REPUTATION

We make reputations long before we suspect that we have any such comet’s tail of public opinion attached to us. We leave ridiculous caricatures of ourselves along the way, which illustrated tragedies in our lives at the time. Later we come upon these records and pictures and are rarely ever pleased. But somebody has kept them for you, and somebody will remind you of them one day when you are sitting on your pinnacle.

I have been painfully reminded of such things, such as the time in my early school days when I wore the wrong little girl’s bonnet and came home with boogers in my hair, the frightful ordeal my head passed through, and mother’s tears. She was a woman who made mountains of her mole-hills and then climbed them, dragging me, miserable, after her. I lived a very sensational life with her morally on this account. I remember the almost fainting state of humiliation I fell in on this occasion, because it seemed I was the only child in the whole history of her family that had ever contracted these disgraceful insects. I have also been obliged to recall how I learned to play cards under the schoolhouse, never having seen such things before, nor dreaming that they were the devil’s own deck of sins. This business lasted a week, and I cleaned up all the available property of my companions, chiefly slate pencils. Then one of the heaviest losers virtuously betrayed me to my grandfather, a stern old man who knew more than I did about the iniquitous gift of gambling in my immediate family.

There was a terrible scene, and I was obliged to stand beside the marble-top center table in the parlor, lay my hand on the Bible and swear solemnly never to play cards again. I have kept this vow. The little girl who betrayed me is a grandmother now, an exemplary woman who indulges in nothing worse than a social game of bridge.

I might easily have forgotten these and many other diminishing incidents of my childhood but for the fact that they are treasured in the archives of the family with parsimonious care. If you wish to collect complimentary material for a record of yourself, never appeal to your relations. They may be proud of you as an asset to the family name, but they have a gift for remembering your gawky period privately, the follies and faults you committed and have forgotten. You may have come up in the world with a laurel on your brow, but if you go back home forty years later wearing two laurels on your brow, and a noble expression, they will miss the point. What you are only serves to remind them of the little snub-nosed girl you used to be. They are determined to remember that you are dust. No matter how well you conduct yourself, you cannot fix their attention on your virtues or your fame, but they remember how you looked in a long-tailed ruffled basque and full skirt when you were eight years old. Or how you grew up to be very sarcastic, and the impudent thing you said to the Baptist preacher who wanted to proselyte you just after you were converted, meaning that the sting of my tongue had not been changed by conversion.

I do not think they mean any harm. They are simply keeping you where you belong in the family no matter where you belong in literature. Still, I would have preferred not to have become such a surprise to these people who knew me in the beginning. It does seem queer that none of them suspected the kind of youngster I really was. I could write a very serviceable anthology on family relations; but it is wiser not to do so, because some of them are bound to survive me and have the last word. It would be truthful but misleading.