intransigence and sternness wasn’t our real mother, who was an innocent schoolgirl, on whom the doors of life had closed like the doors of the Iron Maiden. She was the brilliant, laughing girl who had won all the prizes for excellence and had been given a carved wooden spoon as the most popular girl in her class. I am convinced that she knew nothing about life except as a schoolgirl might when she married my father, as beautiful as an archangel; he, too, the first in his class. Didn’t she say once to my sister, “I cried the whole time of my honeymoon”? So here was a clue, that my father, who was as chaste as my mother when they married, had perhaps frightened her during their first night together, and that this created the horror of sex that she visited on her children. There is a sexual element in all physical tenderness and it was this that was so resolutely suppressed in our family relationships, the absence of which made us so cool and awkward with each other. When we hugged each other, it was without the lovely yielding of real tenderness, and if the latter existed between our parents, they were always careful to hide it from us. My mother created fatal barriers between herself and her children in the name of what was “done,” by turning us over to nurses and governesses, by giving us away, in fact, to Miss Balfour, who came when we were six years old and did not leave until we were sixteen. Miss Balfour’s moral stuff was sterner than our mother’s, and one of our worst crimes was to try to appeal to our mother over Miss Balfour’s head. She liked little boys better than little girls. “Little girls are deceitful,” she said. Her presence in our family created a lethal triangle, and I see now that this is what poisoned that period of my mother’s life: her powerlessness to reach her children, her conviction that Miss Balfour had stolen our love. Miss Balfour had thick, wavy hair, a fresh pink face and beautiful grey eyes; if she had been as kind to us as she was to our brothers, I would have loved her, but she was short-tempered and sometimes downright mean. Sometimes, in order to make some moral point, she slapped us or pinched our arms just above the elbow as we walked down the street on either side of her. We became deceitful to outwit her, and this must have been exasperating, not to mention the awful frustrations of our family life.
After Miss Balfour left us, she took care of a series of little boys, and we would go and visit her. When I saw how tender she was with one of them, how patient, I wept, broke down completely, and Miss Balfour was loving and patient with me. By then, she had suffered the torments of tic douleureux, had been operated on so that her face was partly paralyzed, and her hair had turned white. I realized how we are formed by the relation we have one to the other, how the words “governess-charges” had made Miss Balfour an overseer; and us, her slaves, how she was ruled by the idea of what she thought we should be, how she thought we should behave, how perhaps she hated having two sneaky and loveless little girls as “charges” and her essential good nature was twisted and deformed. And I remember how happy we were to become friends, to be able to behave as friends. In the same way, our mother was held in the iron frame of the words “mother-governess” and “mother-children.” As the years went on and Miss Balfour made herself indispensable, our mother tried more and more frantically to get out of the trap she had made for herself. She suffered torments of jealousy. For a time, until she put an angry stop to it, our older brother used to go and kiss Miss Balfour goodnight as she lay in bed in her schoolgirl nightgown. In any other family, things would have gone further than this, but in ours, the act of kissing your governess goodnight if you were a boy of sixteen was as scandalous as fornication. Yet after this episode, Miss Balfour stayed with us for five more years. Even after she left, her ghost haunted my mother. My father, who had always defended Miss Balfour and considered her a necessary part of the family, arranged for her operation after she had left, and visited her after it in the palatial mansion of her new family to see how she was getting on. This got to the ears of my mother (he had evidently not dared tell her, a fact of some significance, if one is searching in the shadows for truth) and caused another upheaval. Looking back, I remember a period when my mother was continuously in her black state, when she cried day after day. A worldly-wise reader might say that something was certainly going on between my father and Miss Balfour, a reader who did not know my parents or Miss Balfour, one who did not know that the idea of sexual wrong-doing was as terrible as if the act had been committed. It was precisely because there was no accusation my mother could make, because there was no pretext for firing Miss Balfour, that her torment was more acute.
Our poor mother spent the years after Miss Balfour’s departure yearning for her lost children and not knowing how to go about getting them back. By then, we were miles away from her, keeping our lives a secret from her, punishing her, it would seem, for having given us away. After my father’s death, she lived alone in the big house, trying to carry on her old life, as brave as a soldier, and I can’t think of it now without pain. How little we knew of each other; how incapable we were of talking! I remember again the bitter accusation that shot out of her, when, questioning the imminent marriage of a friend and her doubts, I said, “Does she really love him?” “Cold heart,” she said, “what do you know about love?” I hated her at this moment—and yet, what evidence did my unloved mother have that I knew anything about love? And if she had any evidence, wouldn’t her bitterness have been even greater, as it was on another occasion (I was going to visit a friend I loved, but of the love I could say nothing) when she said, “Another woman?”
Even my sister was unapproachable, embarrassed and cool when our mother suddenly said to her (they were sitting on a park bench and it was after our father’s death), “Can’t you love me a little?” We all felt—and I knew—that she couldn’t possibly understand our lives, that there was no use in trying to talk to her, for hadn’t she always been shocked by even the tiniest infraction of her rules? It was much easier to stay on safe ground, to talk about my teaching, about my painting, to go to concerts with her—yes, like schoolgirls—and stay away from dangerous subjects. But why did even these safe subjects create conflicts? Why did it seem to me that there was nothing in the world about which my mother and I agreed when, now, I have the impression that I never bothered really to draw her out? Hadn’t she read all the French classics, seen innumerable operas and plays (my mother liked naughty drawing-room comedies and laughed at behaviour that shocked her in real life. “But it’s a play,” she said when I pointed this out to her); couldn’t she recite the names of the kings of England and France? Didn’t she love chamber music, and go, year after year, to the concert series at Coolidge Auditorium? But something prevented me from believing that this cultivation of hers was real, for she was unable to discuss why or how she loved books and music. A few years before her death, when she was paralyzed and talked with difficulty, I arranged with a violinist friend to come and play for her in her house and warned him that she might be impatient, or even rude, as she was at times with visitors. He played the Bach partita in B minor, perhaps the most exacting of all Bach to listen to, and my mother, far from being impatient, sat enthralled and afterwards thanked him with all the words she could muster. Once again, I felt horribly ashamed of my arrogance, of the false idea I had had of my mother’s feeling about music. And I realized that even if she found the Bach partita hard to listen to, there was something graciously receptive at the very core of her being, stronger than her sickness, that recognized great music played by a master.
My mother had always been humble—much too humble, I thought. She was impressed by any kind of accomplishment, as long as it was accomplished by an outwardly virtuous person, and this humility appeared in her either as a strength or a weakness. In its strong aspect, it made her capable of listening to the Bach partita, of a silent worship of great art. But her character was fatally shaped by the humility that made her deny her own value and accept the impersonal judgements of society. When she married, because my father was a Democrat, she switched her political allegiance from Republican to Democrat, and from then on, she accepted everything the Democrats did without question. Humility was her primal matter and out of it was fashioned her self-denial, her ferocious loyalties and her snobbishness. She had been humiliated by Mater because she came from a small town and her life in Washington was one long effort to keep a high place on the social ladder. But her friends were often not the great ladies of Washington, but rather relatively simple people of sterling character, who gave me the impression of having stepped from the pages of Dickens, and whom she never called by their first names.
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