shaves often enough? How often do you shave?”
“Every three days,” I said, flushing up my neck and cheeks.
“Well, try it every other day.”
“Yes, try to be neater,” my mother said. “I’m sure girls don’t like boys with fuzz on their chin.”
“I think he’s too proud of his beard to shave it,” my sister said, and giggled.
“I feel sorry for the man who marries you,” I said. “Because everybody thinks you’re sweet and you’re not.”
She smiled pityingly at me, and then she looked down over the newspaper again.
* * *
Until I was four, we lived in a large white frame house overlooking the Mississippi River, south of St. Louis. This house had, among other riches, a porte-cochere, an iron deer on the lawn, and a pond with goldfish swimming in it. Once, I asked my mother why we had left that earlier house, and she said, “We lost our money—that’s why. Your father was a very trusting man,” she said. “He was always getting swindled.”
She was not a mercenary woman, nor was she mean about money—except in spells that didn’t come often—but she believed that what we lost with the money was much of our dignity and much of our happiness. She did not want to see life in a grain of sand; she wanted to see it from the shores of the Riviera, wearing a white sharkskin dress.
I will never forget her astonishment when she took us—she was dressed in her best furs, as a gesture, I suppose—to see the house that was to be our home from then on and I told her I liked it. It had nine rooms, a stained-glass window in the hall, and neighbors all up and down the block. She detested that house.
As she grew older, she changed, she grew less imperious. She put her hair into a roll, wore dark-colored clothes, said often, “I’m not a young woman anymore,” and began to take pride in being practical. But she remained determined; she had seen a world we didn’t remember too clearly, and she wanted us to make our way back to it. “I had it all,” she said once to my sister. “I was good-looking. We were rich. You have no idea what it was like. If I had died when I was thirty, I would have died completely happy. . . .”
But being practical did not come easy to her. She was not practical in her bones, and every spring brings back the memory of my mother peering nearsightedly, with surprise, at the tulip shoots in her flower border. And it brings back her look of distraught efficiency during spring housecleaning. “You’d better clear your closet shelves tonight,” she would warn me, “because tomorrow Tillie and I are going in there with a vacuum cleaner, and we’ll throw out everything we find.” Year after year, I would run upstairs to save my treasures—even when I was sixteen and on the verge of a great embarkation, the nature of which I could not even begin to guess. My treasures consisted of my postcard collection—twenty-five hundred cards in all, arranged alphabetically by states of the Union and countries of the world (the wonder was that I lived in St. Louis)—an old baseball glove, my leaf collection, two obscene comic books I had won in a poker game at a Boy Scout jamboree, my marble collection, and thirty-five pages of secret thoughts written out in longhand. All these had to be taken out to the garage and hidden among the tools until the frenzy of cleaning was over and I could smuggle them back upstairs.
After supper, as the season grew warmer, my mother and sister and I would sit on the screened porch in the rear of the house, marooned among the shadows and the new leaves and the odor of insect spray, the light from our lamps sticking to the trees like bits of yellow paper. Usually the radio was on, and my mother, a book on her lap, her face abstracted (she was usually bored; her life was moved mainly by the burning urge to rise once more along the thin edge of social distinction), would listen to the comedians and laugh. When the phone rang, she would get up and go into the house