Percy
REMINISCENCE, along with the cheese boards and ugly pottery sometimes given to brides, seems to have a manifest destiny with the sea. Reminiscences are written on such a table as this, corrected, published, read, and then they begin their inevitable journey toward the bookshelves in those houses and cottages one rents for the summer. In the last house we rented, we had beside our bed the Memories of a Grand Duchess, the Recollections of a Yankee Whaler, and a paperback copy of Goodbye to All That, but it is the same all over the world. The only book in my hotel room in Taormina was Recordi d’un Soldato Garibaldino, and in my room in Yalta I found «Повесть о Жизни». Unpopularity is surely some part of this drifting toward salt water, but since the sea is our most universal symbol for memory, might there not be some mysterious affinity between these published recollections and the thunder of waves? So I put down what follows with the happy conviction that these pages will find their way into some bookshelf with a good view of a stormy coast. I can even see the room—see the straw rug, the window glass clouded with salt, and feel the house shake to the ringing of a heavy sea.
Great-uncle Ebenezer was stoned on the streets of Newburyport for his abolitionist opinions. His demure wife, Georgiana (an artiste on the pianoforte), used once or twice a month to braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe, and, having been given by psychic forces the personality of an Indian squaw, receive messages from the dead. My father's cousin, Anna Boynton, who had taught Greek at Radcliffe, starved herself to death during the Armenian famine. She and her sister Nanny had the copper skin, high cheekbones, and black hair of the Natick Indians. My father liked to recall the night he drank all the champagne on the New York-Boston train. He started drinking splits with some friend before dinner, and when they finished the splits they emptied the quarts and the magnums and were working on a Jeroboam when the train reached Boston. He felt that this guzzling was heroic. My Uncle Hamlet—a black-mouthed old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team—called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, “I’ve had the best fifty years of this country’s history. You can have the rest.” He seemed to hand it to me on a platter—droughts, depressions, convulsions of nature, pestilence, and war. He was wrong, of course, but the idea pleased him. This all took place in the environs of Athenian Boston, but the family seemed much closer to the hyperbole and rhetoric that stem from Wales, Dublin, and the various principalities of alcohol than to the sermons of Phillips Brooks.
One of the most vivid members of my mother’s side of the family was an aunt who called herself Percy, and who smoked cigars. There was no sexual ambiguity involved. She was lovely, fair, and intensely feminine. We were never very close. My father may have disliked her, although I don’t recall this. My maternal grandparents had emigrated from England in the 1890s with their six children. My Grandfather Holinshed was described as a bounder—a word that has always evoked for me the image of a man leaping over a hedge just ahead of a charge of buckshot. I don’t know what mistakes he had made in England, but his transportation to the New World was financed by his father-in-law, Sir Percy Devere, and he was paid a small remittance so long as he did not return to England. He detested the United States and died a few years after his arrival here. On the day of his funeral, Grandmother announced to her children that there would be a family conference in the evening. They should be prepared to discuss their plans. When the conference was called, Grandmother asked the children in turn what they planned to make of their lives. Uncle Tom wanted to be a soldier. Uncle Harry wanted to be a sailor. Uncle Bill wanted to be a merchant. Aunt Emily wanted to marry. Mother wanted to be a nurse and heal the sick. Aunt Florence—who later called herself Percy—exclaimed, “I wish to be a great painter, like the Masters of the Italian Renaissance!” Grandmother then said, “Since at least one of you has a clear idea of her destiny, the rest of you will go to work and Florence will go to art school.” That is what they did, and so far as I know none of them ever resented this decision.
How smooth it all seems and how different it must have been. The table where they gathered would have been lighted by whale oil or kerosene. They lived in a farmhouse in Dorchester. They would have had lentils or porridge or at best stew for dinner. They were very poor. If it was in the winter, they would be cold, and after the conference the wind would extinguish Grandmother’s candle—stately Grandmother—as she went down the back path to the malodorous outhouse. They couldn’t have bathed more than once a week, and I suppose they bathed out of pails. The succinctness of Percy’s exclamation seems to have obscured the facts of a destitute widow with six children. Someone must have washed all those dishes, and washed them in greasy water, drawn from a pump and heated over a fire.
The threat of gentility in such recollections is Damoclean, but these were people without pretense or affectation, and when Grandmother spoke French at the dinner table, as she often did, she merely meant to put her education to some practical use. It was, of course, a much simpler world. For example, Grandmother read in the paper one day that a drunken butcher, the father of four, had chopped up his wife with a meat cleaver, and she went directly to Boston by horsecar or hansom—whatever transportation was available. There was a crowd around the tenement where the murder had taken place, and two policemen guarded the door. Grandmother got past the policemen and found the butcher’s four terrified children in a bloody apartment. She got their clothes together, took the children home with her, and kept them for a month or longer, when other homes were found. Cousin Anna’s decision to starve and Percy’s wish to become a painter were made with the same directness. It was what Percy thought she could do best—what would make most sense of her life.
She began to call herself Percy in art school, because she felt that there was some prejudice against women in the arts. In her last year in art school she did a six-by-fourteen-foot painting of Orpheus taming the beasts. This won her a gold medal and a trip to Europe, where she studied at the Beaux-Arts for a few months. When she returned, she was given three portrait commissions, but she was much too skeptical to succeed at this. Her portraits were pictorial indictments, and all three of them were unacceptable. She was not an aggressive woman, but she was immoderate and critical.