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PARTISAN REVIEW
to man. Father would say, "I'm afraid
I'll
grow dull and drab with
all this goldbricking ashore. I am too old for tennis singles, but too
young for that confirmed state of senility known as golf."
Cousin Ledyard and Commander Billy would puff silently on
their cigars. Then Father would try again and say pitifully, "I don't
think a naval man can ever on the
outside
replace the friends he
made during his years of wearing the blue."
Then Cousin Ledyard would give Father a polite, funereal look
and say, "Speaking of golf, Bob, you've hit me below the belt. I've
been flubbing away at the game for thirty years without breaking
ninety."
Commander Billy was blunter. He would chaff Father about
becoming a "beachcomber" or "purser for the Republican junior
chamber of commerce." He would pretend that Father was in
danger of being jailed for evading taxes to support "Uncle Sam's
circus."
Circus
was Commander Billy's slang for the Navy. The
word reminded him of a comparison, and once he stood up from
the table and bellowed solemnly: "Oyez, oyez! Bob Lowell, our
bright boy, our class baby, is now on a par with 'Rattle-Ass Rats'
Richardson, who resigned from us to become press agent for Sells–
Floto Circus, and who writes me: 'Bilgy Dear- Beating the drum
ahead of the elephants and the spangled folk, I often wonder why
I run into so few of my classmates.' "
Those dinners, those apologies! Perhaps I exaggerate their em–
barrassment because they hover so grayly in recollection and seem
to anticipate ominously my father's downhill progress as a civilian
and Bostonian.
It
was to be expected, I suppose, that Father should
be in irons for a year or two, while becoming detached from his old
comrades and interests, while waiting for the new life.
I used to sit through the Sunday dinners absorbing cold and
anxiety from the table. I imagined myself hemmed in by our new,
inherited Victorian Myers furniture.
In
the bleak Revere Street dining
room, none of these pieces had at all that air of unhurried con–
descension that had been theirs behind the summery veils of tissue
paper in Cousin Cassie Julian-James's memorial volume. Here, table,
highboy, chairs, and screen-mahogany, cherry, teak-looked nervous
and disproportioned. They seemed to wince, touch elbows, shift from
