91 REVERE STREET
475
foot to foot. High above the highboy, our gold National Eagle stooped
forward, plastery and doddering. The Sheffield silver-plate urns,
more precious than solid sterling, peeled; the bodies of the heraldic
mermaids on the Mason-Myers crest blushed a metallic copper tan.
In the harsh New England light, the bronze sphinxes supporting our
sideboard looked as though manufactured in Grand Rapids. All too
clearly no one had worried about synchronizing the grandfather
clock's minutes, days, and months with its mellow old Dutch seascape–
painted discs for showing the phases of the moon. The stricken,
but still striking gong made sounds like steam banging through pipes.
Colonel Myers' monumental Tibetan screen had been impiously
shortened to fit it for a low Yankee ceiling. And now, rough and
gawky, like some Hindu water buffalo killed in mid-rush but still
alive with mad momentum, the screen hulked over us . . . and hid
the pantry door.
Our real blue-ribbon-winning
bete noire
was of course the
portrait of Cousin Cassie's father, Mordecai Myers' fourth and most
illustrious son: Colonel Theodorus Bailey Myers. The Colonel, like
half of our new portraits, was merely a collateral relation; though
really as close to us as James Russell Lowell, no one called the
Colonel "Great Grand Uncle," and Mother playfully pretended
that her mind was overstrained by having to remember his full name,
rank, and connection. In the portrait, Colonel Theodorus wore a
black coat and gray trousers, an obsequiously conservative costume
which one associated with undertakers and the musicians at Sym–
phony Hall. His spats were pearl gray plush with pearl buttons.
His mustache might have been modeled on the mustache of a bar–
tender in a Western. The majestic Tibetan screen enclosed him as
though he were an ancestor-god from Lhasa, a blasphemous yet
bogus attitude. Mr. Myers' colonel's tabs were crudely stitched to a
civilian coat; his New York Yacht Club button glowed like a car–
nation; his vainglorious picture frame was a foot and a half wide.
Forever, his right hand hovered over a glass dome that covered a
model locomotive. He was vaguely Middle-Eastern and waiting. A
lady in Mother's sewing circle had pertly interpreted this portrait
as, "King Solomon about to receive the Queen of Sheba's shares in
the Boston and Albany Railroad." Gone now was the Colonel's place
of honor at Cousin Cassie's Washington mansion; gone was
his
