Harvard Classics

It is the hour of lamps. On our knees my mother and I, still young, color with crayons threadbare nap on the living room rug. Though there is no money, no one seems to care. We are self-possessed as bugs waving their antennae through cracks in the kitchen's linoleum floor. When Father begins to read from the red gilt volume in his lap, a circle of light encapsulates us like hearts in a womb. Except their marriage is already dead. I know this though I'm only six. So we visit pharaohs, a boatman on the Nile, Crusaders eating grapes on a beach. Life escapes with all its sadness while two tragic Greek poets inhabit Father's voice. Who'd know I am just a boy when he begins a stoic moral tale concerning a dull provincial doctor's young French wife? If Mother, in French, begins to sing to herself, I know she's had enough. Crayon stubs litter the crumbling rug. Our prostrate cat sneezes at the dust in her fur. And cries from a swallow remind us one swallow doesn't make a summer.