Chapter 6

Poor Tom! You do feel sorry for him don't you? Well he doesn't need your help. I'll assure you that he was feeling quite sorry himself. As a matter of fact, it was a long time before he could turn his attention outward to his mother and consider what her plight must have been. He had heard from neighbors who had watched the scene that the house was totally engulfed in flames. His mother had been cornered in her room at the farthest end of the house. The firemen could not enter at first because of the heavy flames and Corinth, fearing for her delicate bones, had utterly refused to climb out the window. Instead she had taken refuge in her bathtub; an oasis in the middle of this inferno. And that's where (when the flames had subsided enough for anyone to enter) they had found her.


Tom cringed as he pictured her languishing there like a modern day Marat. At this point it was a thought he could hardly bear and whenever it thrust itself upon him he did his best to dismiss it. His mother had not been a loveable person yet he had loved her. She had been no "amie du peuple", no not even an "amie" of her own son Tom but there was something in living with a person 30 years....even an unpleasant person.....Also, Tom knew better than anyone else that the cutting of the umbilical cord was a mere myth meant to assauge the psyche with feelings of independence and self-determination. In reality one is never really dissvered from a mother or fully reliant on self and so he missed her.

He had certainly never enjoyed the verbal beatings or the physical ones laid by her cane across his back when she had too much whiskey but at least they represented the permanent presence of someone else in his life. He had company then, be it good or bad and that was positive. Now that she was gone the fathomless years unfolded before him in an endless procession. How was he to fill them? Where was he to go? What was he to do and most importantly who would cook his meals? He was frightened, overwhelmed as he had never been before and so he availed himself of the only lethe he knew, his only means of forgetting the unpleasant unreality- sleep. Ah yes...to sleep, perchance to dream. That my friends is the only cure for the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.