railroad carriages, or for making artificial ivory out of caoutchouc, ammonia, chloroform, and phosphate of lime; and some quite unwelcome at the dinner table (or so I perceived—for I had a strong stomach myself—from the suddenly rather taxidermic appearance my mother assumed as her jaw froze in mid-bite), such as a new sort of verminous tumor in the stomach of the horse, an improved remedy for fecal stench, or a way to induce sluggish leeches to suck (soak them in beer). He treated us to expositions on the dyeing of ornamental feathers; female labor in Germany; improvements in chandeliers; the preservation of blood from slaughterhouses in the form of a jelly obtained by adding quick or slaked lime; the Inter-Continental Tunnel planned between Tarifa and Tangiers; a new factory proposing to make paper from the cactus plant; a new method for identifying falsification in documents via photographic copies; and an experiment in weighing the rays of light, which showed that the weight of sunlight on the earth was three thousand million tons, “a force that but for gravitation would drive it into space” (Practical Magazine).

He gave his opinion freely and somewhat wildly on these topics, of which he had no firsthand knowledge whatsoever. Sometimes he became so exercised that he leapt up from his chair and strode around, employing gestures that recalled the elocutionary training of which he was so proud. (He often mentioned that he had won a prize in school for his recitation of Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” a conversational turn that I dreaded, for it invariably progressed from pleasurable reminiscence to lamentation that such as he should have spawned such as I—i.e., a tongue-tied nincompoop.)

When he heard of a new gadget, however dubious or impractical, nothing would stop him from placing an order, and when it came in the mail he would drop everything to read any manuals included with it, to assemble it if necessary, to try it out, and then to show it off. Alas, he did not have any friends to show it to, so he would summon his secretary, the foreman of his factory, and the more trusted and responsible of his skilled craftsmen, and they would all troop into the parlor and sit very silently and awkwardly on our most uncomfortable chairs while my mother poured tea and my father stalked around the device, waiting irritably for her to finish. It was plain to me that these visitors felt uncomfortable in our house and considered the occasion an extension of their work duties rather than a social event, but my father grew flushed and merry and loud and exaggeratedly colloquial in his speech as if to make his low company feel at home (though they themselves were invariably restrained and punctilious in their diction) and reminisced about the event afterward as though it had been a great success. Then he would spend several days in composing a long letter to the manufacturers giving his opinion of the device and suggestions for its improvement and often spoke as if the manufacturers waited eagerly for his letters and were very grateful for his insights and as if he had some sort of official role in the creative process and was indeed practically a co-creator. When I was very young I assumed that this was true and it made me think my father a very important fellow, but later I understood that it was all moonshine and pictured the manufacturers laughing over the letters with which he took such pains or simply dropping them into the trash unread.

I do not remember all the items he purchased. But here are some that I still possess:

An Automatic Signal Buoy;

An Arithmometer, or calculating machine;

A Magneto-Electric Bell Apparatus;

A Pocket Telegraph, or portable Morse instrument;

A Scott’s Electric Hair Brush;

A Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Shock Therapy Machine.

My father often spoke of our world as rendered limitless by the ever-extending reach of practical science, and this had its effect on me, for I will not allow death to be an end. But while my father’s scientific cast of mind and the ideas and devices that he brought into the house were a great influence on my later work, I hold them to blame for many tribulations. Although my father was a serial enthusiast who could usually be trusted to move on from any given hobby within a few months, my stutter was a continual vexation and a reminder to him of the unfinished project that was my speech, and so from the pages of his science magazines came an endless succession of ways to torture my mouth: the syllabic exercises of M. Colobat, regulated by his muthonome or orthophonic lyre (a sort of metronome); exercises for the lips, the tongue, the breath; tongue-depressing plates, jaw-spreading pads, obstructions of various kinds—cruel descendants of Demosthenes’ pebbles—like the little gold fork of M. Itard, worn “in the concavity of the alveolary arcade of the inferior jawbone,” i.e., under the tongue; leather collars that buckled around my neck and pressed firmly against my larynx; metal plates that strapped to my teeth and projected between my lips; and a sort of whistle that was held against my palate by a sharp point digging into my tongue. It goes without saying that none of these devices fulfilled their promises to “restore the patient’s usefulness to Society by opening the Floodgates to cogent and mellifluous Speech.”

