An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness Read Online Free PDF Page A

friends; and it is only now that I really begin to understand how desperately important it was to both my intellectual and emotional life to have had my thoughts and enthusiasms given not only respect but active encouragement. An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers, and I was more lucky than I knew in having been brought up around enthusiasts, and lovers of enthusiasts.
    So I was almost totally content: I had great friends, a full and active life of swimming, riding, softball, parties, boyfriends, summers on the Chesapeake, and all of the other beginnings of life. But there was, in the midst of all of this, a gradual awakening to the reality of what it meant to be an intense, somewhat mercurial girl in an extremely traditional and military world. Independence, temperament, and girlhood met very uneasily in the strange land of cotillion. Navy Cotillion was where officers’ children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn, as if the preceding fourteen or fifteen years hadn’t already made it painfully clear, that generals outrank colonels who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of children, boys always outrank girls.
    One way of grinding this particularly irritating pecking order into the young girls was to teach them the old and ridiculous art of curtsying. It is hard to imagine that anyone in her right mind would find curtsying an even vaguely tolerable thing to do. But having been given the benefits of a liberal education by a father with strongly nonconforming views and behaviors, it was beyond belief to me that I would seriously be expected to do this. I saw the line of crisply crinolined girls in front of me and watched each of them curtsying neatly. Sheep, I thought, Sheep. Then it was my turn. Something inside of me came to a complete boil. It was one too many times watching one too many girls being expected to acquiesce; far more infuriating, it was one too many times watching girls willingly go along with the rites of submission. I refused. A slight matter, perhaps,in any other world, but within the world of military custom and protocol—where symbols and obedience were everything, and where a child’s misbehavior could jeopardize a father’s chance of promotion—it was a declaration of war. Refusing to obey an adult, however absurd the request, simply wasn’t done. Miss Courtnay, our dancing teacher, glared. I refused again. She was, she said, very sure that Colonel Jamison would be terribly upset by this. I was, I said, very sure that Colonel Jamison couldn’t care less. I was wrong. As it turns out, Colonel Jamison did care. However ridiculous he thought it was to teach girls to curtsy to officers and their wives, he cared very much more that I had been rude to someone. I apologized, and then he and I worked on a compromise curtsy, one that involved the slightest possible bending of knees and lowering of the body. It was finely honed, and one of my father’s typically ingenious solutions to an intrinsically awkward situation.
    I resented the bowings, but I loved the elegance of the dress uniforms, the music and dancing, and the beauty of the cotillion evenings. However much I needed my independence, I was learning that I would always be drawn to the world of tradition as well. There was a wonderful sense of security living within this walled-off military world. Expectations were clear and excuses were few; it was a society that genuinely believed in fair play, honor, physical courage, and a willingness to die for one’s country. True, it demanded a certain blind loyalty as a condition of membership, but it tolerated, because it had to, many intense and quixotic young men who were willing to take staggering risks with their lives. And it tolerated, because it hadto, an even less socially