The account of him is platitudinous, worldly and fond, but he has no Christian name and is entitled merely Major M. Myers in my Cousin Cassie Mason Myers Julian-James’s privately printed Biographical Sketches: A Key to a Cabinet of Heirlooms in the Smithsonian Museum. The name-plate under his portrait used to spell out his name bravely enough: he was Mordecai Myers. The artist painted Major Myers in his sanguine War of 1812 uniform with epaulets, white breeches, and a scarlet frogged waistcoat. His right hand played with the sword “now to be seen in the Smithsonian cabinet of heirlooms.” The pose was routine and gallant. The full-lipped smile was good-humoredly pompous and embarrassed.
Mordecai’s father, given neither name nor initial, is described with an air of hurried self-congratulation by Cousin Cassie as “a friend of the Reverend Ezra Styles, afterward President of Yale College.” As a very young man the son, Mordecai, studied military tactics under a French émigré, “the Bourbons’ celebrated Colonel De la Croix.” Later he was “matured” by six years’ practical experience in a New York militia regiment organized by Colonel Martin Van Buren. After “the successful engagement against the British at Chrysler’s Field, thirty shrapnel splinters were extracted from his shoulder.” During convalescence, he wooed and won Miss Charlotte Bailey, “thus proving himself a better man than his rivals, the united forces of Plattsburg.” He fathered ten children, sponsored an enlightened law exempting Quakers from military service in New York State, and died in 1870 at the age of ninety- four, “a Grand Old Man, who impressed strangers with the poise of his old-time manners.”
Undoubtedly Major Mordecai had lived in a more ritualistic, gaudy, and animal world than twentieth-century Boston. There was something undecided, Mediterranean, versatile, almost double- faced about his bearing which suggested that, even to his contemporaries, he must have seemed gratuitously both ci-devant and parvenu. He was a dark man, a German Jew—no downright Yankee, but maybe such a fellow as Napoleon’s mad, pomaded son-of-an-innkeeper general, Junot, Duc D’Abrantes; a man like mad George III’s pomaded, disreputable son, “Prinny,” the Prince Regent. Or he was one of those Moorish-looking dons painted by his contemporary Goya—some leader of Spanish guerrillas against Bonaparte’s occupation, who fled to South America. Our Major’s suffering almond eye rested on his luxurious dawn-colored fingers ruffling an off-white glove.
Bailey-Mason-Myers! Easy-going, Empire State patricians, these relatives of my Grandmother Lowell seemed to have given my father his character. For he likewise lacked that granite back- countriness which Grandfather Arthur Winslow attributed to his own ancestors, the iconoclastic, mulish Dunbarton New Hampshire Starks. On the joint Mason-Myers bookplate, there are two merry and naked mermaids—lovely, marshmallowy, boneless, Rubensesque butterballs, all burlesque-show bosoms and Flemish smiles. Their motto, malo frangere quam flectere, reads “I prefer to bend than to break.”
Mordecai Myers was my Grandmother Lowell’s grandfather. His life was tame and honorable. He was a leisured squire and merchant, a member of the state legislature, a mayor of Schenec- tady, a “president” of Kinderhook village. Disappointingly, his famous “blazing brown eye” seems in all things to have shunned the outrageous. After his death he was remembered soberly as a New York State gentleman, the friend and host of worldly men and politicians with Dutch names: De Witt Clinton, Vanderpoel, Hoes, and Schuyler. My mother was roused to warmth by the Major’s scarlet vest and exotic eye. She always insisted that he was the one properly dressed and dieted ancestor in the lot we had inherited from my father’s Cousin Cassie. Great-great-Grandfather Mordecai! Poor sheepdog in wolf’s clothing! In the anarchy of my adolescent war on my parents, I tried to make him a true wolf, the wandering Jew! Homo lupus homini!
Major Mordecai Myers’ portrait has been mislaid past finding, but out of my memories I often come on it in the setting of our Revere Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind, where it survives all the distortions of fantasy, all the blank befogging of forgetfulness. There, the vast number of remembered things remains rocklike. Each is in its place, each has its function, its history, its drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one either ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come back urgent with life and meaning—because finished, they are endurable and perfect.
* * *
Cousin Cassie only became a close relation in 1922. In that year she died. After some unpleasantness between Mother and a co-heiress, Helen Bailey, the estate was divided. Mother used to return frozen and thrilled from her property disputes, and I, knowing nothing of the rights and wrongs, would half-perversely confuse Helen Bailey with Helen of Troy and harden my mind against the monotonous parti pris of Mother’s voice. Shortly after our move to Boston in 1924, a score of unwanted Myers portraits was delivered to our new house on Revere Street. These were later followed by “their dowry”—four moving vans groaning with heavy Edwardian furniture. My father began to receive his first quarterly payments from the Mason-Myers Julian-James Trust Fund, sums “not grand enough to corrupt us,” Mother explained, “but sufficient to prevent Daddy from being entirely at the mercy of his salary.” The Trust sufficed: our lives became tantalized with possibilities, and my father felt encouraged to take the risk—a small one in those boom years—of resigning from the Navy on the gamble of doubling his income in business.
I was in the third grade and for the first time becoming a little more popular at school. I was afraid Father’s leaving the Navy would destroy my standing. I was a churlish, disloyal, romantic boy, and quite without hero worship for my father, whose actuality seemed so inferior to the photographs in uniform he once mailed to us from the Golden Gate. My real love, as Mother used to insist to all new visitors, was toy soldiers. For a few months at the flood tide of this infatuation, people were ciphers to me—valueless except as chances for increasing my armies of soldiers. Roger Crosby, a child in the second grade of my Brimmer Street School, had thousands—not mass-produced American stereotypes, but hand-painted solid lead soldiers made to order in Dijon, France. Roger’s father had a still more artistic and adult collection; its ranks—each man at least six inches tall—marched in glass cases under the eyes of recognizable replicas of mounted Napoleonic captains: Kléber, Marshal Ney, Murat, King of Naples. One delirious afternoon Mr. Crosby showed me his toys and was perhaps the first grownup to talk to me not as a child but as an equal when he discovered how feverishly I followed his anecdotes on uniforms and the evolution of tactical surprise. Afterwards, full of high thoughts, I ran up to Roger’s play room and hoodwinked him into believing that his own soldiers were “ballast turned out by central European sweatshops.” He agreed I was being sweetly generous when I traded twenty-four worthless Jordan Marsh papier-mâché doughboys for whole companies of his gorgeous, imported Old Guards, Second Empire “redlegs,” and modern chasseurs d’Alpine with sky-blue berets. The haul was so huge that I had to take a child’s wheelbarrow to Roger’s house at the top of Pinckney Street. When I reached home with my last load, Mr. Crosby was talking with my father on our front steps. Roger’s soldiers were all returned; I had only the presence of mind to hide a single soldier, a peely-nosed black sepoy wearing a Shriner’s fez.
Nothing consoled me for my loss, but I enjoyed being allowed to draw Father’s blunt dress sword, and I was proud of our Major Mordecai. I used to stand dangerously out in the middle of Revere Street in order to see through our windows and gloat on this portrait’s scarlet waistcoat blazing in the bare, Spartan whiteness of our den-parlor. Mordecai Myers lost his glory when I learned from my father that he was only a “major pro tem.” On a civilian, even a civilian soldier, the flamboyant waistcoat was stuffy and no more martial than officers’ costumes in our elementary school musicals.
* * *
In 1924 people still lived in cities. Late that summer, we bought the 91 Revere Street house, looking out on an unbuttoned part of Beacon Hill bounded by the North End slums, though reassuringly only four blocks away from my Grandfather Winslow’s brown pillared house at 18 Chestnut Street. In the decades preceding and following the First World War, old Yankee families had upset expectation by regaining this section of the Hill from the vanguards of the lace-curtain Irish. This was bracing news for my parents in that topsy-turvy era when the Republican Party and what were called “people of the right sort” were no longer dominant in city elections. Still, even in the palmy, laissez-faire ’20s, Revere Street refused to be a straightforward, immutable residential fact. From one end to the other, houses kept being sanded down, repainted, or abandoned to the flaking of decay. Houses, changing hands, changed their language and nationality. A few doors to our south the householders spoke “Beacon Hill British” or the flat nay nay of the Boston Brahmin. The parents of the children a few doors north spoke mostly in Italian.
My mother felt a horrified giddiness about the adventure of our address. She once said, “We are barely perched on the outer rim of the hub of decency.” We were less than fifty yards from Louisburg Square, the cynosure of old historic Boston’s plain-spoken, cold roast elite—the Hub of the Hub of the Universe. Fifty yards!
