Chez Cordelia

by Kitty Burns Florey

  It worked. Gradually I learned to read, against my will. My will, as I said, was no match for Mrs. Meek’s. I sat at her knee and prattled off the little stories, stumbling still but, if I went slowly and kept my mind on it, getting through them passably, at least as well as Vinnie DeLuca, who was the worst reader in the third grade except for Danny and me.

  Danny learned, too, though even more slowly than I did. He was always a Problem Reader, all through elementary school, sullenly collecting U’s and 43’s and “Disgraceful!”s on his spelling tests and book reports. I remember once, in sixth grade, I sat across the aisle from him, and we had to correct each other’s English tests. In an exercise requiring us to class a list of sentences as simple or compound, Danny got two out of ten right, obviously by hit-or-miss, and he spelled simple and compound, consistently, as smiple and compond, two words I came to like very much by the end of the test. (I had four wrong myself, but Danny caught only one of them.)

  When I graduated out of the remedial class, Mrs. Meek gave me a giant Hershey bar, tied with a red ribbon, which I ate sitting on a toilet in the girls’ bathroom before I returned to the third grade. Candy was one of the many aspects of what I considered normal life that were forbidden by my parents, and even though the eight-ounce slab of Hershey chocolate was my diploma certifying passage into the world of letters, I knew it was best to devour it and destroy the evidence. I flushed the wrappers down the toilet along with the red ribbon, wiped my mouth on a paper towel, and marched, slightly sick, down the hall to the third-grade classroom, where Sister Victoria Maria gave me a cold smile and the Third Reader, Earth and Sky, in which I laboriously wrote my name. I leafed through it before lunch (which I gave to Billy Arp in exchange for being allowed into the kickball game at recess) in hopes of finding Ted and Nancy replaced at last by more interesting children. But there they were, lumpishly smiling, visiting Uncle Bill’s farm and learning about weather and romping with yet another dog, a collie named Sport. And I could read it all. I felt no triumph, only a sort of drab, betrayed gloom and a vivid, precocious resolution never to let such a thing happen to me again.

  I had mastered reading, after a fashion, as I had learned to make my bed, and I put it in that category: “Boring Chores.” But I did it when I had to, and I ascribe to the fanged, creepy witchiness of Mrs. Meek the fact that the only kind of books I really like to read, to this day, are mysteries—and, come to think of it, that, I suppose, is what I’m writing.

  Chapter Two

  My Father’s House

  My brother, Horatio, writes real mysteries—or, rather, not-real ones, fictional ones. He began as a professor specializing in Chaucer, but in the donnish tradition of academics who turn to crime writing as a sideline, he produced (one summer when it was too hot, he explained, for Middle English) his first murder mystery, Pride, Prejudice, and Poison, in which Jane Austen tracks down the “spa poisoner” who is mixing strychnine with the healthful waters of Bath. It was such a success, winning the Edgar award and selling half a million copies, that, at the expense of his book on Chaucer, Horatio turned out another the following summer: Deep in the Madding Crowd, with Thomas Hardy as the amateur detective who exposes a mass murderer. And when that too hit the bestseller lists he abandoned forever Chaucer, his associate professorship, and the hopes of my parents which he’d filled so faithfully all his life, and became a full-time writer of lurid literary detective stories: Death on the Mississippi (starring Mark Twain), Remembrance of Crimes Past (in which Proust solves the crime without leaving his cork-lined bedroom), and his latest, The Canterbury Deaths (because he got homesick for Chaucer).

  My parents always tolerated Horatio’s degeneration into popular culture because he made so much money at it. My father is a poet, and like all poets he has spent most of his adult life grubbing after cash—grants, fellowships, chairs, residencies, readings, publishers’ advances—and he respects the 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 as books on a shelf except when they were taken down for inspection, for inspiration, for amusement—sometimes for annotation. He loved us best when we were the children he had designed in his head.

  I was never one of those children, and I learned early to stay out of his way, to avoid in particular his attic study (where Horatio had put a sign on the door: HALLOWED GROUND—characteristically, my father didn’t remove it when the joke was over) and the window beneath it. I learned silence. I tried to stay out of the house all I could. For one thing, I got more dirty work than any of my siblings. The
y caught on early that, at our house, you could effectively shirk chores if you whined out, “I’m reading!” or “Can’t I just finish this chapter?” So it was I, little Cinderella (“Here, Cordelia, you’re not doing anything—take out the garbage”), who became, by default, mother’s helper. At six, at seven, I was drying dishes, emptying garbage, setting the table, while Horatio and Juliet and Miranda slouched around lapping up pages of print. It made me mad, but it didn’t make me read. The truth was, I preferred to empty the garbage.

