I was raised in a household where you were ashamed to watch television though they had one. Be quiet Charles. All during your monthly Sunday visits to the children you talk so much that I have to write you letters to fill you in. Our mother was an artist and you felt funny if you were ever caught watching daytime TV or even reading a regular magazine that people read while they get a lot of caramel creams or salted roasted cashews stuck in their teeth.

See Darwin, don't hold it against me that I didn't keep up with the other rationalists and sometimes melted into the Village Voice. It was just my adolescent rebellion from this Mother of mine who made me half of what I am today.

My mother would get so stoned after her workday of giving safe sane sensible advice and very sensible paths to walk on, that you'd ask her if she paid the phone bill and she'd answer, "Ah sunflower weary of time, that countest the steps to the sun."

So I had to get myself out into more neutral territory. So I split for Denver on a Cracker Barrel and had a great time, camping on the thirsty desert sands until the Giant Panda came back into our life and we left for Reno.

Nix next pix box is a kind of warning to you.

Stay away, Variety hints, from hot toddies, cold bodies, most baby ladies and the white whale. Let the Species originate in a Spy Cell in a plain wrapper. Big Daddy will do the rest for you.

At any rate we have to admit and you have to confront the issue of that I am actually pregnant-check it out with Dr. William Carlos Menninger my gynecologist. And by you Darwin, by you, as paternity blood tests perfected by the famous hemotologist, my old boyfriend Charlie Chaplin will attest.

This one is the slowest to develop of all the twigs that have dropped from my trunk.

Imagine two years of morning sickness and only now is the kid beginning to drop.

Listen Chas, I added up all the essays you wrote while you were home plus the ones you wrote from when you were in the service, which you had stashed with that English agent that had the mole on her ear and actually, assuming you only got say thirty five bucks for the one's that landed in the fancy science quarterlies, at the rate you were turning them out, there still has to be like a couple of hundred bucks a week coming in. Could you get Charlotte the Starlet your flotsom jetsam floozie to cut down on her grass habit maybe so your kids can eat something between your visits!

Charlie, Jesus I can't sleep. I don't want to start in with anyone else when your kid is going bonkety bonk inside me, but maybe I have to start thinking about-see Charlie there's a really nice guy hangs out at Sewer Eight who keeps trying to put it to me (chubby with child though I be) and makes me hot sometimes. Remember hot? I could get wet and forget the invoices piling up on all my broken tractor trucks accumulating when 1 hit Reynolds with a rap about needing fringe benefits since you sure don't provide them anymore, honey!!

My Dear Emma,

I bought a package of cherries for a nickel which I traded for a half empty pack of cigarettes which originally cost sixty five cents. I smoked three of the cigarettes and then traded the rest for an apple and two oranges. I ate one of the oranges and gave the other two to a fellow for a pair of sunglasses which I pawned for fifty cents.

With twenty five of the cents I got a cup of coffee. The other quarter I dropped down one of those ridged manhole covers by accident.

Your former husband,

Chas. Darwin

Yes Chas,

Darwin, we are having a new baby. Now l know it is some time since you left but I have lain, as the expression goes, with no one but my own index finger, so it has got to be yours and one of the slowly gestating type.

In other words, a little mutant as pointed out in your essays. (Got any royalties or sold any foreign rights lately?)

Although several years have passed a blood test would prove definitively that the child is yours. Please send extra allotment for maternity clothes, diaper service, formula service and bonus to your other children for partial loss of my services.

To have the child of him who fled.

Oh marrowed rock to seize the

skinned spaced quicksand scene. I am

having an infant of Charles Darwin!

"Hey Charles, I'm having your baby. Tell the kids to raise it. I am having morning sickness and am going to Max's for a couple of tequila sunrises before my time is upon me."

"I will support the child and take it to the zoo with the others on Sundays to learn navigational law."

"Darwin of course you will support our last born, Ralph Waldo Business Administration. Naturally, you have to since you didn't even show up in court so I won the separation agreement by default!"

"Apart from that though, I'd appreciate your actually taking the new baby and suggest that you give your present mistress, the Whore of Scarsdale, a whack at it."

"Have you no motherly feelings?"

"No."

"No?"

"Darwin, relax for a minute. Take off your degrees and remember that I, Emma your former wife, knew you back when. If you want your last baby to survive you will have to raise it as I can't do that kind of thing any more."

"What kind of thing?"

"Come now Charles Darwin. You remember the slimy creatures Iying in their almost constant ooze, the interminable pouring of nourishing fluid down their embarassingly yawning craws."

"If you do not bear the child and treat it gently a bolt of lightning will break your left hip."

"Listen I can't. I can't. I would have gone to the Village Discreet Assistance Society but I'd waited too long, never imagining your last spurt was still cooking on all burners. See when my waistline began to spread I figured I was just hitting the granola and croissants and genoa salami and provelone too hard."

My Dear Emma,

I am overcome by remorse and pink gin tonight and have no words to answer your painful criticism of some of my little essays and forays into the world! In defense, may I continue my small observations on blushing in hopes that you might rethink some of the scope of your statements. Think, before you write next, of the remarkable blushing syndrome in the Negro. One would imagine that the "filling of the capillaries would reflect a somewhat different tint to what it did before. That the capillaries of the face in the Negro become filled with blood, under the emotion of shame, we may feel confident; because a perfectly characterized albino Negress, described by Buffon showed a faint tinge of crimson on her cheeks when she exhibited herself naked. Cicatrices of the skin remain for a long time white in the Negro, and Dr. Burgess, who had frequent opportunities of observing a scar of this kind on the face of a Negress, distinctly saw that it, 'invariably became red whenever she was abruptly spoken to, or charged with any trivial offence.' The blush could be seen proceeding from the circumference of the scar towards the middle, but it did not reach the centre. Mulattoes are often great'blushers, blush succeeding blush over their faces. From these facts there can be no doubt that Negroes blush, although no redness is visible on the skin.

I am assured by Gaika and by Mrs. Barber that the Kafirs of South Africa never blush; but this may only mean that no change of color is distinguishable. Gaika adds that under the circumstances that would make a European blush, his countrymen 'look ashamed to keep their heads up.'

It is asserted by four of my informants that the Australians, who are almost as black as negroes, never blush. A fifth answers doubtfully, remarking that only a very strong blush could be seen. Three observers state that they do blush; Mr. S. Wilson adding that this is noticeable only under a strong emotion, and when the skin is not too dark from long exposure. Mr. Lang answers, 'I have noticed that shame almost always excites a blush, which frequently extends as low as the neck.' Shame is also shown, as he adds, by the eyes being turned from side to side.' As Mr. Lang was a teacher in a native school, it is probable that he chiefly observed children; and we know that they blush more than adults. Mr. G. Taplin has seen half-castes blushing, and he says that the aborigines have a word expressive of shame. Mr. Hagenauer, who is one of those who has never observed the Australians to blush, says that he has, 'seen them looking down to the ground on account of shame;' and the missionary, Mr. Bulmer, remarks that though 'I have noticed that the eyes of the children, when ashamed, present a restless, watery appearance, as if they did not know where to look.

The facts now given are sufficient to show that blushing, whether or not there is any change of color, is common to most, probably to all, of the races of man."

Emma try to listen for once and don't bust in! I have been warning you about habit. A man gets stuck in his habits.

"Therefore, when a man sees his ball traveling in a wrong direction, and he intensely wishes it to go in another direction, he cannot avoid, from long habit, unconsciously performing movements whicl, in other cases he has found effectual.

As an instance of sympathetic movements Gratiolet gives (p. 212) the following case:-'un jeune chien a oreilles droites, auquel son amitre presente de loin quel'que viande appetissante, fixe avec ardeur ses yeux sur cet objet dont il suit tout les mouvements, et pendant que les yeux regardent, les deux oreilles se portent en avant comme si cet object pouvait etre entendu.' Here, instead of speaking of sympathy between the ears and eyes, it appears to me more simple to believe, that as dogs during many generations have, whilst intently looking at any object, pricked their ears in order to perceive any sound; and conversely have looked intently in the direction of a sound to which they may have listened, the movements of these organs have become firmly associated together through long-continued habit."

Yours always,

Charles Darwin

Dear Chas,

Send Blue Cross card for me and mother's helper for our other children. This is my due date . . .

Foreclose and smothered days ago our hindmothers brought forth on this canto, rent with torn factions, an equal, revived in property and postulated on the decibel that all men are created level. Now we are unmade in a great Scarborough Fair fasting whether that faction or any factions so believed and so debilitated can long encore. We are met on first rate cottonfield of that core.

Now we are rephrased in a great devil's door testing whether one ancient so deceived and so situated can long tenure. We are met on the eight cattle car har de har har.

It is to us the gliding rather to be beer predicated on those the foam has thus far soberly contraindicated.

Let me assure penpals and loved ones alike, no discrimination, that it is terrifying to be the wife of Charles Darwin who has dedicated his life that that baboon so banana splitted and so zoo placated, shall not perish from the earth.

"Please be quiet. lt's survival of the fittest. She was never strong. We knew that."

"I knew nothing of the kind."

"Just be quiet for a while. I have to climb a mountain and need absolute-just for a moment-silence."

Four sore unleavened years ago our brothers sought north some incontinent, a skewed station constrained in battery and eradicated to the restoration that well then we're elated sequal.

Now we are collaged in a great festered sore guessing whether any station so construed and so eradicated can Paul Revere.

We make book on the white metalmine of what for.

We have come to resusitate a motion of that mine as a tunneled fasting place for those who here grave there lies that the station mines caves. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a danger fence we cannot eradicate-we cannot concentrate-we cannot follow this sound.

The take ten giving and bled who struggled here, have concentrated it far above our poor power to pad or retract.

The failed will river boat nor chicken gumbo what we say here but it can never forget what they did here.

"Emma, stop jabbering I'll come down off the mountain and earn more money. Would money help?"

"My stomach is bloated, Darwin, and sticks out again. Boy, just two years ago I could Iook clown and see my own cunt. Now pot bellied, I qualify for Mother of the Year awards. Charles, what if in just telling about it, something gets so lost into the already gutted plucked chicken of memory? See the obstetrician says I must stop eating Clark Bars or the intant will pee and be nuts. Don't you think that's an old wives tale? Remember when we made our very own chocolate chip cookies, Charlie, from the Nestles toll house cookies make-your-own kit in the two boxes? One held the chocolate chips themselves, the other held the dry ingredients. You just mixed water and a beat up egg, added the morsels and-I know I'm incoherent. Darwin, I need a Blue Cross card for me and a mother's helper for our other children. This is my due date according to Edgar Cayce."

`'Then how come after all this time my seed has taken hold and you're pregnant?"

"Whaddya mean how come? Christsake Darwin, can't you ever see nothing clear unless it's like written on the sky or something. It's a mutant. Like I said before, I'm a hot potato and a slow gestator."

"Emma, that doesn't even rhyme."

"Everything doesn't always have to rhyme to be part of the human condition, dearie."

"That's true. See you in December. Bye bye love."

"Bye bye sourball. My uterus runneth over."

"Emma, please don't be sarcastic any more. Can't we be friends?"

"Sure Chas. Just send a check in your next fascinating and erudite letter."

My Dear Emma,

Times are hard. "Under a keen sense of shame there is a strong desire for concealment. We turn away the whole body, more especially the face, which we endeavor in some manner to hide. An ashamed person can hardly endure to meet the gaze of those present, so that he almost invariably casts down his eyes or looks askant. As there generally exists at the same time a strong wish to avoid the appearance of shame, a vain attempt is made to look direct at the person who causes this feeling; and the antagonism between these opposite tendencies leads to various restless movements in the eyes. I have noticed two ladies who, whilst to which they are very liable, have thus acquired, as it appears, the oddest trick of incessantly blinking their eyelids with extraordinary rapidity. An intense blush is sometimes accompanied by a slight effusion of tears; and this, I presume, is due to the lacrymal glands partaking of the increased supply of blood, which we know rushes into the capillaries of the adjoining parts, including the retina.

Many writers, ancient and modern, have noticed the foregoing movements; and it has already been shown that the aborigines in various parts of the world often exhibit their shame by looking downwards or askant, or by restless movements of their eyes. Ezra cries our (Ch. ix. 6), "0, my God! I am ashamed, and blush to lift up my head to thee, my God." In Isaiah (Ch. 1. 6) we meet with the words, "I hid not my face from shame." Seneca remarks (Epist. xi. 5) "that the Roman players hang down their heads, fix their eyes on the ground and keep them lowered, but are unable to blush in acting shame."

I have done everything I can to help. Do you not feel guilt and shame in harrassing me so that my work is slowed?

With patience and fondness still,

Charles Darwin

Dear Chas,

I take this note in pen to inform you that your newly arrived son Ralph Waldo Business Administration has arrived like a brick of ton. He weighs thirty-seven pounds twelve ounces. I am all skin and bones.

I wanted to cooperate with the doctors and each time they said bear down, I bore down. But they had to deliver him by breech of promise because he weighed thirty-seven pounds at birth. I'm tired.

This is the kind of child he is Darwin. No monthly visit or metastatic permutation or commutation of the species. Insights have been exchanged between us, Charles. Don't pay any attention to me. I'm just crazy old Emma.

Born alone. We pass box cars so fleeting. Rap rap-promises were made across this table. You get a couple of spots on your hat and you 're through, Arthur Miller. Charles is tending to be chintzy lately (fear of fleeing). Now a bastard is what you are not Ralph Waldo Business Administration. Your father was an eminent Social Tea Biscuit.

"Father, mother is having hallucinations again."

"Where is my destiny? When will my milk come in?"

"Emma my dear, the question as to whether we are mammalian or reptilian has yet to be answered."

"Okay Charles. Anyhow more shit they're handing out in this Blue Shield where wordless cretin gelatinous misfigured boy awaits gestation of state. Your latest child Ralph Waldo Business Administration lies in his cradle mooing."

"Father, mother is having hallucinations again."

Emma dear,

Try my dear, in your everyday encounters with Ralph Waldo at your side, shoving the other children over the counter as it were, to be less belittling. Though his actions and appearance attract criticism, be proud and firm. The other children will pick up from your strength.

"Shyness, as the derivation of the word in several languages indicates, is closely related to fear, yet it is distinct from fear in the ordinary sense. A shy man no doubt dreads the notice of strangers, but can hardly be said to be afraid of them; he may be as bold as a hero in battle, and yet have no self-confidence about trifles in the presence of strangers. Almost every one is extremely nervous when first addressing a public assembly, and most men remain so throughout their lives; but this appears to depend on the consciousness of a great coming exertion, with its associated effects on the system, rather than on shyness; although a timid or shy man no doubt suffers on such occasions infinitely more than another. With very young children it is difficult to distinguish between fear and shyness; but this latter feeling with them has often seemed to me to partake of the character of the wildness of an untamed animal. Shyness comes on at a very early age. In one of our own children, when two years and three months old, I saw a trace of what certainly appeared to be shyness, directed towards myself after an absence from home of only a week. This was shown not by a blush, but by the eyes being for a few minutes slightly averted from me. I have noticed on other occasions that shyness or shamefacedness and real shame are exhibited in the eyes of young children before they have acquired the power of blushing.

As shyness apparently depends on self-attention, we can perceive how right are those who maintain that reprehending children for shyness, instead of doing them any good, does much harm, as it calls their attention still more closely to themselves. It has been well urged that 'nothing hurts young people more than to be watched continually about their feelings, to have their circumstances scrutinized, and the degrees of their sensibility measured by the surveying eye of the unmerciful spectator. Under the constraint of such examinations they can think of nothing but that they are looked at, and feel nothing but shame or apprehension."

Fondly still,

Charles Darwin

At the time Mother was having her first freakout, our father, though his letters indicated otherwise, was separated, living with his mistress and keeping his own anxiety down by total immersion in his work.

Mother's mental state consisted of a layer of angst and two layers of deep anxiety overlaid with much flooding of the unconscious. She was pregnant with my youngest brother at the time our father split and his rejection-added to the depression she was already in after the death of our sister Annie at age ten, left her open to weird hallucinations and fantasies.

It scared me when Mother kept having these hallucinations and sometimes I thought of going to live with Father but his mistress was really a nerd and anyhow I could see after Mother gave birth to our brother Ralph, that she was in bad head shape and needed help.

She took care of the kid properly and even continued cooking and keeping house for us but she cried a lot of the time and wrote lots of guilt provoking letters to our father who had more or less spaced himself out of our scene.

It was true that his checks for our support were minimal but in his defense let me say that all his royalties went for xeroxes and funds towards the classification of xeroxes so it was heavy to ask hum for money to fix our mundane teeth or get clarinet lessons when his income could have gone back easily into supporting his work.

Mother didn't realize that he too needed something to drown out the clanking gears in his head. Both of them had taken the death of Annie very hard.

The lady shrink from the social service agency said that Mother had worked too intensely before and during her pregnancy and was just having what was called a transient situational neurosis because of having lost a child before. They said to be patient and eventually Mother would come out of her space and talk about the new baby realistically instead of defensively chattering about jive fantasy notions like he was a thirty seven pound mutant who had been gestating for years and was going to split like a big overgrown amoeba into two equal parts.

I told the social worker Mother actually seemed to think all this was happening but she told me to read R. D. Laing and get Mother some megavitamins and not give the freakout a name or it would become a self fulfilling fantasy.

It was nice that they were so radical and reassured us that Mother would get better, but it didn't help at the time.

"Yes Father. Good morning Father. Mother freaked out and thought she had given birth to a thirty seven pound mutant when life got too hard for her."

"What do you mean, too hard for her? Life's hard for everyone."

"No really Father. You've got your theories and all your papers to keep you going. Mother doesn't have any interests of her own. I mean all she's ever done was raise us."

"Well she was only doing what was necessary according to her role in nature. She's a good woman and just because I had to split temporarily on account of-um-personality changes-doesn't mean that we both don't love our children and-"

"Sure Father, sure. I know. You've stopped wanting to be together, but you both still like and respect each other and you both still love us, your children. Did you ever read a story by Herb Gold called Love or Like?"

"I am a reasonably significant scholar with no time to read popular fiction."

"Sure Father sure. You're a reasonably significant social scientist and you love us but you'd rather hang out with Charlotte and smoke pot than help us write term papers."

"That's very judgemental. My head's tired at the end of the day."

"So's Mother's. The baby takes a lot out of her. Doing it all over again. She freaks out because she's frightened."

"Why is she frightened? It's very safe here at Downs."

"Oh come off it Father. She misses you and she keeps brooding about Annie. She only started acting a bit nutsy after Annie died. You'd never talk about it and it drove her wild."

"Couldn't talk about it. Still can't. I have my work."

"Well Mother has us and the new baby and it's hard for her to keep her cool at the moment."

"Still, all this jabber of thirty seven pound mutants and God knows what. Maybe I should hospitalize her and get a housekeeper. Doesn't it scare you-your mother in such a depression?"

"Father, please. Just don't do anything. Okay? Give us our money but don't do anything. Mother's fantasy will pass when things are a little easier. The doctor told me there are hormonal changes when a woman has a baby. And all that ergot in her bread pudding. She's probably still tripping."

"I went through changes too. See I don't understand her. I work hard. At the moment I'm conducting a voluminous correspondence, concluding my observations of the Galapagos Archipelago and trying to figure out how I can send a monthly check to your mother and still have money left for an occasional pack of cigarettes. "

"Please Father. I'm old enough to know when you're poormouthing but not old enough to earn my own way."

"Yes. Well you'll never know what it's like to be a parent until you're a parent yourself. Anyhow agreed that we'll take it on faith that your mother doesn't need to be hospitalized and I'll try to send enough for some household help. All I ask is that you try to dissuade her from using what little leisure time she has left writing me these nutty letters about mutants."

"Yes. I hate to say it Father but some of mother's letters to you are fantasies and some concern what's real. For example, I still need corrective dentistry."

"Thought you'd get around to that. My dear child, we all need or think we need corrective dentistry but some things are necessities and others are luxuries."

"Can I quote you on that?"

"Don't be sarcastic my child, don't be sarcastic."

Shortly after I had this formal talk with my Father in the anteroom of an attorney's office (as Mother was at that time sueing him for back and future child support again), Mother began to edge back to cheerfulness though still verbalizing her freakout hallucinations and talking of them as real."

''Born with a large hyatal hernia, a small brain, a supposedly vestigial appendix as big as a Nathan's hot dog, and his initials embossed on his forehead in crosstiched cat gut, our uncorrelated son Ralph Waldo Emerson, is clearly yours. For Christsake Darwin, it doesn't take bloodtests and chromosome counts to see the kid is yours, he looks like you."

"Emma where are your manners? You spout a wishful thought, a pestiferous projection, a self fulflling prophecy. 'The ordinary course of development of beings such as the Echinodermata, in which new organs are formed at quite remote spots from the previous parts, seem to me extremely difficult to reconcile on any view except the free diffusion in the parent of the germs or gemmules of each separate new organ; and so in cases of alternate generation.' "

"Nirts with the doubletalk Charles. Whatever it is, we made it and now we must lie in it. Or raise it. Or whatever you do with-"

"Please don't. Don't think about it. Hush darling. Don't remember the time, months and months before Annie got sick. We were off to see the skaters at the little frozen pond and she wore a wine colored velvet muff and bonnet, trimmed with white fur. A11 the while it never stopped snowing, hundreds of First Aid cotton balls falling from the icy sky."

"I can't think about it."

"I can't either. Sorry I mentioned-"

"Never mind.''

Emma dreams of divorce procedures. Waking up at 3 A.M. with a memory of crazy trials conducted in sleep.

"Judge, the plaintiff wishes to say several sentences in his own defence, regarding his past ambivalent attitude towards presumed past due extra child support in connection with the case of complaintant Emma Darwin."

"This is highly irregular."

"Everything is highly irregular, Judge. Why don't you hear the guy out. My client is a famous scientist and-"

"Okay, Chas, the judge says you can talk."

"Yes, er . . . lt fades so far, Emma's breasts and belly heaving under Me. But my mind had fled-off in some waist high sinking of snow, hearing so many church bells that winter, and chanting of cantors in synagogues. Silent snow secret snow was a story by Conrad Aiken-I studied it in high school. The whole thing happening even while Annie's white triangle of a face that had been ready to laugh most of her ten years, had begun to get sharp and patient, her eyes patient also, waiting for pain to go away. It's not natural God, not natural. Not to a child, so ready for everything. Gazing and fading. Mind out of time. Nets of days. Coughing green."

"It doesn't take thinking about, Charles. I remember too. Anyhow--"

Scuffle of papers, rearrangement of collar and tie. Mouth so dry.

"Yes judge. In my own defense let me say that 'I have a very decided opinion that all mammals must have descended from a single parent. Reflect on the multitude of details, very many of them of extremely little importance to their habits (as the number of bones of the head & etc.). Now this large amount of similarity I must look at as certainly due to inheritance from a common stock. I am aware that some cases occur in which a similar or nearly similar organ has been acquired by independent acts of natural selection. But in most of such cases of these apparently so closely similar organs, some important homological differences may be detected.' I hold up exhibit A, two diagrams showing the sort of manner I conjecture that mammals like us have been developed. 'A' in the diagram I am showing you' Your Holy Judgeness Sir, represents an unknown form, probably intermediate between mammals, reptiles and birds, as intermediate as Lepidosiren now is between fish and Batachrians. This unknown form is probably more closely related to Ornithorhychnus than to any other known form. I do not think that the multiple origin of dogs goes against the single origin of man. All the races of man are so infinitely closer together than to any ape, that (as in the case of descent of all mammals from one projenitor) I should look at all races of men as having certainly descended from one parent. I should look at it as probable that the races of men were less numerous and less divergent formerly than now, unless indeed, some lower and more aberrant race even than the Hottentot has become extinct. Supposing as I do for one believe that our dogs have descended from two or three wolves, jackals, etc.; yet these have, on our View, descended from a single remote unknown progenitor . . ."

"Counsellor, kindly state in regular English what the plaintiff is saying."

"Yes Judge. Sure Judge, Mr. Charlie Sir. I think my client wants it made clear that the infant in question, Ralph Waldo, was conceived by his wife alone, without his even fertilizing the compaintant's ovum."

"Bench rules for the complainant. Plaintiff to pay back extra child support and court costs. Jeez Harry, even us judges know a woman can't do it alone."

"Honest your holiness, the guy's got a real scientific explanation for it. And the infant's a messy musilaginous acne covered enlarged prostate of a bedsore. It's a mutation, Judge."

"Vere vaste a mutation? Vus vilsta? Knadelsoup on your legal stand."

"I made the potroast that day earlier actually because Aloysha had come at lunch to bring a new mouthpiece for Annie's clarinet. He'd got hold of some really fine reeds."

