That Summer

hat summer we had decided we were past caring. It was just too tiring, rushing back and forth between mental institutions. My father was in a well-known sanatorium in Switzerland, but to see him each month mistaking himself for Alfred de Musset, talking to me as if I were George Sand, and reminiscing about wholly imaginary events—and doing so, moreover, with a gaiety and malice that had their charm, no doubt, but seemed singularly out of place under the circumstances—was a burden. What was still more of a burden perhaps was that, deep down, I was very taken with this behavior, and, ensconced in the