91 REVERE STREET
Major Mordecai Myers' portrait has been mislaid past finding,
but out of my memories I often come on it
in
the setting of our
Revere Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind, where it
survives all the distortions of fantasy, all the blank befogging of for–
getfulness. There, the vast number of remembered
things
remains
rocklike. Each
is
in its place, each has its function, its history, its
drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that one either
ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come
back urgent with life and meaning- because finished, they are
endurable and perfect.
Cousin Cassie only became a close relation in 1922.
In
that year
she died. After some unpleasantness between Mother and a co–
heiress, Helen Bailey, the estate was divided. Mother used to return
frozen and thrilled from her property disputes, and I, knowing nothing
of the rights and wrongs, would half-perversely confuse Helen
Bailey with Helen of Troy and harden my mind against the monoto–
nous
parti pris
of Mother's voice. Shortly after our move to Boston
in 1924, a score of unwanted Myers portraits was delivered to our
new house on Revere Street. These were later followed by "their
dowry"- four moving vans groaning with heavy Edwardian furni–
ture. My father began to receive his first quarterly payments from
the Mason-Myers Julian-James Trust Fund, sums "not grand enough
to corrupt us," Mother explained, "but sufficient to prevent Daddy
from being entirely at the mercy of his salary." The Trust sufficed:
our lives became tantalized with possibilities, and my father felt en–
couraged to take the risk-a small one in those boom years--of re–
signing from the Navy on the gamble of doubling his income in
business.
I was in the third grade and for the first time becoming a
little more popular at school. I was afraid Father's leaving the Navy
would destroy my standing. I was a churlish, disloyal, romantic boy,
and quite without hero worship for my father, whose actuality
seemed so inferior to the photographs in uniform he once mailed to
us from the Golden Gate. My real
lo ve,
as Mother used to insist
to all new visitors, was toy soldiers. For a few months at the flood–
tide of this infatuation, people were ciphers to me-valueless except
as chances for increasing my armies of soldiers. Roger Crosby, a
