stairs,” they murmured, as if stairs could no longer be tolerated by human physiology . “All those stairs,” and “all that waste space . ” The old Governor’s Mansion does have stairs and waste space, which is precisely why it remains the kind of house in which sixty adolescent girls might gather and never interrupt the real life of the household . The bedrooms are big and private and high-ceilinged and they do not open on the swimming pool and one can imagine reading in one of them, or writing a book, or closing the door and crying until dinner . The bathrooms are big and airy and they do not have bidets but they do have room for hampers, and dressing tables, and chairs on which to sit and read a story to a child in the bathtub . There are hallways wide and narrow, stairs front and back, sewing rooms, ironing rooms, secret rooms . On the gilt mirror in the library there is worked a bust of Shakespeare, a pretty fancy for a hardware merchant in a California farm town in 1877 . In the k itchen there is no trash compactor and there is no “island” with the appliances built in but there are two pantries, and a nice old table with a marble top for rolling out pastry and making divinity fudge and chocolate leaves . The morning I took the tour our guide asked if anyone could think why the old table had a marble top . There were a dozen or so other women in the group, each of an age to have cooked unnumbered meals, but not one of them could think of a single use for a slab of marble in the kitchen . It occurred to me that we had finally evolved a society in which knowledge of a pastry marble, like a taste for stairs and closed doors, could be construed as “elitist,” and as I lef t the Governor’s Mansion I felt very like the heroine of Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America, the one who located America ’s moral decline in the disappearance of the first course .
A guard sleeps at night in the old mansion, which has been condemned as a dwelling by the state fire marshal . It costs about $85,000 a year to keep guards at the new official residence . Meanwhile the current governor of California, Edmund G . Brown, Jr . , sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the famous apartment for which he pays $275 a month out of his own $49,100 annual salary . This has considerable and potent symbolic value, as do the two empty houses themselves, most particularly the house the Reagans built on the river . It is a great point around the Capitol these days to have “never seen” the house on the river . The governor himself has “never seen” it . The governor’s press secretary, Elisabeth Coleman, has “never seen” it . The governor’s chief of staff, Gray Davis, admits to having seen it, but only once, when “Mary McGrory wanted to see it . ” This unseen house on the river is, Jerry Brown has said, “not my style . ”
As a matter of fact this is precisely the point about the house on the river—the house is not Jerry Brown’s style, not Mary McGrory’s style, not our style —and it is a point which presents a certain problem, since the house so clearly is the style not only of Jerry Brown’s predecessor but of millions of Jerry Brown’s constituents . Words are chosen carefully . Reasonable objections are framed . One hears about how the house is too far from the Capitol, too far from the Legislature . One hears about the folly of running such a lavish establishment for an unmarried governor and one hears about the governor’s temperamental austerity . One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room . It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center . It is the kind of house in which one does not li ve, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class . I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the
A guard sleeps at night in the old mansion, which has been condemned as a dwelling by the state fire marshal . It costs about $85,000 a year to keep guards at the new official residence . Meanwhile the current governor of California, Edmund G . Brown, Jr . , sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the famous apartment for which he pays $275 a month out of his own $49,100 annual salary . This has considerable and potent symbolic value, as do the two empty houses themselves, most particularly the house the Reagans built on the river . It is a great point around the Capitol these days to have “never seen” the house on the river . The governor himself has “never seen” it . The governor’s press secretary, Elisabeth Coleman, has “never seen” it . The governor’s chief of staff, Gray Davis, admits to having seen it, but only once, when “Mary McGrory wanted to see it . ” This unseen house on the river is, Jerry Brown has said, “not my style . ”
As a matter of fact this is precisely the point about the house on the river—the house is not Jerry Brown’s style, not Mary McGrory’s style, not our style —and it is a point which presents a certain problem, since the house so clearly is the style not only of Jerry Brown’s predecessor but of millions of Jerry Brown’s constituents . Words are chosen carefully . Reasonable objections are framed . One hears about how the house is too far from the Capitol, too far from the Legislature . One hears about the folly of running such a lavish establishment for an unmarried governor and one hears about the governor’s temperamental austerity . One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room . It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center . It is the kind of house in which one does not li ve, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class . I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the
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