Diary of a Yuppie by Louis Auchincloss Page B

himself that the protracted company of two little girls, however bright, however darling, does not have its tedious aspect, he is a self-deceiver. And, of course, it is also true that I bore the girls. They begrudge me the time that I spend asking them perfunctory questions about their friends and school (knowing that I am not really interested), just as I begrudge them the same time taken from office affairs. The closest families are not necessarily those that see most of each other.
    I suppose I must admit that Alice has been so quintessential^ the heart of our family that the girls and I find we do not have much of a relationship when she is absent. It is she, after all, who maintains the genuine and constant concern in all details of the girls' daily lives and who keeps the jokes and the chatter bubbling when we are all four together. I can never seem to remember the names of their friends or teachers. Indeed I had better confess at once that I like to hug them and kiss them and leave it at that. Or at most watch them playing with their friends in Central Park when I am sitting on a bench and have a book to read. It might have been different had I had sons, but I am not even sure of that.
    For example, Audrey the other day wanted me to read a blotchy one-page paper that she had written for school on Pizarro and the Incas. I knew that she only wanted my approval. I have learned that in homework children wish the parents either to do it for them or praise what they have done. I'm afraid I did neither.
    "I've never seen why explorers get so much space in history books," I said. "If they hadn't got where they got, someone else would have, the very next year."
    "Miss Lake doesn't care about explorers. She calls them 'exploiters.' She says what Pizarro did to the Incas was cold-blooded murder."
    "But that's the way the Spaniards did things. If Miss Lake doesn't like it, why does she want to read about it?"
    "Because it's history, Daddy! And she teaches history. That's her job."
    "Well, I don't believe in making snap judgments about historical figures. You weren't there. You don't know all the facts. Or even a fraction of them."
    Audrey was as pretty as her mother, but her nature was conventional and little open to new ideas. Sally, her junior by two years, was square-headed and down to earth.
    "There's no point talking to Daddy about homework," she said flatly. "He doesn't think like the teachers."
    I usually manage to be out of the apartment when Alice comes; our talks are few and brittle. She tells me that her literary agency business is going well and that she needs nothing. This probably means that her parents are helping her. I am beginning to realize that I shall have to pay her something if she stays away permanently, but I am still betting that she will be forced to return. I know that her parents cannot afford to support her indefinitely.

    My mother has now settled the matter. When I came home last night I found her in quiet charge of the apartment and the girls peacefully eating their supper.
    "Leave them be, Bob," she said firmly. "Mix yourself a drink and listen to your old ma."
    Mother, so forceful, yet so thin and plain and gray and somehow immortal, never subject to weather, time or emotion! I have always thought of her as weighing me in the balance and finding me wanting, perhaps because I seemed somehow to threaten Father, or at least her image of him. Yet I never feel that she disapproves of me, or even that she does not love me. It is more as if I were in some strange fashion too much for her and that she has always been fair enough to blame herself for this more than she does me. I have perplexed her, but is that, her troubled look seems to ask, my fault?
    "The way you're living is no way to live. You can't look after the girls and work the hours you do. You've got to let Alice come back and live in this apartment while you get a room somewhere."
    "But this is my home, Ma!"
    "Alice is a bargain. She'll look