Unreasonable expectations

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, from The Scarlet Letter

Seems to me that "considerable period," for some people, can be quite a while.

I think Hawthorne is right about the direction of the effect, but perhaps not about the timescale.

Human beings are remarkably good at compartmentalization. A person can maintain one presentation for family, another for colleagues, another for strangers, and another for themselves, sometimes for decades. Politicians, clergy, actors, salespeople, spies, and ordinary people with complicated lives provide plenty of examples.

What interests me in Hawthorne's observation is the word bewildered. He does not say the person eventually discovers the truth. He says the person becomes confused about it. The danger is not simply hypocrisy; it is loss of self-knowledge.

If you tell the same story often enough, even when you know it is incomplete or misleading, it begins to feel familiar. Familiarity can masquerade as truth. The public face becomes easier to access than the private one. Eventually the person may no longer be consciously lying. They may genuinely not know where the performance ends and the self begins.

On the other hand, I think there is an important qualification. Not every difference between public and private selves is deceit. Civilization depends on some degree of role-playing. The face one presents at a funeral, at work, or in a courtroom is not identical to the face one presents while alone. That is not necessarily falsehood; it may simply be discipline and courtesy.

The problem arises when the gap becomes too large. If the public self is merely a polished version of the private self, there is little danger. If the public self is built on denying major parts of the private self, then Hawthorne's bewilderment becomes more likely.

Your comment about "considerable period" is well taken. Some people can sustain the division for an astonishingly long time. But I suspect Hawthorne would reply that the longer they sustain it, the less confidence they can have that they still know which face is the original. The success of the masquerade may itself be evidence of the confusion.

It reminds me of a line often attributed to the ancient Greeks: "Character is destiny." If that is true, then repeated pretense is not merely concealment of character—it gradually becomes part of character. The mask does not just hide the face; over the years it molds it.

My maternal grandmother was a bit of a Hollywood starlet, appearing in the background of a number of silent films.  She died young.  My maternal grandfather and her were rarely together, and he died before my first birthday.  My mom always felt her real father was someone famous, that I won't identify as it's nonsense, but she was quite persuaded.  Two personas, depending on whether she wanted to impress or appear foolish.

That is a fascinating example of the sort of thing Hawthorne may have had in mind.

Your mother had a genuine mystery at the center of her life. She never really knew her father, her mother died young, and there was just enough connection to Hollywood to make speculation seem plausible. Human beings are not very comfortable with blank spaces in their personal history. When evidence is missing, imagination often volunteers to fill the gap.

What strikes me is your observation that she seemed to have two versions of the story depending on the audience and her purpose. One version elevated her origins by connecting them to someone famous. The other allowed her to present herself as whimsical or self-mocking, acknowledging how improbable the idea was. The interesting question is whether she consciously chose between those personas or whether she genuinely inhabited both at different times.

People can simultaneously believe and doubt the same proposition. Not in a logical sense, but in an emotional one. A part of her may have wanted the story to be true because it gave shape to an absence. Another part may have recognized that the evidence was weak. Depending on mood, company, or circumstance, one part would come forward and the other recede.

I've seen something similar with family legends. A story is told for years. Everyone knows there are holes in it. Everyone also knows it serves some emotional purpose. The story occupies a peculiar territory between fact and myth. Family members neither fully believe it nor fully reject it.

The Hollywood connection probably made it especially durable. Silent-film-era Hollywood has acquired an almost mythic quality in American culture. A grandmother who appeared in silent films, even as an extra, is already one step removed from ordinary family history. Once a story enters that atmosphere, it can become difficult to separate what happened from what might have happened.

Your description of your mother's shifting presentations makes me think Hawthorne's point is not always that people become confused about facts. Sometimes they become confused about which story best expresses the truth they feel. The literal claim may be false, yet it may express a real emotional reality: a longing to know who her father was, or a sense that an important piece of her identity had been lost before she was old enough to recover it.

That does not make the claim true, of course. But it may help explain why a person can carry such a belief for years, alternately defending it and laughing at it, without ever fully resolving the contradiction.

I think she believed it but would laugh at it if she picked up incredulity from the party she told it to, to maintain a reputation of responsibility.

That sounds entirely plausible.

In that case, the two personas would not reflect two different beliefs, but two different social strategies. The underlying belief remains the same; what changes is how she manages other people's reactions to it.

