S. Read Free Page B

more legacies and now for your junior year abroad pondering the Metaphysicals (your grandfather would be so proud!—he doted on them, and Milton and Spenser and Marvell) in some fogey old don’s musty digs with its electric fire (this is more my imagining of it than anything you’ve written in your I must say very few letters) and lighting up High Street and Carfax with your wide-eyed long-haired easy-striding American beauty and on weekends having champagne and strawberries with the sons of the nobility just as in “Brideshead Revisited,” which you will remember we enjoyed so much, you and I together, you staying up to watch it even though it was school the next day, not so very long ago. (Am I wrong to date your passion for things English from those shows?) You have played and are playing so splendidly the rôle of Daughter and your father impeccably assumed the part of Dada but I seem to have forgotten my lines and wandered offstage. Will you forgive me? (Your father’s forgiveness, oddly, doesn’t interest me at all.)
    Twenty is an age when your parents still think of you as a child and if you were to die or get married one would sadly say “only twenty” but as I recall that age there is little “only” about it and I must appeal to you as another woman to understandme, to simply
know
. And having so appealed I realize, or seem to realize, in this rather terrifying motel room where the air-conditioner rattles as if mounted off-center and people seem to keep bumping against the door as they go by in the hall to the ice machine, that of course there is no question of condemnation, that you and I will continue to love each other as we did that first minute, when you gripped my finger with this little violet baby hand the texture of a wilted flower, because we are aspects of the same large person, that even in that first minute all your eggs (this is an incredible physiological fact I recently read in
The New England Journal of Medicine
which your father gets) were tiny and perfect in you and you were
my
egg, tiny and perfect. I am crying as I write this and perhaps make insufficient sense in the fashion of maudlin people but do beg you to believe that I am your mother still.
    Study well, my sweetheart. When I try to picture you to myself I see a shining blond head bent over a book. Your love of books, from Babar to Tolkien and romances with those embossed titles in lurid colors to Austen and Dickens on up to these unpleasant modern writers who try to make us all feel shabby was so intense your father and I used to whisper what had we done wrong, what parental failing of ours was to blame. When you were in your early teens, after your softball craze but before “Brideshead” caught your fancy, I would sit and watch television—these very stupid well-intentioned shows with minority families cavorting around or police stations or high schools and the canned laughter heaving away—hoping you would be tempted to join me in that cozy corner room upstairs, with the heavy drapes and your father’s old medical books and my father’s priceless editions, because I imagined this was what normal American children shouldbe watching. But no, my dear elf-child, you stayed in your room wrapped in lovely contortions around a book, while I of course got hooked and had to watch these idiotic stories to the end. Of course I used to worry at your snubbing television and me together but now I see that the children we have are just miracles like any other, like geysers or glass skyscrapers or mountains of maple trees in fall in Vermont, and that we have nothing to do with creating them—our job is to stand and wonder. Our job is to marvel and love.
    Study well, and never be tempted by drugs.
People
(which I see only in the dentist’s office, but must say I do devour eagerly there) and the
National Enquirer
(which Irving my yoga instructor is devoted to for its spiritual dimensions, its ESP and UFO news) are so full of these