As a naval ensign, Father had done postgraduate work at Harvard. He had also done postgraduate work at M.I.T., preferred the purely scientific college, and condescended to both. In 1924, however, his tone began to change; he now began to speak warmly of Harvard as his second alma mater. We went to football games at the Harvard Stadium, and one had the feeling that our lives were now being lived in the brutal, fashionable expectancy of the stadium: we had so many downs, so many minutes, and so many yards to go for a winning touchdown. It was just such a winning financial and social advance that my parents promised themselves would follow Father’s resignation from the Navy and his acceptance of a sensible job offered him at the Cambridge branch of Lever Brothers’ Soap.
The advance was never to come. Father resigned from the service in 1927, but he never had a civilian career; he instead had merely twenty-two years of the civilian life. Almost immediately he bought a larger and more stylish house; he sold his ascetic, stove-black Hudson and bought a plump brown Buick; later the Buick was exchanged for a high-toned, as-good-as-new Packard with a custom-designed royal blue and mahogany body. Without drama, his earnings more or less decreased from year to year.
But so long as we were on Revere Street, Father tried to come to terms with it and must have often wondered whether he on the whole liked or disliked the neighborhood’s lack of side. He was still at this time rather truculently democratic in what might be described as an upper middle-class, naval, and Masonic fashion. He was a mumbler. His opinions were almost morbidly hesitant, but he considered himself a matter-of-fact man of science and had an unspoiled faith in the superior efficiency of northern nations. He modeled his allegiances and humor on the cockney imperialism of Rudyard Kipling’s swearing Tommies, who did their job. Autochthonous Boston snobs, such as the Winslows or members of Mother’s reading club, were alarmed by the brassy callousness of our naval visitors, who labeled the Italians they met on Revere Street as “grade-A” and “grade-B wops.” The Revere Street “grade-B’s” were Sicilian Catholics and peddled crummy second- hand furniture on Cambridge Street, not far from the site of Great-great-Grandfather Charles Lowell’s disused West Church, praised in an old family folder as “a haven from the Sodom and Gomorrah of Trinitarian orthodoxy and the tyranny of the letter.” Revere Street “grade-A’s,” good North Italians, sold fancy groceries and Colonial heirlooms in their shops near the Public Garden. Still other Italians were Father’s familiars; they sold him bootleg Scotch and vino rosso in teacups.
The outside of our Revere Street house was a flat red brick surface unvaried by the slightest suggestion of purple panes, delicate bay, or triangular window-cornice—a sheer wall formed by the seamless conjunction of four inseparable façades, all of the same commercial and purgatorial design. Though placed in the heart of Old Boston, it was ageless and artless, an epitome of those “leveler” qualities Mother found most grueling about the naval service. 91 Revere Street was mass-produced, regulation-issue, and yet struck Boston society as stupidly out of the ordinary, like those white elephants—a mother-of-pearl scout knife or a tea-kettle barometer—which my father used to pick up on sale at an Army- Navy store.
The walls of Father’s minute Revere Street den-parlor were bare and white. His bookshelves were bare and white. The den’s one adornment was a ten-tube home-assembled battery radio set, whose loudspeaker had the shape and color of a Mexican sombrero. The radio’s specialty was getting programs from Australia and New Zealand in the early hours of the morning.
My father’s favorite piece of den furniture was his oak and “rhinoceros hide” armchair. It was ostentatiously a masculine, or rather a bachelor’s, chair. It had a notched, adjustable back; it was black, cracked, hacked, scratched, splintered, gouged, initialed, gunpowder-charred and tumbler-ringed. It looked like pale tobacco leaves laid on dark tobacco leaves. I doubt if Father, a considerate man, was responsible for any of the marring. The chair dated from his plebe days at the Naval Academy, and had been bought from a shady, shadowy, roaring character, midshipman “Beauty” Burford. Father loved each disfigured inch.
* * *
My father had been born two months after his own father’s death. At each stage of his life, he was to be forlornly fatherless. He was a deep boy brought up entirely by a mild widowed mother and an intense widowed grandmother. When he was fourteen and a half, he became a deep young midshipman. By the time he graduated from Annapolis, he had a high sense of abstract form, which he beclouded with his humor. He had reached, perhaps, his final mental possibilities. He was deep—not with profundity, but with the dumb depth of one who trusted in statistics and was dubious of personal experience. In his forties, Father’s soul went underground: as a civilian he kept his high sense of form, his humor, his accuracy, but this accuracy was henceforth unimportant, recreational, hors de combat. His debunking grew myopic; his shyness grew evasive; he argued with a fumbling languor. In the twenty-two years Father lived after he resigned from the Navy, he never again deserted Boston and never became Bostonian. He survived to drift from job to job, to be displaced, to be grimly and literally that old cliché, a fish out of water. He gasped and wheezed with impotent optimism, took on new ideals with each new job, never ingeniously enjoyed his leisure, never even hid his head in the sand.
Mother hated the Navy, hated naval society, naval pay, and the trip-hammer rote of settling and unsettling a house every other year when Father was transferred to a new station or ship. She had been married nine or ten years and still suspected that her husband was savorless, unmasterful, merely considerate. Unmasterful—Father’s specialized efficiency lacked utterly the flattering bossiness she so counted on from her father, my Grandfather Winslow. It was not Father’s absence on sea-duty that mattered; it was the eroding necessity of moving with him, of keeping in step. When he was far away on the Pacific, she had her friends, her parents, a house to herself—Boston! Fully conscious of her uniqueness and normality she basked in the refreshing stimulation of dreams in which she imagined Father as suitably sublimed. She used to describe such a sublime man to me over tea and English muffins. He was Siegfried carried lifeless through the shining air by Brunnhilde to Valhalla, and accompanied by the throb of my Great Aunt Sarah playing his leitmotif in the released manner taught her by the Abbé Liszt. Or Mother’s hero dove through the grottoes of the Rhine and slaughtered the homicidal and vulgar dragon coiled about the golden hoard. Mother seemed almost light-headed when she retold the romance of Sarah Bernhardt in L’Aiglon, the Eaglet, the weakling! She would speak the word weakling with such amused vehemence that I formed a grandiose and false image of L’Aiglon’s Father, the big Napoleon: he was a strong man who scratched under his paunchy little white vest a torso all hair, muscle, and manliness. Instead of the dreams, Mother now had the insipid fatigue of keeping house. Instead of the Eagle, she had a twentieth-century naval commander interested in steam, radio, and “the fellows.” To avoid naval yards, steam, and “the fellows,” Mother had impulsively bought the squalid, impractical Revere Street house. Her marriage daily forced her to squander her subconsciously hoarded energies.
* * *
“Weelawaugh, we-ee-eeelawaugh, weelawaugh,” shrilled Mother’s high voice. “But-and, but-and, but-and!” Father’s low mumble would drone in answer. Though I couldn’t be sure that I had caught the meaning of the words, I followed the sounds as though they were a movie. I felt drenched in my parents’ passions.
91 Revere Street was the setting for those arthritic spiritual pains that troubled us for the two years my mother spent in trying to argue my father into resigning from the Navy. When the majestic, hollow boredom of the second year’s autumn dwindled to the mean boredom of a second winter, I grew less willing to open my mouth. I bored my parents, they bored me.
“Weelawaugh, we-ee-eelawaugh, weelawaugh!” “But-and, but-and, but-and!”
During the week ends I was at home much of the time. All day I used to look forward to the nights when my bedroom walls would once again vibrate, when I would awake with rapture to the rhythm of my parents arguing, arguing one another to exhaustion. Sometimes, without bathrobe or slippers, I would wriggle out into the cold hall on my belly and ambuscade myself behind the banister. I could often hear actual words. “Yes, yes, yes,” Father would mumble. He was “backsliding” and “living in the fool’s paradise of habitual retarding and retarded do-nothing inertia.” Mother had violently set her heart on the resignation. She was hysterical even in her calm, but like a patient and forbearing strategist, she tried to pretend her neutrality. One night she said with murderous coolness, “Bobby and I are leaving for Papá’s.” This was an ultimatum to force Father to sign a deed placing the Revere Street house in Mother’s name.
I writhed with disappointment on the nights when Mother and Father only lowed harmoniously together like cows, as they criticized Helen Bailey or Admiral De Stahl. Once I heard my mother say, “A man must make up his own mind. Oh Bob, if you are going to resign, do it now so I can at least plan for your son’s survival and education on a single continent.”
