Chez Cordelia
A Novel
For Ken and Kate
“Preparation is everything.”
Julia Child
Chapter One
The Chamber of Horrors
I make lists. Not just shopping lists and lists of “Things I Must Do Next Tuesday,” but lists designed to organize my life. I make a list when I need to get things straight—what’s straighter than a list? Nice and neat, with all the nonessentials pruned away. I would like my life to be like that.
I’m writing this account of my life out of necessity, because I need to make sense out of it and lists aren’t enough. I doubt that this will be enough, either. I’m a talker, not a writer. I don’t put much faith in the adequacy of the written word, and this is a labor not of love or of faith but of pure anguish. All my life, I’ve been at war with words put down on paper, and now I’m waging the war in earnest. I have to do it because my honor is at stake. In that respect, it’s like any war, and I suppose it will be just as futile, producing—after all the napalm burns and bombed-out cities—only a temporary peace, or an illusion of peace. But I push on, each page its own lonely battlefield.
I suppose writing is painful for me because reading is. From the time I learned to read, I disliked it. I learned late. Instinctively, I put it off as long as possible. I didn’t really read with fluency until third grade, and I’ll tell you one reason why: I had a mother, a father, two older sisters, and a brother to read to me, and they read so well, with such drama, assuming with such magical ease and accuracy the roles of Flopsy Bunny and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Freddy the Pig, that the printed words, the mere letters marching in dull rows across the page, were hopelessly insipid by comparison.
But that’s not all of it. I resisted reading because books were the family trade, the family obsession. My parents and my siblings read and write as gracefully and as necessarily as they breathe. With me the genes for that sort of thing must have been used up or gone stale or refused to cooperate. From the time I was a child, I was the maverick, the little oddball who hated books.
Books, for me, were never the key to the pleasures of plot and character and language that my anxious mother, during our unproductive talks, claimed them to be (her face subtly horrified at her mutant daughter, the afterthought, supposed to be the joy and comfort of her middle age, apparently no relation—at least spiritually—to her or my father or their other three children, who at tender ages had been reading Dickens and the comedies of Shakespeare). Books were simply a vehicle for getting my family to pay some attention to me, and if that implies that they stopped paying attention to me when I learned to read for myself, it’s supposed to. That’s just what happened, as I sensed it would, though my parents, who in their own way are conscientious about their children, would wince at my thinking so.
But the truth was that they didn’t find me and my oddity very interesting. In fact, they seldom acknowledged its existence. My happy illiteracy was glossed over for years as if it wasn’t there, like some minor flaw I’d probably grow out of with a little help—a lisp, or baby fat. My father always gave me books for Christmas and birthdays, beautifully inscribed in his distinctive handwriting (of course, on top of everything else, the whole family has distinctive handwriting): “To Cordelia, from her loving father,” and the date. I still have all of them (the illustrated David Copperfield he gave me for my fourth birthday makes an excellent place for pressing wild-flowers), but I’ve still never read them. Whenever I open one and read “Your loving father,” I think: if he really loved me he would never have given me these books.
It wasn’t just my parents. My brother and sisters were in on it, too—the conspiracy to entice me into the world of books, and the polite refusal to acknowledge my lack of enthusiasm. Books were waved before me like doughnuts before a dieter, but I can’t remember being very tempted. I think back to Juliet squealing her affected squeal, when I was five and she ten, over The Mill on the Floss. “You are going to love this in a couple of years, Cordelia. Here—” She tossed it in my lap. “Give it a try,” she said, and gave me a sisterly hug before she floated off somewhere to begin on something else. Blast her, she knew I could no more give The Mill on the Floss a try than I could fly up the chimney, but that was her way of teaching me to read. “That’s how I learned,” she used to say to me in the earnest voice she used when she wanted to cover up bragging. “Just by doing it, Cordelia. Start at the beginning and sound out the words, don’t worry if you don’t know what they mean, just keep going on …”
Her voice kept going on. I was her project, and if I could have flown up the chimney I would have. What an escape, what an event it would have been. “Good-bye forever, Jule,” I would have said, and swooshed up the chimney like a skinny little Santa Claus. But no. I used to sit there with those heavy books on my lap, feeling deadened by them, their weight, the immense bulk of the millions and millions of ABC’s in them. Once I told Juliet I didn’t much want to learn to read, and she giggled as at a naughty joke. “Of course you do,” she said, and returned to her book.
All of them—they couldn’t wait until I got tangled in the web of the printed word. They just couldn’t understand what was taking me so long.
“Why do you resist it?” my mother asked me finally when, at six, I brought home my U in first-grade reading. (The U was for Unsatisfactory, which was severely understating the case, but there was no lower grade than U in my positive-thinking, sunny-side-up school.) My mother’s face was almost unlined—she was in her late thirties then—except for two furrows between her eyebrows, the result of all those years of frowning over books. When she looked at my report card the lines deepened, and I could see the hint of more coming, lines that would get sharper the more I brought home lousy report cards. I felt bloated with guilt, my stomach began to hurt, I had to go to the bathroom.