"I beg you not to remind me. Done is done. It was less than a week later that she no longer had enough breath to practice. The melodies that used to come pouring out of her pink and white room-"

"Does Aloysha come to see you ever?"

"Not lately Emma. But I know he still comes to see the others."

"He'll always be around."

Passage of time like a ship maybe, or something like maybe a torn sail.

Dream:

"Ralph Waldo Business Administration has killed his High School principal and had carnal knowledge of her after death. Chas, you have to get a good mouthpiece to spring our son. He's into some kind of heavy space up at Sing Sing and they want encore after encore.

Darwin excuse the typos. Ralph Waldo Business Administration cut its first tooth today. It's sharper than a serpant's claw. Charles, our mutant offspring is an outright regression. We got it on and we were lucky with the others as we were of different attitudes but this bloated bleep that blew out of my blackened blasted vagina like puffed feet shot from huns has got to be headed in a genetic misdirection. The kid's an assembly line lemon."

"Emma it is time for the five AM feeding and miles away I am experiencing your repressed rejection of the infant. It will make him feel unloved. Those species survive that are validated by their hag ridden mothers."

"Nerts Darwinsky. The kids a cretin! You want I should raise it like a bank president?"

"Just exercise a bit of positive reinforcement Emma, my little chickadee. Just a friendly constructive bit of mother's milk now and then."

"It was with a sledge hammer that I first experienced orgasm. Shortly afterwards I ran off with a Fuller Brush. He died in a brief brush fire. Wanna see my thirty seven pound cretinous son (by Charles Darwin who fought the Boulder Dam and single handedly brought Origin to the Species) drool in his dank bedrizzled diaper?"

"Emma, it grieves me to see your continued pessimism and irony concerning the child."

"Recessive reclusion or maybe a depression? Caught a monkey back to back and called the syringe 'honey'."

"Doctor tres Malade in Troy wires that there is hope. Send the infants urine, feces and a single hair from its head, for laboratory observation."

"The left head or the right head?"

My Dear Emma,

Blushing is the most peculiar of the most human of all expressions. Monkeys redden from passion, but it would require an overwhelming amount of evidence to make us believe that any animal could blush. The reddening of the face from a blush is due to the relaxation of the muscular coats of the small arteries, by which the capillaries become filled with blood; and this depends on the proper vaso-motor center being affected. No doubt if there be at the same time much mental agitation, the general circulation will be affected; but it is not due to the action of the heart that the network of minute vessels covering the face becomes under a sense of shame gorged with blood. We can cause laughing by tickling the skin, weeping or frowning by a blow, trembling from the fear of pain, and so forth; but we cannot cause a blush, as Dr. Burgess remarks, by any physical means-that is by any action on the body. It is the mind which must be affected. Blushing is not only involuntary; but the wish to restrain it, by leading to self-attention actually increases the tendency.

The young blush much more freely than the old, but not during infancy, which is remarkable, as we know that infants at a very early age redden from passion. I have received authentic accounts of two little girls blushing at the ages of between two and three years, and of another sensitive child, a year older, blushing when reproved for a fault. Many children, at a somewhat more advanced age, blush in a strongly marked manner. It appears that the mental powers of infants are not as yet sufficiently developed to allow of their blushing. Hence, also, it is that idiots rareIy blush. Dr. Crichton Browne observed for me those under his care, but never saw a genuine blush, though he has seen their faces flush, apparently from joy, when food was placed before them, and from anger. Nevertheless some. if not utterly degraded, are capable of blushing. A microcephalic idiot, for instance, thirteen years old, whose eyes brightened a little when he was pleased or amused, had been described by Dr. Behn as blushing and turning to one side, when undressed for medical examination.

Women blush much more than men. It is rare to see an old man, but not nearly so rare to see an old woman, blushing. The blind do not escape. Laura Bridgman, born in this condition, as well as completely deaf, blushes.

It is remarkable that no matter how outrageous or unjust your accusations, you-unlike most of womankind, never blush. How come?

Your still affectionate husband

Charles Darwin

*** I could not weep and stabbed my feet. Not sleep could ease my mind. Foamy I shaved pubis myself, well prepared to wend historic path down Levine Road to Jewish Memorial Hospital. Help Chas!

Eightieth Answer of Charles Darwin. "Get a horse!"

Dear Emma,

(6) When in good spirits do the eyes sparkle, with the skin a little wrinkled round and under them, and with the mouth a little drawn back at the corners?

(7) When a man sneers or snarls at another, is the corner of the upper lip over the canine or eye tooth raised on the side facing the man whom he addresses?

(8) Can a dogged or obstinate espression be recognized, which is chiefly shown by the mouth being firmly closed, a lowering brow and a slight frown?

(9) Is contempt expressed by a slight protrusion of the lips and by turning up the nose, and with a slight expiration?

(10) Is disgust shown by the lower lip being turned down, the upper lip slightly raised, with a sudden expiration, something like incipient vomiting, or like something spit out of the mouth?

(I I) ls extreme fear expressed in the same general manner as with Europeans?

(12) Is laughter ever carried to such an extreme as to bring tears into the eyes?

(13) When a man wishes to show that he cannot prevent something being done, or cannot himself do something, does he shrug his shoulders, turn inwards his elbows, extend outwards his hands and open the palms; with the eyebrows raised?

(14) Do the children, when sulky, pout or greatly protrude the lips?

(15) Can guilty, or sly, or jealous expressions be recognized? Though I know not how these can be defined.

(16) Is the head nodded vertically in affirmation, and shaken laterally in negation?

Observations on natives who have had little communication with Europeans would be of course the most valuable, though those made on any natives would be of much interest to me. General remarks on expression are of comparatively little value; and memory is so deceptive that I earnestly beg it may not be trusted. A definite description of the countenance under any emotion or frame of mind, with a statement of the circumstances under which it occured, would possess much value.

New York Family Court is one thing, but when it says clearly in the Tibetan Common Law that the decay of the children shall not be visited upon the parent, I suggest that next time round you get thyself to a clinic as my income you well know is insufficient. Towards the end of the month we find ourselves nibbling remaindered encyclopedias. Anyhow, so be it, you be the mother. It is a role you chose. I have spoken.

Your husband,

Charles Darwin

"So? Darwin. So you have spoken. Big deal!"

"Charlotte has agreed to raise the child as her own. Send registered, on delivery, return receipt requested. Leave airholes on outside. Stamps enclosed for special delivery after regular delivery as soon as physician considers it safe. If we're out package can be left in package room."

"Darwin, where did we fail? Where the tragic miscommunication? All my life I tried to be a woman, mother and artist. Now you take the last memento of my years with you. You have stripped me of everything else. Let me at least keep our son!"

"Okay."

*** My Dear Emma,

May I quote Mr. Herbert Spencer: "Fear, when strong, expresses itself in cries, in efforts to hide or escape, in palpitations and tremblings; and these are just the manifestations that would accompany an actual experience of the evil feared. The destructive passions are shown in a general tension of the muscular system, in gnashing of the teeth and protrusion of the claws, in dilated eyes and nostrils. In growls; and these are weaker forms of the actions that accompany the killing of prey." Here we have, as I believe, the true theory on a large number of expressions; but the chief interest and difficulty of the subject lies in following out the wonderfully complex results. I infer that some one (but who he is I have not been able to ascertain) formerly advanced a nearly similar view, but Sir C. Bell says, "It has been maintained that what are called the external signs of passion, are only the concomitants of those voluntary movements which the structure renders necessary." Mr. Spencer has also published a valuable essay of the physiology of laughter, in which he insists on "the general law that feeling passing a certain pitch, habitually vents itself in bodily action;" and that "an overflow of nerve force undirected by any motive, will manifestly take first the most habitual routes; and if these do not suffce, will next overflow into the next habitual ones." This law I believe to be of the highest importance in throwing light on our subject."

Do you recognize yourself? Especially recently?

Your former,

Charles Darwin

*** "Boom boom. Try to make boom boom Ralph Waldo. Tinkle Ralph Waldo. Try to make poo poo Ralph Waldo. Try. Try. If at first you don't succeed try try again. Here we go round the mulberry bush the mulberry bridge is falling. Chas, I have to tell you- I regret to inform you-that-burp-going going gone-daffy maybe. They sold our son at auction, Darwin. I was turning a trick with an auctioneer of my acquaintance since towards the end of the month I have to do something to keep your kids in cornflakes and Carnation milk. Well it was only going to be a quick twelve buck hand job because I told the auctioneer I couldn't get a babysitter for Ralph Waldo and he had to come along. The auctioneer thanked me afterwards with a bonus of a nickel bag of homegrown and rolled me a J for the road of all buds and flowering tops."

"Emma, your maternal behavior is incorrigible."

"Tell it to the judge, Darwin. Anyhow I spaced and usually I stick the kid in this Key Food plastic shopping bag I carry around but this time I walked out without him. Soon as I got home and the effects of the vile insidious illegal weed wore off I phoned up to say I'd take the next bus back to pick him up and meanstwhile the auctioneer should throw him a marrow bone or two. Well, love, what happened was that Ralphie had gone into one of his late afternoon trances (the shrink at Polysylabble institute called it Catatonia). So this creep had held the auction and sold our lastborn as part of a shipload of objects d'art."

"Emma, I'll send a a check to buy the child back. Incidentally, it hurts me to think of the depths to which my former household has fallen."

"Yeah sure. Only it's not that easy. The guy claims he got shipped already and they want costs plus."

"We should go to legal aid. What right had he to sell our son at auction?"

"Yeah. Lotsa luck. A penny saved is a penny earned."

"Emma, Your words have reached me. What can I do to help? Emma. your words have encroached on me. I am beaten to a pulp."

"Me too. Our child is not yet located. Send more money."

"Emma, you keep changing the subject. I implore you not to be so involved in new personal existence as to forget your duties as a mother. Also, as this is a long distance conversation, don't interrupt. In all honesty I can no longer deal with the orthodontist's bills you send me regularly, much less the maturational lag of the muckraked rawhide child of our final copulation. But you always made a good cup of coffee. I'll say that for you."

"Thank you Charlie. Have a little Irish whiskey for the road. It'll loosen the britches of your heart."

"My heart is not in need of loosening."

"Nyah, nyah, baby you're still up tight, Charles. Doncha ever relax and drop the veneer or change your venue? On the rocks or with ice?"

"Thank you no. I'm a teetotaller now. Have to stay sober for my work. I even keep my bit of snuff in the hall to make it harder for myself to be tempted."

"You didn't used to feel that way Charlsie. Many's the Saturday night you picked up your paycheck from the Academy of Genetic Buffs. Twice you got time and a half and at the time of the mine cave-in you were drawing double time burping hybrid peas. But you always blew it, buying rounds of Guiness for the Academy in Lion's Pub before I ever seen a hair of your head. And me shivering in the cottage on the moors with the babies close about me, all huddled under the hand knit knickers of one of your fancy women or students or whatever. I used to find their semen soaked knickers in your file folders and rinsed them all, sewing them together into a shelter for your children."

"Woman, you guilt provoke. This demands much psychic energy on my part."

"Charles, have a sugared cruller and say no more. All is ended between us."

"Yes indeed. Give me my boxer shorts and my clothesline and let me go home."

"You are home. You split, remember? You're in the Ganges with your floozie. Your bunion footed botany student. Nevertheless, here the items you named are all neatly washed and ironed for you and folded on the hot toddy. Thanks for the extra Christmas check. Have a good year."

"Emma, where did we fail?"

"Charles, do you think my self abuse as a child and later when I was Valedictorian caused the acromeglomaniac microcephalic spitfoam quality of out latest child?"

"I don't know dear."

"Well, apart from that, do you have a fire extinguisher?"

My Dear Emma,

No, I certainly do not have a fire extinguisher. I am an evolutionary Essayist but I still retain modesty. At any rate, as I pointed out in some previous letter in reference to habit, Gratiolet appears to overlook inherited habit, and even to some extent habit in the individual; and therefore he fails, as it seems to me, to give the right explanation, or any explanation at all, of many gestures and expressions. As an illustration of what he calls symbolic movements, I will quote his remarks, taken from M. Chevreul, on a man playing at billiards. "Si une bille devie legerement de la direction que le joueur pretent lui imprimer, ne l'avez-vous pas vu cent fois la pousser du regard, de la tete et meme des epaules, comme si ces mouvements, purement symboliques, pouvaient rectifier son trajet? Des mouvements non moins significatifs se produisent quand la bille manque d'une impulsion suiffisante. Et chex les joueurs novices, ils sont quelequefois accuses au point d'eveiller le sourire sur les levres des spectatuers." Such movements, as it appears to me, may be attributed simply to habit. As often as a man has wished to move an object to one side, he has always pushed it to that side.

In concluding, let me express my reaction to your Deathwish telegrams and letters concerning your most recent suggestion--that Charlotte and I raise the child you still claim is mine. May I offer the solution that you put aside for several months your usual bi-weekly thoughts and plans of suicide, stop making your continuous and habitual wills, and rest easy in the knowledge that we are considering your kind offer.

Your affectionate husband,

Charles Darwin

Dear Chas,

Have you noticed that our mutation's drools are getting droller? He isn't unassimilated matter after all. He is just a slow learner.

Maggie got Jiggs with the rolling pin. Pop eyed his spinach. Dick traced a parabola through the old Journal American. Say what happened, Chas?

Darwin, our monstrous defective has got one of the girls in his class pregnant. The parents are livid. You are invited to the parents meeting What will you wear-white tie and tails? Let me know in advance so I can mark it on my calendar as our dress should reflect to mutual advantage.

We pass boxcars so fleeting and all those thousand eyes still waiting Box cars to all those other ice cream places. Never knew this time. Butterfly maybe next time.

Later darling, all the people would have gone away and the children be sleeping. Down in the steerage, wailing like his blown out stomach would burst, my father, the first not yet Americanized eight month old to win the battle with infantile dysentary, was renamed by the Rabbi so the angel of death would pass over him.

I am Emma, nee Wedgewood, invaded by Jewish memory. Help!

Dasher Prancer, Jean Dixon, Vicks Vapor Rub and Blitzen Santa Claus' reindeer ate a snail and called the shell macaroni.

Ralph Waldo Business Administration. Birth pangs, birth pangs, labor, Tory, Whig, Socialist. Before they showed him to me he could have been anything. All that waiting, two years pregnant, I could've had an elephant or a bank president. Instead they held him up. Ring around the rosy, all fall down, boy there was some enclave in the delivery room, I'm telling you it was like a circus of antiquity-they sent in all the fourth year medical students to observe-the kid could've been King Kong for all the fuss they made about him. Especially after he first slid out after a high forceps breach presentation (during which I reached a new potless high) and slid into a liquid pool on the floor. They evidently realized he was the infant and not the placenta by his rancid blue eye and his screech, and mushed him back into solider form with the help of an energetic nurse and a couple of spare bunsen burners.

Yours,

Emma

"He was a coital catastrophe, careening randomly in his second hand skinner crib. Gesundheit."

"Who are you referring to Chas darling?"

"Our family style foolishness in that we loved each other then and thought-"

" You thought!"

All those events. Getting reflective, result of removal of mutant and odd sense of relief-quick glance shows me to be all there.

"Father, mother's hallucinations are getting too heavy for us."

"Charles, they've got our child in rehab and think they can make a computer component out of it."

"Emma, congrats on successful placement of Ralph Waldo via Foundation for the Redefinition of Sanity Referral Service. Keep me informed as to his progress. By the way, do you know where I can get a nickel bag? Charlotte's dealer got laid off just before he got tenure and is having Catatonia in a halfway house named Retreat. "

"Chas, the kid rammed all the principal personnel of his school into a corner with his BB gun and took their cash, keys and crackerjacks. Channel 13 is keeping a silent vigil for him and the other children are out looking. Is this a time to scrounge for pot?"

"Your words have reached me. What can I do to help?''

Dear Chas,

Okay. Think about it, think about it. You always think too much.

Darwin do you know about my doll? My doll was named Honey because it was diminutive for Hernia. She was a large paper mache Grecian faced lady who stood upright and free except for one arm leaning on a paper-mache tree stump. Her skin was painted rosy pink, her eyes stared innocently and blankly. She was beautiful and I loved her though I had to hand sew a whole custom made wardrobe for her, with snap fasteners where her hand joined the tree stump. She had, as befits every great Greek, one tragic flaw, she had a hernia and wore a truss.

My doll was a discarded display piece from my father's Prophylactic Resale Station.

I lugged Honey from one end of childhood to the other, year after year, sometimes wrapped decently in a blanket, sometimes flauntng her incurable wound, with her elastic support. No insult about Honey touched me. Omaha Beach was the place where I started to learn about the world, and what I learned then was that though you had to conform to good manners, and I was so well trained it didn't make it hard, you could play a little trick on your family by walking your own not quite illegal, not ouite reprehensible parapet.

Perhaps what I'm trying to say is that towards the end I became in gingham playsuit and Buster Brown sandals, hair freshly combed, face glowing with soap and water, Omaha Beach's first real beatnik.

Some of the anger is leaving. Darwin, I try to remember about summers. We were really wrong for each other but everything that happened in the summer always seemed right. Why did everything get worse after Annie died? Charles, you turned so cold. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't anybody's fault. I know that now for sure. I swear it Charles. Don't punish me anymore for God's stinking sin.

Yours,

Emma

Calm yourself Emma,

For it is certain that the melodic effect of a series of sounds does not depend in the least on their loudness or softness, or on their absolute pitch. A tune is always the same tune, whether it is sung loudly or softly, by a child or a man; whether it is played on a flute or a trombone. The purely musical effect of any sound depends on its place in what is technically called a 'scale'; the same sound producing absolutely different effects on the ear according as it is heard in connection with one or another series of sounds.

"It is on this relative association of the sounds that all the essentially characteristic effects which are summed up in the phrase 'musical expression,' depend. But why certain associations of sounds have such-and-such effects, is a problem which yet remains to be solved. These effects must indeed, in some way or other, be connected with the well-known arithmetical relations between the rates of vibration of the sound which form a musical scale. And it is possible-but this is merely a suggestion-that the greater or less mechanical facility with which the vibrating apparatus of the human larynx passes from one state of vibration to another, may have been a primary cause of the greater or less pleasure produced by various sequences of sounds."

But leaving aside these complex questions and confining ourselves to the simpler sounds, we can, at least, see some reasons for the association of certain kinds of sounds with certain states of mind."

Therefore, my dear, in the ensuing phone conversations which are necessary if we are to resolve our differences of opinion as to the ultimate disposition of your child support suit re the twins, try to restrain your voice from hitting those decibel levels which destroy my day.

Still fondly,

Charles Darwin

Dear Charles,

I'm still remembering picking up Annie from some child's birthday party. And another day when she was hassled. First Annie got short changed at Key Foods. Missed the call, found on arrival that the refrigerator had gotten wired into the kitchen sink by the tipsy piano tuner and stoned tape recorder repair man. Wanted just one drink of water to wash down her aspirin, found that only gravy, borscht and yogurt poured from the faucet and finally blew out the candles on her tenth birthday cake.

Annie got short changed at Key Foods twice but couldn't care less. Cashed a check for her mother. The bankline consisted of thirteen hundred meat packers with their paychecks. Annie, so young to take a note to the bank.

We pass boxcars so fleeting. Boxcars to all those other ice cream places-never know this time. Going opposite, opposite. Next time to see that heaven in a grain of sand.

Remember how we saw Ingmar Fellini's The Magnificant, on Eighth Street with Annie? She sat on the highest spot in the balcony. She loved parts of it and hated other parts. I can't remember if we stopped for frozen yogurt. No, she ran home ahead and never talked about it.

Be with me now and at the hour of our reawakening. I am her mother. Reparation for what she missed, you behind your books and papers, me always having to run up to Maer Hall to check on Papa. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

Giant Sequoias grow there. So far They fade so far. Lassie come home.

Where and what is reparation? Where do you go to get old debts paid off? Things you should have had but someone was, you know--always too busy-or they couldn't quite get to it. When would her graduation have been? Wouldn't he have been glad? Go tell it on the mountain how many times I woke up shivering.

Yes, Charles. Please try again. Ralph Waldo Business Administration sapped me. Life swiggled me. Veins fell out of my pancreas like spaghetti. Gulls broke my glasses. My excretory system got patched into your father's 10th Anniversary. But we lived through it.

*** Emma,

My little chickadee, do calm down. See some old foolish comedies, study Yoga, try to relax. Unlike you who focus on the minutia of daily existence, I try to focus on my work.

In order to acquire as good a foundation as possible, and to ascertain, independent of common opinion, how far particular movements of the features and gestures are really expressive of certain states of mind, I have found the following means the most serviceable. In the first place, to observe infants; for they exhibit many emotions, as Sir C. Bell remarks, "with extraordinary force," whereas, in after life, some of our expressions "cease to have the pure and simple source from which they spring in infancy."

In the second place, it occured to me that the insane ought to be studied, as they are liable to the strongest passions, and give uncontrolled vent to them. I had, myself, no opportunity of doing this, so I applied to Dr. Maudsley and received from him an introduction to Dr. J. Crichton Browne who has charge of an immense asylum near Wakefield, and who, as I found, had already attended to the subject. This excellent observer has with unwearied kindness sent me copious notes and descriptions, with valuable suggestions. I owe also, to the kindness of Mr. Patrick Nicol, of the Sussex Lunatic Asylum; interesting statements on one or two points.

Thirdly, Dr. Duchenne galvanized, as we have already seen, certain muscles in the face of an old man, whose skin was little sensitive, and thus produced various expressions which were photographed on a large scale. It fortunately occured to me to show several of the best plates, without a word of explanation, to above twenty educated persons of various ages and both sexes, asking them in each case, by what emotion or feeling the old man was supposed to be agitated; and I recorded their answers in the words which they used. Several of the expressions were instantly recognized by almost everyone, though described in not exactly the same terms; and these may, I think, be relied on as truthful, and will hereafter be specified. On the other hand, the most widely different judgements were pronounced in regard to some of them. This exhibition was useful in another way, by convincing me how easily we may be misguided by our imagination; for when I first looked through Dr. Duchenne's photographs, reading at the same time the text, and thus learning what was intended, I was struck with admiration at the truthfulness of all, with only a few exceptions. Nevertheless, if I had examined them without any explanation, no doubt I should have been as much perplexed, in some cases, as other persons have been.

Fourthly, I had hoped to derive much aid from the great masters in painting and sculpture, who are such close observers. Accordingly, I have looked at photographs and engravings of many well-known works; but, with a few exceptions, have not thus profited. The reason no doubt is, that in works of art, beauty is the chief object; and strongly contracted facial muscles destroy beauty. Take it easy Emma. I miss our evening games of backgammon and your splendid renditions at the piano.

Fondly still,

Charles Darwin

*** Dear Mother,

You ask us to write about our feelings and memories of life with our father Charles Darwin, before you both split. O.K. Here goes.

Never was any one more genial, more considerate, more friendIy, more altogether charming that Papa universally was. He never aimed, as too often happens with good talkers, at monopolising the conversation. It was his pleasure rather to give and take, and he was as good a listener as a speaker. He never preached but his talk, whether grave or gay (and it was each by turns), was full of life and salt-racy, bright, and animated.

Some idea of his relation to his family and his friends may be gathered from what has gone before; it would be impossible to attempt a complete account of these relationships, but a slightly fuller outline may not be out of place. Of your married life I cannot speak, save in the briefest manner. In his relationship towards you, his tender and sympathetic nature was shown in its most beautiful aspect. In your presence he found his happiness, and through you, his life, which might have been overshadowed by gloom, became one of content and quiet gladness. This is how it seemed to us, and why your recent estrangement is hard for us to understand.

The 'Expression of the Emotions' shows how closely he watched his children; it was characteristic of him that (as I have heard him tell), although he was so anxious to observe accurately the expression of a crying child, his sympathy with the grief spoiled observation. His note-book, in which are recorded sayings of us as young children, shows his pleasure in us. He seemed to retain a sort of regretful memory of the childhoods which had faded away, and thus he wrote in his 'Recollections': When you were very young it was my delight to play with you all, and I think with a sigh that such days can never return.'

We his children all took special pleasure in the games he played at with us, but I do not think he romped much with us; I suppose his health prevented any rough play. He used sometimes to tell us stories, which were considered especially delightful, partly on account of their rarity.

The way he brought us up is shown by a little story about my brother Leonard, which my father was found of telling. He came into the drawing room and found Leonard dancing about on the sofa, which was forbidden, for the sake of the springs, and said, "Oh, Lenny, Lenny, that's against all rules," and received for answer, "Then I think you'd better get out of the room." I do not believe he ever spoke an angry word to any of his children in his life; but I am certain that it never entered our heads to disobey him. I well remember one occasion when my father reproved me for a piece of carelessness; and I can still recall the feeling of depression which came over me, and the care which he took to disperse it by speaking to me soon afterwards with special kindness. He kept up his delightful, affectionate manner towards us all his life. I sometimes wonder that he could do so, with such an undemonstrative race as we are; but I hope he knew how much we delighted in his loving words and manner. How often, when a man, I have wished my father was behind my chair, that he would pass his hand over my hair, as he used to do when I was a boy. He allowed his grown-up children to laugh with him and at him, and was, generally speaking, on terms of perfect equality with us.

