n two skills, riding and shooting, I received instruction, if in a rather homemade way. Twenty miles off in Southern Pines and Pinehurst the rich Northern winter people had invented for themselves a horsey society complete with a Master of Fox Hounds and all the rest. This struck me as glamorous, but the family line on it was amused contempt. In this view as in most others we followed my grandfather who in early life had seen more than enough of the rich at this kind of play. Only golf, irredeemably suburban, more deeply stirred his impatience. (To a caller recounting stroke by stroke his assault on this or that hole at Pinehurst I once heard Grandfather respond, "How uninteresting. How very uninteresting," in tones so polite that the narrator refused the evidence of his ears.) For us any pleasure was the better if made to seem useful. In winter Grandfather and I rode to exercise the idle horses, to beat the bounds of the place or to inspect the New Ground, a field freshly taken into cultivation, or the plantation of young pines along the county road. Where the land fell away into deep woods we traced out the firebreaks where tongues of red clay penetrated our sandy geology. Pebbles of white quartz washed out there, and on the lookout for wonders I imagined them to be flecked with gold and was slow to learn from disappointment. Here and there a clearing opened for no apparent present reason, as if the trail were an abandoned road leading us to the site of something. Not only in memory do those hollow lanes seem to have been full of an excitement. Even a child felt that just over the next rise some other life might be detected. Deeper in we might reach the little waterfall, famous in my mother's stories, where as a girl she had walked alone with her excellent dogs Romulus and Remus, creatures of fable.

I never jumped a fence or learned how properly to kick Parfait into a rack or canter. I made a tangle of the reins, the curb and snaffle. Never mind. In recollection, where it never rains, under the high-capped longleaf pines Grandfather and I ride home up half a mile of the white sandy driveway that winds and disappears and then declares itself once more. At the barn, dismounting, I stagger on my own feet, suddenly short again.

With Grandfather Maurice at Ballintoy, 1935

From outside our world the sepia Sears-Roebuck catalog offered for sale a Red Ryder BB gun, that dauntless cowboy and his little Indian pal besieged in illustration on the shiny page among the Columbia bicycles and the female models in their countrified, anaphrodisiac underwear. When I was eight Grandfather gave me a real rifle. Once my uncle's, this single-shot Winchester .22 had awaited my coming of sufficient age in a cabinet in the office, Grandfather's business room to the left of the front door, with the rest of our small armory: a pair of English shotguns; a serious hunting rifle (product of Savage Arms: handsome name); a lever-action 38.40, to be mine when I was sixteen; my great-grandfather's Union Navy revolver, a longbarreled .44; a bolo; one or two other such things. . . .

With my .22 I was proof against what sometimes seemed the huge boredom of Home. Though I loved every foot of the place, now and then a great dreariness descended. For half an hour or so I might lean against the mailbox kicking the sand in the driveway; or pressing my face hard against the trunk of a pine tree, pick at the layers of bark as if at a scab. In the hot afternoon, useless to myself, I drooped about the place, poking in corners, desultory, self-pitying in Eden, full of a childish Nothing to Do. . . . More often, savage with this boredom (and yet as if I were suppressing an excitement), for an hour at a time I was absolutely accurate with my rifle. At the end of the lowest level of the garden I set up my targets, a sheet of bullseyes or a tin can wedged between two stones. Flat among the lawn furniture I fired my fifty or a hundred cartridges at the Germans or Japanese arising out of the wilderness beyond the last flowerbed, each round concluding safely in that clutter of trees.

Thus it was I fought the war at Ballintoy--or at the wheel of our Buick baking in the driveway, where I sat at the stick of a Spitfire, the Moore County sky swarming with Messerschmitts. And what, it now occurs to me to wonder, would Grandmother have made of that in her bedroom reading her peaceable Indians and Quakers? We all went to war in our own fashion. Grandfather, that evenhanded man, was president of the county Ration Board, starving his own farm of gasoline to set an example. Once Grandmother crowded the house full of people in evening clothes in support of Bundles for Britain. Grandfather looked splendid in his dinner jacket--a costume that in time he passed to me. Knotting a black tie was the last male skill he taught me.

This prodigious social exertion I do not remember to have been repeated, or not on anything like that scale, though rumors of earlier formal jollifications echoed to me from the Old Days, that legendary period or heroic age before my birth when every room was full of housepartying young people, friends of my mother's and my aunt Ellen's, visitors from the North, instructors and graduate students from Chapel Hill (among them Charles Morris, my father). . . .

