When I'm rich I'm going to buy me a private teacher to tell me all I want to know. If one can take private dance lessons, there must be teachers for all sorts of things. I think I'll have a man teacher. One who's been all around the world, like Paris France. Men know more than women, don't you think so? Maybe I'll go to Paris France too."
"Now wait, Pussy, you're not in New York City yet."
"Well, practically—August is only two months away."
Clem was nettled by the recurrent rains. You sure were caught when it rained in Congress. In Paris you could sit in a café killing time with a Pernod or wander through the Louvre. Sunday was bad enough in Congress, but rain on top of it was unbearable. Luckily he had put off telling his mother he wouldn't be home for Sunday dinner.
Mrs. Brush had been so excessively grateful and touched by the painting of hepaticas that Clem was ashamed. Except for the "Washington Square" it was the only thing he had given her after years of painting. When he said it had been made for her bedroom, she refused to "belittle" it by "hiding it" and hung it in the parlor. She had switched on the light in the imitation alabaster bowl and Clem went to pull down the shades.
"Leave the shades be, Clem, we have nothing to hide."
He rarely went into the parlor since his return home because of a boyhood habit of going straight ahead into the dining room from the entrance hall. The suspended light, installed when he was in the 7th grade and their house, like others on Pawnee Street, got electricity, was the only change as far back as he could remember. The heavy oak armchairs, adaptations of William Morris's aesthetic functionalism, the dark cherry and walnut pieces from his grandmother on his mother's side, stood rooted in the same places. Watching his mother hang the painting, he felt as if it were he who was being nailed into the drear room; it was a feeling of dazed sickish fear, as if awakening from an idyllic dream in which an artist—born and bred in a world fashioned in Paris—he now found himself hurled back, rejected, into the inescapable reality of his fundamental self. Usually, evenings at home, he sat with his mother at the big round dining-room table exchanging laconically items of local news read in the Husker-Sun in light cast by a hanging dome of crude leaded red and green glass fringed with beads. What else could they talk about?
