Proud Flesh by William Humphrey

Author:William Humphrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504006286
Publisher: Open Road Media

Being the first born, the child Amy had been supplanted in her mother’s affections by each child who came after her. In the line that formed to wait for Ma’s attentions, Amy’s place was at the foot, and the line grew longer all the time. Little Amy watched her little brothers and sisters being pampered and petted and was told she was too big to be babied any more and made to feel ashamed of herself that she should want to be. To keep from being jealous, Amy put herself in a different category, out of competition with the others. She identified herself with Ma. She made herself a junior mother to the rest. And, by dint of hard work, she brought home regularly the best report card of any of her class at school. She could not bear to be excelled by any of her classmates. Because when she was, and Ma consoled her by saying it didn’t matter, not to fret over it, to her it didn’t matter at all, then Amy was dismayed. Because if that didn’t matter then neither did it matter when hers were the highest marks in class. Then all her work was for nothing.

And what work it was! Amy’s schoolteachers were women of a now extinct breed: nuns of knowledge, missionaries to the dark continent of the child mind, whose choice of a career, in those days when teachers were forbidden by state law to marry, must have come to them like a call to take the veil—perhaps like some of those calls, following a disappointment in love, or the acknowledgment that love was not going to come. If the teachers of those days were forbidden by law to have any emotional life, the children of those days were presumed not to have any, or if they did, to leave it at home, not bring it to school with them. To school what they brought were their little minds, like pitchers to the well, and those old maid teachers filled them to overflowing. Reading and writing and ’rithmetic were their subjects, rote and repetition their methods. Each evening the children were sent home with an assignment for the following day which only a child could have done, no adult could have stood it. A hundred compound-complex sentences to parse and diagram. A poem to be learnt by heart. They were there yet, all the uplifting poems that had been carved in the tender bark of Amy’s memory: Tell me not, in mournful numbers, Life is but an empty dream! If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, Say not the struggle naught availeth … Fifty new words for the spelling bee, such useful additions to the vocabulary of a ten-year-old as onomatopoeia, rodomontade, exegesis, syzygy … And on one evening after which she was never again to be the same, to which she was even to give a title, like a chapter in a book, one mountainous problem in long division which she could not for the life of her solve.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.