Mr. Potter Read Online Free Page A

of all the Potters that he came from and how it came to be so that he came from them, he did not seek to interrogate the past to give meaning to the present and the future, he only said his name as if he had been asked to state the shape of the earth or the color of the sky, he said his name with the certainty natural to all true things. And as Mr. Potter stood face-to-face with Dr. Weizenger and as Mr. Potter stood before Dr. Weizenger and heard all Dr. Weizenger’s commands in regard to the this (the suitcases) and the that (taking Dr. and Mrs. Weizenger here and there), his mind, his conscious thinking, roused itself from the satisfaction of hearing the music of his own voice saying his own name, and now he suddenly disliked the way Dr. Weizenger spoke English, for the English language did not skip off Dr. Weizenger’s tongue as if glad to do so, it did not dance out of his mouth calmly, so sure of itself; Dr. Weizenger did not speak the English language as if he, Dr. Weizenger, and the English language were one seamless, inviolable whole: ‘E make pappy show o’
’eself, is what Mr. Potter thought when he heard Dr. Weizenger talk then, that time when Dr. Weizenger had just arrived, so new to the new place that was very old to Mr. Potter, so new to the place that Mr. Potter knew very well, inside out or almost so, inside out.
    And Mr. Potter left the Weizengers, that is, Dr. Weizenger and his wife May (for that was her name, May); he left their presence, he left their house and walked out to the car, Mr. Shoul’s car, for Mr. Potter was not yet driving his own car, and he opened the door and he sat in the driver’s seat and he turned the car’s key so that the engine would start the car, making it ready for driving, and then he looked over his shoulder, but only figuratively, for he did not really wish to look backward, and to himself he wondered about the people he had just left behind, Dr. Weizenger and his wife who was also his nurse, her name was May, and when wondering about them then, or at any time, the words to come out of his mouth were, “Eh, eh!” and then, “Eh, eh!” a continuing series of those words, those sounds, “Eh, eh!” “Eh, eh!” And when he got into the car, he placed his right foot on that thing called the accelerator (the car he was driving was made in the United States of America) and he went forward out into the small part of the world that was Antigua, and he drove past the cemetery and he drove past many churches through which all the dead passed on their way to the cemetery, and
as he drove he could see the great sea of the Caribbean on one side of the road and the great ocean that was the Atlantic on the other and events great or small did not enter his mind, nothing entered his mind, his mind was already filled up with Mr. Potter.

A nd Mr. Potter turned his back and walked out of the room in which he had been standing with Dr. Weizenger, Zoltan was his name and his wife was named May, and Zoltan and May, that is, Dr. Weizenger and his nurse, were now all alone, and when they were alone they were Zoltan and May and only when they were not alone were they Dr. Weizenger and his nurse Mrs. Weizenger. And May smiled, not to anyone, not to herself, she only smiled, and this was from a habit developed as a child, for when she had been a child her world was grim, she said her parents had been killed sometimes, had abandoned her sometimes, one way or the other she had no parents, and she only felt the loss of the arm posts of such a thing, called a mother and a father, in the first moments of being alone in a new situation, and
her husband being with her at that moment, just after Mr. Potter had walked out of the room, did not make enough of a difference: Nurse May, Mrs. Weizenger, was alone. And she said, “Zoltan?” and Dr. Weizenger did not answer and she did not want him to do so. And May looked down at her feet, she wore