Chez Cordelia (3 page)

I wasn't allowed to bring most of my friends home. My parents hardly ever approved of them. But I became adept at wangling invitations to their houses. They were mostly non-readers like me, kids whose parents would have admonished them if they had done much reading, “Don't sit around all day with your nose in a book. You'll ruin your eyes! Go out and play!” At their homes, no one ever said, “Hush! Daddy's working!” because their daddies didn't work at home. I used to long for a regular daddy who left the house in the morning and arrived home at dinnertime. Sandy Schutz (my best friend) had a daddy who got home at 6:30 and played kick-ball with her and her brother until dinner and then watched TV with them. I drooled over such normal living. My father's poetry writing was like an illness, our house the house of an invalid who was confined to his room all day and emerged only in the evening. His poems come hard to him, he always tells interviewers, and in order to write them he needs long stretches of quiet. But in the evenings he wanted us to be there, confirming his success as a father, and what he liked best was for all of us to be in the same room, reading, with someone occasionally reading something aloud, or being struck by some idea, or proposing some word game. It was okay to interrupt as long as it was a literary or otherwise intellectual interruption; they would all look up, fingers keeping their places, and join in; then, interruption disposed of, down they'd dive again. I was a talkative kid, but gradually within the bosom of the family I developed a reputation for taciturnity—though it was really the stark knowledge that my interruptions would be met with patient smiles and small response. I sometimes thought living, for them, was little more than a break in their reading or their writing, and to me the silence that surrounded them was oppressive, alien, and hateful.

I, of course, during those jolly family evenings, was seldom reading. Not
never:
I was required as a schoolchild to do a certain amount. At the weekly compulsory trip to the school library I picked out a book along with everyone else, and occasionally even read it, if it was about animals and had plenty of pictures. Sometimes I was forced to read it. My fourth-grade teacher, Sister Caroline, used to make us write a weekly book report, and Sister Joseph Edward, in fifth grade, used to quiz me (and Danny and Vinnie and one or two other reading-resisters) about our library books. (I still remember, at the age of ten, trying to get away with
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
.)

But on most of those long evenings in our messy living room, I had to find other occupations for myself. What I wanted to do plenty of times was scream, throw apple cores, smash something, grab someone's book and stuff pages in my mouth, and gabble horrible noises at them all. But I did none of these things, though it comforted me to imagine them, and worse. After I finished my homework I usually looked at my coins.

When I was eleven, my Aunt Phoebe gave me my grandfather's coin collection, and I fell in love with it. At first my parents were thrilled because it was a faintly intellectual interest. “You'll pick up some history, at least,” they said encouragingly. But as time went on my passion for the coins puzzled and even faintly disgusted them. They couldn't understand how I could just keep looking at them, lying on the floor turning the pages of my coin albums as if they were—well, books. They gave me books on numismatics, but I didn't read them, though I liked looking at the pictures. I preferred to learn about coins from Gene at the East Shore Stamp and Coin Shop. And in my spare time I coin-gazed, simply because I liked my coins—the way they looked, the aura they carried of many hands and many transactions and many people, and the fact that they were mine, all mine. And I liked adding up their value (accurately, in my head) and planning what coins I would add to my collection when I grew up and became rich. And I liked puzzling my parents perhaps best of all.

