THE F EAR 0 'F INN 0 C ENe E
821
I payed to that lonely death my shudder, and walked to the elevator,
dropped swiftly from what parleyed in the unimaginable black, no
longer my busineSl!. To have alone escaped that room seemed a suf–
ficient victory.
Around the first corner I turned, a small girl was bouncing a
ball, chanting in time to the throb of rubber against the pavement,
"Bouncey, Bouncey, Ball-ee! I hope my sister fall-ee!" Her blonde
intent face was screwed to a dwarf's malice, precocious and in that
sunlight startling. "Bouncey, Bouncey, Ball-ee! I hope my sister
fall-ee!" and I felt welling in me for that congenital, inexpert evil
an unexpected pity; knew that even as, with the ball, the wish, she
fell, the child was congruous with my imperfect love.
"Bouncey, Bouncey, Ball-ee! I hope my sister fall-ee!"
"I hope she does," I said. It was as simple at that: the state
of evil ,as the world of love, another innocence.
I knew then toward what I was turning, to what surrender my
unmarked steps, my hardly believed-in tenderness were bearing me,
faster, faster.
This is the apt ending, I thought, but it will not end here; to this
revelation no experience can be adequate; this vision I shall accom–
modate to a hundred shabby betrayals of love; this imperishable cap–
ital squander in time. "Home to his Mothers house private return'd."
That had seemed to Milton an ending. I could foresee how I would
run down the last street, as when I was a boy late from play, be
breathless when I arrived, sweating.
But first there would be the subway, a bus, time to figure out
why that Miltonic line, incantatory and inapt, possessed me, "Home
to his Mothers house private return'd." My suitcases walloped my
hurrying legs, "Home to his Mothers house. . . . " They banged my
thighs, galling the damp flesh. It was not
my
mother, I thought
childishly, "Home to his Mothers ... " I would work on it.
