Please is a mean word. A word in leg irons. She doesn’t say it often. Her pleases and thank-yous are performed in soft-focus, as they like to say in the cinema world. It has nothing to do with love, but you can imagine how it is for her, having to ask and then having to be grateful. It’s too bad. Good manners had such a happy childhood, but then things got complicated. The weave of complication has brought Georgia Willow up against those she would not care to meet again, not in broad daylight anyway, and others who have extracted far more than poor Mr. Manfred at the garden fence ever dreamed of. Good manners are not always nice, not nice at all, although Mrs. Willow has a way of banishing the hard outlines of time and place, and of course she would never think of naming names. Discretion is one of her tenets. She does a special Monday afternoon series on discretion in which she enjoins others to avoid personal inquiries and pointed judgments.

“Courtesy,” concludes Georgia Willow, “is like the golden coin in the princess’s silk purse. Every time it’s spent worthily, another appears in its place.”

Almost everyone agrees with her. However much they look into her eyes and think she is uttering mere niceties, they are sworn to that ultimate courtesy which is to believe what people want us to believe. And thus, when Mrs. Willow bids them good afternoon, they courteously rise to their feet. “Good afternoon,” they smile back, shaking hands carefully, and postponing their slow, rhythmic applause and the smashing of the teacups.

Times of Sickness and Health

Times of Sickness and Health

Kay’s mother had ideas, notions of refinement. One of these notions was that young girls benefitted from the experience of ballet classes, and so all three of her daughters were enrolled-Kay’s sister Joan, a second sister Dorrie, and Kay herself who was the youngest in the class, the youngest by far, being not quite five years old.

The lessons were held in a large mirrored room on the second floor of a commercial building. Kay remembers the long unbroken stairway, lit at the top and bottom, but dark in the middle. Their dance shoes they carried in their hands, soft-toed satiny slippers, not the hard-nosed shoes of classical ballet. The teacher was a thin, darkish woman. She wore a kind of short-skirted costume. Fancy, shiny. Another woman played the piano. One-two-three-jump was the way they started off each week.