Proud Flesh by William Humphrey Page A

rather craved a feeling of being insufficiently appreciated. But her mother more than gratified this craving. Amy tried to reason why. Her mother disliked feeling beholden to anybody for anything; could it be that, all Amy’s covering up notwithstanding, she chafed at a sense of indebtedness for the help Amy had given her brothers and sisters? For it is one thing to dislike unpleasant duties, something else again to feel obligated to somebody for doing the unpleasant duties you have neglected. Perhaps Ma resented Amy’s interference. Perhaps she would rather the children had come to her with their troubles. At times Amy almost felt that her mother hated her, positively hated her, for knowing all her other children’s failings, those guilty secrets which only a mother has the right to know.
    But Amy’s love for her mother was like the camomile: the more it was stepped on the more it grew. She bore her lot patiently, penitentially, telling herself she deserved no better, never letting up in her attentions but persisting in hopes of someday winning her mother’s trust and affection. Yet it pained and saddened her.
    One particularly painful thing was her mother’s dislike of being alone with her. Amy knew herself to be oversensitive, prone to exaggerate her wounds, even to invent them; but this she had seen too many times to be mistaken, and more and more just lately: her mother’s uneasiness whenever they were alone together, her relief at the appearance of another person, at remembering something else that she ought to be doing.
    Amy attributed this in part to her profession. Her mother had a terror of death, and a consequent dislike of doctors; and the next thing to a doctor was a nurse. She might enjoy being babied by others of her children, whose concern over her health she could dismiss as arising simply out of love; but Amy’s concern frightened her, and because it frightened her it angered her. Probably she suspected that Amy had noticed, and knew how to interpret, what had passed unnoticed by the others: a certain bluish swelling around the bases of her fingernails, which she herself knew to connect with her heart condition because the two had appeared at the same time, and that Amy might have caught and identified the odor of valerian and digitalis in her bedroom. When Amy was around she went to great lengths to keep her hands, with their telltale bluish swellings around the nails, hidden from sight.
    Between the two there was also another barrier, and that was Amy’s childlessness. Edwina, mother of ten, could not help pitying a barren woman, and Edwina’s pity was what in another person might have seemed almost like contempt. Over Amy, Edwina had not the hold she had, through their children, over her other daughters.
    Amy and her mother were divided on yet another matter, that of Amy’s baby brother and his disaffection. Amy was the only one ever to dare speak of this to Ma. She could see it was painful to Ma, but she could not hold her tongue, her feelings were too strong for her. She did not understand, she did not ask, she did not want to know the cause of her brother’s final quarrel with her mother. It was not to be understood, only condemned. And there, for Edwina, was the rub. This was something worse than being disagreed with; this was being agreed with when you did not want to be. For by day Edwina might be unforgiving and inflexible and proud of herself for it, but by night, across the years and the miles separating him from her, Edwina pleaded with her errant baby boy to come back home to her, abjectly promising to forgive him and take all the blame upon herself if only he would come home to her; and Edwina did not like to hear from another of her children expressions of the rigor she professed to feel, knew she had every right and duty to feel, and did feel for just half the time.
    â€œA bolt from the blue,” said Gladys. She was describing the effect