Читать книгу Mr. Smith - Louis Bromfield - Страница 6

Table of Contents

I was born in the town called Crescent City of which the suburb Oakdale is now a part. My birth took place in a large and rather ornate house with towers and cupolas and plate glass windows, a very outsize house considering the fact that the city lot upon which it was placed was only seventy-five feet wide and in depth not more than a hundred feet. The big house occupied most of the lot so that it stood very close to the houses on either side, and in the evening, unless the shades were drawn, it was possible to see from our windows what went on inside the houses on either side. I can remember seeing family quarrels taking place and what in those days was referred to as “spooning.” I have seen fathers strike their children, and even in the case of old Hazeltine, who late in life married a young bride, I have witnessed as a child the rather repulsive intimacies of that particular bedroom from my own second-story bedroom window.

The house was a symbol of many things. It belonged to the era which lay between the frontier when Crescent City was a village and the day when, as factories moved in, the village grew to be a town and then to be a city, and finally the people who once would have lived on the main street in such a house as ours, took to the suburbs and the main street became a “dead area.” In time the old big ornate houses went unpainted and the dooryards unkempt, and at last the big trees which once shaded the street were cut down to widen it. The old houses first became boarding houses and presently went half empty save for one or two which housed a funeral home or the establishment of a chiropractor or disappeared before the enameled front of a shiny filling station. The day of the old house and the way of living which went with it passed and the whole neighborhood became “a dead area,” a phrase which might well describe much of American life.

In the very beginning the houses of the village had been close together as a protection against the attack of the Indians, the French, and finally the British. Then as the town grew, the houses remained close to each other because the only transportation was by means of horses, and even the rich built houses on small squares of valuable land within the limits of the city itself. And when the automobile came and changed the element of space into that of time, they moved out a little way into suburbs like Oakdale; but still, even when there was no longer any peril from attack or any limitations of transportation, they still huddled together in the suburbs, building their houses on plots only a little larger than those in the city. Farmers lived on farms and townspeople lived in towns, but a country house was and still is largely unknown—a house where there might be solitude and wildness and beauty of a kind that is connected with space and the breathing of the spirit and cannot be found in towns and cities and suburbs. It was as if the people were always afraid, first of the Indians and the raiders and afterward of being alone or in any way different from their neighbors.

The fear of solitude grew, I think, out of the thinness of their resources and the lack of thought or even the capacity to think. Never as in Europe did they put walls or hedges about their properties so that they themselves might have privacy and be spared the indignity of witnessing, as I did in childhood, unfortunate or unpleasant things going on in the house next door. They did not cherish privacy and, like Enid, actually wanted neighbors to know what was going on within the limits of their own small properties, and so, in a sense, they developed a kind of falseness related to play-acting, concerned wholly with the appearance rather than the substance, with the façade rather than what lay behind it. And all of this became a part of the thing which might be called American culture or civilization, or perhaps more accurately the lack of both. At any rate, it added up to a kind of sterility and still does.

In her way Enid is a humble symbol of what I mean. With her it has become so profound that she play-acts even in bed so that there is no satisfaction in any relationship with her, physical or otherwise. In reality she in a way resembles a prostitute who also play-acts as a part of her profession. There is no way ever of reaching her—in the essence, I mean, or the spirit or the reality, if indeed by now she has any longer any essence or spirit or reality. That is why, long ago, I gradually stopped trying to talk to her about anything whatever—the welfare and future of the children, a political issue, or even the behavior of our neighbors which is always a source of relaxed and easy gossip. When I tried I found myself talking, not to a warm and honest human being, but to an attitude, a pose, a character part in a play, in a setting behind which there was nothing.

It is an extraordinary thing how the life of a town like Crescent City and a suburb like Oakdale has ceased to produce “characters.” Among the early pioneers, tough men and women who knew the satisfaction of building something with their own hands and minds, their own courage and dignity and self-reliance, “characters” among old people were so common that they were very nearly the rule. And even in my childhood there were plenty of characters in the town—people who lived as they wanted to live with a certain freedom and even luxury of expression and action, indifferent to the opinion of others. They made life much richer for the whole of the community and infinitely more colorful. But as I grew older they gradually died off and no new eccentrics came to take their places, and both the town and life itself became much duller until now the whole community at times seems insufferable since every door in every house admits or releases people who are just alike in what they believe, in how they act, in what they think. The odd one, if he occurs, is likely to be shut up or treated as mad. I think it could be said that eccentricity and “characters” are the measure, as they were in the eighteenth century, of an independent and dynamic society, a civilization, or a culture in any nation.