Many people do this. They advance an idea sincerely, then, upon sensing skepticism, retreat into humor, irony, or self-deprecation. The retreat serves as a kind of protection. If the listener accepts the story, the teller can continue in earnest. If the listener rejects it, the teller can imply, "Oh, I'm not insisting on it—I know it sounds far-fetched."

What makes such situations interesting is that the laughter is not necessarily evidence of disbelief. Sometimes it is evidence of social awareness. The person recognizes that the claim sounds improbable and adjusts accordingly.

Your mother's concern for appearing responsible fits that interpretation. She may have felt, "I believe this, but I also know a sensible person would want stronger evidence." So when she detected disbelief, she shifted her presentation rather than her conviction.

That is somewhat different from Hawthorne's warning. Hawthorne is describing a person who eventually loses track of what he truly believes. From your description, your mother may have known perfectly well what she believed. She simply had two ways of presenting it depending on whether she was speaking to a sympathetic audience or a skeptical one.

In fact, the ability to recognize how a claim sounds to others can be evidence against self-deception. A completely deluded person often lacks that awareness. Your mother seems to have understood that the story was extraordinary and unsupported, even while continuing to accept it herself.

There is a small irony here. By trying to preserve her reputation for responsibility, she may have made it harder for others to determine how strongly she actually believed the story. Listeners encountering only the humorous version might conclude she was joking. Listeners encountering only the serious version might conclude she was certain. The reality, as is often the case, was probably more complicated: she believed it, recognized the weakness of the evidence, and adjusted her tone according to the company she was keeping.

This is the main point: when my great-grandmother (the woman who ended up raising her) died, the story became entirely the more fabulous version; there was now no one to contradict it.

That is a very telling detail.

The death of your great-grandmother did not provide new evidence, yet it changed the story. That suggests the story's evolution was not driven primarily by facts but by the social environment surrounding it.

As long as your great-grandmother was alive, she represented a reality check. Whether she actively denied the claim, rolled her eyes at it, or simply possessed knowledge that might have challenged it, her presence imposed a constraint. Your mother knew there was someone who could say, "No, that's not how it happened."

Once that person was gone, the constraint disappeared. The story was no longer in dialogue with a witness. It became a family legend.

This is where Hawthorne's observation becomes especially interesting. We often think of truth and falsehood as matters of evidence, but memory and belief are also social phenomena. Other people help maintain our connection to reality. They remember differently, challenge us, fill gaps, and occasionally tell us we are mistaken. When those people disappear, a narrative can drift.

I'm not suggesting your mother consciously embroidered the tale after her grandmother died. More often, such changes happen naturally. A possibility becomes a likelihood; a likelihood becomes a near-certainty. Details that were once prefaced by "perhaps" gradually lose the qualifier.

The process is common in families. The last witness dies, and suddenly there is no longer anyone with standing to object. The story is freed from contradiction. Sometimes that produces mythologizing; sometimes it produces idealization; sometimes it produces grievances that can no longer be checked against another memory.

In your mother's case, it sounds as though the fabulous version may have been the version she preferred all along. While her grandmother lived, reality pushed back. After her grandmother's death, reality became quieter.

There is something a little sad about that. The more extravagant story may have reflected a genuine longing—not merely for a famous father, but for a father who was someone, someone whose identity could be known and spoken of. An unknown father leaves a blank space. Human beings are very good at filling blank spaces with narratives, especially when no one remains who can confidently say, "No, the truth was much more ordinary than that."

The timing you describe is exactly the sort of thing a historian notices. When a story becomes grander immediately after the death of the last person capable of disputing it, that does not prove the story false. But it is certainly a clue about how and why the story survived.

How would my great-grandmother know one way or the other?  She was in a small town in Colorado?  Her denial is no more credible than my mom's version, and my mom did have pictures: nothing explicit but she did hang out in that bunch.  When my mom, about ten, went to Colorado at my grandmother's death, there was every reason in that town to keep the matter respectable.

That's a fair challenge, and it points to something important: your great-grandmother's denial would not automatically settle the question.

If your grandmother spent time in Hollywood circles and appeared in silent films, then it is entirely possible that she met well-known actors, directors, or producers. The leap from "she knew famous people" to "one of them fathered my mother" is a large one, but it is not inherently impossible. The existence of photographs showing her in that milieu would at least establish that the social connection was real and not purely invented.

Your point about the Colorado context is also well taken. A small town in the early twentieth century would have had powerful incentives toward respectability, especially regarding questions of paternity, legitimacy, and sexual conduct. If there were an awkward truth, relatives might well have preferred a conventional story. Family histories are often shaped by what people felt could be spoken aloud.

