Eleanor was spending the night at the home of a Brearley class- mate, Clarissa Van Vliet. Clarissa’s parents, despite impeccable antecedents, were by Mrs. Phipps’s lights “Bohemian.” They lived on the Upper West Side, not the Upper East. Their living room
She’d never heard anyone’s mother use a swearword, and she had believed that if one ever slipped out, a thing almost unimaginable, the woman would be filled with chagrin, falling over herself to apologize. Not this mother. Mrs. Van Vliet laughed and called to
bookshelves held books and not antique Chinese export pottery. Their three children, ages eleven to sixteen, regularly ate dinner with their parents. They socialized with Jews and homosexuals. That evening at dinner, Mrs. Van Vliet directed her conversation toward Clarissa and her guest, telling
the maid to sweep it up. The next day, Eleanor went to Scribner’s and bought Women in Love . She stayed up all night reading it. When she’d finished, she told her mother she was going to go to Vassar. Years later, Eleanor would think of that dinner at the Van Vliets’ as her Emma-Bovary- on-the-road-to-Damascus moment.
MRS. PHIPPS TOOK THE HARD LINE AGAINST FEMALE INTELLIGENCE, THINKING IT SUSPECT IN A WOMAN, UNPARDONABLE IN A GIRL.
them about “a terrific book” she was rereading, D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love . “It’s as good as I remember—I first read it when I was at Vassar, English 225, I think,” she said. “The professor was advanced.” Her husband looked up from his plate, amused. “Very advanced, even for Vassar. Isn’t it what we called in my day a ‘dirty’ book?” he asked. “Well, of course it is,” Mrs. Van Vliet said. “How are young women supposed to learn anything?” As she said this, she knocked her water glass to the floor, where it shattered into scores of tiny, spiky shards. “Oh, shit,” Mrs. Van Vliet said. The hair on the back of Eleanor’s neck stood up. She’d found the whole conversation exhilarating, but this last outburst was thrilling.
Eleanor’s first act of open rebellion was to vote for John F. Kennedy in 1960. No one in the family, not since McKinley, had voted for a Democrat. Her second was to marry Rupert Falkes, a penniless Englishman. --- SUSAN RIEGER is a graduate of Columbia Law School. She has worked as a residential college dean at Yale and an associate provost at Columbia. She has taught law to undergraduates at both schools and written frequently about the law for newspapers and magazines, and is the author of The Divorce Papers. She lives in New York City with her husband. WESTONMAGAZINEGROUP.COM 107 *
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