Francis waited, his eyes now removed from their vision of the stairs, his head cocked a little in a posture of intent listening. He heard his father in the hall, his steps receding briefly toward the rear of the house. Then he heard a familiar sound and knew that his father was dialing a number on the telephone. A few moments later his father’s voice spoke urgently a doctor’s name. The telephone was behind the stairs, out of view, and Francis, self-schooled in the preservation of silence and solitude, arose in the closet without the slightest sound and slipped into the hall and from the hall into the living room, and so through the dining room and kitchen to the back yard.
At the rear of the yard, its branches spreading over the alley, was a big mulberry tree. No care was taken of it, but the berries, which were large and sweet and dark purple when ripe, somehow escaped the ravishment of worms. Francis often climbed the tree and sat there for long periods eating the berries and thinking about all sorts of things real and unreal, and he went there and climbed it now and sat on a sturdy limb with his back at rest against the trunk.
Sitting so, now and then eating a berry, he began to wonder why his father had killed his mother.
* * * *
The days before his mother’s funeral were desolate days. The shabby rented house was full of relatives who had to be fed and bedded down, and Francis was even forced to give up his room to a maternal uncle and two cousins. There was simply no place to go to he alone, no place in all the house, not even the small closet in the front hall, to spin securely the golden gossamer web of fantasy. The mulberry tree was invaded daily by the two cousins, both of them too young, in the tolerant opinion of the adults, to behave with the decorum of grief for a woman they had hardly known.
Francis himself felt no grief. He merely felt confused and lonely and violated. He spent most of the time alone in corners, and he kept wondering all this time why his father had killed his mother. He had pushed her down the narrow stairs, and then he had certainly given her a definitive blow with the heavy piece of wood or metal, and Francis wondered why. His mother had been a submissive and oppressive woman, oppressive to the spirit, but she had been kind in her own way, within her limited capacity to sense the need for kindness, and if she had not created love, neither had she incited hatred.
There were reasons, of course, why men killed women. One of the reasons was other women, or another woman, but Francis could not believe that this was true of his father, for he had long ago perceived dimly, although he was very young, that his father had no interest in women, not even in his wife, whom he had killed. He was, in fact, a rigid and moralistic man who abstained from tobacco and alcohol and insisted upon clean speech. He said grace at table and spoke up for old-fashioned modesty as opposed to contemporary wantonness. It seemed strange to Francis, when he thought about it, that his father and mother had ever married, or that they had, having married, continued to live so long together. It was impossible to believe that either was in the least interested in the other, and that they had, sometime in these years, by deliberate design or in eruption of distorted passion, given birth to him, their son, was entirely beyond credence, an intolerable obscenity. He did not think of this so specifically or so precisely, of course. He merely sustained, because it was essential to what he was and had to be, the illusion that his relationship with them did not antedate the deepest probing of his memory.
Another reason why men sometimes killed women, he thought in his corner, was to gain money or something valuable that the women had, but this was even more untenable than love or hate as a motive for his mother’s murder by his father. His mother had been as poor in goods as in spirit and body, and she had left nothing to his father except the expense of burying her and feeding for two or three days all the relatives who came to help him do it. There seemed to be, in fact, no rational reason for killing her at all, nothing to be gained that could not have been gained with less trouble and danger by simply going away. Francis, pondering the mystery, was filled with wonder, if not with grief.
It was a great relief when the funeral was finally over. Services were held in the chapel of the mortuary that had received the body, and Francis sat beside his father in a cool, shadowy alcove lined with gray drapes. He could look across the chapel to the casket in which his mother lay under a spray of fern and red and white carnations, and by lifting his eyes he could see, high in the far wall, a leaded window of stained glass that transmitted the sunlight in glittering fragments of color. Most of the time he watched the window, but once in a while he would glance sidewise from the corners of his eyes at his father’s face. He was curious to see if the secret his father thought he shared with no one would reveal itself, here in this dim alcove, in some naked expression, however fleeting. But if there was such an expression, Francis