He was always full of interest about each one's plans or successes. We used to laugh at him, and say he would not believe in his sons, because, for instance, he would be a little doubtful about their taking some bit of work for which he did not feel sure they had knowledge enough. On the other hand, he was only too much inclined to take a favorable view of our work. When I thought he had set too high a value on anything that I had done, he used to be indignant and explode in mock anger. His doubts were part of his humility concerning what was in any way connected with himself; his too favorable views of our work was due to his sympathetic nature, which made him lenient to everyone.

He kept up towards his children his delightful manner of expressing his thanks; and I never wrote a letter, or read a page aloud to him, without receiving a few kind words of recognition. His love and goodness towards his little grandson Bernard were great; and he often spoke of the pleasure it was to him to see 'his little face opposite to him at luncheon. He and Bernard used to compare their tastes; e.g., in liking brown sugar better that white, etc.; the result being, 'We always agree, don't we?'

Mother, I have also told sister to write down her reminiscences of Papa before you both began to think unkindly of each other (due, I suspect, to Papa's much regretted act of leaving us--so suddenly it seemed, after his years of duty, dedication and devotion, for Cast Iron Charlotte, the seductress, an IBM typist, who lured our father off with hints of steno, filing, collating and typing of the hundreds of note book pages filled with his cramped and spidery handwriting.

My sister writes: My first remembrances of my father are of the delights of his playing with us. He was passionately attached to his own children, although he was not an indiscriminate child lover. To all of us he was the most delightful play-fellow, and the most perfect sympathiser. Indeed it is impossible adequately to describe how delightful a relation his was to his family.

It is a proof of the terms on which we were, and also of how much he was valued as a play-fellow, that one of his sons when about four years old tried to bribe him with sixpence to come and play in working hours. We all knew the sacredness of working time, but that anyone should resist sixpence seemed an impossibility.

He must have been the most patient and delightful of nurses. I remember the haven of peace and comfort it seemed to me when I was unwell, to be tucked up on the study sofa, idly considering the old geological map hung on the wall. This must have been in his working hours, for I always picture him sitting in the horsehair arm-chair by the corner of the fire.

Another mark of his unbounded patience was the way in which we were suffered to make raids into the study when we had an absolute need of sticking-plaster, strings, pins, scissors, stamps, footrule, or hammer. These and other such necessaries were always to be found in the study, and it was the only place where this was a certainty. We used to feel it wrong to go in during worktime; still, when the necessity was great we did so. I remember his patient look when he said once, 'Don't you think you could not come in again, I have been interrupted very often.' We used to dread going in for sticking-plaster, because he disliked to see that we had cut ourselves, both for our sakes and on account of his acute sensitiveness to the sight of blood. I well remember lurking about the passage till he was safe away, and then stealing in for the plaster.

Sincerely,

Your child

Dear Emma,

1. Is astonishment expressed by the eyes-and mouth being opened wide, and by the eyebrows being raised?

2. Does shame excite a blush when the colour of the skin allows it to be visible? And especially how low down the body does the blush extend?

3. When a man is indignant or defiant does he frown, hold his body and head erect, square his shoulders and clench his fists?

4. When considering deeply on any subject, or trying to understand any puzzle, does he frown, or wrinkle the skin beneath the lower eyelids?

5. When in low spirits, are the corners of the mouth depressed, and the inner corner of the eyebrows raised by that muscle which the French call the "Grief muscle"? The eyebrow in this state becomes slightly oblique, with a little swelling at the inner end; and the forehead is transversely wrinkled in the middle part, but not across the whole breadth, as when the eyebrows are raised in surprise.

Answer when you have time.

--Charles (Darwin )

*** "Darwin, we are having another new baby. Now I know it is an even longer time since you left but I have lain, as the expression goes, with not one but my own index finger. So it also has got to be yours though generated from one of your own issue by asexual fission. It isn't even growing in my uterus. See our cretinous son Ralph Waldo is beginning to split into twins. Something about hoops that come off Coney Island rides and hit unsuspecting mutants on the head. In other words I suspect there may be two little mutants soon, as pointed out in your essays. (Got any royalties or sold any foreign rights lately?) Although another span of time (Charles was the snow really as high as we remember it?) has passed, a blood test would prove definitively that tle child about to break off from our son, is yours. Please give me an extra allotment for second set of clothes, twin diaper service twin formula service and bonus to your other children for partial loss of Ralph Waldo's services."

"Get off it Emma. Go tell it on the mountain again. This land was made for you and me."

"Charles, how could you? Soon we'll see a twin of the one I birthed. I am for sure unquietly observing mutinous birth of spinoff twin of my initial retard by the world famous naturalist. Charles, I'm cutting the cords of Ralph Waldo's belated twin. Tell the kids to raise it. I am having morning sickness and am going to Max's for a couple of tequila sunsets before my binary fission and cellular duplication time is upon me."

"Annie, make a wish."

"Do you blow the candles out before or after you make the wish?"

"Afterwards of course. You close your eyes tight, make a wish for the year, a real strong one that'll carry you right into your next birthday, and let it roll."

"Vus vilsta make a wish, little Kepala? Such a shane madele, vun all prizes at the school."

"Quiet Great-Grandmother, don't catch flies in your web now, do it in your room Great Grandmother, it isn't polite. It's Annie's birthday party. It's not nice that the company sees you catching flies in your web."

"Do you think it embarassed Annie-since we moved always in academic circles, that one of her great-grandparents was a spider?"

"No more than you yourself embarassed her, and me also in a way, by your perpetual strivings. The child was a free spirit. Her karma was to give joy, not to be forever trying to succeed at something. Baruch hatoi elushame on you. Collect. Adenoi elehanu then shame on you. Boray puree hands off then. Father time I have sinned, I did not wind the clock and my husband Charles Darwin is late for his address to the Minnahaha Society. The other Rabbis are having their modest repast of red ants and centerfolds and I cannot attempt to predict the punishment. Father, how come you're a Rabbi instead of a Cardinal or a Bishop?"

"Matter of personal taste m'dear, matter of personal taste."

"Charles, it fades so far. Do you think we will ever get back to the innocence of that day?"

"The distribution of fresh water molluscs has been a heavy incubus to me but I think I know my way now: when first hatched they are very active, and I have had thirty or forty crawl on a dead duck's foot; and they cannot be jerked off, and will live fifteen and even twenty hours out of water."

"Mazeltov!"

"Emma, I've changed my name back to James, from Aloysha."

"My God, why do you now change your name again?"

"I was living in some made-up world. Sometimes I was one of the Brothers Karamazov and sometimes I was from Dead Souls. I sat sipping tea in the Cherry Orchard of my heart with-Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Robinson, you 'ave a lovely daughter But she was too young then-I was a grown man and she just a child, though so full of laughter and merry as her father described her. And you were so much older then, you're younger than that now."

"In the Dylan way, but not the other ways. Aloysha, it's time for you to go home. What never was, can't be now."

"My name's not Aloysha anymore. I've changed it back to James."

"My new child is splitting into two children. Drive us around park a little, James, Okay?"

*** My Dear Emma,

Nothing we did caused the tragic circumstances that surround our measly, wretched, heaving, vomit covered son, Ralph Waldo Business Administration. Therefore, my dear, I entreat you in this moment of moral conflict, not to succumb to those emotions which will effectively prevent us from continuing to do our duty to the innocent yet revolting mutant we conceived in genetic ignorance.

With respect to blushing from strictly moral causes, we meet with the same fundamental principle as before, namely, regard for the opinion of others. lt is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may siffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush. "I blush," says Dr. Burgess, "in the presence of my accusers." It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face. A man may feel thoroughly ashamed at havin told a small falsehood, without blushing; but if he even suspects that he is detected he will instantly blush, especially if detected by one whom he reveres.

On the other hand, a man may be convinced that God witnesses all his actions, and he may feel deeply conscious of some fault and pray for forgiveness. but this will not, as a lady who is a great blusher believes, ever excite a blush. The explanation of this difference between the knowledge by God and man of our action lies, I presume, in man's disapprobation of immoral conduct being somewhat akin in nature to his depreciation of our personal appearance, so that through association both lead to similar results; whereas the disapprobation of God brings up no such association.

Many a person has blushed intensely when accused of some crime, though completely innocent of it. Even the thought, as the lady before referred to has observed to me, that others think that we have made a stupid or unkind remark, is amply suffcient to cause a blush, although we know all the time that we have been completely misunderstood. An action may be meritorious or of an indifferent nature, but a sensitive person, if he suspects that others take a different view of it, will blush. For instance, a lady by herself may give money to a beggar without a trace of a blush, but if others are present, and she doubts whether they approve, or suspects that they think her influenced by display, she will blush. So it will be, if she offers to relieve the distress of a decayed gentlewoman, more particularly of one whom she had previously known under better circumstances, as she cannot then feel sure how her conduct will be viewed."

To worry about the public behavior of our son is futile and an energy drain considering the real difficulties that loom ahead in his blind and groping vertebraic state.

Yours,

Chas.

"Hard to get started on a difficult subject, Darwin. Nevertheless lets get the bad news over. Our son, Ralph Waldo Business Administration, that foetal sluggish mutantinous result of ours, has split in two. Sliwy and inarticulate he stood like a horse's ass while some grungy second hand and irregular hoop came down off of a Coney Island ride and split him in half. If he'd had any sense he'd of jumped out of the way but you know our kid.

"Emma, this is troubling news you tell me. Is he--are they-still alive. "

"Boy I have to hand it to you Chas, all I said was the hoop split him in half. From your genetic training I guess you figured out that he turned into twins and now there are two of them."

"Yes my dear. That's what I was afraid of. Another mouth to feed. I am perturbed and appalled on a personal level as a geneticist doesn't make half as much as a taxi driver, yet the scientific inquirer in me rejoices at this opportunity to study closely several creatures whose existance did not begin in anything like the usual manner. "

"Rejoice, but don't forget that the mewling, squalling twins will be needing double diaper service for the rest of their lives. Wait Chas, I didn't mean to sound like that. I love my mother, I love my father, I love my sisters, I love my older brothers and my younger brothers, I love my children, my God, my country, my flag, my cup, my spoon--my spoon runneth over Charles. Do you and Scarlet Charlotte want to raise the twins? l'm giving up. Everything is so complicated. Feel like I'm on fire. Do you have a fire extinguisher?"

"Emma, you know my answer to that. It hasn't changed. No. Definitely not. "

* * * "The hassle with major medical is that you always find you're not covered in the small print. I mean like your wheelchair's leg breaks and you find you're not covered."

"Strands of grief baby, strands of grief is how I see it."

"I am the first victim of a wheelchair rape in the Aquarian Age. I was coming home Wednesday night after church bingo and I figured I'm safe in my wheelchair, you know, it's like having a dog. The birth left me bruised. I can only take two steps without the chair."

"You asked for it Emma, with your peek a boo blouses and all too apparent cleavage."

"You were right in the first place. Strands of grief is how I see it too."

"See what, sweetie? Listen, while you're up will you get me a tomb?"

"I'm not up I'm down dear. If anyone objected to male butterflies having been made beautiful by natural selection, and asked why should females not have been made beautiful as well as their caterpillars, what would you answer?"

"How can I gabble about theology while l'm trying to set your wheelchair's broken leg?"

"You weren't always this way. Sometimes you used to go bim bam bamety bam bam and eat pop tarts and have visions."

"I can only have visions in the wheelchair and you're in it."

"That's because I'm the patient now. Chas, when you were the patient I pushed you all the way to the Pole with Peary so you could raise your Hemingway level."

"Don't throw up to me how much you pushed me when I was in the chair. I had a prolapsed mitral valve and the pemmican and reindeer sinew they served at chow made me mostly upchuck. Chagas Disease is no figment of the imagination. The voyage of the Beagle cost me my health."

"Yeah, well speak up Chas. I'm the patient now. That means I'm in charge right?"

"Right."

"Forward harch. Right face. About face. Forward harch. Backwards harch. By the way, what's for taps?"

"Reveille."

"Whaddya mean? We can't have any revelry in this regiment."

"Emma. Stop the defensive wise cracks. My heart is breaking."

"Yes, your heart is breaking. I'm, of course, happy, right?"

"Emma dear, for the sake of what we had together-please-"

"Darwin, evolution proves that the babies you started in that eugenic confusion will have to go. I can't even keep the other honorable children in peanut butter and jelly and their schools. A twin spin off from Ralph Waldo is going to send my thickening mitral valve right into Divisadero Street looking for some mythic and historical fifteen dollar an ounce weed. Listen, I gave you my youth."

"I will support the odd couple and take them to the badlands with the others on Sundays to learn cross polyunsaturation."

"Darwin of course you will support the spin off twin of our last-born, Ralph Waldo Business Administration. Naturally. You have to since your mouthpiece's defence and your own statement was full of holes so the judge ruled in my favor. Apart from that though, I'd appreciate your actually taking the new baby and suggest that you give your present mistress, the Sweetheart of Smegma Chi, a whack at them both."

"Emma we are frightened because we don't have tenure and there have been nationwide budget cuts. Down House needs a new roof. I need further funds for the barnacle studies. The country is bleeding. You're not the only professor's wife on food stamps. Please be patient. Channel Five has put out feelers to my agent about my new folk opera "The Second Origin of The Species." Hopefully soon my financial picture will change and I can help more."

Tante Sophie splitting, leaving sound a smothered fart. I twanged my twat across a crowded room. There was you, me, Mother Superior, Father Posterior, Cardinal of the Bishop's Interior, no amnesty granted. Tall as a pilgrim's prick in land of diddle dick my alimony ricky tick. Cunt, tent and free.

Cummerbund and tamarine, marjoram, ginger, peregrine's pickles, majorca, blondig, sesame and main, felorcio, finnochio, fennel and farne, sintrif, salmonella, saucer and cream, amniot, nutmeg, weathertroll and bunk bunk. Cennelope, sordid Lethal and Maim. "

"Hey Darwin I made ya dinner using a lotta rare spices and the kids are expecting you one igloo at a time Charlie, one igloo at a time. Skeezik bedunk kerchoo. And then Charles, out of the whole mess one framed second appeared to me, like a vision maybe you might call it, or some kind of scene, very cold, a lot of snow, so much snow that even the littlest drifts flowed up to the window frames outside and we all kept coughing that winter. Cried a lot too. It was before the divorce proceedings and all the stuff with Ralph Waldo, before any of the bad feelings began to happen, in a way."

Dear Darwin,

By the time you read this I will have taken the kids and disappeared. If you don't see us again, read R. D. Laing's "Politics of the Family" about attributions, properly known as fear of flying. When God said Noah could put seven clean pairs and three unclean pairs on the ark, he didn't realize that during those forty days and forty nights, two of different species might get it on. Proofing your manuscript went against my Christian conscience.

In the ways that my parents and their parents got on, Darwin, we got on. We loved, or love was an attribution glued on to us by David Cooper in his cinemascope extravaganza "Death of the Family. "

Darwin, in the ways that my parents and their parents didn't get on, we didn't get on. But they stuck it through, while you went from attribution to attribution and I from retribution to retribution. I used to like to read you Dickens, sometimes a chapter a night.

Why are your checks always partial?"

-Emma

"Have you no motherly feelings?"

"Darwin, relax for a moment. It should help your flatulence. Remember that I Emma nee Wedgewood, your x-rated former wife, knew you when. If you want the spin off twin of your lastborn to survive you will have to raise it as I can't do that kind of thing any more."

"What kind of thing?"

"Come now professor, you recall the squall, the grimy creatures sliding in the almost constant bruise, the witless endless pouring of lifegiving sleazy fluid down their humiliatingly yawning craws."

"Emma, I am trying to receive your shadow projections with a measure of composure at your seizure. Guess you have to get all this off your sagging chest. But why must I pay for all other rejections of you? Just because your Uncle Buddenbrooks abandoned you as a child doesn't mean all men are bad. Why did it seem so different when we met?"

"Speak for yourself Charlie, speak for yourself. I think you raise your claws from the slime to write these essays when you could be on Madison Avenue with your writing talent. When the moment of truth occurs, mind if I drop the twins through a hole in the sky and take the kids along with me. All of them, Darwin all of them. I Annie had lived. If she had even lived long enough to grow up. Ten was too soon. It wasn't fair that after all the snow melted and everybody was back to doing those regular things and saying those regular things, we found her wine red velvet muff behind the north hedge. "

"Charlotte has agreed to raise the twins as her own. Send certified on delivery, double return receipts requested. Leave airholes on outside, stamps enclosed for special delivery after regular delivery as soon as medicaid doctor examines the spinoff mutant and considers mailing safe. If we're out, packages can be left in package room. "

"Darwin, where did we grow estranged? Where the ever widening gulf? All my life I tried to be Mother. Now you take the last memento of my years with a brilliant professor. You have stripped me of everything else including my spider grandmother. Let me at least keep our twins!"

"Okay. Do you have a handkerchief?"

"I've got a kleenex. Charles, take a couple of deep breaths. Listen, maybe this will cheer you up a bit-Ralph Waldo and Business Administration, our Twins, seem to be improving."

"Well maybe we shouldn't get our hopes up but as we've both been really trying lately, you better on the monthly checks and me resisting the lure of a quick twenty or so for turning a hasty trick, the twins have taken to meditation and have sat on some books and learned them"

"Emma, they've learned something?"

"Last week they sat on the Encyclopedia Britanica and learned A to F. They appear to be intent on knowledge suddenly and may be into some progress towards evolving into more differentiated matter."

"Zazu pits prune pits zuzu gingersnaps tap dancers preceded or followed soft-shoe dancers why did people put on blackface to entertain?"

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies. "

"Okay Chas, so I'm sitting in the Bureau of Medical Assistance with my dripping nosed crew of dependents around me and the social worker is just going over my application with a fine toothed budget wondering why, as a family, our teeth fall apart so and she was explaining about sharp cuts in allotments for children of naturalists and even sharper cuts for naturalist couples or issue of such couples, when there was a clap of thunder, a burst of applause, and our twin sons Ralph Waldo and Business Administration burst into the room in a hermaphroditically sealed spaceship. "You don't need Public Charity," Ralph Waldo said, pulling out a large wad of bills. "That's right, Mums," said Business Administration, "We've earned enough through the joint combined hardcover sales of our book Oozing Upward from Slime, to take care of ourselves, our siblings. and you too." I tell you this good news, the first in some time."

"Emma, my dear, I've just been putting my notes together on variations apparently due to the immediate and direct action of external causes; and I have been struck with one result. The most firm sticklers for independent creation admit that the fur of the same species is thinner towards the south of the range of the species than north-that the same shells are brighter colored to the south than north; that the same (shell) is paler colored in deep water-that insects are smaller and darker on mountains-more livid and testaceous near the sea-that plants are smaller and hairy with brighter flowers on mountains: now in all such, and other cases, distinct species in the two zones follow the same rule, which seems to me to be simply explained by species, using only strongly marked varieties and therefore following the same laws as recognized and admitted varieties."

"Take it easy Charles. Relax a minute and eat something nourishing. Our lastborn have been reviewing parascientific journals for the Sunday Times Book Review and are developing a tidy reputation. It had to be some mathematical correlation between the size of Ralph's brain in relation to his body weight before the hoop split them."

"I hear you're spaced, love. The other kids wrote that you've been really spaced, Emma and that your pot roast is not what it used to be."

"Yes. Have a hundred dollar bill. We can lend you our chauffeur whenever you like. Cook is very naughty and covers all the franks and beans with bechamel sauce even when she knows we like things simple."

"So there's no remaining problems, right Emma? Your letter was forwarded to me here, where I have been undergoing hydrotherapy for a fortnight, having been here a week and already having received a round of salt blows and ice water floggings. It helps the nausea to be frozen and forced to run barefoot in the woods."

"Charles, I walk on money now but it doesn't help. Do you think there's a heaven, and that Annie is in it? In my mind we're still picking up Annie from some child's birthday party and taking her with us for a picnic. We got to Queen's Point Park with the marshmallows ready to toast and the bag of charcoal. We were going to find long sticks on which to toast them, make a fire in one of the snow covered open fireplaces near the picnic tables, eat them and go home. Annie almost got to eat her marshmallow, first bit anyhow, before we had to give up and toast the rest of them on the regular stove at home."

"So. Well. Today. Wherefore is today different from any other day? "

"Yes. Please try again. Ralph Waldo Business Administration sapped me. Life swiggled me. Veins fell out of my pancreas like spaghetti. Gulls broke my glasses. My excretory system got patched into your father's first telephone. But we lived through it."

"To be less shy. To be more outgoing. I spy mistress Annie standing on a thimble. There we found her frozen muff, wine velvet with white fur trim, iced into the darkness of the side hedge, covered over by ice, snow and brambles. Wasn't it the following year when we discovered it, Chas? The snow lasted so long that year?"

"What year Emma? One year is just like the next year."

"This year isn't a bit like last year. In no way."

"In every way."

"In no way."

"Emma your nature is not yielding. You are destined for survival but of your happiness I am in grave doubt."

"Chicken gravy."

"What did you say?"

"I said grave, Darwin. I said grave. There was a cypress and two black pines. All the school was there, even her principal. I said to the Rabbi, "Don't come. Just let a regular pious jew, one who had known her, help us put her down. I said no one should say the El Male Rachamin over her. Just help us put her down"

"Emma, why do you persist in your recent delusion that we are Jewish? Anyhow, I am undergoing hydrotherapy for a fortnight in hopes of improvement. Please understand. What of me is left goes into my present work, the Mss. of a little book on The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms."

"Have another sugared cruller."

"Too many calories for me."

"Oops, there's a button off your coat. Hand me the thread and I'll put it to rights in a jiffy."

"Survival of the fittest. In the book Ulysses, Leopold Bloom slept with his head at Molly's feet after their child died. Books good for setting on top of photos when you're pasting them down in the photo album."

My Dear Emma,

I'm pleased that you seem to be adjusting to the reality situation of the raising of our mutant children. My continuing reflections on blushing are now of academic interest and no longer specifically mirror my climate of emotional response to your criticism.

It is a rather curious question why, in most cases the face, ears and neck alone redden, inasmuch as the whole surface of the body tingles and grows hot. This seems to depend, chiefly, on the face and adjoining parts of the skin having been habitually exposed to the air, light, and alterations of temperature, by which the small arteries not only have acquired the habit of readily dilating and contracting, but appear to have become unusually developed in comparison with other parts of the surface. It is probably owing to this same cause, as M. Moreau and Dr. Burgess have remarked, that the face is so liable to redden under various circumstances, such as fever-fit, ordinary heat, violent exertion, anger, a slight blow, etc.' and on the other hand that it is liable to grow pale from cold and fear, and to be discoloured during pregnancy. The face is also particularly liable to be affected by cutaneous complaints, by small-pox, erysipelas, etc. This view is likewise supported by the fact that men of certain races who habitually go nearly naked, often blush over their arms and chests and even down to their waists. A lady, who is a great blusher, informs Dr. Crichton Browne, that when she feels ashamed or is agitated, she blushes over her face, neck, wrists, and hands,-that is, over all the exposed portions of her skin. Nevertheless it may be doubted whether the habitual exposure of the skin of the face and neck, and its consequent power of reaction under stimulants of all kinds, is by itself sufficient to account for the much greater tendency of English women in these parts than of others to blush; for the hands are well supplied with nerves and small vessels, and have been as much exposed to the air as the face and neck, and yet the hands rarely blush. We shall presently see that the attention of the mind having been directed much more frequently and earnestly to the face than to any other part of the body, proabably affords a sufficient explanation.

The small vessels of the face become filled with blood, from the emotion of shame, in almost all the races of man, though in the very dark races no distinct changes of colour can be perceived. Blushing is evident in all the Aryan nations of Europe, and to a certain extent with those of India. But Mr. Erskine has never noticed that the necks of the Hindus are decidedly affected. With the Lepchas of Sikhim, Mr. Scott has often observed a faint blush on the cheeks, base of the ears, and sides of the neck. accompanied by sunken eyes and lowered head. This has occurred when he has detected them in a falsehood, or has accused them of ingratitude. The pale, sallow complexions of these men render a blush much more conspicuous than it most of the other natives of India. With the latter, shame, or it may be in part fear, is expressed, according to Mr. Scott, much more plainly by the head being averted or bent down, with the eyes wavering or turned askant, than by any change of colour in the skin.

