1096
PARTISAN REVIEW
did talk to her much. But really, what need is there? Through silence
the situation clarifies. He is her son, she is his mother. She can say to
him, "You know."
She is sitting at the foot of the sofa, her feet together, her hands
together on her knees. He sits on a chair, hardly looks at her and
smokes one cigarette after another. A silence.
"You shouldn't smoke so much."
"That's true."
The whole smell of the neighborhood comes in through the
window. The accordion in the nearby cafe, the heavy evening traffic,
the smell of the skewers of broiled meat that one eats between rub–
bery rolls, a child crying in the street. The mother gets up and takes a
piece of knitting. Her fingers are stiff and deformed by arthritis. She
doesn't work quickly, doing the same stitch three times or undoing
a whole row with a dull sputtering.
"It's a little vest. I'll wear it with a white collar. That and my
black coat, and I'll be dressed for the season."
She has gotten up to put on a light.
"It's getting dark early these days."
Which was true. It was no longer summer and not yet fall.
Martlets were still crying in the gentle sky.
"Will you come again soon?"
"But I haven't gone yet? Why do you say that?"
"No, it was just to say something."
A trolley goes by.
An
auto.
"Is it true that I resemble my father?"
"The spitting image of your father. Of course, you didn't know
him.
You were six months old when he died. But if you had a little
moustache. . . . "
He spoke of
his
father without conviction. No memory, no emo–
tion. Probably a man like a lot of others. Moreover, he had gone off
very enthusiastically. His skull ripped open at the Marne. Blind and in
agony for a week,
his
name inscribed on the monument to the local
war dead.
"After all," she said, "it's better. He would have come back
blind or crazy, the poor thing."
"That's true."
Just what is it that keeps him
in
that room, if not the certainty
