THE APPEAL
THE APPEAL
This isn’t a story. It’s an attempt at reconstruction. Given my knowledge of the principals—Mary Jarvis, and her mother, Mrs. St. Luth—I think I can do it.
Mary Jarvis was my mother, and Mrs. St. Luth, of course, my grandmother. Thank god, I’m a modern and can look at them impersonally—judge each on her own merits, as it were.
My mother and my grandmother made scenes as other women make jumpers. It was their form of self-expression. I imagine—although I never knew for certain—that it was my father’s inability to maintain himself à la hauteur, in the perennial melodrama that was my mother’s idea of life, that led to my grandmother being invited to live with them.
She came when I, their only child, had barely reached the stage of exchanging my baby frills for first knickerbockers. (I am certain, although I don’t remember it, that my mother wept and said she felt that she had lost her baby for ever.)
Already my parents were unhappy together. Mary—I call her so here for convenience, but she would never have tolerated it in reality—Mary, although really affectionate and impressionable, was fundamentally insincere, with herself and with everybody else. She lived entirely on the emotional plane, and when genuine emotions were not forthcoming she faked them by instinct. Her mother, who belonged to the same type, although with more strength of character, and far less capacity for affection, had always played up to her. They had their violent disputes and violent reconciliations—neither could have been happy without—but they did respect one another’s poses.
But my father never played up.
He couldn’t. Worse still, if he could have done so, he wouldn’t—on principle.
Again I can’t remember, but I can imagine, almost to the point of certainty, short and searing passages between my parents.