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Show A PROPER INTRODUCTION-29 out to display on the marble-topped table for company. I l i f t each of the dancers out of the white cardboard box and brush off the paper wisps that cling to them. The dancer executing an arabesque is missing a hand, but she's the loveliest, and I kiss her, feeling a l i t t le silly. "I wish I'd paid more attention," I whisper. Then I replace the figurines in the box and carry them upstairs to the marble-topped table where I arrange them in a semicircle in front of the open hymnal. Among the books where I found the hymnal, I also found a framed black and white photograph of Mother. It is an enlargement from the cast photo of a high school play she had danced in. The enlargement shows only her face, heart-shaped and haloed by a dark coronet of braids. Her head is tilted to one side, and her smile has - - -- •- - - - _ _ __ a Victorian sweetness that she had deplored. 'I don't want to be sweet," she would rail. "I want to be more interesting than that!" When we returned to the States, she began falling down from time to time, explaining this at length with reference to slender ankles and pronation of the foot, so often that we stopped listening. For three weeks once, her hands went entirely numb, although they seemed to flutter more than ever. The doctors said she had a conversion hysteria. A few years later she began having dizzy spells so severe that she had to be hospitalized, although no one could determine the cause. Once, she returned home weighing seventy-five pounds. But she seemed to recover, gaining back her normal weight, reading again, thinking. "Perhaps what we think of as life," she announced one morning after Dad had left for the office, "is merely a dream, and the real world is somewhere else, spiritual, where we belong, really belong-to love, to the universe." Some |