sparing me the bitterness of failure. But there was in her also a curious pessimism about the ability of her children to achieve success in any field. If one of us fell in love, for example, she tended to assume it would be unrequited.
2. John and Priscilla
M Y BROTHER JOHN, six years my senior, was a sober, serious man with a fine clear mind who interrupted a promising career in the State Department to share a life of pleasure and leisure with a rich and devoted wife. Armed with discrimination, taste, and moderation, they achieved both happiness and success in the sort of existence that often offers less than that.
John was a brilliant student at school and college, but he was totally devoid of personal ambition and made not the slightest change in his natural good manners in greeting no matter how famous a visitor. When our cousin Janet Auchincloss (Mrs. Hugh D.), whose daughter Jackie would become first lady, beckoned to him at a crowded Washington party to come and talk to her, he simply shook his head. Asked later to explain this, he told her:
"But Janet, to get near you I have to elbow my rough way through a gaping crowd. I don't do that."
"
Look whom you leave me with.
"
Janet was right. The great are left with the wrong people.
***
Once, when I pointed out to my older brother that I found his group in Newport on the stuffy side, he replied that their dinners were good and their guests on time and never inebriated. I retorted that he would have been happy with the formality and regularity of the court of Versailles, and he did not deny it. For a long time it seemed to me that this propriety was inconsistent with a serious life, that such an attitude must indicate a certain triviality of spirit or even of heart. I was wrong.
My brother, you see, needed only himself for an intellectual companion. He was a deep reader and thinker, and a conscientious liberal in a rigidly conservative society to whose tenets he paid no attention but never took the trouble to contradict. When he had to face a long and agonizing death struggle, no one was ever a better or more cheerful patient, making as little fuss as possible for those looking after him and never complaining. "I can do less and less things," he told me once, "but the lucky thing is that I still enjoy those things."
No less worthy of respect, my uncle Bill, as a Japanese prisoner after the fall of Hong Kong, did all that could be done for his fellows who appointed him as their liaison with the guards and other captors. He and his wife were generally credited with having done everything possible to alleviate the general misery.
I thought of these two men one weekend when my wife, Adele, and I were visiting her grandmother on Long Island, and I happened to overhear a conversation between her uncle, Douglas Burden, and his elderly mother, Adele Sloane Burden, who was, at the time, more often referred to as Mrs. Richard Tobin. During the talk, Douglas urged her to persuade his brother Jimmy not to play golf at the Piping Rock Club on the north shore of Long Island. Jimmy's game, it seems, was a disgrace to the family, at least as far as Douglas was concerned. Neither his mother nor my uncle would have gone along with this; they were much too kind to have hurt anyone's feelings for such a reason, but they would have sympathized with Douglas's distaste for any public display of athletic incompetence.
For a time it seemed my sister Priscilla might be deprived of many of life's great satisfactions. This shy and affectionate girl suffered from an even worse case of the depressive condition that plagued my father.
She and I had adjoining bedrooms on the fourth floor front of the family brownstone on Ninety-first Street. She, being my elder by almost two years, of course occupied the larger room with two windows on the street while I was relegated to the much smaller which had only one. I resented this. The bathroom in the middle of the fourth floor we shared, and I was
2. John and Priscilla
M Y BROTHER JOHN, six years my senior, was a sober, serious man with a fine clear mind who interrupted a promising career in the State Department to share a life of pleasure and leisure with a rich and devoted wife. Armed with discrimination, taste, and moderation, they achieved both happiness and success in the sort of existence that often offers less than that.
John was a brilliant student at school and college, but he was totally devoid of personal ambition and made not the slightest change in his natural good manners in greeting no matter how famous a visitor. When our cousin Janet Auchincloss (Mrs. Hugh D.), whose daughter Jackie would become first lady, beckoned to him at a crowded Washington party to come and talk to her, he simply shook his head. Asked later to explain this, he told her:
"But Janet, to get near you I have to elbow my rough way through a gaping crowd. I don't do that."
"
Look whom you leave me with.
"
Janet was right. The great are left with the wrong people.
***
Once, when I pointed out to my older brother that I found his group in Newport on the stuffy side, he replied that their dinners were good and their guests on time and never inebriated. I retorted that he would have been happy with the formality and regularity of the court of Versailles, and he did not deny it. For a long time it seemed to me that this propriety was inconsistent with a serious life, that such an attitude must indicate a certain triviality of spirit or even of heart. I was wrong.
My brother, you see, needed only himself for an intellectual companion. He was a deep reader and thinker, and a conscientious liberal in a rigidly conservative society to whose tenets he paid no attention but never took the trouble to contradict. When he had to face a long and agonizing death struggle, no one was ever a better or more cheerful patient, making as little fuss as possible for those looking after him and never complaining. "I can do less and less things," he told me once, "but the lucky thing is that I still enjoy those things."
No less worthy of respect, my uncle Bill, as a Japanese prisoner after the fall of Hong Kong, did all that could be done for his fellows who appointed him as their liaison with the guards and other captors. He and his wife were generally credited with having done everything possible to alleviate the general misery.
I thought of these two men one weekend when my wife, Adele, and I were visiting her grandmother on Long Island, and I happened to overhear a conversation between her uncle, Douglas Burden, and his elderly mother, Adele Sloane Burden, who was, at the time, more often referred to as Mrs. Richard Tobin. During the talk, Douglas urged her to persuade his brother Jimmy not to play golf at the Piping Rock Club on the north shore of Long Island. Jimmy's game, it seems, was a disgrace to the family, at least as far as Douglas was concerned. Neither his mother nor my uncle would have gone along with this; they were much too kind to have hurt anyone's feelings for such a reason, but they would have sympathized with Douglas's distaste for any public display of athletic incompetence.
For a time it seemed my sister Priscilla might be deprived of many of life's great satisfactions. This shy and affectionate girl suffered from an even worse case of the depressive condition that plagued my father.
She and I had adjoining bedrooms on the fourth floor front of the family brownstone on Ninety-first Street. She, being my elder by almost two years, of course occupied the larger room with two windows on the street while I was relegated to the much smaller which had only one. I resented this. The bathroom in the middle of the fourth floor we shared, and I was
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