At least three of my grandparents would certainly be regarded today with pity or alarm as eccentrics. My Grandfather Weber came from the Palatinate in the Forties at a time when liberty and independence of thought were of much concern to certain elements among the German people. He fled into exile in order to avoid capture and prison because he was one of the leaders in a movement of revolt against the tyranny of a government which sought to curtail his freedom and deform his personality, and to him such things were unsufferable.

He was a heavy, strongly built man who by trade in the old country had been an ironmonger and blacksmith in a prosperous way, and until the day he died he spoke with a strong South German accent. In addition to being extremely skillful and even an artist in the fashioning of wrought iron in all its forms, he was also something of a musician, played the trumpet, and sang regularly in the bass section with the fellow German refugees who formed a Liederkranz society immediately upon their arrival in Crescent City. He was the father of seven children, including my mother, and so far as anyone knows he remained happily faithful to his wife from the day he married her until she died, at forty-seven. After that he had some kind of a happy relationship with a middle-aged milliner named Mrs. Schontz. How far it went I do not know, but I would suspect that it went all the way. She was a buxom, blonde woman who made wonderful strudel which she always gave us children when we stopped in at the millinery shop. I do not know why they did not marry, but I remember hearing as a child some talk of her feeling that she was not capable of becoming a stepmother to a family of children some of whom already had children of their own. Also there was talk of a ne’er-do-well husband who had disappeared and might possibly return unexpectedly with potential embarrassment to all concerned.

I do not think any of it mattered very much. Whatever happened was carried on in a dignified way. There were no bottles of Bourbon and smooching in the back seat of a car at the country club. They made each other happy, and on occasion she went with him to the Liederkranz society and sang with him in the contralto section of the chorus when the German element did “The Messiah” each year at Christmas time. And she always superintended the annual beer-garden picnic and reunion of the old Germans who came over, during the revolutionary troubles, from Bavaria and the Palatinate.

It was a warm relationship to which nobody, so far as I could discover, ever objected, even the old man’s own children who always regarded Mrs. Schontz as a friend. She supported herself through her millinery shop, and the most he ever spent upon her was to buy a little gift or treat her to beer for the evening. I think that my grandmother herself would have approved of the relationship because it made her Caspar happy. Her Caspar was one of those big strong men who could at the same time be helpless when it came to small things. Mrs. Schontz looked after him.

When she died he became a lonely old man who actually cherished his solitude. He refused to come and live with any of his children and stayed on in the old house where he had lived the whole of his life. Sometimes he came to meals with our family and always he carried sweets of some kind in his pocket for the children. He had worked hard and brought up a large family comfortably, and when Mrs. Schontz died he said, in his funny accent, “Sure it would be nice to live with one of you, but I would be in the way with so many children, and I am old enough now to deserve solitude. When I want to think I can think. When I want to remember the happy times I have had and the blessings God gave me I can sit on the front porch and watch people go by and call out, ‘Good Evening,’ and have a beautiful time all by myself. I have put aside enough savings to live comfortably. I can even keep my own house clean and neat. When I want company I can go to the Liederkranz or the beer garden or come and have supper with one of you.”

He did not want to be “kept.” He did not want the state to make his decisions. He did not want to conform. He had been a good citizen, contributing his share and much more to the general good of the community. He had no fear of being alone. There was his music and his ironwork, and as he grew older he carved little figures out of wood—elves and trolls in the South German tradition, which he painted in bright colors and gave to the children. Even as a very old man he never “killed time” until he died. On the morning my mother found him dead he had been at work creating something up to the last minute when the Lord called him. He left behind, not quite finished, an ornament of wrought iron designed to hold flower pots for the balcony beneath the turrets and scrollwork of my mother’s house.

He was content to die at eighty-one, and it was probably just as well that he did for I remember, even long ago, when I myself was old enough to notice such things, that sometimes the children mimicked his accent as he passed in the street and my cousins complained that they were ashamed of a grandfather who could not speak good English. It made him seem different and so reflected upon themselves who each day sought more and more to be as much like everybody else as possible.

