Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader by Anne Fadiman Read Free Book Online Page A

O’Reilly seemed far less confident. His sacralization of the hearth no longer seemed smug; it seemed anxious. In 1877, he could feel the ground shifting beneath his feet. The “home sanctuary” seemed to him the last bulwark against irreligion, evolutionism, crime, alcoholism, prostitution, political corruption, industrial labor, disrespect for the older generation, and female emancipation. “Close and bar the door of your home at all times,” he cautioned, “when you know that wickedness is abroad in the street or on the highway.”
It’s okay, Father O’Reilly
, I told him.
There are lots of people today who feel exactly the same way
.
    This time around, the prescribed distaff virtues didn’t sound so awful. (In fact, I decided that if they were compulsory for men as well, the world would be a kinder and gentler place.) One night I compiled a brief O’Reilly list and asked George to rate me on a ten-point scale. Here’s how I stacked up:
     
Discretion
7
Discipline
5
Religious fervor
0
Power to soothe and charm
6
Truthfulness
10
Thrift
3
Avoidance of impure literature, engravings, paintings, and statuary
2
Kindness
10
Cheerfulness
6
Order in the Home
5
Abjuration of fashion
10
Self-control
9
Excellence in needlework
2
    My scores wouldn’t have earned me a prize book from the Sisters of the Holy Cross, but I confess to a small, retrograde flush of pride at not having utterly flunked.
    After the second reading, I started asking my mother and my aunt about the woman who had won it. I learned that Maude’s husband, Joseph Sharp, a wealthy young man who had studied the classics at Harvard, was superintendent of the coal mine in Sunnyside, Utah, a position that placed him at the top of the local social ladder. His beautiful wife was a renowned hostess until Joseph quit his job over a matter of principle. My mother remembers that there was an explosion in the mine, and the mine owners forbade him to open the doors to let the trapped miners escape, lest the oxygen spread the fire. My aunt remembers that there was a labor strike, and that the owners turned the miners’ families out of the company houses in midwinter, forcing them to live in holes they dug in the snow. Whatever the reason, Joseph and Maude moved without servants to a dairy ranch, where the winner of the trigonometry and elocution prizes scrubbed laundry on a washboard, killed mice by smashing them with a coal shovel, and rose before dawn to bake bread for a kitchenful of ranch hands wearing unwashed longjohns.
    When their farmhouse burned to the ground, they lost all they owned except a few things, including Maude’s prize book, which she had given to their daughter. Unable to afford rebuilding, they hauled a four-room miner’s shack to the ranch on a horse-drawn wagon. It was unpainted and uninsulated. There were no pictures on the walls, no rugs on the floor, no gewgaws on the mantel, no mantel. Maude slept on a plain metal cot whose legs rested in cans filled with bedbug-deterrent turpentine.
    In a subchapter called “How a Noble Husband Was Sustained by a Devoted Wife While Passing Through Financial Difficulties,” Father O’Reilly told the story of a rich man who suffered a reversal of fortune. His “proud little housewife” offered to sell some of their furniture, saying, “You shall see how easy it will be to me to part with thy treasures, provided I have a little home for you and our darlings.” The family, accompanied by their servants, cheerfully set themselves up again in a more modest house. “The carpets were plain, it is true, and the furniture was of the commonest kind; but chairs and sofas and ottomans had been covered with a chintz so pretty that no one stopped to inquire what was beneath the covering… . The little ones saw no change around them, save that the light of their mother’s smile was even more sunny than ever.”
    Maude must have read this. Did she want to smash its author with a coal shovel for suggesting that