Free Timebends by Arthur Miller Page B

send her into prescient highs of optimism, especially about me. I need only draw a straight line to hear myself praised as a coming da Vinci; my failures she simply swept aside as the fault of my teachers or a momentary fogging of my mind. This worked pretty well until Miss Fisher, the principal of P.S. 24, summoned her to a conference about my unruliness.
    Miss Fisher had been the principal when my mother was a pupil in the same school. Holding me by the hand in the office, my mother seemed to blush in girlish shame as her onetime goddess said, “I do not understand, Augusta, how a fine student like you can have brought him up so badly.” Miss Fisher wore a lace net collar with little ivory stays that pushed into the flesh under her jaw hinges and kept her from bending her neck. It was hard to look up at her without grimacing with pain. She was white-haired and wore ankle-length skirts and white long-sleeved blouses with starched pleated fronts. Tears formed in my mother’s eyes. “Kermit is sucha well-behaved boy,” the great lady went on, “and so quick in his studies …” I began crying too, already feeling the sting of my mother’s hand on the side of my head and imagining the stars I was about to see, but worst of all was her face wracked with disappointment. What was the matter with me? Why was I like this? Dear God, please let me be good like my mother and father and brother! At times like this all life seemed like rowing forever through a sea of remorse.
    Between my terror in the library and Miss Fisher’s condemnation, I seemed to have joined some underworld of disapproved people. My father and brother lived well beyond the sparkling blue line of demarcation—they were wholly good—but placing my mother was not so simple. We had hardly gotten out onto 111th Street when she violently shook me, holding my wrist, gave me a clout on top of the head with her pocketbook, and then bent over me and screamed into my face, “What are you doing to me!” A double condemnation, since even at that moment I knew she wasn’t condemning for her own sake—she adored everything I did—but as an agent for Miss Fisher and implicitly my father and Kermit and the whole United States of America. Thus it was even more painful for her to have to be cursing me when deep within her she thought I hadn’t done anything very wrong. And so we were closer than ever as we reentered the apartment and I pretended deep remorse and she pretended black despair, and in a little while we both had some hot chocolate. Only then did a conspiratorial practicality enter her voice as she said, “Listen”—I looked up from my cup—“I want you to behave.” I said, “I’m going to,” and I meant it. And I did, for a while.
    Of course there are models, avowed and surreptitious, that we mythologize and make into gods, and in enfolding their attributes into ourselves we muddy whatever character they may have really possessed. My mother’s youngest brother, Hymie, was an extremely good-looking young man of no great intelligence or imagination, yet she so loved beauty in women and handsomeness in men that Hymie excited her more than any other relative. In the style of the times he knotted his tie very tight and small, and his collars were so tight that his skin overlapped them, and his hats were tilted over one eye, and when he laughed, his straight white teeth against his swarthy complexion flashed like lights. He had started a small factory to make artificial flowers and brought bouquets of them when he visited. Touching them made me feel itchy, but they were marvelous imitations.
    One afternoon he appeared with a thin blonde woman wearing a black fur collar on a white coat, his beloved, he said, his Stella, whom my mother instantly, as I could see, disapproved of. She disapproved of all the wives of all her brothers. Myron’s Minnie was fat and short