Lily Briscoe. Mary Meigs
fidget, must cover their mouths when they yawn, must sit up straight at the table with their hands out of sight, mustn’t giggle (this was our one safety valve, but was frowned upon). Later, it occurred to me that I was skating on thin ice when I got too near the frontier of properness. I had been “fresh,” which meant to want in respect for all things sacred, to answer back. Levity had to be of the right kind. What did Grandmother want to draw out of us? Our opinions? If I had any, they vanished in the drawing-out process. I was backward in many ways, but sensitive to houses that did or didn’t “foster” me. Our grandmother fostered my older brother and planted in him family pride and love for his inherited family treasures. His house looks like a simplified version of Grandmother’s, with silver displayed on his sideboard and a formal drawing-room that inspires proper thoughts. When I was twenty, I turned against everything Victorian, despised all our family furniture and fell in love with colour, throwing it around in a tasteless and unsubtle way, wearing a green coat, a plaid skirt, a brown hat, a navy-blue sweater. The sensuous use of colour was absent in the houses of my relations, for colour meant a letting-go. My father was angry when I tried to tell him what I saw in Van Gogh. I can almost remember when I began to see colours, having, like my whole family, been blind to them till then. Is it credible that I did not notice the colours of the buildings in Rome? Yet, at seventeen, I hadn’t noticed them; indeed, it seems to me that there was almost nothing I did notice. I try to make the connection between “fostering” and a sense of colour, but can think of too many drab but welcoming houses. In Grandmother’s house, there was above all an absence of carelessness and spontaneity, of sofas sat in and books open, waiting to be read. To my friend, Marie-Claire Blais, all that counts in a person is coeur; intelligence, culture, etc. are nothing if you lack coeur. My little grandmother, packed with energies and enthusiasm, with her knowledge of English and Italian gardens, with the knowledge that selected each object in her house, did she have coeur, the kind that “fosters him that comes,” really fosters? I would like to think she did, and yet, in my arrogant way, I feel I would have responded, that she would have wakened my sleeping coeur (on which, even wakened, I can’t always rely). But it was other much humbler people I loved, in the tentative way I loved then, and I remember having the power to distinguish between a real love for children and the humbug kind, which I detested without knowing why. My grandmother imagined that to will affection was enough, though I doubt if she spent much time analyzing her attitudes; much more, perhaps, in analyzing our non-responsiveness.
I was mortally afraid of grown-ups, feeling obscurely that they abused their power, but I remember a cousin, one of the eccentrics in my mother’s family, who was like a grown-up child, a stout little woman with an oversized head like the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. Her name was Cousin Elsie Keith. Once, when chickenpox prevented me from going to North Carolina for our Easter vacation, and I lay in bed in a state of profound self-pity, Cousin Elsie appeared and gave me a necklace, which I have still, composed of red beads, each of which has a smiling face on either side. Somehow Cousin Elsie had known that I would like this grown-up present better than anything else she could give me; the grotesque little smiling faces made me absurdly happy and I remember a glad feeling of love rushing into my heart when Cousin Elsie put the necklace round my neck.
