THE JOHN O'HARA SOCIETY

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                                                        Zilph's Bedroom

In Ourselves to Know Gerald Higgins enters the bedroom of Zilph Millhauser, late mother of Robert Millhauser. Here's the description.
                                                       
   I got up and walked around the room. The bedstead was a great, elaborately carved walnut piece, matching two of the chairs in the carving and approximating in color and finish the washstand and the desk. The only pictures were two large chromo-photographs of Henry and Zilph Millhauser, in walnut and gilt oval frames, and a smaller photograph of the young Robert Millhauser. The pillows and mattress on the bed were covered by a single spread of heavy dark green muslin flecked with gold. The wallpaper was not paper; it was a cloth that resembled the bedspread in color and like the spread had thin, more widely separated stripes of gold. It was a corner room, with two windows cut through each of the exterior walls, but it was not a room for day living. It was dark and unfeminine, with latticed shutters inside and out, the outside ones permanently open, the inside ones as permanently closed. The north windows commanded the same view of the town that could be had from Robert Millhauser's present bedroom. and to the east and south I could see the distant collieries and the Johnsville Road, below the populated area of Lyons. The sun had gone around to the other side of the house and the room was ready for the darkness that seemed to me its natural condition.
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On March 1, an article entitled "Jazz from the West" was published in the New York Herald Tribune.