I was supposed to be grateful for the trouble my father took over me and to let any setbacks inspire me to greater exertions, so my mother was not permitted to comfort me when I wept. “You have done enough harm, Madam!” he would cry, for my father considered my stutter a sign of the weakness in the maternal line, and never ceased blaming himself for the “temporary venereal intoxication” that had resulted in the “unscientific” and “counter-evolutionary” union of a man of his elevated forebears with a “moral imbecile” from a “line of shopkeepers and petty criminals.” He felt it his duty to correct for the evil effects of his ill-advised marriage on his social class, so when the pages of his monthlies offered no new quackery to inflict on me, he exercised his own ingenuity, pouring all his balked ambition as an inventor into designing novel devices for me to try. No doubt he also calculated that if he could cure stuttering where others had (so obviously) failed, he would make his name.

Never had a mouth been so stretched, cut, prodded, plungered, braced, cantilevered, wedged, winched, pinched—so Scientific Americaned—so Popular Scienced. These periodicals were possessed of wonderfully detailed etchings of docks, and decks, and dykes, where somber, beautiful, flawlessly geometrical machines enjoyed the anonymous attentions of stiff, tidy men with tapering symmetrical limbs. In my father’s fancy and mine, such was or would be my mouth: a site of modern industry, well-regulated and productive, rolling forth (conveyed by belts and pulleys) a serene procession of die-cut, stainless-steel, copper-bottomed sentiments, accompanied by appropriate gestures.

When my father fitted me with his contraptions—the only time he touched me except to punish me—his fingers were not ungentle, and I could sometimes mistake the optimism shining in his eyes for tenderness. Even now I ask myself, was there not, perhaps, under his dissatisfaction with me, a love that could be glimpsed in those moments alone, as mute and enduring as an endolith?

Then I answer, No.

But in those moments during which I sat, given over to his fiddling, my body softened and a strange knowingness went up my spine. “Sit up strai—damn it!” (A spring snapped loose.) “Open, wider, not so wide, clench your teeth, relax, draw back your lips here, no, here, no, you stupid girl, here.” I complied, with something almost like eagerness, and an optimism of my own. This time, surely, it would work. The intensity of our shared wanting would make it work. I felt my coming fluency as a physical pressure at the root of my tongue, begging for release.

It never came. My father’s contrivances were beset with misadventures: A spring-loaded cheek-stretcher came uncocked and shot out of my mouth to ricochet around the dining room. A gutta-percha bladder shipped its anchor when I inhaled and lodged in my windpipe, nearly asphyxiating me. A tiny dumbbell that I was, under his stern eye, rolling forward and backward on my tongue, was accidentally swallowed, after which for days I had to bring him the chamber pot that received my excrements and stand at attention while he dissected them with little metal rods like chopsticks. (The object never turned up; I suppose it is inside me still, lodged in my blind gut and slowly poisoning me, for it was made of lead.) For these mischances he naturally blamed me. Perhaps in some recess of his conscience he knew better, however, for he abandoned the most disastrous conceptions without retrial. Though not, I should say, without punishing me as “slothful, obstinate, and recidivistic,” bringing down the ruler once per adjective.

Then he looks at the white-edged marks on my palm and his face contorts. “I have ruined my life, I will never amount to anything.”

A strange thing for the most important man in Cheesehill to say, but I know what he means. “Don’t cry, Father,” I say kindly, “Someday one of your inventions will work.”

He raises the ruler again.

Sometimes I looked at myself in the maculated mirror above my mother’s dressing table and marveled at my ordinary looks, for my mouth felt bigger, if possible, than the head it was set in, and as violently resistant to socialization as a kraken, strapped to my face in place of a mouth and enjoined to speak.

That there was something of pride in my feelings toward this monstrosity, I did not then recognize. Indeed, for a long time I did earnestly try to master my unruly speech, and in sentimental moments the fantasy rose up before me of the loving family life to which I would matriculate once I had solved my little problem: the parlor, of an evening—myself, reading aloud with superior enunciation and eloquent gestures—my parents’ faces bright with candlelight and pride! But increasingly I believed it to be impossible, and knew my father for a brute for punishing me for something I could not help. And a brute could not figure in those fantasies of mine. It had been a long time since I had seen anything like tenderness in even the way he treated my mother; so those dream candles guttered and went out.

