Free Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick

circling the nearby streets, observing (she was becoming more attentive) the little houses of the neighborhood, each with its low hedges squared off to mark a miniature front yard dominated by a single pared evergreen shrub or lilacs struggling to escape their enforced boundaries. She had grown almost docile about putting on her shoes, and would complain only that she had no others. Except for this recurrent grumbling, she seemed agreeable enough. Now and then I would take Waltraut by the hand and join these modest walks; but Mrs. Mitwisser's newly awakened scrutiny, searching everywhere, continued to avoid the face of her child. Instead she would stop to examine a bit of green stalk burst up from a crack in the pavement, or a purple clover-head sprouting from the curb; or else she would remark on the needling glints of mica in the sidewalk, or the starlike configurations of straw caught in a puddle of sun-melted tar. Her look was that of a microscope, enlarging with a relentless eye whatever fell under it, and I thought I might be witnessing evidences—diminished though they were—of the scientist she had been. The refugee physicist formerly attached to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin suddenly sat down on the ground and picked up a lady-bug and let it run companionably along her finger. But when Waltraut came near, tentatively, distrustfully, drawn by the insect's tiny round spotted back, Mrs. Mitwisser instantly blew it away.
    The walks lengthened. If the day's heat was not too heavy, Mrs. Mitwisser could be cajoled to the outer margins of the bay, untenanted except by her own vagabond boys. They were generally bloody, their feet and shins cut by shells and small sharp stones. A shower of butterflies, wave after wave of whirling white ruffles, splashed up like an inverted fountain around their heads; they dashed through the fluttering clouds, shrieking when thorny grasses caught at their bare legs—they were the captains of this half-wild ring of neglected marsh. Mrs. Mitwisser made no move in their direction. She stood gazing over the water, as if (but this may have been my own imagining) Europe, and not a distant extrusion of the mundanely inhabited Bronx, darkened the opposite shore; and then she bent to study a stray goose feather. Anneliese tried to take her mother's arm; she shook it off. She was enormously—excessively—concentrated. She fixed on a single object as if she could see into its molecular structure, or as if some luring being within it, god or lurking elf, was summoning. She had put on her shoes and awakened to the natural world: the botanical, the ornithological—that goose feather—seized her notice. Her children did not.
    These were days almost pastoral. Professor Mitwisser departed in the morning, attired like an ambassador about to address an assembly of fellow diplomats. Five minutes after the green front door shut behind him, it was jerked open with a force that strained its hinges, and the boys shot out—three dervishes clutching paper-bag lunches and heading for cattails and empty watery lots. Then Anneliese and Mrs. Mitwisser would venture out on their wandering excursions, and usually I followed with Waltraut, who, when the trek began to tire her, rode high on my shoulders. There was a summer stillness in the streets; every few yards Mrs. Mitwisser halted our little parade to investigate a spray of leaves on a fallen twig, or a beetle swimming in a rain-channel. In the afternoons, while Mrs. Mitwisser fell into a doze on her bed, and Waltraut napped in her crib, Anneliese vanished to some other part of the house, shunning me. I understood that she no longer wished to be her family's historian: I had pressed her too hard. Or she feared I would again ask about money. In the motionless quiet of those shadowed hours I was perfectly idle, and perfectly alone.
    This way of life—it had begun to feel exactly that, as immutable as if years were passing in these identical routines—was