MY DAUGHTER, "HAPPY"

Kenneth Burke

Her mother and I had learned a lot in raising her elder sister, and to this extent it was a relatively felicitous situation that she was born into. This was especially so since her elder sister was, from the start, exceptionally amiable and thus rejoiced in Happy's arrival, rather than thinking of her as an intruder (a wrangling situation which a newcomer is often born into). And the daughter who was to be called "Happy" fitted most felicitously into this situation because she had an innate sense of order, yet in ways that could be manifested without vexation to others.

She just "naturally" began building a kind of order into the things all about her. Thus, my first memory of her as a child adapting herself in the world about her, concerns a time when there was a carpenter shingling the walls of our house in the country. She was warned against being where she might get hurt by things falling from the scaffold. But in the course of the job, many nails were dropped. And whenever the opportunity offered, she diligently collected and sorted these, repeating to herself," Happy. . . nail.

I remember her later going about planting things, in gardens, or indoors, and always with a green thumb. Then I recall her success in the self- appointed task of feeding with an eyedropper a still-nursing bunny, until it was mature enough to thrive on vegetables.

Then there was the t ime when, having received as a Christmas present a primitive printing press, she began writing, editing, and printing a "news letteY' (called the "Happy Times"), reporting stories that she judged fit-to-print about doings within the family. That material still survives, and I greatly regret that I can't include some of it

Kenneth Burke, the philosopher and author, is the father of Eleanor Leacock, the distinguished anthropologist, who died suddenly, in Samoa, last year.

Dialectical Anthropology, 14: 239-240, 1989. �9 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

here. But I couldn't locate copies soon enough to meet this schedule. You would be delighted to see so clearly emerging the subject of human relations that she was later to develop with such "activist" zeal and penetration, first as a student and later as an authority.

That brings me to the most desolately ironic aspect of the misfortune which is the immediate cause of our being here. Happy was about to retire, under the most promising of conditions. She had established herself professionally; and through toil, also well enough materially. Her residential holdings fitted to perfection Cicero's humanistic criteria, "a garden and a library."

Even as a pageant, her rented floor in Soho after an athletic climb three flights up, was a delight in obedience to her own planning. Her library there is so expansive that much of it can be reached only by a ladder, itself on a trolley. Besides being as it were a picturesque mark of the founder who designed so technological a mode of order. Her loft could often serve as mere background for festive occasions when students, colleagues, and "familiars" convened symposium- wise. And even if things turned out that her very improvements helped raise the real estate value of the property to the point where the proprietor might raise the rent beyond her ability to pay the increased charges for her own improvements, there were further expedients "market-wise."

And after all, there is her estate in northwest New Jersey, headquarters which she has equipped with all the basic facilities for quite convenient living, if necessary, even in the worst of winter weather.

And there she was, precisely then, her reputation now firmly established, wholly skilled in the ways of research and development, which also involve the sophistication of self-criticism, with the economic vexations sufficiently under control. And precisely then, all ready to retire (which meant for

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her solely to retire from certain administrative obligations, and thereby be all the better able to fulfill the particular academic tasks she had chosen to end up with).

Precisely then, when she had gone back to Samoa with the intention of finishing up a job wh ich she had inhe r i t ed a long wi th her anthropological beginnings as an understudy of Margaret Mead, then, of a sudden, there came the damnable fatal intrusion. By nothing but that sudden flick in her brain, the whole so well earned future gratifications of consciously winding things up, consciously rounding things out, of fulfillment, were denied her.

Ever since hearing the details of Happy's death, I have been fumbling with that formulaic jingle, of Mother Goose cast, "For want of a nail the shoe is lost; for want of a shoe the horse is lost; for want of a horse the rider is lost, etc . . . . "there are

several further stages, each of a greater scope, or magnitude, ending on a kind of recapitulation, "and all for the want of a horseshoe-nail."

In Happy's case the attack occurred far from necessary medical assistance. The week's delay and long flight (to Honolulu) were in themselves a disaster. But why this particular jingle, which told a tale but remotely of the same design, except for the possibility, or even likelihood, that if she could have consulted a physician, rather than resorting to a dosage of her own, which was the very opposite of what her condition called for, she could still be with us now.

Then I suddenly real ized: I have been responding to the sheer tonalities of the case in my thoughts of her physical demise, not by an means a loss of her social (professional) and familial presence among us. I was hearing what I first remember her as saying: "Happy.. . nail."