Upper Bohemia Page 6

  George taught us other games as well. Maybe he liked playing with us because he rarely got to see his teenage son, Conrad, who went to the Kent boarding school in Connecticut. Also, our mother hated games. She only liked to read. In one game George taught us, one person drags her index finger in circles around the other person’s palm, while saying, “Round and round the garden goes the teddy bear.” Then she walks her fingers up the arm and into the armpit, saying: “Step, step, step, step, and tickle you under there!” In another game George cut a row of sharp teeth out of a piece of white paper, stuck it under his upper lip and chased us down the hall growling like a wolf. Blair and I each tried to get ahead so that we would not be eaten first.

  Once when they came home from a party, our mother and George caught Blair and me playing in the hall. George warned us that the next time they went out he would put a piece of Scotch tape on both our doors. If the tapes came loose, he would know that we had left our rooms. Blair and I hatched a plan: I was to climb on my bureau and jump out of the little window that led from my bedroom to the hall. Blair would meet me there. Later I could re-stick the tape on Blair’s door and climb back into my room through the window. The problem was that I was too small to reach the window from the hall floor. When they came home and George saw me rushing to my room, he stood in the doorway blocking my mother’s view and giving me time to vanish. George was on my side, I thought.

  George Senseney was, like all of my mother’s husbands except the fifth one, tall, dark, and handsome. The aura of power and danger around him was magnetic. Blair and I liked him except when he was mad at our mother. This was usually in the evening after he’d had cocktails and then wine at dinner. I didn’t know it then, but George was an alcoholic. He almost never got mad at Blair and me. He was fond of us, actually too fond. Asked what it was like to live with Lybie, he told a close friend of my mother’s, the photographer Hans Namuth, that Lybie was wonderful, but the little girls were fantastic.

  George was much more affectionate than our mother. When he said good night, he wasn’t in a rush the way she was. He talked to us and he kissed us and tickled our backs, but then he went too far. Blair and I had separate bedrooms, so I did not know what happened to her until we were grown up. With me he would tickle my back and then his hand would travel slowly toward my vagina. He would caress me between my labia. I didn’t ask him to stop. I liked the feeling. I had an inkling that it was naughty, but I wasn’t sure it was abnormal. I had no idea what was or was not normal. With Blair, he went further. He took her to his and our mother’s bed and tickled her back. Then he said that she must keep her part of the bargain. He made her masturbate him until he ejaculated into her hands. With her hands cupped, she walked down the long hall to the bathroom to wash off the goo. He told her not to tell our mother. He probably told me that, too, but I don’t remember.

  Photographs of Blair between eight and ten years old show an anxious girl, very beautiful like our mother, but with a sadness that was not childlike. At school, she behaved in such a nervous way that she had to go home after only a half day. She had tunnel vision (said to be a hysterical reaction). She would be looking at something and the center of what she was looking at would vanish. She remembers being deaf, too. And she had a twitch. Her twitch consisted of moving her jaw back and forth. She was actually trying to wiggle her nose because her nostrils itched, and she was trying to press one side of a nostril against the other. (Blair was obsessed with noses—she had to touch them. She would suddenly reach up and squeeze a person’s nose.) I thought the way she moved her jaw back and forth was glamorous, so for a while I copied Blair’s twitch.

  Blair, c. 1945

  Blair, c. 1946, Central Park, New York City

  Dalton was concerned about Blair: she was sent to a woman psychiatrist who showed her some naked dolls. When Blair knew all about what a penis was, the doctor asked her how she knew. Blair said she saw her stepfather naked. The doctor asked her if anyone was touching her down there. “No,” Blair answered quickly, “but, yes. Only once. My stepfather. But don’t tell my mother.” I do not know whether the psychiatrist told our mother. Perhaps she did, because Blair never saw that doctor again. If she had been told, our mother would have refused to believe it. When in my thirties, I told our mother what George had done, she denied it. She looked angry and changed the subject. Another time when I brought it up, she scoffed: “Oh, that kind of thing happens to everybody. It happened to me with my father.”

  During the years he was married to my mother, George drank more and more. The tissue paper butterfly over my mother and George’s bed became a symbol of violence. Their bed was a place to avoid.

