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twenty-five dollars a month. She taught school and had her own income.
The only other assistance Lionel's mother had from her relatives came,
most strangely, from Uncle Louis, the chemistry professor at City College
who had been read out of the family when he married a Gentile. He, too,
began to give her twenty-five dollars a month - with their steady pay–
checks, teachers in the city school system had suddenly become people of
subtance. But Louis's help continued for only a short while: his wife did
her own housework, and when she discovered that Lionel's mother had a
maid, she put a stop to Louis's contribution. The emotional pressure
which his mother put upon Lionel and the constant intrusions upon his
time were not the most troubling aspects of his relation with his family
during these years of the Depression. Surely the worst feature of the situ–
ation was his parents' lack of appreciation of what he was trying to do for
them. Lionel's father lived until 1943. For as long as he lived he never
spoke a word of gratitude. But his father of course was not the family
member who mattered; it was his mother's acknowledgment that he was
doing everything he could for her which Lionel wanted and needed. As
the years went by, Lionel's mother often spoke in praise of me; she would
say that I had been more than a daughter to her. She never said that
Lionel had been more than a son, that he had been her mainstay and the
mainstay of her household. To thank him would, I suppose, have been to
recognize a dependence to which she preferred not to admit.
The part played by Lionel's mother's wish to maintain her place in
the middle class is not to be minimized in any account of her behavior in
these difficult years. Often there was reason for Lionel to feel that she
cared more for the appearance of class than for his well-being. Yet para–
doxical as it may seem, it was finally neither money nor social status
which was most important to her, but something else, something she
called "culture." The world "culture" was often used by her Park Avenue
sisters as well, but what it meant to her sisters was going to the Boston
Symphony concerts on Thursday afternoons and having the right opinion
as to whether Toscanini or Koussevitzky was the better orchestral con–
ductor. By "culture" Lionel's mother meant much the same as Matthew
Arnold had meant: the sum of assumptions and ideals which, in the ab–
sence of a presiding religious faith, offers us our moral guidance. Without
minimizing the tangible advantages of a well-financed membership in the
middle class, she gave her ultimate regard to the intangible advantages of
learning and high aspiration. In this, she was the superior of her Park
Avenue relatives. Lionel was irritated by his mother's invocations of
"culture." He felt that she was laying claim to territory which was not
hers. But I think he was mistaken and that it was her sincere way of re–
ferring to what she most valued in life. There was always less talk of
