91 REVERE STREET
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Captain Atkinson's stately chatter-he was "unable to tell one woman
from another."
Cousin Ledyard's wife, a Schenectady Hoes distantly related
to my still living Great-Grandmother Myers, was twenty years
younger than her husband. This made her a trying companion;
with the energy of youth she demanded the homage due to age.
Once while playing in the Mattapoisett tennis tournament, she had
said to her opponent, a woman her own age but married to a young
husband, "I believe I'll call you Ruth; you can call me Mrs. Atkin–
son." She was a radiant Christian Scientist, darted about in smart
serge suits and blouses frothing with lace. She filled her purse with
Science literature and boasted without irony of "Boston's greatest
grand organ" in the Christian Science mother temple on Huntington
Avenue. As a girl, she had grown up with our Myers furniture. We
dreaded Mrs. Atkinson's descents on Revere Street. She pooh-poohed
Mother's taste, snorted at our ignorance of Myers family history,
treated us as mere custodians of the Myers furniture, resented altera–
tions, and had the memory of a mastodon for Cousin Cassie's associa–
tions with each piece. She wouldn't hear of my mother's distress from
neuralgia, dismissed my asthma as "growing-pains," and sought to
rally us by gossiping about healers. She talked a prim, sprightly babble.
Like many Christian Scientists, she had a bloodless, euphoric, inex–
haustible interest in her own body. In a discourse which lasted from
her first helping of roast beef through her second demitasse, Mrs.
Atkinson held us spellbound by telling how her healer had "surprised
and evaporated a cyst inside a sac" inside her "major intestine."
I can hear my father trying to explain his resignation from the
Navy to Cousin Ledyard or Commander Billy. Talking with an un–
natural and importunate jocularity, he would say, "Billy Boy, it's
a darned shame, but this State of Massachusetts doesn't approve
of the service using its franchise and voting by mail. I haven't had
a chance to establish residence since our graduation in '07. I think
I'll put my blues in mothballs and become a
cit
just to prove I still
belong to the country. The directors of Lever Brothers' Soap in
Cambridge ... I guess for
cits,
Billy, they've really got something on
the ball, because they tell me they want me on their team."
Or Father, Cousin Ledyard, Commander Billy, and I would
be sitting on after dinner at the dining-room table and talking man
