She has no reason to believe that Martha is not her mother. I’m not sure how the status of the husband will be represented in her eyes.
—or that her real mother died trying to save people.
Is that what you think now?
Yes.
I don’t imagine they would tell the child that.
Well, then, the hell with them!
Oh, for God’s sake, why can’t you be reasonable for a change? Think of someone besides yourself.
Oh, Doc. I do. I think all the time of my two girls. I want to read to them like MT did to his little girls, making up stories to help them get to sleep. He says, “They think my tales are better than paregoric, and quicker.”
Andrew, please—
He wrote down this one story for other fathers to use? Every name, and where possible every word, will have a cat in it—Catasauqua, Cataline, cattalactic. And the girls keep interrupting. What is a catadrome, Papa? I’ll look, he says, pretending to consult the dictionary. Ah, it is a racecourse. I thought it was a tenpin alley, but cats do not play tenpins when they are feeling well, but they do run races. Thank you, Papa, the little girl says. Yes, he says, and the story continues.
MT’s invented silliness at his children’s bedtime. How he is their protector, and the world’s a safe snug place at their bedtime. How when they are grown they will remember this tale and laugh with love for their father. How this is his redemption.
To
M.
BY E. L. DOCTOROW
Welcome to Hard Times
Big as Life
The Book of Daniel
Ragtime
Drinks Before Dinner (play)
Lives of the Poets
World’s Fair
Billy Bathgate
Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution (essays)
The Waterworks
City of God
Reporting the Universe (essays)
Sweet Land Stories
The March
Homer & Langley
All the Time in the World
Andrew’s Brain
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E. L. DOCTOROW’S works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World. Among his honors are the National Book Award, three National Book Critics Circle awards, two PEN/Faulkner awards, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal. In 2009 he was short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, honoring a writer’s lifetime achievement in fiction, and in 2012 he won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to an author whose “scale of achievement over a sustained career places him in the highest rank of American literature.” In 2013 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Gold Medal for Fiction.