anything. She realized she wasn’t up to the competition, and she gave it up, just like that. I mean, she wasn’t one of these women who claim to have given up a big career. We had a little apartment in Bayside, and she looked around for a job, and because of her training?I mean, she knew how to use her voice?they took her on at Newark Airport as an announcer. She had a very pretty voice, not affected or anything, very calm and humorous and musical. She worked on a four-hour shift, saying things like ‘Will passengers for United’s jet flight to Seattle please board at Gate Sixteen? Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter? Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter?’ I suppose that girl is saying the same sort of thing.” He nodded his head toward the loudspeaker. “It was a great job, and just working four hours a day she made more money than I did, and she had plenty of time to shop and cook and be wifely, at which she was very good. Well, when we had about five thousand in the savings account, we began to think about having a child and moving out to the country. She had been announcing at Newark then for about five years. Well, one night before supper, I was drinking whiskey and reading the paper when I heard her say, in the kitchen, ‘Will you please come to the table? Supper is ready. Will you please come to the table?’ She was speaking to me in that same musical voice she used at the airport, and it made me angry, and so I said, ‘Honey, don’t speak to me like that?don’t speak to me in that voice,’ and then she said, ‘Will you please come to the table?’ just as if she was saying, ‘Will Mr. Henry Tavistock please report to the American Airlines ticket counter?’ So then I said, ‘Honey, you make me feel as if I were waiting for a plane or something. I mean, your voice is very pretty, but you sound very impersonal.’ So then she said, in this very well-modulated voice, ‘I don’t suppose that can be helped,’ and she gave me one of those forced, sweet smiles like those airplane clerks give you when your flight is four hours late and you’ve missed the connecting flight and will have to spend a week in Copenhagen. So then we sat down to dinner, and all through dinner she talked to me in this even and musical voice. It was like having dinner with a recording. It was like having dinner with a tape. So then, after dinner, we watched some television, and she went to bed and then she called to me, ‘Will you please come to bed now? Will you please come to bed now?’ It was just like being told that passengers for San Francisco were boarding at Gate Seven. I went to bed, and thought things would be better in the morning.
“Anyhow, the next night when I came home I shouted, ‘Hello, honey!’ or something like that, and I heard this very impersonal voice from the kitchen saying, ‘Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent? Will you please go to the corner drugstore and get me a tube of Pepsodent?’ So then I went into the kitchen and gathered her up in my arms and gave her a big, messy kiss and said, ‘Come off it, baby, come off it.’ Then she began to cry, and I thought this might be a step in the right direction, but she cried and cried and said I was unfeeling and cruel and just imagined things about her voice that weren’t true in order to pick a quarrel. Well, we stayed together for another six months, but that was really the end of it. I really loved her. She was a marvelous girl until she began to give me this feeling that I was a dumb passenger, one of hundreds in some waiting room, being directed to the right gate and the right flight. We quarreled all the time then, and I finally left, and she got a consent decree in Reno. She still works at Newark, and naturally I prefer Kennedy, but sometimes I have to use Newark, and I can hear her telling Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the American Airlines ticket counter… But it isn’t only in Newark that I hear her voice, it’s everywhere. Orly, London, Moscow, New Delhi. I have to travel by air, and in every airport in the whole wide world I can hear her voice or a voice just like hers asking Mr. Henry Tavistock to please report to the ticket counter. Nairobi, Leningrad, Tokyo, it’s always the same even if I can’t understand the language, and it reminds me of how happy I was those five years and what a lovely girl she was, really lovely, and what mysterious things can happen in love. Shall we have another bottle of vodka? I’ll pay for it. They give me more rubles than I can spend for the trip, and I have to turn them in at the border.” PERCY
REMINISCENCE, along with the cheese boards and ugly pottery sometimes given to brides, seems to have a manifest destiny with the sea. Reminiscences are written on such a table as this, corrected, published, read, and then they begin their inevitable journey toward the bookshelves in those houses and cottages one rents for the summer. In the last house we rented, we had beside our bed the Memories of a Grand Duchess, the Recollections of a Yankee Whaler, and a paperback copy of Goodbye to All That, but it is the same all over the world. The only book in my hotel room in Taormina was Recordi d’un Soldato Garibaldino, and in my room in Yalta I found [Title of a Russian Book in Cyrillic Script]. Unpopularity is surely some part of this drifting toward salt water, but since the sea is our most universal symbol for memory, might there not be some mysterious affinity between these published recollections and the thunder of waves? So I put down what follows with the happy conviction that these pages will find their way into some bookshelf with a good view of a stormy coast. I can even see the room?see the straw rug, the window glass clouded with salt, and feel the house shake to the ringing of a heavy sea.
Great-uncle Ebenezer was stoned on the streets of Newburyport for his abolitionist opinions. His demure wife, Georgiana (an artiste on the pianoforte), used once or twice a month to braid feathers into her hair, squat on the floor, light a pipe, and, having been given by psychic forces the personality of an Indian squaw, receive messages from the dead. My father’s cousin, Anna Boynton, who had taught Greek at Radcliffe, starved herself to death during the Armenian famine. She and her sister Nanny had the copper skin, high cheekbones, and black hair of the Natick Indians. My father liked to recall the night he drank all the champagne on the New York-Boston train. He started drinking splits with some friend before dinner, and when they finished the splits they emptied the quarts and the magnums and were working on a jeroboam when the train reached Boston. He felt that this guzzling was heroic. My Uncle Hamlet?a black-mouthed old wreck who had starred on the Newburyport Volunteer Fire Department ball team?called me to the side of his deathbed and shouted, “I’ve had the best fifty years of this country’s history. You can have the rest.” He seemed to hand it to me on a platter?droughts, depressions, convulsions of nature, pestilence, and war. He was wrong, of course, but the idea pleased him. This all took place in the environs of Athenian Boston, but the family seemed much closer to the hyperbole and rhetoric that stem from Wales, Dublin, and the various principalities of alcohol than to the sermons of Phillips Brooks.
One of the most vivid members of my mother’s side of the family was an aunt who called herself Percy, and who smoked cigars. There was no sexual ambiguity involved. She was lovely, fair, and intensely feminine. We were never very close. My father may have disliked her, although I don’t recall this. My maternal grandparents had emigrated from England in the 1890s with their six children. My Grandfather Holinshed was described as a bounder?a word that has always evoked for me the image of a man leaping over a hedge just ahead of a charge of buckshot. I don’t know what mistakes he had made in England, but his transportation to the New World was financed by his father-in-law, Sir Percy Devere, and he was paid a small remittance so long as he did not return to England. He detested the United States and died a few years after his arrival here. On the day of his funeral, Grandmother announced to her children that there would be a family conference in the evening. They should be prepared to discuss their plans. When the conference was called, Grandmother asked the children in turn what they planned to make of their lives. Uncle Tom wanted to be a soldier. Uncle Harry wanted to be a sailor. Uncle Bill wanted to be a merchant. Aunt Emily wanted to marry. Mother wanted to be a nurse and heal the sick. Aunt Florence?who later called herself Percy?exclaimed, “I wish to be a great painter, like the Masters of the Italian Renaissance!” Grandmother then said, “Since at least one of you has a clear idea of her destiny, the rest of you will go to work and Florence will go to art school.” That is what they did, and so far as I know none of them ever resented this decision.
How smooth it all seems and how different it must have been. The table where they gathered would have been lighted by whale oil or kerosene. They lived in a farmhouse in Dorchester. They would have had lentils or porridge or at best stew for dinner. They were very poor. If it was in the winter, they would be cold, and after the conference the wind would extinguish Grandmother’s candle?stately Grandmother?as she went down the
