THE EDUCATION OF A QUEEN
559
At the dinnertable, she once said to Jason and me: "Hos–
pitality is the
strongest
of the Greek traditions."
"In Homeric times," roared my father, "we would even
send our wives to bed with the guests!" My mother bent over
the Brussels sprouts and pursed her lips, but I saw the corners
of her mouth twitch.
At one time I had found my father's steady harping on the
means and functions of the procreative organs very amusing,
indeed. There was an embarrassing family legend that Daphne,
aged five, glimpsing her papa making drunken (let us give him
the benefit of the doubt) passes at a girl during one of the
interminable Karamoulis parties had tripped up to him, crying,
"Go to it, Daddy!"
What do you suppose he did then? Coughed, got up, and
strode off, looking well over the bridge of his nose--suddenly
very much the dignified Mediterranean
paterfamilias?
Prob·
ably it cramped his style for the rest of the evening. At any rate,
the ·"bohemian parties," as my mother chose to call them,
stopped a few years later. She put an end to them herself, of
course. She said, "no more or I walk out." Since no Otis ever
uttered a threat without being willing to back it up (the Lord
of the Atheists at our right hand), there were no more bo–
hemian parties.
But there continued to be a certain strain, like dangerously
stretched rubber-bands, in and around the subject of sex. When
I was nine or so my father made some sexual smart crack at
which I laughed broadly.
"Mother," I cried, "isn't he funny? Don't you think he's
funny, Mother?"
"Daphne," said my mother, "it is my hope that someday
you too will grow beyond Rudolph Valentino!"
"Oh Mother," I said, "you're no fun ."
My parents belonged to the progressive school of child–
rearing, and I was not reproved, but sometime later-I must
have been ten or eleven-Mother clarified the subject slightly.
