22
Those two didn’t count. There were two’s and two’s and two’s in my life. There were the two actual brothers (the three of us were born within four years). There were the two half-brothers; there were the two tiny graves of the two sisters (one of those was a half-sister but there were the two or twin-graves). There were the two houses, ours and our grandparents’ in the same street, with the same garden. There were the two Biblical towns in Pennsylvania, Bethlehem where I was born, and Philadelphia, where we moved when I was eight. There were for a time in consciousness two fathers and two mothers, for we thought that Papalie and Mamalie (our mother’s parents) were our own “other” father and mother, which, in fact, they were.
There were two of everybody (except myself) in that first house on Church Street. There were the two brothers who shared the same room; the two half-brothers might turn up at any time, together; there were the two maids who slept in the room over the kitchen; there were my two parents in their room. (There was a later addition to this Noah’s Ark, but my last brother arrived after this pattern was fixed in consciousness.)
My father had married two times; so again, there were two wives, though one was dead.
Then in later life, there were two countries, America and England as it happened, separated by a wide gap in consciousness and a very wide stretch of sea.
The sea grows narrower, the gap in consciousness sometimes seems negligible; nevertheless there is a duality, the English-speaking peoples are related, brothers, twins even, but they are not one. So in me, two distinct racial or biological or psychological entities tend to grow nearer or to blend, even, as time heals old breaks in consciousness. My father’s second wife was the daughter of a descendant of one of the original groups of the early-eighteenth-century, mystical Protestant order, called the Unitas Fratrum, the Bohemian or Moravian Brotherhood. Our mother’s father was part mid-European by race, Polish I believe the country called itself then, when his forefathers left it, though it became German and then fluctuated like the other allied districts back and forth as in the earlier days of the Palatinate struggles. Livonia, Moravia, Bohemia — Count Zinzendorf, the founder of the renewed Bohemian brotherhood, was an Austrian, whose father was exiled or self-exiled to Upper Saxony, because of his Protestant affiliations. The Professor himself was an Austrian, a Moravian actually by birth.
23
Mother? Father? We have met one of them in the garden of the house on Church Street and we have seen the other further down Church Street, where the pavement makes a generous curve under the church on to the shops. But we are not shopping. We are not calling on anyone, friend or near-friend or near or distant relative. Everyone knows our mother so we are never sure who is related and who is not — well, in a sense everyone is related for there is the church and we all belong together in some very special way, because of our candle service on Christmas Eve which is not like what anyone else has anywhere, except in some places in Europe perhaps. Europe is far away and is a place where our parents went on their honeymoon. It is she who matters for she is laughing, not so much at us as with or over us and around us. She has bound music folios and loose sheets on the top of our piano. About her, there is no question. The trouble is, she knows so many people and they come and interrupt. And besides that, she likes my brother better. If I stay with my brother, become part almost of my brother, perhaps I can get nearer to her.
But one can never get near enough, or if one gets near, it is because one has measles or scarlet fever. If one could stay near her always, there would be no break in consciousness — but half a loaf is better than no bread and there are things, not altogether negligible,
to be said for him. He has some mysterious habits, this going out at night and sleeping on the couch in his study by day. As far as that goes, there is his study. Provided you do not speak to him when he is sitting at his table, or disturb him when he is lying down, you are free to come and go. It is a quiet place. No one interferes or interrupts. His shelves are full of books, the room is lined with books. There is the skull on the top of the highest bookcase and the white owl under a bell-jar. He has more books even than our grandfather and he has that triangle paper-weight that shows the things in the room repeated and in various dimensions. This, of course, I have not at the time actually put into words, hardly put into thoughts. But here I am, in some special way privileged. It is his daughter to whom he later entrusts the paper-knife; he leaves his uncut magazines and periodicals for her. She knows how to run the paper-knife carefully along under the surface of the double page, and this is especially important as her older brother is not invited to cut the pages. He has, of course, many other things to do. Our mother is a mixture of early Pennsylvania settlers, people from this island, England, and others from middle Europe — he is one thing. He is New England, though he does not live there and was not born there. He comes from those Puritan fathers who wear high peaked hats in the Thanksgiving numbers of magazines. They fought with Indians and burned witches. Their hats were like the hats the doctors wore, in the only picture that was hanging in his study. The original picture was by Rembrandt, if I am not mistaken. The half-naked man on the table was dead so it did not hurt him when the doctors sliced his arm with a knife or a pair of scissors. Is the picture called A Lesson in Anatomy?
It does not really matter what the picture is called. It is about doctors. There is a doctor seated at the back of the couch on which I am lying. He is a very famous doctor. He is called Sigmund Freud.
24
We travel far in thought, in imagination or in the realm of memory. Events happened as they happened, not all of them, of course, but here and there a memory or a fragment of a dream-picture is actual, is real, is like a work of art or is a work of art. I have spoken of the two scenes with my brother as remaining set apart, like transparencies in a dark room, set before lighted candles. Those memories, visions, dreams, reveries — or what you will — are different. Their texture is different, the effect they have on mind and body is different. They are healing. They are real. They are as real in their dimension of length, breadth, thickness, as any of the bronze or marble or pottery or clay objects that fill the cases around the walls, that are set in elegant precision in a wide arc on the Professor’s table in the other room. But we cannot prove that they are real. We can discriminate as a connoisseur (as the Professor does with his priceless collection here) between the false and the true; a good copy of a rare object is not without value, but we must distinguish between a faithful copy and a spurious imitation; there are certain alloys too that may corrode and corrupt in time, and objects so blighted must be segregated or scrapped; there are priceless broken fragments that are meaningless until we find the other broken bits to match them.