Daily Blague

Watergate was the big story during my central years in Houston. To say that I was dazed and confused down there is to understate matters; I was so dazed and confused that I didn't know it. Until 1976, when I buckled down and studied for the LSAT, and did well enough on the test, I had no exit opportunities from Houston. I was always broke, and I knew that I'd never get my job (programming the music on a classical-music station) in a sophisticated market, because in sophisticated markets the job is done by people with conservatory credentials, and I could barely play "Chopsticks." I made a half-hearted stab at getting into corporate writing, but it never broke the skin. The only sane outlook most days was to Get Used To Houston. The attempt left me dazed and confused, but in a subterranean way.

For fun, I made the maximum use of free passes to Houston Symphony Orchestra concerts and Houston Grand Opera productions. I taught myself how to cook, and how to use a Chinese dictionary. I wrote a lot of little pieces for the Program Guide, which I don't have anymore. I hung out with bohemian friends, but there was always the risk of awkwardness, because I'd grown up in formal surroundings and didn't know far to go, or how far not to go, when "letting go." I saw my little daughter on alternate weekends, or maybe not quite, because I didn't have a car. On the Westheimer bus one day, I suddenly understood what Anthony Trollope meant by the responsibility of being a gentleman, and it may have changed my life. By this time, my mother was dying, and I moved back to my parents' very comfortable place to help maintain the illusion that her standards of housekeeping were being maintained. And then I went back to Notre Dame, falling hard as bricks in love within forty-eight hours with my dear Kathleen.

I can't say that I'd just escaped from the worst time of my life. My childhood, an endless steppe of boredom and punishment, retains that distinction. But my years in Houston don't connect with the others, which were spent either in South Bend or within twenty miles of where I'm sitting now. There are too many discontinuities of memory and association. Houston happened to somebody that I'm quite definitely not anymore. If I'd been comfortable there, I should have become an entirely different person. Such is the illusion. And because what happened in Houston doesn't seem altogether real, neither does Watergate. I was on another planet then.

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This reminds me of Them, Francine du Plessix Gray's memoir of her complicated family. Ms Gray is the daugher of a French vicomte who perished early on in World War II, but everyone else in her background is a Russian émigré who spent some time in Paris between the wars. The exception is her strange grandfather, who headed East, through Shanghai and San Francisco, before winding up, dismally, in Rochester, and it was there that Ms Gray's mother, Tatiana Yakovleva du Plessix, and the man Tatiana would marry, Alexander Liberman, parked little Francine for a few months after arriving in New York in 1941. Having lived in sophisticated comfort until now, Francine was dismayed by the paltriness of her grandfather's home, but she had plenty of opportunity to weep openly at her fallen state. Her grandfather's second wife, and this wife's mother, were just as dismayed, more than twenty years later, by all that they had lost in Russia.

For the following many weeks, I became Zinochka's and Katia Ivanovna's shadow, following them on their daily routine: doing the breakfast dishes, making the beds, dusting the house, laundering, ironing. The two women were readily given to tears, and their lamentations were particularly abundant on the heaviest workday of the week, Monday, wash day. It was then that every feature of bygone life in Russia - its dachas and green pastures, the glory of its nature, its music and its cuisine - tended to most longingly recalled, most tearfully compared to the drab tedium of their Rochester life. "Servants bringing us tea at every hour, such emerald lawns, such orchards! Zina would sob as she ironed Grandfather's shirts, pointing to the narrow backyard, identical to some three hundred adjoining ones, where the muddy ground lay like mangled flesh under the dirty bandage of the melting snow. A rusty car motor, Eugene's abandoned summer project, lay decaying on the ground. The laundry lines of every family in the neighborhood were going up that afternoon, flapping desolately in the icy wind. My companions would go on to deplore the bleak monotony Alexis Jackson [Grandfather] imposed on his family, his apathy and indifference, his failure even to ask for a promotion or a raise in all the years he had been working for Kodak. I fully sympathized with them, for I'd realized after a few days that the Jacksons never traveled or entertained or dropped in on anyone; that they seldom read anything beyond the local paper and Popular Mechanics; that after dinner Grandfather just listened to his radio and chomped on the toothpick, Zina and her mother sighed and mended garments, and Eugene loped upstairs to do his science experiments. So I joined readily in their tears, concealing as ever my worries about my father but pretending, instead, to mourn all the splendors I, too, had left behind on another continent: the elegance of our Paris flat, the radiance of Alex's villa, the beauty and excitement of the Mediterranean.

Francine, happily, would soon find herself in a lovely house on West Eleventh Street back in Manhattan, but I think of those two women, who had obviously been weeping for years before Francine showed up, and who presumably had some more weeping ahead before the final trip to the graveyard. I suspect that I might have started crying all day, too.