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Eliza and I pretended to fall asleep at once. After a half an hour, however, we were reunited in Eliza’s room. The servants never looked in on us. Our health was perfect, after all, and we had established a reputation for being, as they said, “… as good as gold at bedtime.”

Yes, and we went through a trapdoor under Eliza’s crib, and were soon taking turns watching our parents in the library—through a tiny hole we ourselves had drilled through the wall, and through the upper corner of the frame around the painting of Professor Elihu Roosevelt Swain.

• • •

Father was telling mother of a thing he had read in a news magazine on the day before. It seemed that scientists in the People’s Republic of China were experimenting with making human beings smaller, so they would not need to eat so much and wear such big clothes.

Mother was staring into the fire. Father had to tell her twice about the Chinese rumor. The second time he did it, she replied emptily that she supposed that the Chinese could accomplish just about anything they put their minds to.

Only about a month before, the Chinese had sent two hundred explorers to Mars—without using a space vehicle of any kind.

No scientist in the Western World could guess how the trick was done. The Chinese themselves volunteered no details.

• • •

Mother said that it seemed like such a long time since Americans had discovered anything. “All of a sudden,” she said, “everything is being discovered by the Chinese.”

• • •

“We used to discover everything,” she said.

• • •

It was such a stupefied conversation. The level of animation was so low that our beautiful young parents from Manhattan might have been up to their necks in honey. They appeared, as they had always appeared to Eliza and me, to be under some curse which required them to speak only of matters which did not interest them at all.

And indeed they were under a malediction. But Eliza and I had not guessed its nature: That they were all but strangled and paralyzed by the wish that their own children would die.

And I promise this about our parents, although the only proof I have is a feeling in my bones: Neither one had ever suggested in any way to the other that he or she wished we would die.

Hi ho.

• • •

But then there was a bang in the fireplace. Steam had to escape from a trap in a sappy log.

Yes, and Mother, because she was a symphony of chemical reactions like all other living things, gave a terrified shriek. Her chemicals insisted that she shriek in response to the bang.

After the chemicals got her to do that, though, they wanted a lot more from her. They thought it was high time she said what she really felt about Eliza and me, which she did. All sorts of other things went haywire when she said it. Her hands closed convulsively. Her spine buckled and her face shriveled to turn her into an old, old witch.

“I hate them, I hate them, I hate them,” she said.

• • •

And not many seconds passed before Mother said with spitting explicitness who it was she hated.

“I hate Wilbur Rockefeller Swain and Eliza Mellon Swain,” she said.

10

MOTHER WAS TEMPORARILY insane that night.

I got to know her well in later years. And, while I never learned to love her, or to love anyone, for that matter, I did admire her unwavering decency toward one and all. She was not a mistress of insults. When she spoke either in public or in private, no reputations died.

So it was not truly our mother who said on the eve of our fifteenth birthday, “How can I love Count Dracula and his blushing bride?”—meaning Eliza and me.

It was not truly our mother who asked our father, “How on Earth did I ever give birth to a pair of drooling totem poles?”

And so on.

• • •

As for Father: He engulfed her in his arms. He was weeping with love and pity.

“Caleb, oh Caleb—” she said in his arms, “this isn’t me.”

“Of course not,” he said.

“Forgive me,” she said.

“Of course,” he said.

“Will God ever forgive me?” she said.

“He already has,” he