  I wasn’t allowed to bring most of my friends home. My parents hardly ever approved of them. But I became adept at wangling invitations to their houses. They were mostly non-readers like me, kids whose parents would have admonished them if they had done much reading, “Don’t sit around all day with your nose in a book. You’ll ruin your eyes! Go out and play!” At their homes, no one ever said, “Hush! Daddy’s working!” because their daddies didn’t work at home. I used to long for a regular daddy who left the house in the morning and arrived home at dinnertime. Sandy Schutz (my best friend) had a daddy who got home at 6:30 and played kick-ball with her and her brother until dinner and then watched TV with them. I drooled over such normal living. My father’s poetry writing was like an illness, our house the house of an invalid who was confined to his room all day and emerged only in the evening. His poems come hard to him, he always tells interviewers, and in order to write them he needs long stretches of quiet. But in the evenings he wanted us to be there, confirming his success as a father, and what he liked best was for all of us to be in the same room, reading, with someone occasionally reading something aloud, or being struck by some idea, or proposing some word game. It was okay to interrupt as long as it was a literary or otherwise intellectual interruption; they would all look up, fingers keeping their places, and join in; then, interruption disposed of, down they’d dive again. I was a talkative kid, but gradually within the bosom of the family I developed a reputation for taciturnity—though it was really the stark knowledge that my interruptions would be met with patient smiles and small response. I sometimes thought living, for them, was little more than a break in their reading or their writing, and to me the silence that surrounded them was oppressive, alien, and hateful.

  I, of course, during those jolly family evenings, was seldom reading. Not never: I was required as a schoolchild to do a certain amount. At the weekly compulsory trip to the school library I picked out a book along with everyone else, and occasionally even read it, if it was about animals and had plenty of pictures. Sometimes I was forced to read it. My fourth-grade teacher, Sister Caroline, used to make us write a weekly book report, and Sister Joseph Edward, in fifth grade, used to quiz me (and Danny and Vinnie and one or two other reading-resisters) about our library books. (I still remember, at the age of ten, trying to get away with How the Grinch Stole Christmas.)

  But on most of those long evenings in our messy living room, I had to find other occupations for myself. What I wanted to do plenty of times was scream, throw apple cores, smash something, grab someone’s book and stuff pages in my mouth, and gabble horrible noises at them all. But I did none of these things, though it comforted me to imagine them, and worse. After I finished my homework I usually looked at my coins.

  When I was eleven, my Aunt Phoebe gave me my grandfather’s coin collection, and I fell in love with it. At first my parents were thrilled because it was a faintly intellectual interest. “You’ll pick up some history, at least,” they said encouragingly. But as time went on my passion for the coins puzzled and even faintly disgusted them. They couldn’t understand how I could just keep looking at them, lying on the floor turning the pages of my coin albums as if they were—well, books. They gave me books on numismatics, but I didn’t read them, though I liked looking at the pictures. I preferred to learn about coins from Gene at the East Shore Stamp and Coin Shop. And in my spare time I coin-gazed, simply because I liked my coins—the way they looked, the aura they carried of many hands and many transactions and many people, and the fact that they were mine, all mine. And I liked adding up their value (accurately, in my head) and planning what coins I would add to my collection when I grew up and became rich. And I liked puzzling my parents perhaps best of all.

  Why haven’t I said much about my mother? Maybe because I loved her most, or because she bugged me least. I think she was always quietly motherly as my father, for all his show, wasn’t really fatherly. Not that the family disease didn’t infect her as much as any of them. She writes biographies, short ones, of obscure literary figures. I used to think maybe I would read one or two of them, they’re so short; also, they’re inviting books. They’re published by Owl & Bantling, Ltd., of London, a firm that publishes Anglican liturgical works, treatises on gardening, and my mother’s biographies, and they treat my mother well. Her books are printed on creamy thick paper with the ragged edges that are hard to turn, and they all have rose-colored covers with a white spine and gold letters … thin, pretty books by my thin, pretty mother. I opened one once (waiting until no one was home, lest they get their hopes up), the thinnest one (82 pp.), called The Fire’s Path: A Life of Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd. It was about a twelfth-century Welsh warrior poet. I made out that his mother’s name was Pyfog and that his fame rests on eight poems and a good deal of Norman-bashing, but the story was so clogged with words I could hardly read it. I admit I didn’t try for long—I was afraid she’d come in and find me at it, and I’d have to confess I found it dull and incomprehensible—it was Welsh to me, har har har. My mother’s work is apparently a critical and scholarly success, though not—needless to say—a popular one. But Owl & Bantling don’t expect their authors to write best-sellers, they’d probably drop her if she did, and they write my mother affectionate letters, in ink. “Caviar to the general,” my father always said about her stuff, and this expression of her failure seemed curiously satisfying to both my parents. But though I’ve been acquainted with caviar since I was a baby and used to practice my small-motor skills on it, eating it black pearl by black pearl, no one ever told me who the general is; I was expected to know.

