((IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES"
11
go into the booth which is, in a way, like the photographer's, since it
is draped in black cloth and its light is colored and shadowed. The
place is too warm, and my father keeps saying that this is all non-
sense, pointing to the crystal ball on the table. The fortune-teller, a
short, fat woman garbed in robes supposedly exotic, comes into the
room and greets them, speaking with an accent. But suddenly my
father feels that the whole thing is intolerable; he tugs at my mother's
arm but my mother refuses to budge. And then, in terrible anger, my
father lets go of my mother's arm and strides out, leaving my mother
stunned. She makes a movement as if to go after him, but the fortune-
teller holds her and begs her not to do so, and I in my seat in the
darkness am shocked and horrified. I feel as if I were walking a tight-
rope one hundred feet over a circus audience and suddenly the rope
is showing signs of breaking, and I get up from my seat and begin to
shout once more the first words I can think or to communicate my
terrible fear, and once more the usher comes hurrying down the
aisle flashing his searchlight, and the old lady pleads with me, and the
shocked audience has turned to stare at me, and I keep shouting:
"What are they doing? Don't they know what they are doing? Why
doesn't my mother go after my father and beg him not to be angry?
If she does not do that, what will she do? Doesn't my father know
what he is doing?" But the usher has seized my arm and is dragging
me away, and as he does so, he says: "What are
you
doing? Don't you
know you can't do things like this, you can't do whatever you want
to do, even if other people aren't about? You will be sorry if you do
not do what you should do. You can't carryon like this, it is not right,
you will find that out soon enough, everything you do matters too
much," and as he said that, dragging me through the lobby of the
theater, into the cold light, I woke up into the bleak winter morning
of my twenty-first birthday, the window-sill shining with its lip of
snow, and the morning already begun.
