Often at this hour, I found neighbor women seated round about her, going over in exhaustive detail the difficulties of maintaining a household when there was no money to pay the high prices of food. I wondered if these women were as gloomy in their own houses as they were in ours, or if my mother’s winter melancholy was contagious to them as it was to my father and myself. Strangely enough, when the heaviness of the bad weather skies had invaded our kitchen, she cast off the dark colors she had worn all summer and stepped forward, as lively as a bird, in a costume like a ballerina’s. But her full skirt, the length of a peasant’s dress, which was made of black challis and printed with bright pink flowers and fantastic pea-green leaves, her scarlet flannel blouse with tarnished German silver buttons, and her high blue leather boots, laced with tan hide, were not an antidote to her perverse mopes but seemed rather to be the excuse for them. Mrs. Henderson would come in and say, “How gay you look, Mrs. Marburg! Why, I can warm my hands at you.” But my mother, in a voice bleaker than any winter wind along the beach, would answer, “It is the red that fools you. But look at the boots. Now they’re the color my hands used to be all day long in Moscow, even in the house, and they were so stiff I couldn’t hold so much as a wine glass by its little tiny stem.” Sometimes, out of spite, she would then slip her arms into the sleeves of a blue Beacon-cloth bathrobe whose skirt hung to the floor; a high, pointed hood was attached to the back of the neck. It belonged to my father, and the sleeves were so long that the unfilled portions of them flapped like seals’ flippers as she gestured with her invisible hands. Had it not been for her face, she would have looked like a monk of some outlandish order.

Softly I opened the door to the bedroom. She was lying there, either asleep or else so deep in thought that she did not hear me on the threshold. The dark green blinds were down, but the light of the sunset, coming through the holes and falling on her immobile face, gave it an even incandescence like that which comes through the hand when it is held up to a bright light. Her body was covered with an army blanket and though the room was cold, one bare white foot dangled over the side of the bed. I could see my breath. The windows did not anywhere quite fit their frames and we had failed to stop up many of the cracks in the walls, either through laziness or through the conviction that it would do no good.