aughed and stood behind the counter, ready
for a flirtation....

My father was young, too. And he was employed there in the store,
apprenticed to the candy-maker's trade. And, on this day, as he passed
through, carrying a trayful of fresh-dipped chocolates, he winked at my
mother and joked with her in an impudent way ... and she rebuffed him,
not really meaning a rebuff, of course ... and he startled her by
pulling off his hat and grotesquely showing himself to be entirely bald
... for he had grown bald very young--at the age of sixteen ... both
because of scarlet fever, and because baldness for the men ran in his
family ... and he was tall, and dark, and walked with rather a military
carriage.

* * * * *

I was four years old when my mother died.

When she fell sick, they tell me, my grandfather did one of the few
decent acts of his life--he let my father have a farm he owned in
central Kansas, near Hutchinson. But my father did not try to work it.

He was possessed of neither the capital nor knowledge necessary for
farming.

He went to work as clerk in a local hotel, in the rapidly growing town.
Crazy with grief, he watched my mother drop out of his life a little
more each day.

* * * * *

My father and mother both had tempers that flared up and sank as
suddenly.

* * * * *

I had lung fever when I was a baby. That was what they called it then. I
nearly died of it. It left me very frail in body.

* * * * *

As soon as I could walk and talk my mother made a great companion of me.
She didn't treat me as if I were only a child. She treated me like a
grown-up companion. I am told that I would follow her about the house
from room to room, clutching at her skirts, while she was dusting and
sweeping and working. And to hear us two talking with each other, you
would have imagined there was a houseful of people.

* * * * *

My father's anguish over my mother's death caused him to break loose
from all ties. His grief goaded him so that he went about aimlessly. He
roamed from state to state, haunted by her memory. He worked at all
sorts of jobs. Once he even dug ditches for seventy-five cents a day. He
had all sorts of adventures, roaming about.

As for me, I was left alone with my grandmother, his mother,--in the big
house which stood back under the trees,