Why haven't I said much about my mother? Maybe because I loved her most, or because she bugged me least. I think she was always quietly motherly as my father, for all his show, wasn't really fatherly. Not that the family disease didn't infect her as much as any of them. She writes biographies, short ones, of obscure literary figures. I used to think maybe I would read one or two of them, they're so short; also, they're inviting books. They're published by Owl & Bantling, Ltd., of London, a firm that publishes Anglican liturgical works, treatises on gardening, and my mother's biographies, and they treat my mother well. Her books are printed on creamy thick paper with the ragged edges that are hard to turn, and they all have rose-colored covers with a white spine and gold letters … thin, pretty books by my thin, pretty mother. I opened one once (waiting until no one was home, lest they get their hopes up), the thinnest one (82 pp.), called
The Fire's Path: A Life of Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd
. It was about a twelfth-century Welsh warrior poet. I made out that his mother's name was Pyfog and that his fame rests on eight poems and a good deal of Norman-bashing, but the story was so clogged with words I could hardly read it. I admit I didn't try for long—I was afraid she'd come in and find me at it, and I'd have to confess I found it dull and incomprehensible—it was Welsh to me, har har har. My mother's work is apparently a critical and scholarly success, though not—needless to say—a popular one. But Owl & Bantling don't expect their authors to write best-sellers, they'd probably drop her if she did, and they write my mother affectionate letters, in ink. “Caviar to the general,” my father always said about her stuff, and this expression of her failure seemed curiously satisfying to both my parents. But though I've been acquainted with caviar since I was a baby and used to practice my small-motor skills on it, eating it black pearl by black pearl, no one ever told me who the general is; I was expected to know.

She was always at it, my mother. Unlike Daddy, she always did her work in the midst of the family, and I used to find her at the kitchen table when I got home from school, drinking Jackson's Coronation Tea and, say, writing out lists of Anglo-Saxon verbs. Languages are her specialty; I think she knows all of them, particularly the ones which are dead, obsolete, or spoken only by one small tribe living on the banks of a tributary of some minor Australian river—that sort of thing. It depresses me, all that mental energy going for zilch. Not to be disrespectful of my mother. But I can see learning French if you're going on vacation in France. I can even understand learning Latin or Old English so you can read the books written in it if that's your inclination. But the Jeshoba dialect of the Murai? I ask you. In fact, I have asked her: she says she does it for fun, and I must admit my mother has always seemed to me a singularly happy woman. I once asked Juliet, though, and she said something else: “She does it to keep sane. Because of Daddy.” I am still absorbing this blasphemy.

When we were kids, our parents' lives revolved around the family and my father's work. We had plenty of company because my father needed to show off. His poet friends would come for interminable weekends of poetry reading and whiskey drinking. Juliet and I used to sneak out of bed at night to listen to the uproar. “Why do you have to be drunk all the time to be a poet?” I asked her once. “I'm a poet,” she said loftily, “and I'm not drunk.”

There was one man in particular, Theodore Low (jokingly called “The Dentist Poet” because he had briefly, in his youth, gone to dental school), who used to fascinate us. He became violent when he was drunk enough, and he was nearly always drunk enough. He came to visit perhaps twice a year, and I always looked forward to his coming—the way I looked forward to other natural disasters, like blizzards. For one thing, he liked me. I was the only dark-haired one in a houseful of blonde women, and he used to call me his little chocolate cream and sneak me expensive candies from New York. Once he brought me a white fur muff. Another time—not so pleasant a memory, though then it seemed like fun—when he was very drunk, he picked me up, threw me on the sofa, and began tickling me, both of us giggling ecstatically until my mother came in and he suddenly stopped. I remember his pungent breath and my mother's set face. Ted Low also broke windows, pulled the phone out of the wall, smashed whiskey bottles, once set fire to his bed, and made passes at my mother. But my father said he had a great gift, so he kept coming—a short, fat man with a face the color of the suet we put out for the birds. He died in an asylum when I was seventeen, and I cried so hard I had to be kept home from school.

During the time my father was teaching (at Wesleyan for a while, then at Yale), there would be intense students hanging around with sheaves of poems, usually small squares of words typed in the middle of a big sheet of paper (a silly waste, I thought; why couldn't they type two or three to a page?). They idolized my parents, fell in love with our big, book-messy house, and publicly envied us kids our terrific life. And there I was, the little malcontent, huddled over my gold and silver coins like a cavewoman over her fire, to keep off the ravening beasts: books, and book talk, and college boys trying to buddy up to me in order to make a good impression on my father.