“Why don’t you like reading?” she asked me in despair. “With all this around you?” She gestured widely, and indeed the walls (though we were in the kitchen) were lined with books, and through the door into the living room we could see Juliet slumped in a chair, chewing her hair and getting her print fix. On the table before us lay the book my mother had been reading when I got home from school, face down to mark the place.
She waited patiently for an answer. “It’s too hard,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I looked down at the book on the table. If pressed, I would have deciphered the title as Silly Wimps. That couldn’t have been it, of course, but that’s how bad a reader I was—or maybe I was projecting.
My mother sighed. At least I hadn’t confessed the total antipathy she feared. “It’ll get easier,” she said, squeezing my hand. “You’ll work at it, won’t you, Cordelia?” She gazed intently at me, as if my face were a book.
I nodded with enthusiasm, and was rewarded for my fib by seeing the lines smooth out a bit. She gave me a little bowl of salty black olives and a glass of milk. Before I’d finished my first olive she was deep in her book again.
I remember eating olives and feeling lonely, feeling like an alien invader of another planet. The lie I’d just told bothered me—I knew perfectly well I wasn’t going to work at reading. I saw that little evasion as the first in a long string of them; already, at age six, I’d learned how to sneak and compromise in order to get along in hostile territory. My mother was far away in Silly Wimps, though she raised her head once or twice to smile dimly at me. Juliet chewed her long hair and read and read like an enchanted princess. The others weren’t home from school yet. My father was up in his third-floor study. It was raining outside. I’d gotten a U on my report card. Dinner was hours away. I finished all the olives. I began to bang my feet against the rungs of my chair and cry.
It ended with Juliet reading to me. “She’s upset about her report card,” my mother said softly to Juliet, and I yelled, “I am not! I don’t care!” I banged my feet harder. My sister and my mother exchanged a look: “That just shows how much she does care.” I kept muttering “I don’t care” until Juliet offered to read to me. “This always calms her down,” she said to my mother in the prissy, grown-up voice she had adopted when she began getting poems published on the children’s page of the newspaper.
We curled up on the sofa together with one of the Freddy the Pig books I was addicted to. My mother beamed at us. Such traditional family scenes always abstractly touched her; Juliet even had one arm around my shoulder. I sniffled a few more times and burrowed closer to her. Juliet was the best reader of all, better even than my father. She had a real dramatic gift, which was what probably made her, later, a good fashion model; and when she put on her brave, squeaky voice for Freddy and her high, snooty one for awful Mrs. Under-dunk, I giggled with delight, looking resolutely at the pictures and not at the words.
This was what I wanted—someone to snuggle with, someone to pay attention to me, the sound of a human voice. The stories were only a welcome adjunct to these other pleasures. It was the solitariness of reading that turned me off, the deadly grown-up-ness of it. I saw learning to read, and I still believe rightly, as the end of childhood.
And I suppose, put simply, I preferred people to books—not such a bizarre preference, it seems to me. But in my family it was. In my family the eccentricities of characters in novels were lovable, and the eccentricities of the youngest child were unacceptable. It’s that that I thought I could never forgive them for.
But of course I did, finally, learn to read. The full force of family pressure came down on me, abetted by my teachers, when I was in the third grade and still reading at first-grade level, still getting U’s. When I read aloud in the classroom there were sighs of impatience and occasional groans, and I’d see the cold marble face of Sister Victoria Marie close up in silent prayer while I broke out in a sweat over words like surprise and neighbor. I was a whiz at arithmetic, at the head of the class without effort, and my parents had hopes (slightly appalled ones, considering the family talents) that I would distinguish myself in numbers if not in letters. My promise faded with adolescence when I discovered the stigma attached to girls who got A’s in math, but at eight I was a natural, and for that reason I was not held back a grade and was, in fact, considered bright enough—although I had heard my parents more than once discuss the possibility that I was one of those idiots savants who babble and dribble through life until presented with a column of figures, which they promptly add up in their heads, square, and translate into metric feet.
“If she can multiply, she can read,” they said to each other—illogically and without much hope but, it turned out, truly. My parents got after the school, and the school got the Reading Specialist after me.
Her name was Mrs. Meek (so much for the power of words), and she bullied me into it. She had a will of iron, I had as yet no discernible will at all, and by the time I was nine I was spewing out whole chapters of the red-covered First Reader. What a dull book it was, too—what a reward for all my pains: Neighborhood Friends, starring Ted and Nancy and their dog Spot. After I finished it and went sloppily through its accompanying workbook, I pushed on to the Second Reader, This Wide World, in which Ted and Nancy take up basketball, travel to the big city, build a playhouse, and get a new puppy (Skippy, an Airedale), never letting on what happened to faithful Spot or mourning the old boy for a minute.
