A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Read Online Free PDF Page B

hefty rather than stout, with blond hair drawn straight over her scalp to knot in back. She wore mannish suits and her love life was hidden but far from un-guessable. What she believed in was almost the exact opposite of everything Mother stood for: that life could, and perhaps should, be lived for the appreciation of art, if one did not have the good luck to have been born an artist oneself.

    Mother was fond of Aunt Daisy, but she never yielded an inch in her conviction that the only really good life was to have a faithful husband enthusiastically at work in a beloved profession and a faithful wife happily raising a large and essentially obedient family. The amazing thing about my mother was that she was always able to see her own case as a thing apart, having no special relation to others, so that she brought a fresh and unbiased mind of penetrating power to the problems of her friends who sought her advice in droves. As one of them, whose happy marriage she arranged in a difficult situation, told me, "I was lucky not to be related to your mother, for her mind doesn't work as well with her own family."

    Aunt Daisy could only pity Mother for what she regarded as philistine principles. Daisy boasted of having heard more than fifty performances of
Tristan
at the opera house and rarely left town for fear of missing a cultural event. "If you see a tree, give it a kick for me," she used to say to those departing in rustic retreat. She lived amid the large and handsome objects of her prosperous and utterly respectable family, whose money came from one of Commodore Vanderbilt's corrupt judges. New York had its compromises.
    Aunt Daisy was warmly interested in any of her friends' children who showed the least intellectual curiosity, and her talk of art in any form was witty and amusing. Her quotations, mostly of poetry, were wonderfully relevant to the subject under discussion; she was the first person to make me aware of pleasures that were of only tertiary importance to my parents.
    But Aunt Daisy's tragedy was my bitter disillusionment. Her increasing alcoholism rendered her inanely sentimental about works of art, particularly music, about which she had formerly made good sense. In an opera box (one constantly loaned to her by a rich and devoted friend) she would ask me to bring her drinks from the bar and wax irate when I told her it wasn't allowed. The sad thing was that her deterioration struck me as a kind of justification of Mother's point of view. To this sorry state an overindulgence in the arts brought one!
    The elderly husband of Aunt Daisy's most intimate friend once described Aunt Daisy to Mother as the "dark shadow" in his life. Did that mean she and his wife had an affair? I hope so.

    A somewhat similar warning though in a different area was offered by a dazzlingly beautiful first cousin of Mother's whom I shall call Sally. Sally's looks and charm had made her a noted figure in society: she had been married twice—the second time happily though both times childlessly—to attractive men about town who shared her epicurean view of a life dedicated to pleasure and the maintenance of a fine appearance.
    Like Aunt Daisy, but in a very different way, she was Mother's opposite, but as Mother's senior by a year, she had dominated her in childhood and the bond was never loosened. Sally, whose closest next of kin was a brother married to a great heiress, had once proposed to leave her own not inconsiderable estate to Mother's children, but had been dissuaded by Mother, who had insisted on the brother's preference. It was a typical example of what I used to call Mother's "magnificent disloyalty."
    Sally's end might have pointed to the moral in a story written by Mother had she written any. Living alone in an apartment hotel as a widow, surrounded by great gaping dolls in wonderful dresses, she took to the bottle and eventually threw herself out the window. A news account described a pillow in her apartment bearing the