About this time I was being sent for my survival to Dr. Dane, a Quaker chiropractor with an office on Marlborough Street. Dr. Dane wore an old-fashioned light tan druggist’s smock; he smelled like a healthy old-fashioned drugstore. His laboratory was free of intimidating technical equipment, and had only the conservative lay roughness and toughness that was so familiar and disarming to us in my Grandfather Winslow’s country study or bedroom. Dr. Dane’s rosy hands wrenched my shoulders with tremendous eclat and made me feel a hero; I felt unspeakable joy whenever an awry muscle fell back into serenity. My mother, who had no curiosity or imagination for cranky occultism, trusted Dr. Dane’s clean, undrugged manliness—so like home. She believed that chiropractic had cured me of my undiagnosed asthma, which had defeated the expensive specialists.
* * *
“A penny for your thoughts, Schopenhauer,” my mother would say.
“I am thinking about pennies,” I’d answer.
“When I was a child I used to love telling Mamá everything I had done,” Mother would say.
“But you’re not a child,” I would answer.
I used to enjoy dawdling and humming “Anchors Aweigh” up Revere Street after a day at school. “Anchors Aweigh,” the official Navy song, had originally been the song composed for my father’s class. And yet my mind always blanked and seemed to fill with a clammy hollowness when Mother asked prying questions. Like other tongue-tied, difficult children, I dreamed I was a master of cool, stoical repartee. “What have you been doing, Bobby?” Mother would ask. “I haven’t,” I’d answer. At home I thus saved myself from emotional exhaustion.
At school, however, I was extreme only in my conventional mediocrity, my colorless, distracted manner, which came from restless dreams of being admired. My closest friend was Eric Burckhard, the son of a professor of architecture at Harvard. The Burckhards came from Zurich and were very German, not like Ludendorff, but in the kindly, comical, nineteenth-century manner of Jo’s German husband in Little Men, or in the manner of the crusading sturm und drang liberal scholars in second year German novels. “Eric’s mother and father are both called Dr. Burckhard,” my mother once said, and indeed there was something endearingly repellent about Mrs. Burckhard with her doctor’s degree, her long, unstylish skirts, and her dramatic, dulling blond braids. Strangely the Burckhards’ sober continental bourgeois house was without golden mean—everything was either hilariously old Swiss or madly modern. The Frau Doctor Burckhard used to serve mid-morning hot chocolate with rosettes of whipped cream, and receive her friends in a long, uncarpeted hall–drawing room with lethal ferns and a yellow beeswaxed hardwood floor shining under a central skylight. On the wall there were large expert photographs of what at a distance appeared to be Mont Blanc—they were in reality views of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Japanese hotel.
I admired the Burckhards and felt at home in their house, and these feelings were only intensified when I discovered that my mother was always ill at ease with them. The heartiness, the enlightenment, and the bright, ferny greenhouse atmosphere were too much for her.
Eric and I were too young to care for books or athletics. Neither of our houses had absorbing toys or an elevator to go up and down in. We were inseparable, but I cannot imagine what we talked about. I loved Eric because he was more popular than I and yet absolutely sui generis at the Brimmer School. He had a chalk-white face and limp, fine, white-blond hair. He was frail, elbowy, started talking with an enthusiastic Mont Blanc chirp and would flush with bewilderment if interrupted. All the other boys at Brimmer wore little tweed golf suits with knickerbockers, but Eric always arrived in a black suit coat, a Byronic collar, and cuffless gray flannel trousers that almost hid his shoes. The long trousers were replaced on warm days by gray flannel shorts, such as were worn by children still in kindergarten. Eric’s unenviable and freakish costumes were too old or too young. He accepted the whims of his parents with a buoyant tranquility that I found unnatural.
My first and terminating quarrel with Eric was my fault. Eventually almost our whole class at Brimmer had whooping cough, but Eric’s seizure was like his long trousers—untimely: he was sick a month too early. For a whole month he was in quarantine and forced to play by himself in a removed corner of the Public Garden. He was certainly conspicuous as he skiproped with his Swiss nurse under the out-of-the-way Ether Memorial Fountain far from the pond and the swan boats. His parents had decided that this was an excellent opportunity for Eric to brush up on his German, and so the absoluteness of his quarantine was monstrously exaggerated by the fact that child and nurse spoke no English but only a guttural, British-sounding, Swiss German. Round and round and round the Fountain, he played intensely, frailly, obediently, until I began to tease him. Though motioned away by him, I came close. I had attracted some of the most popular Brimmer School boys. For the first time I had gotten favorable attention from several little girls. I came close. I shouted. Was Eric afraid of girls? I imitated his German. Ein, zwei, drei, BEER. I imitated Eric’s coughing. “He is afraid he will give you whooping cough if he talks or lets you come nearer,” the nurse said in her musical Swiss-English voice. I came nearer. Eric flushed, grew white, bent double with coughing. He began to cry, and had to be led away from the Public Garden. For a whole week I routed Eric from the Garden daily, and for two or three days I was a center of interest. “Come see the Lake Geneva spider monkey!” I would shout. I don’t know why I couldn’t stop. Eric never told his father, I think, but when he recovered we no longer spoke. The breach was so unspoken and intense that our classmates were actually horrified. They even devised a solemn ritual for our reconciliation. We crossed our hearts, mixed spit, mixed blood. The reconciliation was hollow.
* * *
My parents’ confidences and quarrels stopped each night at ten or eleven o’clock, when my father would hang up his tuxedo, put on his commander’s uniform, and take a trolley back to the naval yard at Charlestown. He had just broken in a new car. Like a chauffeur, he watched this car, a Hudson, with an informed vigilance, always giving its engine hair-trigger little tinkerings of adjustment or friendship, always fearful lest the black body, unbeautiful as his boiled shirts, should lose its outline and gloss. He drove with flawless, almost instrumental, monotony. Mother, nevertheless, was forever encouraging him to walk or take taxis. She would tell him that his legs were growing vestigial from disuse and remind him of the time a jack had slipped and he had broken his leg while shifting a tire. “Alone and at night,” she would say, “an amateur driver is unsafe in a car.” Father sighed and obeyed—only, putting on a martyred and penny-saving face, he would keep his self- respect by taking the trolley rather than a taxi. Each night he shifted back into his uniform, but his departures from Revere Street were so furtive that several months passed before I realized what was happening—we had two houses! Our second house was the residence in the Naval Yard assigned to the third in command. It was large, had its own flagpole, and screen porches on three levels—yet it was something to be ashamed of. Whatever pomp or distinction its possession might have had for us was destroyed by an eccentric humiliation inflicted on Father by his superior, Admiral De Stahl, the commandant at Charlestown. De Stahl had not been consulted about our buying the 91 Revere Street house. He was outraged, stormed about “flaunting private fortunes in the face of naval tradition,” and ordered my father to sleep on bounds at the Yard in the house provided for that purpose.
On our first Revere Street Christmas Eve, the telephone rang in the middle of dinner; it was Admiral De Stahl demanding Father’s instant return to the Navy Yard. Soon Father was back in his uniform. In taking leave of my mother and grandparents he was, as was usual with him under pressure, a little evasive and magniloquent. “A woman works from sun to sun,” he said, “but a sailor’s watch is never done.” He compared a naval officer’s hours with a doctor’s, hinted at surprise maneuvers, and explained away the uncommunicative arrogance of Admiral De Stahl: “The Old Man has to be hush-hush.” Later that night, I lay in bed and tried to imagine that my father was leading his engineering force on a surprise maneuver through arctic wastes. A forlorn hope! “Hush-hush, hush-hush,” whispered the snowflakes as big as street lamps as they broke on Father—broke and buried. Outside, I heard real people singing carols, shuffling snow off their shoes, opening and shutting doors. I worried at the meaning of a sentence I had heard quoted from the Boston Evening Transcript: “On this Christmas Eve, as usual, the whole of Beacon Hill can be expected to become a single old-fashioned open house—the names of mine host the Hill, and her guests will read like the contents of the Social Register.” I imagined Beacon Hill changed to the snow queen’s palace, as vast as the north pole. My father pressed a cold finger to his lip: “hush-hush,” and led his surprise squad of sailors around an altar, but the altar was a tremendous cash register, whose roughened nickel surface was cheaply decorated with trowels, pyramids, and Arabic swirls. A great drawer helplessly chopped back and forth, unable to shut because choked with greenbacks. “Hush-hush!” My father’s engineers wound about me with their eye-patches, orange sashes, and curtain-ring earrings, like the Gilbert and Sullivan pirates’ chorus.… Outside on the streets of Beacon Hill, it was night, it was dismal, it was raining. Something disturbing had befallen the familiar and honorable Salvation Army band; its big drum and accordion were now accompanied by drunken voices howling: The Old Gray Mare, she ain’t what she used to be, when Mary went to milk the cow. A sound of a bosun’s whistle. Women laughing. Someone repeatedly rang our doorbell. I heard my mother talking on the telephone. “Your inebriated sailors have littered my doorstep with the dregs of Scollay Square.” There was a gloating panic in her voice that showed she enjoyed the drama of talking to Admiral De Stahl. “Sir,” she shrilled, “you have compelled my husband to leave me alone and defenseless on Christmas Eve!” She ran into my bedroom. She hugged me. She said, “Oh Bobby, it’s such a comfort to have a man in the house.” “I am not a man,” I said, “I am a boy.”
