It was partly because I was sure she would not believe me that I did not tell her where the dead child really was. Even more, though, it was because I took a cruel and perverse pleasure in what I was sure was the remorse of her inner soul. His death seemed newly accomplished each day and gradually, while at first my grief had been intermittent and like a tide had washed over me only at intervals, now it became a constant and a profound pain, reaching to the farthest corners of my heart, delivering an unpredicted blow to every delight, whether or not I had been reminded of him. Flirting, in a band of girls with a company of boys, I abruptly ceased my giggles; the isolated moment silenced the flattering insults. I could smell the strange rankness of Mr. Greeley’s waiting room, could see the black roses on the little nightshirt, and I could feel in my temples the vibrations of Mr. Henderson’s boat as we passed through the shoals, where the water had a sinister, subterranean rhythm. Or I would waken in the night and leap from the bed, thinking he had called out. Confronted by the emptiness, my being screamed at the knowledge that he was dead.

Dr. Galbraith came once or twice a week to see my mother, although I had never summoned him. The excuse he gave me, jocularly as though I had no connection either with her or with Ivan, was that he did not want to lose another patient in our house. He gave her, I thought, too much sympathy, so that as she grew a little stronger, she declared that she was growing weaker, and when for a whole day her temperature was normal, the next day it had soared, by the aid of hot tea, to 103 degrees. Beguiled by the idea that she might have consumption, she told the doctor that her mother and father had both died of it, and she was delighted when he promised that as soon as she was well enough to go to the hospital, x-rays would be taken of her chest. In the beginning, I believed that he was deliberately leading her on and that he hoped to cure her psychotic mind as well as her infected bronchial tubes. Thus, one day when he left her bedroom, after a cursory examination and a long talk, I walked out to his car with him on the pretext of asking him how her chest sounded. But instead I told him of her cunning trick of elevating the mercury in the thermometer by immersing it in her tea. “I don’t want Mamma to become a hypochondriac, sir!” I said. “Can’t you help me?”

But he missed the point entirely. “The temperature may be absent altogether in a case like this,” he said. “It’s the sound of the râles that tells the story.”

“Oh, I don’t deny that she’s ill,” I replied. “But, Dr. Galbraith, she shouldn’t put the thermometer in her tea!”