The Semitic races blush freely, as might have been expected, from their general similitude to the Aryans. Thus with the Jews, it is said in the book of Jeremiah (chap. vi. 15), "Nay, they were not at all ashamed, neither could they blush." Mrs. Asa Gray saw an Arab managing his boat clumsily on the Nile, and when laughed at by his companions, "he blushed right to the back of his neck." Lady Duff Gordon remarks that a young Arab blushed on coming into her presence.

Mr. Swinhow has seen the Chinese blushing, but he thinks it is rare; yet they have the expression "to redden with shame." Mr. Geach informs me that the Chinese settled in Malacca and the native Malays of the interior-both blush. Some of these people go nearly naked, and he particularly attended to the downward extension of the blush. Omitting the cases in which the face alone was seen to blush, Mr. Geach observed that the face, arms, and breast of a Chinaman, aged 24 years, reddened from shame: and with another Chinese, when asked why he had not done his work in better style, the whole body was similarly affected. In two Malays he saw the face, neck, breast, and arms blushing; and in a third Malay (a Bugis) the blush extended down to the waist.

The Polynesians blush freely. The Rev. Mr. Stack has seen hundreds of instances with the New Zealanders. The following case is worth giving, as it relates to an old man who was unusually dark-colored and partly tattooed. After having let his land to an Englishman for a small yearly rental, a strong passion seized him to buy a gig, which had lately become the fashion with the Maoris. He consequently wished to draw all the rent for four years from his tenant, and consulted Mr. Stack whether he could do so. The man was old, clumsy, poor, and ragged, and the idea of his driving himself about in his carriage for display amused Mr. Stack so much that he could not help bursting out into a laugh; and then "the old man blushed up to the roots of his hair."

Hoping these small scientific observations will amuse and divert you. I congratulate you on your adjustment to a difficult situation.

By the by, the birth of our mutant and his subsequent development has placed some of my early theories concerning natural selection and survival of the fittest in grave doubt. At any rate, do not let scientific conflict trouble you in reference to our children. Keep up the good work.

Your loving, if estranged, husband,

Charles Darwin

P. S. Charlotte is impossible. Spoiled and-

"Well it isn't possible for me to continue raising him. It makes me feel wierd."

"Wierd how?"

"A bit like a base ignoble lascivious limpet of a gun turret."

"That's not exactly clear, love."

"You say you see Darwin, but you're a thinking type, not a feeling type."

"This phone call is costing me a fortune-"

"Then resolve it here and now. Get the kid a keeper or send me and the other kids on a cruise to the Bahamas before I go bananas."

"Don't joke Emma."

"I'm not joking! God Charles, after I wiped the tar and feathers off the kindergarten teacher and hosed down the mailman from the fire Ralph Waldo had started in his shirt, I just wanted to rest. Just wanted that quiet spot where the sour milk wasn't so I could lie down and rest. Just wanted my fire on this earth to, you know, go out. Peace on earth. Like hear the mermaids singing each to each. But I do doubt they will sing to me."

"So-"

"So? Don't tell me another year has rolled by?"

"Boy you can say that again, time flies. Doesn't it seem like just yesterday that Annie was put in that hole, that goddamn stinking hole. The Vicar spoke inadequately Charles. "

"Emma, please. Anything anyone could have said would have been inadequate."

"He never mentioned how good natured she was. Did you ever see her cross? Anyhow, I could barely take care of Ralph Waldo. I know I can't manage twins now."

"If you do not care for the twins and treat them gently a flash of thunder will contuse and lacerate your right hip."

"Listen, I can't. I can't. I would have gone to the Naturalist's Wive's Discreet Assistance Society but I'd waited too long, never imagining your last splash was still baking in all casseroles. See when Ralph Waldo Business Administration's waistline began to spread I figured he was just hitting the headcheese and brioches and pepperoni and muzzarelle too hard."

"Emma, I have spoken."

"So? You have spoken? So what? Ralph Waldo's twin is appearing from half of him before my eyes and I'm the one who has to eat all that nauseating umbilical cord and start finding enough groceries to feed another one of my dependants while you toddle around in those loathsome bedroom slippers writing some kind of essay. What kind of a job is that for a grown man, Charles? Don't you know you could earn more plucking chickens?"

My dear mother,

There is one memory of waking and another of sleep. In our dreams the same scenes and fancies are many times associated, and that to, it would seem, for years. In sleep one shall travel certain roads in stage-coaches or gigs, which he recognizes as familiar and has dreamed that ride a dozen times; or shall walk alone in familiar fields and meadows, which road or which meadow in waking hours he never looked upon. This feature of dreams deserves the more attention from its singular resemblance to that obscure yet startling experience which almost every person confesses in daylight, that particular passages of conversation and action have occured to him in the same order before, whether dreaming or waking; a suspicing that they have been with precisely these persons in precisely this room, and heard precisely this dialogue at some former hour, they know not when.

Animals have been called "the dreams of nature." Perhaps for a conception of their consciousness we may go to our dreams. In a dream we have the instinctive obedience, the same torpidity of the highest power, the same unsurprised assent to the monstrous as these metamorphosed men exhibit. Our thoughts in a stable or in a menagerie, on the other hand, may well remind us of our dreams. What compassion do these imprisoning forms awaken! You may catch the glance of a dog sometimes which lays a kind of claim to sympathy and brotherhood. What! Something of me down there? Does he know it? Can he too, as I, go out of himself, see himself, perceive relations? We fear lest the poor brute should gain one dreadful glimpse of his condition, should learn in some moment the tough limitations of this fettering organization. It was in this glance that Ovid got the hint of his metamorphoses; Calidasa of his transmigration of souls. For these fables are our own thoughts carried out. What keeps those wild tales in circulation for thousands of years? What but the wild fact to which they suggest some approximation of theory? Nor is the fact quite solitary, for in varities of our own species where organization seems to predominate over the genius of man, in Kalmuch or Malay or Flathead Indian, we are sometimes pained by the same feeling; and sometimes too the sharpwitted prosperous white man awakens it. In a mixed assembly we have chanced to see not only a glance of Abdiel, so grand and keen, but also in other faces the features of the mink, of the bull, of the rat, and the barn-door fowl. You think, could the man overlook his own condition, he could not be restrained from suicide. Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and hole of thoughts is presided over by a certain reason, too. Their extravagance from nature is yet within a higher nature. They seem to us to suggest an abundance and fluency of thought not familiar to the waking experience. They pique us by independence of us, yet we know ourselves in this mad crowd, and own to dreams a kind of divination and wisdom. My dreams are not me; they are not Nature, or the Not-me; they are both. They have a double consciousness, at once sub-and-objective. We call the phantoms that rise, the creation of our fancy, but they act like mutineers, and fire on their commander; showing that every act, every cause, is bipolar, and in the act is contained the counteraction. If I strike, I am struck; if I chase, I am pursued. Wise and sometimes terrible hints shall in them be thrown to the man out of a quite unknown intelligence. He shall be startled two or three times in his life by the justice as well as the significance of this phantasmagoria. Once or twice the conscious fetters shall seem to be unlocked, and a freer utterance attained. A prophetic character in all ages has haunted them. They are the maturation often of opinions not consciously carried out to statements, but whereof we already possessed the elements. Thus, when awake, I know the character of Rupert, but do not think what he may do. In dreams I see him engaged in certain actions which seem preposterous, but of all fitness. He is hostile, he is cruel, he is frightful, he is a poltroon. It turns out prophecy a year later. But it was already in my mind as character, and the sibyl dreams merely embodied it in fact. Why then should not symptoms, auguries, forebodings be, as one said, the moanings of the spirit?

We are let by this experience into the high region of Cause, and acquainted with the identity of every unlike-seeming effects. We learn that actions whose turpitude is very differently reputed proceed from one and the same affection. Sleep takes off the costume of circumstances, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to a deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his selfknowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them-a cheerful, manly part, or a poor driveling part?

However monstrous and grostesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth. The same remark may be extended to the omens and coincidences which may have astonished us. Of all it is true that the reason of them is always latent in the individual. Goethe said, "These whimsical pictures, inasmuch as they originate from us, may well have an analogy with our whole life and fate."

The soul contains in itself the event that shall presently befall it, for the event is only the actualizing of its thoughts. It is no wonder that particular dreams and presentiments should fall out and be prophetic. The fallacy consists in selecting a few insignificant hints when all are inspired with the same sense. As if one should exhaust his astonishment of the economy of this thumbnail, and overlook the central causal miracle of his being a man. Every man goes through the world attended with innumerable facts pre-figuring (yes, distinctly announcing) his fate, if only eyes of sufficient heed and illumintion were fastened on the sign . . .

Dreams retain the infirmities of our character. The good genius may be there or not, our evil genius is sure to stay. The Ego partial makes the dream; the Ego total the interpretation. Life is also a dream on the same terms.

Your loving underachieving son,

Ralph Waldo

"No more, Charles, I can't do more."

"You have to. I can't get enough land unless I make the decision not to turn back and the Bashkirs said if I don't reach my starting point by the time the Sun sets I'll forfeit all my work, all that effort."

"Charles, fancy talk again. I'm no dumbo. You're talking about a Tolstoi short story, right? You and your metaphors. As for all that effort, I didn't ask for it. Only that you not split to your shiksa because it wasn't that easy to be jolly and cheery after Annie died."

"It's true, Emma. A man gets caught in his own endeavors and faces Calvary on a peppermint lifesaver if he wants to. I've done it myself. "

"Not completely my poor Darwin. I didn't exactly say no when you brought home that pink refrigerator from the Seige of Sevastapol. It was only after we broke up that I started realizing I couldn't expect you to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I am a Wedgewood but after the funeral I broke the Wedgewood service for ten one by one against the fireplace wall. And then wept, having nothing left and your attention straying."

"How come only you of all the women I have known, thrusts her hips upwards as I thrust down, just like the Esquimo Squaws."

"Shush Darwin. The children will hear us and we're supposed to be getting divorced."

"Supposed to be. We are. The court says I have to pay you seven kopeks a week and seven kopeks for the children. Do you know what that means in terms of how much less I have to pay shipping costs for stratilication samples, Emma?"

"Be quiet. If we don't reach climax before sunset the Kashmirs will reclaim your homesteading land."

"That's true love. I have to save my energy for the last climb."

"Have a barbecued chicken wing."

"I thought you said they were legs."

"What's the difference Charles? It all gives you indigestion and flatulence anyhow."

"But I'm a scientist and therefore out of ordinary reality as it were."

"Sure. Sure. I always knew you were special."

"Emma do you know the difference between fantasy and ordinary daytime consciousness states?"

"Charles do you know the difference between ants, grubs, worms and a provolone submarine?"

"I'm serious."

"I'm serious. ''

"Emma, what's got into you? Sometimes I think all these things that happened after Annie's passing are fragments of my imagination. My feelings about you run deep-to the extent that it hurt, when you started in with all that legal stuff-or was it all in our minds? Feelings, shadow feelings, not real but only passing tones. I mean for example-are we really getting divorced? I can't believe that. Love passed between us. Children arose out of our maladaption."

"Figure it out for yourself. Our twin sons will give you a grant to contemplate reality. They've got it together to set up some kind of Foundation and because Ralph Waldo has spent so much of his highly valued time since he was individuated in the service of society, he and our other son Business Administration, have achieved tax exemption. "

"Two of our children have achieved tax exemption?"

"It's not that unusual today Chas. Even Guru Maharaji is tax exempt, his followers are giving him a Janis Joplin, excuse me, I mean a Mercedes Benz."

"Please, everything is so much better now, can't we get back together?"

"Were we ever apart?"

"If the papers didn't exist, no. If I didn't really run from your heart rending howls weeks, no months after Annie was buried, if the childrens' diapers and the sour milk and the dirty clothes and the pieces of paper hadn't accumulated in heaps on the floor so I could find nothing of what I needed for my work. If-"

"Believe what you want Charles. It's all the same to me."

"It melts into mist. All I can remember the last few weeks is our vacation, when we were still united in a less tangled way than now. On July first that year we started for Torquay where we remained until August twenty-seventh-a holiday which was "eight weeks and a day." The house we occupied was in Mesketh Crescent, in a pleasantly placed row of houses close above the sea, somewhat removed from what was then the main body of the town, and not far from the beautifully cliffed coast line in the neighborhood of Anstey's Cove. I worked during the Tourquay holiday and for the remainder of the year, at the fertilization of orchids."

"Charles, if I've made up everything, if we've both made up everything, if all of this is some kind of double hallucination, a dream, a miasma and phantom of the mind, then the twins haven't really evolved and we're not only not rich, we're broke. Ponder on that a moment while you munch on a high protein bar."

"Emma I was unable to digest the funeral ceremonies of the ants, notwithstanding that Erasmus has often told me that I should find some day that they have their bishops. After a battle I have always seen the ants carry away the dead for food. Ants display the utmost economy and always carry a dead fellow creature as food. But I have just forwarded two most extraordinary letters to Busk, for a backwoodsman in Texas who has evidently watched ants carefully and declares most positively that they plant and cultivate a kind of grass for storing food, and plant other bushes for shelter!"

"But gai cock is not go piss, gai cock is go shit. Go shit in nah fin yam. Well it sounded something like that. So the yiddishism for excrement is the same as for phallus. That explains a lot."

"Don't say anything more Emma. It's important that you be quiet."

"I have to. I have to talk about it."

"What's done is done. Let it all pass.

The week Emma attempted to do herself in I was called over to give some kind of report to welfare. I was fond of the family and blamed myself for having too heavy a caseload. She was frail and glib and full of wisecracks and I should have known she was in the kind of pain that needs some help. The nurses told me about it later.

"Emma Darwin it said in her address book. She took enough plls to down a horse."

"It was seven fittings for the teeth and only two to get the seal coat. The furrier was better than the Dentist."

"Shut up! Look Golden Age Club, we've got an emergency."

"Nurse please be nice. Forgive me for any trouble I cause. Please Nurse. What I saw in Poland-what they did to us in Poland-"

"Emma, breathe! Slap her. Why do they do it? Listen, we need the doctor."

"I need a little juice with ice chips that the teeth would go in."

"Mrs. Aging, the Kitchen is closed."

"So Angel darling, maybe someone has the key? Blue Cross is paying. "

''Shut that old ass up. I'm not getting a reading I'm not getting."

"9cc. 11 cc. 16 cc."

"How do they go in Mrs. Aging. I never did this before? Where are they?"

"Find the bottoms Angel Nurse Darling. God will reward with 8% interest. Hold this while I put in the bottoms when you find it. It should be in the apple juice."

"Where is the apple juice Mrs. Aging?"

"Maybe we could get a vein in her thigh like they said they did to the Cardiac from Cronin Nine. If this IV clogs, she's not going to make it. Too many downs. Come on kiddo, say how many downs you took to get high? Answer sweetie. Say something. Breathe for Christsake. Slap."

"The apple juice is behind the pocketbook, Nurse Angel Darling."

"Where is the pocketbook?"

"The pocketbook is behind the Daily Forward. See you found it. I told him he should get me a special. A special always finds."

"Listen, will you farts shut up about pocketbooks. Mrs. Darwin try to make a fist."

"The top teeth now, Nurse Darling Angel."

"Christmas or not fucking Christmas. Why is everybody so spaced?"

"Nurse please help me. I'm sorry I argued with you. Miss Head Nurse, after forty eight years my husband can't anymore. Miss Head Nurse, tell them-"

"I'm not getting a pulse on Emma Darwin. l'm not getting nothing. Don't they have anyone else on the floor?"

"Please. I didn't commit a crime. My husband went home. Nurse? Head Nurse? Supervisor! Police! Dentist!"

"It's just not happening. Maybe a tracheotomy! Look in the can. Maybe there's some intern gobbling a little holiday cheer?"

"Angel darling Nurse. I think I can put the top part in if you hand me the apple juice."

"Can't someone shut her off about the teeth? Look, there was one in the can. Just a sleepy fourth year, but he's sober."

"I looked there. I was the one that found him."

"He wants her on a monitor for the night and we don't have an extra monitor."

"So we move 25 to 26. She's better today. She tanked up at the Christmas Party on that cranberry piss plop punch and it stayed down and she's off her IV. She'll be allright, she was really with it this afternoon."

"Please nurse can I have my-"

"Someone shut up the tooth lady. We're busy here."

"Nurse give me my teeth."

"Look they're right in the drawer. We'll put them back for breakfast."

"14cc and make it fast. Put her in the end bed."

"Let me have my teeth please. I'm scared to sleep without them If my husband should come in-"

"You're not going to die. All you had was a barium enema. They're safe in the drawer."

"Let me have my teeth please. Seven hundred dollars. I'll die. I'm paying here. I have Blue Cross."

"So die awhile. We have a new admission. I never saw so many seconals in puke and most of it already got absorbed."

"I had my teeth six years already. Call the police. Get me Legal Aid. I sold the seal coat to get the teeth. I wear the teeth every night."

"That's not urine. That's the IV leaking. Here I thought it was urine all along. Tuinals too. Listen, she's really slowing."

"The Sixth Precinct I'll call on you. All I want is I should have my teeth in."

"Is she allergic to anything? Listen, I can't find a decent vein on this side."

"What can I do for you?"

"Who are you?"

"I'm here to help you put in your teeth but I don't know how."

"So here thank God, is Angel Darling. Raise me Angel Darling. Raise the bed. I have to sit up to get them in. Raise Nurse. Higher Nurse. Higher, higher, higher, higher, higher. Are you my special?"

"Mrs. Aging, the bed won't go higher. Where are the teeth?"

"In the apple juice, like I said before. 8% interest. A mitzvah."

"I see. So this is the upper and this is the lower. Which goes in first?"

"First I drink a little of the apple juice.''

"That the teeth were in, Mrs. Aging?"

"Yes, Angel darling from Heaven. With a little chipped ice please.''

"Mrs. Aging, the kitchen is closed."

"So Angel Darling maybe someone has the key. Blue Cross is paying."

"Shut that old ass up. I'm not getting a pressure at all."

"Find the bottom Angel Nurse Darling. Hold this while I put in the bottom."

"Maybe we could get a vein in her thigh. If the IV isn't going in she's not going to make it."

"The top now Nurse Angel darling."

"Smile Mrs. Aging. Smile as hard as you can. I see. It's even harder to get the top one in."

"More apple juice. Help! Call a dentist. They always went in before."

"Mrs. Aging smile wider. Take another sip of apple juice. It'll go in if you relax."

"Listen, why are you bothering with the old fart. She doesn't even need the teeth till morning?"

"See she has a certain self image and probably a little hardening of the arteries of the brain and she's too anxious to sleep unless she feels her prettiest. It'll only be another minute. Smile wider Mrs. Aging-smile!"

"Son of a mother fucker's bastard's cock, the monitor shorted out. I can't tell a thing except for pressure. Keep slapping her till I get one off another floor."

"Emma-how are you-Emma-do you feel the needle?"

"We've got some eight hour knock out drops for Mrs. Aging. Take it. Shut up. Shut up tooth lady."

"Nurse-what shall I do about the teeth. Nurse Angel darling doesn't have the top in yet. Almost."

"Shut up and go to sleep, fart head. She ain't no nurse. She's Goody Goodshoes. She just can't listen to you screeching."

"Mrs. Aging, you can't make your mouth wide enough. The thing to do is leave the lower and let the upper go till the morning. Take a sleeping pill like the nurse says. Suddenly it'll be morning and the top will fit."

"A sleeping pill? I need a dentist. Please call a dentist. He should give me back the seal coat that I sold. Even my special is telling me now to take a sleeping pill."

"She's not your Special Nurse, Mrs. Aging. She's a dumb dogood cardiac who doesn't know how to take care of herself."

"I'm not getting a pulse. Why did we move her to a monitor if the monitor's not working?"

"Rewire the monitor. Merry Christmas to all."

"It's in. It's in. The top is in. Darling Angel Nurse what is your need? Your desire? I'll tell my husband to bring you stationary tomorrow. "

"That's no nurse Mrs Aging. That was a convalescent cardiac patient trying to help you get your teeth in which you don't need till morning. Florence F. Nightingshit is her name."

"What happened to the Angel darling Nurse who gave me the apple juice and got my teeth in? Nurse-I have to make pee pee. Where's my special nurse? Blue Cross is paying."

"Tell the old fart to call the dumb cardiac. If she can help her into her teeth she can get her the bedpan."

"The cardiac passed out. Try some nitro. No not on farthead. On the cardiac, asshole."

"But what's going on with Emma?"

"Nothing's going on with Emma."

"Don't we have a resusication crew? Deck the halls with heights of folly tra la la la-she's not responding."

"What's going on with the cardiac?"

"She think's she's one of those Christs of Yipsilante. She'll be O.K."

"Her nitro's not working."

"So give her a second nitro. It's not like Bourbon."

"Why doesn't she say anything?"

"What's to say. It's late It's the night before Christmas and it's late."

"Nurse, the teeth are in but I have to pee."

"So pee in the prime of your life. Pee all you want. It's warm in here. Emma'll start smelling before your piss does."

"Isn't there a bedpan? Help me God. I always paid the rent."

"The Lord helps him who helps-did anyone call a priest?"

"Nurse, please call a dentist."

"See. Give me some water."

"I will mother fucker."

"Listen titty bitch, you're in the same hole I'm in. This isn't sex, this is nursing care."

"Please darling. It's getting late. I could get my teeth straightened a little on top?"

"Mrs. Emma Darwin, Benjamin Franklin High School. Graduate. Ten or twelve seconals. A lot of tuinal. Some valium. Some of that sunshine acid that hasn't been around since 1969. A little pizza. I'm not sure extra cheese. Give me a cigarette mother fucker."

"We kept you alive, Emma. My legs are so swelled I can't stand up. Why'd you take all the pills?"

"To wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year."

"Listen. Be quiet. This is a hospital."

"You shit eating tax paying Valedictorians you!"

"Hey. Emma's alive! Listen, is it always this cold in here?"

"High school graduate. Tuinal, seconal, everything. You enjoyed yourself last night. You like to wet the bed?"

"Don't you?"

"Don't be fresh, Emma."

"I looked for the bedpan but I was stoned. Also I was a stone."

"That's true. But we worked hard over you. Even when we thought you were dead."

"I was just trying. Just six or eight or eleven. Have to keep trying."

"Listen kiddo, theyll send you to Grease Pavillion if you do it again."

"What's Grease Pavillion?"

"The Rehabilitation Center for Chronically Emotionally Disturbed Illegal Criminals."

"I'm not a nut. I'm a high school graduate."

"Mrs. Darwin, we're your doctors. Take these pills often?"

"First time. "

"Do you have a boy friend? Your chart says you're divorced.''

"Do you have a boy friend doctor?"

"Don't be fresh, Mrs. Darwin."

"I'm not being fresh. It's a natural question. Don't you read the Village Voice?"

"Did you used to have a boy friend? After your divorce. Do you live with your family? Anything upset up there? Did you have a fight with the family?"

"I love my mother and I love my father and I love my kids and I love my exhusband and I love Stevie Wonder."

"Your family's going to come up. They want to help. There's also a young man, Aloysha James or something."

"Then tell them to do the dishes."

"O.K. We'll tell the family not to come up yet. We'll send a doctor to see you. To talk about your problems."

"I don't talk to doctors. I only talk to strangers. I'll talk to any stranger."

"Emma, what size slippers do you wear?"

"Social Worker, 71/2. 12/2, 171, 111, 28. The usual. Three of each kind."

"Emma, what is the real meaning of the proverb, 'a Stitch in time saves nine'?"

"Social Worker, if you had a big needle but the thread was too thin to keep the buttons on your coat, what would you do?"

"Deck the gallstones, clots of plasma, tra la la la la la la la la la."

"Christ I didn't sit down all night."

"Everything on me hurts more that everything on them. "

"Shut up Pippy. We're staff. We're supposed to hurt."

"So I was just making out the papers for the chart. Then I heard little Florence Nightingshit calling us to put in Mrs. Aging's teeth. "

"550 cc of-"

"50 cc of-"

"1 2 cc of-"

"Do we have to hurry?"

"Do we ever not have to hurry?"

"Listen, where did Mrs. Darwin get all those downs?"

"Are you kidding? Been in Washington Square Park lately?"

"Mrs. Darwin, a social worker is coming to see you."

"I don't need social workers. I'm a graduate of Benjamin Franklin High School."

"Here's a little something for Christmas from the Sisters."

"Thank you Sister. Ever made it with a father, sister?"

"I have to make eh eh."

"Who said that? Was that the sister?"

"No, the sister split. Mrs. Aging's starting up again."

"Mrs. Aging, you just made pee pee."

"Eh eh is different from pee pee."

"We know Mrs. Aging, we know."

"Did anyone get a chart back on the little cardiac who got Mrs. Aging's upper teeth in last night. The skinny one? Mrs. Aging called her Nurse Angel Darling. She was mumbling about 'self image in the elderly' while we were trying to get some pressure back on Mrs. Darwin."

