In One Person

vacuous mind. Like my grandmother, Aunt Muriel managed to be both arrogant and judgmental without saying anything that was either verifiable or interesting; in this respect, both my grandmother and my aunt struck me as superior-sounding bores.
    In Aunt Muriel’s case, her impeccable enunciation made her entirely credible onstage; she was a perfect parrot, but a robotic and humorless one, and she was simply as sympathetic or unsympathetic as the character she played. Muriel’s language was elevated, but her own “character” was lacking; she was just a chronic complainer.
    In my grandmother’s case, she was of an unyielding age and she’d had a conservative upbringing; these constraints led her to believe that the theater was essentially immoral—or, to be more forgiving, amoral—and that women should play no part in it. Victoria Winthrop (the
Winthrop
was my grandmother’s maiden name) believed that all the women’s roles in any dramatic performance should be played by boys and men; while she confessed to finding my grandfather’s many onstage triumphs (as various women) embarrassing, she also believed this was the way drama should be enacted—strictly by male actors.
    My grandmother—I called her Nana Victoria—found it tiresome that Muriel was inconsolable (for days) when she lost a plum part to Grandpa Harry. In contrast, Harry was a good sport whenever the sought-after role went to his daughter. “They must have wanted a good-lookin’ girl, Muriel—you have me beat in that category, hands down.”
    I’m not so sure. My grandfather was small-boned and had a pretty face; he was light on his feet, and effortless at girlish laughter
and
at sobbing his heart out. He could be convincing as a scheming woman, or as a wronged one, and he was
more
convincing with the onstage kisses he gave to various miscast men than my aunt Muriel ever managed to be. Muriel cringed at onstage kissing, though Uncle Bob didn’t mind. Bob seemed to enjoy seeing his wife
and
his father-in-law bestowing kisses onstage—a good thing, too, since they had the leading female roles in most of the productions.
    Now that I’m older, I have more appreciation for Uncle Bob, who “seemed to enjoy” many people and things, and who managed to convey to me an unexpressed but sincere commiseration. I believe that Bob understood where the Winthrop side of the family was coming from; those Winthrop women were long accustomed (or genetically inclined) to looking down their noses at the rest of us. Bob took pity on me, because he knew that Nana Victoria and Aunt Muriel (and even my mother) were watching me warily for telltale signs that I was—as they all feared, as I feared myself—my no-good father’s son. I was being judged for the genes of a man I didn’t know, and Uncle Bob, perhaps because he drank and was considered “beneath” Muriel, knew what it felt like to be judged by the Winthrop side of the family.
    Uncle Bob was the admissions man at Favorite River Academy; that the school’s standards for admission were lax did not necessarily make my uncle
personally
accountable for Favorite River’s failures. Yet Bob was judged; by the Winthrop side of the family, he was called “overly permissive”—another reason I thought he was wonderful.
    Though I remember hearing about Bob’s drinking from a variety of sources, I never saw him drunk—well, except for one spectacular occasion. In fact, in the years I was growing up in First Sister, Vermont, I believed that Bob’s drinking problem was exaggerated; those Winthrop women were known for their overstatements in the morally outraged category. Righteous indignation was a Winthrop trait.
    It was during the summer of ’61, when I was traveling with Tom, that it somehow came up that Bob was my uncle. (I know—I haven’t told you about Tom. You’ll have to be patient with me; it’s hard for me to get to Tom.) For Tom and me, this was that allegedly all-important summer between our graduation from prep school and the start of our freshman year in college; Tom’s family and mine had granted us a reprieve from our usual summer jobs so that we could travel. We were probably expected to be satisfied with spending no more than a single summer in that doubtful pursuit of “finding” ourselves, but for Tom and me the gift of this summer didn’t seem as all-important as that time in your life is supposed to be.
    For one thing, we had no money, and the sheer foreignness of