60
PARTISAN REVIEW
the dining room. There was a neighbor there by the name of Mrs.
Kirtle, and our grandmother, father, the four of us boys, and
Mother. Mrs. Kirtle had been very busy the past three days doing
things for us, running in with hot dishes, ordering this and that
for the house, telling callers how wonderfully Mother was bear·
ing up, and taking charge generally. She was a very active woman
in the town, and was president of the Garden Club and also of the
Shakespeare Club. People said she had been an opera singer in
her youth, and there was a picture of her on her parlor wall
dressed in a Japanese kimono, with a fan, and paper chrysanthe–
mums behind her ears. It didn't look like her now, but those small
beady eyes peeping over the fan were Mrs. Kirtle's all right.
I was looking at a pin Mother was wearing on her black silk
blouse and Mother must have thought I was looking at the blouse,
because she said, "Don't worry, son. I won't be wearing black
after today." She turned to my grandmother and said, "The boys
don't like me in black-" and then she began to cry, the first we
had seen her cry since Sunday.
My father got up from the table and came around to Mother
.and put his hand on her shoulder, saying, "That's right, Ellen, let
yourself go. It's just what you need."
"Yes, it will be good for you," my grandmother said. "Don't
•mind the boys."
Mother sobbed on and on, shaking her head from side to side,
her fingers held to her temples. Tears fell to the table-cloth and
Mrs. Kirtle got up and pressed a handkerchief into Mother's hand.
The sobbing continued unabated for it must have been three or four
minutes, when Mrs. Kirtle said the thing that made Mother stop
crymg.
"Think how good it was of God," Mrs. Kirtle said, "to keep
Rachel home with you all summer. You must comfort yourself
with that, Ellen."
We knew what Mrs. Kirtle meant. Every year since Rachel
was a little girl she had spent the summer at grandmother's farm
in the Catskills-every summer, from the first of June, till school
opened in September. But this year, for some reason that we boys
didn't know, Rachel stayed home. Mother had planned to let her
go, the same as usual, and all during the spring Rachel had talked
about it and looked forward to her summer at Grandmother's farm.
