(1810)

My mother fell into a consumption. I cooked her meals for her, sat in a

chair and read her novels, administered the drug called Quietness that

seemed to lift her not only from her pain but from herself, for a few

minutes, or an hour, and with a cool cloth wiped away the tangled

strands of grimy hair that fell across her fevered brow – that face doubly

dear to me – because for those several years, after my father’s fatal fall,

and the horrid interloper Rawlings, a wretched clerk whose true trade it

was to prey on widows, then later the other disgraces, the tales of her

being kept by the Jew at Enfield, and my grandmother telling us nothing

of her, we had supposed her forever gone – and then her coming back a

sad wanderer, drinking brandy – this dying beauty coiling in her pain

upon the drenched bedsheets – I believe it was her seeming not so much

my mother as some marvelous revenant out of a ghost story or a tragedy,

forced to undergo its end a second time, that made my fear so grave, my

love for her so strong, and my grief in the later days back at school so

unnerving – so that during study hours I hid behind the master’s desk to

dwell unto myself, in my anguish over losing her, while the other boys

and the master himself kindly waited upon me, and the room fell hushed.