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250
PARTISAN REVIEW
my parents would die and Miss Pride would come to take me to live
at the hotel, if they died in the summer, or in Boston, if in the win–
ter. Or I watched the waves part and saw a dry path laid for me be–
tween the water's furniture and then I stepped forward off the beach
and walked across to the first wharf in Boston harbor. I could hear
the calm waves washing the rocks and the shore and although my
mind was far away, I could hear their undertone, gentle and melan–
choly reiterating endlessly my father's words: the child should never
have been born.
2
On the following morning, both my parents slept late, and I was
on edge, fearful that my mother would not be on time at the Hotel
or that a customer would come to my father's cobbling sho·p at the
rear of the house and finding the place closed would leave and not
return. My worry made my fingers all impatient thumbs and the
fire would not start for me. Through the shimmering veil of tears,
particulars of the room, aglow with morning sunshine, were distorted
in a dream-like beauty: the stains of the dark blue sink under the
window were invisible and it appeared, with the glittering water–
drops that depended from its brassy taps, patinated with green, like
some old and precious vessel. The crimson geraniums on the sill
above were blurred in a tropical splendor. As the kindling caught,
my eyes cleared, winking away the tram;formation of the sink and
seeing once again its preposterously graceful legs and its drain-board
bristling with sodden splinters. I counted slowly to sixty before I
lifted the stove-lid again to see the progress of the fire, and as I
counted, stared at the two pictures which hung one above the other
over the table. The lower one was a barn-yard scene of russet hens
and two majestic roosters avidly pecking at the foot of a pile of ma–
nure while beyond them there loomed a red bam from which stared
out a thoughtful cow. The higher picture represented two little girls
in white dresses and white satin slippers playing with five white pup–
pies under the supervision of the snow-white mother dog.
When the kindling had caught, I dropped in a few lumps of coal,
then waited until I had counted two hundred before I closed the
damper. I gazed at one object until I had counted fifty and then
shifted my eyes to another. We had three hard chairs with imitation
leather seats adorned with lions' heads in bas-relief; a bright red step–
ladder; a footstool made of a cheese box; a pea-green washstand
where stood a pitcher and bowl, discarded by the Hotel Barstow.
