How It Ended: New and Collected Stories - By Jay McInerney Page 0,59

now turn ugly, Faye was determined. She realized her position was more than a little ironic, since more than once she'd expressed the wish that the stupid house, with all its bad plumbing and bourbon fumes and family secrets, would burn to the ground so they could all just get on with their lives. Here in the self-proclaimed Athens of the South, she hated all the nostalgia mongering, the pedigree parsing, and the casual racism of her brother and his friends. She'd gone to college in Massachusetts, which her grandfather derided as “the Yankiest state in the Union,” and then moved beyond the pale to New York. She returned from time to time, but she'd truly believed when she left at eighteen that she was leaving for good. All of which saddened and mystified her mother, who was, to no small extent, the focus of Faye's apostasy.

Sybil Hayes Teasdale was everything the South expected its daughters to be, and everything that Faye wished to escape. She wore white gloves whenever she left the house, and on those rare occasions when she could be persuaded to speak ill of others, the worst curse she could muster was “common.” The Hayes family had achieved prominence in South Carolina before Sybil's grandfather decamped to the more fertile cotton land of the Mississippi Delta, where he made and lost several fortunes and served two terms in the Senate. Her father attended Vanderbilt long enough to acquire a suitable bride, Dottie Trammel, whom he carried back to the Delta plantation. Sybil's most vivid childhood memories centered around the flood of ‘27, when she and her mother spent two days atop a levee outside of Greenville, waiting to be rescued. Eventually they were picked up in a rowboat and carried to safety. But her father, who stayed behind to help coordinate relief efforts, drowned trying to save one of his men, or so the story was told. Dottie took her daughter and moved in with her parents in Nashville, and while the Trammels always honored the heroic memory of their son-in-law, there was an almost palpable sense of relief that their daughter had returned to civilization.

Her father's death could only have exacerbated that innate southern consciousness of loss and nostalgia, while her mother's family, whose respect for the proprieties was profound, raised her with an exaggerated sense of the perils beyond the family threshold, as if she herself were in imminent danger of being sucked under by muddy torrents. Later, as she started to blossom, this peril was identified as male lasciviousness; she was sent to a finishing school in Switzerland. Returning to Nashville at the age of eighteen, she became the object of intense competition among the eligible men of her generation, who vied to be named one of the six escorts at her debutante ball, held the following spring at the Belle Meade Country Club. Faye's father was not among the chosen, the Teasdales having fallen out with the Trammels over a failed business venture—but he spent the next three years wooing Sybil. Theirs was a storied romance, the beauty with the tragic past and the scion of one of the town's great families, and they were inseparable for the forty-five years of their marriage, although Faye remembered her father as something of a tyrant when it came to his demure and fragile spouse. She'd loved him wholly but was glad she was his daughter, rather than his wife. Even with a staff of six at his disposal, Hunt had demanded constant attention and service from Sybil, and he'd seemed always to be pounding the table and raging against some perceived shortcoming on her part.

Faye had come away from her childhood less than impressed with the institution of marriage. These feelings were reinforced as the sixties gave way to the seventies and their minister at St. George's began railing against free love and women's lib, both of which sounded pretty appealing to teenaged Faye.

Sybil never seemed to feel her oppression as acutely as Faye thought she should, so instead of blaming her father, Faye blamed his wife for her slavish adoration, adding this sin to the tally of grievances against her mother, along with the injunction against blue jeans, and her constant endorsement of “ladylike” behavior. She would have liked to dismiss her mother as a hopeless prude, but on several occasions she had surprised her parents in the act. Saturday afternoons, after her father's golf game, were consecrated to conjugal sport; Faye and