464
PARTISAN REVIEW
but Back Bay and Beacon Hill parents loved him just for being. No
one asked this hollow and leonine King Log to like children.
One day when the saucer magnolias were in bloom, I bloodied
Bulldog Binney's nose against the pedestal of George Washington's
statue in
f
LI!l
view of Commonwealth Avenue; then I bloodied
Dopey Dan Parker's nose; then I stood in the center of a sundial
tulip bed and pelted a little enemy ring of third-graders with fer–
tilizer. Officer Lever was telephoned. Officer Lever telephoned my
mother. In the presence of my mother and some thirty nurses and
children, I was expelled from the Public Garden. I was such a bad
boy, I was told, "that
even
Officer Lever had been forced to put
his foot down."
New England winters are long. Sunday mornings are long. Ours
were often made tedious by preparations for dinner guests. Mother
would start airing at nine. Whenever the air grew so cold that it
hurt, she closed the den windows; then we were attacked by sour
kitchen odors winding up a clumsily rebuilt dumb-waiter shaft. The
windows were again thrown open. We sat in an atmosphere of glacial
purity and sacrifice. Our breath puffed whitely. Father and
I
wore
sleeveless cashmere jerseys Mother had bought at Filene's Basement.
A do-it-yourself book containing diagrams for the correct carving
of roasts lay on the arm of Father's chair. At hand were Big Bill Tilden
on tennis, Capablanca on chess, newspaper clippings from Sidney
Lenz's bridge column, and a magnificent tome with photographs and
an acid breakdown of Sir Thomas Lipton's errors in the Cup De–
fender races. Father made little progress in these diversions, and yet
one of the authors assured him that mastery demanded only willing
readers who understood the meaning of English words. Throughout
the winter a gray-whiteness glared through the single den window. In
the apoplectic brick alley, a fire escape stood out against our sooty
plank fence. Father believed that churchgoing was undignified for
a naval man; his Sunday mornings were given to useful acts such
as lettering his three new galvanized garbage cans: R.T.S. LowELL–
U.S.N.
Our Sunday dinner guests were often naval officers. Naval of–
ficers were not Mother's sort; very few people
were
her sort
in
those
days, and that was her trouble-a very authentic, human, and
