Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr
for The Washington Post at the time, Geoffrey Wolff—that frailest of bridges between Warren’s parents and me—later claimed Mr. Whitbread was the only man he ever saw talk down to the Supreme Court.)
At dinner, I’d seen my lover’s fine jaw flex as he studied his plate, and I’d felt the liquid warmth of our time together evaporate as he braced himself for his father’s scrutiny. Now I long for some definitive gesture to free him, to throw my port glass into the fireplace and stalk out with a poor kid’s piety, riding off with him in his Mazda into a life with nary a polo divet to stomp. But the house’s disabling comfort saps resolve.
And by the time we’re in the library, I’ve begun to breathe in the parents’ gentility. The conversation is so adroit—the nonchalance so juicy—I lap it up as Tiger did our fatty scraps, steel bowls rattling on the kitchen tiles. I want to believe I’m at home with these composed individuals. They’re liberal in their politics, after all. From where I sit on the low settee wedged among needlepoint pillows, I can see a whole shelf devoted to the egalitarian writings of Thomas Jefferson. Surely they recognize my native intellect. At some point Mrs. Whitbread says casually, What religion does your family practice, Mary?
Which I take as interest in my strangely compelling history. I think of my mother, who studied every faith and—with her husbands—committed to none.
We’re not anything, really, I say. But I find myself dredging up a few childhood visits to the Presbyterian church, for I know a joke punch line about Episcopalians being Presbyterians with trust funds.
But I catch Mrs. Whitbread’s unmet glance toward Warren, and it dawns on me that had he brought home his classmate Caroline Kennedy, her being a Catholic might have been a mark against her.
In a mind shift, I’m a schoolgirl again in summer, and my half-Indian daddy has just come in the back door at dawn with grime under his nails from a double shift. How carefully he draws five one-dollar bills from his weathered billfold to give Mother for two pairs of school shoes—one for me, one for Lecia. While I wait for her to bring the car around, he slips off his shirt, showing a chest pale as paper where his worker’s tan runs out. He steps out of his khakis, and jutting through his baggy boxers, his legs are knobby and thin. One thigh’s pronounced hunk of shrapnel is royal blue. The long scar up his right shinbone where a horse he was breaking threw and dragged him looks freshly scabby. He sits down on the bed’s edge, staring at his brown forearms. Daddy, I whisper, and that greedy call for him snaps the connection to the past. The voltage drops, and he’s gone, reabsorbed into the shriveled form in my mother’s house, tended days by a male nurse we can’t afford, nights by Mother, who resents it.
In an instant I’m back in the Whitbreads’ library, and Daddy lies uninsured, half paralyzed.
On the mantle, sits a recent Christmas snapshot with all the siblings before the fireplace, glossy-haired and tidy. They actually match like the gorgeous silverware. Not resemblance but precise replication. I think, Tiger One, Tiger Two … (I’ll come to believe that the WASP genetic code imperially squashes the other parent’s contributing DNA in offspring. My own son, blond and blue-eyed, will bear so little of me that ladies in the park will think I’ve been hired to push his stroller.)
Just as we’re saying good night, Mr. Whitbread inquires whether, as a Texan, my father’s in oil, and I tell him he was, adding—wittily, I think—up to his elbows twelve hours a day. Which fact they take with a preoccupied air. I could speculate on what they thought, but they’re unreadable as granite.
That night, lying in Warren’s narrow bed, where I’ve sneaked from his sister’s flowery boudoir to make love, I ask him, How’d I do?
He cups my face. I love you, he says. Leafy shadows move over us. (How young we were.)
Do you think they heard us just now?
Don’t be silly, he says. I doubt they’d care.
Their room is in another wing, which includes—among other mysteries—Mr. Whitbread’s own dressing room, padlocked from the outside. Not even the maid is allowed to clean in there.
Warren is lying on his back, and his face mesmerizes me—the patrician nose, Germanic jaw.
Do they like me? I say.
You want everybody to like you, he says.
You don’t? I say.
Only you, he says. And Tiger.
Not Sammy?
Sammy’s common, Warren says, referring to something his mother said about a cousin’s wife.
I’m common, I say.
I always fancied an affair with a scullery maid, he says. I’m propped on an elbow studying him. He fails to open his eyes, as he says, Aren’t you even a little sleepy?
I’m pouting, I say. Can’t you hear me pouting with your eyes shut?
He reaches up a hand to pinch my pouting mouth with two fingers. Okay, duck lips, he says, rolling over. My father thinks you’re smart and funny—both uncommon virtues. My mother thinks if you keep jogging, you’ll damage your female organs and fail to reproduce.
Do they think I’m cute?
He’s half blind. She wants to dress you in hot pink or lime green.
Tell me they like me and I’ll sneak back to your sister’s room.
As much as they like anybody, he says. Don’t worry about it, sweetie.
The next morning I’m wide-eyed before dawn, half waiting for some Inquisitor to roust me from the ruffled covers of the type Little Bo Peep probably slept in. I bathe with French-milled soap and brush my short hair.
In the library, I find a copy of Matthew Arnold’s poems autographed to some illegible forebear. I’m perusing when a voice from the stair causes Tiger Three to rise shakily on his ancient hips and trot out. Mr. Whitbread says, I fail to see why you couldn’t greet them when they arrived, for God’s sake.
Once the front door has opened and shut, Tiger slinks back in and slumps at my feet. After a while I smell coffee and bacon, and a while later, I see a wizened, disheveled old woman balding under her black hairnet. Slippers slide her up the hall across from me to the wet bar. (I’d later find out she’s the cook.) She opens the fridge and draws out a carton of eggnog, pouring herself a small punch cup full. How sweet, I think, they keep eggnog in the summer. Then she unscrews the top of a bottle of dark rum and upends it with both hands. She takes two long draws, then shuffles off.
The myth they chose was the constant lovers.
The theme was richness over time
It is a difficult story, and the wise never choose it
because it requires such long performance,
and because there is nothing, by definition,
between the acts …
—Robert Hass, “Against Botticelli”
It would’ve been a vintage personal ad. Scared, provincial girl desperate to escape family insanity seeks quietly witty, literate gorilla. Profound loneliness a must. Belief in poetry must supersede belief in capitalism. She: abrim with self-loathing, incapable of chilly silence. He: won’t yell, wag firearms, or leave.
Were Warren laboring over this story, I’d no doubt appear drunkenly shrieking; spending every cent I could get my mitts on; alternately crowding his scholar’s home with revelers, then starting to vanish nights into a kind of recovery