ways, was to become their true friend, to help them in need, to visit them when they were sick and to go to their funerals when they died; I look on his tender propitiation of our sins with awe.
It should have been obvious to me from our lifestyle that we had the means to enjoy it, and yet it never occurred to me that we were “rich.” My mother’s prejudices embraced not only all those who were “not quite” or “common,” but also the “nouveaux riches,” who had begun life, she presumed, either as one or the other. To have inherited your money and your possessions was not to be rich, but to inhabit the special and discreet world in which good Philadelphia families lived. Your house could be furnished with Chippendale chairs, Queen Anne tables and oriental rugs, you could be waited on by four or five servants, but it was as though all these visible signs of richness were the legitimate garments of one’s class, which, one was given to think, was the only class that had the approval of heaven. To talk about money was vulgar, though you could complain about how much things cost, and “rich” was a dirty word; better to think of one’s family as “comfortably off,” with a sense of Christian responsibility. My parents were so harried by their consciences, so determined to be good and do good, that they were ashamed of “enjoying” their money. My father had an almost monkish simplicity of soul and the things he loved were reduced to his gold repeating watch (he used to let us listen to its fairy chiming when we were little), a gold pocketknife and a little carnelian owl that sat on an ebony stand. It was our mother, like me, who craved things and who enticed Father on excursions to buy a Ming vase or a Chinese screen; it was she who had a real passion for shopping, but also it was she who drew those nice lines between Tightness and luxury, who knew exactly at what point you overstepped the boundary and passed into ostentation. As for us children, I believe we still deceive ourselves with the thought that our attitude toward money and a Puritan rigour of mind prevent us from being “rich” as others are.
I should add that we were so thoroughly insulated from life that we hadn’t the faintest idea of what it was like to be poor. We did not have any poor friends or even any whose parents had been poor. Without having our parents’ precise notions of the social hierarchy, I had the complacent idea that our status was normal, instead of seeing, as I now do, that we belonged to a very small and snobbish minority. In my present circle of friends, I am the only one with an inherited income, and I listen humbly to the tales they tell of their growing-up in families who fought hard battles with poverty. My childhood, my school and college years were passed among the “privileged,” who not only had money, but also were “respectable” in the same sense that we were. It was not until the war threw me with different kinds of people that I discovered that friends sometimes have drunken mothers or ne’er-do-well fathers, that the children of poor parents are often more remarkable than the children of rich parents, that people one knew had abortions and illegitimate children, were divorced, alcoholic, etc., that the professions of law, medicine, the ministry and teaching were not the only honourable ones. My family’s sense of hierarchy extended even to shibboleths like the proper pronunciation of “tomato.” If you said, “tomato,” you revealed that you were “not quite,” even if you qualified for “quiteness” in every other way. My mother belonged to a charitable organization which probably still exists called The Girls’ Friendly Society, the purpose of which was to go among the needy and minister to them, much as the good ladies in Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë did. When we were sixteen, my sister and I conducted a class for poor children, the idea being to teach them to sew and to play games such as Going to Jerusalem and Musical Chairs. I remember only my distaste for these strange clamouring little girls whose clothes smelled of stale cooking oil, who could not learn to sew and who hated our games. It was a long time before I learned that we were as handicapped by our wealth as they were by their poverty. They, at least, had an accurate idea of what life was like; ours was restricted by the blinders we wore.
In my mind, I recreate the vanished house and my parents who now inhabit the shadows of death, their complicated lives reduced to my memories of them, faulty and biased, and with so little evidence of their real selves, for I have only a few of their letters, and they did not keep journals. Even in letters, they hid from us and from themselves, and in this, I am utterly unlike them, for in letters I spill out all my joys and sorrows without reticence or remorse. Sometimes, my parents appear to me in dreams, miraculously cured, my father of his tuberculosis; my mother of her stroke, and I recognize them joyfully. Or they are sick, as in a dream about my mother, paralyzed, lying in a bed surrounded by people. She speaks, but no one can understand her; then, I hear words, “Don’t worry about light. You’ll always have enough to see your way.” I took these words spoken in a dream six years after she died as having come directly from her. Now and then during her lifetime she had made me happy by saying something of the same sort, out of a clear sky. “There is something light about you—like the touch of a butterfly wing,” she once said to me, who felt, on the contrary, that I must weigh heavily on her. Perhaps it was the memory of this other kind of light that had provoked the dream. It was uncharacteristic of my mother to analyze character or, in fact, to think rationally about anything; she had a “feminine” way of conducting a discussion as something to escape from, instead of as a way of getting at the truth. One could write at length about the tricks that people invent in order to avoid talking about what they don’t want to talk about, elaborate and beautiful tricks of evasion, but maddening to a rational adversary. The course of her flight was studded with burrows in the form of entrenched prejudices and refusals. There were things that were too terrible to be talked about at all, such as divorce (my mother did not speak to divorced people if she could help it) or illegitimacy. These prohibitions were expected to apply to everybody in the family; once I was severely scolded when I remarked that a baby which had been adopted by the mother of an unmarried friend looked exactly like the friend. My mother would not even permit the subject to be discussed. At the time, I thought this ridiculous, but I now see how much it reveals of her fierce discretion; she would fly in the face of reason to protect a friend. It is possible that she made herself believe that the baby had really been adopted, knowing as she did that no “nice” young woman would have an illegitimate child. If a person’s misbehaviour was outside her circle of friends, my mother was unforgiving, and her not-forgiving was of as pure an ore as her rectitude. By keeping these two qualities shackled together, generations of “good” people were bred and lived to make life miserable for others. Just as Chinese mothers had consented to foot-binding, my mother’s mother, and her mother before her, had bound and shrunk their daughters’ minds and their will to question the accepted order of things. My parents went to China for their honeymoon, and I remember my mother telling us that she had seen a woman with bound feet, as though it were not a scandal, but a fact of great interest. She had even bought a pair of tiny shoes which I looked at without horror, and it was not until a few years ago, when I saw a bound foot pickled in ajar of formaldehyde at the Musee de PHomme in Paris, that the crime of foot-binding struck me with its full force.
I ponder now on our mind-habits that enable us to suppress or to torture other human beings or to fill them with guilt; and on my mother, whose habits were set when she was very young. She was not a naturally rigid person (is anyone?), but full of delicacy and gaiety. She was “light.” I know this not only from memories, but also from studying photographs of her as a young woman, in which her face was often transformed by the most delightful smile. I think of her in our house in Washington and of my parents’ room with twin beds made of mahogany, with flowered pink and white wallpaper, with blue chintz slipcovers on the furniture, and a dressing table covered with little china and silver boxes, much like Mater’s. In the drawers of the 18th Century highboy, there was a sweet disorder of handkerchiefs and stockings and underthings scented with lavender and rose sachets, for even the messiness of my mother was charming, and on the closet floor, many pairs of long, narrow shoes in a row. I remember the sadness of seeing these elegant shoes and the hats on a top shelf, decorated with fruit and feathers, after my mother’s death, testifying to her long sickness when she could no longer wear them. The eloquence of a pair of shoes! Just as my mother refused to wear glasses until she could no longer read the telephone book, even at arm’s length, she refused to buy bigger shoes when her ankles were swollen from high blood pressure. She was proud of her hands and feet, proud perhaps of those parts of her which my father had admired; she pretended not to know how to wind a watch because it pleased my father to think that she was helpless about