I often loitered near my father’s study as he made his experiments, hopeful that something would go wrong, and once, at least, this paid great dividends. The occasion was the arrival of the Galvano-Faradio Magneto-Electric Machine previously mentioned, which promised to Tune the Entire Organism, Restoring Balance and Harmony to Disordered Nerves, and Sending Vitality Coursing Through the Body. I watched through the door as, moving with deliberation, he unbuttoned his cuffs and collar, took off his shirt and folded it and set it aside, then his undershirt. He had a patch of bear-black hair between naked, womanly breasts. I do not recall that I had ever seen them before. He took hold of one wire and after hesitating a moment fastened the claw-grip at its end to one nipple. He connected the other wire to the other nipple. It comes to me now, as it did not then, that this was a curious site to choose and that perhaps he was engaged in something other than scientific inquiry or medical treatment. I have heard that there are those who take erotic pleasure in pain, their own or others’, but I know nothing of such perversions of sensuality—and little enough, to be candid, of its orthodox course—so shall leave further speculation to those better informed.

As I edged a little farther into the room, my father took up the pamphlet and consulted it again, holding it in both hands. Then he reached out slowly and switched on the Magneto-Electric Machine. A strange expression came over his face and he jerked about, dropping the pamphlet and batting at the wires, but they did not come loose; finally he seized hold of one wire and with a powerful yank pulled it quite free of the machine, which spat cobalt zips of light and then went dead. He hunched over, breath coming in tearless sobs, then carefully parted the jaws of the dangling wire to detach it from his nipple. The other still connected him to the dead machine. Suddenly he perceived me watching him. He stared at me for a moment, the wire hanging from his hand, then struck at me with it.

Many things then happened at once. I sprang back, receiving the protruding corner of a credenza in the kidneys. The wire, missing its target, flexed wildly, and its tip caught him in one nostril and scored a line from there down to his lower lip. His sudden movement threw his weight against the wire that was still affixed to his nipple and ripped it free, so that he cursed and clapped both hands to his breast; the first wire, borne thoughtlessly along, flexed again and struck him, though this time with less force, on the forehead. I leaned back against the credenza as if I were quite comfortable there, and made myself laugh, though my side hurt very much. Blood was coming from both his nipple and his lip, and his pale stomach was jumping up and down with his breath.

“Monster! Banshee!”

“It is not my fault, Father,” I said. “Perhaps the machine was on an incorrect setting. Why don’t you try it again?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He lunged at me and got me by the ear, twisting it as he pulled me against him, until I cried out. “I’ll let go if you can say, ‘Please, Papa, pick me a peck of pickled peppers.’” My face was against his sweating side; he smelled sour.

I could not say it, as he knew very well.

Now that he had the best of me he seemed to swell; his stomach broadened, the worm of blood that had started wriggling down it froze as if alarmed. “You would like to curse me, wouldn’t you? But you just can’t find the words!” He laughed loudly, his rage almost forgotten in enjoyment of my shame.

Let us bring down the curtain on this sorry scene—it can go nowhere good. Suffice it to say that I could never witness his misfortune without ultimately suffering a greater one.

It is probably not possible to feel completely innocent when one is always being punished, so I supposed myself to be a fairly wicked character, and while I was sometimes sorry for it, I felt myself a hopeless case, and gave in to a life of sin and stuttering. Indeed, my father always punished me a little more than I thought my transgressions were worth, so I felt that I had paid in advance for any crimes I might wish to commit, and would be improvident not to commit them. By, for instance, watching my parents through a crack in their bedroom ceiling that I had widened with a nail file, an often boring vigil enlivened by the certainty that my father would be incensed at the illicit advantage it gave me to possess a knowledge that he did not know I had. Or hiding a lump of ambergris that he had acquired at great expense in the back of a kitchen drawer, where it reposed for many years, imbuing the vicinity with a mysterious fragrance. Or tampering with the wiring of a new gadget. Thus I balanced my books. If after a particularly criminal act I thought I might have overdrawn my account, I got an uneasy feeling, and sometimes even goaded my father to punish me again, on the rare occasions that he lacked reasons of his own to do so. At this I became very adept, playing on my father’s rage as other, happier daughters might on the spinet, rousing and calming it in orderly arpeggios, until I was ready to release it. The feeling of superiority and control that this gave me was worth the pain of a beating to me, and the system worked to my satisfaction until I stupidly succumbed to the temptation to show him that I did not care much about the kind of pain he dealt me. Then he sought other ways to punish me, and found them.

