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Authors: Geoffrey Wolff
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ease, relaxed her defenses.
It wasn’t until I transcribed her words, twelve hours of talk, that I appreciated the full force of her gift to me. I had been prepared to save my mother from those little gaffes of speech that everyone commits, errors of tense and number and parallelism, the
ahs
and
ughs
and
I
-
means
and
you-knows
that deface interviews. And because my mother is not an articulate woman I had expected to give her special protection against her infelicities of speech. But I was wrong about what I thought I had heard her say to my tape recorder; perhaps I have been wrong about what I heard her say as long as I have known her. For here were finished sentences and paragraphs, calculated and precise. We have no documents in our family to restore my mother’s past with my father to the present, and that was what my mother wished to do. She had thought hard about it, and wanted me to have it, as it was, plain. When I asked a hard question, my mother paused, and triedhard to answer it. If I didn’t know what to ask, my mother asked for me.
I believe she may have paid a heavy toll for her precision and honesty, that her speech in this book may appear cold, unfeeling. It is no such thing. It is respectful of particulars, without false piety or sentiment. What my mother told me of our history brought us together again, and we had a long way to journey from there to here.)
Duke appeared at the house where Rosemary was baby-sitting, and behaved himself. He sat across a coffee table from her and told stories at his own expense, entertained and charmed her. “But he didn’t attract me.”
When my mother met him, my father was living at home. The Doctor was dying of stomach cancer, and Duke spent much time with him. What could they have said to each other, so late in the season? Duke got by on a dollar a day and all he could borrow; his friends Gifford Pinchot and Nervy Smith and Wellington Glover and Jack Lester and Piggy Gillette all had plenty, enough for everyone, and soon my mother began going with my father and these people to parties in Hartford and New York and Boston and New Haven.
“Although I was not what you’d call innocent, I had never run around with people who were quite so open about their mischief. Your father led this group; he seemed, then, to prefer weak friends.”
If Rosemary’s feeling for Duke was so tepid, why did she bother with him?
“The pressure at home was terrible.”
Yes, it was. At the funeral of Commander Stephen A. Loftus my brother wept. My mother, his mother, the commander’s only daughter, asked why. “What’s so sad?” (In fact my brother was moved to tears not by a dead man in a box but by the occasion, a military ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. My brother was in the Army, and liked the guns and uniforms and flags, was moved to tears by rows of crosses.)
My mother’s father was a time-serving prig and bully; he wasnarrow, envious, bigoted, self-important, peacock-proud and snake-mean. His parents had come to America from Ireland during the potato famines, and he and several brothers were born here in awful poverty.
A family photograph taken at the turn of the century, where they fetched up, shows weathered peasants, the teenagers looking forty, dressed in shiny black worsted church clothes. The brothers’ wrists hang from frayed, stiff jacket cuffs, and the sleeves are too short. Everyone but the eldest brother wears a hand-me-down, and far down the line comes Mother’s father, the only Loftus with clean fingernails. My mother pointed to his brothers:
This one died in Ludlow in the mines, a strike or a cave-in, can’t remember which; that one killed a railroad bull, and went to prison; this gentle-looking boy just disappeared …
The second youngest, Stephen, went to sea in 1903 as a cabin boy, and came out of the Navy a commander in 1944. He was what they call a Mustang, a man with brilliantly spit-shined shoes who pulled himself up through the ranks.
It wasn’t until I transcribed her words, twelve hours of talk, that I appreciated the full force of her gift to me. I had been prepared to save my mother from those little gaffes of speech that everyone commits, errors of tense and number and parallelism, the
ahs
and
ughs
and
I
-
means
and
you-knows
that deface interviews. And because my mother is not an articulate woman I had expected to give her special protection against her infelicities of speech. But I was wrong about what I thought I had heard her say to my tape recorder; perhaps I have been wrong about what I heard her say as long as I have known her. For here were finished sentences and paragraphs, calculated and precise. We have no documents in our family to restore my mother’s past with my father to the present, and that was what my mother wished to do. She had thought hard about it, and wanted me to have it, as it was, plain. When I asked a hard question, my mother paused, and triedhard to answer it. If I didn’t know what to ask, my mother asked for me.
I believe she may have paid a heavy toll for her precision and honesty, that her speech in this book may appear cold, unfeeling. It is no such thing. It is respectful of particulars, without false piety or sentiment. What my mother told me of our history brought us together again, and we had a long way to journey from there to here.)
Duke appeared at the house where Rosemary was baby-sitting, and behaved himself. He sat across a coffee table from her and told stories at his own expense, entertained and charmed her. “But he didn’t attract me.”
When my mother met him, my father was living at home. The Doctor was dying of stomach cancer, and Duke spent much time with him. What could they have said to each other, so late in the season? Duke got by on a dollar a day and all he could borrow; his friends Gifford Pinchot and Nervy Smith and Wellington Glover and Jack Lester and Piggy Gillette all had plenty, enough for everyone, and soon my mother began going with my father and these people to parties in Hartford and New York and Boston and New Haven.
“Although I was not what you’d call innocent, I had never run around with people who were quite so open about their mischief. Your father led this group; he seemed, then, to prefer weak friends.”
If Rosemary’s feeling for Duke was so tepid, why did she bother with him?
“The pressure at home was terrible.”
Yes, it was. At the funeral of Commander Stephen A. Loftus my brother wept. My mother, his mother, the commander’s only daughter, asked why. “What’s so sad?” (In fact my brother was moved to tears not by a dead man in a box but by the occasion, a military ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. My brother was in the Army, and liked the guns and uniforms and flags, was moved to tears by rows of crosses.)
My mother’s father was a time-serving prig and bully; he wasnarrow, envious, bigoted, self-important, peacock-proud and snake-mean. His parents had come to America from Ireland during the potato famines, and he and several brothers were born here in awful poverty.
A family photograph taken at the turn of the century, where they fetched up, shows weathered peasants, the teenagers looking forty, dressed in shiny black worsted church clothes. The brothers’ wrists hang from frayed, stiff jacket cuffs, and the sleeves are too short. Everyone but the eldest brother wears a hand-me-down, and far down the line comes Mother’s father, the only Loftus with clean fingernails. My mother pointed to his brothers:
This one died in Ludlow in the mines, a strike or a cave-in, can’t remember which; that one killed a railroad bull, and went to prison; this gentle-looking boy just disappeared …
The second youngest, Stephen, went to sea in 1903 as a cabin boy, and came out of the Navy a commander in 1944. He was what they call a Mustang, a man with brilliantly spit-shined shoes who pulled himself up through the ranks.
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