But in the end, no matter how glibly I rattled off the adventures of Ted and Nancy and their doomed mutts, I knew my parents were disappointed in me. The fact that I’d had to work so hard at reading, and, worse yet, didn’t enjoy it at all, was a grievous blow to them. There was Juliet, in the eighth grade, winning the Junior Scholastic short story contest for the third year in a row and regularly contributing to the children’s page. And Miranda, in tenth grade, editor of the school paper, honor student, spelling bee veteran. And Horatio, in his senior year, a Merit scholar finishing up his first novel and ready to head for Harvard. And me … an unpromising third-grader who read simpleminded texts not for pleasure but because I was browbeaten into it by Mrs. Meek. I never told them I was bribed into it, too, with candy. A worse ignominy than not to read at all: to read for Hershey bars.
I look back on my sessions with Mrs. Meek—that calculated breaking of my will, the first hard assault on my spirit—as the point at which I said to myself, “No more. Never again,” and resolved to go my own way. It’s the search for that way that I’ve had to build my life on, and it’s because of my parents and my siblings and Mrs. Meek that I sit, today, at this particular table, with this particular pencil in my hand and this particular view (trees, banks of flowers, quiet blue lake) before me.
There was another third-grade failure taken on by Mrs. Meek, along with me—Danny Frontenac. Three times a week Danny and I met with Mrs. Meek in her little room with the bright green tables and chairs and yellow walls and red square of carpet, a room so deliberately cheery that even third-graders noticed and resented it. There were always animal cutouts stuck up on the walls with tape, the kind of thing we were far too old to relish—duckies wearing boots and carrying umbrellas, black cats popping out of jack-o’-lanterns, that sort of nonsense. There was a permanent one on the door, under the sign JUNE MEEK, READING SPECIALIST (which for months I deciphered as JUNIOR MEEK, READING SPACEMAN)—a white kitten with glassy green eyes and a ballon coming out of its mouth saying, “Please Come In!”
In we went, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday before lunch, and I recall that for some reason we went hand in hand, like Hansel and Gretel into the forest, perhaps because children in St. Agatha’s Catholic Academy were made to travel in pairs, on the grounds that idle hands are the devil’s playground and linked hands are therefore at least half spoken for. But I can’t remember if our hand-holding was officially sanctioned school policy, or if it was a symbol of our unity. For we were united, Danny and I, not in friendship but in fear. Terror of Mrs. Meek was what we had in common. Otherwise we disliked each other heartily, as all third-grade boys and girls who have been ruthlessly segregated since kindergarten dislike each other. But for those three half-hours a week we were bound by ties of hate and fear, and by our clutched hands, which kept their white-knuckled grip on each other down the corridor to the stairs, up the stairs, down half another corridor, and into a cul-de-sac which contained the nurse’s office on the right, the nuns’ bathroom (hee hee hee!) on the left, and straight ahead Mrs. Meek’s chamber of horrors inviting us in. There our sweaty hands parted, reluctantly, and took up pencils and workbooks and chocolates.
The horrors in the chamber were the words, our enemies—books full of them, and flash cards which Mrs. Meek could snap in our faces like a magician doing some evil card trick, and stories with questions to go with them that were designed to trip us up and humiliate us. And there was Mrs. Meek herself.
She terrified us, though it’s hard now to say why. She was tall and broad, middle-aged, with short blond hair, and she always wore dark blazers and skirts. “She looks like a daddy,” Danny said once, shuddering, but while I saw his point—there was something of the female impersonator about her—I didn’t agree. For one thing, my daddy had a long black beard. I thought she looked like an off-duty nun, out of uniform.
She had a way of looking swiftly stunned (eyes popping, lips parted, nostrils pinched) and then pained (eyebrows angled down, teeth bared to the canines, eyes squinted half shut) at our mistakes, before the forbearing nunlike smile appeared again and the encouraging nods commenced. She filed her nails short, in points, and painted them red. Her eyes were pale blue with brown streaks in them. She must have worn a powerful girdle under her dark straight skirts, because I once jostled her and she felt exactly like a piece of furniture—the unyielding back of our sofa, maybe, stuffed with horsehair and covered tightly with fabric. She always seemed to both of us like a fraud, a witch disguised as a nice lady. She smiled a lot, showing plenty of crimson gum line and sharp white teeth, and she always spoke gently, and she rewarded us with candy, and she was always patient, but the whole performance, no matter how well acted, reminded me of the witch in Hansel and Gretel—sweet as pie until she had the children where she wanted them, and then wham! The door slammed shut, the oven was lighted, the fiendish cackles were released at last …
I had to hold off Mrs. Meek, and the only way to do it was to resist reading, resist the words she sent flying at me, fight the workbook with its trick questions. And I did fight; so did Danny. My weapon was inattention, his a slowness of mind I thought well feigned. Together we drove her crazy, drove her to superhuman patience and weekly more terrible smiles and bags and bags of Hershey kisses. (Even then a practical child, I used to wonder who paid for the candy, Mrs. Meek or the nuns?) She used to say, “That’s better, Cordelia, really much better, it’s coming nicely,” after I stumbled through the tale of the spotted dog and the mud puddle; translated, her words meant “You little beast, how much longer will this go on?” (I could hardly read English, but I could read Mrs. Meek.) Once—only once—when my absentminded stammerings drove her to some kind of brink, she raised her hand as if to slap me, and there was an awful pause, an eternal three seconds that lasted until she deflected her hand to the candy bag. The smile remained frozen on her face, no less grim than the creepy leer of the cat-sprouting jack-o’-lantern on the wall, and she pushed a piece of candy at me and watched me eat it, showing her sharp teeth, her sharp claws reaching for another one. I ate all she gave me, hungrily; it was not for nothing that our remedial sessions were held just before lunch. But the candy wasn’t candy: it was reading medicine, and all three of us knew it. I would have resisted that, too, along with the other witch-blandishments, but though I knew it was medicine as surely as Robitussin and Kaopectate were medicine, it tasted just like candy, and I bolted it.
