THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
565
bered incessantly, boomed and yakked the radio, and .even
tinkered with his tools and tiny toys. Occasionally Joshua would
frown us away from something, and once he said to me,
"Daphne, if you were my little girl I would slam you one
on your behind," which made me rush upstairs to my room
weeping with humiliation and disappointment.
Little girl,
indeed!
when he was the forbidden fruit of my fantasies. I wouldn't
blossom forth (Elaine, the lily maid of Astalot) until he came
to murmur through my keyhole, "Come on out, sweetheart; I'll
make you a special box all your own. OK?"
He made us-each member of the family-several boxes,
which have been flooded out or burned or lost in the way of
most flotsam. I see now that his boxes were more than cute
three-dimensional collages or elaborate toys. They were often
playful but just as often wistful or downright sad. There was
frequently a narrative or descriptive element to them, but neither
simple nor temporal: they didn't tell stories like a picturebook.
"Little Side-Dream" was a wooden box almost a foot
square. Under the sliding glass lid with its delicately beveled
edges lay a whole nest of old-fashioned watches, perhaps a dozen,
each telling a different time. He had bought them (all broken)
in a lot at a rummage sale. When you slid out the glass and
lifted the watch-faces you found beneath each, instead of the
works, a special scene or object: a used railway ticket; a ship
tumbling over the waves; a tiny effulgent city, the neon lights
drops of colored enamel; a sidereal landscape; a sleeping maiden;
the silky parabola of my curl. Like all his boxes, it revealed in
a flash a whole fantasy or fragment of experience.
In short, it was art.
If
it were to be resurrected today I
suppose the museums, ravenous as ever, would stick it in an
Extinguished Talent or Old Americans show and then, frail
creation, it'd be taken up and touted about by the best fairy
gallery in New York.
R equiescat in pace.
My friend, my secret pet, my slight gentle idol, ignorant
companion of my midnight, pre-breakfast and, frequently, surrep-