Boy—at that time this word had private associations for me; it meant weakness, outlawry, and yet was a status to be held onto. Boys were a sideline at my Brimmer School. The eight superior grades were limited to girls. In these grades, moreover, scholarship was made subservient to discipline, as if in contempt of the male’s two idols: career and earning power. The school’s tone, its ton, was a blend of the feminine and the military, a bulky reality governed in turn by stridency, smartness, and steadiness. The girls wore white jumpers, black skirts, stockings, and rectangular low-heeled shoes. An ex–West Pointer had been appointed to teach drill; and, at the moment of my enrollment in Brimmer, our principal, the hitherto staid Miss Manice, was rumored to be showing signs of age and of undermining her position with the school trustees by girlish, quite out of character, rhapsodies on the varsity basketball team, winner of two consecutive championships. The lower four grades, peaceful and lackadaisical, were, on the other hand, almost a separate establishment. Miss Manice regarded these “coeducated” classes with amused carelessness, allowed them to wear their ordinary clothes, and … carelessness, however, is incorrect—Miss Manice, in her administration of the lower school, showed the inconsistency and euphoria of a dual personality. Here she mysteriously shed all her Prussianism. She quoted Emerson and Mencken, disparaged the English, threatened to break with the past, and boldly coquetted with the non-military American genius by displaying movies illustrating the careers of Edison and Ford. Favored lower school teachers were permitted to use us as guinea pigs for mildly radical experiments. At Brimmer I unlearned writing. The script that I had mastered with much agony at my first school was denounced as illegible: I was taught to print according to the Dalton Plan—to this day, as a result, I have to print even my two middle names and can only really write two words: “Robert” and “Lowell.” Our instruction was subject to bewildering leaps. The usual fall performance by the Venetian glass- blowers was followed by a tour of the Riverside Press. We heard Rudy Vallee, then heard spirituals sung by the Hampton Institute choir. We studied grammar from a formidable, unreconstructed textbook written by Miss Manice’s father. There, I battled with figures of speech and Greek terminology: Chiasmus, the arrangement of corresponding words in opposite order; Brachylogy, the failure to repeat an element that is supplied in more or less modified form. Then all this pedantry was nullified by the introduction of a new textbook which proposed to lift the face of syntax by using game techniques and drawings.
Physical instruction in the lower school was irregular, spontaneous, and had nothing of that swept and garnished barrack-room camaraderie of the older girls’ gymnasium exercises. On the roof of our school building, there was an ugly concrete area that looked as if it had been intended for the top floor of a garage. Here we played tag, drew lines with chalk, and chose up sides for a kind of kids’ soccer. On bright spring days, Mr. Newell, a submerged young man from Boston University, took us on botanical hikes through the Arboretum. He had an eye for inessentials—read us Martha Washington’s poems at the Old State House, pointed out the roof of Brimmer School from the top of the Customs House, made us count the steps of the Bunker Hill Monument, and one rainy afternoon broke all rules by herding us into the South Boston Aquarium in order to give an unhealthy, eager, little lecture on the sewage-consumption of the conger eel. At last Miss Manice seemed to have gotten wind of Mr. Newell’s moods. For an afternoon or two she herself served as his substitute. We were walked briskly past the houses of Parkman and Dana, and assigned themes on the spunk of great persons who had overcome physical handicaps and risen to the top of the ladder. She talked about Elizabeth Barrett, Helen Keller; her pet theory, however, was that “women simply are not the equals of men.” I can hear Miss Manice browbeating my white and sheepish father, “How can we stand up to you? Where are our Archimedeses, our Wagners, our Admiral Simses?” Miss Manice adored “Sir Walter Scott’s big bow-wow,” wished “Boston had banned the tubercular novels of the Brontës,” and found nothing in the world “so simpatico” as the “strenuous life” lived by President Roosevelt. Yet the extravagant hysteria of Miss Manice’s philanthropy meant nothing; Brimmer was entirely a woman’s world—dummkopf, perhaps, but not in the least Quixotic, Brimmer was ruled by a woman’s obvious aims and by her naive pragmatism. The quality of this regime, an extension of my mother’s, shone out in full glory at general assemblies or when I sat with a handful of other boys on the bleachers of Brimmer’s new Manice Hall. In unison our big girls sang “America”; back and forth our amazons tramped—their brows were wooden, their dress was black and white, and their columns followed standard-bearers holding up an American flag, the white flag of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the green flag of Brimmer. At basketball games against Miss Lee’s or Miss Winsor’s, it was our upper-school champions who rushed onto the floor, as feline and fateful in their pace as lions. This was our own immediate and daily spectacle; in comparison such masculine displays as trips to battle cruisers commanded by comrades of my father seemed eyewash—the Navy moved in a realm as ghostlike and removed from my life as the elfin acrobatics of Douglas Fairbanks or Peter Pan. I wished I were an older girl. I wrote Santa Claus for a field hockey stick. To be a boy at Brimmer was to be small, denied, and weak.
I was promised an improved future and taken on Sunday afternoon drives through the suburbs to inspect the boys’ schools: Rivers, Dexter, Country Day. These expeditions were stratagems designed to give me a chance to know my father; Mother noisily stayed behind and amazed me by pretending that I had forbidden her to embark on “men’s work.” Father, however, seldom insisted, as he should have, on seeing the headmasters in person, yet he made an astonishing number of friends; his trust begat trust, and something about his silences encouraged junior masters and even school janitors to pour out small talk that was detrimental to rival institutions. At each new school, however, all this gossip was easily refuted, worse still Mother was always ready to cross-examine Father in a manner that showed that she was asking questions for the purpose of giving, not of receiving, instruction; she expressed astonishment that a wishy-washy desire to be everything to everybody had robbed a naval man of any reliable concern for his son’s welfare. Mother regarded the suburban schools as “gerrymandered” and middle-class; after Father had completed his round of inspections, she made her own follow-up visits and told Mr. Dexter and Mr. Rivers to their faces that she was looking for a “respectable stop-gap” for her son’s “three years between Brimmer and Saint Mark’s.” Saint Mark’s was the boarding school for which I had been enrolled at birth, and was due to enter in 1930. I distrusted change, knew each school since kindergarten had been more constraining and punitive than its predecessor, and believed the suburban country day schools were flimsily disguised fronts for reformatories. With the egotistic, slightly paranoid apprehensions of an only child, I wondered what became of boys graduating from Brimmer’s fourth grade, feared the worst—we were darkly imperiled, like some annual bevy of Athenian youths destined for the Minotaur. And to judge from my father, men between the ages of six and sixty did nothing but meet new challenges, take on heavier responsibilities, and lose all freedom to explode. A ray of hope in the far future was my white-haired Grandfather Winslow, whose unchecked commands and demands were always upsetting people for their own good—he was all I could ever want to be: the bad boy, the problem child, the commodore of his household.
When I entered Brimmer I was eight and a half. I was distracted in my studies, assented to whatever I was told, picked my nose whenever no one was watching, and worried our third-grade teacher by organizing creepy little gangs of boys at recess. I was girl-shy. Thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish, I had the conventional prepuberty character of my age; whenever a girl came near me, my whole person cringed like a sponge wrung dry by a clenching fist. I was less rather than more bookish than most children, but the girl I dreamed about continually had wheel-spoke black and gold eyelashes, double-length page-boy blond hair, a little apron, a bold, blunt face, a saucy, shivery way of talking, and … a paper body—she was the girl in John Tenniel’s illustrations to Alice in Wonderland. The invigorating and symmetrical aplomb of my ideal Alice was soon enriched and nullified by a second face, when my father took me to the movies on the afternoon of one of Mother’s headaches. An innocuous child’s movie, the bloody, all-male Beau Geste had been chosen, but instead my father preferred a nostalgic tour of places he had enjoyed on shore leave. We went to the Majestic Theater where he had first seen Pola Negri—where we too saw Pola Negri, sloppy-haired, slack, yawning, ravaged, unwashed … an Anti-Alice.
