"Of course I know that you think all of this unimportant. It is no secret to me that you would have preferred a more conventional mother- someone who sent you baked goods and remembered your birthday-but it seems to me that in our knowledge and study of one another we are circumspect and timid to an impractical degree. In our struggle to glimpse the soul of a man-and have we ever desired anything more-we claim to have the honesty of desperation whereas in fact we set up whole artificial structures of acceptable reality and stubbornly refuse to admit the terms by which we live. I will, before I end my letter, bore you with one more observation of fact. What I have to say must be well known to most travelers and yet I would not dare confide my knowledge to an intimate friend, lest I be thought mad. Since you already think me mad I suppose no harm can be done.
"I have noticed, in my travels, that the strange beds I occupy in hotels and pensions have a considerable variance in atmosphere and a profound influence on my dreams. It is a simple fact that we impress something of ourselves-our spirits and our desires-on the mattresses where we lie and I have more than ample evidence to prove my point. One night in Naples last winter I dreamed of washing a drip-dry wardrobe which is, as you well know, something I would never do. The dream was quite explicit-I could see the articles of clothing hanging in the shower and smell the wet cloth although this is no part of ray memories. When I woke I seemed surrounded by an atmosphere unlike my own-shy, earnest and chaste. There was definitely some presence in the room. In the morning I asked the desk clerk who had last occupied my bed. He checked his records and said that it had last been occupied by an American tourist-a Miss Harriet Lowell-who had moved to a smaller room but who could then be seen coming out of the dining room. I then turned to see Miss Lowell, whose white drip-dry dress I had already seen in my dreams and whose shy, chaste and earnest spirit still lingered in the room she had left. You will put this down to coincidence, I know, but let me go on. Sometime later, in Geneva, I found myself in a bed that seemed to exhale so unsavory and venereal an atmosphere that my dreams were quite disgusting. In them I saw two naked men, mounted like a horse and rider. In the morning I asked the desk clerk who the earlier tenants had been and he said: "Oui, oui, deux tapettes." They had made so much noise they had been asked to leave. After this I made a practice of deciding who the previous occupant of my bed had been and then checking with the clerk in the morning. In every case I was correct-in every case, that is, where the clerk was willing to cooperate. In cases involving prostitutes they were sometimes unwilling to help. If I found no presence in my bed I would judge that the bed had been vacant for a week or ten days. I was always correct. Traveling that year I shared the dreams of businessmen, tourists, married couples, chaste and orderly people as well as whores. My most remarkable experience came in Munich in the spring.
"I stayed, as I always do, at the Bristol, and I dreamed about a sable coat. As you know I detest furs but I saw this coat in great detail-the cut of the collar, the honey-colored skins, the yellow silk with which it was lined and in one of the silk pockets a pair of ticket stubs for the opera. In the morning I asked the maid who brought me coffee if the previous occupant of the room had owned a fur coat. The maid clasped her hands together, rolled her eyes and said yes, yes, it was a Russian sable coat and the most beautiful coat that she, the maid, had ever seen. The woman had loved her coat. It was like a lover to her. And did the woman who owned the coat, I asked, stirring my coffee and trying to seem unexceptional, ever go to the opera? Oh yes, yes, said the maid, she came for the Mozart festival and went to the opera every night for two weeks, wearing her sable coat.
"I was not deeply perplexed-I have always known life to be overwhelmingly mysterious-but wouldn't you say that I possess indisputable proof of the fact that we leave fragments of ourselves, our dreams and our spirits in the rooms where we sleep? But what could I do with this information. If I confided my discovery to a friend I would likely be thought mad and was there, after all, any usefulness in my ability to divine that my bed had been occupied by a spinster or a prostitute or by no one at all? Was I gifted or were these facts known to all travelers and wouldn't giftedness be a misnomer for a faculty that could not be exploited? I have finally concluded that the universality of our dreams includes everything-articles of clothing and theater ticket stubs-and if we truly know one another so intimately mightn't we be closer than we imagine to a peaceable world?"
XII
I grew up in Grandmother's house in Ashburnham and went to a country day school. I took my meals in the pantry until I was ten or eleven, when I was elevated to the big dinner table. There were usually guests. It was a time of life when the conversation of adults seemed painfully tiresome. I guess I was sulky. Anyhow Grandmother lectured me. "Now that you're old enough to dine at my table," she said, "I expect you to make some contribution to the conversation. When people gather in the evening they gather to dine but they also gather to exchange opinions, experiences and information. We learn something every day, don't we? We see something interesting every day. Surely during your day you learn or observe something that will be interesting to me and my guests and I want you to take a more active part in the conversation." I asked to be returned to the pantry but Grandmother didn't seem to hear me and I was nervous when I went to the table that night. The talk rattled on and then Grandmother smiled at me to signify that my turn had come. All I could remember was that walking home from school I saw a lady in the public park stealing marigolds. When she heard my footstep she hid the marigolds under her coat. As soon as I passed she went on picking flowers.
"I saw a lady in the park," I said, "stealing marigolds."
"Is that all you saw," asked Grandmother. "I saw the basketball game." The adults picked up the talk again but I knew I had failed and would have to prepare myself. I was taking a course in ancient history and I began each night to memorize the gist of two pages from my textbook. "Of all the Greek states," I said, "that stretched from the Black Sea to the western shores of the Mediterranean, none approached Athens, and the man responsible for this achievement was Pericles…" The next night we had Solon in Sardis and the night after that we had the Athenian constitution. At the end of the week Grandmother said kindly: "I guess perhaps it would be better if you listened to the conversation."