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FICTION

THE HEIRS BY SUSAN RIEGER

E leanor belonged to that class of New Yorker whose bloodlines were traced in the manner of racehorses: she was Phipps (sire) out of Deering (dam), by Livingston (sire’s dam) and Porter (dam’s dam). Born in 1938, during the Depression, to parents who had held on to their money, she was never allowed to buy anything showy or fashionable. It had to be good and it might be costly, but not obviously so to someone outside the walls of New York’s Four Hundred families. She went to Brearley because the women in her father’s family had gone there and because Brearley girls wore shapeless, navy, hand-me-down, Catholic-school uniforms and brown oxfords. Eleanor’s upbringing had been conducted by a martinet mother

Mrs. Phipps, had she known, would have bridled at the “authoritarian” epithet the professor had so slickly applied to Eleanor’s upbringing. She was no narrow dogmatist, doing unto Eleanor as had been done unto her. She never struck Eleanor or locked her in a closet or made her stand in the corner. Her childrearing regimen was up-to-the-minute and scientific, based on the soundest principles of “child development.” An early and avid subscriber to Parenting magazine, she was a votary of the psychologist J. B. Watson and kept his book Psychological Care of Infant and Child by her bedside. She took to heart his nostrums against hugging and kissing and often quoted to Eleanor his most famous axiom: “Mother love is a dangerous instrument that can wreck a child’s chance for future happiness.” Everything she did was for Eleanor’s own good.

and a succession of brisk English nannies who drilled her daily on grammar, hygiene, deportment, and dress. In truth, she wasn’t so much raised up as subjugated, yoked to a set of rules and rituals that rivaled Leviticus for their specificity, rigor, piety, and triviality. On the subject of manners, Mrs. Phipps swore by Emily Post’s diktat that the Chief Virtue of Children was Obedience. No young human being, any more than a young dog, has the least claim to attractiveness unless it is trained to manners and obedience. The child that whines, interrupts, fusses, fidgets, and does nothing that it is told to do, has not the least power of attraction for any one. . . . When possible, a child should be taken away the instant it becomes disobedient. It soon learns that it cannot “stay with mother” unless it is well-behaved. This means that it learns self-control in babyhood.

Deference to males, no matter their age, was an article of faith in the Phipps household, and by the time she was twelve, Eleanor, with no show of temper, would lose regularly at tennis to boys who weren’t nearly as good as she was. With similar equanimity, she would never argue with a boy or, worse, correct him, no matter how thick he was. At most she’d allow herself a “Do you think so,” then clear her throat. Mrs. Phipps took the hard line against female intelligence, thinking it suspect in a woman, unpardonable in a girl. Vulgarity was the besetting sin, the mark of the ill-bred, covering a range of behaviors extending well beyond conspicuous consumption to reading French novels, confusing a fish fork with a dessert fork, nodding off at the opera, using “lay” instead of “lie,” and wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

Adolescence offeredno escape for Eleanor fromthematernal dragnet except in furtive play. Pre-Kinsey, she didn’t have a name for it; she only knew she wasn’t to do it. “No decent person does it,” Mrs. Phipps told her. “Only perverts.” Eleanor’s response, by now second nature, was to slip into silence, which passed for submission, and take long baths. Her mother always blamed Vassar for Eleanor’s marriage to Rupert, and certainly it contributed to her general “Bolshiness,” as her mother called it. In truth, the path was laid down when she was sixteen in a setting Mrs. Phipps would have thought, if not entirely wholesome, then safe enough.

When, years later, at Vassar, Eleanor read Mrs. Post’s 1922 monumental Etiquette in a sociology class, she saw the “it” as the key to her upbringing. She wrote her term paper on obedience, “Portrait of the Debutante as a Young Dog.” Her professor gave her an A. His only comment was: “So, Miss Phipps, what do you think it would have been for you, as one raised under authoritarian principles, in WWII? Hitler Youth? White Rose? Kinder, Küche, Kirche?” Eleanor showed her roommate. “The creep is flirting and insulting me at the same time,” she said.

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