The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories 精彩片段：
The Sojourner-2
"I just had this day in town. I came home unexpectedly. You see, Papa died last week."
"Papa Ferris is dead?"
"Yes, at Johns-Hopkins. He had been sick there nearly a year. The funeral was down home in Georgia."
"Oh, Im so sorry, John. Papa Ferris was always one of my favorite people."
The little boy moved from behind the chair so that he could look into his mothers face. He asked, "Who is dead?"
Ferris was oblivious to apprehension; he was thinking of his fathers death. He saw again the outstretched body on the quilted silk within the coffin. The corpse flesh was bizarrely rouged and the familiar hands lay massive and joined above a spread of funeral roses. The memory closed and Ferris awakened to Elizabeths calm voice.
"Mr. Ferris father, Billy. A really grand person. Somebody you didnt know."
"But why did you call him Papa Ferris?"
Bailey and Elizabeth exchanged a trapped look. It was Bailey who answered the questioning child. "A long time ago," he said, "your mother and Mr. Ferris were once married. Before you were born -- a long time ago."
"Mr. Ferris?"
The little boy stared at Ferris, amazed and unbelieving. And Ferris eyes, as he returned the gaze, were somehow unbelieving too. Was it indeed true that at one time he had called this stranger, Elizabeth, Little Butterduck during nights of love, that they had lived together, shared perhaps a thousand days and nights and -- finally -- endured in the misery of sudden solitude the fiber by fiber (jealousy, alcohol and money quarrels) destruction of the fabric of married love.
Bailey said to the children, "Its somebodys supper-time. Come on now."
"But Daddy! Mama and Mr. Ferris -- I --"
Billys everlasting eyes -- perplexed and with a glimmer of hostility -- reminded Ferris of the gaze of another child. It was the young son of Jeannine -- a boy of seven with a shadowed little face and knobby knees whom Ferris avoided and usually forgot.