In fact the house was often full of visitors still. Cousin Marian was one, a maiden sub-librarian at Vassar, her mouth in constant pursing motion as if she were about to spit out a persimmon. Or Cousin Priscilla, a glamor girl of sorts, who, refugeeing from the country club rigors of Cedarhurst, Long Island, was to marry first one, then another Yugoslavian. Or Cousin Frazier, a New Yorker, very rich by our modest standard, tall and preternaturally handsome for a Maurice, with an old-fashioned "society" accent in which he recorded books for the blind. His tales of Berlin in the 1920s, even if severely edited, I wish I had retained. And with Frazier his friend Bill C., whose conversation ran too much on his acquaintance among theater people and the Irish peerage. Any day the guest rooms opening onto the gallery might contain one or another of my aunt Ellen's friends: unpromotable female associate professors of French or assistant deans of women, full of firm and unusual opinions, oddly and vividly dressed. These persons even a child could almost see were locked into some angular relation with ordinary life yet were (like Ellen) on the whole content. One of them dashingly flew her own airplane. In later life I now and then found my path crossing theirs in strange places--a fact perhaps supporting Ellen's view, often reiterated and half believed, that there are only 415 people in the world.

Such visitors might remain a day or two, a week, rarely a month. From earliest days I faintly recall ancient Aunt Lida, no relation really, who stayed off and on for years, her ashes at last buried in our family plot. A friend of Grandmother's, perhaps an object of her charity, she looked like Mr. Toad in The Wind in the Willows and had a Ph.D. in French history from Columbia. Ellen used to recall her strong interest in Marie Antoinette: "The guillotine was Lida's King Charles's head."

Ellen herself, my mother's elder sister, seldom left Ballintoy. Occasional jaunts to Chapel Hill, an expedition to Mexico, another to Bermuda, a yearly month or two at her cottage on the

Not surprisingly Ellen was a repository of family lore, a trove of generations of anecdote, a settler of arguments about the provenance of this or that piece of furniture or the precise degree of our relation to some distant cousin.

South Carolina coast--these are the only absences I remember. Boarding school had not worked, Ellen returning home almost as soon as deposited, and college was not even attempted. By contrast a winter in Paris in the 1920s loomed in legend as a great success. This venture had been organized to separate my mother from an unsuitable admirer. There one story had my mother confounding herself by undertaking to explain in French to her class of other visiting foreigners the working of the United States Constitution, a document of which she had scarcely heard. Ellen on the other hand was unembarrassable. The Madame Quelque-chose with whom the girls boarded summoned weekly dinner parties to hear her discourse on any subject whatever in an uninhibited approximate French of the grossest accidental indecency. However infirm her grasp of the language, Ellen formed a lasting friendship with a translator of Faulkner to whom for years she explained by mail locutions like "worm fence" and "split-bottom chair"--terms perhaps opaque enough without a page or two of Ellen's spirited clarification.

Like the rest of the family Ellen assumed that a child was a rational being interested in the sort of things that interested her and wholly conversable. My elders never noticeably adapted their vocabulary to childish capacities. At the same time, if a word or subject puzzled me I had only to ask and a full and courteous explanation was instantly provided. (Most of them had, too, a modest gift for the telling and memorable phrase delivered impromptu and unselfconsciously. "Wrangle windows and divorcement doors," Ellen remarked of her parents' plans for their house.) The brisk good sense of this general family way with the young had a special charm coming from Ellen who retained all her life a childlike freshness of attack in her dealings with the world at large, an enthusiasm and emotional expressiveness. Her arms might fling wildly about and her voice vary widely in loudness and pitch, even roaring or screeching, or break suddenly into alarming loonlike laughter. One of my happiest recollections is Ellen seen from behind as she bustled toward some task, some object. She moved with a sort of vigorous waddle, every limb somehow in independent motion, as if the whole oddly hafted frame were held together inexpertly by wires. Then with a surprising force and deftness, intent, she wrung the neck of her problem. I loved her too in calmer mood--her gestures tamed, her voice resolving into ladylike composure, her face pensive now, lovely with introspection.

With Aunt Ellen, 1985

Ellen claimed perfect recall of everything read or heard before she was thirty; of nothing at all thereafter. The most remote association evoked from her memory passages of newspaper verse or Shelley, old songs, dialogue out of forgotten novels or Broadway plays, the 1907 summer schedule of trains between Bronxville and Manhattan. Contexts and sources were seldom supplied. In college I was amazed to discover that I had been listening to "Lycidas" all my life. Not surprisingly Ellen was a repository of family lore, a trove of generations of anecdote, a settler of arguments about the provenance of this or that piece of furniture or the precise degree of our relation to some distant cousin. About Family in the snobbish sense she cared only a little, but the family simply as family, as an entity, mattered tremendously. Undistinguished we might be; we were nonetheless distinct--our precious collective selves and no one else. Herself stunningly an original, she sometimes sank her own identity in ours, in her ancestors'. In her old age my cousin Tony kindly took her to live with him in Fairfax County, Virginia, where her mother's people came from. There she registered to vote. "And when did you move to the county?" the Registrar inquired. "In 1682," Ellen answered, with no air of saying anything out of the way.