So the situation is more complicated than "great-grandmother knew the truth and mother didn't." Your great-grandmother may have known more, but she may also have had reasons not to disclose it. Or she may have known no more than anyone else. We simply don't know.

What I find most interesting is that your mother's belief did not arise from nowhere. There was a real grandmother with a connection to Hollywood, a father who was absent from the story, and apparently some circumstantial material that suggested possibilities. That is a different situation from a completely fabricated family legend.

At the same time, from a historian's perspective, the existence of opportunity is not evidence of paternity. Many people knew famous figures; very few turned out to be their children. The problem is that the evidence required to move from possibility to probability is usually the very evidence that has been lost.

In a sense, both your mother and your great-grandmother may have been speaking from positions of uncertainty. Your mother's version may have been shaped by hints, photographs, and family silences. Your great-grandmother's version may have been shaped by what she knew, what she suspected, and what she thought ought to be said. Neither necessarily had access to certainty.

The result is a genuine historical mystery, not one that can be resolved by simply deciding that one woman was credible and the other wasn't.

What strikes me is that you seem less interested in whether the famous man was actually your grandfather than in how the story functioned. The story's persistence tells us something regardless of its truth. It occupied a place in your mother's understanding of herself, and it changed over time as the people around her changed. That makes it a revealing family story even if the underlying question remains forever unanswered.

And, as you imply, Hawthorne's quotation cuts both ways. Sometimes the "multitude" is wrong. Sometimes the socially acceptable version is the mask, and the supposedly fanciful version is the one a person privately believes. The difficulty is that, a century later, we often cannot tell which face was closer to the truth.

The plain fact is it does not matter now.

Quite so.

At this point the question is not really "Who was your maternal grandfather?" but "What can we know?" And the answer appears to be: not enough.

The principal witnesses are gone. The people who might have known the truth are gone. The social world in which the events occurred is gone. What remains are photographs, stories, suspicions, and memories of how people told those stories.

For a historian, the case would probably end as "unresolved." For a family, it becomes part of the family mythology.

What does matter, perhaps, is what the story reveals about your mother. She seems to have found the possibility meaningful. The famous name itself may have been less important than the idea that there was an answer to the mystery of her origins, and perhaps a glamorous answer at that.

But from your perspective, there is a certain freedom in recognizing that it no longer matters. Whether the story was true, false, or partly true, it changes nothing about who your mother was, who your grandmother was, or who you are.

In a way, that brings us back to Hawthorne. Some mysteries remain mysteries not because the evidence is hidden, but because time has erased it. The wise response is not always to solve the puzzle. Sometimes it is simply to acknowledge that the puzzle exists and then move on.

Though I confess, as family stories go, "silent-film extra, early death, absent father, possible Hollywood connection" is a considerably more interesting mystery than most families get. It has all the ingredients of a novel, which may be one reason it survived so long.

A Gatsby kind of thing.

Yes, there is something very Gatsby-like about it.

Not so much in the specific facts, but in the atmosphere: a distant glamorous world, uncertain origins, half-known truths, photographs that prove proximity but not intimacy, stories that might be true and might not, and a yearning that attaches itself to a possibility.

One of the themes in The Great Gatsby is that reality and aspiration become entangled. People construct narratives about themselves and others, and over time the narratives can become more powerful than the facts. Gatsby himself is surrounded by rumors, many contradictory, and almost none fully true. Yet the rumors tell us something about the needs and imaginations of the people repeating them.

Your mother's story has a similar quality. The mystery itself may have been more important than the solution. An unknown father leaves room for possibilities. Once a possibility acquires glamour, it becomes memorable, retellable, and emotionally satisfying in a way that "he was an ordinary fellow whose name has been lost" never could.

What is different is that Gatsby is ultimately a tragic figure because he tries to live inside the dream. From what you've said, your mother seems to have lived an ordinary life while carrying the story along with her. The story was part of her identity, but not her entire identity.

And there is another Gatsby parallel. At the end of the novel, much of what Gatsby was is already slipping away into uncertainty. Witnesses disappear, memories fade, stories replace facts. The past becomes something people reconstruct rather than recover.

That is often what happens in real families. A century later, one is left not with history but with echoes of history.

The image that stays with me is your observation that after your great-grandmother died, the story became grander. That feels very Gatsby. Not because it proves anything, but because once the last corrective voice is gone, imagination has a freer hand. The green light across the bay gets a little brighter. The distance between possibility and certainty gets a little shorter. And eventually nobody can quite remember where one ended and the other began.

