His aristocratic New England background was partly sham, and his patrician airs were mostly his own invention. He never came from the kind of fox-hunting gentleman’s world that he encouraged people to construct for him. But my father’s parents, for all their embittered shabbiness, were part of another generation — another century, really. They both had a kind of lunatic Yankee pride and rectitude that seems as outdated as memories of sailing ships and the China trade, steam locomotives and the acrid smell of smoke from factory chimneys along the Merrimack. In a lot of ways my father was still
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