466
PARTISAN REVIEW
Mother's comfort was chic, romantic, impulsive.
If
her silver
service shone, it shone with hectic perfection to rebuke the functional
domesticity of naval wives. She had determined to make her
am–
biance
beautiful and luxurious, but wanted neither her beauty nor
her luxury unaccompanied. Beauty pursued too exclusively meant
artistic fatuity of a kind made farcical by her Aunt Sarah Stark
Winslow, a beauty too lofty and original ever to marry, a prima
donna on the piano, too high-strung ever to give a public recital.
Beauty alone meant the maudlin ignominy of having one's invest–
ments managed by interfering relatives. Luxury alone, on the other
hand, meant for Mother the "paste and fool's-gold polish" that one
met with in the foyer of the Loew's Orpheum Theater. She loathed
the "undernourishment" of Professor Burckhard's Bauhaus modern–
ism, yet in moments of pique she denounced our pompous Myers
mahoganies as "suitable for politicians at the Bellevue Hotel." She
kept a middle-of-the-road position, and much admired Italian pottery
with its fresh peasant colors and puritanical, clean-cut lines. She
was fond of saying, "The French
do
have taste," but spoke with a
double-edged irony which implied the French, with no moral stand–
ards to support their finish, were really no better than American
yahoos. Mother's beautiful house was dignified by a rich veneer
of the useful.
"I have always believed carving to be
the
gentlemanly talent,"
Mother used to proclaim. Father, faced with this opinion, pored over
his book of instructions or read the section on table carving in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. Eventually he discovered among the in–
numerable small, specialized Boston "colleges" an establishment known
as a carving school. Each Sunday from then on he would sit silent
and erudite before his roast. He blinked, grew white, looked winded,
and wiped beads of perspiration from his eyebrows. His purpose
was to reproduce stroke by stroke
his
last carving lesson, and he
worked with all the formal rightness and particular error of some
shaky experiment in remote control. He enjoyed quiet witticisms at
the expense of his carving master-"a philosopher who gave himself
all the airs of a Mahan!" He liked to pretend that the carving
master had stated that "No two cuts are identical,"
ergo:
"each
offers original problems for the
executioner."
Guests were appeased
