2

Dr. McAllister, after he had seen my mother two or three times, said that for the present she was well enough off at home. The first time he came, a few days after my talk with him, she was still in a state of total lethargy, but she had begun to speak English again. She was under the impression that the doctor had come to see her fancy-work and she exhibited it to him with the boredom and hauteur of a great lady who has at last summoned up the energy to pay a duty call on a dowdy friend and dispenses her good manners with an effort of will. “Thank you,” she said when he complimented her on a set of table mats embroidered with yellow tulips. “It don’t show up in this light but it’s done well if you like tulips.” Dr. McAllister said he was very fond of tulips and was surprised at my mother’s indifference to them. She smiled with some lofty, secret knowledge of the flower’s faults which she did not impart to us. Soon afterwards, in what I later recognized as a gauche breach of taste, I invited the doctor to drink a glass of brandy. My mother allowed her daft eyes to rove from one to the other of us. “Brandy?” she queried. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Sonia. You must forgive my daughter, Mr. Whatyoumaycallit, she’s always been a dreamy girl.” I started to point to the shelf where the bottle stood, still half full, but the doctor shook his head at me, and my mother went on, “I had a little money here years ago and this silly child can’t believe it’s all used up. Mamma, where is the golden egg? she’ll ask me and look in the Bible where we used to keep it. But she’s a treasure all the same.”

She would have gone on in an interminable eulogy of my abilities, my eyelashes, my character, had she not been silenced and rendered immobile by the returning torpor which immediately extinguished the light in her eyes and fixed her mouth. She sank to a chair and did not change her position for the half hour that the doctor lingered. Her hand, resting on the table covered with her fancy-work, could have been made of marble.

On his later visits, Dr. McAllister saw her alone, in the bedroom, and I could sometimes hear him interrupting her in the midst of what I knew, though I could not distinguish the words, was a tale of persecution. “Now, wait a minute, Mrs. Marburg, I haven’t got the scene clear in my mind. Tell me what the place looked like.” She would begin again, her voice sailing the calmed waters of her perpetual woe.

He told me that it was possible she was posing, that she was cleverer than I thought, but when I asked him what it was she could gain hereby, he could not answer to my satisfaction. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s afraid that now you are nearly grown you will leave her. But that mustn’t alarm you, for I don’t think she’d ever do anything drastic to keep you with her.”