(Ed note: Earlier in the week we announced publication of Jeanne McCulloch's memoir All Happy Families. Here's an essay with more of the backstory to Jeanne's fine memoir. sdl)
In the spring of 1983, I was a 25-year-old graduate student in the department of English literature at Columbia University. I wrote my masters thesis on a story by Katharine Mansfield titled “The Garden Party,” in which the Sheridan family in rural England prepares for their annual garden party, a grand affair, when down the street a young man driving a livery cart is killed when his horse shies and he is thrown, breaking his neck. The central tension is the simultaneity of life and death, of celebration and mourning, as seen through the eyes of one of the Sheridan daughters, Laura. In “The Garden Party” there is an exchange between Laura and her mother, in which she asks how they can possibly go ahead with their party, with a man lying dead down the street. “You’re being absurd,” her mother tells her, brushing aside any suggestion that the party would be delayed or cancelled. I understood that, because my own mother had much the same attitude, we got through everything “with style and grace, even if it killed us.”
When I received my degree, I marched in a blue cap and gown. My mother was there, and my sisters, but not my father. My father had been barred from coming by my mother, who was sparing us, she thought, the spectacle that would very probably occur if my father came. Chances were good he’d be drunk, and possibly he’d pass out during the ceremony, even collapse theatrically on the green. At 74, he had a track record of this kind of behavior. So, he stayed home, and later that night he came to a little family gathering at my apartment down the street from Columbia, where I lived with my fiancé Dean. I still remember the sight of him that evening, unfocused and sad, indisputably in a stupor. His tie was loose, his jaw was slack, his jacket fell oafish off his shoulders, as he both watched and didn’t watch the party take place both with and without him. We pretended it was all okay, but of course it was not. In the cycle of my father in those days, he was more reliably drunk than he was sober, and so this occasion, which would have meant so much to him had he been present to participate, was lost to him, and to me, as I’d always thought it would make him so proud and happy, he a scholar in his own right, with numerous advanced degrees and a fluency in 14 languages, to see his daughter get a graduate degree.
Continue reading here.
Comments