But there was another reason, far more profound. He died before he saw the fiery spirit of the French Revolution, for which he had made himself an exile from the Rhine country he loved so much, begin to be transmuted into something else, something derived from the Marx whom he had always detested and who was a materialist and the bitter enemy of the human spirit which the French Revolution glorified through blood and strife and suffering. He would have resented bitterly the materialism which ordered him to pay taxes so that he might have an old-age pension, the materialism which crippled his own independence and reduced him to the level of men incapable of taking care of themselves and their families, which treated him as part incompetent and part indigent. It was not materialism for which he had conspired and fought and been exiled, nor for a state potentially as tyrannical and much less colorful than the state against which he had rebelled. He had fought for something quite different which concerned the dignity rather than the material security of man. In the New World he had found that freedom which permitted a man to be a man and live with human dignity, aware of his own strength and thought and abilities and trustful of the good will of his neighbors. He did not live long enough to see that right of freedom and independence begin to fade into commonplaceness and conformity and the sacrifice of the spirit for which he had fought, turn into a dull paternalism as vicious and perhaps more deadening than the old tyranny had been.

My paternal grandparents were of another tradition altogether. My father’s father was already well past middle age when my father, one of twelve children, was born, so that he seemed immensely old when I knew him as a child. He died when I was very young, at the age of ninety-three, and had lived through most of the nineteenth century when the whole country about Crescent City was transformed from a near wilderness into a huge and modern industrial community. Despite the great distance which separated him and me, my memories of him are vivid. He was a man, I think, who, once seen and known, made an impression as on a photographic plate, which remained forever.

He was a tall, thin, very tough old man who always seemed younger than his years and was vigorous up until the moment he died. By blood he was mostly north of Ireland Scottish with some English blood, and he possessed both the ruggedness of the one people and the adaptability of both. Essentially he was a pioneer, but you couldn’t make a career out of being a pioneer, and during the course of his life he had tried his hand at many things. Apparently he would undertake a job and, once it was accomplished, he would lose interest and set himself at once to another, which is I suppose a characteristic of the pioneer. As a young man he had fought in the Indian Wars in the Great Plains and the Southwest and he had traveled a great deal inside the borders of this country.

He was a great storyteller and his tales of the Southwest had a passionate interest for me. They were better than any I have read since, and sometimes, when the memory of those tales returns to me, I feel a great sense of sadness, injury, and loss that the country he talked of no longer exists and that I never had the opportunity of knowing it. Of course, the flood-stream beds, the mountains, the mesas are still there, but the excitement and the struggle and the perils have gone and everywhere there are shacks and filling stations and motels. That country has become a shrunken thing, and to find again a wild country like it one would have to search the wildernesses of the earth.

I think that more and more most of us suffer from an increasing claustrophobia. The next town is too near and the distance between it and our own town is built up with bungalows or their successors—the ranch-type house. Great cities which seemed to me as a child romantic and distant places are only a few hours away by plane or even automobile. Europe is too near and Asia threatens us. More and more we feel a sense of uneasiness at this mechanically projected process of shrinking the world. More and more there is a universal and shadowy psychological sense of alarm and even dread, as if there were no longer enough room in the world. And all the time there are more and more of us—more Chinese, more Americans, more Russians—and the more people there are, the more complex and difficult become the problems of the world and consequently our own personal problems.

My paternal grandfather, who was called Colonel Jared Smith, lived in a free world filled with a sense of space and of boundless opportunity. He could be an Indian fighter, a settler, a merchant, a trapper. He could set up a small business which might grow into a great industry or do any of a hundred adventurous and fascinating things. We hear much in these times of how the span of life has been extended and how fewer and fewer people die of tuberculosis or plague, of how such dread things as syphilis are cured overnight, of how the weak and handicapped who might have died are kept alive to go on breeding. We hear about the great advances in transportation, of plumbing, of radios and television. ... I don’t know. Maybe it is a better world. But in return for all of these things we have sacrificed much and have raised for ourselves, and above all for our children, complexities and problems which may never be solved and which in the end may mount up until the heap collapses and thrusts mankind and civilization back again into the Dark Ages. I don’t know. What do you think?

We live in a world of short cuts, many of them brutally contradictory of natural law, yet the whole swarming ant-mass of this planet is insignificant in relation to the universe and its immutable laws.

Anyway, Grandpa Smith had always gone his tough way, using brawn and wit to make for himself a fascinating life, to build and create, at least in part, the world into which I was born, a world which even on my entry into life was beginning to become a static rather than a dynamic world, a world resembling more and more closely the tight crowded world of Europe where there were too many people and not enough free land and there has long been a shortage not of men but of land and space and opportunity.

