silences, the bud had become almost a flower, though not quite full-blown. He pointed it out to his mother. She laughed, for a moment forgetting.
“Why, so it has,” she exclaimed. “I never knew an amaryllis bud could open so quickly. But then I’ve never sat in front of one just as I am sitting here now.”
She gazed, half-dreaming, at the flower. “It’s symbolic, somehow—the opening of a new flower at this moment when we’re so sad. It means something—I don’t quite know what—but as though your father were saying something to us. It’s comforting somehow.”
She looked at him wistfully. “Oh, Rannie, I do hope I’ll be the sort of mother you need! I’ve always left you to your father since you were a baby, that is… because he’s… he was so much wiser than I, and he knew you were no ordinary child. I hope… I hope I’ll be able to… not of course take his place—that I could never, never do —but fulfill my own place as perhaps I haven’t, because perhaps I haven’t felt it necessary, but you must help me. You must tell me if there is anything I should be doing that I’m not doing, for it won’t be lack of willingness, darling, but just that I don’t know enough.”
He met her pleading look with a tenderness he had never felt before. All his deepest love he had given to his father, but now he saw her separately, a childlike creature and yet a woman, of whose flesh he had been born and to whom in a way, too, he belonged.
“There is something you can do for me, Mother,” he said.
“And that is?” his mother asked.
“I’d like to know everything about my father—everything—everything. I realized now that when we were together we always talked about me—or something
“No, you weren’t selfish,” she said quickly. “He was simply—overcome with joy that he had a mind like yours to teach, to work with. He—he was—a born teacher and he revered a fine brain. He used to speak of your—your brain—as a treasure.”
“But I want to know
She looked at him with a wondering love. “How could you know?…” she murmured.
“Know what, Mother?”
“That what you have just said comforts me as nothing else could! I’d never have thought of it myself—that I,
And in comforting her he himself was comforted. They had a way now to live, a purpose in their life together as mother and son. They would keep his father alive.
IT WAS NOW EVENING AND they sat in the study. She had decided that the study was the room where it would be best for them to talk. It would bring his father nearer, she said. Nothing in the room was changed. On the desk his manuscript lay half-finished in his father’s fine, close handwriting. Someday, his mother said, he, the son, would finish it. His father had allowed it and he had been reading it slowly, carefully, understanding and not understanding the philosophy it proclaimed, and yet fascinated by it. Every scientist an artist? Every artist a scientist? What was the secret they held in common?
“Light the fire, son,” his mother said. “There’s snow in the air.”
He stooped to set the lighter ablaze beneath the logs, as he had so often seen his father do. The logs were dry and the flames roared up the chimney.
“Sit in his chair, son,” his mother said on this, the first of their evenings. “I like to see you sitting there.”
He settled himself in his father’s chair. He liked sitting there, his body settling into the hollows his father’s body had shaped during the years.
“I met your father in college,” his mother began. “I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. He wasn’t the sports type, not the football hero and all that, though he played a sharp game of tennis. When he found I was the champion tennis player, he challenged me promptly. I beat him—”
She paused to laugh, her eyes suddenly sparkling. “I don’t think he liked that too well. And I told myself I was a fool and probably he’d never want to see me again. But I was wrong. He told me afterwards, when we’d got to know each other quite well, that he liked me for doing my best against him. He thought he was pretty good, and he confessed to being mortified at being beaten by a girl, but he’d have thought the less of me if I’d done any pretending. That was one thing he was always firm about. ‘I want the truth from you, Susan.’ I can hear him say it now.”
She paused, a half smile on her face, and looked across to him, sitting there in his father’s chair. “I got the habit of truth, son—and I’ll never tell you anything but the truth. Let’s make it a bargain—truth between us for your father’s sake.”
“It’s a bargain,” he said.
She was silent for minutes, thinking. Then she began again, “I don’t want to go too fast. I want to make it last a long time. There’ll be evenings, too, when you want to do things. Evenings when we’ll have to decide what we should do. What do you want to do, son? I don’t think we ought to take the tour—we’ll need the money for your college education, even though they will give you your tuition as a scholarship for your father’s sake.”
“I’ll go to college,” he said. “I can start at the beginning of the term in the New Year.”
“But you’re not thirteen yet—and all those older pupils—what will they do to you?”
“Nothing, Mother. I’ll be too busy.”
“But you’ll miss all the fun of being your age.”
“I’ll have other things,” he said briefly, but he did not know what things, so he urged her to go on with her story. “Go on, Mother.”
“We soon fell in love,” she went on shyly. “In those days love was something important—not like today. But he said we wouldn’t be married until after his graduation. I was only a sophomore, but I didn’t want to go on. I only wanted to be with him. So in June we were married. It was a lovely wedding, I was the only child in my family, and they all wanted me to have the prettiest possible wedding. Besides, they liked your father. That’s one thing I didn’t like about coming to Ohio, Rannie, after your father got his doctorate. It brought us far away—so that you haven’t known my family. And since your father’s parents were dead and he was an only child, there’s been only the two of us to be your family.”
“I haven’t missed anything,” he said.
She was silent a long time now, her eyes fixed on the fire, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling. He sat silent, waiting, inwardly restless, and yet not wanting to break into her thoughts.
It was to be true of all these evenings. She relived her life, dreaming, remembering, half-smiling while he sat waiting, inwardly restless. Suddenly she would look at the clock, astonished at the time.
“Oh, it’s late,” she would exclaim, and the evening was ended.
Each evening he sat there submissively, his eyes fixed on the fire, and as his mother’s voice flowed on, broken now and again by laughter or a long sigh of remembrance, he enjoyed in himself the ability to see what she was saying. That is, as she finished describing an incident now long past, he saw it all as clearly as though taking place before him. He was aware of this ability, for as he read a book, whatever it was—and this had been always true ever since he could remember, or so it seemed to him—he saw what he read, and not the words or the pages on which they were printed. The ability had been of special value to him in school, always, and especially in mathematics, for when a problem was presented by his teacher or the textbook, he saw not the figures but the situation they presented and the relationship to the whole, so that he was ready with the answer immediately. Sciences, too, had been made very easy for him by this ability to visualize simultaneously as he read or listened.
So now he saw his father as his mother told of her life with him as a young man. It was actual seeing. He had this ability that he supposed everyone had, until he discovered later on in his life that it was unique, and that he could actually see, in shape and solidity, a person or an object of which he was thinking. As his mother described his father, he saw the tall young man, fair-skinned, fair-haired, quick to laugh but always ready to listen and to wonder. He had never told anyone of this visual ability, but now he told his mother.
“I see my father as he was, before I was born.”
His mother stopped and gazed at him, questioning.