For years, though, my war with the printed word never penetrated my father's consciousness—not really. My mother and I used to discuss it, briefly but regularly over the years, discussions ending in sad sighs all around, but no matter how many U's and notes from my teachers and picture-ridden library books I brought home, my father kept giving me absurdly inappropriate books for presents, and couching his affection for me in literary terms. What did it mean to me to be told I was his masterpiece, his
Hamlet?
Or to be thrust, helpless, into his poems? Or to be asked, every time I sulked, “‘So young and so untender?'” I didn't want to be my father's inspiration, I didn't want to be a damned literary allusion, I just wanted to be his daughter. I wanted him to accept my differences, but his attitude toward me was always expectant: one of these days I'd take to books, just as one of these days I'd grow tall.

These hopes weren't unreasonable when I was little, but they persisted into my adulthood. The truth is, my father is a snob; he couldn't let a book-resistant offspring into the clan. But I was his daughter, he was the poet of family life, he couldn't very well expel me. So he refused to admit my failings were final. He applied faith, hope, and charity to my case. And he waited for the baby of the family to grow up, to settle down, to become the person he expected.

The waiting hasn't aged him; he doesn't seem to have changed much from his early pictures—the series of snapshots, for instance, he and my mother took of each other on their honeymoon (a walking tour through England) in 1941. My father today hasn't one white hair, his cheeks are rosy, his vision is 20-20, his belly curves out over his belt to exactly the same degree it did when he was twenty-five. If all his hair turned white, he'd look like Santa Claus, but for the moment he is a large, hearty man who looks more like a lumberjack than a poet. You'd never peg him as someone who sits around writing and reading all day. His poems, by contrast, are apparently polished and classical—and “accessible,” I'm told, in spite of his turning me into a red maple in one of them. They achieve, according to
Time
magazine, “the difficult combination of readability and profundity.” His fourth book,
Where the Children Go
, is in paperback at the drugstore in town: “America's best-loved poet,” the cover blurb says. (I saw it in the rack the other day when I was in there and blushed scarlet, remembering that it's the volume that contains the poem about my getting my period: “Meditation on a Daughter's Menses.”) The two-part TV special about him and his family (I refused to appear) set a record for audience response on the public broadcasting station. My mother smiles and murmurs about Browning, Frost … There are times when Tennyson isn't enough for her.

It may be partly my father's large, picturesque hairiness, and our big old house in the Connecticut woods, that have endeared him to the public at a time when bushy beards and wood stoves (we have four of them) and ten acres of birch forest and meadow and close family ties are dear to the hearts of Americans. Or it may be, as they said on the TV special, that “Americans are ready for poetry again,” and specifically for Jeremiah Miller's brand of poetry.

But it's my theory that he simply knows how to market himself. He has always made sure that he and his beard and his stoves and acres and kids are visible. Even before the TV special, he let us all be used in a
Time
photo essay: “The Poet and His Family.” I was too young to protest: there I am, “Cordelia, youngest of the Miller brood,” sitting up in the apple tree. I'm even quoted: “Says Daughter Cordelia, 12, with the devastating honesty of her namesake, ‘What's all the fuss about? He's just my dad,'” words I never uttered. (They could make me sit for the damned photographers, but they couldn't make me talk; and even at the age of twelve I knew that, whatever my father was, he was surely not just my dad.)

Then, besides
Time
, there were women's magazine articles on my mother: “Elizabeth Miller, devoted mother, first-class cook, nature buff, linguist, biographer, and—last but by no means least—wife to America's unofficial Poet Laureate.” One magazine even featured some of my mother's bizarre, extravagant, impetuous recipes, and another was keen to make her over with a haircut and eyeshadow and a string of pearls until my father put his foot down. Daddy has appeared on the Dick Cavett show twice, and he writes articles for the
Times
Op-Ed page, usually about the old-fashioned virtues of this and that and the other thing. He got his publishers to put into print Horatio's autobiographical novel (written before he left for Harvard). He even got in on Juliet's modeling career:
Vogue
did a series called “The Renaissance of the Family” that included a four-page spread on Juliet (in Ralph Lauren) and her pop (in flannel shirt and dungarees he'd had since the 1940s), and along with it a poem he composed for the occasion called “Daughter,” which compared Juliet to (I think) a loaf of rising bread.