In any case, I was born into a world very different from that of the old gentleman Colonel Jared Smith. The look of his world was in his eye—the kind of look one rarely sees in these times save in the eye of an eccentric hermit, if you can find one. It was at once a look of peace and of arrogance. There was in it the fierce independence that is in the eye of the eagle but beyond that there was the look of peace which is in the eyes of people who have lived full rich lives and, when old, find peace and no regrets either for the things they have done or have not done. It is the kind of look one finds in the eyes of people who have discovered that in old age there is a richness, a quiet satisfaction they never attained earlier in life. They are the people who have lived, you might say, in rhythm, completing the full arc of man’s existence from fiery ascending youth through the solid accomplishments of middle age into the quiet, peaceful decline toward death. They are not people who dread death or struggle to evade it, for their lives have been complete, rounded out, and realized like a great work of art. They have never feared life or denied it. They do not welcome death through frustration and despair but because they have fulfilled their cycle with richness and satisfaction. How few of them there are in our times!

He was a great horseman and as an old man he rode an old spotted mare which he had brought from the West twenty years earlier. Actually he died while riding her and was found dead in the fields of his farm lying on the ground with one hand holding the reins. She was not a pretty beast. She was heavily built and had a Roman nose but she was smart and looked after the old man. They were devoted to each other, and she ran loose like a dog about the farmhouse. When he died she was never able to understand that he had gone away and this time was not coming back. In the summer mornings she would come to the back door and neigh as she had done hundreds of times before, but he was no longer there to give her an apple or a lump of sugar. She died during the following winter, perhaps of old age, perhaps out of loneliness. We could never quite explain to her what had happened.

This grandfather had great good luck in his wife. He had found her in California where her father operated as a rancher on one of the last Spanish grants. She had Spanish blood which showed in her dark hair and black eyes, and it is not impossible that there was some remote Indian blood in her. She was very trim and very spry, even as an old lady, and she was a wonderful cook. I think it is by her cooking that I remember her and I know of no better way by which to remember anyone. The children always liked going out to the farm for meals since the food was excellent and of great variety, including even Spanish and Mexican dishes which seemed very hot until we got used to them. She must have been very handsome as a girl with her brilliant black eyes and firm full-breasted figure and trim ankles.

In any case, she seemed always to have been in love with my grandfather, and I suspect that the basis of the love on both sides was founded on complete physical satisfaction in each other. From that stemmed in turn tenderness, devotion, self-sacrifice, understanding, and even common interests. It is on the physical side, which is usually the foundation of any lasting love affair or marriage, that so many marriages in the world I have known have failed, because this part of the marriage has been a bungled and unsatisfactory operation without abandon, or ecstasy, or complete surrender. It is, all too often, a messy affair brought about by physiological pressures with urgent brutality on the one side and a contrived and patient endurance on the other. And so comes divorce or that dreary limited compromise which is varied only by sordid adventures on the side.

My grandmother’s name was Pilar, a pretty name, and she always encouraged the impression that my grandfather not only dominated her but bullied her. He was always ordering her about saying, “Pilar, do this,” or, “Pilar, do that.” She usually did it in her own good time, if it suited her, and all the while it was she who in reality ran everything. She kept charge of the money and took care alike of his children and his investments when he went away on one of his long trips. She ran the house and the farm and the livestock, patiently and with satisfaction, until he returned, when there was a turbulent reunion lasting for days from which there inevitably resulted still another child.

She appeared a little strange in Crescent City and the surrounding countryside, and I think that always most people looked upon her as alien. There was always a Latin elegance about her carriage, in her habit of dressing nearly always in black and white, and even about the way she kept her house. Whether she was aware that she seemed strange I cannot say, but if so It did not appear to trouble her. The odd thing was that, although she had been brought up as a Catholic and a Spanish one at that, her children had contact with no particular faith save that whenever it became necessary to have the services of a clergyman, the Presbyterian preacher was summoned. She did not appear to miss the consolations of religion perhaps because she lived very close to nature and the animals, both wild and domestic, on the farm which next to my grandfather was the most important thing in her life. These two elements, together with her children, made up the whole of her existence.

She died suddenly of a stroke a little over a year after my grandfather was found dead beside his mare. None of the children seemed to have inherited either her taste for country life or my grandfather’s wild restlessness, and presently the farm which we all called “Pilar’s Farm” was sold. The old buildings have been long since torn down and no memory or even physical vestige of the place remains. The fields have long since been broken up into suburban lots and the farm is a part of the fashionable suburb of Oakdale. My own house is not far from the site of the old farm house.