In that old age she once expelled me, otherwise always her bright, particular star, from that company. Across the dining table at Ballintoy for ten seconds of sudden senility she did not know me: "Who are you? Who are you?" A pause full of glittering blankness; then: "I know you. You're one of those clever Morrises!" I am shocked and hurt to remember it.

A Morris I certainly was. Where was the sin? True enough, no one could plausibly accuse the Maurices of whatever unpleasant thing Ellen meant by cleverness. But surely even the Morrises were not so clever as all that? In what did this quality consist? A century or so of provincial professorships? I followed in that train and was pleased to do so. But in the face of one of Grandfather Morris's articles on ringmail in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, I was almost as much at a loss as any Maurice. I could as soon bridge the Susquehanna as imitate it. Ellen was wrong: precisely in me one strain of Morris cleverness had run out (though perhaps a whisper of the old high mania remained). And as for the Maurices . . . well, for a generation or so that family had been hard happily to marry into; now it appeared you couldn't even be born one of them. If I, the favored of Heaven, were not one of Us. . . . Let there be no more Maurices! Perhaps at forty-nine it was time to be myself alone. Or so I may have felt for the moment.

ne morning in July of 1990, almost four years after our mother's death, my sisters and I put a kind of end to her, laying to rest at last that ghost, the Estate of Charlotte M. Hammond. Mother's will had not really required so many months of administration. Our lawyer, Mrs. C, perceiving that what we three elderly children really wished was to be dependent still, to be forever children, had delayed the settlement as long as in conscience she could. In my name as formally the executor, Mrs. C had conducted an exercise in painstaking protraction. Bank accounts were closed, opened, closed again, reopened; checks were drawn and books were balanced; tax returns compiled, filed, negotiated, adjusted, refiled, amended, submitted at last in final form. Insouciant, unresponsible, under her lawyerly eye I approved each document after a careless inspection, and paid each bill with an exhilarated signature. Now all this was coming to its proper end. From this morning on my sisters and I were on our undercapitalized own. For the last time Mother had met our obligations. The past was over.

From a new building near the Battery the lawyer's office looked down on the old New York Custom House, an undefended view not contemplated by the last-century architect. Our business done, Mrs. C as a last duty offered my sisters and me lunch at her club on Hanover Square, a building of New York brownstone near Fraunces Tavern. From the dining room walls pictures of what seemed every ship to have entered the harbor in the nineteenth century glimmered down at us. In this time machine one half expected to glimpse through a doorway Bartleby's employer gazing in wild surmise at the table after table of women taking for granted, over their abstemious salads, this dusty comfortable masculine decor. In the echoing desolate men's room the gleaming row of breast-high urinals, flushing in unison, gave forth a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, and a gloomy ancient in a white jacket offered me a towel and hairbrush, I his only and perhaps his final client.

Closing accounts that afternoon, I revisited, a touch self-consciously, some scenes of childhood. Long gone now from Washington Square the children's photographer with his Shetland pony; gone, too, of course, the squad of ragged boys who robbed me there at knife-point in 1940. A pair of tourists, faces full of fancied daring, recorded on tape this plaza major, the broad walks loud with genial Spanish under the Anglo-Saxon trees. North of the Arch the Hotel Brevoort, its sidewalk cafe the scene of my mother and stepfather's courtship, had disappeared decades ago into recollection. Down two steps at 60 West Ninth Street the round-headed door was still painted the creamy red of fifty years before; above it projected the tiny balcony from which I used to lean, craning to see Mother approaching from the Fifth Avenue bus and her job at B. Altman. What unworthy persons enjoyed now our handsome living room and the iron outdoor stair leading down from the French window into our miniature garden? In this partly manufactured mood I paused across from 25 West Tenth Street. Behind the four windows at the top of the house (a floor-through-fifth, three bedrooms with roof and wood-burning fireplace, $75 a month) I had been confined for much of my ninth year, the four flights of stairs too many for me. In a phrase that lodged in memory, I had grown "too large for my heart"; and my aching head and joints, jagged temperatures and low red blood count were judged symptoms of rheumatic fever. Out my bedroom window I stared for months down into the complicated interior of the block. Here at the back of the house were displayed stairways, fire escapes, pieces of garden; in glimpses through windows domesticities offered themselves to view--other people's arrangements, ordinary and everyday to them no doubt, but to the overseeing child mysterious, ceaselessly fascinating. I spy with my little eye. I liked to see how someone looks when no one is watching--and I the no one. Here were other people's lives as I began to prefer them. I alone knew how they looked alone. . . .