Cousin Elsie came to see me in our house in Washington, which our parents had bought when we (the twins) were nine years old. It was a five-storey, semi-detached, red brick house, facing a little park, and beyond, the facade of the Roman Catholic cathedral. The house had been quite splendid in its heyday, hallowed by the legend that Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the former owner and the last living daughter of T.R., had stood on her head at the foot of the stairs, in the stairwell where our Christmas trees were to stand so tall that you had to fix the electric star on the summit by leaning over the second storey bannister. Mrs. Longworth was never invited to the house for the simple reason that she was a Republican and my parents were Democrats. The social life of Washingtonians was determined by the party in power; until Franklin Roosevelt was elected, my mother dwelt in the shadows, but from that moment, until a few years before her death, she was free to pursue her social ambitions with an energy that amazed me. There was much leaving of cards at the houses of senators and justices of the Supreme Court, and at the White House; there were special days appointed for this, and days when my mother, too, was “at home.” She believed in all these rites and they paid off in the form of invitations which, in turn, generated grand dinner parties given by my mother when the silver service plates would emerge from their red flannel jackets and my mother would get out her Crown Derby dinner plates and Waterford wine glasses and embroidered linen table cloths, and the mahogany table, immensely long with its full complement of inserted leaves, would be decked with all this splendour. Yes, it really happened! My mother lived this way. And during the war, I would go to these dinner parties in my WAVE uniform and engage in sparkling conversation (I thought) with the Attorney General, who, by accident or design, had touched his knee against mine under the heavy tablecloth. It would be dishonest of me to pretend that I never enjoyed myself in these exalted circles or that I wasn’t pleased when we (the four children) went to a dance at the White House, and later, to receptions with our parents where we shook hands with President and Mrs. Roosevelt and with General Eisenhower. Who could resist the heady air of great houses and great people? But I didn’t fit; I didn’t look the part; I was too shy to make conversation with our supposed peers; and above all, I didn’t really care. None of us, including my father, cared as our mother did. She cared, but failed to make lasting friends among the elegant ladies at whose houses she left cards, and whom she never called by their Christian names.
But I must speak of the metamorphoses of the house, changes not so much physical as spiritual. On the back side of the house was a walled yard with two maple trees, an ailanthus growing close to the house that shot up to the third storey, and another strange tree with leaves as big as dinner plates, a garage and a little house my brothers had built and named the Brass Tack Club. Innumerable alleycats prowled along the wall and wailed; bats hung upside down in the wisteria vine that climbed up the back wall of the house, and, on hot summer nights, they sometimes flew into our open windows and brushed our heads with their leathery wings. The earth was hard-trodden, baked by the summer sun, and the grass refused to grow except in the corners. During the war, I tried to dig up worms in the intractable soil of the backyard for the baby robin I’d found in the street and I could only find one worm. A few days later, I had a hard time digging the robin’s grave. Nobody loved that backyard; the Brass Tack Club was abandoned and the cats rounded up. It never changed its status and became a garden, despite our periodic efforts to plant flowers, and my mother’s surveillance over a somewhat spindly crepe myrtle bush. The growing things that flourished had to seek protection against the house, like the wisteria vine which spread with such prehensile energy that it tore apart the bricks of the house and had to be cut down, almost to the ground.
As for the house—its ghost is full of memories, pleasant and uncomfortable, for it was a witness to all the pains of our growing up—its basement was peopled with the dark shades of our black servants: Sarah, the cook; Amelia, the laundress; Kathleen, Archie, Randolph, Christine—their names changing with the years—except for Sarah, Amelia, and Kathleen, who outlived our mother. Symbolically, rivers of black coal were fed from the street into the bins next to the furnace room, and a horrendous retching was audible even on the third floor, when the furnace was stoked. Every day my mother would descend the steep stairs to the basement and confer with Sarah, the cook, and the others, and it shows something of her true character that they loved her steadfastly and stayed on. As for my sister and me, we scarcely gave them a thought. Sometimes we chatted with Alvernia, the black seamstress, who pedalled away at the old Singer sewing machine in a little room next to our “nursery” on the third floor and who claimed to be able to speak every language, including Egyptian. We stayed upstairs with Miss Balfour and learned nothing from the servants in the basement, when we might have learned much. Most shocking of all, we did not learn what it was, then, to be black. Black people had scarcely begun to rebel; Kathleen, for instance, was unhappy when my older brother asked her to call him by his first name. We were Miss Mary, Miss Hester. My mother held to the belief that you did not entertain black people in your drawing-room or consider them as possible friends. It makes me sick now to think of all this—of the passive state that permitted me to receive ideas and prejudices without questioning them. It surprises me that our black servants, knowing what they knew