His mother laughed and hugged him quickly. "Yes, eastward," she said.
After that all his birds flew one way, and in the left-hand lower corner there was usually a blob of dark brown or black. Once it was a square, red, white, and blue.
On her table his mother had a little globe which revolved above a brass base. Because of this he knew the relative position of two places--America and Bohemia. Of this country he thought his mother was unwilling to speak, but its name fell from her lips with sighs, with--as it now seemed to him--a wild longing. Knowing nothing of it, he had pictured it a paradise, a land of roses. He seemed to have no knowledge of why she had left it; but years later his father spoke of finding her in Boston in the days when he preached there, penniless, searching for work as a teacher of singing. How she became jettisoned in that--to her--cold and inhospitable port, Stefan did not know, nor how soon after their marriage the two moved to the still more alien peninsula of Michigan.
Into his memories of the room where they painted a shadow constantly intruded, chilling them, such a shadow, deep and cold, as is cast by an iceberg. The door would open, and his father's face, high and white with ice-blue eyes, would hang above them. Instantly, the man remembered, the boy would cower like a fledgling beneath the sparrow-hawk, but with as much distaste as fear in his cringing. The words that followed always seemed the same--he could reconstruct the scene clearly, but whether it had occurred once or many times he could not tell. His father's voice would snap across the silence like a high, tight-drawn string--
"Still wasting time? Have you nothing better to do? Where is your sewing? And the boy--why is he not outside playing?"
"This helps me, Henry," his mother answered, hesitating and low. "Surely it does no harm. I cannot sew all the time."
"It is a childish and vain occupation, however, and I disapprove of the boy being encouraged in it. This of course you know perfectly well. Under ordinary circumstances I should absolutely forbid it; as it is, I condemn it."
"Henry," his mother's voice trembled, "don't ask me to give up his companionship. It is too cold for me to be outdoors, and perhaps after the spring I might not be with him."