“How about de Menil?” Mom offered. I had never heard the name before, and couldn’t picture its letters.
“What’s that?” asked Dad.
“De Menil,” she said. “You know, the art collection in Houston? Way back on Pete’s side of the family we’re related.”
Dad ate another pretzel. “Huh. I hadn’t known that.”
“Yes,” said Mom. She explained that her beloved grandmother, who had died several years before, used to talk about a great-great-uncle who had come up with his siblings through New Orleans. I’d heard this story. Almost everything from that particular family line had been stolen in a home invasion in St. Louis ages before, but the robbers had missed a ladies’ fan, ornate silk and paper, that someone’s great-great-great-great-grandmother had brought from France and waved in front of her face during the steamboat voyage up the buggy Mississippi. One of these relatives had stayed behind in New Orleans. I liked this ghost, the man who had stayed—there was a suggestion of booze, cards, some fallenness. I imagined him putting the rest of them on the boat with their petticoats and silk fans and disappearing into the city streets. He’d escaped us all that way. Nobody alive even knew his name.
Mom wrote, in her distinctive hand, Lacy Cahill de Menil Crawford.
Dad didn’t protest this change, and I, standing barefoot in our kitchen, didn’t understand it. Why did I need another name? What would this give me that I didn’t already have? Now that I had it, would I be okay?
I didn’t think of the word impostor. It would have been useful to have this word to describe the way I felt in the world every day, given how much my smallest mistakes burned me, and how I figured they marked me as not belonging, but I didn’t try to describe that feeling even to myself. The word for my mother’s adding a new name was wish. I thought I understood the spirit of it, and how it was consonant with the school itself. When we had toured St. Paul’s, I’d been so struck by the school’s beauty that it had seemed all pretend. It looked like what a child might dream before ever having seen an actual school: in bright red crayon, a schoolhouse here, with a tower, for learning; and an enormous red chapel like a cathedral here, for singing; and here a gray library rising out of the pond, and here and here long stone footbridges for zooming across; and here and here, gray and white manors where the kids will sleep. There’d be a flagpole and woods to run in and a white egret fishing beneath a waterfall. There’d even be a dorm hidden high on a hill in the woods, like a castle, and stained glass, and an ice rink, and a boathouse…
So why not get a little imaginative ourselves? Why not make me into anyone we wanted me to be?
Almost twenty years later, I met a man at a dinner in London whose name really was de Menil.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s my middle name.”
He said, “No, it’s not.”
“Actually, it is. One of my middle names.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Oh, okay, well—”
“It can’t be.”
“Ah,” I said lightly, intrigued. How could this stranger deny me my name, any name? “Well, it is.”
“The de Menil name was conferred in title by Napoleon,” said this man, “and we have traced every single person who possesses it. You cannot.”
My mother may have gotten her genealogy wrong, but if she had intended to give me a boost into a world of holdings and pride, her aim, it seemed, could not have been better.
By the middle of fourth-form year I’d sort of gotten used to seeing my name written this way or, as it often was, abbreviated on a computer form as Lacy Cahill deM. The school used complete names wherever possible, and especially if you were honored to have your name read in Chapel. The sole exception to this was when the rector, at the end of the day’s news and just before the hymn, would announce a disciplinary action, and in this case it was one’s familiar name and nothing more:
“Benjamin McKenna has been suspended for violating the expectations of intervisitation.”
“Lucretia Turner has withdrawn from the school.”
Then the organ pipes would explode above the noise of our whispering, and the faculty, seated all along the walls looking in, would stare at each of us to ensure we sang.
I wondered how they’d fit my whole new name on the boards at St. Paul’s once I graduated. Some of the longer names had to be abbreviated, and their capitals, periods, and Roman numerals ended up looking silly. Maybe, in victory, I’d drop the de Menil when I left.
For now it was a secret Mom and I shared, an extra name like a good-luck charm she’d tucked in my pocket that was also, happily, a little joke on the school. You want heritage? We’ll give you heritage. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, she’d have said.
So, Lacy Cahill de Menil Crawford.
In February of my fourth-form year, I heard it read aloud.
I hadn’t been paying much attention in Chapel. The rector had begun intoning the full names of classmates, and before I figured out why this was happening, he came to mine.
In the carved chapel seats opposite me, my adviser’s face lit up.
More names followed, beautiful words I thought evoked places, not people: Heath. Pell. Gallatin. Troy. This last name I recognized as my friend from soccer, who went by Robin and was already writing novels in her room after supper. After a moment,
