The Genetic Strand by Edward Ball

Author:Edward Ball
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2007-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

ONCE, WHEN I WAS about eight years old, my parents went on a bank errand and took me along. They were visibly nervous, because the errand was to break my father’s paycheck; this was something they never did, but of late they’d had medical bills. The teller counted out $500, my father’s monthly salary. My mother, who had worked as a bookkeeper, counted the money again, with reverence, and folded the bills into her wallet. From these few minutes, I took a permanent impression about money, the substance that could make one’s parents, godlike adults, grip the armrests of a chair in anxiety.

My father, an Episcopal priest, brought home an unexorbitant income, which paid for one car, the one in which we took our vacations because airfare was too high. Our housing was on loan, the property of the church. One summer, as a gift to the collection plate, a member of my father’s congregation, who owned an appliance store, outfitted our house with the bewildering luxury of central air-conditioning. My mother clipped coupons and carried a bundle of them on trips to the grocery. My parents had no inherited money, and they owned no stock.

But the intangibles. Proximity to the church gave us social value, and the game of family background meant a lot. It was a marker of some kind that both my parents possessed old family stories; that their people had ended up in the same cemeteries for centuries. As a child, I knew that our origins could be traced to northern Europe, and that the adjective “northern” conveyed an extra measure of status. The ability to locate one’s predecessors in England or France was regarded as virtuous, because northern Europe was regarded as an almost utopian place.

My father had come from a string of Protestants, and while some of my mother’s family had French names, and were Catholic, my mother’s branch was not. Then, as now, blond hair was a marker of goodness and desirability, and we were one down on that chart, because no one was blond. But there were a lot of tall people, and some had “Nordic” features: chins, cheekbones, high foreheads. The term was obsolete but still somewhat in play, and it didn’t sound strange to hear adults speak of “their Nordic line.”

No money, but cultural capital. Sometimes, through the cloud of our meager circumstances, I couldn’t see it, but in time the outline of our good fortune was plain.

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