Upper Bohemia Page 3

  The Chermayeffs’ younger son, Peter (b. 1936), recently told me that his father once walked along the edge of Slough Pond to deliver ice to a voluptuous woman, a sculptor named Gitou Knoop, who was staying in a house on the same pond. When Gitou came to the door, there was Serge, holding ice tongs with a huge block of dripping ice. He was stark naked.

  Like many of my parents’ Cape Cod friends, the Chermayeffs thought their children could fend for themselves. In 1940, when Serge and Barbara went to San Francisco to see about a teaching job for Serge, they left their two sons with Walter Gropius. After the California job came through, Serge wrote to Gropius and asked him to send the boys. Gropius had misgivings: Ivan Chermayeff was eight and Peter was four. The trip to San Francisco would take four days and require four changes of train. But Serge arranged for Catholic nuns across the country to meet and supervise the boys at the stations where they had to change trains. “And my father was an atheist!” Peter observed.

  Serge Chermayeff with Marcel Breuer on Chermayeff’s deck, 1980

  Other friends such as the highly regarded literary critic and editor, Edmund Wilson and his then wife Mary McCarthy, came from across Route 6. McCarthy put my father (conflated with another male friend) in A Charmed Life, her bitter 1955 novel about Wellfleet and Truro’s bohemia. I don’t think she had much respect for my father or for any of the artists and writers in the Wellfleet/Truro community. In a story called “The Lost Weekend” she described Wellfleet (which she called Nottingham) as “a kind of asylum for the derelicts of the American creative life…” Most of these “charming” people, she wrote, were trying to ignore their “failure of talent.” Although my father had a quick wit and knew everything about nature, he was not a man who talked about literature, politics, or ideas. He was a talented flirt whose seductive manner delighted all the beautiful women. Maybe witnessing my father’s charm at work on others irritated McCarthy, who always liked to be the center of attention.

  Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy

  Edmund Wilson was what my mother, in a disparaging tone of voice, called “a big intellectual.” He had served as editor for Vanity Fair and The New Republic. His literary criticism appeared in The New Yorker magazine as well as in his brilliant book Axel’s Castle (1931). He took a keen interest in politics, and in To Finland Station (1940) he examined the development of socialism from 1824 to 1917. No doubt he thought of my parents as intellectual lightweights. In a diary entry for June 18, 1940, Wilson wrote: “It seemed to me that people like Margaret Bishop [writer John Peale Bishop’s wife] and Jack Phillips and his wife, who probably thought they were anti-Fascists, were becoming more aggressive in response to the Nazi successes.”

  Wilson was also a man who enjoyed extramarital affairs. (His friend Leon Edel, who edited some of Wilson’s diaries, called him a “roving bohemian.”) Perhaps his friendship with my parents had something to do with my mother’s beauty. My father’s memories of Wilson and McCarthy were gently scornful. One of his favorite stories was about the night Wilson and McCarthy came for supper and, when they drove home, a roll of chicken wire fencing got caught on the back bumper of their old Chevy. As they progressed along the dirt road that leads from Horseleech Pond to Route 6, the wire unrolled behind them. My father delighted in visualizing the discomfited (and probably inebriated) Wilson having to cope with detaching the wire from his car in the dark. Another time, my parents were driving past a swimming beach on Slough Pond when they spotted McCarthy and Wilson about to set a match to a pile of kindling upon which they planned to cook a picnic lunch. My father was horrified. There had been a long drought and the day was windy. The forest could have gone up in flames as it had in 1922 when many acres in Wellfleet and Truro burned. My father jumped out of his car and told them not to light the fire. Wilson was angry. “Why not come over to our house for the cookout?” my father suggested, but “They sort of went off in a huff.”

