MILLICENT BELL
421
grown up in Washington, too; her father, a WASP patnclan who had
become an admiral, also supported Roosevelt, and after his death her moth–
er's well-run tidewater estate on Virginia's "Northern Neck" is a place of
continuity for her children, a haven where wealth seems still married to
seemliness and responsibility. Framing these lives is the viewpoint of the
future, the perspective of Mike's and Joss's two daughters. Edith, the elder,
is the novel's narrator much of the time, as she remembers the lives of her
parents and the members of their circle. The novel's trajectory stretches
from her own and her sister Nora's childhood to the present. A school–
teacher and an actress, now, they try to understand who their parents were.
Casey's novel is a complex, often non-chronological sequence of early
and late moments along this arc of time. Whether or not they contribute
to anything so old-fashioned as a "plot," these bits and pieces are intense–
ly rendered, and the accumulation is true to the way we remember our
own lives as a disorderly collection of occasions and impressions whose
sequence is forgotten and whose exact significance remains unclear. In the
first sixty pages or so, we begin with that day when Mike calls for his
daughter at her tap class and finds that a classmate, doing "Singin' in the
Rain," poked an umbrella into little Nora's eye, and she has been taken to
the hospital for surgery-a crisis to which he and Joss react in their sepa–
rate, characteristic ways. A long- before episode surfaces out of the period
of his employment as a congressional aide, when he is asked to counteract
the effect of his congressman's anti-Semitic remark about Emanuel Celler
by digging up something anti-Catholic from the record of the Jewish con–
gressman from New York. rn Charlottesville, things are only less savage
when his new partners explain the sociology of the genteel, conservative
suburban world to which he has removed himself. They quietly let him
know that his liberalism is irrelevant-though, of course, his legal keen–
ness makes him a valued Ii tigator, and the fact that his and Joss's fathers
were friends of presidents will impress clients. Perhaps his liberal goodwill
comes to him too easily, anyhow. Edith recalls Mike relating how,just out
of law school and before he got his Navy commission, he did volunteer
civil-rights work. His colleague, a fellow-Catholic but black, mentioned
once when Mike seemed to miss some point about the nature of prejudice
how the white priest in his church fastidiously administered the wafer of
the mass without ever touching a black lip. It was something Mike would
never have suspected. And so the episodes go. Accompanying them, like a
repeated little tune, are demonstrations of Mike's irrepressible womaniz–
ing-e.g., his roving interest in Nora 's pediatrician, or her dance teacher,
even at the time of the eye accident. There's a hilarious masquerade party,
a local arts center benefit, during which his erotic confusions multiply
among the female maskers. And sounding repeatedly also are moments that
