people never come loose. Watch them. Listen. They would never give you a sly sideways wink, they'd never tap your chaste foot with their own. True, you hear about them being divorced and being remarried, and occasionally someone dies and is never heard of again, but it is done in an orderly way. So where did our sense of adventure come from? Only from Nada. She was intoxicated with it. She was intoxicated with our house—with her new expensive furniture, her marble-topped table and her exquisite bookshelf, given to her by Father's great-aunt and worth—oh, let me tell you!—quite a bit. She was intoxicated with expensive tidbits Ginger had unfrozen not half an hour before, and she was intoxicated with her white, white dress and her emerald necklace, and the tinkling made by ice in drinks, and by the mystical sense of her being at last in power, in control, a part of the secret, invisible world that owns and controls everything.
Because Fernwood does control everything, like it or not.
If these people ever mentioned her writing she would raise one lovely shoulder and smile and change the subject at once. She wanted nothing so much as to grovel and annihilate herself before these people, the only people in the world she admired because they were the only people she could not imitate. She could never compete with them, never. The most ignorant, most self-complacent, ugliest dowager of them all bowled Nada over simply because—guess why!—she had never read Thomas Mann, had never heard the name, and gave not the slightest indication of regretting her loss. My poor mother … Perverse and selfish as she was, I never for an instant doubted that she was my mother. It was my father I doubted. I kept waiting for another man to appear, not bounding into the room with that bulky, boyish, wet grin my father had but walking quite sedately and confidently in, taking over. Did that man, that phantom father, that real father ever appear? I'll deal with that in a later chapter.
So they started giving parties and going to parties. It began suddenly, in one week. They “caught on” the way they had always caught on, in other towns. Father had the kind of easygoing swagger that made him welcome anywhere, as a lesser guest. He was the man hostesses thought of after they listed their main guests. Nada must have been a mystery to them; they were interested in her for her “mind,” though she never demonstrated much intelligence in their presence. She refusedto discuss her writing, not understanding that Fernwood was a hundred years beyond the bourgeoisie that scorned the intellectual: today's Fernwood wanted to hug intellectuals and “artistes” to its matronly bosom until something of their mysterious dark charm smeared off. At the age of ten I could tell they were proud of Nada for being a “writer,” but she never caught on. Even after the women chatted energetically about their ballet classes, sculpting classes, theater groups, Great Books Round Tables, Creative Writing Clinics, she never caught on; she had a certain opaqueness, a failure of vision common to people who see only minute things well.
There was this woman, a giant huntress type with a hairdo that looked like a fan, or like a Tudor get-up out of a history pageant; she lived in Fernwood Dells, a semi-good section, better than ours but not as good as Fernwood Heights. She was a widow, but very healthily and robustly a widow, as Fernwood widows are; she played tennis and golf, swam, paddled canoes, went “hiking.” She wore chiffon dresses that looked odd on her hefty frame, but I overheard Bebe Hofstadter say once, “No one dresses as well as Tia.” This woman's name was Tia Bell. She tried sweetly and insistently to draw Nada out, asking her about her writing. What were her themes? When did she find time to write? She invited Nada to the Fernwood Heights Episcopal Church, there to hear John Ciardi speak of the mystic force of Dante, and another time she took Nada
Because Fernwood does control everything, like it or not.
If these people ever mentioned her writing she would raise one lovely shoulder and smile and change the subject at once. She wanted nothing so much as to grovel and annihilate herself before these people, the only people in the world she admired because they were the only people she could not imitate. She could never compete with them, never. The most ignorant, most self-complacent, ugliest dowager of them all bowled Nada over simply because—guess why!—she had never read Thomas Mann, had never heard the name, and gave not the slightest indication of regretting her loss. My poor mother … Perverse and selfish as she was, I never for an instant doubted that she was my mother. It was my father I doubted. I kept waiting for another man to appear, not bounding into the room with that bulky, boyish, wet grin my father had but walking quite sedately and confidently in, taking over. Did that man, that phantom father, that real father ever appear? I'll deal with that in a later chapter.
So they started giving parties and going to parties. It began suddenly, in one week. They “caught on” the way they had always caught on, in other towns. Father had the kind of easygoing swagger that made him welcome anywhere, as a lesser guest. He was the man hostesses thought of after they listed their main guests. Nada must have been a mystery to them; they were interested in her for her “mind,” though she never demonstrated much intelligence in their presence. She refusedto discuss her writing, not understanding that Fernwood was a hundred years beyond the bourgeoisie that scorned the intellectual: today's Fernwood wanted to hug intellectuals and “artistes” to its matronly bosom until something of their mysterious dark charm smeared off. At the age of ten I could tell they were proud of Nada for being a “writer,” but she never caught on. Even after the women chatted energetically about their ballet classes, sculpting classes, theater groups, Great Books Round Tables, Creative Writing Clinics, she never caught on; she had a certain opaqueness, a failure of vision common to people who see only minute things well.
There was this woman, a giant huntress type with a hairdo that looked like a fan, or like a Tudor get-up out of a history pageant; she lived in Fernwood Dells, a semi-good section, better than ours but not as good as Fernwood Heights. She was a widow, but very healthily and robustly a widow, as Fernwood widows are; she played tennis and golf, swam, paddled canoes, went “hiking.” She wore chiffon dresses that looked odd on her hefty frame, but I overheard Bebe Hofstadter say once, “No one dresses as well as Tia.” This woman's name was Tia Bell. She tried sweetly and insistently to draw Nada out, asking her about her writing. What were her themes? When did she find time to write? She invited Nada to the Fernwood Heights Episcopal Church, there to hear John Ciardi speak of the mystic force of Dante, and another time she took Nada
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