"They moved her back to lntensive Scare Unit 9. Someone said she got transferred to stack 792 in the 42nd Street Library, but someone else says she's still on the monitor gazzling oxygen."

"Shall we share her stuff or will they want it all saved for the relatives?"

"Her kids are coming to have Christmas dinner. We'd better leave it or they'll request it."

"The pain starts dull, then sharper as it goes through the left side. Someone, give me something? Ma, give me something."

"My leg."

"My teeth."

"Just above my bladder."

"Apple juice with a little ice please."

"Here's another gift from the-"

"Santa Claus is coming to-"

"O.K. Emma. Get some sleep. That was a lot of pills baby, You were blue."

"I'm always blue. I'm a high school graduate."

"O.K. Turn over slowly. Can you turn?"

"Nobody brought me food! I want ice cream. I want a cigarette. I want six thousand and seventy three dollars and twelve cents."

"Listen to Emma. Instead of the morgue she'll be having Christmas dinner and it'll probably stay down by New Years. Where's the catheter. No, not that one, asshole, the short one."

"Nurse Darling angel, I have to make pee pee?"

"Emma made it! Maybe we could put some tinsel in her IV. Ever try chesnut stuffing through a vein, kid?"

"Don't laugh at me. I'm a high school graduate."

"Listen Mrs. Darwin, we're not laughing. Look at my left leg. It's called Elephantiasis House Arthritis. They make me work Christmas Eve and then take the N train home. I take the tylenol express to Caton Avenue and then two buses. I'm not laughing."

"Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way."

"Would someone turn off the shit licking radio station? Why doesn't everyone go to Mass so we could get a coffee break?"

"Nurse angel beauty darling, please reinsert my upper teeth. They're in the apple juice. You promised me they'd go."

"Mrs. Aging it's not morning yet. You could still have your sleeping pill. lt's still dark."

"So could I make pee pee even though it's not morning?"

"Who am I to stop you from pee pee. Am I God?"

"But I need the pan or you'll scold me."

"You need the pan? It drips anyhow. I have to change you in an hour anyway. The whole world is your bed pan Mrs. Aging."

"Where's Nurse Darling Sweetheart Angel? You're not Nurse Darling Sweetheart Angel. You sound different. Apple juice. I need apple juice. So my teeth go in straighter."

"Here Mrs. Aging. One little swallow and you can rest. And just think, your teeth are in. My you look pretty."

"Boy, isn't it nice when it's quiet for a minute? You can hear Christmas."

"You working tomorrow?"

"No. I got off. We got tickets."

"Tickets to what?"

"Who knows. I leave that stuff to him. He takes me then for Chicken in a Basket."

"Where's the clean gowns. Who wants-listen-please help me turn Mrs. Vampire."

"Who's Mrs. Vampire?"

"Stroke case. You want suction? Give me the finger if you want suction. Vampire Honey. She's really sweet."

"Then we can give them their sleeping pills and get some coffee. "

"Applejuice!"

"The teeth! The teeth! Where's Nurse Darling Angel Sweetheart. The upper isn't straight enough. Where's my special?"

"She's not a nurse. She's back in Intensive Scare on a monitor. You can see her heart beating on Channel 13."

"Could I pee pee now?"

"Sweetheart you can pee pee whenever you want. None of my business. "

"How come Emma's alive. She wasn't making it. My leg was just so swollen I didn't have the energy to pull the sheet over her face or write her up."

"Nurse. Teeth. Pee pee. Eight and one half percent for anyone who brings me the bed pan."

"What is the matter? Mrs. Aging, would you like a little warm flea bath lotion or some Cologne up your ass?"

"Merry Christmas. We shall gather at the River. The beautiful river-. And a Happy New Year."

"I'm Charles Darwin an I'm here to see my ex-wife. I received a call that she had attempted suicide."

"What's her last name?" said the nurse.

"Darwin, Emma Darwin."

"Yes, she's here. No visitors."

"What do you mean, no visitors? I'm her ex-husband. I have a right to see her."

"She's been transferred to Shrinko Clinical Treatment Center Auditorium and they are troubled."

I pulled rank, flashed my Victoria Cross and let it slide that I was the Charles Darwin, famous author of the "Origin of the Species," so the nurse let me through.

Emma looked so thin I realized that Ralph Waldo must have been taking up most of her body space. Poor girl, I felt much compassion especially when the nurse, in slipping me my pass had made it clear that she's been having a hard time, taking overdoses and trying to zizz out of life.

"I came as fast as I could Emma. What can I do for you?"

"You sound so weaselly. Like you'll really send child support checks on time and then saying do I know where you can get some Thai stick when God, Fucker Avenger and Grapenuts knows you do up the edge of your stinky scholastic salary on the stuff that makes you leave your page proofs just as the clams have festered and are ready to be observed in utero, to shit in the Lotus position and therefore once again hear Echinaderm Pithecamprothis say 'Survival of the Fittest.' And then two weeks of meditation which doesn't even pay state minimum."

Listening to her I began to wonder, as all men born of woman, having fertilized unwittingly by my simple spurt, if I was good or bad. Indeed, as all men listening to the plaints of woman, if I was real or a figment of their imagination invented to send money to raise the children they bore.

"Into Shma Yisroel thou was offered-unto baruch hatoi thee was a boy, the noon spooks seemed to say. Never prescribed before tea time as Nanny used to. Ouch, it's just not going to happen. Hard to know what goes on inside the Mind of a Woman by Barbara Stanwyk and Barbara Streisand." Emma said.

She was spaced. Out of it. I'd ask her what I could do and she'd say pitifully, "Money. More money."

As I knew her request was for milk, oatmeal and cod liver oil and not fast cars or champagne, I was rueful.

"My dear Emma," I would answer, "This is beginning to break my heart. I didn't come here to hurt you or be hurt. You said the baby was definitely mine."

Emma turned away and said, "Don't be sarcastic. I call a nurse for sarcasm, a doctor for continued stinginess. What do you think I can feed your children with when the checks don't come? Burpee hybrid morning glories?"

"Emma, "I inquired earnestly, "You don't look well. How is your health?"

"Wonderful Charles. A little schitziness behind the ears but nothing that you can't rinse off with Endust."

"I still love you. It isn't real with Charlotte. I'll be better about the checks."

Emma looked me in the eye for the first time. "Does that mean we get another try at being wife and children in residence?"

I was starting to feel terrible. My character is weak. Her voice had gotten rational. I, Charles Darwin, couldn't say anything. I'd gone too far. Love and pity, love and pity-

I told Emma that maybe that exact thought was a little premature so to leave a bit of time, maybe six months to a year would be an appropriate span, and then we should have this discussion again in either the Russian Tearoom or Joe Allen's. She chose Joe Allen's which I knew she would and went quite instantly into her schitz act again, hardening which I'd begun to know through Emma's space trips through all these new places. A long time coming and a long time gone.

"Emma, I'm going to see the baby."

No answer.

"How are the other kids?"

No answer.

The day after Emma's attempt at suicide, I am called by my superior to make a home visit and arrange for childcare while she's in the hospital.

When l get there the apartment door is wide open. Frances and Leonard "Darwin'' are the kind of children that blow me away. They are too good, none of the other children at the project are that "good," mostly they rumble around hitting each other regularly for no reason, punching each other in the stomach while yelling arcanely, getting into construction sites that are sealed off, places off bounds. But Frances and Leonard had been brought up well, their manners old fashioned. l feel their terror, l sense them growing older, older, old, in a matter of minutes before my very eyes. These are little children we're talking about by the way. Frances is nine; Leonard is eleven. They are also very hip. You have to hand it to Emm! that when she was not into imagining she was the ex-wife of Charles Darwin the famous naturalist she was a first rate mother, a first rate mother. Only the whole thing with the baby had freaked her. Yes yes, Emma is freaked, no doubt about it. The kids know their mother is freaked. I wondered if Frances or Leonard know why Emma had been taken to the hospital? Do they know she tried to do herself in? Do they know Emma's run of gags and taglines is a coverup for some genuine fright, some astonishment at the total responsibility she has, since her old man actually did split and actually did send really inadequate checks.

If l had to bring up Frances, Leonard and the new one she'd had on a combination of the occasional fatherly check that three out of four times bounced plus supplementary Aid to Dependant Mothers allotment, l would probably freak worse than Emma. And I'm tough. Yes yes, tougher than most. Undeniable.

I see the children are there, just like usual, around raisins and a surprising amount of all natural soft licorice candy, the kind in strings. They do them now with honey instead of the corn syrup and no artificial colorings or additives.

Frances is doing her homework and Leonard is watching Ella Fitzgerald. Everything seems perfectly normal, like they had gotten it together to know enough not to light the stove or do anything dangerous.

"What's happening," I say. "Who's taking care of you?"

Leonard says the cops had called his father and his father said he'd come, but he hadn't yet. So that's why they were having peanut butter for supper.

"I know I could make a Swansons' TV dinner, but Leonard says I shouldn't or I'll burn us up. I always obey Leonard."

"Very sensible," I say. "Very sensible. When did they call your father?"

"Yesterday morning." Frances says. "He's always like that. He's got a lot of stuff he has to do before he can get to us. He crossfertilizes orchids and boy if you don't get them at the right moment all your experiments are screwed."

"I know." I answer sarcastically. "He must get tired always being on call."

These are really sensitive children. Emma had to have been earth-mother before she got clobbered by life. Okay, frst she loses the ten year old Annie-then her husband toddles off into the wide grey yonder as men do sometimes-and then the new one who does have developmental difficulties, yes, turns up needing her to do the whole thing again without even enough money to feed the crew properly. I give Emma points for extenuating circumstances though I'm still in a rage at her for not just calling and telling me how low she was feeling.

"We don't need anybody," Leonard says. "We know what time it is to go to school. I have my own key and Frances has Mother's."

"Well, that's just fine," I say. You seem to have it covered."

Leonard points in the direction of the door and says, "Down the hall there's a lady who'd look after us if we needed it but we don't. We don't need anybody."

Frances takes a nice new brown divider page from her notebook and breaks it in half and crushes the little plastic tab for no reason.

"When is Mother coming home? We want to see her tomorrow. Can you take us to see her?"

I say I will and I know I can't. I know I'm supposed to arrange for someone else to do it. It's nice being with them though, they're my favorite family. In all the case load there's no other children like them, they're like out of old fashioned days of forever ago. Sometimes they seem like they're from the nineteenth century and I rub my eyes and feel funny and wonder if any of Emma's fantasies could be real.

When I was in high school I read "The Mill on the Floss" and Frances seems like Maggie Tulliver. Leonard-well, he is putting me on the spot and I keep looking at him. Seaweed is the color of his eyes, so pure. I catch my reflection in the white of his eye and wonder what I'm doing standing here, waiting for some sign of feeling from these white children.

"Do you want to talk about what happened to your mother?" I ask. Pick her up, go ahead. pick her up and put her on your lap and rock her and get her to cry, my spirit says to me, but I'm afraid to, she looks so cool.

"Not particularly" Frances says. "Would you mind, since you're here, putting the Swansons' TV dinner in the oven. Four as a matter of fact," Frances says firmly. "Then we can have one each for supper and one each tomorrow. Wouldn't be so bad cold as long as they're cooked."

"Someone'll be taking care of you tomorrow," I say but it's the wrong thing.

"Not that you need anybody," I say quickly, acknowledging their ability to get by in the icy prickle spaces of this world. "But the agency won't give the money unless you let them send someone to take care of you until she comes home."

"Oh in that case," Leonard says, acknowledging that in this life reality rules about the receiving of money, without which there would be no TV dinners, no all-natural soft licorice strips, had to be respected.

There's a toughness about these children that dismays me. Like they have learned how to survive and lost their childhood in the learning of it. Oh, oh that sounds much much much fancier than I want it to. Much much. I want to hug them back into being children, I worry that they are so sensible about stoves and things.

"Well Mother will have to stay in the hospital for ten days to two weeks, maybe three weeks," I say.

They begin to cry. Frances cries first and then Leonard joins her and Frances is equipped with kleenex-and I have never seen a child equipped with kleenex-and kleenex is not allowed on food stamps.

So yay, I can cuddle them which I proceed to take advantage of eagerly. Excuse my emotionalism, I fnd them in my mind half the time. So with all this new joy for me of that now they're crying and I can hug them like I wanted to do in the first place, I hear this cry coming from the bedroom and I can't believe my ears.

"Is the baby there?" I ask Frances.

"Sure. We gave him his bottle an hour ago. We can't go near the fire but we heat the bottles in a pot of hot water from the tap. He's due for another. When he starts to cry he's mostly just hungry or needs his diaper changed. Leonard warm up another. It's no hassle," she explained. "We have a bunch of those cans of milk."

"The police didn't take the baby to Infant's Shelter? My paper says right here that the baby's being taken to Infant's Shelter."

"Well," says Leonard in an exact mini version of Emma's acid wit, "You're paper says so but Frances is bringing him in so your paper must be wrong."

Frances brings him to me sopping. She sees I'm not that anxious to hug him. "Don't worry," she says, "You'll love him after he's changed." She changes him, lumpily but adequately and Leonard does the actual safety pinning while she functions as nurse's aide.

I take a moment and have a talk with God. God, I say, what happened? how could she have left these kids, tried to do herself in? God answers instantly, in his best Charleton Heston voice, "Dorothy Pageant, what makes you think poor Emma knew what she was doing?"

I remember seeing the small brown see through pill bottles that they had been laying on Emma, the agency referral center shrinks, the mood elevators, the MAO inhibitors, drugs that blocked connections, the major tranquilizers that Emma said made her feel in a straight jacket. The medicines had dazed her, she had been in a daze.

It was good that the God from Brooklyn, or Jesus, or I Am That I Am, had clued me in on this because when I explained to the children, that their mother had truly not been responsible because of that miasma of chemical ups downs ins and outs with which they had treated her, both of them look truly relieved. "It's true," Frances says. "It has to be true. We know Mother. We know she wouldn't ever leave us unless she was spaced out and didn't know what she was doing. That stuff the doctors give her isn't good stuff. They should give her good stuff. The doctors should give better stuff to people who are sick."

"They should give her flowers," Leonard says. "When Father gives Mother flowers she cooks the best things in the whole world for supper. Once Father brought Mother flowers and she cooked quiche and baked stuffed bluefish with strawberry shortcake for dessert. The next day he wasn't around but she kept looking at the flowers and cooked me eggs mollets a l'indienne and cooked Frances and herself eggs beurre noir with almond fruit flan for dessert."

While they're getting the baby's bottle warmed I call their father from the number I have on the chart. No one answers so I call Infant Shelter and make arrangements about the baby.

When I turn around the baby is on Leonard's lap, drinking the probably still coolish milk placidly and Frances is back to her homework. I think they are made of iron but they are not; they are children. I see that Frances is crying again, no noise. Leonard sniffles and has to keep blowing his nose.

Two days later it's settled. The children stay home; an Emergency Housekeeper comes after school to make them boiled potatoes without salt, and other high cuisine dishes. There's no problem about the baby, Frances and Leonard don't mind a weeks vacation from diapers and bottles. Emma will get the baby back as soon as she comes home because I'm going to stick my neck out for her. She's a real good mother; the stuff they tell me about her wild talk of turning tricks to earn money makes me laugh because if there was ever a genuinely more conscientious mother than Emma I never saw her. As for her wit, her sharp, fine wit, her fantasies-well-sticks and stones will hurt my bones but names will never hurt me-Emma was not herself when she took too much and I intend to tell the judge in chambers. Give the best mother in the world that nightly medicine cabinet full of psychotropic drugs for depression and she'll just end up acting wierd. Yes yes I've seen it over and over, Emma is not the first.

The hospital says the children are too young to visit so I make a great stink about it. It's not just Emma. I'd do the same for anyone on my caseload except the nod outs. I don't have time to do much for the nod outs and they don't care.

So we compromise, the hospital authorities and I. I bring the kids to the parking lot and from Emma's window-she's off the monitor and the IV now so she can walk around. We wait down below all of us feeling stupid, but she throws down a note and that makes the day.

The note says, "All that medicine messed me up. I didn't know what I was doing. Next Thursday I'll be home and I'll make you Eggs Portugaise and Curried Fish Croquettes."

Frances is pleased. She reads the note aloud, faltering at Portugaise and croquette but getting it across anyhow. Leonard stamps his foot and sulks. "I want Eggs Gascon instead," he says frustrated because he can't shout up and will have to tell her when she comes home. I find that even during the past six months of depression, the new baby taking much extra time, Emma has evidently plowed her way through something called The Gourmet Eggs Cookbook and on the way home-by bus-my expenses are to the dime they tell me the kinds of eggs Emma makes when she's feeling lighthearted. They don't run out of names until we're less than a block away. Eggs Soubise, Eggs Benedictine, Eggs Suzette, Eggs Flamenco, Eggs Savoyarde, Eggs Mimosa, Eggs Romaine.

Yes yes, these children are not into dwelling on morbid worries. As soon as we hit the apartment the TV goes on and the homework books come out. No one has to remind them to do their homework, the TV is a necessary sound background, like I turn on Otis Redding or Stevie Wonder when someone new comes by and I need some sound in the room to cover my nervousness.

I consider myself a kind of co-parent except that Frances and Leonard don't notice, they're too busy taking care of themselves. Besides, the housekeeper's already there, provided with a key the day before. No longer needed for my great grownup ability to light the stove and therefore slide in TV dinners, the children ignore me. Again not really necessary to anyone, except for a series of reports I do to get the actual money for everyone, the checks, the checks, the cash flow that makes it possible for them to continue, I slide back again into my "job," a minor official of a bureaucracy that passes around the dote.

It's way way after five thirty and I've let the paperwork go to bring them to the hospital. I'll be up until about midnight getting it together. My feet hurt.

The housekeeper is bossy, glaze-eyed, ineffective and no fun. She wants to settle down with a magazine anyhow. I hang in uncertainly, thinking maybe little Frances, with her flaming hair straight out in a triangle, and her intelligent expression, will look up and say something to me like, "Oh Dorothy you are the very best social worker in the whole world." I'm used to that Leonard wouldn't notice-he's a man and men just don't notice. But Frances is woman like me, nine is old enough to spot extraordinary feelings. Why doesn't she say something?

"Frances," I say, "I have to go now. "I'll take you to see mother next week."

"Okay. "

"Did you like getting the note thrown down from her?"

"It was okay."

"Would you like to get another note next Thursday?"

"That'll be okay."

"Shall I take you even if your father comes?"

"He won't come," she says. "He's got a lot of work. He'll call and say he can't come."

I don't know, families-men get it started-women maybe encourage it sometimes wanting babies, wanting that small cloned image of self, who spin off and then widen the possibilities. In a way I envy Emma her responsibilities. Me with my good taste neat apartment, my three secret beers a night and my dream of immortality so integrated that we decide if we can let the white folk use the bathroom when they have to piss.

It's going to rain the next day. My arthritis is a great weather predictor.

"Frances," I say foolishly, "Do you love me at all or do you only love your motler?"

She stops doing her homework and looks at me as though I'm crazy.

"I only love my mother," Frances says.

"I don't even love her," says Leonard turning into the 8 o'clock movie so he can get his arithmetic homework out of the way. 'But I like her better than anyone."

Everybody calls me Dorothy at the agency. Dorothy or Miss Pageant. It was only at home that they used to call me Beauty Pageant and it was always just a joke.

Yes yes, yes yes absolutely. The world is as strange as Emma "Darwin" imagines it is. That's why I keep telling my supervisor Emma's freaked out but she's sane. If you know what I mean. If anyone knows what I mean.

I think to call the children's father and see if guilt provoke won't get him to send Emma her child support checks. Not that I'll get anywhere with him, nobody does. But for a minute this strangeness, dreams of children come to me like a froth of rosebuds for a dinner centerpiece. The way it looks I'll be a spinster; the other scene's too hard.

Frances gives me a piece of soft licorice strip and I have to be content with that. What mysteries in the world. Who has it all together, in the exact proportions?

One foot out the door I try again.

"What would I have to do for you to love me Frances?" I say. lt has been my lifelong habit to say stupid things and the habit is still strong.

She looks at me soberly.

"It's not about doing anything Dorothy. "

"Then how would I have to be for you to-"

"She wants more licorice," Leonard says over the blaring TV. Give her some more licorice."

Frances does and I leave, a six inch black licorice string sticking out of my mouth, musing about how odd the world is and hoping that if it does ran the next day it won't be heavy because my raincoat is at the cleaners.

Ten days later Emma comes home.

Ten days later I am given fare to bring Emma home in a cab. It's already been recommended that the baby be returned, but what will have to happen first is a simple hearing in judge's chambers during which I'm supposed to be present.

"I don't know how to thank you, Dorothy," Emma says to me on the way home.

"That's okay kid. You and I don't have to get into stuff like that. Mainly I wanted to tell you I'm sure they'll give Ralph back, it'll just take a little time. Just this hearing."

Emma is mostly quiet anyhow, something you'd never know from her outrageous letters, but after I say that she doesn't open her mouth all the way home, just looks out the window and makes swirls with her finger on the condensation inside.

Frances and Leonard are downstairs waiting in front of the project and pile into her like a football maneuver, almost toppling her over. Look at that! Look how they hug her while nothing l can do would ever get more than a licorice strip.

The housekeeper's hours are changed now. She's supposed to come from after school until bedtime. For two more weeks. There she is, standing with her hat and shapeless brown coat on as we come in so I suggest she go home. God she is square, she is so square! If she goes home Emma will start to relax about the baby, know I'm really behind her, will fight for her. If she goes home Emma and I can make hot chocolate for the children and pile into a six pack. Emma's my buddy now, she'll be my buddy.

A little later I am into the beer but Emma has hot chocolate with the children. Frances asks, in her usual straightforward way, why Emma had tried to commit suicide.

"I didn't really," Emma says. Frances is on her lap and Leonard is on a chair. Nobody is on my lap, it's obvious that nobody will ever ever ever be on my lap. It's not likely that I'll meet the right person to have a baby with. Yes absolutely unlikely.

Leonard says Emma shouldn't tell fibs.

"It's not a fib," Emma says. "The doctors gave me different medicine before I got really mixed up. I was tired. I wasn't all awake."

"There's no excuse," Leonard says accusingly.

Emma puts out her arms for him to run over to, but he takes his cup of hot chocolate and ostentatiously goes to bed. We stop talking while I drink my beer and Emma rocks Frances back and forth until she gets sleepy.

The world is too much with us late and soon is like a line of poetry right, but what is the way to describe that you want to be someone's friend, just their real true plain regular for always hopefully friend, but in this life it is so impossible, because of all the fragmented communications and zerox machines I guess, that feelings get lost.

There Emma sits, rocking her daughter, her small stubborn son having retreated to bed to make clear the other side of his feelings (one half having been that running jump right into her stomach when he saw her before from where the children had been waiting in front of the apartment). As Pastor Frykman says, what makes you think we were necessarily set on this earth for happiness, or at least happiness all the time?

Oh dear Emma, be my friend, open that literate, sarcastic mind of yours to the possibility of me, Dorothy, as friend, not just caseworker.

Frances, half asleep, says, "Mother, tell me what you'll make for supper tomorrow."

"Ratatoille and vichysoise, oeffs en gelee and rasberry meringue," Emma whispers gently.

"No mother no. Leonard and I want souffle. We want souffle."

I burst out laughing but they are serious. Children ask for potato chips or candy or spaghetti. Children don't ask for souffle.

They look at me guilessly and Emma puts Frances to bed. The apartment is chilly. Yes yes yes here I go again, making a big thing of it. It is just that I'm not sure that judge will give back Emma's baby and she looks at me and she knows I'm not that sure.

She drinks only two sips of beer. I'd thought it would be fun-I don't know why I always thought it would be fun to be with Emma-maybe because sometimes she is fun, with her tough tone and cutting edge words. Only this time she keeps looking towards the other room where the baby was and it's like the evening two weeks before when I went to arrange about the children. Only this time it's Emma I hear crying softly when I'm in the bathroom and then just as I leave for the night.

The hearing is at 10:00 AM but Emma and I are there at nine fifteen, frightened to be late. Probably I'm the only one in the whole world who knows how much she wants the baby back. And its funny because she never told me, even now she doesn't say anything about it.

By the time we're supposed to go to the judge's chamber, Emma is starting to come apart. It was bad to be early. It would have been bad to be late, but it was bad to be early. She can't drink her coffee in the coffee shop and her hands shake.

It's time now. We sit there while the judge looks Emma over. There's a bunch of other people in the room. I'm not even sure myself who's on whose side, but it wouldn't make any difference anyhow, all I'm going to do is tell the truth.