It worked. Gradually I learned to read, against my will. My will, as I said, was no match for Mrs. Meek’s. I sat at her knee and prattled off the little stories, stumbling still but, if I went slowly and kept my mind on it, getting through them passably, at least as well as Vinnie DeLuca, who was the worst reader in the third grade except for Danny and me.
Danny learned, too, though even more slowly than I did. He was always a Problem Reader, all through elementary school, sullenly collecting U’s and 43’s and “Disgraceful!”s on his spelling tests and book reports. I remember once, in sixth grade, I sat across the aisle from him, and we had to correct each other’s English tests. In an exercise requiring us to class a list of sentences as simple or compound, Danny got two out of ten right, obviously by hit-or-miss, and he spelled simple and compound, consistently, as smiple and compond, two words I came to like very much by the end of the test. (I had four wrong myself, but Danny caught only one of them.)
When I graduated out of the remedial class, Mrs. Meek gave me a giant Hershey bar, tied with a red ribbon, which I ate sitting on a toilet in the girls’ bathroom before I returned to the third grade. Candy was one of the many aspects of what I considered normal life that were forbidden by my parents, and even though the eight-ounce slab of Hershey chocolate was my diploma certifying passage into the world of letters, I knew it was best to devour it and destroy the evidence. I flushed the wrappers down the toilet along with the red ribbon, wiped my mouth on a paper towel, and marched, slightly sick, down the hall to the third-grade classroom, where Sister Victoria Maria gave me a cold smile and the Third Reader, Earth and Sky, in which I laboriously wrote my name. I leafed through it before lunch (which I gave to Billy Arp in exchange for being allowed into the kickball game at recess) in hopes of finding Ted and Nancy replaced at last by more interesting children. But there they were, lumpishly smiling, visiting Uncle Bill’s farm and learning about weather and romping with yet another dog, a collie named Sport. And I could read it all. I felt no triumph, only a sort of drab, betrayed gloom and a vivid, precocious resolution never to let such a thing happen to me again.
I had mastered reading, after a fashion, as I had learned to make my bed, and I put it in that category: “Boring Chores.” But I did it when I had to, and I ascribe to the fanged, creepy witchiness of Mrs. Meek the fact that the only kind of books I really like to read, to this day, are mysteries—and, come to think of it, that, I suppose, is what I’m writing.
Chapter Two
My Father’s House
My brother, Horatio, writes real mysteries—or, rather, not-real ones, fictional ones. He began as a professor specializing in Chaucer, but in the donnish tradition of academics who turn to crime writing as a sideline, he produced (one summer when it was too hot, he explained, for Middle English) his first murder mystery, Pride, Prejudice, and Poison, in which Jane Austen tracks down the “spa poisoner” who is mixing strychnine with the healthful waters of Bath. It was such a success, winning the Edgar award and selling half a million copies, that, at the expense of his book on Chaucer, Horatio turned out another the following summer: Deep in the Madding Crowd, with Thomas Hardy as the amateur detective who exposes a mass murderer. And when that too hit the bestseller lists he abandoned forever Chaucer, his associate professorship, and the hopes of my parents which he’d filled so faithfully all his life, and became a full-time writer of lurid literary detective stories: Death on the Mississippi (starring Mark Twain), Remembrance of Crimes Past (in which Proust solves the crime without leaving his cork-lined bedroom), and his latest, The Canterbury Deaths (because he got homesick for Chaucer).
My parents always tolerated Horatio’s degeneration into popular culture because he made so much money at it. My father is a poet, and like all poets he has spent most of his adult life grubbing after cash—grants, fellowships, chairs, residencies, readings, publishers’ advances—and he respects the stuff with a respect bordering on dementia, but he’d never admit it, any more than he’d admit he looked down on Horatio and considered him a sellout and a crass materialist. Money, according to my parents, is no good unless it’s been grubbed after in some arty way, and achieved in bits. The cash that flowed into Horatio’s bank account (and promptly out again, I should say) they considered tainted money.
