456
PARTISAN REVIEW
"Come see the Lake Geneva spider monkey!" I would shout. I don't
know why I couldn't stop. Eric never told his father, I think, but
when he recovered we no longer spoke. The breach was so unspoken
and intense that our classmates were actually horrified. They even
devised a solemn ritual for our reconciliation. We crossed our hearts,
mixed spit, mixed blood. The reconciliation was hollow.
My parents' confidences and quarrels stopped each night at ten
or eleven o'clock, when my father would hang up his tuxedo, put
on his commander's uniform, and take a trolley back to the naval
yard at Charlestown. He had just broken in a new car. Like a
chauffeur, he watched this car, a Hudson, with an informed vigilance,
always giving its engine hair-trigger little tinkerings of adjustment or
friendship, always fearful lest its unbeautiful black body lose its outline
and gloss of a man's patent leather dancing pump. He drove with
flawless, almost instrumental, monotony. Mother, nevertheless, was for–
ever encouraging him to walk or take taxis. She would tell him that his
legs were growing vestigial from disuse and remind him of the time
a jack had slipped and he had broken his leg while shifting a tire.
"Alone and at night," she would say, "an amateur driver is unsafe
in a car." Father sighed and obeyed-only, putting on a martyred
and penny-saving face, he would keep his self-respect by taking the
trolley rather than a taxi. Each night he shifted back into his uni–
form, but his departures from Revere Street were so furtive that
several months passed before I realized what was happening-we
had
two
houses! Our second house was the residence in the Naval
Yard assigned to the third in command. It was large, had its own
flagpole, and screen porches on three levels-yet it was something
to be ashamed of. Whatever pomp or distinction its possession might
have had for us was destroyed by an eccentric humiliation inflicted
on Father by his superior, Admiral De Stahl, the commandant at
Charlestown. De Stahl had not been consulted about our buying
the 91 Revere Street house. He was outraged, stormed about "flaunt–
ing private fortunes in the face of naval tradition," and ordered my
father to sleep on bounds at the Yard in the house provided for
that purpose.
On our first Revere Street Christmas Eve, the telephone rang
in the middle of dinner; it was Admiral De Stahl demanding Father's
