Objects of Our Affection by Lisa Tracy

Author:Lisa Tracy [Tracy, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-553-90734-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

A PAIR OF OLD PISTOLS were the perfect example of that phenomenon, and their almost-famousness was in the end part of what saved them from going under Bill Harlowe’s gavel. They also illustrate something about the way stories get handed down in a family, and with the stories, provenance—or at least a shot at it.

As Mother began delving into family history, she concentrated on her side of the family. Of course, this made perfectly practical sense: That was the side that was germane to proving her Colonial Dame–worthiness; it was also the side she knew best—and the side with whose stories we’d grown up, living in Charlie’s house.

We did subliminally gather from her, however, that my grandmother Jeanne’s family, the Wests and the Woods, were rather aristocratic as American families went. Mother might not have felt very close to her mother-in-law, but she did hang the portrait of Admiral Wood in the living room, over the Kilbournes’ Chippendale sofa, and she did mention crazy Cousin Ernie and show us his picture, with the wild hair and beard—but it wasn’t until years later that a cousin from Daddy’s side of the family told us his story.

About Daddy’s father’s family—the Tracys and Powells and their forebears—we knew even less. There was some story about someone’s having lost all his money in the crash of 1929, and it always had a vaguely disreputable sound to it, as if he had been in, well, the trades, or banking, or something. Mother somehow seemed not to have gotten around to investigating that end of the family. Nor had she given much shrift to her mother-in-law’s furniture except for a couple of the really nice smaller pieces, such as the rosewood love seat and lady’s parlor chair, or something as undeniably useful as the highboy she stored linens in. But as for their stories, these pieces weren’t asked to speak, at least not in Mother’s house. Pretty as they were, they were to be seen and not heard.

There was one exception: a pair of old wooden dueling pistols Daddy and Mother had brought back from his mother’s apartment during that expedition to Washington after Big Jeanne’s death.

The pistols. Jeanne and I had been completely unaware of their existence until the afternoon Mother revealed them to me, sometime after she and Daddy came back from that Washington triage. That was the day she unveiled—with a dramatic flourish and a grave air of secrecy—our ownership of, ahem, the so-called Aaron Burr pistols.

I was in high school at the time and Jeanne was on a Fulbright in Germany. Mother said she had something to show me and led me to what had been Jeanne’s room and was now a guest room. We knelt together in front of the low carved wooden toy chest Daddy had made for Jeanne when she was just a baby. And so for one of the very few times in our young lives, with Jeanne away, I as the younger sister actually got first crack at a family revelation.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.