Juliet did a little better: she was perpetually hard-up but intellectually respectable, writing verse dramas no one would produce and sonnet sequences no one would publish. For years, she flitted around the earth living on grants at various universities where she studied Greek. In her spare time, she poured out her soul into her verse epic, The Labyrinth, which dealt with herself in relation to Greek mythology. She’d been working on it for nine years, and the end was not in sight—which was just as well, because although my father (who managed to remain wildly excited by the project for all those nine years) promised to get Juliet a publisher, I had a feeling that this time his vast network of connections would break down and no one would touch it. I had seen the thing: it was thicker than David Copperfield and it was partly in Greek. Juliet used to bring my parents all the new bits, and they read them and beamed ecstatically and hugged her, as if she’d presented them with grandchildren.
My other sister, Miranda, was married to a man named Gilbert Sullivan (I kid you not) and had her own printing press, on which she and Gilbert published, chiefly their own works. (Miranda wrote novels about tormented women in analysis; Gilbert wrote art criticism.) Miranda is shaped like a hatpin—tall and thin, with piled-up hair. She used to play basketball. Both my sisters, in fact, went through periods of what my parents considered frivolity in connection with their height: Miranda, as “Ready Randy” Miller, put herself through college on basketball scholarships, and Juliet was briefly a fashion model. But Daddy went to Miranda’s games, and Mom bought the magazines in which Juliet was featured, just as they both read Horatio’s books. Their disapproval of Miranda’s and Juliet’s and Horatio’s strayings from the fold was always touched with amusement, and that’s because the three of them are relentlessly literary types, whatever their peccadilloes. Juliet with her epic, Miranda with her little press, even Horatio with his abandoned professorship and vulgar success: they all sit smack in the middle of various literary pies. Small wonder that I, by contrast, am the family disappointment: short to their tall, discreet to their flashy, sense to their sensibility. What they liked to do when we all got together was play Botticelli or Scrabble, or read Juliet’s verse epic aloud. What I liked to do was watch Hawaii Five-O or play blackjack.
My father is Jeremiah Miller, “a household word the way Tennyson was,” my mother likes to say when she sums up his career. There used to be a picture of Tennyson in the guest room (where all the odds and ends went), and he did remind me of my father—the beard, the melancholy brown eyes, the look of celebrity about him. But my father seems rougher, heartier, and I doubt Tennyson would want to have anything to do with him.
My father is, officially, an old-fashioned family man. He can be flamboyantly paternal. “These are my best poems,” he would say when we were small, gathering us to his bosom where the soft black beard flowed. “My masterpieces,” he sometimes continued. “My chefs d’oeuvres, my Don Juan, my Canterbury Tales, my Four Quartets—” His I-don’t-know-whats. It’s always been clear that he loves us—adores us—although it was also clear to me, from my earliest youth, that he loved us best when we were quiet, that children should be as unobtrusive as books on a shelf except when they were taken down for inspection, for inspiration, for amusement—sometimes for annotation. He loved us best when we were the children he had designed in his head.
I was never one of those children, and I learned early to stay out of his way, to avoid in particular his attic study (where Horatio had put a sign on the door: HALLOWED GROUND—characteristically, my father didn’t remove it when the joke was over) and the window beneath it. I learned silence. I tried to stay out of the house all I could. For one thing, I got more dirty work than any of my siblings. They caught on early that, at our house, you could effectively shirk chores if you whined out, “I’m reading!” or “Can’t I just finish this chapter?” So it was I, little Cinderella (“Here, Cordelia, you’re not doing anything—take out the garbage”), who became, by default, mother’s helper. At six, at seven, I was drying dishes, emptying garbage, setting the table, while Horatio and Juliet and Miranda slouched around lapping up pages of print. It made me mad, but it didn’t make me read. The truth was, I preferred to empty the garbage.
I wasn’t allowed to bring most of my friends home. My parents hardly ever approved of them. But I became adept at wangling invitations to their houses. They were mostly non-readers like me, kids whose parents would have admonished them if they had done much reading, “Don’t sit around all day with your nose in a book. You’ll ruin your eyes! Go out and play!” At their homes, no one ever said, “Hush! Daddy’s working!” because their daddies didn’t work at home. I used to long for a regular daddy who left the house in the morning and arrived home at dinnertime. Sandy Schutz (my best friend) had a daddy who got home at 6:30 and played kick-ball with her and her brother until dinner and then watched TV with them. I drooled over such normal living. My father’s poetry writing was like an illness, our house the house of an invalid who was confined to his room all day and emerged only in the evening. His poems come hard to him, he always tells interviewers, and in order to write them he needs long stretches of quiet. But in the evenings he wanted us to be there, confirming his success as a father, and what he liked best was for all of us to be in the same room, reading, with someone occasionally reading something aloud, or being struck by some idea, or proposing some word game. It was okay to interrupt as long as it was a literary or otherwise intellectual interruption; they would all look up, fingers keeping their places, and join in; then, interruption disposed of, down they’d dive again. I was a talkative kid, but gradually within the bosom of the family I developed a reputation for taciturnity—though it was really the stark knowledge that my interruptions would be met with patient smiles and small response. I sometimes thought living, for them, was little more than a break in their reading or their writing, and to me the silence that surrounded them was oppressive, alien, and hateful.
