The Corrections

wool beauties. Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.
    Cleaning Al’s room in St. Jude she found a much-handled volume of Schopenhauer with certain passages underlined. For example: The pleasure in this world, it has been said, out weighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other .
    What to believe about Al Lambert? There were the old-man things he said about himself and the young-man way helooked. Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.
    While she waited, she ironed twenty shirts a week, plus her own skirts and blouses.
    Nosed in around the buttons with the iron’s tip. Flattened the wrinkles, worked out the kinks.
    Her life would have been easier if she hadn’t loved him so much, but she couldn’t help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.
    Every day she endeavored to cleanse the boys’ diction, smooth out their manners, whiten their morals, brighten their attitudes, and every day she faced another pile of dirty crumpled laundry.
    Even Gary was anarchic sometimes. He liked best to send the electric engine barreling into curves and derail it, see the black chunk of metal skid awkwardly and roll and spark in frustration. Second best was to place plastic cows and cars on the rail and engineer little tragedies.
    What gave him the real techno boner, however, was a radio-controlled toy automobile, much advertised on television lately, that went anywhere . To avoid ambiguity he planned to make it the only item on his Christmas list.
    From the street, if you paid attention, you could see the light in the windows dimming as Gary’s train or Enid’s iron or Alfred’s experiments drained power off the grid. But how lifeless the house looked otherwise. In the lighted houses of the Meisners, of the Schumperts and the Persons and the Roots, people were clearly at home—whole families grouped around tables, young heads bent over homework, dens aflicker with TV, toddlers careening, a grandparent testing a tea bag’s virtue with a third soaking. These were spirited, unselfconscious houses.
    Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact.
    The family was the house’s soul.
    The waking mind was like the light in a house.
    The soul was like the gopher in his hole.
    Consciousness was to brain as family was to house.
    Aristotle: Suppose the eye were an animal—sight would be its soul .
    To understand the mind you pictured domestic activity, the hum of related lives on varied tracks, the hearth’s fundamental glow. You spoke of “presence” and “clutter” and “occupation.” Or, conversely, of “vacancy” and “shutting down.” Of “disturbance.”
    Maybe the futile light in a house with three people separately absorbed in the basement and only one upstairs, a little boy staring at a plate of cold food, was like the mind of a depressed person.
    Gary was the first to tire of the basement. He surfaced and skirted the too-bright dining room, as if it held the victim of a sickening disfigurement, and went up to the second floor to brush his teeth.
    Enid followed soon with seven warm white shirts. She, too, skirted the dining room. She reasoned that if the problem in the dining room was her responsibility then she was horrendously derelict in not resolving it, and a loving mother could never be so derelict, and she was a loving mother, so the responsibility must not have been hers. Eventually Alfred would surface and see what a beast he’d been and be very, very sorry. If he had the nerve to blame her for the problem, she could say: “You’re the one who said he had to sit there