The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

12

Cordelia’s Story

I WAS born in 1895, the baby of the family, the third of three girls, and because of complications attending my Caesarian birth it was decided that Mother should not be allowed to try again for the son whom she and Pa had so desperately wanted. Poor little fellow, I may have cost him his life, but when I think of the problems that any son of Pa would have had to face, it occurs to me that a wise providence may have known what it was about. Pa took his revenge on me by a gleeful exercise of his sardonic sense of humor in the choice of my name. Imagine the lifetime of bad jokes that I have had to endure, as a third daughter, with the name Cordelia!

But Shakespeare was a game that two could play, and there have been times, I’m sure, when poor Pa would have carried me across the stage, hanged and dead, with only mirth in his heart as he cried: “Howl, howl.” I cannot imagine why Mother ever put up with such nonsense except that she had a rich aunt who was also named Cordelia. The aunt, incidentally, left me nothing.

Mother was acutely aware from the beginning of the difficulties of bringing up her daughters in the center of a boys’ school. She was determined that we should not be petted and spoiled and grow up with silly notions of standing, like musical comedy princesses, on balconies while choruses of hussars sang our praises, and saw to it instead that we received instruction even tougher than that meted out to the boys. But however well she was able to teach me to read Greek at twelve and to understand Darwin at fourteen, she was less successful in coping with the strong strain of romantic melancholy that I inherited from Pa.

Mother was as rational as she was plain, as sensible as she was unimpressable. I think of her now as she was in her later years, tall, gaunt, a bit bent, with dyed brown hair and a great hook nose and small, darting eyes, walking around and around the campus, even on the wettest afternoons, dressed in brown tweed with a small brown ridiculous beret pulled tightly about her oval head. I am sure the boys called her a witch, but I hope they thought her a friendly one. She was sometimes formidable and sometimes almost scaringly detached as a parent, but she always tried to make her girls feel that they were as important as Pa’s sacred boys.

I don’t know how good a headmaster’s wife she was, by ordinary standards. She wasn’t gracious; she wasn’t stately, and she made a poor enough show on the dais on Prize Day squinting nearsightedly at the titles of the volumes that she handed out. But she never forgot a boy’s name, and she would argue with them over games of chance and in debates on “parlor night” as hotly as if they had been contemporaries.

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