"All right," the judge says. "I've read a lot of papers about this. Lots of papers. All about you young lady," he says to Emma. "Some of the papers I read say that you made a serious suicide attempt and you refer to your baby in very harsh ways. I have here a whole series of letters in which-"

"Excuse me Judge," I say. "I'm Emma's social worker. I've been with this case from the beginning. She has a bitter sense of humor but those words are just her way of blowing off steam-I see her a lot and I know her real feelings."

He looks at me cold eyed. "You will be asked to give your opinion in due time. It is this young woman to whom I am speaking. I ask this question. Do you want your baby?"

Emma starts to shake. "Of course I do."

"There are no of courses here. We understand that you're raising the children alone and that the baby does have some problems. So there are possible alternatives. Consider young woman, maybe this is all too much for you."

"May I please take home my baby?"

He turns to some attorney standing there, I don't know for who. His voice lowers. He confers. He then confers with someone else.

I see Emma holding on to the table like she needs something to grab on to. Yes yes, in her shoes I'd feel the same.

What's going on with the judge talking away to yet another man, reading papers from a folder?

The judge turns to me then and I get a chance to speak my piece about how good a mother Emma actually is. "I'll vouch for her," I say. "She just makes jokes. Heavy jokes. She's good with the baby. She's the baby's mother for God's sake. Wasn't the baby in good shape?"

He strokes his skimpy little beard, and consults the papers again. "That's true, considering the baby's neurological deficits he was just fine."

"Do you think you will be well enough to care for the baby properly?" the judge asks Emma.

She answers yes and her voice is tight. Emma's sarcastic jokes in the hospital are one thing, what's happening now is scary. I am as scared as she is.

By the shores of gitchy goomie lived a warrior Hiawatha or a maiden Minnehaha. He takes so long all the poems of elementary school keep rushing back, or at least the first two lines of all of them. Beads of sweat stand out on Emma's face.

"Well let's have another try young woman," he says. "Let's have another try."

The room swings in circles like it's a little planet itself. I smile at Emma reassuringly.

After a lot of red tape, a lot of forms to fill out and a lot more red tape, we go down to Infant Shelter and get Ralph Waldo and take him home. Emma keeps a tighter rein on herself after that and certainly jokes less.

As for me, well you know me. Yes yes Dorothy, it's always someone else's story, isn't it?

Well I'm just Emma's caseworker is all.

Dear Emma,

How touched I am by your retreat. I say this to reconcile you to the new turn of events without too much pain.

Shyness. This odd state of mind, often called shamedfacedness, or false shame, or 'mauvause honte,' appears to be one of the most efficient of all the causes of blushing. Shyness is, indeed, chiefly recognized by the face reddening, by the eyes being averted or cast down, and by awkward, nervous movements of the body. Many a woman blushes from this cause, a hundred, perhaps a thousand times, to once that she blushes from having done anything deserving blame, and of which she is truly ashamed. Shyness seems to depend on sensitiveness to the opinion, whether good or bad, of othes, more especially with respect to external appearance. Strangers neither know nor care anything about our conduct or character, but they may, and often do, criticize our appearance; hence shy persons are particularly apt to be shy and blush in the presence of strangers. The consciousness of anything peculiar, or even new, in the dress, or any slight blemish on the person, and more expecially on the face-points which are likely to attract the attention of strangers-makes the shy intolerably shy. On the other hand, those cases in which conduct and not personal appearance is concerned, we are much more apt to be shy in the presence of acquaintances, whose judgement we in some degree value, than in that of strangers.

I remain plagued and troubled by your continuous howl for help.

A scream, for instance, uttered by a young animal, or by one of the members of a community, as a call for assistance, will naturally be loud, prolonged, and high, so as to penetrate to a distance. For Helmholtz has shown that, owing to the shape of the internal cavity of the human ear and its consequent power of resonance, high notes produce a particularly strong impression. When male animals utter sounds in order to please the females, they would naturally employ those which are sweet to the ear of the species. and it appears that the same sounds are often pleasing to widely different animals, owing to the similarity of their nervous systems, as we ourselves perceive in the singing of birds and even in the chirping of certain tree-frogs giving us pleasure. On the other hand, sounds produced in order to stike terror into an enemy, would naturally be harsh or displeasing.

Whether the principle of antithesis has come into play with sounds, as might perhaps have been expected, is doubtful. The interrupted, tittering sounds made by man and various kinds of monkeys when pleased, are as different as possible from the prolonged screams of these animals when distressed. The deep grunt of satisfaction uttered by a pig, when pleased with its food, is widely different from its harsh scream of pain or terror. But with the dog, as lately remarked, the bark of anger and that of joy are sounds which by no means stand in opposition to each other; and so it is in some other cases.

There is another obscure point, namely, whether the sounds which are produced under various states of the mind determine the shape of the mouth, or whether its shape is not determined by independent causes and the sound thus modified. I look into the mirror my dear, and try to decide which is so in your case. And I recommend also some exercises and some focus on other than the most personal problems which seem to plague you so.

Sincerely,

Charles Darwin

* * * Dear Mother,

The witchcraft of sleep divides with truth the empire of our lives. This soft enchantress visits two children Iying locked in each other's arms, and carries them asunder by wide spaces of land and sea, and wide intervals of time:

There lies a sleeping city, God of dreams!

What an unreal and fantastic world

ls going on below!

Within the sweep of yon encircling wall

How many a large creation of the night,

Wide wilderness and mountain, rock and sea,

Peopled with busy, transitory groups,

Finds room to rise, and never feels the crowd.

'Tis superfluous to think of the dreams of multitudes, the astonishment remains that one should dream; that we should resign so quietly this deifying Reason, and become the theatre of delirious shows, wherein time, space, persons, cities, animals, should dance before us in merry and mad confusion: a delicate creation outdoing the prime and flower of actual nature, antic comedy alternating with horrid pictures. Sometimes the forgotten companions of childhood reappear:

They come, in dim procession led,

The cold, the faithless, and the dead,

As warm each hand, each brow as gay,

As if they parted yesterday:

or we seem busied for hours and days in peregrinations over seas and lands, in earnest dialogues, strenuous actions for nothings and absurdities, cheated by spectral jokes and walking suddenly with ghastly laughter, to be rebuked by the cold, lonely, silent midnight, and to rake with confusion in memory among the jibbering nonsense to find the motive of this contemptible cachinnation. Dreams are jealous of being remembered; they dissapate instantly and angrily if you try to hold them. When newly awakened from lively dreams, we are so near them, still agitated by them, still in their sphere-give us one syllable, one feature, one hint, and we should possess the whole; hours of this strange entertainment would come trouping back to us; but we cannot get our hand on the first link or fibre, and the whole is lost. There is a strange wistfulness in the speed with which it disperses and baffles our grasp.

A dislocation seems to be the foremost trait of dreams. A painful imperfection almost always attends them. The fairest forms, the most noble and excellent persons, are deformed by some pitiful and insane circumstance. The very landscape and scenery in a dream seems not to fit us, but like a coat or cloak of some other person to overlap and encumber the wearer; so is the ground, the road, the house, in dreams, too long or too short, and if it served no other purpose would show us how accurately nature fits man awake."

Lovingly,

your still undifferentiated son,

Ralph Waldo

"Excuse the detour friends and loved ones, I voice moments of 1947 emotion all us romantic wives of Charles Darwin, geneticist and two pants salesman of the eighteen hundreds, have and conceal. It is to us the giving rather to be Beer predicated on those the foam has thus far soberly contraindicated. That from those blundered bled we take increased commotion."

"Emma, no more variations on the Gettysburg address, I beg you. Please don't fall in love with my noble social mission."

"Please resist. It's only part of our trip Rabbi, here on St. Valentine's day. Let me assure you Uncle Vanya that we here shall not have heaved in vain.-Digression within a regression. Look, let me assure loved ones and pen pals alike, no discrimination, that it is terrifying to be the wife of Charles Darwin, who here dedicated his life that that baboon, so banana baited and so zoo placated, shall not perish from the earth.-To abandon. To be abandoned. To abandon. To be abandoned."

The children always called me when Emma went into a heavy freakout. Mostly I saw her about money, checks gone astray, cessation of benefits once when the Department thought she was earning some, increases in aid to dependent children. She was managing O.K. mostly except for her heavy fantasy life, but the children phoned me everytime she started talking as though she were Jewish. Mention of the Spider Grandmother was the other thing that made those children phone me up and ask if I could help.

I'd get there-right after work-the department would have her in Ward 6 faster than an owl can snore if I told them, so I simply never did. I'd get there and poor Emma would be talking to herself like an old bag lady on St. Mark's Place.

"Back to the pond."

"Which pond."

"The pond that was the place we went to when she was still well enough to iceskate and we were all together."

"Vus iss 'all together' Momele?"

"Be quiet Buba. Annie and Charles and Aloysha and I are going on an outing Buba. You hear? Turn up your hearing aid, Buba. We'll be back by dinner-time. You could make us some corn latkes if you get bored. We'll all be so hungry by then with the air so brisk outside and that gentle almost warm soft falling snow.

"Vus iss 'snow'?"

"It's that white powdery stuff outside the window, Buba. Come see how high. Did you ever in your life-."

"Vunce."

"Gai cock in nofin nah fin yam. Go shit in the ocean. Hewlett Cedarhurst Laurence Lynbrook and Far Rockaway."

"Zayda always said."

"Quiet Buba, don't think about Zayda. He couldn't help it, poor man. The screams of Vilua were still in his ears. The new country frightened him, the new synagogue seemed cold. Every policeman was a Cossack rounding up villagers to be shot. He couldn't earn a living. Don't think about poor Zayda. just go into your room and read your Yiddish Daily Backward until it's time to make corn latkes. No Buba, don't spin your web in the living room, it'll get on the new sofa. If you want to spin your web and be a Spider Grandmother again, please stay in your room or we'll have to send you to-"

"Don't cry, Buba, I was only joking. You can stay here. Annie loves your feelers now and don't worry about anything."

"Grandpa Trotsky Revisionisky used to say there are two kinds of people, people who admit they piss in the ocean and people who don't admit it."

"Gai cock in nah fin yam."-Phonetic memory of what it sounded like, those fluttery echoes of words used between parents and grandparents to further parental secrets, those hints expressed in a language dimly heard no long remembered. The world will soon forget what we say here but it can never forget what they did here. That from these honored-

I would make Emma a cup of tea and try to get her back to reality. I didn't want to refer her to a shrink because she was so spaced that I knew they'd take the kids. Poor lady, she fluttered about like some Ophelia if you can imagine a still sweet but faded and distracted woman. I never knew where her Jewish expressions come from and neither did she. "There's Beauty." she'd say, acknowledging my presence with a nod.

We're in the money. Let's da da da da let's send it spend it send it rolling along. Goodbye my Coney island baby, hello my ragtime gal. Love oh love oh careless love. For me and my gal."

"So we went to the pond, it was a Saturday, Shabbas, Tanta BubaZayda would have called it."

"Good Shabbas Tante BubaZayda."

"Good Shabbas, Emma."

"Now we are rephrased in a great devil's door testing whether one ancient so deceived and so situated can long tenure. We are met on the late tattle har de har har!-Rabbi, forgive me for I know not what I say.-Baruch hatoi eluhanu-testing whether this patient or any patient so achieved and so elevated can long- Charles, Annie's here-Annie stands in her toasty warm winter coat, snug as a sun-flower with her wine colored velvet muff and bonnet and the special cape you gave her. Aloysha does fancy figures in his ice skates and then returns to lace Annie's up. He makes jokes about Cinderella and her glass slipper. I can hear her laughing in that funny hurry breath way. Laced in the white birthday ice skates she stands uncertainly. Aloysha (I can see now why he changed his name from James) said, after you my Czarina Annie Darwinovitch, and Annie skated along the pond as graceful as any dancer."

"Emma, I warn you not to talk of this anymore. My work still remains to be finished and to think of these things now-"

"Just once please. Instead of always holding it in. Just once."

"You'll kill us both with memories. Let's think of the others.''

"So she skated not very far but just far enough to be out of reach when the ice cracked. You let out a howl of terror and Aloysha skated towards her, then crouched to pull on his skates. Our terror turned into such a laugh-see Charles I'm trying only to remember the good parts. The pond was no deeper than two feet at that spot and our Annie stood laughing in merriment and surprise, just up to the waist."

"That was funny. How we all looked. It was such a scare and then suddenly such a frolic. We all wrapped her around and around in the carriage blanket, and carried her home for warm clothes and a dry log in the fireplace and some of Grandma Spider's (excuse me, Tante BubaZayda's) corn latkes. It was after but not connected with it, that she got sick and Our Lord took her to his side."

"It was after that, and probably much connected with it, that we held ourselves from each other for a while, cried when solitary and quarreled when together. But now the others are grown and even the last graduated yesterday. So we have finished with the anger maybe, and can be together."

"As you say, Charles. As you say."

Dear Charles,

Fever sore and weighty days ago our fall flowers brought forth upon this concubine a new station retrieved in cavities and suffocated to the proper position that all theorems are apriori true. Now we are engaged in a great Castle Keep testing whether this patient or any patient so received and so segregated, can long underwear. We are set on the great bottle babies of this war.

Before and seven years ago our poor feathers brought forth upon this concentrate a new ration conceived in poverty and predicated on the excavation that all dogs run free. Now we are enraged in a great resale store testing whether any ration so bereaved and so predicated, can long revive.

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Survival of the fittest, whitest. Charles, if we'd been of the same species-would that have-

Now we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefireld of that war. We have. come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might-

It snowed yesterday, was what reminded me of her. When are you coming to see the children? I've made a walnut loaf for you, with the crust light like you used to ask for.

That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this citation under mild wood-shall have a new dream verbatem and that covenant of the scruple with the scruple and for the scruple shall not ravish giving birth.

Rabbi Rectorpastor preached a fine sermon said a few words in memory of forescore and father years ago our notation gathered in reconnaisance concealed in liberty and dreaducated to the supplication that all animals are regretted equal. Brought forth upon regression a new dum dum retrieved in libertine and graduated to the recreation that all hens are completed sequel.

Remember mitosis. The cells of the Gamete shall be taken at Dawn and marched to the symbiosis of a distant drummer crunchified that elation or any elation so felt and so underwritten, shall not perish from this earth. The sun set on the great bottleboiled of this scar. Fasting whether that station or any station so agrieved and so vasodilated can long endure. The world will soon regret what we fry here but it can never forget what we broil here. It is for us the swerving rather to be here correlated that from these Consolidated Ed we take increased persuasion-

Yours,

Emma

Dear Charles,

Enclosed find verbatim account of my last night's dream. Also, what was your grandfather's Social Security number. We need it to get food stamps.

Nurse Anteater (She's probably me.): So Darwin Dear, what is the fantasy content of the last soporific vision you had, ach mine lieber patient dollink?

Dr. Aardvark (He's probably you.): I cannot reveal. It is embarassing. Yet how can I sublimate the bumble bee that storms the hirsute gatekeeper of my heart if I do not ventilate this final vision which has come upon me in my declining years and bombards me daily with auguries of its imminence?

Nurse Anteater: Yes, yes your eminence. We know the pattern by this time. For almost four years we have struggled in this cabin of disclosures, this peripatetic paddy wagon of thoughts for which you continue to flagellate yourself dear colleague. Instead of accepting-how shall we put it-dear Darwin, when are you going to-as they say-let it all hang out?

Dr. Aardvark: Accept my last vision as an integral part of my personal ego? I canot Dear Anteater, I cannot. My entire career as a naturalist is challenged and unhinged by this continuously passing tableaux which has obsessed what is left of my mortal trip. Alas, if only I could have dreamed it. Then it would return with morning to that strange half live world of renegade colleague Herr Doctor William Carl Jung with whom I recently (ln a stormy exchange of belles lettres) disagreed-

Nurse Anteater: Charles, you aren't Freud. You're Darwin remember? Anyhow, out with it our little father of the survival of the Dimmest Wit. What is the vision on which your day depends daily?

Dr. Aardvark: I see a vale of tears, a railroad tie of time, a rented motel room in New Delhi, Pa. And in the room I see a naked lady. Nurse Anteater: A naked lady. Can you describe her?

Dr. Aardvark: Certainly. Her legs are spread so far the refugees of every fragmented culture struggle through the broad appraoch offered by her straddled stance. Thousands of pilgrims pass through her entrancing pubic entrance in a misted vista. Her very own sisters enter her labia majora with uncovered heads and live to tell the tale. Later, reeling, they related to open mouthed audiences the karmic vibrations of passing through the furry triangle of their sibling's dampened bush. Meanstwhile I sit battered to bouncing on her antic art.

Nurse Anteater: Look Charles, tell it factually and don't embroider the vision with your fancy language. Just let me know your visionary spaces in a simple way.

Dr. Aardvark. Yes. Well the lady lies on about seven matresses, her girth so spreading that as I stare, the vision of the body widens out, becoming oceanic in its enclosure. First those long silken legs that stretch from prehensile toe to carefully tamed Hollywoodian thigh. Then the warm crack where once they join obscured a bit by swirls of curl and then a gleam of pink to hold the breath in turmoil while a whitening mound rises and lowers, sending in their throb, droplets of dew to whet the appetite. Liquid pours out like undiluted cream of mushroom while her belly continues to undulate and all her seven merry breasts become erect as I in my devotion bow."

Nurse Anteater: Charles, for God's sake. You grossed me out. We'd better footnote your last vision in our next session.

Dr. Aardvark: Interruptus I priapus puss in boots Amen. It's a bit warm for Sunday. Maybe I should ventilate further? l'll carry my vision to my room and have her at teatime with a bit of watercress sandwich and sausage cinnamon bun. Oh glory be to the survival of the tittest. She is beyond description this last glimpse.

Nurse Anteater: Yes Charles D. Aardvark. I'm just your old wife, remember. But pay no attention, make yourself comfortable. Life is short. Have a sugared doughnut and some greasy potatochips, unquote. The protein is good for you."

Dr. Aardvark (suspiciously): Who said that, Emma dear?

Nurse Anteater: Someone from Philadelphia probably. Some hallucination from Philadelphia probably.

Dr. Aardvark: My word, when we start going in the unconcious and the future maybe we should keep a lid on the id?

Nurse Anteater: Too little data for any attempt at interpretation. But for a professional, you sure are a bit of a maiden aunt still, Charlie.

Dr. Aardvark (insulted, smoking a controlled substance from a silver chalice): Say that again and I'll begin flashing.

Nurse Anteater: Please don't. You don't have tenure yet. They could give the lecture Series to the Heidelberg Man over your heads.

Dr. Aardvark (ruefully): Can I bum a bit of snuff from you, Nurse Emma?

Nurse Anteater: Of course, Alas, no time for childhood traumas and sexual innuendo, our fifty minutes are almost up Chuck dear and I have promises to keep and baleful children to tuck in at home before I sleep.

Dr. Aardvark: You are the inexorable charmer via teasing glances at your wristwatch. Don't sweat it. I'll carry my vision around until our next session unless (I will try not to Emma) I am driven to acting out before we meet again.

Nurse Anteater (blanching): Not acting out. Oh, Charles I implore you, don't act out. Clarence Darrow needs you for the Scopes trial and the world at large is not as tolerant of pathological adulterousness fornico nose powder as we are here at the Winter Palace.

Dr. Aardvark: Then let's have a little smoochum on the mouth Nurse Emma and I'll be a good boy and go home and write a treatise on the Origin of the Species, until we meet again.

Nurse Anteater (reluctantly): Allright Charles, but just a little one. My goodness you are manipulative. Maybe, just for a change, you should try to control your fantasies. Ta. Ta.

As Emma's social worker I often stick my neck out. I want to tell my supervisor to lay off and end up writing memos and manifestos during my lunch hour. Must be working off some karma.

Out of the Tower of Babel which makes up theories of emotional disturbance in our time, one clear pattern can be seen.

The pattern is this: some people come into this world more sensitive to pain and conflict stimuli than others. For assorted reasons, constitutional, biochemical, whatever, sometimes reactions while they proceed through life are such that traumas which can be accepted by some cause trouble in others. Maybe perceptions in some areas are expanded in the way that a person's perceptions are expanded when he/she is on a LSD or mescaline trip; maybe perceptions are distorted in a similar way. Whatever the cause, if we are one of these especially sensitive people, we will be caused excessive pain by the ordinary kinds of mistakes every family makes in the process of raising children; we will be caused excessive pain by the ordinary injustices of the world in which we live.

If these perceptive differences are more than passing, clearly organic causes like brain tumor, hardening of the arteries of the brain, diet deficiency illness, etc., have been ruled out, chances are that we are one of those extra ordinarily sensitive people and have been so from birth. Without blame we can recognize that some of the events which may happen in our families can trigger or worsen symptoms, and learn to probe these events or interactions neither taking on guilt nor ignoring our possible role in the ups and downs of disturbance. When we understand that there is no blame attached to the possibility that our goals for one part of personality may have been experienced as pressures by another part or that lack of goals may have been experienced as absence of confidence, we will be dealing with a total personality, where it is at.

To be grown up in this culture and not do harm involves keeping our ears open to the people who have really different values, whether classified emotionally disturbed, rebellious adolescent, minority group, or old and senile. Taken together these voices of the "others" lead to an an awareness of ourselves as balanced precariously over a chasm, one foot on the top of each mountain. Those of us who are successful at maintaining this balance are able to do two things: keep our authentic inner life ("to thine own self be true"), and negotiate the kind of outward reality relationship, perhaps a job, that in some measure fulfills the needs and demands of the society in which we live. When we can do one but not the other; satisfy either our own inner voices or the culture in which we live, we get labelled as emotionally disturbed for not being able to do both at the same time. It is this inability to balance which sets up our agony.

In trying to be true to ourselves we have to discover who we really are by tendency alrnost from birth, and relax in that. Yet not to put one foot back over the chasm between times is to be so frightened, so cut off from the broad flow of life which must involve communication with other kinds of values, that we come then, out of fear, to where our society is at. Those "other" people, the people on the opposite side of the chasm who perceive differently, experience differently, are "wrong." Not only is this wrong but it is "crazy." We can, if we are really insecure enough, give this craziness names, because names are reassuring. We can communicate, by our tone and often just by our gesture or a look, that those names imply something lesser, inferior, something that denotes shame. We call them schizophrenic, manic depressive, paranoid, and we sometimes do that not just because we are trying helpfully to classify those times in which certain people are overwhelmingly "disturbed by their emotions" and therefore truly need help, but because we are in terror that the differences of their perception during those times will threaten our own precarious self-image.

We might think of what is known as emotional disturbance as existing in a different state, during which perceptions are altered, either temporarily or permanently. You can understand this if you think of the so-called "crazy" person as on a drug which makes him or her see and experience things differently. If we have perceived things differently once, either because of physical makeup or sensitivity from birth or when we did take a drug (you can consider the chemical explanations for behavior almost as though a person is inwardly directed by a drug), that way of perceiving can come back again and again, triggered by any of the things mentioned by those who explain emotional disturbance by psychological or emotional reasons. For example, our problems will return if people around us put us in a double bind by indicating one thing and saying another, or invalidating our true feelings. Our problem will return if the community or people who care, fail to help us solve reality problems, (maybe work training, a satisfying place to live, an authentic relationslip).

We must face, with as much honesty as we can muster, the role of the caretaking person in sometimes producing-through confusion, unconscious anger, old attributions or lack of insight-an increase of symptoms in the person he loves. There are six "models of madness" described by Dr. Humphrey Osmond in a little paper that tried to bring order into the jungle of theories on causation about emotional disturbance.

How can we live more authentically and helpfully with family members or friends who are emotionally upset, without knowing the cause of the unpleasantness? Laing and Esterson and Don Jackson's studies of families of schizophrenics claim that some families use other family members to resolve their own problems, displacing them on the "sick" one who becomes therefore the unconscious scapegoat of unconsciously destructive caretaking family members. If so, how can these unwitting victimizers rally round to help, especially as they are sometimes victims themselves?

Today, it becomes more and more clear that these disturbances probably have multiple causes. Certain people are more sensitive to certain stimuli, based on personality from birth, biogenetic makeup, reaction to chemicals, reaction to social injustice, art, other people, and every conceivable influence from the world outside and the body and mind within. Whatever these causes, however plagued by a low threshold for pain, an ungainly or unattractive body, a withering of certain senses and an exaggeration of others, every human being has the right to a life filled with the events of dynamic existence in the world, trying to find the true nature of confusion behind symptoms can only help, in the learning or expanding sense. We must stay open enough to see that sometimes, inadvertently, our needs gone underground may conflict with theirs, or even that our need is for them to be sick and that we need help ourselves to never make this happen.

Using the "dirty" words of psychiatry-schizophrenia, manic depression, involutional illness-we can communicate the kind of difference in function that exists, yet take the sting out of the words by recognizing the hairline difference between those people whose problems have been given a name, and those whose problems are still nameless.

