Herself Read Free

of a terrible mess that everybody’s in. We’re in the Army Ordnance now, traveling with a baby, on half the salary, which doesn’t always come through on time.
    Once, in a new town, we go to the store with $5 to cover the ten days to the end of the month and, after setting aside the baby’s milk money, buy beans, flour, lard, a bacon slab, two cans tomatoes, and eggs. Sugar and spices we carry with us; no coffee, a little tea. We could telegraph “home,” but we are gourmets now, weighers of experience. At night, for health, we carefully lick the baby’s cod-liver spoon, each to a side. I make muffins with a water recipe I know, lard cookies with lemon extract, beans with Bell’s seasoning, and bacon with beans. We have a roof, a fireplace, a sink, wood in the yard, toilet in the house, all needed beds and tables, and a musical instrument.
    On the last night, I play a flourish on it, and set forth our dinner—a triumph. For each of us, one half of the last of everything—of a muffin crowned with a poached egg, crossed with bacon, sunk in “cream” sauce, and, on top, from some Christmas box, a bubbling rind of cheese. We’re not perky or grand; we’re temporarily cozy, and fearful. We are ordinary, for our time. The decade I came out to was over. But that night, and often after, I could feel it inside me, reassuring me of what was real.
    Every decade sooner or later gets authenticated in every detail, maybe by a later one that falls in love with it. For years, the ’20s have been our belle époque , congealed by us into a mélange of Riviera tennis matches with Gertrude Stein leading Gatsby, and diamonds-are-girl’s-best, dusty answer, to death-by-toreador—in the revolutionary afternoon. That’s the easy, highlighting way. Now it’s the turn of the ’30s, and we can all see that film-fashion image coming, in the berets and the bell-bottoms, and Humphrey Bogart’s revisited nonsmile.
    Nice, all of it, but it’s not the straight story. What is? No decade is ever all economics, either, any more than it is only what it wears, or sings. And a decade is never itself only. For some people, the ’30s will always be the time they first heard the Bach passacaglia as well as “Those Little White Lies.” All the sex in the world is in every decade, and all the subjects of literature. So, the mountain of what I haven’t mentioned, from Mae West to dance marathons to the rise of John Dewey to the decline of Jack Dempsey, doesn’t oppress me. I’ve my own dream, or artifact.
    I pick—an apple. My nickel Cézanne, it now holds an era, polished by the decent, trembling fingers of the past. In it I see us, then and now. Some men never got over that time; they lost their confidence there, sitting at idle windows, in vague West Virginias of the soul. Others, like me, have merely an odd way with money, call it healthy or ambivalent. At times we can’t spend money, at times we can’t save it—depending. We’re often not good at getting jobs, but are beavers when we do. And many a woman among us, no matter her stock list, and sables, feels safest with an egg in the house. No wonder some of the young, in search of the pure, are nostalgic for our bitter-bright youth. No wonder we are. In any decade, men and women have to settle for themselves the connection between money and life. The ’30s showed us—the difference.
    Still, I had a special feeling for American fashions in decades. Falling in love with a part of the past is a human habit. Surely it must start in those slanted oral histories given the young. Those handed me had had an oddly longer span than is customary. Born of a father and grandfather who had both waited to marry and rear families until near elderly, when I delved into that two-generational perspective which is a child’s usual lot, I unwittingly went much farther back. I heard nothing direct from that grandfather who, on record here as an elder of the synagogue in 1832, was probably born in the