“He’s a time waster,” Dr. Hemingway said in a stern, settled voice.

After a brief silence my mother, anxious to prove she was not a time waster, said, “Can we help wash the dishes?”

“That would be useful,” Mrs. Hemingway said.

Later they told each other it was all they could do to choke back their laughter. Mrs. Hemingway’s stiff autocratic phrase became their private invitation to hysteria. They inverted its icy finality and made of it the signal for hilarity. If Aunt Ingrid offered to give Gladys a manicure, for instance, as she often did, Gladys would say, “That would be useful.” If Mary Morgan said she was thinking of strolling down to the public library, they would all call out after her, “That would be useful.” When a man named Eugene Prop-per proposed to Aunt Ingrid, she swore she came close to giggling out, “Why, that would be very useful.”

A year later, Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises and became famous, but by that time my mother and Ingrid and Mary and Gladys had moved to an apartment on the west side.

This has always seemed to me to be a tragedy of timing. “Why did you move after only one year?” I used to badger my mother, and her answer was always the same: “That house was so cold, we couldn’t stand it another winter. We complained and complained about the heat, but they never did a single thing about it.”

My mother never read Hemingway; his reputation intimidated her, I think. I started early, at fourteen, reading him with eager pleasure, but also out of a compulsion to fulfill a side of a family contract which I felt had been allowed to lapse. It seemed to me I had been willed the sharp perspective of privilege. For instance, I would look up from certain passages in Green Hills of Africa and suddenly think: this is the voice of a man who grew up in an insufficiently heated house. The drafty stairs, the icy bedrooms, the two inches of bath water, all these things tore brokenly into the smoothness of his sentence parts, or so I thought, and I wanted to reach through the pages and warn him that he was in mortal danger of exposing himself. Didn’t he realize what those soft places in the prose revealed? Couldn’t he see what was so clearly apparent to the most casual observer, what his pathetic evasions revealed?