Matters of Honor Read Online Free PDF

doesn’t think about me from one end of the week to the other, except when he wishes I were there to chauffeur him or run errands. And of course during the scenes my mother makes about me. She claims that the only reason she stayed with him after the war was that she didn’t want to lose me and now she’s lost me anyway and somehow that’s my father’s fault.
    He laughed again. I bet he wishes he had told her to shove off and take her precious son with her! Actually, that’s unfair. I know he loves me in his own way, whatever that means, but he has other things on his mind. Such as his business and money, and how to tiptoe around my mother. But he doesn’t get worked up about me. That’s her specialty. I think she really believes that the only way to show love is by imagining catastrophes. She’ll say, I can see it: you’ve been hit by a bus, you’ve fallen down the stairs and broken your back, your appendix has burst and you’re in unbearable pain. I can already see them carrying you away. That’s not love; it’s some disastrous mutation, the worst form of selfishness.
    You’ve got to see my mother’s worrying for what it is, he continued, undeterred by my silence. Some part of it is genuine, but mostly she just wants me to toe the line. She uses the same technique on my father, but that’s a whole different story. For instance, if I don’t call because I forgot or couldn’t bring myself to do it—which does happen—she can shift the blame to me for everything that has gone wrong over there in Brooklyn. She couldn’t cook dinner because she was so worried; she dropped the Rosenthal platter on the kitchen floor because she was so nervous; my father had to take his nitroglycerin because right away he noticed the state she was in; she has spent all her time and energy on me, she hasn’t been able to make friends. This can go on and on. She worries about my father’s angina and weak heart but not enough to go easy on him. Somehow, I’m not made like them: I worry when I have a problem. Then I do something about it. My mother claims I am heartless. Sometimes, when I want to needle them, I tell them they’re right, I have no heart and therefore no pains in the chest. You should hear them afterward. The first punitive measure is to stop my allowance. They send it weekly, so it’s easier to clamp down, although the ostensible reason is that if they sent it in advance, for instance monthly, I would spend it all in two days. Of course, at a certain point after a big row I begin to feel bad. I want to make up. That means I have to apologize in at least ten different ways. If the transgression is grave, I have to apologize in writing. There is no such thing as taking in the prodigal son without first raking him over the coals.
    Henry laughed at his own joke; he had an irritating tendency to do that. In any event, I disliked his tirades and wondered how much this one owed to Dostoyevsky. We were both reading
The Brothers Karamazov,
and Henry had decided that it contained the answers to all the great questions that perplexed him.
    My mother had given me a Sheffield tea set she had inherited a couple years ago from her aunt Kitty and some cups and saucers. The electric hot plate and the kettle I had bought on my own initiative. When the tea was ready, we drank in silence until I broke it asking why, if the telephone calls were such a torment, he didn’t tell his parents they could save money by limiting the calls to one a week.
    That wouldn’t work, he said. My father counts every penny, but hanging on to me is a matter of life and death for my mother, so they consider the high telephone bills another inevitable consequence of having allowed me to go to Harvard. You see, they’re in a bind. They realize that they couldn’t really force me to decline admission on a full scholarship. In fact, it’s something they can brag about. But at the same time they can’t get over my having left home. They see it as an