Biologists tell us that we do not inherit directly from our parents, who are merely the carriers of seed, but from our four grandparents, and this may account for the fact that none of Pilar and the Colonel’s own children seemed to inherit their tastes. They were all on the whole respectable and commonplace and conventional. It may also account for the fact of my own restlessness and frequent melancholy. With Pilar and the Colonel the restlessness, the physical passion, the color, and the delight in purely physical things were all realized and satisfied. With me these things have been suppressed and frustrated, partly by circumstance and partly perhaps simply by my own weakness and indecision.

It raises the old question between inheritance and environment about which there seems to be no really definite decision. I only know that at times I can somehow feel Pilar and the Colonel in my blood, in wild but suppressed and concealed outbursts of disgust and frustration, and on those occasions when in my mind I considered secretly the easiest and quickest way of getting rid of Enid altogether.

Enid, of course, never knew of these secret plottings, when in a vicarious way, entirely in the imagination, I destroyed in a single wild explosion all of my Oakdale life, killed her, escaped, and lost myself forever. Nor do I think that she ever suspected what I was thinking and even plotting since that kind of violence was something quite beyond her understanding. It was her way to go on patching and compromising and pretending. Well, that is what I did too because I could never bring myself to act and could find no way out until the war came along and dropped me here on a steaming tropical island as far from Oakdale as it is possible to be in this world.

My own father was as little like his parents as it was possible to be, unless it could be said that he inherited something of Pilar’s sense of stability and outward orderliness. The only inheritance left by Pilar and the Colonel was the farm and the livestock and machinery which went with it, so their children had very largely to make their own way, and my father got a job early in life in the office of old Mr. Hargreaves who had the first and the biggest insurance agency in Crescent City. As the city had grown and the country developed, his insurance business became immensely lucrative, and when he died he left it jointly to a nephew and to my father to whom he had taken a fancy. So at thirty my father was very well off with a business which he liked and for which he had a talent.

In some ways my father was the perfect small-town Middle-Western businessman of his time. He belonged to half a dozen fraternal organizations. He helped to organize the first Rotary Club of the town. He was a regular attendant of the Presbyterian church. He knew nearly everyone in the town and few had a bad word to speak against him. He was outwardly a good husband and definitely he liked his children although he never came very near to them. Whether he ever loved his wife or not I do not know. He must have married old Caspar’s daughter out of love since when the old German’s estate was settled she inherited only a few hundred dollars.

How long that love or the desire which accompanied it endured I do not know. I was the third child, and by the time I was old enough to be aware of such things there was very little evidence of love or even affection between my parents. It was not that they quarreled or even showed any evidence of disliking each other. They simply went their own ways, seeing each other at meals morning and evening and sharing until he died a large double bed. They spoke to each other occasionally but they never conversed. Exchange of words was commonplace and habitual but I never remember their showing any great interest in each other or any interest in what the other was doing or saying. In all their conversations there was never the slightest evidence of an idea or of any thought.

My mother is still alive, a solid rather square-built woman with the heavy reliable energy which came down to her through my German grandfather. Most people would call her handsome. She should, I think, have been the head of a great business or engineering corporation and perhaps in these days would have held an executive position or even have founded a business of her own. But when she was eighteen there was no place for a woman to go, and so she married my father, which seemed the obvious thing to do. He was good-looking, three years older than herself, and very well off with an insurance business which was about as solid as anything could be. I do not know how much they were in love with each other or indeed do I know what love is because it can be so many different things to so many different people. Certainly neither of them was very hot-blooded or passionate, or at least neither of them seemed ever to have discovered either passion or desire. That, I suppose, is how it is with many people who live lives which are like a pudding without salt or sugar or spices.

They were what are called good citizens. They were prosperous. They had three well-behaved and satisfactory children. I suspect that the family was limited to three not because of any effort at birth control but simply because my parents lost interest in each other. I think that both of them missed much in life and that, partly aware of this, they lost themselves and partially cured their frustrations by becoming frantically “busy.”

