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328 The Kentucky Anthology Elizabeth Hardwick “Evenings at Home” A Lexington native, Elizabeth Hardwick is not a household name in Kentucky— not even in the households where books are often read. Blame it on her decision to move to New York as soon as she finished her master’s degree at the University of Kentucky in 1939 and then to maintain a rather cold distance from her family and hometown. During her time away from home, however, she has been busy creating a reputation for herself as a no-nonsense critic and author of essays and short stories and several novels, including her very promising first novel, The Ghostly Lover (1945). Despite her rather calculated decision to absent herself from her home, she has certainly earned a spot in this anthology by the quality of work she has produced, including this fine memoir-essay of a Jamesian return to Lexington, where she confronts some of the ghosts she left behind—some living, some dead, and some merely disfigured. There is a saying that Kentuckians some way or another, sooner or later, will always come home. Will Elizabeth Hardwick disprove the old Kentucky saying? h I am here in Kentucky with my family for the first time in a number of years and, naturally, I am quite uncomfortable, but not in the way I had anticipated before leaving New York. The thing that startles me is that I am completely free and can do and say exactly what I wish. This freedom leads me to the bewildering conclusion that the notions I have entertained about my family are fantastic manias, complicated, willful distortions which are so clearly contrary to the facts that I might have taken them from some bloody romance , or, to be more specific, from one of those childhood stories in which the heroine, ragged and castoff, roams the cold streets begging alms which go into the eager hands of a tyrannical stepmother. I staggered a bit when I actually came face to face with my own mother: she carries no whips, gives no evidence of cannibalism. At night everyone sleeps peacefully. So far as I can judge they accuse me of no crimes, make no demands upon me; they neither praise nor criticize me excessively. My uneasiness and defensiveness are quite beside the point, like those flamboyant but unnecessary gestures of our old elocution teacher. My family situation is distinguished by only one eccentricity—it is entirely healthy and normal. This truth is utterly disarming; nothing I have felt in years has disturbed me so profoundly as this terrible fact. I had grown accustomed to a flat and 328 Elizabeth Madox Roberts 329 literal horror, the usual childhood traumas, and having been away from home for a long time I had come to believe these fancies corresponded to life, that one walked in the door, met his parents, his brothers and sisters, and there they were, the family demons, bristling, frowning, and leaping at one’s throat. I was well prepared to enjoy the battle and felt a certain superiority because I was the only one among us who had read up on the simplicities and inevitabilities of family life, the cripplings and jealousies, the shock of birth and brutality of parenthood. When I did not find these hostilities it was just as if the laws of the universe had stopped and I became wary and confused. It is awful to be faced each day with love that is neither too great nor too small, generosity that does not demand payment in blood; there are no rules for responding, no schemes that explain what this is about, and so each smile is a challenge, each friendly gesture an intellectual crisis. I cannot sit down to a meal without staring oft in a distraction and when they ask me what I am thinking I am ashamed to say that I am recalling my analysis of all of them, pacing again, in some amazement, the ugly, angry, damp alleys I think of as my inheritance. But now I look around the table and can see these family faces—my father’s narrow skull, the sudden valley that runs down my mother’s cheeks from the ears to the chin, my sister’s smile which uncovers her large, crooked teeth and makes one think for the moment that she is as huge as an old work horse, though she is, except for her great teeth, very frail—everything I see convinces...

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