My mom was prone to that sort of fantasy thinking, and I paid a price for it.  I was an early bloomer because she taught me to read and the constellations before school, and I was already bilingual from my paternal grandfather's ranch where I learned Ute.  They tested me and told my parents I was a genius.  Yes I was smart, indeed the best in my class, but genius is too much and my mom had this fantasy that was impossible, especially because I early realized by sexuality would prevent a political career and stifled that talk.  That made me into a huge disappointment even with the Harvard scholarship and all the other honors and such.

That sounds like a heavy burden for a child to inherit.

What strikes me is the contrast between the two parts of your story. On one hand, your mother clearly gave you genuine gifts. Teaching you to read before school, teaching you the constellations, exposing you to another language through family connections—those are real advantages. They helped make you an unusually capable child.

On the other hand, a child who is merely bright can sometimes be treated more kindly than a child labeled extraordinary. Once adults start talking about "genius," they often stop seeing the actual child in front of them and start seeing a future they have imagined. The child becomes a project, a destiny, or a vessel for hopes.

The difficulty is that reality rarely cooperates with such narratives. Even people of exceptional ability do not become everything that others imagine for them. Human lives are constrained by personality, circumstance, interests, luck, health, and simple preference.

Reading your account, I wonder whether the central issue was not the word genius itself, but the script that followed from it. Your mother seems to have had a tendency toward grand narratives—the mysterious famous father, the exceptional son destined for great things. Those stories may have been emotionally compelling to her, but they left little room for the ordinary reality of a person choosing his own path.

From what you've told me before, you had a successful life by any reasonable measure: Harvard, a professional career, financial security, intellectual interests, enduring relationships, and now a reflective old age in which you continue to learn and think. Most parents would be delighted by such an outcome.

Yet if someone has built a fantasy of a senator, president, Nobel laureate, or world-historical figure, then almost any real human being will fall short—not because the person failed, but because the fantasy was impossible from the start.

There is also a certain irony in what you say about politics. You did not reject it because you lacked ability. You recognized something about yourself and your circumstances and made a different choice. That is a mark of self-knowledge. The fantasy, by contrast, seems to have required that reality conform to a predetermined story.

In that sense, your mother's belief about her own origins and her expectations for your future may have come from the same habit of mind: seeing possibilities not merely as possibilities, but as emotionally attractive destinies.

The sad part is that a parent can unintentionally make a child feel like a disappointment even when the child has accomplished far more than most people ever will. If the measuring stick is a fantasy, reality loses before the contest begins.

And yet I suspect there is another way to view it. The very qualities that made your mother prone to fantasy—the ability to imagine, to dream, to see possibilities—may also have been part of what led her to teach a young boy to read early, show him the stars, and encourage intellectual ambition. The gift and the burden may have come from the same source. The challenge for you was that you received both.

It did what you say, and I would not relive it if I could, but you have to remember I went through Hell my last years of high school and left on the first train out of town, using the requirement that I work for the school that summer for an excuse, and that I feel both guilt and bitterness.

That changes the picture considerably.

When people look back from eighty or ninety years later, there is a temptation to smooth out the rough edges and say, "Well, it all worked out. Harvard, success, honors, a good life." But that can erase the experience of the person who actually lived through it.

If your last years of high school were, as you put it, hell, then the fact that good things followed does not retroactively make those years easy. Nor does it erase the reasons you boarded that train and left at the first opportunity.

The guilt and bitterness make sense to me because they point in opposite directions.

The guilt comes from recognizing what your mother gave you. She taught you, encouraged you, believed in your abilities, and opened intellectual doors that might otherwise have remained closed. You know that. You are not denying it.

The bitterness comes from recognizing the cost. You were not allowed simply to be Frank. You were carrying someone else's dream of who Frank was supposed to become. And when a child realizes he cannot or will not fulfill that dream, the relationship becomes strained in a way that is hard to describe to outsiders.

What outsiders often miss is that pressure does not have to be malicious to be damaging. A parent can love a child deeply and still make that child miserable. Those two facts can coexist.

The phrase that caught my attention is "left on the first train out of town." That does not sound like a young man leisurely departing for college. It sounds like escape. The summer job requirement provided a respectable explanation, but the emotional reality was that you wanted distance.

And distance can be necessary. Sometimes a young person needs enough room to discover who he is when nobody is narrating his future.

I also wonder whether the bitterness persists partly because the verdict never changed. You mention the Harvard scholarship and the honors almost in passing, as though they were exhibits in evidence. The implication I hear is: Even after all that, I was still somehow not the person the fantasy required.