My first rabbits were not really mine but my father’s, intended for the table. When he slaughtered them I grieved but little, since through all the moments of our acquaintance a spectral gravy boat had bobbed, reminding me of their destination. But these rabbits got more rabbits before they died, and I petitioned my father for the raising of them. His enthusiasm for rabbit-breeding having waned, he agreed.

Do not care excessively for anything, not even your own self, and you will be invulnerable. So I thought and so I sought to conduct myself. I made a grim game of hiding away my favorites, but when they were discovered, and delivered to our hired man Lucius, who killed and skinned them, I taught myself to watch. In this way I schooled myself in hardness and thought myself a pretty cool customer. But then came Hopsalot, the weapon I put into my father’s hands. He did not look like a weapon, he was fat, furry, and indolent, with floppy ears, but I loved him, though I tried not to show it.

That I had failed I learned on the occasion of a piece of petty mischief. My father had arranged his collection of dessert spoons in order by their year of issue, one of the rare enterprises that he carried through to completion. I had carefully rearranged them. Not having any very high opinion of his discernment, I imagined that he would never notice—the joke was to be a private one—and pictured him taking out his case and polishing each spoon before putting it back in its slot, his lips bunched up with pleasure, while I savored a different pleasure of my own. But my sabotage was discovered after all, and my father confronted me. Aware of the magnitude of my crime, I stammered so badly that I could not answer him, a circumstance that invariably infuriated him. He rushed out of the house and to the shed—there were the hutches; took up his knife from the shelf (I was clinging to his arm now, and groaning in an uninflected monotone, for I could not discover any words in myself, such was my distress); opened the hutch and took out Hopsalot, who hung in his hand as tame, comfortable, and soft as an old hat.

“D-d-d—”

He raised his brows, cocking his head in mock solicitude, and I felt his anger spoil into malice. “Oh, sorry—did you have something to say?” His voice was roguish, kittenish, grotesquely lilting.

A bulb of pressure rose in my throat, forcing my glottal folds, but only a huff of breath escaped before they closed with an audible click. A muscle on the side of his mouth twitched. My mouth shaped the word don’t, but no breath came to fill it.

To think of it, even now, my skull roars like a blast furnace. Didn’t happen, didn’t happen, no no no no no no no! Over and over I speak words ablaze with righteousness. Over and over Hopsalot spills new-smelted from the flames: sleek, shining, whole. But that ingot is fairy metal, it melts. Probably there was nothing I could have said to avert what was coming, but I will never know. Silver-tongued Demosthenes did not rise again in me. I stood there, my fingers plucking at my father’s arm, and choked on my assassin silence.

My father regarded me with smiling contempt. “Did you wish to raise an objection? No? Nothing to say? My mistake!” He flipped Hopsalot upside down and waggled the blade violently around in his mouth. “We cut the mouth veins so as to drain the body of blood,” he said in a neutral tone (barely audible under the terrible screaming, as if addressing nobody, or his own conscience). He ran a wire a few turns around the kicking feet, one of which got loose and broke, I hoped, his nose—then, cursing, strung him up from the roof beam while I kicked him as hard as I could in his shins, Hopsalot jerking, twisting, screaming, and flicking drops of blood all over my father and myself that were indistinguishable from the blood streaming now from my father’s nose as well.

Language is a terrible, cold thing, I think. One may recount an event, calmly selecting the most suitable words, that to remember without benefit of ink is almost beyond bearing. We accept the counterfeit and are thankful, for it spares us the awful weight of our lives.

