Mr. Waddy's Return

Ira Waddy returns to Boston with money enough to buy半个城市, but he carries something his fortune cannot erase: the blood of a Mayflower cook, not a passenger. The Waddy family built their name on meekness, on knowing their place. Now Ira has spent years in India as a nabob, accumulator of rupees, master of servants, and he returns neither the humble descendant of a pilgrim's kitchen nor quite the British gentleman he tried to become. Boston society watches him with careful eyes. His own heart may not know which man he is. Theodore Winthrop, who died at 28 in the Civil War, wrote a sharp study of what money cannot buy and identity cannot escape: the past we carry in our names, the class that clings to our skin, the question of whether a man can reinvent himself or only reveal what was always there. This is American realism before realism had its name, and it stings.