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 flipthrough 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 inNew 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
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 flipthrough 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 inNew 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
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