Taking umbrage:
Byrne, Katharine
THE LAST WORD Taking umbrage KATHARINE BYRNE Daisy and I were walking around the block one spring day when we saw Mrs. Wesley standing near her mailbox, riffling through the day's offerings, not...
...Daisy recognized the likelihood of a long pause in our progress, and found a place to lie down, under an old lilac bush...
...For in the world of umbrage-takers, you have trampled, not on my property, but on my feelings, my dignity, my sense of worth...
...She pushed the contents into my hands: The Christian Pewholder, the telephone bill, and what looked like a couple of begging letters for worthy causes...
...And I am outraged...
...the man whose name is mispronounced when his child walks across the auditorium stage on graduation day...
...One year, however, as the gelatinous salads sag, the vegetables turn gray, the children begin to whine, someone says, "Let's eat...
...The annual distribution of the local undertaker's calendars...
...Around the first Sunday of January there occurs at the entrance of the church an annual happening fraught with possibilities for the taking of umbrage...
...Wouldn't you think that after we've been living here for fourteen years with four kids in this school, they would find out how to pronounce "Papanastas-siou...
...I can't afford another one...
...Civic and religious organizations as well as families are likely settings for the taking of umbrage...
...Katharine Byrne writes from Chicago...
...And now, the insistent exceptions...
...Who would remember a wedding like that...
...But there is another kind of trespassing that lives beyond the law books, in the world of umbrage...
...Both my sisters had real nice affairs, but when it was my turn, my father said, 'Enough...
...Because he knows something about the persistence of umbrage, an elderly usher, veteran of many years at his post, declares to one of his colleagues, "We may never see that one again until they wheel him in for his own funeral...
...The woman who wants one for her mother-in-law "now living in Florida but she used to iron the altar linens...
...One is said to "take urn-, brage," and umbrage, once taken, is likely to be hung onto...
...These involve not only miscreant persons but grazing cattle and horses, as well as dogs unleashed and vicious...
...Sadly she turned and walked up her front steps, the hurt in her heart deep and enduring...
...You and Norbert will have to wait.' But we didn't want to...
...any of these "acting alone or in concert, engaged in tortious action...
...Family celebrations are rich in possibilities for outrage...
...Each year a certain rich relative is the designated turkey carver...
...And that's why we never get any anniversary cards...
...they have stepped on his place of honor, denigrated his position of authority...
...And they do so...
...I found this unremarkable, but didn't say so...
...The movie is about a large and gregarious immigrant Jewish family whose custom it is to gather in great numbers for Thanksgiving Day...
...So we got married by the city clerk with a little gathering at the Elks' meeting hall...
...When Norbert and I got married we didn't have a fancy wedding...
...The man who wants an extra calendar for his office, reminding all who can hear him that his family has contributed to the support of this church for the past fifty years, and who, when his request is politely refused, huffs out vowing never to return to this place...
...Among them there is little likelihood of mitigation or forgiveness...
...A few sturdy ushers brace themselves, attempting to keep order and to uphold the rule, "only one to a family...
...My neighbor plunged into her story...
...There is the volunteer whose name is inadvertently left off a list of helpers...
...True, he is always late for dinner, but they always wait for him...
...The compiled statutes of any state contain perhaps a dozen close-printed pages of laws and cases about trespassing on someone's property...
...Yet flouted feelings are not confined to the elderly...
...Today is our forty-seventh anniversary," she told me, "and there is not even one card here to congratulate us...
...Two in one year is enough...
...It wasn't fair...
...Perhaps...
...the woman whose contribution is somehow not recorded...
...He is indignant and unforgiving...
...Wesley standing near her mailbox, riffling through the day's offerings, not happily...
...When the late-arriving uncle appears, it is all over but the pumpkin pie...
...Like the umbrella it suggests, umbrage casts a shadow on the lives of those who are afflicted with this sense of "pique or resentment at some real or fancied slight or insult...
...He walks out and stays away for many years...
...Shall we dismiss my old neighbor as just another old party who has little to think about and lots of time to think about it...
...Do you remember a scene from a movie called Avalon, the episode about the family dinner...
...Would she spend the rest of their bright spring day brooding over a perceived wrong suffered so many years ago...
Vol. 122 • January 1995 • No. 1
