Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr
forks poultry slices onto a plate, and no one says anything till after Kelley settles it before me. He says, That’s right. Nancy’s at Harvard.
Nancy’s getting ready for law school, Mrs. Whitbread says.
I’m working in the library, Warren says.
Right, his father says.
The Harvard library, his mother adds, wreathed in a smile I can’t decipher. That stamp on Warren’s job invokes the family’s appetite for excellence, how expected it is, demanded, devoured. It strikes me then how a house so large might feel like cramped quarters.
To their credit, they all read so much they seem to accept Warren’s poem-making—he’s just starting to publish in journals—as a worthy enterprise despite its fiscal impracticality. Still, they say little about it (and it’s the not saying, I later learn, that matters).
Widener Library? his father asks.
Lamont, Warren says. There’s a recorded poetry archive there.
He’s remastering these great lost recordings, I say. He found one of Tennyson. And these amazing Nabokov lectures.
The arctic wind blows over us again, for my bragging has breached some protocol too delicate for me to understand yet. One does not brag; one does not need to. Mr. Whitbread pours me more wine, a sympathetic gesture that feels—no doubt unintentionally—like a pat on a dog’s head.
Kelley comes in with a vat of asparagus she goes around dishing out.
Mr. Whitbread keeps looking for one of the standard social connection points—to explain who the hell I am, I guess—till Mrs. Whitbread mentions that I’m friends with the writer Geoffrey Wolff, whose memoir of his con-man father had made a splash the year before. One of the few writers of any stature I know, Geoffrey happens to be married to Warren’s first cousin.
It’s a frail link, and Geoffrey’s being Jewish maybe undoes most of its value, but I try to capitalize on it, saying that he and his brother, Toby, taught at my grad school.
Mrs. Whitbread perks up. You went to Princeton? Our son-in-law went there.
Warren explains I hadn’t gone to Princeton but to a hippie school that just went belly-up.
With that in the open, we fall to sawing our food. The cutlery weighs about a pound—a heft that sends some ineffable message.
And what are two young poets reading? Mr. Whitbread asks.
I babble on about the memoirs of Chilean poet Neruda, for ballast throwing in some pretentious French philosophy I’ve never so much as held in my hands.
Mr. Whitbread asks for more asparagus, and Kelley vanishes with the bowl.
How about you, Warren?
Warren—having barely touched his food—dabs his mouth before saying, A biography of Samuel Johnson.
Boswell? Mr. Whitbread says. I loved Boswell. How he described spying on Mr. and Mrs. Johnson through the bedroom keyhole in flagrante delicto like two walruses.
Mrs. Whitbread ducks her head, and I try not to snicker, for any talk of sex in those environs seems particularly wanton.
This is by Walter Jackson Bate, Warren says.
Bate’s a campus luminary you can see sashaying through the library stacks wearing a little porkpie hat like Art Carney in The Honeymooners.
Kelley returns to say there isn’t any more asparagus, and the cook bellows from the kitchen, Tell him if he ate like a normal man, there would’ve been enough asparagus. Which holler blows invisibly through the room. Again Mrs. Whitbread covers her mouth with her napkin, and Warren’s eyes aren’t beaming over at mine. The Whitbread talent for ignoring the ugly obvious is a quality I covet.
Before we leave the table, we’re supposed to give our breakfast requests to the cook via Kelley. Mrs. Whitbread finds it odd that I won’t have at least a poached egg. But in the tract houses I visited as a kid, you declined food, presuming a spare larder made any offering a polite show.
You’ll starve into a little chicken, Mrs. Whitbread says, standing and placing her napkin on the table.
Over port in the library, I manage to sip daintily—having swilled enough wine at dinner to keep pace with Warren’s father—while I flip through portraits. In the small solitary time I’d had with Warren after tea, I’d tried to drag out some explanation of the house, the family’s history, but he’d dozed by the pool instead.
Sitting in their library, the Whitbreads are only slightly more forthcoming. So I pore over the photo albums like a scholar trying to decipher the rules of the realm. With each flip of the page, I tune in more keenly to what the sloppy shoe box of photos in my homestead holds: Mother’s cousin Henry drunk in Mexico, dressed as a matador; Daddy and his brothers with alligators they’d killed for the hides strung from a tree.
How would the society page editor chronicle my lineage for this historic visit to Fairweather Hall? At that time my family is broke out in the kind of misery common to sharecroppers in Faulkner novels. Just that month Daddy had suffered a stroke. While drinking at the VFW bar, he’d toppled off a bar stool. He’s still alive but paralyzed and speechless, barely aware that Mother’s popping valium like pop-tarts.
But the Whitbreads’ photo album bulges with enough presidents to fill a high school history book. Both Roosevelts practiced in the family firm. Here’s Great-grandfather in the old touring car with McKinley right before he was shot.
Warren gets quiet during the stories. He was bred in quiet and carries quiet in him but elegance also. Even picking burrs out of Tiger’s tail he can pull off with gravitas. But he can also drift far from me into himself. Sitting across from him, I can’t meet his eyes. Maybe he’s patiently irritated with how awed I am by the posh household he’s fleeing. Or maybe I’m breaking rules of comportment subtle enough to resemble the minuscule gaffes you get demerits for in precision diving contests.
Warren’s grandfather—in riding gear circa 1930-something, holding a polo mallet—is Warren’s exact double. Here’s the cover of The New York Times that falsely reported his death after a fall. Mr. Whitbread stares into some decades’-old distance, saying, The old man was on a horse again the next morning. Infuriated my mother. People in New York were sending wreaths to the house, and he was galloping across a field.
Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you’re born to, which opposes what little I’ve garnered about comportment. I’m bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A’s you get come from effort. Strife and strain are all the world can offer, and they temper you into something unbreakable, because Lord knows they’ll try—without letup—to break you. Where I come from, house guests have to know you’ve sweated over a stove, for sweat is how care is shown. At the Whitbreads’, preparations are both slapdash and immaculate. You toss some melba toast on a plate next to a fragrant St. André triple-crème cheese, or on Christmas Eve, half a pound of caviar casually flipped into a silver urn.
It’s taken me so much effort just to do as medium-shitty as I’ve heretofore done. Just to drop out of college, stay alive, and have my teeth taken care of.
I take another sip of port, which slides down as if greased. Warren seems thousands of miles away, and why has he kept all this from me?
Here’s Mrs. Whitbread in her dress for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. Some polo connection? They’ve stopped explaining why they were various places. Here’s Mr. Whitbread flanked by briefcase-carrying aides, striding confidently up the steps of the Supreme Court.
Warren says, I remember sitting behind you, and you pulled out some notecards.
You were there? Mr. Whitbread asks.
Mrs. Whitbread looks exasperated. Of course, darling. I thought they should experience it.
Warren goes on, And your client said, What are you doing?
Mr.