At any rate, I poured it out on Bob Durfree's yarn because of the dignities I have referred to—and in light scorn of those critics who can never tell if silver is alloyed in gold since they do not know what gold is. They will follow their wrong guesses into oblivion. Every time they cried Eureka another true prophet went flat on his face.
It was about five o'clock when my phone rang.
I was surprised it hadn't rung sooner.
People are always calling me up. They want me to talk to Lions, Elk, Moose, and other quadrupeds. I never do. They want me to go on Information Please, or Town Hall, or Breakfast at Sardis. I never go. They want to know what boat to charter for a day's fishing. I always tell them. They want to argue. Me, too.
I thought, friends, relatives. Max, maybe—my brother. I thought, We, the People, asking me to appear as a Voice.
"Sorry—I'm all booked up. Busy. Going to die in a few weeks. Yes—exactly. Keeps you jumping."
"Phil! This is Paul! I'm down in the lobby!"
"Well, come up." I gave him the room number.
Paul is the eldest of my nephews—twenty-five now, or perhaps only twenty-four. His last name's Wilson. He is my older sister's only son and he reminds me of myself at that age, sometimes. Gaunt and hectic—continually outraged by the course of human events and continually upset by his own doings as well as his failures to do. Erudite in many things. Phenomenally naïve, all but unteachable, in others. (Maybe I haven't changed as much as I think.) And there is a difference between us of great magnitude. Where I was an interested but lazy mathematician, Paul is a genius; where I was captivated by every discovery of every science and adept at none, Paul was captured in earliest childhood by physics. We are temperamentally alike, to some degree. But he concentrated and achieved where I dispersed my attention and mastered nothing. He has—as I have—the familial facility for expression; this is the common property of so many of my relations that when any of them turns out to be inarticulate he is regarded as a sport.
Paul's mother, Georgianna Wylie, was such. Born two years before me, still more years before my brother, sister, half brother and half sister, and dispatched to an aunt after the death of my mother—which occurred when I was small—she was always a nebulous member of the family. A cumbersome, religious woman who wore plain-colored dresses—brown, as a rule—and rolled her hair in tight coils, like rusty screendoor springs. An introvert. She sang in the choir somewhere and studied for the missionary field. She never made it. Some remote Wylie cousin fell ill and Georgianna was drafted to take care of her. The illness turned chronic and young Georgianna's assignment became penal servitude. She spent twenty years or so as a peon in a prairie village that straddled a State border. What was never bloom, faded gradually; but it did not quite die out. One night in Minnesota at a camp meeting she met a chemistry professor who had gone to the service for a lark. He had it. He got Georgianna pregnant on the spot—or within harmonium-shot of it—and she died giving birth to Paul.