  She was always at it, my mother. Unlike Daddy, she always did her work in the midst of the family, and I used to find her at the kitchen table when I got home from school, drinking Jackson’s Coronation Tea and, say, writing out lists of Anglo-Saxon verbs. Languages are her specialty; I think she knows all of them, particularly the ones which are dead, obsolete, or spoken only by one small tribe living on the banks of a tributary of some minor Australian river—that sort of thing. It depresses me, all that mental energy going for zilch. Not to be disrespectful of my mother. But I can see learning French if you’re going on vacation in France. I can even understand learning Latin or Old English so you can read the books written in it if that’s your inclination. But the Jeshoba dialect of the Murai? I ask you. In fact, I have asked her: she says she does it for fun, and I must admit my mother has always seemed to me a singularly happy woman. I once asked Juliet, though, and she said something else: “She does it to keep sane. Because of Daddy.” I am still absorbing this blasphemy.

  When we were kids, our parents’ lives revolved around the family and my father’s work. We had plenty of company because my father needed to show off. His poet friends would come for interminable weekends of poetry reading and whiskey drinking. Juliet and I used to sneak out of bed at night to listen to the uproar. “Why do you have to be drunk all the time to be a poet?” I asked her once. “I’m a poet,” she said loftily, “and I’m not drunk.”

  There was one man in particular, Theodore Low (jokingly called “The Dentist Poet” because he had briefly, in his youth, gone to dental school), who used to fascinate us. He became violent when he was drunk enough, and he was nearly always drunk enough. He came to visit perhaps twice a year, and I always looked forward to his coming—the way I looked forward to other natural disasters, like blizzards. For one thing, he liked me. I was the only dark-haired one in a houseful of blonde women, and he used to ca
ll me his little chocolate cream and sneak me expensive candies from New York. Once he brought me a white fur muff. Another time—not so pleasant a memory, though then it seemed like fun—when he was very drunk, he picked me up, threw me on the sofa, and began tickling me, both of us giggling ecstatically until my mother came in and he suddenly stopped. I remember his pungent breath and my mother’s set face. Ted Low also broke windows, pulled the phone out of the wall, smashed whiskey bottles, once set fire to his bed, and made passes at my mother. But my father said he had a great gift, so he kept coming—a short, fat man with a face the color of the suet we put out for the birds. He died in an asylum when I was seventeen, and I cried so hard I had to be kept home from school.

  During the time my father was teaching (at Wesleyan for a while, then at Yale), there would be intense students hanging around with sheaves of poems, usually small squares of words typed in the middle of a big sheet of paper (a silly waste, I thought; why couldn’t they type two or three to a page?). They idolized my parents, fell in love with our big, book-messy house, and publicly envied us kids our terrific life. And there I was, the little malcontent, huddled over my gold and silver coins like a cavewoman over her fire, to keep off the ravening beasts: books, and book talk, and college boys trying to buddy up to me in order to make a good impression on my father.

  For years, though, my war with the printed word never penetrated my father’s consciousness—not really. My mother and I used to discuss it, briefly but regularly over the years, discussions ending in sad sighs all around, but no matter how many U’s and notes from my teachers and picture-ridden library books I brought home, my father kept giving me absurdly inappropriate books for presents, and couching his affection for me in literary terms. What did it mean to me to be told I was his masterpiece, his Hamlet? Or to be thrust, helpless, into his poems? Or to be asked, every time I sulked, “‘So young and so untender?’” I didn’t want to be my father’s inspiration, I didn’t want to be a damned literary allusion, I just wanted to be his daughter. I wanted him to accept my differences, but his attitude toward me was always expectant: one of these days I’d take to books, just as one of these days I’d grow tall.