Lily Briscoe. Mary Meigs
out his arms to me, and instead of embracing him, I blew him a kiss. That was the last time I saw him alive, except in dreams. I still dream about him and see his eyes; sometimes he is younger, not sick; sometimes he takes the form of a blue-eyed child, tiny and wise. I gaze at this child in silent admiration. He is myself perhaps, as I wanted to be—a small replica of my father.
Later, having learned nothing, it seemed, from this failure with my father, I was irritated by the question, “Do you love me?” “Love me!” “Help me!” To me, it was the same idea in different words: the sudden weight of the other on oneself, a trap (the obligation to love) and the wary reaction; something grim inside that says, “Did you love me? Did you help me when I needed it?” A different “you” who, long ago, had withheld love. “I give when I feel like giving,” says a stingy little voice inside me. It is fatal when a giver in his own time is wedded to a person who needs, who insists on love; the needer makes the needed even stingier.
“Yes, yes, it’s a matter of temperament, from the day of one’s birth, one has chosen to refuse or accept.” My parents were like the couple in lonesco’s Jeux de Massacre: the wife has chosen acceptance and love; the husband, refusal and anguish. But is it a choice? Rather, is it not something in each person that succumbs or not under the weight of evidence? It is as if each one of us were a jury member for a huge trial with the evidence spread out: one chooses to believe that the good outweighs the bad, that the human race is worthy of survival, or vice versa. My parents, except for their Puritan heritage, began quite gaily. They adored each other, and in photographs taken of them after their marriage, they looked wonderfully joyful. Yet I remember my mother telling me that she cried from homesickness all through their honeymoon. How did it happen, the slow sinking of my father into depression (“a nervous breakdown,” they said), his yielding to it, dying of it (which came first, the depression or the tuberculosis?) while he was still quite young? “It was his mother’s fault,” said my mother. His father, a doctor, had died young, too, of a ruptured appendix; and his mother, a tiny person with a high-bridged nose and my father’s eyes, several shades paler and frostier, ruled her three sons, each twice as tall as she was. She would write my father at medical school: “Be sure to leave cards at the Eliots’. Be sure to call on your Aunt Emma.” She was still interfering, fussing, bossing him around when she was eighty and my father was fifty. “Your grandmother is a remarkable woman,” everybody said. Could it have been this little woman, so dogmatic and sure of herself, who ruined my father’s life? She kept lists of “Things to Do.” She travelled with at least fifteen watches and clocks, wore her yellow-white hair piled high, a velvet ribbon round her neck, and her skirt down to the ground. She reigned over her house in the country; over her Irish cook and maids, her Scottish chauffeur, her Italian gardener and her butler, Percy; over her garden full of peonies, roses, giant oriental poppies, larkspur, box hedges; the vegetable garden beyond; the cows with wildflowers’ names (Buttercup, Primrose, Four O’Clock), the geese, ducks, sheep, donkeys; and her little dog, Balfour. And she reigned over my uncle, her irascible unmarried son, an architect, who, after her death, tore down the Poicile, the imitation Greek temple in the garden (but left the Sunset Tower and the Burning Pit), and turned the Garden Room into a pool room; de-Victorianized the entire house with silvery carpets and a suppression of all but the most elegant furniture.
My grandmother was snobbish, arrogant and prejudiced, but packed in with these qualities, there was something whimsical and artistic. She painted exact watercolours of rocks and flowers. And the house she lived in was an extension of her best self. My sister and I felt happy there the moment we began the walk upstairs on the red-flowered carpets with polished brass rods to our room on the third floor which had straw matting on the floor, brass beds, and a window on a level with the tops of the tulip poplars outside, where the robins sang in a great chorus every morning at dawn, and from which you could look down into the open poplar flowers and see raindrops shining. And I felt happy with the ceremony of meals there: the smell of the little gas flame under the egg-boiler; the pepper enclosed in a silver pug dog; and Percy, the butler, with his white face, lank black hair and sardonic mouth, who stood close to my grandmother’s chair. We had hominy for breakfast. There was laughter because I thought Harmony, an erstwhile dog of my grandmother’s, whom I’d seen in a photograph, was named Hominy. Laughter, because I thought the multiplication tables were real tables. My uncle, ever-superior, mystified the four children with: “Irks care the cropfull bird? / Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?” No amount of explanation could ever make this clear to me.
I remember the joy of that house, yet there was something missing at its heart. My grandmother and my uncle were two identical contentious souls who never really tried to understand another soul, who imposed themselves on other people and then judged the person that resulted. “Why don’t you talk?” my grandmother would ask my sister and me, striking terror and silence into us, making it impossible to talk, and then she would tease us for our shyness. We were called “The White Rabbits.” My grandmother even bullied my mother, just after her marriage, made her feel, because she was born in a little town where her father ran the iron works, that she belonged to a lower social order, made her cry—and cry by herself. (I have inherited the bully in her, the nagger, but at least I hear myself doing it.) My mother was always amazed by the high-pitched arguments between Mater, as she called my grandmother, and Mater’s sons, which became louder and louder at the dinner table. After Mater died, the arguments continued, between my father and my uncle, violent argument being as necessary to certain members of the family, it seems, as food and drink.
Pater, who had been dead for a long time, looked down on us from the wall of the dining room. A “distinguished physician” in a long, unbroken line of them, says the Dictionary of American Biography, as Edmund pointed out to me. Pater looked kind and intelligent. Mater told a joke about him: that he had been introduced to her as a person who was timid and silent. It turned out that he wasn’t at all timid and talked all the time. Mater telling this story, which for some reason always made everybody laugh, seemed not to realize that she herself was as loquacious as a guinea hen. Talking, in fact, is something that has always run in every branch of my family. “We’re not fighting, we’re discussing,” my uncle used to say, but I see now that in these so-called discussions every member of the family thought he was right, except for my mother, who was preternaturally humble and only thought herself right about questions of morality. About these, she was as inflexible as the Rock of Gibraltar. Sometimes they were all “right” about the same things (they agreed); sometimes the sense of Tightness lay like a huge weight in a scale and dragged the scale down, while the little weight of the counter-argument flew upwards.
The case for the family was composed of pride, self-importance, duties, responsibilities—an inflated sense of what we were as a family, for we selected our most distinguished ancestors to be descended from: the one who had signed the Constitution, for instance; and felt less enthusiastic about the ancestor who made hats in Guilford, Connecticut. The family case was argued by Mater and my uncle against my father, a renegade, who had left the ancestral city of Philadelphia to work for the government in Washington, for something in him obviously had longed to be free of the crushing burden of family. “He was losing his roots,” my uncle said, and his children would be rootless. In every discussion of “roots,” I took the position that I preferred to be rootless, which made my uncle furious. But lurking in me was a silly little pride; I suffered when my mother said that someone was “not quite” or when my aunt said that Grace Kelly came “from the other side of the tracks” (the royal ascent of Grace Kelly had not the slightest effect on this judgement), but refused, for the most hypocritical reasons, to invite my college roommate to our “coming out” party. “She wouldn’t like it,” I told my mother. My roommate was different from me in unimportant ways, in the kind of shoes she wore and in her ankle socks. I judged people by these little differences and preened myself on the niceness of my taste. I was snobbish in a worse way than my mother, who had an intuitive sense of the real worth of someone and was more offended by vulgarity than by superficial details.
Looking at this notion of family, I try to decide what there was in it of positive good. My father’s side was prosperous and tidy, with Roman virtues: scrupulously honest, disciplined, rational, law-abiding; my mother’s side was full of people who embarrassed me by their eccentricities. (I was embarrassed then by anything unconventional.) They were prosperous