  Another misadventure with Wilson and McCarthy happened in the late 1930s when my father and mother picked mushrooms for a mushroom feast to which they invited ten or twelve friends. “Edmund and Mary, probably the Jencks…” were among the guests, my father recalled. The musician Gardner Jencks and his wife, Ruth (nastily portrayed in McCarthy’s The Charmed Life), lived in a house overlooking the bay way out on Bound Brook Island. Most likely Charles and Adelaide Walker came, too. Charles Walker was a writer, historian, and editor who, in 1922 had written Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker about his own youthful labors in a steel mill in 1919. In 1933, with his wife, Adelaide, he founded the Theater Union, a downtown Manhattan performing group. “We had something with mushrooms in it,” my father remembered, “a soup or a stew.… Well, I must have picked russula emetica, with its pink-ribbed cap: it would only take about one of them to make people sick. They sort of left the table and went home: our dinner was soon over. Only Lybie and I weren’t sick—it sort of puzzled us. It was considered, of course, a disaster.”

  In June 1942, my father rented the Paper Palace to the Surrealists Matta Echaurren, Max Ernst, and Ernst’s wife, gallerist Peggy Guggenheim. These tenants taught my parents Surrealist games, the erotic nature of which shocked my father. He recalled that in the game of Truth and Consequences, if you chose consequences, you might be required to masturbate in front of the assembled players. My father was not enthusiastic. He didn’t care that the Surrealists thought he was a stuffed shirt. “They were very theatrical. They made me nervous, but they weren’t boring.… I think my wife joined in some of the games they were always playing. Peggy Vail [Peggy Guggenheim’s daughter] was doing transformations of bottles and I remember Max Ernst swinging a can of paint with holes punched in the bottom over a canvas spread on the kitchen floor.… Matta used to go about with a little walking stick and a kerchief. I thought he was absolutely riveting, full of energy and very friendly. Matta did a lot of painting up there, and [Abstract Expressionist painter, Robert] Motherwell, who arrived looking very gray flannel suit, seemed very impressed by his work.”

  Paper Palace designed by my father in 1939 and occupied by Max Ernst, Matta Echaurren, and Peggy Guggenheim in 1942

  Both Ernst and Matta got into trouble with the FBI. Ernst was a German émigré, thus suspect. One day he went into the woods to burn trash, and the police came around. “You have been sending up smoke signals to the enemy,” they said. “Did you know that just a few days ago an American ship was sunk nearby by a Nazi submarine?” The FBI questioned Ernst about whether Matta had been using the Paper Palace’s shutters to send signals to German submarines. They also suspected that Matta had been climbing onto the Paper Palace’s flat roof in order to communicate with submarines. An agent asked Ernst how many ladders Matta had. Hearing “letters” instead of “ladders,” Ernst said, “Five: M-A-T-T-A.” In the end, Ernst had to go to Boston for further questioning. Peggy Guggenheim accompanied him and brought an end to the ordeal by telling the authorities that she was a copper heiress. All it took was a phone call and Ernst was free to go.

  My father came under suspicion, too. During the war he was driving to the Big House after picking up my mother from the train station and he noticed a car following him. The car came all the way into the woods and out of it came agents of the FBI. The officers assumed the Navajo blanket that my father had thrown in the back of his car in case my mother felt cold must be hiding guns. Its design resembled a swastika. When my father explained that this was a Native American motif, all was well. Another time, the Wellfleet police chief, who did occasional handyman’s work, was installing lanterns in the Big House and he noticed that my father had a gun rack. “A few days later,” my father recalled, “the house was surrounded by a small army, led by a lieutenant who came to look for ‘Nazi guns.’ Well, they discovered they were antiques.”

  3 Turkey Farm

  The chicken wire fence that attached itself to Edmund Wilson’s car was farm equipment. My father raised turkeys during the war. He had experimented with turkeys before the war, raising one hun
dred chicks in his dune studio. With the help of Anna Matson’s younger brother, a conscientious objector named Hayden Walling, my father constructed ten turkey brooder houses out of two-by-fours and Homasote board and he placed them on the hillside overlooking the ocean, a four-minute uphill walk from our house. “We got about 3,000 chicks through the mail,” my father told an interviewer. “Given the usual mortalities from disease or predators, we ended up with 2,600 brown birds.… After the chicks had grown up, we put them out behind the fencing wire.… All this kept Hayden [Walling] and me busy.”

