The Bigness of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

thus unable to deny the charges or be punished, advice that my mother resisted until it became clear that she might be facing an even longer sentence. Martin and I learned all of this from the newspaper, which we were not supposed to read but did, and from the taunts hurled at us by children who used to be our friends but were no longer allowed to play with us because many of their parents had money in my grandfather’s bank and even those who didn’t felt that my mother had betrayed the entire community.
    We missed her terribly in the beginning, my father most of all, though I believe that he grieved not at being separated from her but because the person she was, or that he had thought she was, no longer existed, which meant that he grieved almost as though she were dead. There was some speculation in the newspaper about my father, about what was referred to as his “possible complicity,” but I remain convinced to this day that my father knew nothing about what had been going on at the bank, though whether it was true that it was all my grandfather’s doing, that my mother had been nothing more than a loyal daughter as her lawyers claimed—this I will never know. Martin was of the opinion that it shouldn’t matter, not to us,but I felt otherwise, particularly when he came home from school with scratches and bruises and black eyes that I knew were given to him because of her, though he always shrugged his shoulders when my father asked what had happened to him and, with a small smile, gave the same reply: “Such is the life of a fairy.” My father did not know how to respond to words like sissy and fairy , nor to the matter-of-fact manner in which Martin uttered them, and so he said nothing, rubbing his ear vigorously for a moment and then turning away, as was his habit when presented with something that he would rather not hear.
    Of course, as Ilsa walked us home from her cottage that day, we had no inkling of what lay ahead, no way of knowing that the familiar terrain of our childhoods would soon become a vast, unmarked landscape in which we would be left to wander, motherless and, it seemed to us at times, fatherless as well. Rather, as we walked along holding hands with Ilsa, our concerns were immediate. I fretted aloud that our parents would be angry, but Ilsa assured me that they were more likely to be worried, and though I did not like the idea of worrying them, it seemed far preferable to their anger. There was also the matter of Ilsa herself, Ilsa, who, even with her hat on, seemed unfamiliar, and so Martin and I worked desperately to interest her in the things that we saw around us, things that would have normally moved her to tears but which she now seemed hardly to notice. Across our path was a snail that had presumably been wooed out onto the sidewalk during the previous day’s rain and crushed to bits by passersby. I stopped and pointed to it, waiting for her to cry out, “Death, be not proud!” and then to squeeze her eyes shut while allowing us to lead her safely past it, but she glanced at the crushed bits with no more interest than she would have shown a discarded candy wrapper.
    As we neared our house, I could see my father’s car in the driveway. “Can we visit you again, Ilsa?” I asked, turning to her.
    “I am afraid that that will not be possible, children,” she said. “You see, I will be setting off very soon—really any day now—on a long journey. I suspect that I may be gone for quite some time.”
    “Are you going to see the ocean?” I asked. At that time in my life I could not imagine anything more terrifying than the ocean, which I knew about only from maps and school and movies.
    “Yes,” she said after giving the question some thought. “As a matter of fact, I believe that I will see the ocean. Have you ever seen the ocean, children?” Martin and I replied that we had not.
    “But you must,” she said gravely. “You absolutely must see the ocean.”
    “Why?” I