I, of course, during those jolly family evenings, was seldom reading. Not never: I was required as a schoolchild to do a certain amount. At the weekly compulsory trip to the school library I picked out a book along with everyone else, and occasionally even read it, if it was about animals and had plenty of pictures. Sometimes I was forced to read it. My fourth-grade teacher, Sister Caroline, used to make us write a weekly book report, and Sister Joseph Edward, in fifth grade, used to quiz me (and Danny and Vinnie and one or two other reading-resisters) about our library books. (I still remember, at the age of ten, trying to get away with How the Grinch Stole Christmas.)
But on most of those long evenings in our messy living room, I had to find other occupations for myself. What I wanted to do plenty of times was scream, throw apple cores, smash something, grab someone’s book and stuff pages in my mouth, and gabble horrible noises at them all. But I did none of these things, though it comforted me to imagine them, and worse. After I finished my homework I usually looked at my coins.
When I was eleven, my Aunt Phoebe gave me my grandfather’s coin collection, and I fell in love with it. At first my parents were thrilled because it was a faintly intellectual interest. “You’ll pick up some history, at least,” they said encouragingly. But as time went on my passion for the coins puzzled and even faintly disgusted them. They couldn’t understand how I could just keep looking at them, lying on the floor turning the pages of my coin albums as if they were—well, books. They gave me books on numismatics, but I didn’t read them, though I liked looking at the pictures. I preferred to learn about coins from Gene at the East Shore Stamp and Coin Shop. And in my spare time I coin-gazed, simply because I liked my coins—the way they looked, the aura they carried of many hands and many transactions and many people, and the fact that they were mine, all mine. And I liked adding up their value (accurately, in my head) and planning what coins I would add to my collection when I grew up and became rich. And I liked puzzling my parents perhaps best of all.
Why haven’t I said much about my mother? Maybe because I loved her most, or because she bugged me least. I think she was always quietly motherly as my father, for all his show, wasn’t really fatherly. Not that the family disease didn’t infect her as much as any of them. She writes biographies, short ones, of obscure literary figures. I used to think maybe I would read one or two of them, they’re so short; also, they’re inviting books. They’re published by Owl & Bantling, Ltd., of London, a firm that publishes Anglican liturgical works, treatises on gardening, and my mother’s biographies, and they treat my mother well. Her books are printed on creamy thick paper with the ragged edges that are hard to turn, and they all have rose-colored covers with a white spine and gold letters … thin, pretty books by my thin, pretty mother. I opened one once (waiting until no one was home, lest they get their hopes up), the thinnest one (82 pp.), called The Fire’s Path: A Life of Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd. It was about a twelfth-century Welsh warrior poet. I made out that his mother’s name was Pyfog and that his fame rests on eight poems and a good deal of Norman-bashing, but the story was so clogged with words I could hardly read it. I admit I didn’t try for long—I was afraid she’d come in and find me at it, and I’d have to confess I found it dull and incomprehensible—it was Welsh to me, har har har. My mother’s work is apparently a critical and scholarly success, though not—needless to say—a popular one. But Owl & Bantling don’t expect their authors to write best-sellers, they’d probably drop her if she did, and they write my mother affectionate letters, in ink. “Caviar to the general,” my father always said about her stuff, and this expression of her failure seemed curiously satisfying to both my parents. But though I’ve been acquainted with caviar since I was a baby and used to practice my small-motor skills on it, eating it black pearl by black pearl, no one ever told me who the general is; I was expected to know.
She was always at it, my mother. Unlike Daddy, she always did her work in the midst of the family, and I used to find her at the kitchen table when I got home from school, drinking Jackson’s Coronation Tea and, say, writing out lists of Anglo-Saxon verbs. Languages are her specialty; I think she knows all of them, particularly the ones which are dead, obsolete, or spoken only by one small tribe living on the banks of a tributary of some minor Australian river—that sort of thing. It depresses me, all that mental energy going for zilch. Not to be disrespectful of my mother. But I can see learning French if you’re going on vacation in France. I can even understand learning Latin or Old English so you can read the books written in it if that’s your inclination. But the Jeshoba dialect of the Murai? I ask you. In fact, I have asked her: she says she does it for fun, and I must admit my mother has always seemed to me a singularly happy woman. I once asked Juliet, though, and she said something else: “She does it to keep sane. Because of Daddy.” I am still absorbing this blasphemy.
When we were kids, our parents’ lives revolved around the family and my father’s work. We had plenty of company because my father needed to show off. His poet friends would come for interminable weekends of poetry reading and whiskey drinking. Juliet and I used to sneak out of bed at night to listen to the uproar. “Why do you have to be drunk all the time to be a poet?” I asked her once. “I’m a poet,” she said loftily, “and I’m not drunk.”
