***

One of my chairs is smaller than the others. It is clear to me now that it is a child’s chair. I have never sat on it. I am beginning to feel that I must, however uncomfortable it may be, if I am to finish my first life properly. I must sit in the child’s chair. I am afraid to.

Eventually I sat in the small chair. I folded my hands in my lap, because that seemed the thing to do, and inclined my head. The chair was not uncomfortable at all. I felt quite natural and comfortable in it. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them after a bit I found that I was looking at my own small knees. They were bare below short pants and were scraped and rough-looking the way boys’ knees sometimes are. I looked up. I was sitting facing the corner of a small bedroom papered in pink wallpaper. To my right was an open closet and to my left a bed. It was Mother’s bedroom. I had been sent there to sit in the corner for an hour because of something bad I had done. I was not to speak or squirm or wriggle. I felt terribly uncomfortable and for a moment I panicked and almost willed myself back here to Limbo, but I decided to hold off for a while to see what would happen. My heart was beating fast. I was about six years old and I knew I had been here in this chair in the corner many times and I knew that something important was going to take place. Something would happen that always happened when I was sent to sit in the corner. I began to have a dim sense that I had wanted to be sent there, had done something deliberately bad so that it would happen.

Time passed. I sat and tried to remember how my mother had looked when I was a small child, but I could not My father—that weak, almost absent man—had told me that she was an “extraordinarily beautiful” woman when he had married her. All I could remember was the way she had looked in the few years before she had died, when I was in my late thirties. Both of my wives had hated her and said I was too good to her, had resented the closeness of the two of us. Well. That had been their problem, not mine. I only saw my mother when she came to visit. She was thick-waisted and had gray hair then and she wore cheap print dresses. But she was fun to talk to and she laughed a lot when we would sit and drink sherry together in the living room. Mother could be really funny when she was a little tipsy, and she was devastating in the way she could point out the pretensions of others. I have always admired her mind.

I sat there for about twenty minutes and thought of Mother and her false teeth and her wit and the big gestures she would use when talking and how she would say things like “to my utter astonishment” and “That, my dear, will be the day.” Whatever my wives had said, she was a pleasure to be with.