Lit: A Memoir. Mary Karr

quotes the famous pastoral proposition poem, Come live with me and be my love … The sixteenth-century version of Hubba, hubba, sweetcakes. My heart’s banging bongos. And four months later—after he’s driven cross-country to see me several times—he asks me to move to Cambridge with him. Three years after that, we’ll get engaged.

      But before any of that, I have to meet the family, and boy am I eager, facing the task with a peasant girl’s bouncy determination to wow people not overimpressed by much. The final miles Warren’s tiny car putters, I hold a compact in one hand and a mascara wand in the other, globbing on lashes. (Little did I know my mother’s advice—You can never wear too much mascara—is, in this company, deeply wrong.)

      We pass through wrought-iron gates, and I look up, wand in hand, to ask, Is this a subdivision?

      This is my house, he says.

      It’s a testament to Warren’s reticence that he’s failed to mention the place is posh enough to sport a baronial-sounding name without seeming ridiculous: Fairweather Hall. There’s a separate wing for the live-in staff, severely reduced now that the six children are gone. If I remember right, the gardener even grew up on the estate since his father had been Mr. Whitbread’s valet in law school—sounding like a Chekhov serf to me.

      After Warren parks, I gawk my way from the car, jaw unhinged, about to burst out with a ghetto goddamn.

      Why didn’t you tell me about all this? I ask.

      Tell you about what? he wonders, completely sincere, for he’s never less than sincere, which partly informs my devotion. I already know how Warren shrinks from show. When people ask where he went to college, he’ll avoid dropping the H-bomb as long as possible, though I’d have tattooed it on my forehead.

      That ivy-scribbled house has a fairy-tale quality, with gardens sprawled around it and long, vaulted windows you could drive a Buick through. Plus a door bigger than my daddy’s bass boat, with a bronze knocker, even. The uniformed Irish maid waits outside to help us with our bags, which Warren refuses, partly because she’s at least seventy and no taller than five feet.

      They call her Kelley, though it’s her last name, and I’ll later find out she was deputized to take Warren trick-or-treating when he was a kid, with a sheet over her head and a bag for her own candy. Odd, I thought, my parents hadn’t taken me around, either. (Though the Whitbreads’ offhand parenting style was light-years from my family’s, both Warren and I grew up yearning for a warmer home than where we’d started.)

      I don’t have the sense not to hug whoever greets us, so I try to throw my arms around Kelley, and she flinches away, straightening her apron. Facing the big house, I’d like to say I’m neither wowed nor panicky, but I feel like a field hand called out of the cotton.

      Would you like some tea? Kelley asks.

      Yes, please, Warren says, closing the door.

      The foyer, a crystal chandelier like a sparkly jungle gym hangs from the two-story ceiling. Two dogs waggle around us, which Warren pats and baby-talks to while I stare. Cloudily mirrored alcoves hold Chinese vases. The staircase curves grandly enough for his older sister to have descended for her debut into New York society on it. At some point, Warren gently uses his hand to close my jaw.

      For something to say, I ask the dogs’ names.

      The mutt is Sammy, Kelley says, and this grand old man—she ruffles the ears of the golden retriever—is Tiger.

      Tiger Three, Warren says. He explains that the death of Tiger One so traumatized the family twenty years back that his father kept buying new pups and stapling the old name on.

      Tea comes in the formal library, Kelley lurching in under the weight of a silver tray. A dozen cookies circle a linen napkin, and following Warren’s lead, I take a single measly cookie the size of a half dollar, eyeing the rest with the same appetite that keeps Tiger panting openmouthed nearby. In that house, you have to practice not wanting.

      The living room has about fourteen chintz couches and a fireplace big enough to roast a pig, plus polo trophies and embossed silver cigarette cases. Also a baby grand nobody’s used since Warren left for prep school.

      I ask where the TV goes in that vast space, and he drags aside the drapes to reveal the portable set his dad infrequently rolls out for viewing golf. Warren tells me if his father poked his head in the living room and found Warren and his sister before the TV, he’d never fail to say, Hello, idiots.

      Which shocks me. In my house, personal freedom is all, amusement so hard won in that town that the right to scrabble for it is inalienable. Also in my house, cruelty was rarely so deliberate, more often the haphazard side effect of being shitfaced.

      I plop down at the keyboard to play the only chord I know, but Warren mentions his mother naps after lunch. He sits next to me with a wry smile. In the car he’d told me how he’d chosen poetry over his family’s penchant for law, partly to escape that preordered hamster wheel he was bred for. He’s opting for a game only history can measure his success in. (He didn’t mention how his father came home from Wall Street and read Homer in Greek and Virgil in Latin.) How clear Warren’s green eyes are as he restates those to me noble convictions, and then he bends to kiss me with a mouth tasting of anise seed. Poetry will deliver him from his stultifying fate as it will me from my turbulent one. We’re sealed in that unlikely covenant already, with the vast house spread out around us as the dogs circle, tags clanking.

      Afterward, Warren leads me meandering through the scented rose garden and alongside the neat rows of vegetables. I think of Daddy’s pride at tomatoes staked in paint buckets on the porch under the clothesline sagging with dishrags.

      The tennis courts were razed for a huge pool. At the old stable—empty of horses—we feed carrots to the gray-muzzled donkeys. Once bought to keep the thoroughbreds calm, they’re fat court jesters who’ve taken over the place now the royal family’s died off. The family’s history is linked to horses. In my hometown, they’re used to cut cattle. As a kid, Warren and his sisters rode with their father before breakfast in the mornings. You had to make the high jump to get an extra serving of roast beef at dinner.

      Crossing the wide pantry, I spy the saucer of cookies and ask, Your mother still upstairs?

      Why are you whispering, sweetie? he asks, adding, Take another one if you like.

      How can you only eat one cookie? I say, biting down on one, then thumbing the fallen crumbs off my lip.

      My father’s always on some diet he can’t adhere to. It must’ve affected the rest of us, he says.

      Evening finds us seated at the long glossy table, half the length of a bowling alley, where his parents sit at opposite ends—his father portly in a tweed jacket with patched elbows; his mother blond and thin as a greyhound, smiling.

      Thank Mary for the Burgundy, Mrs. Whitbread says.

      You brought this? Mr. Whitbread holds his glass up. (In fact, I’d called the old bar I used to tend to find out what to bring.) It’s excellent. He takes a sip, adding, My own children think I’m rich enough to buy my own wine.

      I could never find one you liked, Warren says.

      Which prompts the first of many silences I’ll sit through at that table. Silence rolls across us like a gray sea fog. Ice crystals form around our faces. Forks freeze in place. The salad plates are cleared. Warren sits straight enough to be lashed to a stake.

      Kelley comes in hauling a massive tray where two capons lie prissily on curlicues of kale. Mr. Whitbread rises to carve. I study the stiff painting over the massive sideboard—Mr. Whitbread in full riding gear atop a horse. I feel a stab of tribal pride that in the cracker-box house I grew up in, Mother’s blazing nudes assembled with swashbuckling brushstrokes show way more sensibility.

      So, Warren, his father finally says, will you row this year?

      Warren says, I’m not in college anymore.

      I shoot my eyes to him, but he fails to meet my gaze. How,