I supposed, first of all, that she had schemed for me to become a cosmopolitan. "Always remember that you were born in Europe," she would remind me on the backs of picture postcards mailed at whim from the vortex of those falsely outrageous and half-secret parleys, congresses, and merely meetings that sprang like self-propagating plants in the path of her travels—"it is your lost continent," she would write, "enlarge character by recoupment of Europe" (the latter was rather like the operatic journalese of parts of
Marianna),
and occasionally I would recognize upon those rumpled three-color reproductions of aged citadels, photographed from helicopters and machine-painted with machine-vivid unreality, not simply the dry sheddings of her acquired and too-conscious myth—the romance that America cannot be "experienced" except through its sources—but also the. vaguer significations of my mother's desire.
Her aim, I conjectured, was to re-father me. She had tried it with William, and I had acquiesced, impressed with William's substantiality. Her acknowledgment of her first husband's practical authority was the nearest my mother had ever brought me to any kind of religion, but she was not altogethermistaken in it, for William, with his sober inherited scruples, his cautious hook of jowl, and his pious distaste for all the things of this world except notes and bonds, which he somehow regarded as divine albeit negotiable instruments for good in the same way that he imagined capitalism to be the ordained church of the economic elect—this same deliberate William was one of that diminishing honor-guard of armored and ceremonial knights whose Presbyterianism is stitched into the orthodox width of their hat-bands, coat-lapels, and shoe-toes, and who preserve by its rites a creed which no longer exacts or enacts tenets. William was all my Protestantism; and if my mother, in atonement for my bad education and her own bad taste (I had once actually confused the Holy Ghost with a new kind of candy bar), had sent me to him for the sake of a patriarchal, as well as a paternal, judicature, poor William could hardly be blamed if in the name of that same Protestantism he had had to turn me away. Not William's own presumably more charitable bent, but rather the higher connivance of Christianity, prevented him from accepting that filial homage which my mother promoted in me: for she had always chosen to say "ask William," and "tell William," and "show William," while he withdrew in a sort of noble terror from the confidences and questionings of a child not his own—but his denial and his recoil were not wilful: they burgeoned out of the spirit of the integrity of the family (an abstraction which I quickly identified as a Protestant virtue), although it was clearly the integrity of his own family he meant (his preoccupation with ownership being a further example of a Calvinist probity). He believed unashamedly in the influence of private institutions. And if he was willing, as I have observed, to have Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck pass for an evil museum or palace of crime, a kind of still-alive Madame Tussaud's, then surely he would not have been reluctant to think of himself as a temple, or, at the very least, a minor but equally sacred outer chapel. Besides, William's wife hid behind kindness her plain dislike of me. Although she had no fear or envy of her husband's earlier bride (arguing logically enough that it was William, after all, who had wished for the divorce in the first instance and in the second for a woman like herself, devoted, spiritual even, who put candles on her dinner table every evening and garden-flowers in her vases every morning), it did not please her that William on his visits should encounter me so often in corridors and corners or the dark parts of stairways, where she imagined I must lurk like a process server with a summons or a creditor with a claim. Out of the most upright reservations, then, William had refused to
Marianna),
and occasionally I would recognize upon those rumpled three-color reproductions of aged citadels, photographed from helicopters and machine-painted with machine-vivid unreality, not simply the dry sheddings of her acquired and too-conscious myth—the romance that America cannot be "experienced" except through its sources—but also the. vaguer significations of my mother's desire.
Her aim, I conjectured, was to re-father me. She had tried it with William, and I had acquiesced, impressed with William's substantiality. Her acknowledgment of her first husband's practical authority was the nearest my mother had ever brought me to any kind of religion, but she was not altogethermistaken in it, for William, with his sober inherited scruples, his cautious hook of jowl, and his pious distaste for all the things of this world except notes and bonds, which he somehow regarded as divine albeit negotiable instruments for good in the same way that he imagined capitalism to be the ordained church of the economic elect—this same deliberate William was one of that diminishing honor-guard of armored and ceremonial knights whose Presbyterianism is stitched into the orthodox width of their hat-bands, coat-lapels, and shoe-toes, and who preserve by its rites a creed which no longer exacts or enacts tenets. William was all my Protestantism; and if my mother, in atonement for my bad education and her own bad taste (I had once actually confused the Holy Ghost with a new kind of candy bar), had sent me to him for the sake of a patriarchal, as well as a paternal, judicature, poor William could hardly be blamed if in the name of that same Protestantism he had had to turn me away. Not William's own presumably more charitable bent, but rather the higher connivance of Christianity, prevented him from accepting that filial homage which my mother promoted in me: for she had always chosen to say "ask William," and "tell William," and "show William," while he withdrew in a sort of noble terror from the confidences and questionings of a child not his own—but his denial and his recoil were not wilful: they burgeoned out of the spirit of the integrity of the family (an abstraction which I quickly identified as a Protestant virtue), although it was clearly the integrity of his own family he meant (his preoccupation with ownership being a further example of a Calvinist probity). He believed unashamedly in the influence of private institutions. And if he was willing, as I have observed, to have Gustave Nicholas Tilbeck pass for an evil museum or palace of crime, a kind of still-alive Madame Tussaud's, then surely he would not have been reluctant to think of himself as a temple, or, at the very least, a minor but equally sacred outer chapel. Besides, William's wife hid behind kindness her plain dislike of me. Although she had no fear or envy of her husband's earlier bride (arguing logically enough that it was William, after all, who had wished for the divorce in the first instance and in the second for a woman like herself, devoted, spiritual even, who put candles on her dinner table every evening and garden-flowers in her vases every morning), it did not please her that William on his visits should encounter me so often in corridors and corners or the dark parts of stairways, where she imagined I must lurk like a process server with a summons or a creditor with a claim. Out of the most upright reservations, then, William had refused to
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