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sat, leaning her head on her hand, reading. If someone came in she never tried to hide what she read, or slip it under a book, but let her hand fall, indifferently. In this room Gérard had lived the most hideous adventure of his life. Sometimes he thought it was a dream and he willed it to be a dream, even if it meant reversing sleeping and waking forever and accepting as friends and neighbors the strangers he saw in his sleep. He would remember it sometimes and say, “I must have dreamed it.” His collection of pornography was heaped in plain sight on his mother’s desk. There were the pictures, the books carefully dissimulated under fake covers, and the postcards from France and India turned face down. His mother sat with these at her elbow, and, of course, he could see them, and she said, “Gérard, I won’t always be here. I’m not immortal. Your father is thirty years older than I am but he didn’t have to bear his own children and he’s as sound as this house. He might very well outlive me. I want you to see that he is always looked after and that he always uses saccharine to sweeten his tea. There is a little box I slip in his pajama pocket and another in the kitchen. Promise me. Now, the sweater you had on yesterday. I want to throw it out. It’s past mending. I don’t want you to sulk for a week, and that’s why I’m asking you first.” He wanted to say, “Those things aren’t mine, I’ve got to give them back.” He saw through her eyes and all at once understood that the cards from India were the worst of all, for they were all about people scarcely older than Léopold, and the reason they looked so funny was that they were starving to death. All Gérard had seen until now was what they were doing, not who they were, or could be. Meanwhile the room rocked around him, and his mother stood up to show that was all she had to say.
    She did not sleep in the pretty room, but in a Spartan cell where there were closets full of linen and soap, and a shelf of preserves behind a curtain, and two painters’ stepladders, and two large speckled mirrors in gilt frames. One wall was covered with photographs of a country house the children had never seen, and of her old convent school. The maid, when there was one, went freely in without knocking if she needed a jar of fruit or clean bedsheets. Even when her daughters married and liberated their rooms one by one, she stayed where she was. The bed was hard and narrow and the old man could not comfortably spend the night. For years Gérard had slept in a basement room that contained a Ping-Pong table, and from which he could hear, at odd hours, the furnace coming to life with a growl. A lighted tank of tropical fish separated two divans, one of which was used now by his father, now by his little brother. He had never understood why his father would suddenly appear in the middle of the night, and why the little brother, aged three and four and five, was led, stumbling and protesting, to finish the night in his mother’s bed. Gérard was used to someone’s presence at night, the warm light of the tank had comforted him. Now that he had a room of his own and slept alone in it, he discovered he was afraid of the dark.
    His mother sat by his bed, holding his hand, until he pretended to be asleep. His door was open and a ray from the passage bent over the bed and along the wall. “I’m sure I must be pale,” she said, though her cheeks and brow were rosy. She believed her children had taken her blood to make their own and that hers was diminished. Having had seven babies, she could not have left much over a pint. Bitterly anti-clerical, she sometimes hinted that nuns had the best of it after all. Gérardhad been wrong to wake her; he had no business walking in his sleep. Tomorrow was what she called “a hell day.” It was Léopold’s ninth birthday, she was without help, and twenty-two people were going to sit down to lunch. Directly after the meal, she was to take