Our class belles, the Norton twins, Elie and Lindy, fell far short of the Nordic Alice and the foreign Pola. Their prettiness, rather fluffy, freckled, bashful, might have escaped notice if they had been one instead of two, and if their manners had been less goodhumored, entertaining, and reliable. What mattered more than sex, athletics, or studies to us at Brimmer was our popularity; each child had an unwritten class-popularity poll inside his head. Everyone was ranked, and all day each of us mooned profoundly on his place, as it quivered like our blood or a compass needle with a thousand revisions. At nine character is, perhaps, too much in ovo for a child to be strongly disliked, but sitting next to Elie Norton, I glanced at her and gulped prestige from her popularity. We were not close at first; then nearness made us closer friends, for Elie had a gracious gift, the gift of gifts, I suppose, in a child: she forgot all about the popularity-rank of the classmate she was talking to. No moron could have seemed so uncritical as this airy, chatty, intelligent child, the belle of our grade. She noticed my habit of cocking my head on one side, shutting my eyes, and driving like a bull through opposition at soccer—wishing to amuse without wounding, she called me Buffalo Bull. At general assembly she would giggle with contented admiration at the upper-school girls in their penal black and white. “What bruisers, what beef-eaters! Dear girls,” she would sigh, parroting her sophisticated mother, “we shall all become fodder for the governess classes before graduating from Brimmer.” I felt that Elie Norton understood me better than anyone except my playful little Grandmother Winslow.
One morning there was a disaster. The boy behind me, no friend, had been tapping at my elbow for over a minute to catch my attention before I consented to look up and see a great golden puddle spreading toward me from under Elie’s chair. I dared not speak, smile, or flicker an eyelash in her direction. She ran bawling from the classroom. Trying to catch every eye, yet avoid commitment, I gave sidelong and involuntary smirks at space. I began to feel manic with superiority to Elie Norton and struggled to swallow down a feeling of goaded hollowness—was I deserting her? Our teacher left us on our honor and ran down the hall. The class milled about in a hesitant hush. The girls blushed. The boys smirked. Miss Manice, the principal, appeared. She wore her whitish-brown dress with darker brown spots. Shimmering in the sunlight and chilling us, she stood mothlike in the middle of the classroom. We rushed to our seats. Miss Manice talked about how there was “nothing laughable about a malaise.” She broke off. Her face took on an expression of invidious disgust. She was staring at me.… In the absentmindedness of my guilt and excitement, I had taken the nearest chair, the chair that Elie Norton had just left. “Lowell,” Miss Manice shrieked, “are you going to soak there all morning like a bump on a log?”
When Elie Norton came back, there was really no break in her friendliness toward me, but there was something caved in, something crippled in the way I stood up to her and tried to answer her disengaged chatter. I thought about her all the time; seldom meeting her eyes now, I felt rich and raw in her nearness. I wanted passionately to stay on at Brimmer, and told my mother a fib one afternoon late in May of my last year. “Miss Manice has begged me to stay on,” I said, “and enter the fifth grade.” Mother pointed out that there had never been a boy in the fifth grade. Contradicted, I grew excited. “If Miss Manice has begged me to stay,” I said, “why can’t I stay?” My voice rose, I beat on the floor with my open hands. Bored and bewildered, my mother went upstairs with a headache. “If you won’t believe me,” I shouted after her, “why don’t you telephone Miss Manice or Mrs. Norton?”
* * *
Brimmer School was thrown open on sunny March and April afternoons and our teachers took us for strolls on the polite, landscaped walks of the Public Garden. There I’d loiter by the old iron fence and gape longingly across Charles Street at the historic Boston Common, a now largely wrong-side-of-the-tracks park. On the Common there were mossy bronze reliefs of Union soldiers, and a captured German tank filled with smelly wads of newspaper. Everywhere there were grit, litter, gangs of Irish, Negroes, Latins. On Sunday afternoons orators harangued about Sacco and Vanzetti, while others stood about heckling and blocking the sidewalks. Keen young policemen, looking for trouble, lolled on the benches. At nightfall a police lieutenant on horseback inspected the Common. In the Garden, however, there was only Officer Lever, a single white-haired and mustached dignitary, who had once been the doorman at the Union Club. He now looked more like a member of the club. “Lever’s a man about town,” my Grandfather Winslow would say. “Give him Harris tweeds and a glass of Scotch, and I’d take him for Cousin Herbert.” Officer Lever was without thoughts or deeds, but Back Bay and Beacon Hill parents loved him just for being. No one asked this hollow and leonine King Log to be clairvoyant about children.
One day when the saucer magnolias were in bloom, I bloodied Bulldog Binney’s nose against the pedestal of George Washington’s statue in full view of Commonwealth Avenue; then I bloodied Dopey Dan Parker’s nose; then I stood in the center of a sundial tulip bed and pelted a little enemy ring of third-graders with wet fertilizer. Officer Lever was telephoned. Officer Lever telephoned my mother. In the presence of my mother and some thirty nurses and children, I was expelled from the Public Garden. I was such a bad boy, I was told, “that even Officer Lever had been forced to put his foot down.”
* * *
New England winters are long. Sunday mornings are long. Ours were often made tedious by preparations for dinner guests. Mother would start airing at nine. Whenever the air grew so cold that it hurt, she closed the den windows; then we were attacked by sour kitchen odors winding up a clumsily rebuilt dumb-waiter shaft. The windows were again thrown open. We sat in an atmosphere of glacial purity and sacrifice. Our breath puffed whitely. Father and I wore sleeveless cashmere jerseys Mother had bought at Filene’s Basement. A do-it-yourself book containing diagrams for the correct carving of roasts lay on the arm of Father’s chair. At hand were Big Bill Tilden on tennis, Capablanca on chess, newspaper clippings from Sidney Lenz’s bridge column, and a magnificent tome with photographs and some American’s nationalist sketch of Sir Thomas Lipton’s errors in the Cup Defender races. Father made little progress in these diversions, and yet one of the authors assured him that mastery demanded only willing readers who understood the meaning of English words. Throughout the winter a gray-whiteness glared through the single den window. In the apoplectic brick alley, a fire escape stood out against our sooty plank fence. Father believed that churchgoing was undignified for a naval man; his Sunday mornings were given to useful acts such as lettering his three new galvanized garbage cans: R.T.S. LOWELL-U.S.N.
Our Sunday dinner guests were often naval officers. Naval officers were not Mother’s sort; very few people were her sort in those days, and that was her trouble—a very authentic, human, and plausible difficulty, which made Mother’s life one of much suffering. She did not have the self-assurance for wide human experience; she needed to feel liked, admired, surrounded by the approved and familiar. Her haughtiness and chilliness came from apprehension. She would start talking like a grande dame and then stand back rigid and faltering, as if she feared being crushed by her own massively intimidating offensive.
Father’s old Annapolis roommate, Commander Billy “Battleship Bilge” Harkness, was a frequent guest at Revere Street and one that always threw Mother off balance. Billy was a rough diamond. He made jokes about his “all-American family tree,” and insisted that his name, pronounced Harkness, should be spelled Herkness. He came from Louisville, Kentucky, drank whisky to “renew his Bourbon blood,” and still spoke with an accent that sounded—so his colleagues said—“like a bran-fed stallion.” Like my father, however, Commander Billy had entered the Naval Academy when he was a boy of fourteen; his Southernisms had been thoroughly rubbed away. He was teased for knowing nothing about race horses, mountaineers, folk ballads, hams, sour mash, tobacco … Kentucky Colonels. Though hardly an officer and a gentleman in the old Virginian style, he was an unusual combination of clashing virtues: he had led his class in the sciences and yet was what his superiors called “a mathmaddition with the habit of command.” He and my father, the youngest men in their class, had often been shipmates. Bilge’s executive genius had given color and direction to Father’s submissive tenacity. He drank like a fish at parties, but was a total abstainer on duty. With reason Commander Harkness had been voted the man most likely to make a four-star admiral in the class of ’07.
