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comfort great and small, and they were always to be connected with secrecy, with some hermetic privilege that was mine alone. This time, displaced in its sudden, unexpected balm, listening to its rhythm with my head cocked upwards, I told myself obscurely that it must have come because the ceiling here, high and molded with antique frivolity, had a never-before-noticed look of some in my own country, of back there. Years were to pass before I knew otherwise, before I knew for sure that the alien is not national; his drum sounds from farther below. Some are born so easy and tactile to the world’s gates; others, yet so handsome and fully organed, are born without hands. I lowered my head, and the found heartbeat was gone, as it has always gone, and I was myself again, gnawing and humbly feral, outside.
    The kitchen was cool, an old woman’s haven, with the musty dryness the old bring to a room, dry cool of bird-bones that need flannelette, subtemperate blood that wants its tea. Miss Pridden was out marketing, no doubt, with Perry, the small colored boy who came every week to carry, to whom she always paid, with the obligation of the noble, one of her scant supply of quarters, although the going rate was a dime. Once, early in my acquaintance with her, I had been there when he came, and she had dismissed him, saying, “I think perhaps my young friend here will help me today, thank you, Perry,” although I had seen the quarter change hands nevertheless. When we had returned that afternoon with the bundles, after we had stored the food away, she had offered me no money, but when tea came it was not as usual in the china pot, but in the full silver service with the urn for hot water, and on the table there was a plate of benné seed cakes. I had never seen the latter before, and did not know that they were the region’s token of aristocratic friendship. “’Tisn’t the same as your seedcake, ’s I recollect,” she said, for, as I found out later, she was always gleeful over what she knew of my country and often even spoke to me confederately of what she called “the Continent,” as if the fact of my foreign birth alone made me a qualified veteran of the Grand Tour.
    Thereafter, if I happened to come by on a Friday, the ceremony was repeated, and I usually ate a cake or two for the honor I had learned was in them, as I listened to her reminiscences—because here I already knew so well what was expected of me—although I had not much taste for the flat perfume of either. For although Miss Pridden did not always descant of travel, she had, like so many I knew later, nothing to show of life but a tourist’s trinkets of memorabilia, legal tender as worn as the stamped shell one buys on the plage , open as the postcard with the X marking the room among the hundred rooms, her only poor treasure being that the X was hers. And already I had begun to form a taste for confidences of another order. What compels me are not the common postcards of another’s reminiscence, but the letters—letters from those dead emotions whose signals, faint from within the coffin, it is sometimes still possible to hear—of whose harmonics even the narrator is sometimes not aware. Or not as aware as the listener, as I.
    I left the kitchen, not sorry to find it, as I supposed then, quite empty, and stole into the library. But again the machine sticks, stopping me as I watch myself leave, teaching me, twenty-five years later, that the listener too, talented arranger that he is, may sometimes be unaware. Truly, memory is God; it lets not a sparrow fall. In its foreground the main characters reanimate, their talk flashes again, but beside them, in every corner, the small still life waits, just these apples—why picked by the painter to keep this significant flame? Behind me as I left, I did not see, waiting ready on the table, a plate of benné seed cakes. She must have put them out so on many a Friday, perhaps all. Yet I never marked them, that