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By Root 368 0

shelves should someone want to know who in the hell we were, wasn’t about to go out and be somebody’s receptionist at a dental office in town. (Which is just what she ended up doing.) She was increasingly pissed about supporting us, not something women who went to Manhattanville in 1959 routinely did. “I didn’t sign up for this, sweetheart,” she’d say to me as she warmed up for her nightly weepathon. The first mother I saw like mine was Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, going into reveries about her suitors. There was Rodney, the man my mother should have married, she could have had lunch every day at the St. Louis Country Club. He was presumably a bore and a penny loafer guy. And was named Rodney. Or Chip Boulard, whose family owned the biggest lead company in the world. She could have had the fanciest pencils in all the world, I guess, which, when you’re a crossword fanatic as she was, might be no small thing. She talked about how her father never said he loved her, how he worked all the time, how she never saw him, how her parents had a loveless marriage. She told stories of her structured childhood and her academic drive. I spoke French in preschool and now look at me, she seemed to say on a nightly basis.

WHILE MY FATHER’S PARENTS were pretty darn sparkly in their heyday, writing for newspapers and hosting radio shows, Katharine in particular being a well-known St. Louis columnist with a searing wit, they were not immune to the difficulties of the writing life, the ups and downs, the financial bumpiness, and when Dagwood died, Katharine’s Chicken Salad Financial Index plummeted. Her driver, Edward, came up with the idea of picking her up at the paper, driving her home, opening the car door for her and then, as she made her way up the front walk, transforming superhero style into the butler. As Katharine approached the front door, Edward would dash around to the side door, throw off his chauffeur jacket, throw on a white coat for serving, and rush through the interior of the house to answer the front door for her, as if he were now an entirely different person, and ask her if she wanted her usual martini. Much later, in her seventies, she got by with small writing gigs people gave her. “Crazy Kate,” as her five kids called her, lived out the remainder of her life rather meagerly in a crummy apartment building in St. Louis, with no comforts or financial security, until she went totally mad and lived until her death with my aunt Betty and her eight kids in Betty’s turn-of-the-century mansion—which had a working elevator but a nonworking front door, so for years people entered through a gigantic first-floor window.

Writing seemed to get rather rough in your later years. This was the side I was aware of as a kid—the curse of the writing life, the way it seemed to leave you in a tough spot in your old age. I didn’t see lawyers suffering like this in their later years. And I worried that my dad might be headed down the same road as his mother. When I read Death of a Salesman, I saw my father so clearly in Willy Loman, clinging just a little too tightly to some importance he had known in St. Louis to keep himself going, peddling graphs no one wanted. Knowing that we had no health insurance, let alone life insurance to cash out like Willy, helped me sleep at night. My father’s slipping grip on his dream showed itself in various ways. He insisted you look at him while he talked. If you dropped your fork at dinner and your eyes dropped to locate it while he was theorizing on “The Waste Land,” he’d bark, “Look at me while I’m talking to you, God damn it.” You’d find yourself groping for your bread and trying to butter it like a blind person never taking your eyes off him lest his ego catch you taking five. But Willy Loman was suicidal. My dad doesn’t have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can’t be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing