or reinvent yourself, depending on how much life you’ve lived.”
Much of this is going over Douglas’s seventeen-year-old head, though he has an inkling of what she means about Dad’s family. His uncle Tim, Dad’s younger brother, and aunt Betsy, who live in Amherst, visit him often at Milton and have become almost surrogate parents. A month ago, at the end of the second term, they scooped him up and brought him to the family compound on the coast of Maine to meet some of his relations. The big old house, big as a hotel, had a weird name, Mingulay—a Scottish name, someone told him—and oil paintings and brownish old photographs of Braithwaites going back several generations hanging on the board-and-batten walls. The place teemed with around forty aunts and uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, first, second, and even third cousins, with whom he sailed and canoed in Blue Hill bay, played tennis, hiked in the piney woods, and ate dinner in the baronial dining room, where all males over sixteen were required to wear jackets and ties and all females over the same age had to wear dresses and everyone engaged in brilliant, witty conversations he had a hard time following. Tim and Betsy showed him a family tree that was periodically updated, like the U.S. census. He saw his own name and where he fit into that consanguineous universe and learned that he was directly descended from two people who’d come to America not long after the Mayflower. His father had never once mentioned that. In the library one evening his aunt and uncle paged through photo albums with him, and he saw his father as a kid, back in the early fifties, and his grandfather and great-grandfather in their youths. On the bookshelves were family histories and self-published biographies and autobiographies of various ancestors, and he got the idea that Braithwaites were proud of their past and the high-minded, noble things family members had done, putting their principles above their self-interest, like the Boston doctor who could have made a pile treating rich patients but started a charity hospital instead, like the woman who’d been arrested in a demonstration to give women the right to vote, like the naval officer who’d left the quarterdeck during a sea battle in the War of 1812 to save his wounded captain and got court-martialed for abandoning his post. To a kid from the West, where people’s roots didn’t go down very far, unless you were an Indian or a Mexican, all the ancient family lore was fascinating; yet it was also kind of smothering. He too was proud that he came from such fine people; at the same time, he felt an eerie pressure from his dead relations, as if they were telling him that he had to live up to their self-sacrificial ideals, whether he wanted to or not, while the presence of so many living relatives made him feel that he was losing his individual identity, that he was being absorbed into their collective life, like a drop of water into a sponge. He’d had a lot of fun, but a week was enough, and he was relieved to be by himself after Tim and Betsy dropped him off at Boston Logan and he boarded the plane for Tucson.
So he can understand why Dad wanted to get away and be his own man, but he can’t fathom what that has to do with the reason his mother started this discussion about his father.
“He dropped out of Princeton and transferred to the University of Arizona,” she is saying now. “Can you imagine? Trading Princeton for the U of A?”
She snorts, suggesting that she thinks that move was as dumb as the great-whatever passing up a chance to get in on the ground floor of Wrigley’s Spearmint.
“If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have met you,” Douglas says in its defense.
“True.”
“And then I wouldn’t be here.”
“Also true.”
“And neither would Megan and Lisa.”
“Ditto.”
“So we’re real glad he dropped out of Princeton,” he adds, reaching for a lighthearted tone.
She senses that it’s not genuine, a pretty wrapper in which he’s trying to smuggle a not-very-pretty question.
Turning from the window, she says:
“I am, too. You’re all three the most precious things in the world to me. Don’t worry. I know it sounded bad last night, but it’s not as bad as it sounded. How many times have you and your sisters heard us quarrel?”
“Mom, that wasn’t a quarrel.”
“Fight, then. How many times?”
“Not many.”
“Drop the m and you’ve