M OTHER DIED IN CHILDBIRTH. SHE HAD BEEN CONFINED TO her bed for months; I found her fingerprint in the dusting of talc on her boudoir’s cluttered surface; I bent my face low and blew the dust away. She was my mother who died in childbirth. Altering the sentence cannot alter the fact. I found her fingerprint in the dust and blew it with my breath away; I did this when she was still alive. It was then I was a child.
I don’t remember much, which is why my memory is so accurate: one cast-iron pinecone on the metal chain clicked upward while the other clicked down so I knew the minutes were passing even when the bird didn’t—springing out her house’s door—sing. I remember the dark rooms of the house lit up by lantern light, a yellow light that warmed the darkness, revealed the darkness, more than it countered it, removed it; but we owned no lanterns. My father read a book. When Mother screamed from upstairs and Father went up to listen through the door, I walked over to his desk. Spine-cracked, the book lay flat. He had underlined one sentence on the page, underlined it over and over again—“It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist”—with such repetitive force he had cut through the page with the pen’s nib and crossed out a sentence on the page below. I don’t remember reading the sentence; I couldn’t read then. I remember turning the page over, and seeing underneath the dark line cut precisely through the words, severing them in half, “It is but a choice between soft and turbulent dreams. People disparage knowing” —but I couldn’t yet read.
My father came back and looked at me; I was sitting at his desk, looking at the book he had just been reading, holding his pen in my hand. For many years I have tried to write a description of his face; once, in the back of a car driving through the countryside, being chauffeured to the estate of a wealthy patron of the college, and seeing three trees on the roadside, trees through which the wind was blowing and knocking from within them their cottony seed, I saw once again my father’s face, saw him looking at me, and, taking out my journal from my case, tried to draw what I had always failed to describe; it was a likeness I was pleased with until, the car hitting a rut in the road, I drew a line through his eye. His was a face that could not be described; there was a line between his eyes that cut through them. He looked at me as if I were him. “You know it already. Your mother has died.” My father, he was not an unfeeling man; he spoke with no emotion. I can hear his voice now. Emotion—it stops when it enters grief’s true realm. The bird sang out the hour.
I had a little sister and no mother; my father had a daughter and no wife. My sister was not well. The doctor handed her to my father and said she did not have long to live, that my father should name her, but he wouldn’t. He said he wouldn’t give her a name. He simply took her from the doctor—a man who seemed to me to disappear at that very instant, as if in being in such proximity to death and life made him less than material, subject to laws other than natural laws—and began pacing through the house, through the long hours left in the night, until the morning grayed the sky into vision, humming some tune that is no song, and I followed him, humming the same tuneless notes, echoing his steps with my steps, running my fingers along the walls of the house until, the sun breaking the horizon’s line, he stopped his dark song, stopped his wandering, and said, “It’s done.”
It was my sister.