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their bedroom and herself contentedly slept in the living room. As
the
years went by, Lionel's mother and I grew close to one another. I came
to think of her as a fond and generous parent, much to be relied upon.
When I was pregnant and began to miscarry, she stood by me as I cannot
suppose that my own mother would have, insisting that I had not lost
the
baby and helping me to withstand the doctor's opinion that I should have
a curettage. How reconcile the woman she became with the woman who
in the early years of the Depression had so little heed of us and our needs
and difficulties? Throughout our first year uptown Lionel's mother gob–
bled up Lionel's energies like an ill-conditioned child. At one point the
pressure became so great that Henry Rosenthal, in his role of rabbi, inter–
vened with her on Lionel's behalf, reminding her that Lionel was only at
the start of his professional life and that she now must give him the peace
and freedom to find his way. I, too, pleaded with her to retract some of
the greedy demands she put upon Lionel; in response she sternly cau–
tioned me that the one thing she would never forgive me was interfering
with Lionel's career. Although it had to be plain that my father no longer
had money, Lionel's mother still apparently solaced herself with the idea
that I was an heiress and had only to dip into my private reserves for her
financial problems to evaporate.
It
was not uncommon in her time and
class to suppose that people had secret legacies or other hidden sources of
money. Lionel's mother was always enviously conjecturing of one or an–
other of her women acquaintances that she was "climbing the marble
steps." This meant that the woman was secretly squirreling away money
from her housekeeping allowance. In the earlier years of this century the
private universities took it for granted that their instructors were not
fi–
nancially dependent on their university earnings. When our friend Alan
Brown was a young instructor of English at Columbia and asked for a
raise because he now had two children in school, his head of department
assured him that it was always legitimate to invade capital for the educa–
tion of one's children, and at Yale this confidence was carried even fur–
ther. There it was assumed that anyone who taught at Yale must be rich
enough to own a boat: one of the senior professors in the Yale English
Department, taking leave of a junior colleague at the start of the summer
vacation, urged this impecunious young friend of ours to be sure to moor
in his harbor should he be cruising off the coast ofMaine.
Lionel's mother's Park Avenue relatives had not forgiven Lionel for
marrying. Although they were themselves little hurt by the Depression,
they made no move to help their sister. They were pleased that the bur–
den of his mother's support had now fallen on Lionel and that the mar–
riage had not permitted him to escape his duty to his family. A few years
later, one of the aunts, Aunt Deborah, softened and gave Lionel's mother
