"Everyone must believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.” W.C.Fields

My mother lost her newly married husband at the front in the summer of 1918.  Her second husband, my father, died in an automobile accident a few days after his fiftieth birthday, leaving her with six children ages 14 to 4, and a considerably diminished trust income.  Her relatives considered her life tragic, and she an unfortunate victim of terrible circumstances.  The population of my home town considered her life a happy and comfortable one.  (I remember not really understanding a parent of a fellow student in first grade saying nastily to the teacher within my earshot no less:  "It's about time she had something to suffer over," referring, I have to imagine, to the death of my father only a few months earlier.)  We lived in a very large house, with a staff of five plus a full time gardener to deal with extensive grounds.  Mother did not work.  Well, what did she do?  Puttered in the garden, read several newspapers, went to luncheons, did all the grocery shopping--these were the days before supermarkets when it was possible to establish a relationship with the provender of every sort of food, and mother took that relationship seriously, appealing as it did, I imagine, to the feudal in her.  She distanced herself from her children when they were young, the servants being a buffer, but any time I was in her company she was never failingly pleasant.  That was her default mode.  She always had a slight smile on her face, even when no one was with her, you could see it on her walking along for instance from the garage to the house when she came home.  She encouraged it in us much to the rage of my teenaged sister who insisted it was utterly false.  My mother accepted the dichotomy between what life had brought her and the way she presented herself to the world.  In some sense she insisted everything was coming up roses.  As I grew older and spent more time with her I saw that what held the day together was the cocktail hour, the time when she drank slowly and with considerable relish two Scotch Old Fashioneds prepared in an exquisite cut crystal glass.  All her relatives and friends did the same.  Your mother's cocktail hour was what High Mass is to others, a friend once observed, and I think, yes, it was a sacrament that gave in loosening the tensions some kind of benediction as well.  A.R. Gurney's play"The Cocktail Hour" catches this.  I can still see the actress Nancy Marchand, feigning a posture of slightly bent age, in her knit cardigan and white hair, holding out her cocktail glas, and saying from time to time in the play "Just another splash, please."  That was my mother-in-law to a tee at ninety eight as I remember her, same attitude toward life as my mother.  W.C.Fields, although it describes comically the point of view of a lush, and is very different, in a perverse way always makes me think of mother.