Billy called his wife Jimmy or Jeems, and had a rough friendly way of saying, “Oh, Jimmy’s bright as a penny.” Mrs. Harkness was an unpleasant rarity: she was the only naval officer’s wife we knew who was also a college graduate. She had a flat flapper’s figure, and hid her intelligence behind a nervous twitter of vulgarity and toadyism. “Charlotte,” she would almost scream at Mother, “is this mirAGE, this MIRacle your own dining room!”
Then Mother might smile and answer in a distant, though cosy and amused, voice, “I usually manage to make myself pretty comfortable.”
Mother’s comfort was chic, romantic, impulsive. If her silver service shone, it shone with hectic perfection to rebuke the functional domesticity of naval wives. She had determined to make her ambiance beautiful and luxurious, but wanted neither her beauty nor her luxury unaccompanied. Beauty pursued too exclusively meant artistic fatuity of a kind made farcical by her Aunt Sarah Stark Winslow, a beauty too lofty and original ever to marry, a prima donna on the piano, too high-strung ever to give a public recital. Beauty alone meant the maudlin ignominy of having one’s investments managed by interfering relatives. Luxury alone, on the other hand, meant for Mother the “paste and fool’s-gold polish” that one met with in the foyer of the new Statler Hotel. She loathed the “undernourishment” of Professor Burckhard’s Bauhaus modernism, yet in moments of pique she denounced our pompous Myers mahoganies as “suitable for politicians at the Bellevue Hotel.” She kept a middle-of-the-road position, and much admired Italian pottery with its fresh peasant colors and puritanical, clean-cut lines. She was fond of saying, “The French do have taste,” but spoke with a double-edged irony which implied the French, with no moral standards to support their finish, were really no better than naval yahoos. Mother’s beautiful house was dignified by a rich veneer of the useful.
* * *
“I have always believed carving to be the gentlemanly talent,” Mother used to proclaim. Father, faced with this opinion, pored over his book of instructions or read the section on table carving in the Encyclopædia Britannica. Eventually he discovered among the innumerable small, specialized Boston “colleges” an establishment known as a carving school. Each Sunday from then on he would sit silent and erudite before his roast. He blinked, grew white, looked winded, and wiped beads of perspiration from his eyebrows. His purpose was to reproduce stroke by stroke his last carving lesson, and he worked with all the formal rightness and particular error of some shaky experiment in remote control. He enjoyed quiet witticisms at the expense of his carving master—“a philosopher who gave himself all the airs of a Mahan!” He liked to pretend that the carving master had stated that “No two cuts are identical,” ergo: “each offers original problems for the executioner.” Guests were appeased by Father’s saying, “I am just a plebe at this guillotine. Have a hunk of my roast beef hash.”
What angered Father was Mrs. Harkness’s voice grown merciless with excitement, as she studied his hewing and hacking. She was sure to say something tactless about how Commander Billy was “a stingy artist at carving who could shave General Washington off the dollar bill.”
Nothing could stop Commander Billy, that born carver, from reciting verses:
“By carving my way
I lived on my pay;
This reeward, though small,
Beats none at all …
My carving paper-thin
Can make a guinea hin,
All giblets, bones, and skin,
Canteen a party of tin.”
And I, furious for no immediate reason, blurted out, “Mother, how much does Grandfather Winslow have to fork up to pay for Daddy’s carving school?”
These Sunday dinners with the Harknesses were always woundingly boisterous affairs. Father, unnaturally outgoing, would lead me forward and say, “Bilge, I want you to meet my first coupon from the bond of matrimony.”
Commander Billy would answer, “So this is the range-finder you are raising for future wars!” They would make me salute, stand at attention, stand at ease. “Angel-face,” Billy would say to me, “you’ll skipper a flivver.”
“Jimmy” Harkness, of course, knew that Father was anxiously negotiating with Lever Brothers’ Soap, and arranging for his resignation from the service, but nothing could prevent her from proposing time and again her “hens’ toast to the drakes.” Dragging Mother to her feet, Jimmy would scream, “To Bob and Bilgy’s next battleship together!”
What Father and Commander Billy enjoyed talking about most was their class of ’07. After dinner, the ladies would retire to the upstairs sitting room. As a special privilege I was allowed to remain at the table with the men. Over and over, they would talk about their ensigns’ cruise around the world, escaping the “reeport,” gunboating on the upper Yangtze during the Chinese Civil War, keeping sane and sanitary at Guantanamo, patroling the Golfo del Papayo during the two-bit Nicaraguan Revolution, when water to wash in cost a dollar a barrel and was mostly “alkali and wrigglers.” There were the class casualties: Holden and Holcomb drowned in a foundered launch off Hampton Roads; “Count” Bowditch, killed by the Moros and famous for his dying words to Commander Harkness: “I’m all right. Get on the job, Bilge.”
They would speak about the terrible 1918 influenza epidemic, which had killed more of their classmates than all the skirmishes or even the World War. It was an honor, however, to belong to a class which included “Chips” Carpender, whose destroyer, the Fanning, was the only British or American warship to force a German submarine to break water and surrender. It was a feather in their caps that three of their classmates, Bellinger, Reade, and another, should have made the first trans-Atlantic seaplane flight. They put their faith in teamwork, and Lindbergh’s solo hop to Paris struck them as unprofessional, a newspaper trick. What made Father and Commander Billy mad as hornets was the mare’s-nest made of naval administration by “deserving Democrats.” Hadn’t Secretary of State Bryan ordered their old battlewagon the Idaho to sail on a goodwill mission to Switzerland? “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,” Commander Billy would boom, “the pious swab had been told that Lake Geneva had annexed the Adriatic.” Another “guy with false gills,” Josephus Daniels, “ordained by Divine Providence Secretary of the Navy,” had refused to send Father and Billy to the war zone. “You are looking,” Billy would declaim, “at martyrs in the famous victory of red tape. Our names are rubric.” A man they had to take their hats off to was Theodore Roosevelt; Billy had been one of the lucky ensigns who had helped “escort the redoubtable Teddy to Panama.” Perhaps because of his viciously inappropriate nickname, “Bilge,” Commander Harkness always spoke with brutal facetiousness against the class bilgers, officers whose “services were no longer required by the service.” In more Epicurean moods, Bilge would announce that he “meant to accumulate a lot of dough from complacent, well-meaning, although misguided West Point officers gullible enough to bet their shirts on the Army football team.”
“Let’s have a squint at your figger and waterline, Bob,” Billy would say. He’d admire Father’s trim girth and smile familiarly at his bald spot. “Bob,” he’d say, “you’ve maintained your displacement and silhouette unmodified, except for somewhat thinner top chafing gear.”
Commander Billy’s drinking was a “pain in the neck.” He would take possession of Father’s sacred “rhino” armchair, sprawl legs astraddle, make the tried and true framework groan, and crucify Mother by roaring out verbose toasts in what he called “me boozy cockney-h’Irish.” He would drink to our cocktail shaker. “’Ere’s to the ’older of the Lowelldom nectar,” he would bellow. “Hip, hip, hooray for señor Martino, h’our h’old hipmate, ’elpmate, and hhonorary member of ’07—h’always h’able to navigate and never says dry.” We never got through a visit without one of Billy’s “Bottoms up to the ’ead of the Nation. “’Ere ’s to herb-garden ’Erb.” This was a swaggering dig at Herbert Hoover’s notoriously correct, but insular, refusal to “imbibe anything more potent than Bromo-Seltzer” at a war-relief banquet in Brussels. Commander Billy’s bulbous, water-on-the-brain forehead would glow and trickle with fury. Thinking on Herbert Hoover and Prohibition, he was unable to contain himself. “What a hick! We haven’t been steered by a gentleman of parts since the redoubtable Teddy.” He recited wet verses, such as the following inserted in Father’s class book:
“I tread the bridge with measured pace;
Proud, yet anguish marks my face—
What worries me like crushing sin
Is where on the sea can I buy dry gin?”
In his cups, Commander Bilge acted as though he owned us. He looked like a human ash-heap. Cigar ashes buried the heraldic hedgehog on the ash tray beside him; cigar ashes spilled over and tarnished the golden stork embroidered on the table-cover; cigar ashes littered his own shiny blue-black uniform. Greedily Mother’s eyes would brighten, drop and brighten. She would say darkly, “I was brought up by Papà to be like a naval officer, to be ruthlessly neat.”
Once Commander Billy sprawled back so recklessly that the armchair began to come apart. “You see, Charlotte,” he said to Mother, “at the height of my climacteric I am breaking Bob’s chair.”