My father went early to the office and came home late. He was away a great deal on business trips. I think he really loved the immense files and the complicated forms that went with the insurance business. All this did not make him either a very attentive father or a very interesting one. Until he died he always seemed something of a stranger to me, and even now I find myself thinking of him not as “Father” or “Dad” or “Pop” but simply as “Mr. Insurance Man.” His business constantly grew and finally he bought out his partner, the nephew of the man who had befriended him and who preferred hunting and fishing to insurance. The partner took a smaller house and presently a small farm and sold some farm insurance on his own, enough to keep his wife, himself, and his five children, and gradually he became half-forgotten by the town in which his uncle had been one of the richest men and one of its most prominent citizens. When people thought or spoke of him it was to say, “Isn’t it a pity the way Tom Hargreaves has gone downhill? It would certainly be a disappointment to his uncle.”

Sometimes, because one of his boys was about my age and a friend of mine, I went to stay at their small farm for a few days. Everything went wild there, including the children. We camped out, scared at night by the rustling sounds made by the wild animals and the calls of the screech owls, and in summer the swimming hole behind the house was our bathtub. Tom Hargreaves may have gone downhill, but he certainly had more fun than my father ever had and he gave fun and excitement to many other people.

After such a visit I always returned home saddened and filled with wistfulness because I always wished I had a father like him.

My mother was a good housekeeper and we were able to afford a cook, a “day” girl, and a laundress in the big house with the towers and the fretwork. She did little housework herself and actually disliked it. Most of her heavy energy went into her women’s club activities and into raising charity funds and attending conventions. The house was always well kept and the food good, but there was a sterile emptiness about it and an almost total lack of warmth and never any excitement at all. It was as if we were all hypnotized, paralyzed, and embalmed in material security, order, and convention, in a big ugly house on a seventy-five-foot lot.

My mother was fair and just and a goad disciplinarian when she was with us, and we three children grew up to be a well-mannered lot and extremely conventional, but I think now that all three of us married very early in life simply in the half-conscious hope of having a “home.” What we had had all our lives was a comfortable, even luxurious house and good food, but none of us had ever had a home. It was only when we went on a visit, as I used to go to Hargreaves’ farm, that we understood what it was that we did not have.

Yet despite her apparent indifference and her preoccupation with other things, my mother exercised over us an iron control. She always “knew better” than anyone else, including ourselves, what was good for us, and she somehow, in her spare time, managed to get us all married to “suitable” mates of what were considered good families and which she described as “well situated.” In this she displayed her powers as a manager and an executive, and long afterward I came to realize that she was as much responsible for my marriage to Enid as I myself was.

She managed this in a hundred small ways—by praising Enid, by throwing us together, by rather backhanded hints about our being suited to each other, and by suggesting that it would be a perfect match. I think she would not have objected if I had got Enid into trouble so that a shotgun wedding would have been necessary. Of course such a thing with Enid would have been quite impossible unless Enid had found a man who was absolutely indispensable to her future security and position, and then it would never have been the result of passion or deception but of calm calculation on her part. It was the marriage my mother wanted to bolster up her own sense of success and perfection and help complete the planned pattern of what to her was a satisfactory existence. Now, as a still powerful and firm old lady, revered as past president of the American Federation of Women’s clubs and honorary member of the Lord knows how many other women’s organizations, she can look back with satisfaction upon a life which she ordered and planned from the very beginning.

She failed only in the cases of two of her children. My sister’s husband is a hopeless and partly secret drunkard, and it is scarcely possible for a man’s marriage to have been more drearily unhappy than my own eventually became. These failures, however, did not disturb her for she simply refused to recognize them. When once or twice my sister tried to discuss the tragedy of her husband, my mother simply turned her off by saying, “Let’s not discuss it, my dear. We all have our problems and you have yours. You must try a little harder to make him happy and he will forget about drinking. I always managed in my own life to iron out these little difficulties and I think I can say that I succeeded.” What was a great tragedy she treated as little more than an annoyance.

In this attitude she was not too different from many of the American women of her generation, or indeed men as well, for it is a great trait of Americans to believe what they want to believe or to ignore or distort any truth which may be disagreeable.

They are, I think, as fearful of facing the truth as they are of being alone, and the two fears are inevitably linked and blended, since it is when one is alone that the truth is faced and revealed, and so they hunt in packs and move in crowds and attend conventions and drink themselves into the sleep which is a little like the death they await while marking time in emptiness.

And so my sister had to bear alone the burden of her husband’s tragedy of disintegration which began, I think, when his parents forced him to become a lawyer—something he never wanted to be but which was in the family tradition. And so he was a bad lawyer and a failure and ashamed before the wife whom he sincerely loved. He drank because whatever he did was a frustration and against his nature.

