I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly: And Other Stories

The Swing As she grew old, she began to dream again. She had not dreamed much in her middle years; or, if she had, the busyness of her days, converging on her the moment she awoke, had pushed her dreams right out of her head, and any fragments that remained were as busy and prosaic as the day itself. She had only the one son, James, but she had also mothered her younger sister after their parents died, and she had done all of the office work during the years when her husband's small engineering firm was getting on its feet. And Julius's health had not been too good, even then; it was she who had mowed the lawn and had helped Jamie to learn to ride his bicycle and pitched balls to him in the backyard until he learned to hit them. But she was dreaming again now, as she had when she was a child. Oh, not the lovely, foolish dreams of finding oneself alone in a candy store, or the horrible dreams of being pursued through endless corridors without doors by nameless terrors. But as her days grew in quietness and solitudefor James was grown and gone, and Julius was drawing in upon himself, becoming every day more small and chill and dimcolor and life and drama were returning to her dreams. But on that first night when she heard the creak of the swing, she did not think that she was dreaming at all. She had been lying in bed quite awake, she thought, in the little room that used to be Jamie'sfor nowadays her reading in bed, and afterward her tossing and turning, disturbed Julius. The swing was not an ordinary one. Julius had put it up, in one of the few flashes of poetry in all his worrisome, hardworking life, when Jamie was only a baby and nowhere near old enough to swing in it. The ladder Julius had was not tall enough, and he had to buy a new one, for the tree was tremendous and the branch on which he proposed to hang the swing arched a full forty feet from the ground, and much thought and consideration and care were given to the chain, and the hooks, and the seat. The swing was suspended from so high, and its arc was so wide, that riding in it was like sailing through the air with the leisurely swoop of a wheeling bird. One seemed to travel from one horizon to the other. And how proud Julius had been of it when Jamie was old enough to swing in it, and the neighborhood children had stood around to admire and be given a turn, for there was no other swing like it. The swing was hardly ever used now; it was only a treat, once in a while, for a visiting child, and occasionally when she was outside working in her flower border she would sit and rest in it for a moment or two, idling, pushing herself a little with a toe. But the rhythmic creak of the chains was so familiar that she could not mistake it, she thought. Could the wind be strong enough to move it, if it came from the right angle? She finally gave up thinking about it and went to sleep. Nor did she think of it the next day, for they were due for Sunday dinner at James's house. He lived in a suburb on the opposite side of the cityjust the right distance away, she often thought, far enough so that aging parents could not meddle and embarrass and interfere, but near enough so that she could see him fairly often. She loved him with all her heart, her dear, her only son. She was enormously proud of him, too; he was a highly paid mathematician in a research foundation, an expert in a field so esoteric that she had given up trying to grasp its point. But secretly she took some credit, for it was shewho had kept the engineering firm's books balanced and done the income taxwho had played little mathematical games with him before he had ever gone to school and had sat cross-legged with him on the floor tossing coins to test the law of probability. Oh, they had had fun together in all sorts of ways; they had done crossword puzzles together,Gavell, Mary Ladd is the author of 'I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly: And Other Stories' with ISBN 9780375506123 and ISBN 0375506128.