Harkness went in for tiresome, tasteless harangues against Amy Lowell, which he seemed to believe necessary for the enjoyment of his after-dinner cigar. He would point a stinking baby stogie at Mother. “’Ave a peteeto cigareeto, Charlotte,” he would crow. “Puff on this whacking black cheroot, and you’ll be a match for any reeking señorita femme fatale in the spiggotty republics, where blindness from Bob’s bathtub hooch is still unknown. When you go up in smoke, Charlotte, remember the Maine. Remember Amy Lowell, that cigar-chawing, guffawing, senseless and meterless, multimillion-heiress, heavyweight mascot on a floating fortress. Damn the Patterns! Full speed ahead on a cigareeto!”
Amy Lowell was never a welcome subject in our household. Of course, no one spoke disrespectfully of Miss Lowell. She had been so plucky, so formidable, so beautifully and unblushingly immense, as Henry James might have said. And yet, though irreproachably decent herself apparently, like Mae West she seemed to provoke indecorum in others. There was an anecdote which I was too young to understand: it was about Amy’s getting her migraine headaches from being kept awake by the exercises of honeymooners in an adjacent New York hotel room. Amy’s relatives would have liked to have honored her as a personage, a personage a little outrée perhaps, but perfectly within the natural order, like Amy’s girlhood idol, the Duse. Or at least she might have been unambiguously tragic, short-lived, and a classic, like her last idol, John Keats. My parents piously made out a case for Miss Lowell’s Life of Keats, which had killed its author and was so much more manly and intelligible than her poetry. Her poetry! But was poetry what one could call Amy’s loud, bossy, unladylike chinoiserie—her free verse! For those that could understand it, her matter was, no doubt, blameless, but the effrontery of her manner made my parents relish Robert Frost’s remark that “writing free verse was like playing tennis without a net.”
Whenever Amy Lowell was mentioned Mother bridled. Not distinguishing, not caring whether her relative were praised or criticized, she would say, “Amy had the courage of her convictions. She worked like a horse.” Mother would conclude characteristically, “Amy did insist on doing everything the hard way. I think, perhaps, that her brother, the President of Harvard, did more for other people.”
Often Father seemed to pay little attention to the conversation of his guests. He would smack his lips, and beam absentmindedly and sensuously, as if he were anticipating the comforts of civilian life—a perpetual shore leave in Hawaii. The Harknesses, however, cowed him. He would begin to feel out the subject of his resignation and observe in a wheedle obscurely loaded with significance that “certain cits, no brighter than you or I, pay income taxes as large as a captain’s yearly salary.”
Commander Harkness, unfortunately, was inclined to draw improper conclusions from such remarks. Disregarding the “romance of commerce,” he would break out into ungentlemanly tirades against capital. “Yiss, old Bob,” he would splutter, “when I consider the ungodly hoards garnered in by the insurance and broking gangs, it breaks my heart. Riches, reaches, overreaches! If Bob and I had half the swag that Harkness of Yale has just given Lowell of Harvard to build Georgian houses for Boston quee-eers with British accents!” He rumbled on morosely about retired naval officers “forced to live like coolies on their half-pay. Hurrah for the Bull Moose Party!” he’d shout. “Hurrah for Boss Curley! Hurrah for the Bolshies!”
Nothing prevented Commander Billy from telling about his diplomatic mission in 1918, when “his eyes had seen the Bolshie on his native heath.” He had been in Budapest “during the brief sway of Béla Kun-Whon. Béla was giving those Hunkyland money-bags and educators the boot into the arms of American philanthropy!”
Then Mother would say, hopefully, “Mamá always said that the old Hungarians did have taste. Billy, your reference to Budapest makes me heartsick for Europe. I am dying for Bob and Bobby’s permission to spend next summer at Etretat.”
Commander Billy Harkness specialized in verses like “The Croix de Guerre”:
“I toast the guy, who, crossing over,
Abode in London for a year,
The guy who to his wife and lover
Returned with conscience clean and clear,
Who nightly prowling Piccadilly
Gave icy stares to floozies wild,
And when approached said, ‘Bilgy Billy
Is mama’s darling angel child—’
Now he’s the guy who rates the croy dee geer!”
Mother, however, smiled mildly. “Billy,” she would say, “my cousin, Admiral Ledyard Atkinson, always has a twinkle in his eye when he asks after your vers de société.”
“‘Tommy’ Atkins!” snorted Commander Billy. “I know Tommy better than my own mother. He’s the first chapter in a book I’m secretly writing and leaving to the archives called Wild Admirals I Have Known. And now my bodily presence may no longer grace the inner sanctum of the Somerset Club, for fear Admiral Tommy’ll assault me with five new chapters of his Who Won the Battle of Jutland?”
After the heat and push of Commander Billy, it was pleasant to sit in the shade of the Atkinsons. Cousin Ledyard wasn’t exactly an admiral: he had been promoted to this rank during the World War and had soon reverted back to his old rank of captain. In 1926 he was approaching the retiring age and was still a captain. He was in charge of a big, stately, comfortable, but anomalous warship, which seldom sailed further than hailing distance from its Charlestown drydock. He was himself stately and anomalous. Serene, silver-maned, and Spanish-looking, Cousin Ledyard liked full-dress receptions and crowed like a rooster in his cabin crowded with liveried Filipinos, Cuban trophies, and racks of experimental firearms, such as pepper-box pistols and a machine gun worked by electric batteries. He rattled off Spanish phrases, told first-hand adventure stories about service with Admiral Schley, and reminded one of some landsman and diplomat commanding a galleon in Philip II’s Armada. With his wife’s money he had bought a motor launch which had a teak deck and a newfangled diesel engine. While his warship perpetually rode at anchor, Cousin Ledyard was forever hurrying about the harbor in his launch. “Oh, Led Atkinson has dash and his own speedboat!” This was about the best my father could bring himself to say for his relative. Commander Billy, himself a man of action, was more sympathetic: “Tommy’s about a hundred horse and buggy power.” Such a dinosaur, however, had little to offer an ’07 Annapolis graduate. Billy’s final judgment was that Cousin Ledyard knew less trig than a schoolgirl, had been promoted through mistaken identity or merely as “window- dressing,” and “was really plotting to put airplane carriers in square sails to stem the tide of our declining Yankee seamanship.” Mother lost her enthusiasm for Captain Atkinson’s stately chatter—he was “unable to tell one woman from another.”
Cousin Ledyard’s wife, a Schenectady Hoes distantly related to my still living Great-Grandmother Myers, was twenty years younger than her husband. This made her a trying companion; with the energy of youth she demanded the homage due to age. Once while playing in the Mattapoisett tennis tournament, she had said to her opponent, a woman her own age but married to a young husband, “I believe I’ll call you Ruth; you can call me Mrs. Atkinson.” She was a radiant Christian Scientist, darted about in smart serge suits and blouses frothing with lace. She filled her purse with Science literature and boasted without irony of “Boston’s greatest grand organ” in the Christian Science mother temple on Huntington Avenue. As a girl, she had grown up with our Myers furniture. We dreaded Mrs. Atkinson’s descents on Revere Street. She pooh-poohed Mother’s taste, snorted at our ignorance of Myers family history, treated us as mere custodians of the Myers furniture, resented alterations, and had the memory of a mastodon for Cousin Cassie’s associations with each piece. She wouldn’t hear of my mother’s distress from neuralgia, dismissed my asthma as “growing-pains,” and sought to rally us by gossiping about healers. She talked a prim, sprightly babble. Like many Christian Scientists, she had a bloodless, euphoric, inexhaustible interest in her own body. In a discourse which lasted from her first helping of roast beef through her second demitasse, Mrs. Atkinson held us spellbound by telling how her healer had “surprised and evaporated a cyst inside a sac” inside her “major intestine.”
* * *
I can hear my father trying to explain his resignation from the Navy to Cousin Ledyard or Commander Billy. Talking with an unnatural and importunate jocularity, he would say, “Billy Boy, it’s a darned shame, but this State of Massachusetts doesn’t approve of the service using its franchise and voting by mail. I haven’t had a chance to establish residence since our graduation in ’07. I think I’ll put my blues in mothballs and become a cit just to prove I still belong to the country. The directors of Lever Brothers’ Soap in Cambridge … I guess for cits, Billy, they’ve really got something on the ball, because they tell me they want me on their team.”
Or Father, Cousin Ledyard, Commander Billy, and I would be sitting on after dinner at the dining-room table and talking man to man. Father would say, “I’m afraid I’ll grow dull and drab with all this goldbricking ashore. I am too old for tennis singles, but too young for that confirmed state of senility known as golf.”
