Sometimes my mother’s affection (she would suddenly drop her work to kiss me) spread like an epidemic through the room and the demented creatures who that day had no visitors shouted and cooed and goggled their eyes and beckoned me with rapidly wagging fingers. One mild and motherly woman with white hair and dimpled cheeks would hold up a pink candy box that rattled when she shook it. “I’ll show you what’s inside, Ellen, if you’ll just come to Granny,” and when I shook my head, smiling politely, she would take a man’s white handkerchief out of her bosom and cry a little and blow her nose. Once an attendant let her come sit beside us to show us her treasure, fifteen gallstones of varied sizes and shapes. My mother was charmed. “That’s a fine one!” she cried as she picked one up, but the old lady snatched it out of her hand. “No you don’t, my good woman,” she said sharply. “Do you think they grow on trees?”

Most of the others had neither fancy-work nor gallstones to keep them occupied, and so they merely sat about, batting their eyes, grinning and purring like happy cats. The malcontents, arms crossed on their breasts, sat apart, muttering motley diatribes: “I called the police. No, couldn’t make it, too busy they said. Busy, yes, no doubt of that, I said, busy taking the bread out of poor people’s mouths, that’s what you’re busy doing. Called the newspaper. No, didn’t handle such matters. Why not, I said. Do you mean to stand by and watch the people of your community suffer because dentists’ brothers are politicians? Yes, ma’am, no, ma’am. Don’t yes, ma’am, no, ma’am, me, I told them and hung up. It is a crying shame that you can’t carry x-rays of your teeth in your pocketbook without gangsters, hired by dentists’ brothers, following to steal them or substitute the real ones with other people’s teeth or dog’s teeth, for that matter. I merely walked into the restaurant and two men with revolvers were waiting. Merely stepped inside to have a cup of tea after the dentist’s visit, and there they were waiting.” The less articulate of the persecuted stared in silence at the attendants, their faces fixed in a monotonous sneer.

My mother no longer felt that she was victimized, for much had been deleted from her memory: if she ever spoke of a place other than the asylum garden or of the room we sat in, it was of Luibka’s house or the officers’ tavern, but not of Chichester. She did not forget me, although, because her sense of time had gone, she thought I was eight or nine years old, and the six days when she did not see me were like the six hours when formerly I had been at school; nor did she forget the cold, but she would rub my hands between hers in the old way and complain with sorrowful resignation that “they” put snow in the stoves instead of wood. “They” were unreal shadows, harmless, stupid, servile ghosts who required a good deal of pampering; because she did not wish to offend them, she always spoke in whispers. “A new one came this morning just after you left, darling,” she would say, “and left the door wide open so the snow came in. That’s why it’s so cold.”