“I don’t understand Italian,” the waiter said.
“Oh, come off it,” my father said. “You understand Italian, and you know damned well you do. Voglianio due cocktail americani. Subito.”
The waiter left us and spoke with the captain, who came over to our table and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but this table is reserved.”
“All right,” my father said. “Get us another table.”
“All the tables are reserved,” the captain said.
“I get it,” my father said. “You don’t desire our patronage. Is that it? Well, the hell with you. Vacla all’ inferno. Let’s go, Charlie.”
“I have to get my train,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sonny,” my father said. “I’m terribly sorry.” He put his arm around me and pressed me against him. “I’ll walk you back to the station. If there had only been time to go up to my club.”
“That’s all right, Daddy,” I said.
“I’ll get you a paper,” he said. “I’ll get you a paper to read on the train.”
Then he went up to a newsstand and said, “Kind sir, will you he good enough to favor me with one of your Goddamned, no-good, tencent afternoon papers?” The clerk turned away from him and stared at a magazine cover. “Is it asking too much, kind sir,” my father said, “is it asking too much for you to sell me one of your disgusting specimens of yellow journalism?”
“I have to go, Daddy,” I said. “It’s late.”
“Now, just wait a second, sonny,” he said. “Just wait a second. I want to get a rise out of this chap.”
“Goodbye, Daddy,” I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father. AN EDUCATED AMERICAN WOMAN
Item: “I remain joined in holy matrimony to my unintellectual 190-pound halfback, and keep myself busy chauffeuring my son Bibber to and from a local private school that I helped organize. I seem, at one time or another, to have had the presidency of every civic organization in the community, and last year I ran the local travel agency for nine months. A New York publisher (knock on wood) is interested in my critical biography of Gustave Flaubert, and last year I ran for town supervisor on the Democratic ticket and got the largest Democratic plurality in the history of the village. Polly Coulter Mellowes stayed with us for a week on her way home from Paris to Minneapolis and we talked, ate, drank, and thought in French during her visit. Shades of Mlle. de Grasse! I still find time to band birds and knit Argyle socks.”
This report, for her college alumnae magazine, might have suggested an aggressive woman, but she was not that at all. Jill Chidchester Madison held her many offices through competence, charm, and intellect, and she was actually quite shy. Her light-brown hair, at the time of which I’m writing, was dressed simply and in a way that recalled precisely how she had looked in boarding school twenty years before. Boarding school may have shaded her taste in clothing; that and the fact that she had a small front and was one of those women who took this deprivation as if it was something more than the loss of a leg. Considering her comprehensive view of life, it seemed strange that such a thing should have bothered her, but it bothered her terribly. She had pretty legs. Her coloring was fresh and high. Her eyes were brown and set much too close together, so that when she was less than vivacious she had a mousy look.
Her mother, Amelia Faxon Chidchester, was a vigorous, stocky woman with splendid white hair, a red face, and an emphatic accent whose roots seemed more temperamental than regional. Mrs. Chidchester’s words were shaped to express her untiring vigor, her triumph over pain, her cultural enthusiasm, and her trust in mankind. She was the author of seventeen unpublished books. Jill’s father died when she was six days old. She was born in San Francisco, where her father had run a small publishing house and administered a small estate. He left his wife and daughter with enough money to protect them from any sort of hardship and any sort of financial anxiety, but they were a good deal less rich than their relatives. Jill appeared to be precocious, and when she was three her mother took her to Munich, where she was entered in the Gymnasium fur Kinder, run by Dr. Stock for the purpose of observing gifted children. The competition was fierce, and her reaction tests were only middling, but she was an amiable and a brilliant girl. When she was five, they shifted to the Scuola Pantola in Florence, a similar institution. They moved from there to England, to the famous Tower Hill School, in Kent. Then Amelia, or Melee, as she was called, decided that the girl should put down some roots, and so she rented a house in Nantucket, where Jill was entered in the public school.
I don’t know why it is that expatriate children should seem underfed, but they often do, and Jill, with her mixed clothing, her mixed languages, her bare legs and sandals, gave the impression that the advantages of her education had worked out in her as a kind of pathos. She was the sort of child who skipped a lot. She skipped to school. She skipped home. She was shy. She was not very practical, and her mother encouraged her in this. “You shall not wash the dishes, my dear,” she said. “A girl of your intelligence is not expected to waste her time washing dishes.” They had a devoted servant?all of Melee’s servants worshipped the ground she walked on?and Jill’s only idea about housework was that it was work she was not expected to do. She did, when she was about ten, learn to knit Argyle socks and was allowed this recreation. She was romantic. Entered in her copybook was the following: “Mrs. Amelia Faxon Chidchester requests the honor of your company at the wedding of her daughter Jill to Viscount Ludley-Huntington, Earl of Ashmead, in Westminster Abbey. White tie. Decorations.” The house in Nantucket was