My father thrust me from him and, jamming his finger crosswise under his up-tilted nose, from which black-cherry blood was flowing, strode out of the shed. He left me pretty well frantic, leaping up to catch at the roof beam, though I was too short. I wasted a moment or two in this pointless activity before I thought to pile up the hutches and though I put my foot through one of them, to the stupid consternation of young Gundred, Countess of Furry, I did then manage to reach the beam and, weeping, unwind the wire that bound Hopsalot, paying no mind to his claws raking my cheeks. But when I bore him down to the heap of straw where the escaped but unmoved Gundred, against whom I conceived an immediate dislike, was hopefully sniffing (for concealed carrots, perhaps), he lay listless on his side, paws twitching a little, blood rouging his muzzle, and died.

“Oh, please—don’t go—don’t leave me—” is what I tried to say, and more to this effect, but it came out very broken under the press of my emotion. Indeed I had possibly never stuttered so violently.

This is how I made the first of my great discoveries, which I therefore owe to my father’s cruelty. You can read about it elsewhere. The result was that I brought him back, I mean Hopsalot. Alas, I brought him back, not to healthy indifferent life, but to that moment in which he lay dying, in pain, terror, and incomprehension, perhaps not even trusting, now, my own hands, since they had taught him a lie, that he was safe. I kept him dying for hours, or so it felt, and then in hot, banging shame for my cruelty I shut up and let him be. Be dead. Die.

Gundred took belated fright and fled. I believe that she accounts for the great number of feeble-minded rabbits that presently inhabit Cheesehill and regularly fling themselves under one’s wheels.

I rose from the soft mound that had been Hopsalot—the pluperfect was making its fitness felt—and went meditatively into the house, repeatedly spreading and unspreading my fingers to feel the blood that was drying on the webbing between them stick and unstick. My father was languid on the divan in a smoking jacket, a healthy flush in his cheeks, a fine crust of black rimming his nostrils, poring over a pamphlet and mumbling, “Deranged condition of the whole system . . . innervated . . . dyspepsia. Beef tea?” Without looking up, he added in the same tone of voice, “Where have you been?”

I could not call my mouth back from wherever it had been. “Sh-sh-sh . . .”

He swung his feet to the floor and swatted the pamphlet down onto the cushion beside him, which bounced a little. “Damn it,” he ejaculated lazily, “you will regulate your speech!”

I gazed dumbly at him, my fingers spreading and unspreading.

“You are my creature,” he said. His tone was sonorous, he seemed to taste his words; I perceived that he was calling on his elocutionary skills. “My qualities appear in you, although warped and weakened by the deleterious influence of your mother’s line. I will not allow that minuscule portion of myself that survives in you to appear before the world with disordered speech and—” he sat back, perceiving only now that my dress was fouled with blood and rabbit fur “—appearance.” His tone was disbelieving. “Why, in some vitiated fashion, you express me! You bear my signature, although the text is corrupted. The fault for that is mine, and I accept it, but I cannot accept that even in dilute form my gifts are not equal to or superior to those of a lesser man’s child, and you will make yourself the mistress of my legacy, however diminished. Come here.” He smiled grotesquely, patting a cushion. “Let us hear you say, ‘I will regulate my speech and impose harmony on my disordered senses.’”

I took a few steps toward him and attempted to force the air between the commissures of my lips. Only a grinding sound ensued, like that of a motor failing to start.

His face twisted in a grotesque imitation of kindness, though the time for kindness, I thought, was past. He had perhaps forgotten what reason he had lately given me for resentment; or I was wrong and he had never understood in the first place what my rabbits were to me. “Shall we try again? ‘I will regulate . . .’”

“Grr-grr-grr.”

The suppressed impatience roared back into view. “Are you being deliberately obtuse? This is the nineteenth century!” He leaned forward, employing the Horizontal Oblique gesture, Fig. 28, A Practical Manual of Evolution. “When industry and the applied sciences break mighty rivers and the power of the lightning bolt to the harness, shall one little girl’s tongue idle in a state of nature, as lawless as a catamount? I say nay! We squeeze lemons until they express their juices, and make no doubt of it, Sybil Joines—” he caught my shoulder in a pincer-like grip, forgetting oratory “—I will juice you.”

I turned my face away. I pressed my hand to my thigh. I moved my hand and felt that my dress was stuck to it.

How real I was, and solid as a ham. It is distasteful to look back on it, now that I am scarcely here at all. Now that I am little more than a corset through which an interesting wind blows, and the other world is more real to me than this one.

My father had a pedagogical theory (original to him, as far as I know) of the proper sequence of childhood attainments, from the diaper right on up to higher mathematics. Every art was erected on the foundation of the last; each had its numbered place, and although he periodically revised the list, promoting, say, the study of counterpoint from #164 to #158, while demoting the trimming of bonnets from #174 to #193, the spoken word (#13) invariably preceded the written (#37), and as we know, I stuttered. So there I stuck, at the first landing.

Thus it was with the fearful, forbidden relish of an Eve (whose attainments, I noted, would have ranked her in the low teens) that, one afternoon, when he was at the factory, I crept into my father’s study, abstracted a book from a low shelf, took it into a corner where a little warm, dust-spangled sunlight fell sidelong between curtain and wall, and seated myself in that bright angled stripe, which etched with crisp shadows the blind-stamped decoration (oak leaves, an acorn) on the front of the object in my lap. Sliding between my thighs, the book presented to me its fore-edge, which was smooth and gilt, and I ran my finger down the golden channel between the boards, consciously dawdling. I had conceived a sort of dread of books, which had supplied my father with so many notions disconcerting to the tranquility of our home, and yet I was determined to make their acquaintance. It seemed to me that if I piled up enough books I might mount high enough that I could leave #13 for a more auspicious time, or forever. At last I parted the willing pages and stared at their Byzantine ornamentation, willing it to become words.

Those peculiar entities they called letters frightened me a little. Nothing in the groans and hoots of speech suggested to me that it was made up of such articles. I might have imagined myself the victim of a fanciful hoax, had my father possessed any sense of whimsy or shown the least interest in my belief one way or the other. Spurred and tufted like flies’ feet, the printed words seemed glossy but dry, chitinous also as a fly; the round counters were globular, oversized eyes that were watching me knowingly; like flies the words kept deceptively still, but appeared primed for flight, and when I closed the book I heard coming from it the sound a fly makes against a window in another room, a quiet, sad, monotonous frenzy. From other, larger books in the glazed bookcase came the dull underwater rattle of crustacean claws. If speech was made of such spiky characters it did not surprise me that they got caught in my throat and tangled up in one another. The marvel was to see them in such quiet and orderly ranks upon the plot of the page. One thought of cemeteries. Perhaps it was their spirits that rose, silent and vaporous, to the reader’s mind. The reader was then God, bent avidly over the charnel ground, inhaling souls.

You will perceive that I was confused, and not only theologically. My mind teemed with likenings. I could not even decide whether the printed word was quick or dead. Now, accepting that it is both quick and dead, like ghosts, I can barely understand my perplexity, but I remember it. With equal vibrancy do I remember the nap of the curtains against the side of my face, and the brandy sheen of the fine hairs on my lawlessly exposed shins, and the dark room whose heavy chairs and desks and secretaries, inkstands, ledgers, and paperweights, galvanometers and centrifuges, coils of copper wire, retorts and beakers all kindly turned their backs to me, and the page staining with brightness the space around it, and how I would shuffle sideways on my haunches without lifting my eyes from the page when a chill along one thigh told me that the sun had moved. Time, syrup-slow. My father’s absence, that had made it so. The absence of everyone, except the distant authors whose intentions somehow infused the cryptic signs before me. Infused also the green and violet specters that the incandescent page burned into my retinas.

I do not remember how I learned to read, only that the sound of human voices gradually rose above the stridor of those flies. I say that it rose, but it felt more as though I descended, leaning through the words (which no longer seemed like wrought iron—or flies—or crustaceans—or any solid thing, but like so many bolt-holes) and hanging precariously over another world, whose doings I took in with avid eyes.

