Interpretation: To “dance” means to enjoy intercourse. She missed having intercourse with Father. The wooden leg signified her dead husband. She was dancing with her dead husband in the dream. It was the first and last time that my mother asked me about a psychoanalytic interpretation.
SHE WALKS up the porch steps of her father’s house. The front door is open; he is with a patient in his office upstairs. She is to wait for him downstairs. Nothing has changed since she left for college, except that the dining-room table where she used to do her homework is now entirely covered with his papers, piles of mail and medical journals. The black air-raid shades from the forties are still on all the windows behind the regular yellow shades; both drawn three-fourths down during the day. At night he pulls them all the way down, going from room to room, and in the morning hoists them one-fourth up, meticulously. When the house is dark during the day, he puts on the dim little wall lights.
Her father had furnished the house to suit his own needs: the living room was where he made his telephone calls; the dining room, where he answered his mail; a table with six chairs and a buffet, the set bought second-hand for a hundred and ten dollars, filled the space. A room needed furniture, but he hadn’t arranged his house for entertaining, or even casual sitting around. Women friends and his sister-in-law Olga were always offering to fix up the house for him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Busybodies!” he told his daughter. He knew he could afford finer materials, custom-made furniture, “But what for?” The chest of drawers he bought for eight dollars served perfectly well; and the curtains that were hanging on the windows when he bought the house didn’t bother him. That such things should bother his daughter when she lived with him was always a source of grief. “You’ll be leaving anyway in a few years,” he used to answer her complaints.
She hears the patient come down the carpeted stairs, the front door open and close, and soon after, her father’s heavy tread that makes the woodwork creak. He stands smiling, arms thrown apart, as he had done when she was a small child. It would be wonderful if she could run into his arms like then, run and be lifted in the air; but on her long legs she stands three paces from him, too near to run; she walks two steps and they embrace, the old bear hug.
“Well, at last! At last!” His raspy voice welcomes her, his voice like his grip on her arm, proprietary. To his child, who will always belong to him, he repeats with relish, “At last you’re here. It’s right. Come,” he says and she follows him into the kitchen. “We have many things to discuss. But we have time.” He shows her there’s everything in the icebox; a roast turkey, bread, butter, cake, eggs, salami, ham. “We will eat, but not yet. We will take our usual evening walk.” But first he must draw down the shades, put on the lights, wind the clocks, change his shoes. “No,” he says sternly when she offers to help. He doesn’t want her to touch the shades. They’re old and fragile, all the fixtures in his house, only he knows how to wind his clocks properly. She follows him up the stairs; there is a clock in every room, in the upstairs and downstairs halls and on the landing. She watches him tie his shoelaces, the way he learned as a boy. Forming two loops he makes a double knot with appropriate grunts.
“Come,” he says, “I want to show you...” She knows what: the envelopes with his will, with the cash, with the list of telephone numbers, instructions for his funeral. And then to the drawer with all the documents, and through all the closets, then up to the attic. On the third floor, showing her the boxes of reprints of his articles, copies of Imago, her childhood things, drawings, notebooks; a box where he put wedding presents for her from his friends in Garfield: Paul Revere pots and pans, and more of those meaningless pairs of silver candlesticks.
“What will you do with all this when I die?” he asks anxiously. “Do you want this? Shall I give it away? I don’t want you to be burdened with such details. Everything should be in order when I die.”
Ever since they had lived in the house he had spoken of his will, and periodically showed her where he kept the envelopes; then every time she left to play in summer stock and when she came home for vacation from college and when she visited after she was married; her father’s house in Garfield was always the house to which she would have to return one day to open envelopes, meet with lawyers, real estate men; the house she would have to dispose of; the house where her father had just died and where it was frightening to hear his footsteps at night; a house where it felt strange to sit in the kitchen with her father while he read the newspaper.
She watches him, an apron around his waist, scraping leftovers into the garbage can, then wiping his plate with a Kleenex, his and her plate, before he washes them. He has never allowed her to cook in this kitchen beyond boiling eggs or wieners and always preferred to clean everything himself. Till she went to college they ate from cans. Since then a Negro woman trained to prepare Hungarian dishes, to be silent and to wash up everything before he sits down to eat, comes daily, and he washes the plate he eats on after. He has taken her cup; she hasn’t finished her coffee, “Have you finished?” he asks, the cup already in his hand.
“Yes.” It’s
