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it. "Oh, well, if you want me to believe some formula about blood will tell, that sort of thing," she accused when I could not oblige her; "you saw your father's name and you simply
knew.
Not," she finished without pleasure, "that we ever kept it from you!"
    In this way, and alone, I learned who my father was. But, lest my mother feel the shame of my shame, I was discreet; I did not disclose all that I knew. There was nothing extraordinary in my recognition. Toward the end of a dark March, while an endless snow lay swarming on the sills, going by my mother's door I heard the rattle of bracelets on her furious arms; she clanked them like shields and cried out; and then, while I stopped wretchedly aware, Enoch's voice came maundering from the fastness of her room: "It's all right; come, there's nothing else to do; besides, it doesn't matter. Let's go ahead and get it over with." It was all hidden, and all familiar; it meant a letter from my father—a summer's beetle swaddled in the cold storm, prodded and found miraculously preserved, and more, atwitch with ugly life. My father's letters, infrequent as they were, always brought their own oppressive season into our house, suggestive of a too-suddenly fruitful thicket, lush, damp, growing too fast, dappled with the tremolo of a million licking hairs—deep, sick, tropical. And then my mother's eyes, which delighted her because of their extravagant decorative roundness, like roulette wheels, would shrink to hard brown nuts. We came to live with heat, barely breathing; we came to live with the foul redolence of heat, like fish rotting in a hull. Outside my mother's windows the snow continued to mass, but in the housewe sickened, enisled, hung round with my father's rough nets. "What does he want?" my mother cried out behind her door in that frozen March; "how much now?" And Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck like some indolent mariner lay on the beach of his island, nude to the waist; I saw him—my father; he lay there cruelly, like refuse; he had the patient lids of a lizard, and a yellow mouth, and he was young but half-blind; and he lay alone on his beach, in the seaweed-littered sand, among shells with their open cups waiting; and he waited. And with confidence: the day came, it would always come, when my mother could withstand the siege no longer. Then gradually my father's presence, humid and proliferous, thick and invisible, less an untutored mist than some toxic war-gas pumped by armored machines into the flatulent air, or a stubborn plague-wind slow to cool away, would recede and die. Unseen, unknown, proclaiming himself with doubtful omens, like a terrible Nile-god Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck invaded, vanished, and reappeared. Nothing would secure his eclipse but propitiation of the most direct and vulgar nature, and my mother, as enraged as any pagan by a vindictive devil, had to succumb. Money was what he wanted. Money came to him at last where he lay, and he blinked his torpid jaundiced lids and was content. My mother had her peace then, which she would celebrate at once by a journey abroad, to some cold and rain-washed country, perhaps in Scandinavia: a far and bitter place where my father had never touched. And yet the money was an act of allegiance, it appeared; she reviled the Nile-god but she rewarded him. It was not for charity, and not for pity, and not for the sake of a righteous heart: for charity, pity, and a righteous heart would not have seized her with fury or churned those wrathful cries. And afterward she had to travel, as for relief after excess. Was it love then that he sent her—my father, the man of talent—in his jagged inkings? And year after year was it love turned to money that reverberated from her hand? As I have said, my mother had no concern with the past, which she considered eccentric, because it differed from the present. Everything old struck her as grotesque, like costumes in photographs of dead aunts. She did not believe in old obligations or old