476
PARTISAN REVIEW
charming satire on the belles of 1850, entitled,
Nothing to Wear,
which had once been quoted "throughout the length and breadth of
the land as generally as was Bret Harte's
Heathen Chinee";
gone
was his priceless collection of autographed letters of
all
the Signers
of the Declaration of Independence-he had said once, "my letters
will be my tombstone." Colonel Theodorus Bailey Myers had never
been a New Englander. His family tree reached to no obscure Somer–
setshire yeoman named Winslowe or Lowle. He had never even, like
his father, Mordecai, gloried in a scarlet War of 1812 waistcoat. His
portrait was an indifferent example from a dull, bad period. The
Colonel's only son had sheepishly changed his name from Mason–
Myers to Myers-Mason.
Waiting for dinner to end and for the guests to leave, I used
to lean forward on my elbows, support each cheekbone with a thumb,
and make my fingers meet in a clumsy Gothic arch across my fore–
head. I would stare through this arch and try to make life stop. Out
in the alley the sun shone irreverently on our three garbage cans
lettered: R. T. S. LOWELL-V. S. N. When I shut my eyes to stop
the sun, I saw first an orange disc, then a red disc, then the portrait
of Major Myers apotheosized, as it were, by the sunlight lighting
the blood smear of his scarlet waistcoat. Still there was no
coup de
theatre
about the Major as he looked down on us with his portly
young man's face of a comfortable upper New York State patroon
and the friend of Robert Livingston and Martin Van Buren. Great–
great-Grandfather Myers had never frowned down in judgment on a
Salem witch. There was no allegory in his eyes, no
Mayflower.
Instead
he looked peacefully at his sideboard, his cut-glass decanters, his cel–
laret-the worldly bosom of the Mason-Myers mermaid engraved on
a silver-plated urn.
If
he could have spoken, Mordecai would have
said, "My children, my blood, accept graciously the loot of your
inheritance. We are all dealers in second-hand furniture."
The man who seems in my memory to sit under old Mordecai's
portrait is not my father, but Commander
Billy-the
Commander
after Father had thrown in his commission. There Billy would sit
glowing, perspiring, bragging. Despite his rowdiness, he even then
breathed the power that would make him a vice-admiral and hero in
World War II. I can hear him boasting in lofty language of how he
had stood up for democracy in the day of Lenin and Bela Kun; of
