My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead Read Free Page A

After Lesbia spurned him, what did Catullus do? Kill himself ? Drink to excess? No. Mostly, he wrote, and eulogized his friendships and his dead brother. He brought to his work the same devotion he’d once lavished in vain on Clodia. And he left behind his poems, which speak to the stories in this collection that burn, dazzle, delight, or sadden, depending.
Passer pipiabat . Here’s a loose translation: “Better a sparrow, living or dead, than no birdsong at all.”
(Finally: As this book is a charitable undertaking, I ask the reader to be charitable toward its numerous and unavoidable omissions.)
     

FIRST LOVE AND OTHER SORROWS
HAROLD BRODKEY
 
TOWARD THE END of March, in St. Louis, slush fills the gutters, and dirty snow lies heaped alongside porch steps, and everything seems to be suffocating in the embrace of a season that lasts too long. Radiators hiss mournfully, no one manages to be patient, the wind draws tears from your eyes, the clouds are filled with sadness. Women with scarves around their heads and their feet encased in fur-lined boots pick their way carefully over patches of melting ice. It seems that winter will last forever, that this is the decision of nature and nothing can be done about it.
At the age when I was always being warned by my mother not to get overheated, spring began on that evening when I was first allowed to go outside after dinner and play kick-the-can. The ground would be moist, I’d manage to get muddy in spite of what seemed to me extreme precautions, my mother would call me home in the darkness, and when she saw me she would ask, “What have you done to yourself?” “Nothing,” I’d say hopefully. But by the time I was sixteen, the moment when the year passed into spring, like so many other things, was less clear. In March and early April, track began, but indoors; mid-term exams came and went; the buds appeared on the maples, staining all their branches red; but it was still winter, and I found myself having feelings in class that were like long petitions for spring and all its works. And then one evening I was sitting at my desk doing my trigonometry and I heard my sister coming home from her office; I heard her high heels tapping on the sidewalk, and realized that, for the first time since fall, all the windows in the house were open. My sister was coming up the front walk. I looked down through a web of budding tree branches and called out to her that it was spring, by God. She shrugged—she was very handsome and she didn’t approve of me—and then she started up the front steps and vanished under the roof of the porch.
I ran downstairs. “The bus was crowded tonight,” my sister said, hanging up her coat. “I could hardly breathe. This is such a warm dress.”
“You need a new spring dress,” my mother said, her face lighting up. She was sitting in the living room with the evening paper on her lap. She and my sister spread the newspaper on the dining-room table to look at the ads.
“We’ll just have to settle for sandwiches tonight,” my mother said to me. My father was dead, and my mother pretended that now all the cooking was done for my masculine benefit. “Look! That suit’s awfully smart!” she cried, peering at the paper. “Montaldo’s always has such nice suits.” She sighed and went out to the kitchen, leaving the swinging door open so she could talk to my sister. “Ninety dollars isn’t too much for a good suit, do you think?”
“No,” my sister said. “I don’t think it’s too much. But I don’t really want a suit this spring. I’d much rather have a sort of sky-blue dress—with a round neck that shows my shoulders a little bit. I don’t look good in suits. I’m not old enough.” She was twenty-two. “My face is too round,” she added, in a low voice.
My mother said, “You’re not too young for a suit.” She also meant my sister was not too young to get married.
My sister looked at me and said, “Mother, do you think he