454
PARTISAN REVIEW
"I am thinking about pennies," I'd answer.
"When
I
was a child I used to love telling Mama everything
I had done," Mother would say.
"But you're not a child," I would answer.
I used to enjoy dawdling and humming "Anchors Aweigh" up
Revere Street after a day at school. "Anchors Aweigh," the official
Navy song, had originally been the song composed for my father's
class. And yet my mind always blanked and seemed to fill with a
clammy hollowness when Mother asked prying questions. Like other
tongue-tied, difficult children, I dreamed I was a master of cool,
stoical repartee. "What have you been doing, Bobby?" Mother would
ask. "I haven't," I'd answer. At home I thus saved myself from
emotional exhaustion.
At school, however, I was extreme only in my conventional
mediocrity, my colorless, distracted manner, which came from restless
dreams of being admired. My closest friend was Eric Burckhard, the
son of a professor of architecture at Harvard. The Burckhards came
from Zurich and were very German, not like Ludendorff, but
in
the kindly, comical, nineteenth-century manner of Jo's German
husband in
Little Men,
or in the manner of the crusading
sturm
und drang
liberal scholars in decent old German
novelle.
"Eric's
mother and father are
both
called Dr. Burckhard," my mother once
said, and indeed there was something endearingly repellent about
Mrs. Burckhard with her doctor's degree, her long, unstylish skirts,
and her dramatic, dulling blond braids. Strangely the Burckhards'
sober continental bourgeois house was without golden mean-every–
thing was either hilariously old
Swiss
or madly modern. The Frau
Doctor Burckhard used to serve mid-morning hot chocolate with
rosettes of whipped cream, and receive her friends in a long, un–
carpeted hall-drawing room with dowdy ferns and a yellow bees–
waxed hardwood floor shining under a central skylight. On the wall
there were large, expert photographs of what at a distance appeared
to be Mont Blanc-they were in reality views of Frank Lloyd
Wright's Japanese hotel.
I admired the Burckhards and felt at home in their house, and
these feelings were only intensified when I discovered that my mother
was always
ill
at ease with them. The heartiness, the enlightenment,
and the bright, ferny greenhouse atmosphere were too much for her.
