believed that “meanwhile” referred to a period of vindictive time) St. Margaret’s began to earn its eleven hundred annual pounds. Gradually at first, and then with increasing speed and confidence, Jill learned new math, horsemanship and the Graces. She became, what every parent hopes for and all discipline is intended to create, a miniature adult. When, sunnily polite, one toe dragging in a becoming suggestion of modesty and her hands cupped carefully under the edges of a crystal plate, she handed round the onion dip, our friends could not find sufficient praise for her. These adult functions filled her with shy excitement, and she was shiny with it—her explosive eyes, scrubbed cheeks, her patent shoes and velvet shift, her two long plaits that caught the candlelight. “She’s absolutely dazzling, Virginia,” someone would say. And in truth I was dazzled; at the balletic suppleness of her flight to the kitchen to fetch the peanut dish, at the mimetic perfection of her “Good evening, Mrs. Kitto.”
But that was the point: mimesis. Every artist knows that beauty is generated in the conjunction of opposites. Because she was a child, Jill’s performance was poignant in the extreme. But then I would see her at the age of Mrs. Kitto, her eyes caught in a tessellation of those wrinkles that come from too many years of smiling, and that one foot still left behind, perhaps. I had seen many women drag a foot that way like a declaration of incipient withdrawal: I can retreat instantly if you wish me to; you see that I do not stand on my own two feet. And this aging woman who had been to the best schools and therefore knew what a woman was, no longer playing at it or, worse, no longer knowing that she was playing … I would see this woman my daughter would become, and she was a woman I could not talk to, could not like.
So that when Jill lapsed into straightforward childish greed or sulkiness, when she whined for candy or refused to put on her raincoat, I was relieved. I was comfortable. But wasn’t there something wrong with me, if I preferred my daughter in her worst moods?
And that was not the worst. The worst was that Jill seemed determined to pass civilization on to me. “Your language is revolting,” she would say imperiously at my least “goddam.” She herself locked the bathroom door and developed an obsession for closing others. Once when Phaideaux crapped on the back doormat she informed me that I kept “an unsanitary house.” Once when we sat on the Backs together, me in a low-cut summer cotton, she poked a finger toward my cleavage and whispered, “Pull your dress up, Mummy!” There flashed into my mind a moment from the summer when I was twelve, on the bus from Seal Beach to L.A., when my mother had said the same thing, with the same emphasis.
“Jesus,” I said to Oliver. “All my childhood my folks were passing moral judgments on me, and now I’m getting it from below. Any day now she’s going to start lecturing me on the evils of drink and fornication; I can feel it in the air.”
But Oliver did not see the humor of it, maybe because he knew I wasn’t joking—did Oliver still know when I was joking? “When parents and children pass the same judgments,” he said, hypothetical, “maybe there’s something in them.”
8
F RANCES REMAINED THE SAME, Malcolm’s insight into her trouble couldn’t be verified and had no use, because we couldn’t establish contact with her. When it was humanly possible to be silent, she was silent. Any work that could be done in a corner, she did in a corner. At such intervals as could be considered decent and necessary, she went into the W.C. to cry.
But one day the four of us left her in the office when we went to lunch. She was dittoing a memo to the bleachers and twisters, and Mom had asked her to finish the run before she left. We were all the way to the refectory before Dillis remembered that she hadn’t told her to lock the door.
“Do you think
But that was the point: mimesis. Every artist knows that beauty is generated in the conjunction of opposites. Because she was a child, Jill’s performance was poignant in the extreme. But then I would see her at the age of Mrs. Kitto, her eyes caught in a tessellation of those wrinkles that come from too many years of smiling, and that one foot still left behind, perhaps. I had seen many women drag a foot that way like a declaration of incipient withdrawal: I can retreat instantly if you wish me to; you see that I do not stand on my own two feet. And this aging woman who had been to the best schools and therefore knew what a woman was, no longer playing at it or, worse, no longer knowing that she was playing … I would see this woman my daughter would become, and she was a woman I could not talk to, could not like.
So that when Jill lapsed into straightforward childish greed or sulkiness, when she whined for candy or refused to put on her raincoat, I was relieved. I was comfortable. But wasn’t there something wrong with me, if I preferred my daughter in her worst moods?
And that was not the worst. The worst was that Jill seemed determined to pass civilization on to me. “Your language is revolting,” she would say imperiously at my least “goddam.” She herself locked the bathroom door and developed an obsession for closing others. Once when Phaideaux crapped on the back doormat she informed me that I kept “an unsanitary house.” Once when we sat on the Backs together, me in a low-cut summer cotton, she poked a finger toward my cleavage and whispered, “Pull your dress up, Mummy!” There flashed into my mind a moment from the summer when I was twelve, on the bus from Seal Beach to L.A., when my mother had said the same thing, with the same emphasis.
“Jesus,” I said to Oliver. “All my childhood my folks were passing moral judgments on me, and now I’m getting it from below. Any day now she’s going to start lecturing me on the evils of drink and fornication; I can feel it in the air.”
But Oliver did not see the humor of it, maybe because he knew I wasn’t joking—did Oliver still know when I was joking? “When parents and children pass the same judgments,” he said, hypothetical, “maybe there’s something in them.”
8
F RANCES REMAINED THE SAME, Malcolm’s insight into her trouble couldn’t be verified and had no use, because we couldn’t establish contact with her. When it was humanly possible to be silent, she was silent. Any work that could be done in a corner, she did in a corner. At such intervals as could be considered decent and necessary, she went into the W.C. to cry.
But one day the four of us left her in the office when we went to lunch. She was dittoing a memo to the bleachers and twisters, and Mom had asked her to finish the run before she left. We were all the way to the refectory before Dillis remembered that she hadn’t told her to lock the door.
“Do you think
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