There is frost in the air. I sidle nearer to my brother. I am implicated, though in no way blamed.
20
There is an earlier occasion and again the sun is shining. From the cloth dress my mother wears, I think it must be spring, or it is an Indian-summer day, between seasons at any rate, for my mother wears a cloth dress without a coat. It is not summer, for we go into summer clothes as regularly and as inevitably as people in the tropics. We are subtropic, a town in Pennsylvania, on the map’s parallel, I believe, south of Rome. Winters are cold, summers are hot, so we have the temperament of Nordics and of southerners both, harmoniously blended and altering key or vibration in strict accordance with the seasons” rules — or not, as may be. It is summer anyway in my mother’s face, for she is laughing.
We have been out with her to help her with the shopping or to drop in on one of her many relatives or friends. The town contains scarcely anyone who is not a relative or friend — the “old town” at any rate; and this is the old town, for we are seated on a slight elevation of the pavement, on the curb-stone as it makes a generous curve off Church Street, under the church and on to the stores and hotel and shopping centers of Main Street — I think it was called Main Street; it should be, anyway.
It seems odd that my mother should be laughing. My brother has defied her. He is seated firm on the curb-stone. He is not going home. As he repeats this solemnly, my mother laughs more. People stop and ask what has happened. My mother tells them and they laugh too. They stand either side of my mother, more people, friends and strangers, all laughing. “But we’re collecting a crowd,” she says, “we can’t stay here, crowding the pavement.” She obtains supporters; strangers and near-strangers repeat her words like a Greek chorus, following the promptings of their leader.
There is a slight, whispered conspiracy. The strangers melt away and my mother, with feigned indifference, strolls off. My brother knows perfectly well that she will relent, she will pretend to go away but she will wait around the corner, and if we don’t follow her she will come back. He has told her that he is going away to live by himself, and he has moreover told her that his sister is coming with him. His sister waits anxiously, excited yet motionless, on the curb beside him. In addition to this final ultimatum of my brother’s, we were not supposed to sit on the curb-stone. But there we sit, not “crowding the pavement” but making a little group, design, an image at the crossroads. It appears variously in Greek tragedies with Greek names and it can be found in your original Grimm’s tales or in your nursery translation, called Little-Brother, Little-Sister. One is sometimes the shadow of the other; often one is lost and the one seeks the other, as in the oldest fairy tale of the twin-brother-sister of the Nile Valley. Sometimes they are both boys like the stars Castor and Pollux, sometimes there are more than two. Actually in the case of Castor and Pollux there were four, with Helen and Clytemnestra — the children of a Lady, we are told, and a Swan. They make a group, a constellation, they make a groove or a pattern into which or upon which other patterns fit, or are placed unfitted and are cut by circumstance to fit. In any case, it is a common-or-garden pattern though sometimes it finds its corresponding shape in heaven. And their mother has walked away. He knows that she will come back because he is older and is admittedly his mother’s favorite. But she does not know this. But though her brain is in a turmoil of anxiety and pride and terror, it has not even occurred to her that she might throw her small weight into the balance of conventional behavior by following her mother and leaving her brother to his fate.
21
These pictures are so clear. They are like transparencies, set before candles in a dark room. I may or may not have mentioned these incidents to the Professor. But they were there. Upon the elaborate build-up of past memories, across the intricate network made by the hair-lines that divided one irregular bit of the picture-puzzle from another, there fell inevitably a shadow, a writing-on-the-wall, a curve like a reversed, unfinished S and a dot beneath it, a question mark, the shadow of a question — is this it? The question mark threatened to shadow the apparently most satisfactory answers. No answer was final. The very answer held something of death, of finality, of Dead Sea fruit. The Professor’s explanations were too illuminating, it sometimes seemed; my bat-like thought-wings would beat painfully in that sudden searchlight. Or reversely, other wings (gull or skylark) that seemed about to take me right out of the lower levels of the commonplace would find themselves beating in the confined space of a wicker cage, or useless under the mesh of a bird net. But no — he did not set traps, he did not really fling nets. It was I myself, by my own subconscious volition or unconscious will, who walked or flew into them. I over-stressed or over-compensated; I purposely and painfully dwelt on certain events in the past about which I was none too happy, lest I appear to be dodging the analysis or trying to cheat the recorder of the Book of Life, to deceive the Recording Angel, in fact, in an effort to escape the Day of Judgment. Once when I painfully unravelled a dingy, carelessly woven strip of tapestry of cause and effect and related to him, in over-careful detail, some none-too-happy friendships, he waved it all aside, not bored, not grieved or surprised, but simply a little wistful, I thought, as if we had wasted precious time, or precious hours together, on something that didn’t matter. “But why,” he asked, “did you worry about all this? Why did you think you had to tell me? Those two didn’t count. But you felt you wanted to tell your mother.”
All this seemed almost too simple at the time. My mother was dead; things had happened before her death, ordinary as well as incredible things, that I hadn’t told her. In some cases, I wanted to spare her worry and pain, as during the period of the First World War when I was in England and she was in America. Then there was her personal bereavement to consider; the death of my father followed closely on the news of the death of my older brother in France. My father, a boy of seventeen, and his older brother had been soldiers in our American Civil War and my father had lost this only brother in that war; he was a mathematician, an astronomer, detached and impartial, a scholar or savant, to use the more colorful French word. But the news of the death in action of my brother in France brought on a stroke. My father died, literally, from the shock. The Professor had had shock upon shock. But he had not died.
My father was seventy-four or seventy-five when he died — at any rate, not as old as the Professor was now. My mother had had her seventieth birthday in the early twenties. She stayed with me for some years in London and in Vaud, Switzerland. She went back on a visit to America. I knew that she would die there; she knew it too. But I wanted to avoid thinking about this. I did not want to face this. There are various ways of trying to escape the inevitable. You can go round and round in circles like the ants under that log that Eric pried up for us. Or your psyche, your soul, can curl up and sleep like those white slugs.