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Show -151 Skinner like me, in whom gloom took a violent form. He waved his arms. "It's sad, it's sad!" he shouted. "i'm very sad!" "Sit down!" Alice said sharply. He froze in mid-caper and looked at us with liquid anxious intelligent eyes; his head was tilted to one side, one arm was outstretched, bent slightly at the elbow, the other hung down. "I'm so very sad," he whispered. The next morning I boosted my brother though Alice's kitchen window after she had gone off to work. He opened the back door for me and we tiptoed together through the deserted rooms. This house was as hard as the lady herself; it was bare as a barracks, with waxed hardwood floors, bone-white walls and severe furniture, as if she had determined not to give an inch to Skinner romanticism. Feeling like a fool I helped Jacob look in the back of closets, in dresser drawers, under piles of sheets and towels, inevitably white, always sharply folded. I was embarrassed to be touching her clothes; I lifted a bra and blushed. She was my father's mistress and although she was no relation to me and I didn't like her, she seemed in some antique sense my mother. We didn't find anything. "That's that," Jacob said. "So much for my theory." "Alice is smart-she's a chemist with a Ph.D. Would she keep something like that where we could find it?" |