There was one man in particular, Theodore Low (jokingly called “The Dentist Poet” because he had briefly, in his youth, gone to dental school), who used to fascinate us. He became violent when he was drunk enough, and he was nearly always drunk enough. He came to visit perhaps twice a year, and I always looked forward to his coming—the way I looked forward to other natural disasters, like blizzards. For one thing, he liked me. I was the only dark-haired one in a houseful of blonde women, and he used to call me his little chocolate cream and sneak me expensive candies from New York. Once he brought me a white fur muff. Another time—not so pleasant a memory, though then it seemed like fun—when he was very drunk, he picked me up, threw me on the sofa, and began tickling me, both of us giggling ecstatically until my mother came in and he suddenly stopped. I remember his pungent breath and my mother’s set face. Ted Low also broke windows, pulled the phone out of the wall, smashed whiskey bottles, once set fire to his bed, and made passes at my mother. But my father said he had a great gift, so he kept coming—a short, fat man with a face the color of the suet we put out for the birds. He died in an asylum when I was seventeen, and I cried so hard I had to be kept home from school.
During the time my father was teaching (at Wesleyan for a while, then at Yale), there would be intense students hanging around with sheaves of poems, usually small squares of words typed in the middle of a big sheet of paper (a silly waste, I thought; why couldn’t they type two or three to a page?). They idolized my parents, fell in love with our big, book-messy house, and publicly envied us kids our terrific life. And there I was, the little malcontent, huddled over my gold and silver coins like a cavewoman over her fire, to keep off the ravening beasts: books, and book talk, and college boys trying to buddy up to me in order to make a good impression on my father.
For years, though, my war with the printed word never penetrated my father’s consciousness—not really. My mother and I used to discuss it, briefly but regularly over the years, discussions ending in sad sighs all around, but no matter how many U’s and notes from my teachers and picture-ridden library books I brought home, my father kept giving me absurdly inappropriate books for presents, and couching his affection for me in literary terms. What did it mean to me to be told I was his masterpiece, his Hamlet? Or to be thrust, helpless, into his poems? Or to be asked, every time I sulked, “‘So young and so untender?’” I didn’t want to be my father’s inspiration, I didn’t want to be a damned literary allusion, I just wanted to be his daughter. I wanted him to accept my differences, but his attitude toward me was always expectant: one of these days I’d take to books, just as one of these days I’d grow tall.
These hopes weren’t unreasonable when I was little, but they persisted into my adulthood. The truth is, my father is a snob; he couldn’t let a book-resistant offspring into the clan. But I was his daughter, he was the poet of family life, he couldn’t very well expel me. So he refused to admit my failings were final. He applied faith, hope, and charity to my case. And he waited for the baby of the family to grow up, to settle down, to become the person he expected.
The waiting hasn’t aged him; he doesn’t seem to have changed much from his early pictures—the series of snapshots, for instance, he and my mother took of each other on their honeymoon (a walking tour through England) in 1941. My father today hasn’t one white hair, his cheeks are rosy, his vision is 20-20, his belly curves out over his belt to exactly the same degree it did when he was twenty-five. If all his hair turned white, he’d look like Santa Claus, but for the moment he is a large, hearty man who looks more like a lumberjack than a poet. You’d never peg him as someone who sits around writing and reading all day. His poems, by contrast, are apparently polished and classical—and “accessible,” I’m told, in spite of his turning me into a red maple in one of them. They achieve, according to Time magazine, “the difficult combination of readability and profundity.” His fourth book, Where the Children Go, is in paperback at the drugstore in town: “America’s best-loved poet,” the cover blurb says. (I saw it in the rack the other day when I was in there and blushed scarlet, remembering that it’s the volume that contains the poem about my getting my period: “Meditation on a Daughter’s Menses.”) The two-part TV special about him and his family (I refused to appear) set a record for audience response on the public broadcasting station. My mother smiles and murmurs about Browning, Frost … There are times when Tennyson isn’t enough for her.
It may be partly my father’s large, picturesque hairiness, and our big old house in the Connecticut woods, that have endeared him to the public at a time when bushy beards and wood stoves (we have four of them) and ten acres of birch forest and meadow and close family ties are dear to the hearts of Americans. Or it may be, as they said on the TV special, that “Americans are ready for poetry again,” and specifically for Jeremiah Miller’s brand of poetry.
But it’s my theory that he simply knows how to market himself. He has always made sure that he and his beard and his stoves and acres and kids are visible. Even before the TV special, he let us all be used in a Time photo essay: “The Poet and His Family.” I was too young to protest: there I am, “Cordelia, youngest of the Miller brood,” sitting up in the apple tree. I’m even quoted: “Says Daughter Cordelia, 12, with the devastating honesty of her namesake, ‘What’s all the fuss about? He’s just my dad,’” words I never uttered. (They could make me sit for the damned photographers, but they couldn’t make me talk; and even at the age of twelve I knew that, whatever my father was, he was surely not just my dad.)
Then, besides Time, there were women’s magazine articles on my mother: “Elizabeth Miller, devoted mother, first-class cook, nature buff, linguist, biographer, and—last but by no means least—wife to America’s unofficial Poet Laureate.” One magazine even featured some of my mother’s bizarre, extravagant, impetuous recipes, and another was keen to make her over with a haircut and eyeshadow and a string of pearls until my father put his foot down. Daddy has appeared on the Dick Cavett show twice, and he writes articles for the Times Op-Ed page, usually about the old-fashioned virtues of this and that and the other thing. He got his publishers to put into print Horatio’s autobiographical novel (written before he left for Harvard). He even got in on Juliet’s modeling career: Vogue did a series called “The Renaissance of the Family” that included a four-page spread on Juliet (in Ralph Lauren) and her pop (in flannel shirt and dungarees he’d had since the 1940s), and along with it a poem he composed for the occasion called “Daughter,” which compared Juliet to (I think) a loaf of rising bread.
