BERNARD MALAMUD
539
The acts among
Between the Acts.
No one she knew inspired her to more than momentary erotic
excitement throughout her life. She loved Shakespeare's sister.
Leonard gave up that ghost .
"They also serve."
She felt a daily numbness, nervous tension. "What a born
melancholic I am."
They had called her the goat in the nursery, against which she
tore at their faces with her tiny nails .
They had never found Thoby her dead brother's lost portrait.
Vanessa had painted and forever lost it.
Her mother died.
My father is not my mother. Leonard is my mother. We shall
never conceive a living child .
"I shall never grow my whiskers again."
She heard voices , or words to that effect.
"Maiden, there's turd in your blood," King Edward chanted in
Ancient Greece .
Her scream blew the bird off its one legged perch and it flapped
into the burning wood .
An old king strode among the orange azaleas.
For years she simply went mad .
She spoke in soft shrieks .
She wrote twenty-one books whose reviews frightened her.
"That was not my doing," said Leonard Woolf.
"Nor mine," sobbed her Greek tutor.
Perhaps it was mine, Vita Nicolson said, "She was so frail a
creature . One had to be most careful not to shock her."
I loved Vita. She loved
Orlando.
Virginia wrote a biography of Roger Fry. She did not want to
write a biography of
Roger
Fry.
Leonard served her a single soft-boiled egg when she was ill.
"Now Virginia, open your mouth and swallow your egg. Only if you
eat will you regain the strength to write your novels and essays. "
She sucked the tip of his spoon.
"Though you give much I give so little ."
"The little you give is a king's domain."
At that time the writing went well and she artfully completed
Between the Acts,
yet felt no joy.
Virginia relapsed into depression and denied herself food.
"Virginia, you must eat to sustain yourself."