My brother, happily, married a girl from Seattle and so went far off to live and seldom returned to the East. So far as I know they are happy, but he showed little desire ever to see his parents again after his marriage.

So far as the trouble between Enid and myself, I have never discussed the matter with my mother, but she knows, I am sure, the misery of the household. But she ignores it and only contributes to the fiction of our perfect suburban life as the “finest type of American family.” I have overheard her saying as much on more than one occasion when she knows perfectly well that it is not the truth.

It is very difficult to describe my mother or give her any particular character because in some respects she was and is like a machine with an incredible power of riding over everything and everybody. She accomplishes this without any violent struggle or even intrigue but always quietly and almost sweetly, as if the crushing effect of her passing over you like a steam roller were good for you. Always, of course, she has operated in the tradition of the “accepted thing” so that she has behind her the vast power of convention, of conformity, of a crushing mediocrity.

She is now a venerated, distinguished, respected character in the community and even in a small way in the nation. She has very white hair which, with her rather cold blue eyes and high-colored complexion, makes her very handsome and “aristocratic-looking”—a common phrase and description which belongs with the “lovely homes” and “gorgeous drapes” and “occasional chairs” school of formula and vulgarity. Two things subtract from any look of genuine distinction. One is her taste for fussy dresses and elaborate hats. The other is the pince-nez which she always wears attached to a fine gold chain that snaps in and out on a spring from a gold button attached to her broad bosom. These two things rather give her away. In one sense she could in her prime have posed for a composite portrait of the typical middle-aged middle-class American woman of her era.

She belonged, and as long as she lives will still belong, to a particular era in the development of American sociology, and the key to her story is that very likely she should never have married at all but have gone into business, a thing that was very nearly impossible in her time. Today it is quite different. Such a woman can undertake a career and either never marry at all or marry and relegate her family to the second position of importance in her life and thus be able to avoid many frustrations and small deceptions and hypocrisies. Although my mother has been very active all her life, there was never any sense of adventure in her, nor any real fire. Her life was satisfactory, according to her lights, and dull, and she, so help me God, was the dullest thing in it. Before I was fifteen years old I knew that she was a dreadful bore. Now in her old age, since she has come to consider herself a “character” and to demand reverence and attention, she has become insufferable.

It is true too that she lived toward the end of an era in which the frontier was passing and in which women were scarce and simply under the law of supply and demand, if for no other reason, became desirable. It gave all women, unattractive or otherwise, a great advantage. It gave rise to the absurd fashion of placing all women either on a pedestal or in the gutter. There was nothing in between and no allowance made for the mixed-up thing which most women are, part mother, part bitch, part beauty, part ugliness. This mixed-up quality is what makes women charming and interesting, but the women of my mother’s generation and situation were not allowed to be mixed up. They were all supposed to be pure and virtuous and motherly whether they were or not, and most of them spent their lives in giving a performance of all of these things. Not only did it make them dull and false; it turned them into hypocrites who practiced their bitcheries never openly but secretly and in a veritable web of intrigue. Sweetness of nature was rarely genuine; it was usually the sugar coating on a bitter pill of frustration and envy and baffled ambition. Of course Enid, in her more subtle way, was a remote product of this same tradition.

Motherhood, a physical fact, arrived at often enough bitterly and unwillingly or by accident, was a sacred word, regardless of whether the mother neglected her home, tortured her husband, or devoured her children after first deforming their lives. Good mothers are purely accidental and they are rare enough. It is a pity that the word “mother” suffered the debasement it experienced during most of American sociological history. Things have begun to change, and it is gradually becoming recognized that many mothers are merely monsters. There is nothing sacred about the fruition of the act of copulation. It depends upon what a woman makes of such a situation.

I have been able to avoid my mother pretty well for the last ten years, but there were the inevitable yearly visits which fortunately could not last for long since it was impossible for two such women as herself and Enid to stay for long under the same roof without a violent explosion. Fortunately my mother never stayed more than a week, but at the end of that time the tension between the two women, aggravated perhaps by my own corroding inward misery and weakness, became unbearable. In a Latin country like France such an atmosphere would have led to physical violence and even perhaps murder. The nearest it ever came to violence was that furious quarrel when they joined forces against me. I know now that the only thing which prevented violence in our house was the composite pattern of illusion and play-acting in which both women lived. Enid wanted always to be able to say, “I don’t understand mother-in-law trouble. I get on so well with mine. I think the solution is fundamentally based on our attitude toward each other,” ... then with a smile, as if she were saying something witty and original, “You know, bear and forbear.” And my mother wanted always to be able to say, “My daughter-in-law is utterly devoted to me. When I visit her the place is turned over to me. Nothing is too good for Grandmother.”