Every day it came nearer. The jealous buzzing of the books that I had not chosen rose to a din, the handles of the barrister bookshelves rattled, but I paid no attention, forcing myself—against trivial but unyielding impediments, such as my body—toward a place that felt more like home than home did. Sometimes I came away from my father’s study with the sand of its shores under my nails, or a furry blue leaf entangled in my hair. When I stole a look at myself in the shadowed, subaquatic depths of the mirror in the hall, I could see strange reflections in my eyes: languid wicker airships crewed by clockwork octopuses, a church thatched with feathers, a quarry from whose unfathomable depths a winding line of ragged, gaunt laborers dragged barrows heaped with muddy phonographs.

My idyll was cut short through my own weakness and cupidity. I was very often hungry as a child. I do not mean to imply that I was deliberately starved—that was not one of my father’s particular unkindnesses—only that in our strictly regulated household there was no hope of securing so much as a heel of bread until the clock in my father’s study had informed him that it was mealtime. But my stomach did not heed the clock, so I ravened. Sometimes I dared to set ahead the clock, but not by much. Sometimes I secreted a biscuit or a piece of cheese in my pinafore during a meal, and put it aside to nibble while I read, but my willpower was not strong and I invariably fell upon it a short time later and then was as hungry as if it had never been. Sometimes to chew on a bonnet string gave me a little relief, but it was accompanied with dread, since I knew that I would be punished if the ends were seen to be damp or frayed.

So as the clock ticked, and the golden parallelogram slid across the floor, and the weight on my left thigh grew heavier, and the weight on my right grew lighter, and my soul leaned into another world, held back only by the ignoble cravings of my stomach, I took to eating books.

I exaggerate. I did not eat whole volumes. I tore off the corners of pages and bit and sucked and chewed and when they eventually dissolved, I swallowed them. But it felt like eating, and placated my belly, and so I resorted to it more and more often, and even stole away one tasty book to hide in the shed against my next incarceration. I grazed ever farther afield, depredating whole swathes of my father’s library (even today, I must be part book), and learned discrimination. I found that I disliked the coarse yellow stuff of the cheaper books and magazines, which disintegrated quickly into a sort of paper gruel that was gluey and gritty at once. The thick white glossy clay-coated stock on which some illustrated books were printed squeaked nastily under my teeth and sometimes dealt paper-cuts to the corners of my mouth. The best paper rendered down into a sturdy cud that lasted, and had a simple, bready flavor.

You will excuse, I hope, a brief excursion into pedantry. The compulsion to eat paper bears the same name as a measurement of font size. It is known as pica (from the Latin pica, or magpie), and is said to reflect, like the compulsion to eat dirt, chalk, or ice, a nutritional as well as a psychological abnormality. I believe that the homology with a type size is instructive, and that pica reflects, also, an abnormality in relations with the printed word. I loved books not spiritually, but carnally. And although I did not know it, I was practicing to channel the dead, who have always found in the printed page their most reliable medium.

Though possibly I was just trying to bite my father, in proxy.

In any case the time came that I had always known would come. When the uproar arose from the study, I set down my embroidery (a mere prop; my work never advanced by more than an X or two), rose, went out the back door, and crept through the loose and rotting latticework (more X’s) into the muddy space under the back porch. The feet of giants creaked overhead. It grew colder, darker. I heard the sound of the dinner bell. My stomach boiled obediently. I became aware of the pointlessness of my position. My father was not even looking for me, confident that I would eventually return.

I did, and was beaten, scalded, shut up in the shed. Thereafter my father’s study was kept locked. The key now hung around his neck. I would not until years later even consider resorting to the Cheesehill library, for that would entail mingling with my social inferiors. Only one book remained to me, hidden in the shed: a gnawed copy of Moby-Dick. I might have done worse.

I believe my father attributed my assault on his book collection to spite and never considered that I might have taught myself to read. Well, I believe that it is uncommon enough.

Now, however, I turned from reading to writing. It was not quite for the first time: As soon as I had learned my letters I had employed them in fell curses scratched on our boundary rocks and fences, calculated to alarm the superstitious children of the neighborhood. More recently I had exercised my talents in a stolen ledger on a few pitiful stories in which young girls defied their captors in magnificent invective, the account of which made up the majority of the narrative. It will be apparent from these examples that the written word played then a merely prosthetic role, supplying an eloquence that in speech I lacked, and giving weight to infantine fantasies of puissance.