It tires me to think of it, the lengths he’s gone to for the purpose of cramming literature down the throats of his countrymen. On them, it works. People write him letters saying he’s changed their lives. They send him gifts, usually handmade. He’s always giving readings—college students love him, so do senior citizens. Dick Cavett calls him up. Yale wants him back. He’s been to the White House four times. Only with his youngest daughter has he failed.
I once made a list—I suppose I was about thirteen—of my differences from the rest of the family. It’s in my List Notebook, the same one I’ve been using all these years, so tidy are my habits, so tiny my handwriting. What it actually is, is a dark blue Old Honesty Composition Book, the kind with the boy and the dog on the front cover and Useful Tables on the back. I bought it when I was in the fifth grade, at the suggestion of Sister Joseph Edward, to keep a list of difficult spelling words, but I never went beyond the first five: lavender, sheriff, radiator, fiendish, humble. That was one list that could have gone on indefinitely, but I quit there, perhaps from the hopelessness of it, more probably from sheer boredom. I devoted the rest of the book to more interesting lists. “Friends,” for example (six names: Danny Frontenac and Billy Arp plus Sandy Schutz and three other girls in my class) and “Coins” (I can date this list precisely: the night of the day—my eleventh birthday—when my aunt gave me Grandpa Cole’s collection).
This particular list is on the fourth or fifth page of my List Notebook, and it’s headed “Differences”:
1. Don’t like reading or writting
2. left-handed
3. short
4. scallop-ear
5.
Number five is left blank not because I could think of only four but because there were so many—such vastness that was not covered in those four superficial items. The profound difference between the others and me was undefinable, unlistable. To this day I haven’t been able to fill in number five, but I still see the rightness of that extra number and the blank space after it.
The differences I did list, though, are not really all that trivial—even my left-handedness. How I came to be the only left-handed person in a family of righties I don’t know. Grandpa Cole, the coin collector, was left-handed. He’s the only one anybody knows of. He died when I was a baby, and I’ve always wondered if he was as left-handed as I am: my right hand is practically useless for any movement more delicate than simply picking something up. I couldn’t hold a fork properly with my right hand if my life depended on it, and when kids used to fool around by scrawling their names with their opposite hand, I was a sensation, hardly able to hold a pencil, much less write, even a scribble. My whole right side, in fact, I’ve always thought of as my vulnerable side; it’s my right ear, too, that has the queer, deeply scalloped lobe. When I was married, I insisted on wearing my ring on my right hand, mostly so it wouldn’t get in the way, though eventually I decided it added strength and stability to my bad hand. And when I was obliged to remove it my hand was always uneasy, less defended than ever …
I’m beginning to be bothered by my lack of organization here. Written-down words have a way of wandering off, and you can’t organize them with a gesture or an inflection or a touch on the hand the way you can speech. You set them down neatly (in your tiny, slanting backhand), and before you know it they march off, forming odd links, hauling in other words, clogging together in ideas you never intended. I keep wanting to supply headings to hold them in: “My Left Hand” and “Lists” and, before that, “Learning to Read” and “My Father’s Poems.” I would still prefer, probably, merely to list instead of write. But listing does have its limitations, even I can see that. It could never deal adequately with the tale I have to tell; I know I have to write it out. If I’m going to deal with it at all, I have to do it with words.
Whenever I read my father’s poems, I always think: why doesn’t he just come out and say it? I know this is the philistine’s approach, I know I’m condemning myself as an inferior form of humanity even to admit to it—my father, after all, is Jeremiah Miller—but I still can’t understand why a poem about me (at least it’s called “Of Cordelia, Small Daughter”) should go on for thirty lines about a red maple tree. I always come out and say it. I believe experience can be explained and understood, and I’m here to do it, taking my pencil in my strong left hand and setting down word after laborious word. But I resent all the way the necessity of doing so, of succumbing at last to the family fetish—me writing a book! It’s another victory for the forces of Mrs. Meek. And this time, if I’m rewarded with a ribbon-tied Hershey bar, I won’t be able to eat it, not even secretly in the bathroom, because candy bars are on my list of “Forbidden Foods.” But I don’t need anything tied up in ribbon. The setting-down of this story, the labor of this writing, is its own reward—like virtue.
There won’t be much virtue in this tale, though. It’s a story of crime, punishment, prison, adultery, deceit …
There. I’ve whipped up interest right at the beginning, just as Horatio did in Pride, Prejudice, and Poison.
Chapter Three
Hector’s Market
As you might expect, I left my father’s house as soon as I could. I did it by getting married to Danny Frontenac when I was nineteen.