91 Revere Street

Life Studies (1959)

91 Revere Street(Life Studies, 1959)

My mother was roused to warmth by the Major’s scarlet vest and exotic eye. She alwaysinsisted that he was the one properly dressed and dieted ancestor in the lot we had inheritedfrom my father’s Cousin Cassie. Great-great-Grandfather Mordecai! Poor sheepdog inwolf’s clothing! In the anarchy of my adolescent war on my parents, I tried to make him atrue wolf, the wandering Jew! Homo lupus homini!

Major Mordecai Myers’ portrait has been mislaid past finding, but out of my memories Ioften come on it in the setting of our Revere Street house, a setting now fixed in the mind,where it survives all the distortions of fantasy, all the blank befogging of forgetfulness.There, the vast number of remembered things remains rocklike. Each is in its place, eachhas its function, its history, its drama. There, all is preserved by that motherly care that oneeither ignored or resented in his youth. The things and their owners come back urgent withlife and meaning - because finished, they are endurable and perfect .

I was in the third grade and for the first time becoming a little more popular at school. I wasafraid Father’s leaving the Navy would destroy my standing. I was a churlish, disloyal,romantic boy, and quite without hero worship for my father, whose actuality seemed soinferior to the photographs in uniform he once mailed to us from the Golden Gate. My reallove, as Mother used to insist to all new visitors, was toy soldiers. For a few months at theflood tide of this infatuation, people were ciphers to me – valueless except as chances forincreasing my armies of soldiers.