An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [10]
One way of grinding this particularly irritating pecking order into the young girls was to teach them the old and ridiculous art of curtsying. It is hard to imagine that anyone in her right mind would find curtsying an even vaguely tolerable thing to do. But having been given the benefits of a liberal education by a father with strongly nonconforming views and behaviors, it was beyond belief to me that I would seriously be expected to do this. I saw the line of crisply crinolined girls in front of me and watched each of them curtsying neatly. Sheep, I thought, Sheep. Then it was my turn. Something inside of me came to a complete boil. It was one too many times watching one too many girls being expected to acquiesce; far more infuriating, it was one too many times watching girls willingly go along with the rites of submission. I refused. A slight matter, perhaps, in any other world, but within the world of military custom and protocol—where symbols and obedience were everything, and where a child’s misbehavior could jeopardize a father’s chance of promotion—it was a declaration of war. Refusing to obey an adult, however absurd the request, simply wasn’t done. Miss Courtnay, our dancing teacher, glared. I refused again. She was, she said, very sure that Colonel Jamison would be terribly upset by this. I was, I said, very sure that Colonel Jamison couldn’t care less. I was wrong. As it turns out, Colonel Jamison did care. However ridiculous he thought it was to teach girls to curtsy to officers and their wives, he cared very much more that I had been rude to someone. I apologized, and then he and I worked on a compromise curtsy, one that involved the slightest possible bending of knees and lowering of the body. It was finely honed, and one of my father’s typically ingenious solutions to an intrinsically awkward situation.
I resented the bowings, but I loved the elegance of the dress uniforms, the music and dancing, and the beauty of the cotillion evenings. However much I needed my independence, I was learning that I would always be drawn to the world of tradition as well. There was a wonderful sense of security living within this walled-off military world. Expectations were clear and excuses were few; it was a society that genuinely believed in fair play, honor, physical courage, and a willingness to die for one’s country. True, it demanded a certain blind loyalty as a condition of membership, but it tolerated, because it had to, many intense and quixotic young men who were willing to take staggering risks with their lives. And it tolerated, because it had to, an even less socially disciplined group of scientists, many of whom were meteorologists, and most of whom loved the skies almost as much as the pilots did. It was a society built around a tension between romance and discipline: a complicated world of excitement, stultification, fast life, and sudden death, and it afforded a window back in time to what nineteenth-century living, at its best, and at its worst, must have been: civilized, gracious, elitist, and singularly intolerant of personal weakness. A willingness to sacrifice one’s own desires was a given; self-control and restraint were assumed.
My mother once told me about a tea she had gone to at the home of my father’s commanding officer. The commanding officer’s wife was, like the women she had invited to tea, married to a pilot. Part of her role was to talk to the young wives about everything from matters of etiquette, such as how to give a proper dinner party, to participation in community activities on the air base. After discussing these issues for a while, she turned to the real topic at hand. Pilots, she said, should never be angry or upset when they fly. Being angry could lead to a lapse in judgment or concentration: flying accidents might happen; pilots could