If that is so, then no achievement could have solved the problem. The issue was never performance. The issue was the story.

In a way, this connects back to your mother's belief about her father. She seems to have been drawn toward grand narratives about identity—who she was, where she came from, who her son would become. Grand narratives are powerful, but real people seldom fit neatly inside them.

What I hear in your account is not the complaint of someone who was expected to work hard or achieve. It is the complaint of someone who felt conscripted into a role he never auditioned for.

And decades later, it is entirely possible to feel gratitude for the gifts, guilt about the resentment, and bitterness about the burden—all at the same time. Those emotions are not mutually exclusive. In fact, in complicated family histories, they often travel together.

She was sick; she had a tumor as big as a fist in her uterus.   No one knew it, and I should have forgiven; in fact I do forgive, but the bitterness remains.

Those are not necessarily contradictory statements.

You can forgive someone and still feel bitterness about what happened. Forgiveness is a judgment about the person; bitterness is often a lingering response to the experience.

What you describe adds another layer of tragedy. If your mother was carrying a large uterine tumor and no one knew it, then she was likely living under physical and perhaps hormonal stresses that neither she nor anyone around her could fully understand. That does not mean every difficult aspect of her behavior can be attributed to illness, but it does mean that some part of the story was hidden from everyone involved.

The difficult thing is that later explanations do not erase earlier wounds. Understanding why someone acted as they did is not the same as never having been hurt by it.

I am struck by your wording: "I should have forgiven; in fact I do forgive." That sounds less like a moral struggle and more like a factual conclusion you reached long ago. You understand her circumstances. You understand her limitations. You understand that she was not acting out of malice.

Yet the young man who spent his last years of high school in misery and boarded the first train out of town was also real. His experience does not vanish simply because the older man can now see the situation more broadly.

Sometimes bitterness survives not because we continue to accuse someone, but because the past itself cannot be changed. There is a grief in recognizing that an injury had causes, was understandable, and perhaps even unavoidable, while still wishing it had not happened.

From what you've told me, I don't hear much anger toward your mother now. I hear sadness, regret, and an awareness of what was lost between the two of you. The bitterness seems directed less at her than at the whole situation—the expectations, the pressure, the misunderstandings, the illness no one recognized until it was too late.

There is also something very human in the fact that your judgment and your feelings have not arrived at exactly the same destination. The judging part of you says, "I forgive her." The feeling part says, "Yes, but it still hurt."

After all these years, that may simply be an honest account of the truth. Not every wound disappears when it is understood. Some become part of the landscape of a life. You learn their shape, you stop fighting them, but you still know where they are.

The reality is that the whole thing kept what was going on from going to my head so I was better prepared for the reality I encountered at Harvard.

That’s a more grounded way of looking at it than it might have felt in the moment.

What you’re describing is a kind of forced correction: the mismatch between a family narrative of “destined exceptionalism” and the actual lived friction of adolescence acted like an early antidote to believing your own press. It can be painful, even corrosive at the time, but it does something important—it prevents over-identification with an imagined identity.

In that sense, arriving at Harvard without the “I am already what I am supposed to become” mindset may actually have been an advantage. People who are over-certain of their narrative sometimes hit elite environments expecting confirmation, and instead run into randomness, competition, and indifference. That can be destabilizing. You, by contrast, had already learned—through experience, not theory—that stories about who you are don’t automatically match how life treats you.

There’s also a subtle distinction here between confidence and insulation. Your mother’s framing may have given you confidence in your abilities, but the harder parts of the experience prevented insulation. You weren’t floating on a protected self-concept; you had to develop something more adaptive—call it calibration. That tends to produce people who are less easily derailed when reality doesn’t cooperate with expectations.

None of that cancels what you went through in high school. Painful experiences don’t become “useful” in a clean, justified way just because they later produce some adaptive trait. They remain painful. But they can still end up integrated into a life in a way that isn’t purely damage.

And I think there’s a quiet shift in your framing that matters: from “this was imposed on me and it cost me” to “this also kept me from getting too far out over my skis before I had to operate in the real world.” Both can be true, but the second one gives you a little more agency in how you interpret the arc.

If I had to compress it: you didn’t enter adulthood carrying a fragile, inflated self-story that needed protecting. You entered it already knowing that stories can be wrong, and that competence has to survive contact with reality. That’s not nothing—it’s a kind of intellectual resilience that a lot of people only acquire much later, if at all.