In the presence of strangers or friends who dropped in, the performance between the two women could only be described as “revolting.” They fell into their roles and really “hammed” and “mugged” them. Each built up the other’s act with “dears” and “darlings” as thick in their conversation as currants in a bun. Then the moment the door closed on the visitors, the overanimated, falsely eager faces drooped again and a kind of bristling like that of two hostile bitches circling each other came into the atmosphere.

Of course I caught it both ways. Enid, throughout the visit, would keep saying to me, “You know, darling, your mother is a wonderful woman but she is a great trial. She’s so used to being the center of everything and running everything. I’m always so tired by the time she leaves that I could lie down and die” (the very last thing indestructible Enid would ever dream of doing).

And on my mother’s side, I would get, “It’s a pity Enid doesn’t show more interest in cultural things. I never thought she’d turn out this way when you married her. She seems to think only of neighborhood gossip and the housekeeping. She has plenty of help. Why doesn’t she manage them so that she doesn’t have to spend all her time house-cleaning? It’s very difficult to talk with her about anything serious. I don’t see how a woman could have spent four years at college and come out with so little.”

Of course during the annual visit I had to give up altogether the luxury of my solitude behind the locked door of the rumpus room. If I attempted to escape I was persecuted by both of them with hints and hurt looks and implications of an almost sinister sort. In short they ganged up on me in a bitter and unholy alliance. And I was weak enough to be concerned about the horror involved in the spectacle of the two of them sitting over my head alone together in the sitting room, hating each other and making nasty remarks. Even if I had tried to escape to the rumpus room, I could not have accomplished anything because the picture of the whole thing would have been in the back of my mind, disturbing me and upsetting any attempt to think or put anything on paper.

So I would sit there with them, usually playing records on the player as loudly as possible in order to make conversation difficult and try meanwhile to get a little reading done. And presently my mother would rise and suggest that it was time to go to bed and perhaps that both Enid and I would be the better for a little more sleep and a few less cocktails. Enid would never give in and go to bed first. By the time the evening broke up I was much too exhausted to think of going back to the rumpus room and find a little solitude. I merely did what was expected of an American husband approaching middle age who has no longer any interest in his wife—go upstairs to a single bed next to hers as if they were going to bed to perform the marital act, as if either of them still wanted to. The mere thought of my occupying a separate room while my mother was in the house was, of course, unthinkable to Enid, who wanted my mother to feel that it was Enid who had possession of me now and that we were still passionately in love with each other—something we never were.

Of course all of this came partly from my own weakness, but essentially I am a man who likes peace and wants people to like each other and get on well together rather than to corrode the whole of their spirits and everybody else’s spirits by intrigues and envy and jealousy and hatred and that horrible desire to possess and devour others which is popularly called “sharing everything.” The odd thing, which I have never been able to understand, is that the two women actually seemed to find pleasure and satisfaction in hating each other.

It was curious that, despite my mother’s immensely “successful” life, her mouth turned down sharply at the corners and there was a line almost like a gash from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth. As Enid grew older, her mouth too began to turn down at the corners and the same line like a gash began to develop. It is very common with American women of middle age upward. Of all the lines which come into the human face with increasing age, this is the ugliest and most frightening, for it comes from an inner and carefully hidden torment and an unhappiness and frustration which is terrifying to contemplate.

I have gone at some length into my ancestry, for ancestry and inheritance are of course an immense part of all of us. We do not perhaps inherit acquired characteristics but we certainly do inherit glands and physiological factors which tend to reproduce the same traits which have been observed in an ancestor. We can, for example, inherit a bad liver and develop the traits of most other people with bad livers or a thyroid weakness which makes us more or less like all other people with thyroid weaknesses. To be sure, the variety of the combinations of inherited genes and factors are enormous, but some still follow through from one’s sources of inheritance.

Like most Americans, my own blood came from many races and subdivisions of races. In that respect I could scarcely be more typical in a biological sense of what is today called an American. My background of ancestors and of the culture and civilization of their times could scarcely be more conventional. All of these things produced me and some other millions of American men very like me. I am forced to examine all these things to find some answer to who and what I am and why I come to find myself now on a remote tropical island with a sense of failure and the desire each night, when I turn in on a damp hot Army cot, never to waken again.