My Oedipus Complex Read Online Free PDF

to deceive me on any major issue.
    But about the other matter I saw that it was hopeless to ask her any more. For days I made the most pertinacious inquiries at school and received some startling information. One boy had actually come floating down on a snowflake, wearing a bright blue dress, but to his chagrin and mine, the dress had been given away to a poor child in the North Main Street. I grieved long and deeply over this wanton destruction of evidence. The balance of opinion favoured Mrs Dwyer’s solution, but of the theory of engines and starting-handles no one in the school had ever heard. That theory might have been all right when Mother was a girl but it was now definitely out of fashion.
    And because of it I had been exposed to ridicule before the family whose good opinion I valued most. It was hard enough to keep up my dignity with a girl who was doing algebra while I hadn’t got beyond long division without falling into childish errors that made her laugh. That is another thing I still cannot stand, being made fun of by women. Once they begin on it they never stop. Once when we were going up Gardiner’s Hill together after school she stopped to look at a baby in a pram. The baby grinned at her and she gave him her finger to suck. He waved his fists and sucked like mad, and she went off into giggles again.
    â€˜I suppose that was another engine?’ she said.
    Four times at least she mentioned my silliness, twice in front of other girls and each time, though I pretended to ignore it, I was pierced to the heart. It made me determined not to be exposed again. Once Mother askedUna and her younger sister, Joan, to tea, and all the time I was in an agony of self-consciousness, dreading what she would say next. I felt that a woman who had said such things about babies was capable of anything. Then the talk turned on the death of little John Joe, and it all flowed back into my mind on a wave of mortification. I made two efforts to change the conversation, but Mother returned to it. She was full of pity for the Dwyers, full of sympathy for the little boy and had almost reduced herself to tears. Finally I got up and ordered Una and Joan to play with me. Then Mother got angry.
    â€˜For goodness’ sake, Larry, let the children finish their tea!’ she snapped.
    â€˜It’s all right, Mrs Delaney,’ Una said good-naturedly. ‘I’ll go with him.’
    â€˜Nonsense, Una!’ Mother said sharply. ‘Finish your tea and go on with what you were saying. It’s a wonder to me your poor mother didn’t go out of her mind. How can they let people like that drive cars?’
    At this I set up a loud wail. At any moment now I felt she was going to get on to babies and advise Una about what her mother ought to do.
    â€˜Will you behave yourself, Larry!’ Mother said in a quivering voice. ‘Oh what’s come over you in the past few weeks? You used to have such nice manners, and now look at you! A little corner boy! I’m ashamed of you!’
    How could she know what had come over me? How could she realize that I was imagining the family circle in the Dwyers’ house and Una, between fits of laughter, describing my old-fashioned mother who still talked about babies coming out of people’s stomachs? It must have been real love, for I have never known true love in which I wasn’t ashamed of Mother.
    And she knew it and was hurt. I still enjoyed going home with Una in the afternoons and while she ate her dinner, I sat at the piano and pretended to play my own compositions, but whenever she called at our house for me I grabbed her by the hand and tried to drag her away so that she and Mother shouldn’t start talking.
    â€˜Ah, I’m disgusted with you,’ Mother said one day. ‘One would think you were ashamed of me in front of that little girl. I’ll engage she doesn’t treat her mother like that.’
    Then one day I was waiting for Una