But now it became something more for me. My ledger, barely a quarter filled, became my daily consort. Concealed in the shed, where I kept it, I poured into it all the thoughts I could not frame in speech, trivial and great; I wrote about my housework, my rabbits; I wrote fragments of stories; I wrote to read myself writing. As I did not speak like a little girl—did not speak—I did not write like a little girl. My syntax was baroque, my style orchidaceous. The phrases tumbled out, with inflections first heard decades and centuries before my birth. I had read them all before, in arrangements only a little different. Though they addressed the concerns and characters of my little life, they did not seem like mine. They were stamped with a maker’s mark I could not quite make out; they belonged to others and to elsewhere. Not to readers; I did not dream of fame. No, to the world of books, beloved and now lost to me. It seemed to me that I heard the buzzing of flies again and louder than ever, that my own voice (always faint enough, in any case) was completely drowned out by the din that rose from the page. I saw that the other world I yearned for was already inside me. To reach it I had merely to turn myself inside out.

How to do that I would learn. It would take me some years.

I became fluent—on paper. To summon this fluency into my throat was not then possible. I suppose that ordinary children begin by saying a word or two, graduate to sentences, then stories, and only much later and with difficulty learn to poke, pleat, and tuck the airborne phenomenon that is speech into a page-sized package. It is perhaps like folding a parachute? For me it was the opposite. My parachute came folded, and only much, much later would I tweak it out and call a wind to fill it.

But the intricacy of those folds! Slowly, my distress at feeling that I had no voice and without a voice, no self, gave way to wonder and delight. What was a self? A wishbone stuck in my throat. On paper I could be anyone. There was nothing to be stuck in or to stick, only boundless elasticity, boundless subtlety, clarity, rarefaction, light and space and freedom; in a word, joy.

I reveled in counterfeit. I wrote about myself in the third person and in hagiographic terms; I described a life that I did not live, and it seemed realer than my own. It eventually consumed my ledger; in searching for more paper in my mother’s writing desk, I came upon a little envelope of loose stamps, which inspired me to write a series of scurrilous letters to the editor of our local paper in the name, first, of fictitious entities, then of certain actual persons² who had aroused my dislike. This caused a minor stir. It died down. No one blamed me, of course; recall that I had never formally been taught to write, or even to read. What’s more, my style was scarcely juvenile. If anything, it was senescent, with the gaseous orotundity of an earlier era.

One day I procured some writing paper and with excruciating care drafted the following letter, or one very like it:

Harwood Joines, Esq.

Dear Sir,

I am very obliged to you for your review of our product, the Galvano-Magnetic Thingummy. You have identified shortcomings that even my own team of trained Galvanists did not recognize, and the solutions you suggest display astounding technical acumen. You are wasted in—that quaint name again?—Cheesehill! I would like you to come to my factory and train my workers in your methods. Would you do this for me, Harwood? I employ your first name, because already I think of you as a friend. Great minds must stick together! I see a fruitful partnership in our future. All expenses for your travel will be reimbursed when you arrive, so please do not hesitate, but come as soon as may be, no advance notice required. We shall not stand on ceremony, you and I.

Affectionately,

Your Brother in Science,

Samuel B. Alderdash

Proprietor, Galvano-Magnetic Thingummy

I folded and sealed this in an envelope to which I had transferred a canceled stamp steamed from another envelope that I had found in the trash. To conceal the inadequacies in the postmark that I had carefully drawn on with faint stipples of ink, I ripped, crumpled, and dirtied the corner of the envelope, as if it had been mangled in transit. Then I slid it under the other mail awaiting my father on the hall table, minutes before he swept it all up and bore it with him to his study.

My heart was slightly, unpleasantly out of time with the hall clock.

My father came out again and stood in the hall, his arms hanging, staring past me. His eyes were wide and glossy; the pink pockets of his lower lids gaped. I realized that I had never before seen him happy. I could bear it only because I knew what was in store for him.

After a few words with my mother, he shut himself in his study. My mother silently packed his bag. At the dinner bell he emerged to request that his food be brought to him on a tray. I ate my dinner with unusual relish, alone with my mother. My father departed early the next morning. From my bedroom window I watched him square his briefcase on his knees as the carriage jerked into motion.

He came back very late that night and murdered my mother.