Lit by Mary Karr Page A

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. Whitbread tosses some nuts into his mouth, saying, I suppose I told him I was preparing my argument. And he said, Now?
    (Working for The Washington Post at the time, Geoffrey Wolff—that frailest of bridges between Warren’s parents and me—laterclaimed 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 paperwhere 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