July 24.
The kind of service you've got to put up with! I am frankly scared of Yoshi, but if I fire her the next one may be worse yet. Yoshi says they want to be two but the dasus prevent it. Chewing a parrot feather for a toothpick, she says if they cannot be two they'll bring on the earthquake, a terrible earthquake.
November 11.
They both spat out their spinach. They have the same likes and the same dislikes. They wet their diapers at the same time. Woe, if I changed Phil without changing Will! And Will must always be first.
May 1.
Yoshi says, and she wears an old stocking of mine on her head for a turban, help them be two. She says: Do shave Will's hair and sacrifice it to Shiva-with-the-Four-Arms that he sever them into two times two. Burn Will's hair. But Phil's hair should be done up with cow dung. That will help them be two.
November 9.
Will's cold is hanging on. We still kept him indoors today. He's rather cross and a bit run down. Got himself badly scratched up, along the left leg, while playing in his play-pen with some train tracks. When Phil came home I'll be darned if he hadn't his leg scratched up too. The right one. He had crawled off towards the garden fence and fallen against the barbed wire.
December 13.
Yoshi said, in a magical singsong voice not her own: Don't bathe them in water, which makes for sameness. Will should be rubbed with the fat of a hilsa, but for Phil you should get the twice-chewed hay of a sacred cow and boil it in palm oil, with leaves of sandalwood and minusops. That you should rub on Phil. It will make them different.
February 12.
There is a Peter Toledo and a Peter MacGregor among the boys down at the Mission Nursery. Peter Toledo is small and dark and flabby, and Peter MacGregor is tall and blond and springy. They haven't got a thing in common but their name. And that Phil is picking on Peter Toledo and Will is bothering Peter MacGregor. Today Phil took Peter Toledo's cookies, up in the dining room, and bit him when he cried, while Will kicked Peter MacGregor off the swing, down in the backyard, and rocked himself wildly and burst with laughter when he saw that Peter had got hurt.
Christmas.
It seems so strange, these two children who are really only one. And you don't know where one ends and the other begins. Will is for Phil, Phil is for Will, and there seems to be no room for anybody else. The space between them seems different from the space around, permeated by invisible communications. I've looked it up in the books, and it seems to be all perfectly normal the way it is. James says each one has a soul, each one of them is alone before God. But sometimes I wonder.
May 5.
Phil has grown faster than Will. He is almost an inch taller now. But Will is getting so bossy. Phil—"My Phil"—he has to do everything just the way Will wants him to. Phil is such a good boy. He does not mind. This morning Will wetted Phil's bed. I know he did, because Phil's bed was dry when I picked him up for his bath. But Will said: "Phil made wettywetty in his beddy. Bad Phil." And Phil looked at us so sorrowfully with guilty eyes. I really think he believed he did it.
Halloween.
Yoshi said: Their karmas are two. They are two. She sat on a stool by the bead curtain front door, spreading her shawl over Will and Phil on her sides, and she held their hands—Will's left, Phil's right joined on her lap. The heart and the head line will never meet on Will's palm; he's going to be an impulsive boy. Phil will be pensive. See, where they join, the head and the heart line, in one. This swelling shows fortune and foresight. The life line is long but the mountain of love is shrivelled; dimpled and broken his pride and reliance. Will too shows good fortune but is reckless and wild. The field of Dishnana augurs abundance, but the mountain of love is like Phil's, just like Phil's, and his life line is cut through by Asuras. Their karmas are two, said Yoshi.
Palm Sunday.
I gave Phil a bunny with floppy ears, but he cried till Will got one just like it. I gave Willy a set of jinglebells but he broke them in two, half for him, half for Philly. I gave them a team of galloping horses hitched to a covered wagon. They cried they did not want one but two. But there wasn't another one, not in all of Vanyambadi. So they cried and they said: We are scared of it, take it away!
This is as far as she got. Poor mother. Here her hand was halted.
Had she listened to Yoshi, perhaps the earth would have tarried. And we were to leave anyway, for Dad had been called to the Christ Church in Chicago. But the earth did not wait. God knows why it was sore at me and my Will.
There is not much I can remember. A sulky day of frightening colors. The kitten vomited and mewed, and the sheep dog had his tail between his legs. Yoshi was off to the village. Rice wine, too much rice wine, 1 remember they said. Has anybody ever seen a sunset like this, they said. A cloud with a golden rim was hovering over the horizon like a monster. Then I felt dizzy, trying to hold myself on all fours, and sick to my stomach. When it was over, the house had crumbled and the yard was gaping and smoking and the sheep dog was howling at the ruins and Dad took me in his arms and kissed me and carried me away. Mother had gone to Heaven, he said, and Will had gone with her so she wouldn't be lonely, but Philly and Daddy would go to Chicago. The stars had long tails and swirled over the sky through the ship's bull's eye.
Poor father. Had he listened to me, we might have found Will, for he was not in Heaven. I heard his voice calling in the night and wept to the nurse who came to soothe me. "My Will is crying, my Will wants me." I heard him often and knew him to be sick and looking for us. Phil is missing Will so, they said.
There was a mirror in the dressing room at the Nursery School in Chicago. I looked at it, while the teacher but-toned up my snowsuit, and called, overjoyed, "There is my Will." The other children too began to point at their selves in the mirror and shouted names and jumped and laughed. There is another Dick. Where is the other Helen? My Tommy! Many a one fancied a twin. It was a game like another. Thus my Will faded to fantasy and then was forgotten. He was put away with the old toys for new ones.
That was thirty years ago.
Rome, December 3. William Sailor, thirty-four-year-old Anglo-Indian, was murdered this afternoon in his apartment in Via Sistina. Apparently he was attacked by his wife, the former Martha Egan, a television starlet, with a hunting knife. The woman, who was found to be doped and drunk, stabbed his left cheek and wounded his left arm. While Sailor was staggering and trying to regain his senses, the woman fired two shots from a pistol. Sailor was killed instantly. Neighbors and police were brought to the scene by the shots. Mrs. Sailor suffered a nervous breakdown. The Sailors had been heard quarrelling several times before.