Up the four flights of stairs the stealthy milkman climbed each morning; I held my breath until he turned away. All this was fifty years ago, the cream rising in the bottles. Expensive logs burned in the weekend fire, and Mother told me she meant to remarry. On the wall over the sofa the Chinese woman fed her delicate deer in the print we had had forever. I had not thought that such a thing as she proposed was permissible.

n any first flash of memory of those days, I see myself alone. This was not the case. My three-year-old sister, Anne, at that age the most passionate, most desperate of stutterers, breathless with rage, battered herself with her fists in an agony of inarticulation. While Mother was at work and on evenings when she went out, we were looked after by a Miss Heine, an exiled German dentist, lightly bearded, awkwardly kind, who clumped about the apartment in heavy, loosely-fitting, high-topped shoes. But other people's lives, always only intermittently vivid to me, were in those days almost nothing to my self-absorption. The world reached me by radio--now not the children's programs only. At about nine in the morning, the soap operas began: "Ma Perkins," "When a Girl Marries," "Mary Noble, Backstage Wife," "Our Gal Sunday," others now forgotten--for hours every day I drifted, vaguely enthralled, down the day-long current of this stuff, these fifteen-minute segments of the drama of domestic life as crisis infinitely protracted. At four o'clock, Lorenzo Jones--the name at once ordinary and wonderfully queer--wandered from himself for months, lost in amnesia. Such an affliction I had never heard of, but I attended, fascinated, to this allegory of self-forgetfulness. Then it was time for Captain Midnight and the Lone Ranger.

On a long afternoon of infinite summer boredom I'd hold my breath and turn the noisy key, . . . In the stored air of this Bluebeard's chamber (as I excited myself by thinking of it) I tried on that black hat of hers, too small for my great head, and her glamorous high-heeled boots, still years too large for me.

From liquor cartons I constructed a little street of houses, the doors and windows cut out with Mother's pinking shears. On our kitchen floor one evening after supper, my kitten from the Bide-a-Wee home died in agonies of distemper. In a rare failure of understanding, Mother scolded as callousness my horrified laughter; this shocked me more than the death. For awhile I warmed to the kitten's replacement, an aggressively uncuddlesome Belgian hare, which when hungry or cross, attacked Mother's visitors, especially excited to savagery by women's open-toed shoes and painted toenails, then much in fashion. This briskness of approach to life, this unrabbitlike élan I admired; but soon a sort of fungus, such as grows on a rotting log, developed in his ears, weighing them down like a dog's. The pet shop agreed to take him back but refused to return our six dollars.

On weekends, our living room might be full of Mother's friends--her boarding school roommate, with her naval officer husband; another naval officer or two . . . ; an engaging Englishman named Felix (possessor of a collapsible opera hat which took my fancy); a floating group of others. These came for a meal new to me called brunch, a word I priggishly disapproved of. Now and then a man named John Hammond appeared alone for dinner. I welcomed him all unsuspecting. In August, he would become my stepfather. He or someone like him had been the point of the year in New York.

Just when the divorce occurred I do not recall--perhaps 1938. In a photograph album in a drawer of the highboy at Ballintoy, Mother perches on a dude ranch fence rail outside of Reno, her lipstick almost as dark as her black hat, the whole effect a touch perverse, shockingly lovely. Items of this costume we preserved for years in the Ballintoy trunk room among huge, heavy, leather suitcases, resonantly empty and placarded with stickers from Cunarders long out of service. Entry here was for some reason forbidden to me. On a long afternoon of infinite summer boredom I'd hold my breath and turn the noisy key, listening hard for any sign that this transgression was detected. In the stored air of this Bluebeard's chamber (as I excited myself by thinking of it) I tried on that black hat of hers, too small for my great head, and her glamorous high-heeled boots, still years too large for me. From a box I extracted her fox fur, abandoned since Vassar days or the year in Oxford, and arranged it about my shoulders. In a shadowy corner, among a clutter of rejected furniture, a tilting cheval glass gave back from its cracked and splotchy surface the image of my odd ensemble as seen from above. In memory I survey this reflection. There I stare up at me under that black hat, and at the point of my shoulder, the clip beneath the fox's mask seizes like jaws the base of his tail as if to sever it.

I think I did not, day by day, consciously miss my father. His sorrows and absences had, after all, begun in the early days of his madness. Still, perhaps I can trace to this time the onset of what seems to me my long habit of sadness (though perhaps that is simply a case of constitutional melancholy, a defect common among the Morrises). In any case, something had gone slightly wrong in the child I remember here, something more than a fever. . . . With the point of a drawing compass I incised again and again on the top of my pine chest the outline of the Tin Woodman, his insensible head and funnel hat, deepening every day this inscription easy to gloss. And now Mother was to remarry. Inside my Philco, Lorenzo Jones had disappeared from his own recollection. In the living room grate I burned my liquor carton houses. In that self-pitying fire, people screamed from every window I had cut. The dangerous milkman climbed the creaking stairs.

(More, to Part 3 of 3)

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