Reflections in a Golden Eye - Carson McCullers [30]
'Are you sleepy?' she asked.
'Not at all.' But at the very mention of sleep he was so tired that he could not keep from yawning. Loyally he turned away and tried to pretend that he had opened his mouth in order to feel one of his new wisdom teeth with his forefinger. I had a nap this afternoon and then I slept awhile tonight. I dreamed about Catherine.'
Alison could never think about her baby without experiencing an emotion so loaded with love and grief that it was like an insupportable weight on her chest It was not true that time could muffle the keenness of this loss. Now she had more control over herself, but that was all. For a while, after those eleven months of joy, suspense, and suffering, she was quite unchanged. Catherine had been buried in the cemetery on the post where they were stationed. And for a long time she had been obsessed by the sharp, morbid image of the little body in the grave. Her horrified broodings on decay and on that tiny lonely skeleton had brought her to such a state that at last, after considerable red tape, she had had the coffin disinterred. She had taken what was left of the body to the crematorium in Chicago and had scattered the ashes in the snow. And now all that was left of Catherine were the memories that she and Anacleto shared together.
Alison waited until her voice should be steady and then she asked: 'What was it you dreamed?'
'It was troubling,' he said quietly. 'Rather like holding a butterfly in my hands. I was nursing her on my lap then sudden convulsions and you were trying to get the hot water to run.' Anacleto opened his paint box and arranged his paper, brushes, and water colors before him. The fire brightened his pale face and put a glow in his dark eyes. 'Then the dream changed, and instead of Catherine I had on my knees one of the Major's boots that I had to clean twice today. The boot was full of squirming slithery new born mice and I was trying to hold them in and keep them from crawling up all over me. Whoo! It was like '
'Hush, Anacleto!' she said, with a shiver. 'Please!'
He began to paint and she watched him. He dipped his brush into the glass and a lavender cloud showed in the water. His face was thoughtful as he bent over the paper and once he paused to make a few rapid measurements with a ruler on the table. As a painter Anacleto had great talent of that she was sure. In his other accomplishments he had a certain knack, but at bottom he was imitative almost, as Morris said, a little monkey. In his little water colors, and drawings, however, he was quite himself. When they were stationed near New York, he had gone into the city in the afternoons to the Art Students' League, and she had been very proud, but not at all surprised, to observe how many people at the school exhibition came back to look at his pictures more than once.
His work was at once primitive and over sophisticated, and it laid a queer spell on the beholder. But she could not get him to take his gift with proper seriousness and to work hard enough.
'The quality of dreams,' he was saying softly. 'That is a strange thing to think about. On afternoons in the Philippines, when the pillow is damp and the sun shines in the room, the dream is of one sort. And then in the North at night when it is snowing '
But already Alison had got back into her rut of worry, and she was not listening to him. 'Tell me,' she interrupted suddenly. 'When you had the sulks this morning and said you were going to open a linen shop in Quebec, did you have anything particular in mind?'
'Why, certainly,' he said. 'You know I have always wanted to see the city of Quebec. And I think there is nothing so pleasant as handling beautiful linen.'
'And that's all you had in mind ' she said. Her voice lacked the inflections of a question and he did not reply to this. 'How much money