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Show -206 I stood in my winter suit among the men in bermuda shorts and the wives in bright dresses, looking around for Fancy; I felt like a mole among parakeets and butterflies, an out of season figure of gloom and melancholy that reminded me irresistibly of my own father. He was always bewildered by the people who could enjoy themselves. Parties amazed him and he watched those half-drunk happy people with secret envy disguised as contempt, itself disguised as tolerance and amusement. Shoulder-slappers and woman-pinchers were more incomprehensible than cannibals to my gloomy self-conscious dad. He was, I see it clearly now, a devious man who hid one emotion under another, a conscientious man also, who tried hard to feel what he ought to; he had as many layers as an onion or a pearl and the precious true Self at the center was entombed irrevocably, sealed under the wrappings of Morality and Reason. What a terrible savage Self it must have been to provoke such panic! My father was badly spooked by the heart's reasons that reason knows not, as the French poet says; he spent his life worshipping safely dead savages and denying the true fierce dangerous native in himself. While I searched the hotel grounds Fancy circled back; when I gave up and returned to our room she was there waiting for me, "When I was a little girl I used to think that love was |
