PARTISAN REVIEW
Undoubtedly Major Mordecai had lived in a more ritualistic,
gaudy, and animal world than twentieth-century Boston. There was
something undecided, Mediterranean, versatile, almost double-faced
about his bearing which suggested that, even to his contemporaries,
he must have seemed gratuitously both
ci-devant
and
parvenu.
He
was a dark man, a German Jew-no downright Yankee, but maybe
such a fellow as Napoleon's mad, pomaded son-of-an-innkeeper–
general, Junot, Duc D'Abrantes; a man like mad George Ill's
pomaded, disreputable son, "Prinny," the Prince Regent. Or he
was one of those Moorish-looking dons painted by his contemporary,
Goya-some leader of Spanish guerrillas against Bonaparte's occu–
pation, who fled to South America. Our Major's suffering almond eye
rested on his luxurious dawn-colored fingers ruffling an off-white
glove.
Bailey-Mason-Myers! Easy-going, Empire State patricians, these
relatives of my Grandmother Lowell seemed to have given my father
his character. For he likewise lacked that granite
back-countriness
which Grandfather Arthur Winslow attributed to his own ancestors,
the iconoclastic, mulish Dunbarton New Hampshire Starks. On the
joint Mason-Myers bookplate, there are two merry and naked mer–
maids- lovely marshmallowy, boneless, Rubensesque butterballs, all
burlesque-show bosoms and Flemish smiles. Their motto,
malo fran–
gere quam fleclere,
reads "I prefer to bend than to break."
Mordecai Myers was my Grandmother Lowell's grandfather.
His life was tame and honorable. He was a leisured squire and
merchant, a member of the state legislature, a mayor of Schenectady,
a "president" of Kinderhook village. Disappointingly, his famous
"blazing brown eye" seems in all things to have shunned the out–
rageous. After his death he was remembered soberly as a New York
State gentleman, the friend and host of worldly men and politicians
with Dutch names: De Witt Clinton, Vanderpoel, Hoes, and Schuyler.
My mother was roused to warmth by the Major's scarlet vest and
exotic eye. She always insisted that he was the one properly dressed
and dieted ancestor in the lot we had inherited from my father's
Cousin Cassie. Great-great-Grandfather Mordecai! Poor sheepdog
in wolf's clothing! In the anarchy of my adolescent war on my
parents, I tried to make him a true wolf, the wandering Jew !
Homo
lupus homini!
