“This old man, he played five,
He played nick nack on my hive,
With a nick nack paddywhack give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played six,
He played nick nack on my sticks,
With a nick nack paddywhack give a dog a bone,
This old man came rolling home.
This old man, he played seven,
He played nick nack”
“THE EYES AGAIN!” cried Mr. Mullhouse in an unearthly screech.
“Oh God, what?” gasped Mrs. Mullhouse, lifting a hand to her cheek.
“Staggering as if struck by lightning,” said Mr. Mullhouse, “he lost his balance and tumbled over the parapet. The noose was on his neck. It ran up with his weight, tight as a bowstring and swift as the arrow it speeds. He fell for five-and-thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs, and there he hung, with the open knife clenched in his stiffening hand. The old chimney”
“Oh Abe, for heaven sakes. You frightened me.”
“Good. Excellent. The old chimney quivered with the shock, but stood it bravely. The murderer swung lifeless against the wall, and the boy, thrusting aside the dangling body which obscured his view, called to the people to come and take him out, for God’s sake. A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on the parapet with a dismal howl and, collecting himself for a spring, jumped for the dead man’s shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the ditch, turning completely over as he went, and, striking his head against a stone, dashed out his brains.”
“Oh really,” said Mrs. Mullhouse, “where do you dig up that stuff, anyway.”
“Dickens, m’dear,” said Mr. Mullhouse, and returned to his book.
Edwin, attracted by the unusual sound of his father’s voice, had turned during the reading from the pad to his father’s face. Afterward he continued to sit motionless and unblinking, seeming to stare at his father but seeing nothing; while in the gleaming obsidian heart of each wide pupil, ringed with its smooth iris of polished mahogany, a small and perfect image of the lamp was clearly visible to the casual observer, complete with its ivory figure on top, its glowing shade, and its swelling porcelain belly on its base of brass.
The next evening I arrived as usual and took my place beside Edwin, who was trying to feed his zebra an empty spool held in an old soupspoon. After a while he put the spool in his crayon box and began hitting the zebra on the head with the back of the spoon. Mr. Mullhouse sat puffing away beside the glowing lampshade, one leg hooked over the chairarm and the vast moccasin dangling; from time to time he raised his eyes from the page to frown at the bowl of his pipe. Mrs. Mullhouse sat in the knitting corner of the couch with her legs thrown under her and a red ball of yarn resting on the groove between the two cushions. The puffball kittens slept on the rug beside a straw bag filled with colored balls of wool and long pink and green knitting needles with silver buttons on the end. As she clicked away at a pair of red mittens for Edwin she began to sing.
“Lavender blue, dilly dilly,
Lavender green.
When I am king, dilly dilly,
You shall be queen.
Actually that doesn’t make any sense sung by oh damn I’ve dropped a stitch.”
There was a pause, followed by the sound of clicking, pipe-puffing, and fire-crackling. After a while she sang again:
“Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.
One for my master, one for my dame,
And one for little Edwin who lives in the lane.
Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.”
She sighed, and again the living room filled slowly with its sounds. Edwin was crawling about, dragging his zebra by the tail over the fireplace bricks, bumping him down onto the rug and over the mahogany paws of the little table before the couch, dragging him up and down among the dark leaves and swirls of the rug until he came to the puffball slippers. He placed the zebra headfirst into one, with its hind legs and tail sticking out, and lost interest. Reaching up to his mother’s knees he pulled on her dress and drew himself up to a standing position before her.
“Why Edwin,” said Mrs. Mullhouse, looking up from her needles with a smile. “Did you want to see mommy?”
Edwin toddled around to the side of the couch. Mrs. Mullhouse followed him with her eyes; from my post of observation before the fireplace I followed her eyes, wherein I detected an amused perplexity. For a time Edwin simply stood there with his back against the wall bookcase and both hands resting on the white doily of the couch-arm. He was staring at the needles and Mrs. Mullhouse said: “Do you want to see mommy knit, Edwin?” She began to work the needles loudly, frowning down at her lap and occasionally giving to the strand of red yarn a jerk that caused the yarnball to jump. As she knitted away before the eyes of her son, Edwin leaned closer until his face almost touched her shoulder. Looking up at her ear he shouted: “ICE AGAIN!”
Mrs. Mullhouse jerked her head away and at the same time, as if to ward off a blow, jerked up her hands. The ball of yarn gave a jump. It rolled to the edge of the cushion, tottered over, and dropped softly to the floor. Making its way crookedly among the gleaming table-paws it came tumbling crazily toward me, leaving on the dark rug behind it a sudden bright red slash.
10
MRS. MULLHOUSE recovered her composure and her yarn; and now every evening Mr. Mullhouse read aloud to Edwin from books without pictures, while Edwin, understanding nothing, listened in fascination to his father’s voice. It was the sound alone that held him, undistorted by meaning; and the sense I think of a special occasion, a sacred rite requiring in the profane listener a hush of awe. Mr. Mullhouse’s reading voice was not his everyday voice but a formal, artificial, ideal version of it; a voice, you might say, that formed literature out of the dust of speech and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life. For the next few months Edwin experienced the great passages of English literature as a feast of babbling. Besides a few standard courses in English Composition, Mr. Mullhouse was teaching a course called Survey of English Literature from Beowulf to Joyce and another called Victorian Fiction. Edwin’s favorite poets at this time were Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; he showed a special interest in medieval alliterative verse; and in prose, aside from his beloved Dickens, he listened with pleasure to passages from Le Morte D’Arthur, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and Finnegans Wake. In the months that followed, as sounds increasingly came to be associated with things, Edwin lost his interest in adult literature, which curiously enough ceased to have any meaning whatsoever as the words themselves began to acquire meanings.