Kitty Speaks - The Irony of Sentimental History
I shouldn’t be telling you this, Melancholy, but Mother still sometimes asks about you. She’s never forgotten that first meeting. None of us have, honestly. Please don’t get angry, but it’s become something of a joke in our family, the whole foreigner thing. When we were summering in Maine last year, Mother even tried to call herself a foreigner on the census form. She told us she was going to put as her ethnicity Some Other Race.
“How do you propose, Barbara, to fill in the blank?” asked Father.
As you probably remember—no, that’s not right. You wouldn’t remember, Melancholy, would you? Because you never remembered anything I ever told you about my family. It was always a one-way street, our conversations about family history, about how you descended from a glorious line of artists, whereas my family could only claim prominence in—how did you phrase it, Melancholy?
Oh yes. My family only excelled at bourgeois concerns. Bourgeois concerns. I guess you have little respect for the banking industry, which I can understand—except that you were working as a banker, when you said this about my family. Oh Melancholy! Sometimes you are just too much.
Anyway, had you been a thoughtful boyfriend you would have remembered that Mother, to those she knew well, preferred going by her middle name, Keen.
“I’m going to write Barbarian in the blank, if you must know.”
“Damn it,” said Father, “a joke is one thing, but this thing has gone far enough.”
He was annoyed enough to get up from his chair on the screened porch and start pacing. Do you remember the cottage and its screened porch, Melancholy? Maybe not. But I know you remember the outdoor shower. Surely even you… that was a lovely night, Melancholy, wasn’t it? We went swimming in the lake and then had to run back with only our towels because the twins stole our clothes—oh, Melancholy. I mean, all the pain has been so awful, but when I think back on that summer, when you came up to our place in Maine and we had those four weeks together, I tell myself It was worth it.
“The St Claire family has been in this country for more than three hundred years, and you Bradfords came over on the Mayflower, for Chrissake. Who are you fooling, Barbara?”
“Well, I think you’re behaving like a terrific barbarian, Charlie.”
With that, she got up, walked up to the big house and didn’t come down for the rest of the evening, and that night, Father had to sleep on a couch in the cottage. Honestly, though, he loves the cottage, so he didn’t mind so much.
