It seemed to me that Grandmother was long at war with her mantelpiece, it was always youthful, always beautiful. Grandmother had been a child, looking up to that great thing, playing around it, dressing like it, and, with the aid of stepladder, arranging things upon its shelf, then Grandmother had grown up and had married Grandfather, and then Grandfather visited and I do think then that there were moments when Grandmother was very jealous of her caryatids, that their voluptuousness mocked her, for she was always so thin, Grandmother, flat-chested, narrow of waist, and all bone. Grandmother, day by day, had grown old and had grown frail and had shrunk but those marble girls were still as big and powerful and so rounded and she stooped and brittled and took her teeth out and hurt here and there with her aging. For months at a time Grandmother would have the mantelpiece covered up. Once, for a year or so, it was even bricked over. Later she would scratch at it with things, she marked it and she dented her own birth object. Taking up a hammer and chisel, she added wrinkles here and there to her nearly naked ladies, and yet, despite all this, I think she loved them. For that great marble thing, unlike all our foot pumps and hot-water bottles, unlike our shoes and folding pocket rules, unlike our watering cans and footstools, was a thing of startling beauty.

I had not visited Grandmother for several seasons, the last time I was there, she had been very short with me, had called me a tremendous disappointment. On that occasion, she had blamed my father; she said that my father had never been much of anything, that he had been a terrible mistake for my mother, even that he had killed my mother, that, if it wasn’t for Father, Mother would still be alive now. How right she was, she had told me, to have given him a chalkboard rubber, so that he might rub himself out. She had said, crying then, that she could see something of Mother’s face in mine, but it was a dismal version of it, a bad imitation, a flawed mimicry. She had packed me off then, saying she never wished to see me again, that I was horrible history, that it was better for her to suppose that my mother had never been born, because the agony of the loss of her was too, too sharp a thing to bear.