DIANA TRILLING
353
Journal
Cohen and Solow thought his peaceableness a weakness of charac–
ter, and when I became phobic and abnormally dependent upon Lionel's
being with me, our close friends thought it neurotic of him to sacrifice his
freedom as he did in order to stay with me - with the exaggeration which
was usual in his pronouncements on marriage, Kip Fadiman assured
Lionel that there was only one test of a good marriage, the distance a man
could put between himself and his wife.
While the loss of his money and business was bound to alter my fa–
ther's sense of himself, it never altered his behavior to his children or ours
to him. Whatever his private emotions of diminished pride, there was no
diminution in the authority he held for us or in the respect we accorded
him. But with the loss of their financial independence, the relation of
Lionel's mother and father to Lionel and me was forever reversed: we be–
came the parents, they the children. Lionel's father steadily receded into
his darkening world. He took no account of how his household was be–
ing managed; from time to time he would emerge to ask Lionel for
money with which to meet some personal obligation such as a bill for his
medications - he lived at the border of addiction, always frightened that
his drugs would give out. Lionel's mother made no outright demand for
more money than Lionel gave her, but her relation to us was charged
with dissatisfaction: the money we gave her was insufficient; she felt that
she was not getting her due. The best of Lionel's mother's strength of will
in
those years was directed to avoiding a change in her standard of living.
Lionel had been sent to Columbia rather than City College, where the
tuition would have been free; his sister Harriet, now in college, was simi–
larly sent to New York University instead of Hunter. She was not made
to work on Saturdays or during vacations. We were never told where the
money came from for Harriet's tuition, but her mother's long-cherished
diamond rings and diamond brooch, once the property of
her
mother, dis–
appeared, and we surmised that they were sold for that purpose. What
was perhaps most extraordinary was that the Trilling household continued
to employ a daily maid. To be sure, the pay for a maid in the Depression
was only a dollar a day, but one could also feed a family of four on a
dollar a day. The fact that it was our money that Lionel's mother was
spending made it impossible for us to tell her how she should spend it.
Had she been asked to justify the way she handled her domestic affairs,
she would almost certainly have said that she had to keep up appearances
for Harriet's sake: if Harriet was to make a proper marriage, she must
come from a proper middle-class home. And, in fact, once Harriet mar–
ried, her mother dropped all pretense to a station beyond her means: she
happily did her own housework and after her husband died rented out