We can freely and honestly express our feelings about that member of the family for whom life seems to be so perenially hard, who is always having such a rough time of one kind or another, and encourage, with all the sympathy at our disposal, human connections despite his difference (which could be seen by society as occasionally beautiful and visionary). We can influence enough people in our own building, our own neighborhood, our own community, to no longer regard these words as stigmatized, or derogatory, so that eventually the goal might be that we ourselves sometimes, like them can say, "It's a little hard for me to see it your way. Explain it to me. I'm schizophrenic and I sometimes see things differently."

And finally, we can recognize our own lack of power over a final outcome. Imposing one's own values on a person who experiences life differently is the quickest way of feeling that the effort has been a failure.

Nobody, unless there is no alternative, should be deprived of major life experiences. That those experiences may seem to be shallow and chancy is a judgment of ours based on our feeling that length of time is one of the conditions of intensity. Yet a happy moment is fixed forever as a happy moment.

In mid October Emma (I called her that to conceal her difficulty from the children's schools) had perhaps the worst breakdown I had ever seen in my eighteen years as caseworker, except for a battered drummer. It was hard to know if the letters her children showed me were real or automatic writing of hers in a different handwriting. To this day I am inclined to think they were real, but no logic could explain it. Luckily it was summer so we sent the children to camp and the baby to Jewish Infant Shelter. Within a month she was back to functioning and we returned the baby. During the freakout, treated with compassion, she talked of herself in the third person always.

Terms of cause and effect- Bertrand Russell went to town along with calm John Dewey. Goosed Spinoza from the rear and called, "You mystics, phooey! "

The first letter I was actually shown read as follows:

My dear Emma,

I take hand in pen to write you of my reintegrating feelings of tender regard and delicate remorse these recent paintorn days. We have experienced the Void, those places where our own loss carries us into the very moment when ice swept like torrents down mountain steep as a tyrant's nose, sloped gentle as a fly in church on Sunday. Mouths open in piercing shout of alarm we have been trapped in some sudden glacial spume. Legal papers, suicide attempts and expressions of mutual rage and loss have passed between us while we were trapped there among the overturned early horses, their hind legs sticking up out of the ice, dinosaurs and giant winged reptiles in grotesque positions that could not be except their bones were broken, little amazed amphibians staring at us from behind sheets of sleet, like pictures framed under glass.

Mish mash tzadick (Wise man) maven (expert). A chal ar o ye zulst du ha hoppen cholera should get you lieven zuss umlaut cockie-Spanish so maybe a coincidence that the Yiddish gai cock in the ocean be equated with the man's penis or pee pee as we children call it.

-Darwin

"What's a sonata with you? Charles I have written the Ergot Rag. What's a sonata with you?"

Emma maintained a body weight of from eighty two to eighty four throughout her adult life, opting to eat from time to time through the day small morsels of food so as not to crowd the aperture like rush-hour on the Broadway N train otherwise known as the Sea Beach express, from the Bronx, going most of her life from the Bronx, returning at emergency moments to Chaimonides Clinic. She is I or I am her or we are Emma, wife once, and now after the ice age maybe still -of Charles Darwin.

This in order to avoid elective surgery for correction of the dull kind of pain, the kind that had got confused with the other sharp pain, experiencing and remembering surgery as an intrusion and rape of the vulnerable pathetic insides of her, opened when no other means would suffice at that early age.

To be in constant pain. Then nine minutes of pain and one minute of respite. Then eight minutes of pain and two minutes of respite. Then seven minutes of pain and three minutes of respite- and that after forty three hours without such relief, weeping inside for a knife with which to cut it out.

We are but imperfect creatures, Charles, each with our little congenital anomolies and acquired herniated ulverous arterially thickened memories and memories of memory.

"Emma," I would say when she'd phone and I'd get there, "You talk to yourself."

"Oh Miss Pageant," she would answer, "I talk to one of my other selves, not my regular self. And I talk to Charles also. Would you like to talk to Charles?"

Emma's efforts to materialize him were pathetic and absurd, something like an unsuccessful seance. I always waited patiently, made her a cup of sage tea and just kept her company, making no effort to bring her back to reality. She was fun, was the truth of it, agonized word salad and all. She had a sharp wit, even at the worst of it. Bitter, like my own.

"Charles, can you hear me on your mountain."

"Speak a little louder Nettie, the Grand Canyon is between us."

"I say can you hear me?"

"Can I hear what?"

"Morsel of bad tooth broken off from the rest was how it started to feel sometimes Darwin. It went on for such a long time, me always suing you and chasing you and serving you summons. It wasn't always that way. I'm not sure exactly when it started to get better, see when Ralph Waldo split into twins it seemed like I couldn't handle one thing more. I mean I was tired Charles. I didn't want to be an anteater anymore, I wanted to be an inchworm cracking stems as I slid and just carousing with the other castaways. "

"Sometimes I no longer wanted to be a geneticist or an aardvark either. Sometimes I wanted to be an inchworm. I get tired too, Emma. What's for dinner?"

"What do you mean, what's for dinner? You're not living with me. You're living with Scarlet Charlotte, the toilet seat of the Ivy League. "

"Please, you never used to be gross. I'm so conflicted Emma."

"So what's new? Have a gingersnap. Actually it just so happens that I'm making the potroast with the prunes and sweet potatoes the way you used to like it. Maybe you want to stop by. Ralph Waldo and Business Administration are truly getting better. I'm beginning to think they're not hopeless after all."

"Maybe our son was too physically large for his brain and that made him sluggish. Maybe the hoop that came out of the air and split him in two made each of them half size and therefore just the right size for their brain. Anyhow it's wonderful that they're improving, can they read yet?"

"Charles you're days behind in the news. Now sure I should even fill you in because while they were glutinous farinaceous sebaceous pustular infants that I rocked in my paws and sang lullabyes while they snapped at me with their oozing fangs, you denied your paternity. We even went to court, remember. Now that they're getting better, you show some concern."

"Don't say that Nettie. I didn't realize there was that much change. I thought you were being reassuring, like maybe Ralph Waldo learned how to say mama and wave bye bye, peekaboo, I see you. I didn't realize there was any substantial change."

"So then hello bye bye so then hello bye bye so then hello bye bye vus vista dutton was how powdered eggs were remembered by lost oh by the Wolfe grieved one come back again! Look upward fallen angel and the New Funk and Wagnall's encyclopedia!"

"You say but but you mean and-"

"No. I mean but--"

"You say and but you mean for-"

"No I mean and--"

"Could it be that in the whole world only Darwin, Tante BubaZayda, the Spider Grandmother, Jimmy, Ivan, Muriel, Bill, Alice, Lester, Grace. Patrick and me know that the Origin of the Species determined the Origin of the Rat Race? Goodby old friends."

"Careful Emma. Remember the pond."

"Howl howl. Howl howl cream scream shit piss dream clad laid flayed bad in a zing of a death a zing of a death I'm going into a zing of death Charles and whosoever went into a zing of death needs nobody black hole cut cutting come but butting on a hit of black bolster bade the aubade give buttercups whore a where is it where is it Charles, where did it go, hanging around in some cold office on a son of a conundrum maybe. Because let them cut off my boobs and throw them to the birds this time Jose, Chet, Darwin, Tante BubaZayda, Spider Grandmother. I can't any more is all there is to it. I can't and that's the end of it.--Last night the sound of music got into the flaying fright bait also the titmate said wherever the academic bullshit goes hesoever shall follow the bent of the currying favor in the ways that all the young curry but the East Indians use tamarind and mango chutney to conceal the middle class brownose pinknose rednose zion nose nose of Zion rose of Sharon until it comes pouring in on us like looney lava silly putty. You are not my homeland we are my homeland you are not my homeland we are my homeland I think that."

"It can't be any more."

"You mean everyone knows it, not just us? That how much land a man needs is what men live by?"

"Yes everyone, poor long abandoned mama in your wheelchair with the broken leg."

"Doesn't everyone's wheel chair have a broken leg, Beauty? The world will maidenhair and fern December what we play here, but it can never forget what they bred here."

The sunk-in living and fed, who struggled here have correlated it beyond the power of our sore sour to sad or contract. The jailed will bottle boat what we played here, it can never resurrect what they hid here. It is for us the giving rather to be fornicated here to the unwilted smirk, which they who brought here have dust bowl so soberly romanced.

It is rather for pus to be here tabulated to the great gasp remaining before us that from these underfed we take policed conversion to those paws with which they gave the lastfull measure of Depression-

Hail fellow well met on a state cabinboy of what for. We have numb a pie slice of that shield as a proper resting place.

lt is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate-we cannot consecrate-we cannot-

Requesat in request in peace help me father for I have sinned. I have brought forth into this neverland a new incontinent, conceived posteriorly and dedicated to the craposition that all adversities are one two three. I squatted, pledged allegience to the flag of the United States of Remarque and French kissed in commemoration that convex organ of allure known as my own pee pee. My husband was Catullus (the Cat) Darwin, and I live in Indonesia and I originated the Origin of the Species, or he did.

"Which is the sin of which thee speaketh kiddo?"

"I had carnal knowledge of my wife after I knew I did not love her."

"No kidding. Kinaherra, I have to hand it to you converted Yiddles. You do manage to get it on. More than I can say for us aspiring fathers and brothers."

"Brothers I have sinned. I have had cardinal knowledge of pope piously pissed on turd, begat the whole idea of resurrection."

"Yeah, well. Anyhow it makes life easier for me now. They got into the Bronx High School of Science last week and will be receiving their Westinghouse Science Scholarships tomorrow. Seems like they were just slow learners, though I know the correlation of brain size to body weight began to dawn on them."

"God that's nice. It helps me to hear a bit of good news after all this time. l do try to help, Nettie. I'm trapped in some dumb eugenic illusion and despite my modest reputation based on those papers into which I plunged all the more when we lost Annie. I mean my own situation is untenable. I mean I'm losing my buttons. Charlotte isn't at all the scheming temptress you think her. Lord it was hard to think in that crowded villa we had in Milano the year you took up painting and there were always all those things to get for you at the hardware store and that vile frozen pizza you always had for dinner on Thursdays. When I split I was up to my ears--my Chicken Tandoori experiments were going badIy and the little ones kept the telly on all the time."

"That's what children do. One of the things. Some grownups too. Just because you're forever with your nose into a book or a microscope doesn't mean everybody can be like that."

"See I thought life with Charlotte would be-different. I was desperate actually. My work was starting to reach the spot where you look down and see that the whole search meant something- and I needed more data, urgently, because it had all begun to matter so much, maybe because of what happened, maybe because I wanted to know why some survive and others like our Annie, fall down like feathers. Emma, Charlotte isn't even that pretty. Look, she could type superbly and take shorthand, she could collate, she could file, she-"

"You've still got your sense of humor at least. You must be happy with her."

"I'm wretched with her. She's docile and obedient and insecure and competent and boring."

"And I'm manic and compulsive and flighty and foolish and-"

"Emma could I stop by for dinner. It is Friday, isn't it?"

"Yes but not if you're just going to eat my potroast and run. If you listen to the twins read selections from Sonnets to the Portugese, you can come."

"Claim. Blame the same name for having fame deny my happenstance. I, Charles Darwin, author of the Origin of the Species, Voyage of the Beagle, Expression of the Emotions In-"

"All our children become one. Our children fusing together like lovers first entwined and then grown together as some are born, poor assembly line lemons of God, Siamese Twins."

"She had as sensitive and delicate a nature as that exquisite daughter of Charles Darwin, the one who died at ten."

"It is for us the living rather to be here dedicated that those who something here shall not have cried again-that the expression of this emotion-under God-shall have a new da da da and that this ravishment-up to the rope ladder-down the rope ladder-shall not-courage, was it worth-?"

"He retreated behind a veneer (not simulated) of ill health. It was exciting for him to have dinner out as he usually dined home because of the need to hoard his health."

"So strange the howl turned to a laugh when we saw Annie literally standing in the pond, having gone through the ice but the water only up to her waist."

"Back to spider grandmothers. Tante BubaZayda, and Siamese twins arising from one ooze, gushing from one spurt, then separating into-going, going, gone, chip off the old block this infant son of Charles Darwin and Emma Wedgewood, christened by the shammas of the shule Ralph Waldo's identical twin Business Administration, sprung fullblown from the head of Zeus-excuse please-that was in some earlier reincoronation of the lion in winter."

"Gai cock in the ocean."

''But the sewers of the world run into the oceans of the world Spider Grandmother. Out of shit arisen and into shit we shall- "

"No Emma. You say it wrong. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

''That's what I mean. Asses to asses. Lust to rust."

"If your sacriledge and irreverence possibly the cause of--"

"Please God no. Please don't let it have been the result of something I did or said something I felt for a moment-some fatigue, some unfulfilled- "

"Stop dear. It was nothing you did or I did. She wasn't strong enough. These things get sorted out by nature. It was inevitable."

"Charles, my ears hurt from the cacophanous storm in Beethoven's Sixth, even the Pierre Monteux, the "sweet" version. Are you saying that if He exists He is a monkey, or a baboon."

"No Dmitri. I say that the Grand Inquisitor-"

"But if He is omnipotent then He is not benevolent and if He is benevolent then He is not much more than an early chimpanzee in-"

"Stop quoting Dostoievsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov' again. Be human. Be ordinary."

Everytime Emma was on the brink, I'd hear her spouting variations of Lincoln's Gettysburg address like an addled speach writer tippling on memory.

As Emma's caseworker I have to report that she needs more help than she is getting from our agency. Much more. There are simply extra expenses that must be met in this family. Money worries plus the neurological deficits of the new baby are making her feel so odd she doesn't think she can make it.

Do we let her get worse-she'll cost more hospitalized-or pay the dentist and get the color TV collection agency off her back?

Foreclose and smothered days ago our hindmothers brought forth on this canto, rent with torn factions, an equal, revived in property and postulated on the decibel that all men are created level. Now we are unmade in a great Scarborough Fair fasting whether that faction or any faction so believed and so debilitated can long encore. We are met on first rate cottonfield of that core.

Now we are rephrased in a great devil's door testing whether one ancient so deceived and so situated can long tenure. We are met on the eight cattle car har de har har.

It is to use the gliding rather to be beer predicated on those the foam has thus far soberly contraindicated.

Let me assure penpals and loved ones alike, no discrimination that it is terrifying to be the wife of Charles Darwin who has dedicated his life that baboon so banana splitted and so zoo placated, shall not perish from the earth.

"Please be quiet Charles. It's survival of the fittest. She was never strong. We knew that."

"I knew nothing of the kind."

"Just be quiet for a while. I have to climb a mountain and need absolute just for a moment-silence."

Ten sore unleavened years ago our brothers sought north some incontinent, a skewed station constrained in battery and eradicated to the restoration that well then we're elated sequel.

Now we are collaged in a great festered sore guessing whether any station so construed and so eradicated can Paul Revere.

We make book on the white metalmine of what for.

We have come to resuscitate a motion of that mine as a tunneled fasting place for those who here grave there lies that the station mines caves.

It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a danger fence we cannot eradicate-we cannot concentrate- we cannot follow this sound.

The take ten giving and bled who struggled here, have concentrated it far above our poor power to pad or retract.

The failed will river boat nor chicken gumbo what we say here but it can never forget what they did here.

"Emma, stop jabbering. I'll come down off the mountain and earn more money. Would money help?"

"My poor Emma, what time are we from? Is this a dream, as many philosophers and even our own sons Ralph Waldo and Business Administration have suggested, or are we mutants ourselves, pieces of pieces of eight (spin offs from the Great Hermaphrodite Harry Carrie)? Did I spend my life foolishly trying to amass facts to prove survival of the fittest and end up ruining our marriage, mttering much, after we lost our Annie. How many facts does a man need to prove his thesis, to satisfy his obsessive need for more, always more, the land and its bounties, its questions and answers stretching out unendingly, so that-well-yes Emma, my energy got sapped."

"So your energy got sapped Charles. Go tell it on James Baldwin. Listen. I know the whole riff. You got tired classifying stones in the drift near Southampton, worrying about the Galapagos Archipelago, and washing the car, and figured that-"

"Figured nothing my dear. Never forget that vou are still a Wedgewood and your conflicts betray your Origins. Just let it all occur."

"So was it my fault that I didn't water your plants?"

"It was indeed, my dear. Reverence and past affection for your womanhood led me to continue correspondence far beyond my spindrift singalong to pant and perspire. The world will soon collect and long require what we bred here, but it can never forget what we shave for. It is for us the heaving rather to be long conjoined to them who thus far spent their last displeasure of revulsion that from these sins unsaid- "

"Someone just came in. They came by telephone and they need all their forms filled out."

"People don't come by telephone. Only ice ages come by telephone. Hey kid, do you still have those freckled pink nipples so admired by Lamark, Mendel, De Vries and Lenny Bruce? "

"Please Charles. It never was how you thought it from that one time. I actually was never promiscuous, it was only your best friend that I could be with and that only after you had already clearly shown-"

"Enough interpersonal-I need to meditate a minute on the deluges of submarine porphyritic lavas."

"We could have got along on less earthquakes. I didn't ask for half the earthquakes you brought home just to prove to yourself that you could get more than your brother, Abel. At least not until much later, after the separation proceedings had started."

"Whenever the moon and stars are out. Happy Birthday and Beatrice and Aunt Beatrice and Dante Andante going back further into the deep forest and then further back into the deep castle keep was what they called it where the psyched out abscondees of Honorable World War Two went and where you went Charles, taking hopefully without guilt because by your living you made it possible for those dead to be heard though they speak with the gift of tongues for others before them. Of that to evolve something has got to be left and those left able to describe and let others describe those events which they knew would be horrors even before they became horrors. Our Annie liked her eggs scrambled lightly with a teaspoon of cream. God forbid that I or Grandma Spider should brown them even at the edge for then the child would toss her head in that delicate sideways way she had and say, 'But Mama I don't like the brown part.'"

"Emma you may be interested to know that with the return after the glacial period, of a warmer climate in the equatorial regions, the 'species then living towards the equator would retreat north and south to their former homes, leaving some of their cogoners, slowly modified subsequently . . . to repeople the zone they had forsaken.' In this case the species now living at the equator ought to show clear relationship to the species inhabiting the regions around the 25th parallel whose distant relatives they would of course be."

"Will you ever come down off your mountain Darwin, and be "regular" like the kids and me. To spend a Sunday watching television or ice skating at ponds again, instead of barricading yourself behind your pill bottles and piles of assorted piles of papers, card indexes, correspondence ancl bottled incubi as far as the eye could see."

"I am down, Emma. The terrifying truth of Heisenberg's Obedience principle, that the observation of an event, such as recording the earthquake by seismograph or the written notes of naturalist or artist, alters the event, has come through to me. The world will little note nor long remember what we discovered here but we can never forget what we did here."

"Dear Charles, then we're cured-for a bit-and let's live happily ever after."

"Dear Emma, for a bit."

My Dear Emma,

The Cebus Azarae when rejoiced at again seeing a beloved person, utters a peculiar tittering (Kichernden) sound. It also expresses agreeable sensations, by drawing back the corners of its mouth, without producing any sound.

"The gorilla, when enraged, is described as erecting its crest of hair, throwing down its under lip, dilating its nostrils, and uttering terrific yells. Messrs. Savage and Wyman state that the scalp can be freely moved backwards and forwards, and that when the animal is excited it is strongly contracted; but I presume they mean by this latter expression that the scalp is lowered; for they likewise speak of the young chimpanzee, when crying out, 'as having the eyebrows strongly contracted.' The great power of movement in the scalp of the gorilla, of many baboons and other monkeys, deserves notice in relation to the power possessed by some few men, either through reversion or persistence, of voluntarily moving their scalps."

A living turtle was placed at my request in the same compartment in the Zoological Gardens with many monkeys; and they showed unbounded astonishment, as well as some fear. This was displayed by their remaining motionless, staring intently with widely opened eyes, their eyebrows being often moved up and down. Their faces seemed somewhat lengthened. They occasionalIy raised themselves on their hind-legs to get a better view. They often retreated a few feet, and then turning their heads over one shoulder, again stared intently. It was curious to observe how much less afraid they were of the turtle than of a living snake which I had formerly placed in their compartment; for in the course of a few minutes some of the monkeys ventured to approach and touch the turtle. On the other hand, some of the larger baboons were greatly terrified, and grinned as if on the point of screaming out. When I showed a little dressed-up doll to the Cynopithecus niger, it stood motionless, stared intently with widely opened eyes, and advanced its ears a little forwards. But when the turtle was placed in its compartment, this monkey also moved its lips in an odd, rapid, jabbering manner, which the keeper declared was meant to conciliate or please the turtle.

I was never able clearly to perceive that the eyebrows of astonished monkeys were kept permanently raised, though they were frequently moved up and down. Attention, which preceded astonishment, is expressed in man by a sligllt raising of the eyebrows; and Dr. Duchenne informs me that when he gave to the monkey fonnerly mentioned some quite new article of food, it elevated its eyebrows a little, thus assuming an appearance of close attention. It then took the food in its fingers and with lowered or rectilinear eyebrows, scratched, smelled and examined it--an expression of reflection being thus exhibited. Sometimes it would throw back its head a little, and again with suddenly raised eyebrows reexamine and finally taste the food.

I say to survive a man needs to own no more land than he can eat.

lt doesn't matter about the potatoes as long as you make the prunes with the potroast.

Your loving husband,

Charles Darwin

It was an average British family-my father worked on the old Journal American-night job printing. They told me my mother died when she was twenty-nine. They called me into the room to sing "Danny Boy" for her but I couldn't. If a child or a young person dies-if someone weak dies before someone strong-it doesn't seem natural, Charles. Some Charles wrote 'when my father died I had this recurrent dream. For years I felt as though it were my fault. It wasn't. If anything it was his fault, for making me dream the dream."

"I didn't say that. It was some other Charles. I say that it is natural but I also say, not as a scientist but as a father and a man, that it hurts."

"Pink white and lilac flowered china egg cup with some dried flowers predominantly baby's breath and pink and lilac stattice is how I see her now."

"Me too. What are you making for dinner?"

"Though a Wedgewood, I'm making the potroast with the prunes and sweet potatoes. The potatoes are wild. I gathered them in the woods."

"Don't take any wooden Indians, Emma. Could I come by again?"

"That would be beautiful. The twins and our other wonderful children have translated my old lawyer's Gettysburg address into fourteen languages and are exporting it in fortune cookies throughout the Third World."

"That was a splendid dinner, Emma. Like in the old days."

"Glad you liked it Charles. Next time you come by you might just stop at the bakery for a bit of sinew meat for dessert."

"Instead of coming back next time, might I just stay over forever?"

"As you like' Charles. As you like."

"Zy gesunt, madele. Go in good health. Long years on you. May we have often such occasions. That from this village we take increased devotion that this cholera epidemic shall not have hit in vain. That this family, under God, shall experience heretoforth only bar mitzvahs, weddings and circumcisions-no more funerals and these refugees of the trouble-for the trouble-and by the trouble-shall not salvage what it's worth. So, poking a cold paw up in the primordial sludge, inching matted furred body festered with war wounds. Spotted with those huge sores necessary to buffer self from the sharp dangerous world. Callous they called my outcroppings of skin that kept the addicts and sharp portugese beach grass from cutting into me as I edged forward, our children on my back, towards a buffalo bitten wild potato that shown in my retina like a diamond."

"But Emma, my treatise alone earned me enough to keep our children in food certainly."

"Careful-I am Emma, formerly Wedgewood, and speak in figures of speech, pieces of eight, bottles of foam, blood in the vein."

''I understand your defenses, your wisecracks, your foxy tangles."

"Do you? Have a barbecured mountain climber, Charles."

"Certainly, if you do me the honor of having one too."

DARWIN RECONCILIATION BOFFO NEWS SENDS MIDDLE EASTERN SITUATION TO PAGE TWO. SCOPES TRIAL ENDS DEFENSE SCUTTLED COURT RULES FOR DIVINE BIRTH DARWIN'S THEORY OF EVOLUTION NIX IN FINDINGS AND PIX

"But attorney for the plaintiff? Have you Scopes now or ever taught evolution in the public schools."

"I have Rabbi, I have."

"The prisoner shall be remanded to a public zoo and taken on the third day in June to the Man in the moon henceforth to be fed only bananas and confined in a cage with masturbating gibbons and altered gorillas until such time as-"

"But attorney for the plaintiff, William Jennings Bryant died a few days later. "

"Hell hath no sourdough like Vic Trader's spawned."

"Rest Emma. Hush. You can rest now. Here's some nice warm tea See, I brought you some sinew meat. I trust you with it again."

"As you like Charles, as you like."

