91 REVERE STREET
461
enter in 1930. I distrusted change, knew each school since kinder–
garten had been more constraining and punitive than its predecessor,
and believed the suburban country day schools were flimsily disguised
fronts for reformatories. With the egotistic, slightly paranoid appre–
hensions of an only child, I wondered what became of boys graduat–
ing from Brimmer's fourth grade, feared the worst-we were darkly
imperiled, like some annual bevy of Athenian youths destined for
the Minotaur. And to judge from my father, men between the ages
of six and sixty did nothing but meet new challenges, take on heavier
responsibilities, and lose all freedom to explode. A ray of hope in the
far future was my white-haired Grandfather Winslow, whose un–
checked commands and demands were always upsetting people for
their own good-he was all I could ever want to be: the bad boy,
the problem child, the commodore of his household.
When I entered Brimmer I was eight and a half. I was dis–
tracted in my studies, assented to whatever I was told, picked my
nose whenever no one was watching, and worried our third-grade
teacher by organizing creepy little gangs of boys at recess. I was
girl-shy. Thick-witted, narcissistic, thuggish, I had the conventional
prepuberty character of my age; whenever a girl came near me, my
whole person cringed like a sponge wrung dry by a clenching fist. I
was less rather than more literary than most children, but the girl
I dreamed about continually had wheel-spoke black and gold eye–
lashes, double-length page-boy blond hair, a little apron, a bold, blunt
face, a saucy, shivery way of talking, and ... a paper body-she
was the girl in John Tenniel's illustrations to
Alice in Wonderland.
The invigorating and symmetrical aplomb of my ideal Alice was
soon enriched and nullified by a second face, when my father took
me to the movies on the afternoon of one of Mother's headaches.
An innocuous child's movie, the bloody, all-male
Beau Geste
had been
chosen, but instead my father preferred a nostalgic tour of places
he had enjoyed on shore leave. We went to the Touraine Hotel where
he had first seen Pola Negri-where we too saw Pola Negri, sloppy–
haired, slack, yawning, ravaged, unwashed ... an Anti-Alice.
Our class belles, the Norton twins, Elie and Lindy, fell far short
of the clean Alice and the abandoned Pola. Their prettiness, rather
fluffy, freckled, bashful, might have escaped notice if they had been
one instead of two, and if their manners had been less goodhumored,
