Why does the nurse tell them "brightly"? ("... a nurse they knew, and did not care for, appeared at last and brightly explained that he had again attempted to take his life.") Each sentence or vignette is back to back with cruelty, pessimism and only visions of hope in the form of gullibility, dejection, and analyses in the mother's thoughts of what hope and goodness are hopelessly up against.
The nurse and social institutions don't get a break in this story.
One of the mysteries of the story: Why was the mother so sure she knew why the caller was calling the wrong number ("I will tell you what you are doing") and what is the significance, to those who suffer from referential mania, of "you are turning the letter O instead of zero"?
Barrie Karp
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