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PARTISAN REVIEW
cedures of our souls do not lend themselves so very well to physical anal–
ogy, do they.
Next the kitchen in the pantry alcove Dick drags open the flour bin
drawer and from its lip cleverly mounts to the countertop. One long
stretch over the void to the next cupboard and he has it! Oh but his foot
slips, tumble, down goes Dick. And down cracking him smartly right on
top of his skull flies the hefty chunk of maple sugar so nearly grasped.
All is not lost. A walnut's worth of the candy loaf has fractured free.
Sucking this lump he manages his forlorn way into the living room and to
the day bed against the stairwell wall. On the stiff dark blue brocade he
curls up, tugs the afghan over to enfold him. One sunbeam spills through
from the dining room but here behind the roof of the eastern front porch
all is dim. And silent. Sweet syrup slowly dissolves in his cheek. Does a
brain tumor extort such pain? Were a wine cork sentient how but with a
squeak should it protest the spiral hook winced into its bark until at the
welcome plop! all is debouchee. Would that we might so deftly withdraw
the morbid gall of this earache. He hugs his hands between his thighs. His
eyelids fall. Come, care-charmer sleep.
Now is the time, as Dick snoozes, for us to remind ourselves of the sad
cause of Dick's distress. He himself in his proper mind knows no more of
it than he knows he is not for the first time alone in the house-it is out
of awareness, as we say. Still who can tell what knowledge is in his bones.
And the prudent man, however skeptical, will take care of his thoughts lest
they be in some form transmitted even to one sound asleep. But we must
state that the simple fact is, in that day, nor medical men nor friends and
neighbors nor Father's own tender feelings advised that Dick should be
told the truth. Better he should never know that the dark downward spi–
ral into black melancholia bore faithful earnest loving Ellen Alford at last
to suicide.
Your ordinary truck, it is true, is often as not a piteous sight to see,
cowering and creeping like a slave or donkey beneath some ungainly heap,
a rattletrap, groaning and whining uphill on hands and knees, downhill
desperately scuttling to keep up with the runaway load, fenders cauliflow–
ered, frame rust-caked, bed staked no better than a Tobacco Road garden
patch, braced or bailing-wired who knows how, banging and backfiring,
more than likely even smelling bad. But not ours! Let it have without pre–
sumption a Homeric tag,
the tall cart with pretty wheels
in the poet's epithet,
and a proper wagon-bed fitted atop it,
the one that carried Nausikaa's laundry
to her goddess-fated encounter with Odysseus. Never with more aplomb
did Maharajah's golden-tusked pachyderm in bejeweled panoply lightly
and high aloft bear the royal howdah than sports our vehicle its gleaming