My Dear Emma,

In no case did any monkey keep its mouth open when it was astonished. Mr. Sutton observed for me a young orang and chimpanzee during a considerable length of time; and however much they were astonished, or whilst listening intently to some strange sound, they did not keep their mouths open. This fact is surprising, as with mankind hardly any expression is more general than a widely open mouth under a sense of astonishment. As far as I have been able to observe, monkeys breathe more freely through their nostrils than men do; and this may account for their not opening their mouths when they are astonished; for, as we shall see in a future chapter, man apparently acts in this manner when startled, at first for the sake of quickly drawing a full inspiration, and afterwards for the sake of breathing as quietly as possible.

Terror is expressed by many kinds of monkeys by the utterance of shrill screams; the lips being drawn back, so that the teeth are exposed. The hair becomes erect, especially when some anger is likewise felt. Mr. Sutton has distinctly seen the face of the Macacus rhesus grow pale from fear. Monkeys also tremble from fear; and sometimes they void their excretions. I have seen one which, when caught, almost fainted from an excess of terror.

Sufficient facts have now been given with respect to the expressions of various animals. It is impossible to agree with Sir C. Bell when he says that 'the faces of animals seem chiefly capable of expressing rage and fear'; and again, when he says that all their expressions 'may be referred, more or less plainly, to their acts of volition or necessary instincts.' He who will look at a dog preparing to attack another dog or a man, and at the same animal when caressing his master, or will watch the countenance of a monkey when insulted, and when fondled by his keeper, will be forced to admit that the movements of their features and their gestures are almost as expressive as those of man.

It frightens me to think how far we have gone in search of something or in avoidance of something. Can we ever work our way back?

More fondly,

Charles

"Continual paranoia based on and needing to split from before being split from, abandon before being abandoned, leave before being left. Right left right forward march this is the way we wash our clothes so early Monday morning. This is the way we dry our clothes, dry our clothes, dry our clothes, this is the way we went to see Snow White and the seven wharves are like docks Daddy said but I said then how come they're spelled different? Oh, he said, you got me there! So it ended unresolved like John Doe Cage re mi fa sol la ti went to town behaving a bit funny, caught a jet plane to some spa and came back on the train- Charles please let's reconsider."

"Reconsider what? We have adjourned and have put asunder."

"Under God Charles. We were joined under God in holy matrimony and no feather tickling electric vibrator using manipulator of a pink pussy should replace those feelings we will always have till forescore and seven years ago--"

"She doesn't use an electric vibrator. Just battery."

"The kids said so. They saw one, right on her bedroom bureau. Do you doubt the words of your own children conceived under God in a steeple, for a steeple and of a steeple."

"You used to use feather ticklers on me too."

"True, but the price has gone up on feathers. Mistresses can be extravagant. I have all these little mouths to feed."

"Go away, I have to label and identify insects."

"Label and identify, label and identify, Charles. But remember, for every pig in a poke you can't make a wet nurse out of a sow's

108 ear."

"Emma you wander. Where do you wander?"

"To the car in the snow. Our parents had taken us to see Snow White at the Bronx Academy of Music and the car broke down. It got stuck in the deep snow and the old man tried and tried what with bricks and pieces of wood under the rear tire and much shrieking at my mother. So finally he went to find help and it was cold but okay but after a long time he didn't come back so she went to get help, you know, just someone to get the car started. The snow drifted outside the windows and covered them, all except one tiny spot of vision where the windshield went 'windshield wind, windshield wind,' and you could see a patch of ground. It was the cemetary that ends just before you hit the park circle at 606 Ocean Parkway."

"But they eventually came back."

"Charles, eventually was too long then and still is now. My name is anteater and my extusband is an aardvark and I eat ants. My name is Little Orphan Annie and my daddy's name is Warbucks and he eats aspirgum. My name is Virus and my doctor's name is Virchow and he eats spirochetes. My name is Virago and my spirit's name is Zanthippe and she scolds Socrates. My name is dirt and my affliction's name is Wart and eat crow.-Charles, I'm sorry, Charles."

"Don't keep saying that . You remind me of my father. Blow your proverbial stack or don't blow your proverbial stack but don't come apologising to me afterwards."

"What shall I do?"

"Take all the divorce proceedings that have accumulated in your paranoid traumatized myth-trapped Wedgewood birdbrain of a mind and use them for toilet paper. It all looked so real I began to believe it after a while. When it comes right down to it all I actually goddam did was hire a decent typist/fileclerk who could take speedwriting, do a little transcribing on the side, and keep my god-damn correspondence in some kind of order when the gout has me so bad I can't do what I have to concerning the natural selection of the species."

"What are species Charles?"

"Species are those living things which differ from other living things in some ways."

"Then everything is species?"

"No, other things exist."

"Like what, Charles?"

"Like apple pie."

"I see."

"Charles. Please don't fade. First Annie faded and then God faded and then I thought you faded. That's why I started seeing all those lawyers of the mind."

"Okin, Pressler and Shapiro exist Emma. Bergen County exists. Dockets and supeonas exist."

'They do? I thought they were jets of steam that come from the kettle when one is brewing sassafras tea."

"You're crazy Emma."

"You too, Charles."

"Granted but let's try again anyhow. Here, I'll get on top of you and you wriggle around a bit until it feels nice."

"It feels nice now, but your whiskers hurt and I don't know where to put my legs."

"Didn't your mother ever show you? Didn't you have any instruction in high school? And didn't we do it for a long time and many times before Annie died?"

"Yes but that was then. I've forgotten how to do it."

"Here, let me show you."

"That's nice. Honestly, did you only want Charlotte because she could type eighty words a minute and classify alphabetically?"

"No, not only for that reason. She wasn't very exciting but she smiled often and politely and ghosts and spirits with wine colored velvet muffs and bonnets with white fur trim didn't surround her. I hurt enough inside and the water cure is strenuous. I couldn't take more hurt coming in from outside."

"I understand."

"You always understand after your rage is spent and you've taken a librium. I need someone who has no rage or who goes and sticks needles in effigies instead of ventilating."

"You mean an early Christian Haitian voodoo martyr."

"Yes, it she can type well."

"Charles, can we try again?"

"Good Lord, I never stopped trying. What do you think all the certified checks were, confederate wall paper?"

"Money can't buy love, Charles."

"Don't quote the Beatles to me. Those Iyrics occured decades after I died and turned into miso flour."

"I'm sorry, darling. "

"Shut up and move down a little. There, that's better. Let your leg just slide out naturally to the left. Now when I press down you press up. Doesn't that feel better?"

"It feels nice."

"You bet it feels nice Emma. It's what keeps us all from dashing our heads against coral reefs."

"There are no coral reefs here."

"But if there were, this is what would keep us from dashing our heads against them."

"So we're not divorced after all?"

"Look, there was an event. Several events. We said lots of harsh things to each other."

"No more babies got born and l got tired after losing Annie and wanted to look through the hole. I took chances Charles, and figured Tante Buba-Zayda could do a better job than me raising children eventually. "

"Sure, sure, except Tante Buba-Zayda's a little odd you know and spins webs much of the day to catch spiders. That's not exactly designed to get our kids into Oxford-Harvard you know. "

"True. I had conflicts."

"Don't talk about conflicts when you're under me. As I lower you just raise a litle. When I raise, you lower."

"Like this?"

"Exactly. Now don't say anything at all and maybe things will get better."

"After a while Emma nee Wedgewood and Chades Darwin the eminent naturalist, had a simultaneous orgasm, rested a while, warmed up some coffee with half hot milk and a bit of cinnamon and brown sugar, and resumed their lives. I, Tante BubaZayda known in Kiowa Indian myth as Spider Grandmother, made myself scarce, only emerging from my room now and then to baby sit, reconcile their checkbooks, and spin silk shawls. Seeing the apparent reconciliation, knowing from history that battle after battle precedes detumescence, held my peace. I am as neutral as a Swiss and nothing could pry from my lips the story of the six hexagonal crayons."

"Grandma, what happened with Mama and the six hexagonal crayons?"

"Shhh. I'm sworn to secrecy. Well, when your mother was six and went to kindergarten she used to throw up each morning on her teacher, Miss Weaselthere."

"Miss What?"

"Her teacher Miss Weaselthere. Now one morning her teacher Miss Weaselthere got very bothered that your mother had thrown up her breakfast of Cream of Wheat on Miss Weaselthere's new lime striped chiffon blouse, so she locked her in the supply closet for an hour as punishment."

"Could mother breathe in there, Grandmother?"

"Oh sure, it was a good five feet deep and quite high. lt had all these reams of yellow manila paper and little boxes of nice dull kindergarten scissors and a gross of hexagonal crayons in assorted colors."

'What did Mama do?"

"Well first she cried and pounded at the door. Then she stamped her foot and she said cursewords used only by privates and privates first class during World War Two. Then she fell silent and touched her parts until things seemed a little better, though she didn't come or anything becuase she was but a child and understood nice, but not nice, nicer, nicest, and the bang, finish. You know what I mean, Ralph Waldo?"

"Not exactly Grandmother."

"Never mind. lt doesn't matter. You're too young to understand all that stuff anyhow. Look, would you mind turning off the cassette while I explain about your mother? These machines all you kids use these days to document fascinating old characters like me, begin to freak me out."

"It's so much easier to remember this way Grandma. and l can give the tape to Daddy's secretary Charlotte the flotsam floozie to transcribe. "

"Turn off the damn gadget or not a word more. And don't think you fool me with the built in condenser mike."

"Okay Grandma. okay. Anyhow what happened to Mama?"

"Well she then took some of the yeliow manila paper and six of the hexagonal crayons and she drew a lot of genitals and at the bottom of each page she did what all children her age do if they can write letters and she could because she had taught herself to write by copying out the complete works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Booth Tarkington, James Oliver Curwood, and How To Succeed at Contract Bridge."

"What was that, Grandma?''

"Well she put her teacher's name at the bottom of all the pages of genitals she had drawn, and then she blew her nose on the drawings and let it dry."

"Why did Mama do that, Spider Grandmother, Tanta BubaZayda?"

"Why do children do anything? Because they feel like it Ralph Waldo, because they feel like it. Growing up is learning how to not always do what you feel at the moment that you feel like it."

"So what happened?"

"So just before her hour of punishment was up she reached into the boxes of assorted hexagonal crayons and took one of each color, crimson red, scarlet red, pink, powder blue, dark blue, and chrome yellow, along with a few extra sheets of the manila paper. The crayons she stashed in her pinafore pocket and the paper she wadded up into her pantaloons, just to one side of where her slip stuck out."

"Didn't she get caught?"

"In a way Ralph Waldo, in a way. Her teacher opened the door when the three o'clock bell rang and said, "My dear, what nice drawings you made," being a bit nearsighted and not recognizing genitals when she saw them anyhow."

"Then school let out and your mother went to stand on the corner until her daddy Trotsky Revisionitsky would pick her up with the car. You see several weeks before, her family had moved from Coney Islandgetti to Grey Fridge, Bronx, and they figured it would be good to let the child finish out her first term at school. That was why each day her father came to pick her up."

"Grandma Spider, what is a father?"

"Someone who takes voyages on Beagles, and mounts specimens and comes to limited conclusions. Anyhow your mama waited on that corner for some time and finally a green Studebaker went by. See your grandfather had a green Studebaker."

"Didn't everyone in those days have a green Studebaker?"

"Perhaps, perhaps. Anyhow let me finish because I'm getting hungry and my spider latkes will be done in a couple of minutes."

"So she figured that since the green Studebaker had gone by, her father had perceived that she was a thief (the six hexagonal crayons still clutched firmly in her pinafore pocket, the yellow manila paper scratching her child's behind). Obviously one glance from the window of the green Studebaker-and remember this was the same green Studebaker in which she had shivered and watched snow flurries when her father had once before gone supposedly for help-had clued in her father on the following sins: theft of six hexagonal crayons and some dozen sheets of yellow manila paper; touching her little pussy in fear and trembling for comfort when locked in; vomiting good food her mother had fed her on Miss Weaselthere's striped blouse."

"So what happened then?"

"What do you think happened Ralph Waldo, she sat on the curb until nighttime. It rained, rain mixed with her tears, she didn't realize it was a different green Studebaker that had passed. Her father had thought her mother was picking her up and I-well I was painting my first abstract expressionist painting and thought Daddy was getting the kid. Later when we called the precinct, they didn't have any report on her. A squad car subsequently sent out disclosed a child who had been saying to candy store owners and cops that her name was Emma Revisionist, her address was Rottaway Beets, and that her parents didn't want her anymore because she had sinned. She was picked up from Temporary Children's Shelter the next morning after having vomited her civic breakfast on the police matron and had a fear of abandonment ever since."

"Turn off your cassette Ralph Waldo. My spider latkes are ready and I am not Thomas Wolfe's mother nor Sigmund Freud. Life is harsh but it has its rewards. Do you prefer a wing or a leg?"

"Tante Buba-Zayda, I don't want to bother you but in an effort to rehabilitate myself and not turn tricks any more to support Charles Darwin's children, l wrote a book. I know how busy you are making spider latkes and trying to estimate just how much land you need, but I thought you might happen to take thirteen hours or so just to read it and suggest an agent or possible publisher."

"Emma this has come up with us over and over. First of all, aren't your twin sons Ralph Waldo and Business Administration supporting you now?"

"Please let's not get into Langian knots, Tante BubaZayda, you know how kids are. At first they were very, very generous with their royalties but after a couple of days they fell in love with two ardent Zionists and are now sending their money to Israel."

"So dollink, if you choose to live in the diaspora, don't take it out on your old friends and spider grandmothers. Us Russian peasants find it just as hard as you to accumulate enough kopeks to keep the plantation in hemorrhoid ointment. Besides you keep putting me in a double bind. One time you say you want only the pleasure of my company, the next you ask about agents."

"It's true. I think I have lost my most favorite old friend who was weird and funny like me and used to be a hunchback for Unicorn Press in the elevators, by such conflicted behavior. Do you think I need group therapy?"

"A blow on your tuchas is what you need. Vus vilsa conflicts? Tilling the pushcarts we had no time for conflicts. Only the goyim and the American Indians have conflicts. lt comes of coveting land."

"Honest Tanta Buba-Zayda? But I covet nothing, just enough to get by. Darwin is as inconsistent in his child support and fringe benefits as in his explanation of the Origin of the Species."

"Don't try confusion technique on me Emma. I've been around for too many hundred years to be manipulated. We were talking about your periodic requests for favors."

"I don't want to be famous like Charles. I just want someone to read it."

"So make up your mind. If you don't want me to suggest an agent or a publisher I'll just read it and lend you what you need for the children's knadel soup at only six and a half percent interest because you're a relative."

''No see, I'd like you to suggest a publisher because then lots of people would read it and-"

"AII right, we'll settle. I'll send it to Bill at Arleigh Books. Let me go back to my spider latkes. Now leave me alone or you'll lose me like you may have already lost your other friends."

There was a place that we could never go to. I know that place dum dum da da da da da dum. There was a time where we were little babies. l know that time dum dum da dum dum da da da. There was a momemt when the ice age hit us. I know that moment da da da dum dum dum dum dum.

Bim bam bamety bam bim bam.

"Conflicts and quandaries Emma! Conflicts and quandaries!"

"But I don't understand, Bill. How can you be an editor at Arleigh Books now when l've been the widow of Charles Darwin for a hundred years?"

"Come now dear, I had to earn a living while you were ex-wife and widow of our forefathers festered score ago. Listen, Darwin was a famous geneticist buried at Westminster Abbey for God's sake. You could afford to retreat into-"

"Bill, you don't understand. Charles was predictable in terms of accurate observation that the moderate differences between the female pheasant, the female Gallus Bankiva, the female black grouse, the pea hen and the female partridge, have all special references to protection under slightly different conditions, but he was confusing and inconsistent about supporting his kids. including the early years of our lastborn, Ralph Waldo Business Administration. I used to have to turn tricks toward the end of the month. It was only after I was attacked by an Office of Vacational Rehabilitation and lost my fur for six months, that I trained myself with mail order teachers and a pint of Columbian, to write a book. "

"So its been for you like it is with us. One foot ahead of the other."

"Yeah, well. It gets easier. We don't have to give the babies their flea baths any more."

"True. But there's still the paper work. When God created Adam he should have looked at the Orangoutang and noticed how much time our humbler cousins have left for meditation by not stripping the bark from trees and writing stuff on it."

"Yeah, well the only thing is when God created Adam he was into one of his cyclic depressions and nothing interested him. He didn't even want to go to the Zoo on Sunday and look at the monkeys. Darwin got into the same trip when he'd take the kids to the park just before he got me pregnant with Ralph Waldo and split."

"Split from you or split in two like Jackie was telling me the other day?"

"Both, Judy. There was this picture l have of you taken at 613 Second Avenue some time in nineteen forty Dum Dum."

Fuck shit to fuck this tit such but muck cluck lit this shits gang bang fuck stunk piss shit gas shit kiss fit split tit slup glop pluck bob hit bat sit cat stat bit but fag fit cut damit lust cocksit turd dirt bit commit wasp tit ask fit last spot first pot this piss is what hail hail the gang's on beer what we hear is what we fear the times a bloody bass fiddle the amps the muddy mace guitar they threw the mace and hit an ice flow that was son of a bitchly cocksucking along a quiet city street when seven pale fairies were said to be penance-is how some of the time is and will always be.

"Judy when you were at Rooster, Bill was at Temporary Filling Press. Charles and Grace were still with their tabloid The New York Daily March of Dimes, and Jose and St. Nick were shuttling back and forth between the North Pole and Macy's, on a sled named Rosebud borrowed from Orsen Welles. Milk stood firm at three and a half cents an ounce and the post World War Two population explosion had caused the origin of the calibrated lens through which a historic photograph ofCatullus, schoolmate of Charles, was soon to be taken. Breadlines covered the nation, rising one morning to yeast swollen dimensions so high as to obscure the skyline and cover the President."

"Emma, who are you, my child or mother? Friend or foe?"

"Yeah, well, who are you, old friend? Look I'm sending you this book I found in the garbage under a cabbage with its placenta still uncut. Unable to walk, its terrified unwed mother had mailed it to Albert Schweitzer who had mailed it back in a wheelchair and placed it in the package room of a large artists' housing project converted from the old Don Ameche Telephone Building. On its return, its mother, fortified by megavitamins and resolute of mind now, raised it."

"Life is hard, (or easy as the case may be)."

"I had this dream of throwing a frisbie. Do you think it had anything to do with what was going on?"

"I'm afraid to dream. I'm afraid to get hit in my dreams. If I feel myself starting to dream I jump up and drink something nourishing. "

"When I used to let myself dream they were always problem-solving dreams, so in a way I miss them."

"Yes."

"My dreams stopped telling me what to do. They were just about things that had happened, like what happened during the evolution of man. Like survival of the fittest. Ice Ages. Personal ice ages. Ugh!"

"Did you know that if you take a galvanized wire and apply it to an individual's facial muscles with the proper current, you will succeed in producing facial contortions?"

"That seems irrelevant Charles. You're so remote. In the dreams l couldn't do anything about anything, just watched them roll by like old movies."

"Galvanization can mimic perceived emotion."

"Sure. Well for example I'm on line to cash a check for eleven dollars and in the dream I start at the end of the line, work my way to the beginning, the girl gives me the eleven dollars and I walk out. The only thing unusual is the number of times I dreamed that dream."

"A man in a coonskin cap needs a loan signed. He wants an eleven dollar bill and you've only got ten."

"Yes Charles. I guess I dreamed that maybe fourteen hundred times. Then I continued to dream the same dream but it was about a check for twelve dollars instead of eleven."

"Man in a coonskin cap-can't remember the rest. It was a Dylan song wasn't it?"

"Charles! You're no help. No help. For a social scientist who wrote Origin of the Species you sometimes seem spaced."

*** THE GARDEN REVISTED

When Darwin died in 1882, he was buried in Westminister Abbey near kings and scientific greats, such as Sir Issac Newton. To be buried in Westminister Abbey is an honor accorded to very few people other than royalty and military heroes. That Darwin was buried in the Abbey is testimony to the greatness he had achieved.

The honors received in life and death could not change the fact that his life's work, natural selection, was in serious trouble. The trouble was not in the belief of the mutability of species. By the time Darwin died, most biologists believed that species evolved somehow. However, none of Darwin's followers had been able to offer a satisfactory explanation of how variations happen and how the variations are inherited. Pangenesis was a desperate, if well-thought-out, attempt to save natural selection. There was no experimental evidence to uphold pangenesis. Despite this, there were many who held onto it simply because there was othing else to believe in.

It is to be expected that not everyone rallied to Mendel and Bateson. The battle between the pro- and anti-Mendelians was long and bitter. Galton was particularly opposed to Mendelism. But the biometricians were now not the only ones who had precision on their side.

Bateson promoted Mendelism with the zeal of a missionary, but the biometricians used the memory of Darwin to uphold their cause. Bateson had a problem in that he did not have a job. Loudly advocating Mendelism and his aimost violent opposition to Darwinian gradual evolution was not likely to help him get one. Most of the people who had the power of hiring were older and more likely to hold to older ideas. Nevertheless, he continued to promote Mendelism. Bateson skillfully planned his campaign to show that only Mendelism could save Darwinism. He wrote a book on the subject, A Defense of Mendel's Principles of Heredity.

In his book Bateson said that Mendelism was the greatest thing for Darwin's theory of evolution since Darwin himself. Bateson was not content to just write books. He engaged in a great deal of research intended to point out the universality of Mendel's principles. Before many people knew what was happening, a new science had been started. It needed a name. In a rather lengthy statement, Bateson proposed a name-genetics.

Shortly after the rediscovery of Mendel, DeVries published a book. Much of what he had in his book was supported by observations he had made on a plant called Oenothera lamarckiana, the evening primrose. Oenothera is an American species which had been brought to Europe.

DeVries came across a patch of Oenothera in a field. He saw that among the plants there were two which were noticeably different from the others. DeVries was quite excited by what he saw. Here were actual mutations! He collected samples of the regular and apparent mutant types and grew them in his garden.

He found that many of the mutant types bred true generation after generation. The regular types frequently produced variant types. He felt sure that these results proved his ideas on mutation. He maintained that his results demonstrated that selection had little or nothing to do with the production of ne species. The cytologists would have some fun wth DeVries work a few years later.

When cytologists read Mendel's work, many were able to see a significant relationship between Mendel's work and their own. Mendel had proposed that the "factors" segregate and are redistributed in a random manner to future generations.

Many cytologists claimed that if the word chromosome were substituted for factor, Mendel's paper would be a fairly accurate description of what they had seen in the meiotic cell division which produced gametes. This observation tended to strengthen earlier suspicions that the chromosomes were the home of the hereditary factors. In 1902 an American, W. S Sutton, made some statements on these observations, and in so doing, forever united cytology and genetics.

William Sutton's life was somewhat the reverse of many who came before him. He started out as a research biologist and later went to medical school and became a surgeon. In 1902 he was a garduate student at Columbia University in New York. One of his teachers was C. E. McClung, who was doing some work with a peculiar little chromosome he had observed in a bug called Pyrrhocoris. This chromosome was so peculiar it was dubbed "X". McClung thought it might have something to do with determining whether a Pyrrhocoris was a male or female bug.

Sutton used a large grasshopper for his work. This grasshopper, called the "lubber" grasshopper, was suitable because its cells had only eleven pairs of easily seen chromosomes. Sutton concentrated his work on the production of sperm cells.

He wrote two papers on his work. The first was a detailed account of the sequence of events in meiosis in the grasshopper. In the second paper, he related the behavior of the chromosomes to Mendelian genetics.

He reiterated the belief that pairs of homologous chromosomes come together in synapses. The pairs which had come together were always the same size and shape. By this time, it was generally accepted that the chromosomes retained their identity through many repeated cell divisions.

He started his paper with five general statements:

1. The chromosome group of the presynaptic germ-cells is made up of two equivalent chromosome series, and strong grounds exist for the conclusion that one of these is paternal and the other maternal.

2. The process of synapsis . . . consists in the union of pairs of the homologous members (i.e., those that correspond in size) of the two series.

3. The first post-synaptic or maturation mytosis is equational and hence results in no chromosomic differentiation.

4. The second post-synaptic division is a reducing division resulting in the separation of the chromosomes which have conjugated in synapses, and their regulation to different germ-cells.

5. The chromosomes retain a morphological individuality throughout the various cell divisions.

He went on to say that the way the paired chromosomes gathered at the center of the cell was purely a matter of chance. The chance position determined whether gametes would receive chromosomes containing hereditary units of paternal or maternal origin. This chance position of the chromosomes resulted in a very large number of possible combinations of hereditary factors in the gametes produced by meiosis. Sutton believed that his observations were cytological proof of Mendel's laws of segregation and Bovari had arrived at somewhat the same conclusions at about the same time. Of course, all this was based on the unproved idea that hereditary factors were in the chromosomes.

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