Manhattan Monologues Read Online Free Page B

the term "ladies" advisedly, for this "out" was evidently not available to humbler females. Mother and her sisters were "heiresses" and did not have to perform before the footlights; they could remain, serene and placid, in their big brownstones or Beaux Arts country chateaux, or migrate on set dates to distant villas appropriate to the changing season, and live for clothes and cards in overheated conservatories filled with palms and marble fauns. The sputterings of their sometimes irascible husbands dashed like spray against the rocks of their tranquillity; they were too confident that nothing the latter could do would undermine the eternity of solid support guaranteed by their father's limitless fortune.
    It was in the year after my debut, a time when it was generally expected that a young lady of decent looks and ample fortune should take a mate, that I learned of a third role that I was perhaps destined to play. It was Papa who revealed this to me. He did not, after all, it appeared, wish me to remain a virgin priestess at his altar. Far from it! He wished me to marry, not one of what he called "the silly fops you and your cousins play around with" or even one of the golden heirs of our circle; oh, no, he wanted me to marry a "great man," or one who bore the signs of becoming—a statesman, an ambassador, a many-starred general!
    He confided in me gravely that I was the only one among his offspring who had any of his brains and talent. He described my two poor younger sisters as giddy and party-obsessed, and I have already written what he thought of Otto. He predicted that, as the partner of greatness, I could make a contribution to history and that it was a woman's only way. But wasn't he in fact preparing the sole poor candidate he had to attain the success that had consistently eluded him? Did he love me? Could he? And did I love him? Really and truly? Certainly he frightened me, but he also awed me. I had always been flattered by his attention, which made me feel pleasantly superior to my siblings. Now I began to wonder whether I was getting too much of it.
    He and I had in common a love of reading; his happiest, or perhaps I should say his least frustrated, hours were spent in his dark leathery library, whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with shelves of closely packed volumes, including the rare quartos and folios of his favorite Jacobean dramatists. He liked to read aloud to me from the latter, and, though impressed by his noble tone and theatrical emphasis, I was sometimes appalled at the blood and thunder he admired. I can still hear him in Malcolm's speech in
Macbeth.
Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth.
    Was that what Papa would do if
he
were a great man? Was there a wish under all his oratory to wreak revenge on the universe? At any rate, after his first pronouncement of the desirability of my ultimate union with a gentleman of national importance, he did not mention the subject again, and I am fairly sure that he never discussed it with Mother or any of her family. I began to wonder, with some relief, whether it had been a momentary fancy on his part. I should have known better.
    It was my cousin Lily Hammersly, Aunt Maud's daughter and my exact contemporary (we had "come out" together in a joint ball given by Grandpa and Grandma), who came closest to convincing me that life didn't have to be as I or even as Papa visualized it. She was considered the "belle" of the family, though her little brown pert face was not much prettier than my rather pallid blondness. But she had animation and high spirits and wit, and wasn't in the least in awe of anyone, even Grandpa, whom she dared to tease, or Papa, her uncle-in-law, who was strangely tolerant of her even when she contradicted one of his pronouncements. She regarded the older generations as obstacles that could be made to yield to cajolery, and all of the