  When he first took me up the hill and showed me his turkeys, the brooder house floors were covered with fuzzy yellow chicks whose voices merged into one beseeching wail. It was alarming. I wanted to pick up one but didn’t. My mother later told me that my father had raised turkeys to avoid going to war. Being married and the thirty-four-year–old father of two children, he did not want to enlist.

  He had participated in the war already. When the United States entered World War II in December 1941 our family was spending the winter in New York City and my father went to work designing camouflage at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The job seemed pointless: radar was making camouflage obsolete and the design aspect of camouflage work was drying up. In any case, he hated working in an office. He was an outdoors man, and prolonged periods in confined interiors made him desperate. When he got home at night he was depressed and angry, which was not good for his marriage. Years later, my father remembered that: “My immediate boss, a Navy commander, wanted to get me into a two-striped lieutenant’s uniform and I realized it was an awfully stupid job.… So I quit and came up here and had a turkey farm going in no time flat, as part of the war effort.” Becoming a farmer and selling turkeys to the troops gave him an exemption. His mother criticized his choice and praised her younger son, Arthur, who served as a fighter pilot and who escaped death by disobeying the orders of the officer in charge of an aircraft carrier who sent his pilots up in spite of terrible weather. When they tried to land on the carrier, several planes fell into the sea. When it was his turn, my uncle decided to fly his plane to shore. The commander was “kicked upstairs” and my uncle’s military career soon ended.

  In the midst of the brooder houses was a very different kind of house, eight-foot square with weathered wooden walls and glassless windows. As a child, I never knew what this house was for. Because it had no purpose, I thought of it as mine, my safe place, my fort. Later I learned that Dr. Rollins had built it as a lookout. His journal entry for November 14, 1927, tells us that on the bluff overlooking the ocean, he found old bricks and other vestiges of a ruined building, which he surmised must be from a halfway house erected as a refuge for shipwrecked sailors. With his friend Leslie Newcomb, he built “a rough structure with windows on three sides and a glass in the door on the west, so I can sit there and see the surf. I am so old I get chilled there in too short a time; for high surf means high wind, and when comparatively calm at camp, it may be fifty miles an hour there. It is the best view I have… I can get there in a few minutes.” I could get there from the Big House in a few minutes, too, but the windswept hilltop felt thousands of miles away from home. It felt brave to be up there on the treeless hill covered with bearberry, poverty grass, and a few strands of beach grass. Through the window that faced the ocean I could watch for German submarines.

  For my father, this small house was a place to get out of the rain or to keep an eye out for predators. Indeed, there were predators, foxes, of course, and weasels and raccoons, but the worst were the great horned owls. They bit the heads off our turkeys. My father hired nine-year-olds Ivan Chermayeff and Charles Walker (the son of Charles and Adelaide) to spend nights at the turkey farm and keep watch. Ivan recalled being equipped with a gun with which to shoot owls. The owls prevailed. Peter Chermayeff remembers the horror of coming up the hill and seeing headless turkeys with bloody necks lying all over the ground.

  While my father dealt with his turkeys, I stood in the look-out house listening to the ocean and watching clouds move in and out of my view. Sometimes I imagined that I lived here all alone. I moved my eyes over the hill and wondered what I could find to eat. Bearberry, an evergreen ground cover that looks like cranberry, has little red berries that taste awful. I could find blueberries, yes; they grew at the bottom of the hill, closer to the pond, and maybe a fish. This kind of thought made me glad when my father finished his turkey chores and took me home for supper.

  About a mile to the north of the turkey farm, just where a deer path leading from the west end of Horseleech Pond to the ocean beach comes out at the top of a dune, there used to be another small house that Blair and I played in. This one was said to have once been a sailors’ halfway house. During the war, it was used by the Coast Guard to watch for German submarines. The Coast Guard drove Jeeps along a sand road that ran on the tops of the dunes all the way from Newcomb’s Hollow Beach to Ballston Beach. Now, after years of wind and waves blasting the dunes, the Coast Guard road has fallen into the sea.

  I used to dream that a German submarine rose out of the water and came toward our beach. As Germans clambered out of their boat, I ran up the dune, which, in my dream was immense and had an overhang that made it impossible to reach the top. Sand kept sliding so that no matter how hard I tried, I made no progress. And now the Germans were climbing the dune behind me. I needed to scale the dune and run down to the safety of our pond, but I couldn’t move. That was the point when I always woke up.

