The dinner was on the table. The lamp was on the sideboard. The doors opened from the little hall that led into the kitchen and every time the door opened and Ida came in, you could see how the whole room was different. There was the door that led down steps to the street, that we called the side door; it was closed now. There was the door that led into the sitting room. Someone might come in, like they did, maybe Uncle Hartley with a newspaper or Aunt Jennie with a basket or even Mamalie with a plate and a napkin over it, “I know Charles likes my apple pies,” she would say and Mama would take the plate and say, “Oh, Mimmie you do spoil us,” and say, “Sit down Mimmie,” and Mamalie would say, “But Francis” (that was Papalie) “is waiting for his dinner.”
At any moment, someone might walk in the door through that street door or the closed sitting room door and you would see now how they said things, how Mama was sure to say, “Oh, Mimmie you spoil us,” and Papa would look up and get up to find Mamalie a chair and then she would slide out; she is a very little lady; really, soon, Gilbert will be as tall as she is. You could see how pretty Mamalie was, in her lace cap.
Mama had been to a fortune-teller. I do not remember when she first told me about it, yet I remember the strange gap in consciousness, the sort of emptiness there, which I soon covered over with my childish philosophy or logic, when she said, “It’s funny, the fortune-teller told me, I would have a child who was in some way especially gifted.”
It was that, that stuck. We were not any of us, “gifted,” as if we had failed them somehow. I can not say why we cared, or maybe the others didn’t care. But there should have been a child who was gifted. How could I know that this apparent disappointment that her children were not “gifted,” was in itself her own sense of inadequacy and frustration, carried a step further?
Mama told me how she heard a voice outside one of the empty classroom doors.
“What voice, Mama?”
“Oh, it was only Papa, it was only Papa; he said, 'Who is making this dreadful noise in here?’”
“Who was?”
“Well — I was alone, I went off, I was alone, I was hiding, I was singing.”
“Oh — I see — didn’t Papalie know?”
“Well — I don’t know — I don’t think he meant to hurt me, no, I know he didn’t mean to hurt me.”
“Maybe it was someone else making a noise in another classroom.”
“No — maybe it was — yes, but anyhow, I was so hurt, I never sang any more, not even in church.”
So Mama never sang any more, though her speaking voice had a rare quality; it was low and rich and vibrant. Yet, it couldn’t have been just that that stopped Mama singing, there must have been other things as well. Anyhow, she told me that, and she told me how she went to a fortuneteller.
Mama did not tell me that the Spanish Student came into the fortune-telling, but she did tell me about the Spanish Student. I see the Spanish Student, in capital letters like that, like a play or an opera. It was perhaps a play or an opera to Mama, something that might have happened, which did not happen, in which she played a small part, in which she might have played a leading role.
She told me about Madame Rinaldo who had taught singing at the seminary, and who had been an opera singer, and the aunts often talked about her, and we still had some of the old things that Madame Rinaldo had left Mama — a crown, bracelets, stage properties, veils, and robes in an old chest in the attic. Madame Rinaldo did come into it, but Mama never said she imagined herself in Madame Rinaldo’s crown and bracelets, though I often tried them on and wished I were enough grown-up so they would fit me, and like Mama, I pretended to sing when no one was around.
The Spanish Student was from South America; he was at the university.
Mama said, “There was a Spanish Student at the university — he — well, he thought that he was very fond of me. I was sorry afterwards.” What was she sorry about? Was she sorry he had gone away or that she had not gone with him, or what?
“How do you mean you were sorry afterwards?”
“I mean,” she said, “I forgot myself, I might almost have forgotten myself — I mean he was a stranger, he was a southerner, he did not understand — I mean, I never told Papa about it, I was sorry afterwards.”
I waited for more.
She said, “He went away.”
Madame Rinaldo died and left Mama her opera things, the Spanish Student went away, Mama met Papa at the seminary at German reading-classes they had for older people in the evenings. Mama said the fortune-teller was just like those people, she just happened to say this or to say that. I did wonder what she really did say. But Mama did tell me that the fortune-teller told her that she would have a child who was gifted.
“You know what these fortune-tellers are like,” said Mama. “Of course we never told Papa.”
THE DREAM
The dog is now a myth, for that reason he appears in dreams, unmistakably and in the most satisfactory manner. He wallows in snowdrifts, his ears are like the knitted mittens on that long tape than ran through the sleeves of our winter coats; he carries, of course, the barrel strapped to his collar, and as I fling my arms about his neck— he is larger than a small pony — I am in an ecstasy of bliss. The snow gives back whatever an anesthetic may have once given.
Mythology is actuality, as we now know. The dog with his gold-brown wool, his great collar and the barrel, is of course none other than our old friend Ammon-Ra, whose avenue of horned sphinxes runs along the sand from the old landing-stage of the Nile barges to the wide portals of the temple at Karnak. He is Ammon or he is Amen, forever and ever. I want you to know he is as ordinary as the cheap lithograph that used to hang in nursery bedrooms; he is even as ordinary as the colored advertisement sheets, bearing his effigy, tacked to telegraph poles that one passed, in the old days, along the reaches of the Bernese Oberland. You see him on a postcard in a window along the lake of Lucerne. There is a monk standing beside him; we may whisper Saint Bernard. Or, depending on what particular line or telegraph pole our particular wire of approach to the eternal verities is strung, we may actually be reminded of our own or a friend’s dog, or we may know that we have seen, in the flesh, the Lion of Saint Mark’s or the Lion of Saint Jerome, or we may recognize our indisputable inheritance, Ammon, Amen from time immemorial, later Aries, our gold-fleece Ram.
Our Ram, however, had not gold fleece, his fleece came from Mamalie’s medicine cupboard. It was pulled off in tufts from a roll of cotton for making bandages or for stuffing pillows or for putting in ears with a little oil or for borrowing to make a quilt for the new bed for the doll house. Cotton? Was this from a bush that grew in the South or was it from a sheep? I do not think we knew or asked; greater issues were at stake, greater questions though unasked were being answered.
It would be near Christmas again, because Papalie had a great lump of clay on his table, the microscope was put away on top of the bookcase, and the tray of pens for his red and green and black ink was pushed aside and he had just said, “Elizabeth,” (which was Mamalie) “will you keep an eye on these ink bottles?” There was not a breath of suggestion that any of us might upset the ink bottles, there was nothing of that in his voice. He wanted room for the lump of clay that was wrapped in a damp cloth and the cotton wool and the roll of fine wire and the matchsticks.