Cousin Ledyard and Commander Billy would puff silently on their cigars. Then Father would try again and say pitifully, “I don’t think a naval man can ever on the outside replace the friends he made during his years of wearing the blue.”
Then Cousin Ledyard would give Father a polite, funereal look and say, “Speaking of golf, Bob, you’ve hit me below the belt. I’ve been flubbing away at the game for thirty years without breaking ninety.”
Commander Billy was blunter. He would chaff Father about becoming a “beachcomber” or “purser for the Republican junior chamber of commerce.” He would pretend that Father was in danger of being jailed for evading taxes to support “Uncle Sam’s circus.” Circus was Commander Billy’s slang for the Navy. The word reminded him of a comparison, and once he stood up from the table and bellowed solemnly: “Oyez, oyez! Bob Lowell, our bright boy, our class baby, is now on a par with ‘Rattle-Ass Rats’ Richardson, who resigned from us to become press agent for Sells-Floto Circus, and who writes me: ‘Bilgy Dear—Beating the drum ahead of the elephants and the spangled folk, I often wonder why I run into so few of my classmates.’”
Those dinners, those apologies! Perhaps I exaggerate their embarrassment because they hover so grayly in recollection and seem to anticipate ominously my father’s downhill progress as a civilian and Bostonian. It was to be expected, I suppose, that Father should be in irons for a year or two, while becoming detached from his old comrades and interests, while waiting for the new life.
* * *
I used to sit through the Sunday dinners absorbing cold and anxiety from the table. I imagined myself hemmed in by our new, inherited Victorian Myers furniture. In the bleak Revere Street dining room, none of these pieces had at all that air of unhurried condescension that had been theirs behind the summery veils of tissue paper in Cousin Cassie Julian-James’s memorial volume. Here, table, highboy, chairs, and screen—mahogany, cherry, teak—looked nervous and disproportioned. They seemed to wince, touch elbows, shift from foot to foot. High above the highboy, our gold National Eagle stooped forward, plastery and doddering. The Sheffield silver-plate urns, more precious than solid sterling, peeled; the bodies of the heraldic mermaids on the Mason-Myers crest blushed a metallic copper tan. In the harsh New England light, the bronze sphinxes supporting our sideboard looked as though manufactured in Grand Rapids. All too clearly no one had worried about synchronizing the grandfather clock’s minutes, days, and months with its mellow old Dutch seascape-painted discs for showing the phases of the moon. The stricken, but still striking gong made sounds like steam banging through pipes. Colonel Myers’ monumental Tibetan screen had been impiously shortened to fit it for a low Yankee ceiling. And now, rough and gawky, like some Hindu water buffalo killed in mid-rush but still alive with mad momentum, the screen hulked over us … and hid the pantry sink.
Our real blue-ribbon-winning bête noire was of course the portrait of Cousin Cassie’s father, Mordecai Myers’ fourth and most illustrious son: Colonel Theodorus Bailey Myers. The Colonel, like half of our new portraits, was merely a collateral relation; though really as close to us as James Russell Lowell, no one called the Colonel “Great Grand Uncle,” and Mother playfully pretended that her mind was overstrained by having to remember his full name, rank, and connection. In the portrait, Colonel Theodorus wore a black coat and gray trousers, an obsequiously conservative costume which one associated with undertakers and the musicians at Symphony Hall. His spats were pearl gray plush with pearl buttons. His mustache might have been modeled on the mustache of a bartender in a Western. The majestic Tibetan screen enclosed him as though he were an ancestor-god from Lhasa, a blasphemous yet bogus attitude. Mr. Myers’ colonel’s tabs were crudely stitched to a civilian coat; his New York Yacht Club button glowed like a carnation; his vainglorious picture frame was a foot and a half wide. Forever, his right hand hovered over a glass dome that covered a model locomotive. He was vaguely Middle-Eastern and waiting. A lady in Mother’s sewing circle had pertly interpreted this portrait as, “King Solomon about to receive the Queen of Sheba’s shares in the Boston and Albany Railroad.” Gone now was the Colonel’s place of honor at Cousin Cassie’s Washington mansion; gone was his charming satire on the belles of 185o, entitled Nothing to Wear, which had once been quoted “throughout the length and breadth of the land as generally as was Bret Harte’s Heathen Chinee”; gone was his priceless collection of autographed letters of all the Signers of the Declaration of Independence—he had said once, “my letters will be my tombstone.” Colonel Theodorus Bailey Myers had never been a New Englander. His family tree reached to no obscure Somersetshire yeoman named Winslowe or Lowle. He had never even, like his father, Mordecai, gloried in a scarlet War of 1812 waistcoat. His portrait was an indifferent example from a dull, bad period. The Colonel’s only son had sheepishly changed his name from Mason-Myers to Myers-Mason.
Waiting for dinner to end and for the guests to leave, I used to lean forward on my elbows, support each cheekbone with a thumb, and make my fingers meet in a clumsy Gothic arch across my forehead. I would stare through this arch and try to make life stop. Out in the alley the sun shone irreverently on our three garbage cans lettered: R.T.S. LOWELL—U.S.N. When I shut my eyes to stop the sun, I saw first an orange disc, then a red disc, then the portrait of Major Myers apotheosized, as it were, by the sunlight lighting the blood smear of his scarlet waistcoat. Still there was no coup de théâtre about the Major as he looked down on us with his portly young man’s face of a comfortable upper New York State patroon and the friend of Robert Livingston and Martin Van Buren. Great-great-Grandfather Myers had never frowned down in judgment on a Salem witch. There was no allegory in his eyes, no Mayflower. Instead he looked peacefully at his sideboard, his cut-glass decanters, his cellaret—the worldly bosom of the Mason-Myers mermaid engraved on a silver-plated urn. If he could have spoken, Mordecai would have said, “My children, my blood, accept graciously the loot of your inheritance. We are all dealers in used furniture.”
The man who seems in my memory to sit under old Mordecai’s portrait is not my father, but Commander Billy—the Commander after Father had thrown in his commission. There Billy would sit glowing, perspiring, bragging. Despite his rowdiness, he even then breathed the power that would make him a vice-admiral and hero in World War II. I can hear him boasting in lofty language of how he had stood up for democracy in the day of Lenin and Béla Kun; of how he “practiced the sport of kings” (i.e., commanded a destroyer) and combed the Mediterranean, Adriatic, and Black Seas like gypsies—seldom knowing what admiral he served under or where his next meal or load of fuel oil was coming from.
It always vexed the Commander, however, to think of the strings that had been pulled to have Father transferred from Washington to Boston. He would ask Mother, “Why in God’s name should a man with Bob’s brilliant cerebellum go and mess up his record by actually begging for that impotent field nigger’s job of second in command at the defunct Boston Yard!”
I would squirm. I dared not look up because I knew that the Commander abhorred Mother’s dominion over my father, thought my asthma, supposedly brought on by the miasmal damp of Washington, a myth, and considered our final flight to Boston a scandal.
My mother, on the other hand, would talk back sharply and explain to Billy that there was nothing second-string about the Boston Yard except its commandant, Admiral De Stahl, who had gone into a frenzy when he learned that my parents, supposed to live at the naval yard, had set themselves up without his permission at 91 Revere Street. The Admiral had commanded Father to reside at the yard, but Mother had bravely and stubbornly held on at Revere Street.
“A really great person,” she would say, “knows how to be courteous to his superiors.”
Then Commander Harkness would throw up his hands in despair and make a long buffoonish speech. “Would you believe it?” he’d say. “De Stahl, the anile slob, would make Bob Lowell sleep seven nights a week and twice on Sundays in that venerable twenty-room pile provided for his third in command at the yard. ‘Bobby me boy,’ the Man says, ‘henceforth I will that you sleep wifeless. You’re to push your beauteous mug into me boudoir each night at ten-thirty and each morn at six. And don’t mind me laying to alongside the Missus De Stahl,’ the old boy squeaks; ‘we’re just two oldsters as weak as babies. But Robbie Boy,’ he says, ‘don’t let me hear of you hanging on your telephone wire and bending off the ear of that forsaken frau of yours sojourning on Revere Street. I might have to phone you in a hurry, if I should happen to have me stroke.’”
Taking hold of the table with both hands, the Commander tilted his chair backwards and gaped down at me with sorrowing Gargantuan wonder: “I know why Young Bob is an only child.”