  My father impressed me as a man who could do anything. He could build houses. He could go deer hunting accompanied by our beloved red setter, Hamlet. In winter, he could sail across the frozen pond by attaching a sail to his khaki-green duck boat. One year he bought a huge army Jeep and he drove Blair and me across land that had no roads on Great Island, a pine-covered peninsula that juts out into Wellfleet’s bay. In the autumn, he would kill turkeys and hang them by their legs on a wooden frame just below our front steps. When they were ready, he knew how to pluck them, too. And our father had a daring stunt that he performed at dull moments during parties and that, if we begged, he would do for Blair and me. All six-foot-two of him would be standing straight with his arms pinned to his sides and he would suddenly fall forward, stiff as a board. He would then get up and smile at our alarm. Later I learned that a second before hitting the floor he put his hands forward to break his fall.

  He was good at making dwellings. Once while the Blunderbus was parked just below the front steps of the Big House, my father turned its back cabin into a room complete with a woodstove, a rug, and two cots. For a week or so—maybe when our parents had guests who needed our rooms—Blair and I got to live in the Blunderbus. It was like playing house. We felt so grown up, so independent. One winter the snow came higher than the Big House windows. Our father shoveled a narrow path that wound its way downhill from our kitchen door. When I walked on it, all I could see was the tops of trees and the sky. Just to the left of the Big House’s front steps he made an igloo by tunneling into a drift. Blair and I crawled inside and were surprised to find how cozy it was. It wouldn’t be that bad to be an Eskimo.

  This must have been the snowstorm of December 1942, probably the same storm that, years later, my father told me about, a storm that felled trees and made it impossible to drive out of the woods. The Matsons, he recalled, were running out of food and their pipes froze so they moved in with us and shared our meals of turkey—the headless turkeys left by the owls needed to be consumed. When the storm cleared, there was a note in the local newspaper saying that the Phillips family was “down to their last turkey.” A letter from my mother to her mother-in-law written just after what was probably the same storm said that my father, because he had to go to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, had walked out to the bus pulling his belongings on a toboggan. Our heating oil ran out and we all lived in the kitchen and living room which were heated with wood. Finally, the Coast Guard came and helped by carrying me, some toys, and our luggage to Newcomb’s Hol
low Beach where a taxi transported my mother and Blair and me to a train. My mother was amused when all the newspapers on the East Coast carried the story: “Nine people cut off in woods on Ocean Beach. Food dwindling, oil gone.”

  After escaping the snowy woods, we went to New York and moved into an unfurnished apartment. Once the town had ploughed our dirt road, the Blunderbus brought our furniture. Since my grandmother was always complaining that my parents lived too expensively, my mother explained to her in a letter that the reason they rented an unfurnished apartment was because furnished ones cost over $200 a month. “Try to make a budget of $360 a month and include schools, maid, food, liquor, doctors, children’s clothes, entertainment, Jack’s lunches, electricity, gas, telephone, drugs etc. and see how much is left for rent.”

  Instead of painting in his dune studio, my father liked to build alternative places to live in and to serve as rental properties. He decided to hire a bulldozer to clear a road to the other end of Horseleech Pond where he planned to build a camp. He was getting tired of turkeys. “By our third or fourth year,” he recalled, “problems arose—and I had to market the surviving turkeys before they were fully grown.” Making dwellings seemed like a better idea. When the rough dirt road was finished, you could walk from our Big House to the west end of Horseleech Pond. If you looked to the right, through oak trees, you could see sunlit dunes. If you looked left, there were glimpses of our pond.

  When I was maybe five or six, I had a dream about being in the back of my father’s open army Jeep with my mother at the wheel and Blair beside her. They talked in the most casual way as the Jeep plowed through the forest where the not-yet-built road would be. I was shocked by my mother’s lack of concern as she drove straight up each tree trunk and down the other side. She never bothered to go around. By some magic stronger than gravity the Jeep did not fall. Nothing scared my mother. She wanted her daughters to be undaunted, but her blithe attitude frightened me.