The Window

When I was nine or ten I walked down the hallway past my father’s study and the door was open by four inches. I do not know why the door was open. It was usually closed when he was working. I stopped because the light inside was different from the light in the hallway. The lamp on his desk was on and the rest of the room was dark.

He was reading. He had a book open flat on the desk and his left hand was resting on the left-hand page with his index finger under a line. His finger did not move. I watched his finger not move for what I now think must have been a full minute, and then it moved to the next line and stopped again. I had never seen a person read so slowly.

His lips moved once. He said a word I could not hear. Then he turned the page and started again, and his finger was under the first line of the new page and it did not move.

I did not go in. I did not say hello. I stood in the four inches of open door and watched him for as long as I could bear to and then I walked back down the hallway the way I had come. He did not know I had been there. I never told him.

What he was doing that afternoon was not for me. It was for the line under his finger. The line under his finger was the most attended-to thing in the world for one minute, and I was outside the minute, and the minute was complete without me.