"My grandfather Steele called her "the empress tigress," and it is an apt description. Katharine Lyman was often imperious and seldom wise about personal relations. It rarely entered her calculations that she might be wrong about anything, especially regarding how her husband or children should conduct their lives. This, needless to say, made her a difficult person to be closely related to, for she interfered, ordered, and bossed constantly, but almost never understood, or even tried to understand, any other point of view than her own.
Conspicuously beautiful in her youth, she married the notably handsome son of a prominent lawyer (and nephew of an even more prominent banker). But this golden couple did not flourish as she clearly expected was their right to. He had studied mining engineering at college, and his first job after their marriage was in a small town called Rush Run, West Virginia, where he worked for a coal-mining company.
But she was hardly content to live in such places and she yearned for the great world of New York in which she had grown up and which she felt to be her rightful place. She soon convinced him (bullied, I suspect, would be a better term) to move to New York and become a stockbroker. Although he had neither talent for nor interest in Wall Street, he would spend the rest of his professional life there, a fish out of water.
In the 1920's she took the family to France for two years, as many people did because it was possible to live in great luxury there at that time at small expense.
Like all descendants of her father Hart Lyman, she was very witty, often hilarious. One of my favorite remarks of hers was saying that "the cruelest choice I can imagine having to make would be between cream and gin." I remember her with some affection because of this trait. But while wit must have a core of wisdom to exist, I also remember her as being, quite unintentionally, very silly at least as often."
