Family Happiness Read Free Page A

bad time in his professional life. He loved his work; he was patient and dogged, but he expected results. One big anti-trust case was not going well; another was on appeal. These cases had dragged on and on, and when they came to no satisfactory end, Henry was first furious, then frustrated, and then dark. In the past year Polly had noticed how much oxygen in the atmosphere of home Henry’s job used up. Had he always been so moody? So unresponsive? So snappish? So abstracted? So preoccupied?
    Polly had grown up in a household in which a father’s work was paramount. It was not easy to be the child of a distinguished parent, Polly thought, but it certainly taught a girl her place. In Polly’s household, Henry’s job was not so much paramount as catered to. Polly had two occupations: her real job and her job of lightening her husband’s darkness, if she could. She could not get incompetent judges off the bench, or dig up expert witnesses, or ease the burden of document research, but she could make Henry’s home a happy fortress. That, she felt, was her true skill, and if Henry did not particularly notice his well-run and happy fortress these days, he would when the pressure was off him, Polly felt. If he had to be asked whether his pancakes were all right, instead of spontaneously thanking Polly for them, he must at least find consolation in having a loving wife to sweeten his morning. It was hard to be angry at a man as fine as Henry for what Polly considered second-rate complaints. Her goal was to be good and forgiving—that was the mission of people with level and happy temperaments, as her mother had often reminded her. And as the only member of her family who was not moody, quirky, or willful, she had had plenty of practice.
    The Solo-Millers dressed for Sunday breakfast. This meant that you could not show up in your old blue jeans, and in the days when Polly had gone for a Sunday-morning ride in Central Park, she was made to change out of her riding clothes and into a skirt. She had spent hours of her adult life wondering what a child could wear that would be formal enough for breakfast and rugged enough to be played in. Polly hated the sight of a child dressed up. She remembered her own childhood clothes as scratchy—Wendy believed that in public a child should look starched. Polly’s children were taken to their grandparents’ wearing corduroy, and she had insisted that Dee-Dee be permitted to wear trousers.
    â€œYour father will have a fit,” said Wendy. Henry, Sr., of course, cared chiefly that his grandchildren did not shout; he hated a shouting child. But on this point Wendy was right: he did not like to see girls in trousers. Andreya was an exception. She did not own a skirt and there was nothing to be done about it.
    â€œI can’t think why you want your daughter to look like a hooligan at breakfast,” Wendy said.
    â€œI don’t want her to have to sit for forty minutes feeling strangled by her clothes,” Polly said. “Besides, they’re mostly not at the table. They’re mostly playing in the park. Why should she have to worry about getting her nice dresses dirty?”
    â€œModern life!” Wendy said. “I just don’t understand it. Everyone wants to look like everyone else. This notion of being casual. No sense of decorum or occasion.”
    Polly favored soft, old, sober clothes. She usually wore to her mother’s a cashmere sweater and a tweed skirt. She wore her old blue jeans only in Maine, where that was acceptable dress, and even then, her father flinched a little. “Going around looking like a fright” was his description of the appearance of most young people.
    Polly finished browsing through the paper and took Henry’s tray into the kitchen. Henry roused himself and went to shower and shave. It was time to get the children dressed and to make sure all their cows and hedgehogs were put away.
    â€œIs