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My first cousin once removed was Robert Lowell, The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet--a fact I just happened to mention on my application to Harvard College. The worst part was that I had to work this genealogical information into the essay. The application had a section for listing family members who had gone to Harvard, but it was only supposed to include immediate family members. The essay wasn't a real essay, just two little white spaces under the questions: "How have your personal experiences contributed to your intellectual growth?" and "How have your academic experiences contributed to your personal growth?" It was three o'clock in the morning, and the application was due the next day. So I started writing something moronic about my intellectual development--or was it my personal growth?--all the while saying to myself, I can't, I can't, when suddenly out of the blue came, "As I was having dinner last night with my first cousin once removed, Robert Lowell, the poet, I turned to him and said. . . ."
That was a long time ago, in 1969, and it is time to make a clean breast of it now. Also, I might just as well admit that I don't get poetry. In high school I was good at subjects like "the Negro" and the "Culture of Poverty," but when it came to analyzing poems, forget it. To this day, put a gun to my head and I still cannot tell you the difference between the mood of a poem and the tone of a poem. My parents were no help. When I went to them with my homework, my father would just shake his head and say he wondered how he ever got such smart kids. My father is a big bragger about us kids--a feat, considering all that has transpired. Not long ago we were at a wedding reception,and across the room I saw my father motioning to me wildly, with his fingers in his mouth, trying to get me to whistle through my teeth, a talent of mine he had obviously just bragged about. It is lucky for my father that he has four kids, because usually one of us is doing all right. One kid might be in a mental hospital, another with the Maharishi, and another with a marriage on the rocks, and my father can turn to someone and say, "My son Bill just got a raise at his job."
Still, I did not lie on the application to Harvard, technically speaking. Bobby--"Bobby" is what we called him in the family--had been over for dinner the night before. Bobby came out to visit us in Concord whenever he was teaching at Harvard. Concord, Massachusetts, is where I grew up, under the influence of the writings of Louisa May Alcott. My mother said there was an excruciating period when I called her Marmee and helped with the dishes every two seconds. Eight years ago, as a grown-up, I moved my husband and children from New York to Concord, on a wave of nostalgia. "So the kids can have swimming lessons at Walden Pond!" I cried out, though it turned out they wanted to have them at a pool.
My mother and Bobby were first cousins, which is how Bobby became "once removed" from me, meaning that he is the same relationship to me as he is to my mother, just one generation away. Understanding "once-removes" is kind of an off-putting characteristic, but it is something I grew up with. Some families discuss politics or the shortest route to I-95 or how to cook a roast chicken in a paper bag; my family has murderously hot discussions about whether Sally Pickering, a woman no more interesting dead than she was alive, is related to us by blood or marriage. (It turns out everyone is correct: She was a cousin who married a cousin.) In my family, genes are everything, so that even being a manic depressive is a kind of badge of honor, proving the family's tenacity in sticking close to Boston, where there was no one to marry but one another.
Bobby was a manic depressive. Half of my family is manic depressive; the rest is screwed up about it. I should mention that whenever I talk about my family it is usually my mother's family to whom I am referring. My father has been known to mention at funerals and other occasions that he has a family too. "The name McGuire would open any door in the South," he says, but nobody is listening.
On the maternal side of my mother's family are the Thorndikes--whose claim to fame is Israel Thorndike, the first millionaire in New England, who looted British ships during the Revolutionary War and later got his portrait hung at Harvard. On the paternal side are the Winslows, who came over on the Mayflower, befriended the Indians, slaughtered the Indians, governed a colony, fled to Canada during the Revolution, and sold matches on the streets. Bobby is related to my mother through the Winslows.
Bobby was an only child. He and my mother were one year apart, and when they were growing up they'd spend weeks together at their grandparents', where their mothers dropped them whenever they had a chance. Neither Bobby's mother nor my mother's mother was what you call a "baby person," although what kind of a person was left for them to be is hard to grasp since neither of them ever cooked, cleaned, earned a dime, or went to college. My mother was very beautiful--her mother used to dress her in Alice-blue velvet and have her sit at the piano with her hair flowing down her back, but sadly her talents lay elsewhere. Nor was she an intellectual. This never seemed to bother Bobby. My First Cousin Once Removed. Copyright © by Sarah Payne Stuart. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
