Chez Cordelia Read Free Page B

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