  8 Granny Blair

  Our mother often took us to 226 East Seventieth Street where her parents lived in a small two-bedroom apartment whose walls were brown because my grandmother was a manic depressive and she was too anxious to allow house painters into her home. Granny was heavy. Her face was gray, and she always wore black. She may have had only one dress, because parts of the cloth had lost some of its blackness and were shiny. Granny and Granddaddy didn’t get up from their chairs when we arrived. I had to go over and give them each a kiss on the cheek, which I didn’t feel like doing. But once I was sitting down and drinking a glass of ginger ale, I was happy. Granny always sat with her back to the window. Granddaddy sat on the right side of the sofa. Behind him hung a huge dark painting said to be by Claude Lorrain. Granddaddy had a round, pink face. He was fat, too, but his stomach made him look jolly. He usually wore three-piece suits, and when I sat on his lap and fished inside his vest for his watch chain, I felt how firm his chest was, whereas Granny’s saggy belly rested on her thighs. Granddaddy’s pocket watch was a marvel of intricacy. He showed me how to open it up to see the little wheels ticking inside.

  Granny on our Cape Cod beach, c. 1937

  Granddaddy (Charles Hildreth Blair), 1940s

  Granddaddy always had a martini in his hand or on the cocktail table in front of him. He hardly talked—Granny talked a lot, especially when she was manic. When he picked up his martini glass, he would hold it out toward me and say, “Here’s how!” That must have been what he said when he drank with friends at the Cornell Club. At his club, he was admired. Since Granny seemed not to notice that he existed, he probably needed adulation. He had once been rich with a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, but he lost all his money during the Depression, and Freddy Sheffield, my mother’s sister Carolyn’s husband, had to support both him and Granny. At the Cornell Club Granddaddy found respect in part because his grandfather, Ezra Cornell had founded Cornell University. In Ezra Cornell’s family photograph album, there are photographs of Ezra’s wife and two daughters. Emma, Granddaddy’s mother, was her father’s favorite and he taught her Greek and Latin. But she was a depressive, and when she had children she couldn’t look after them, so her older sister, Mary, took on the job. Emma’s eyes haunted me. In photographs they look shadowy, so totally sad. Of course, Granny could not have inherited depression from her husband’s mother, but she had some unhappy sisters of her own. On the North Shore of Maryland, the Belle sisters were noted beauties and they all married the right kind of men, but, those men, too, lost their fortunes after the 1929 Crash, and my mother told me that two of Granny’s sisters committed suicide.

  When Granny was not depressed, I sometimes spent the night in her little guest room. Blair did this more often than me because she was Granny’s favorite. Granny gave Blair a big antique doll called Betty who had eyes that opened and real eyelashes. I longed to pick up Betty, but it was forbidden. I was given a less breakable doll, a baby with rubbery arms and a torso made of stuffed cotton cloth. During her manic phases, as a treat, Granny picked up Blair and me at Eighty-Fifth Street and took us to a hamburger place called Prexy’s or sometimes to Hamburger Heaven, which I liked better because it had chairs that you climbed up into and then closed yourself in by pulling a hinged wooden tray/table toward you. The waiters placed our hamburgers and
drinks right on this tray. When we crossed the street with Granny, she held my hand so tightly that it hurt. She was afraid that I would get run over. I was afraid to pull my hand away. I did not want to hurt her feelings.

  Ezra Cornell’s wife Mary (center) with her daughters Emma (left) and Mary (right)

  Sometimes Granny came to our apartment bringing dresses with matching bloomers for Blair and me. She had made them herself out of seersucker printed with wild patterns. Because they were seersucker, our mother wouldn’t have to iron. Most of my clothes were hand-me-downs from Blair, so a new Granny dress was exciting. One of my hand-me-down dresses was embroidered all around the skirt with swings upon which sat small brown bears made of fake fur. The bears swung when I walked. This was the dress I wore to birthday parties.

  Granny and my mother and father with Hamlet, c. 1937

  9 Birthday Parties

  Some Dalton children had parents with a lot of money, and their birthday parties were elaborate with candied apples and a magician or a clown. We dunked for apples floating in a huge metal tub. You had to grab an apple with your teeth, no easy feat because the apples bobbed and rolled in the water and your face got all wet. My classmates had fantastic cakes, specially ordered from a bakery with their name and Happy Birthday written in pink icing across the top.

  The problem was that my mother didn’t understand the kinds of presents that were expected at Dalton birthday parties. Most people brought well-wrapped boxes that contained some new game or at least a book. My mother thought expensive presents were vulgar. Also, she didn’t have much money because George Senseney was supporting her, and he didn’t earn much. On the way to one party, my mother bought a pink helium balloon for me to give to the birthday girl. I was mortified. A balloon is something that you buy on your way home from the zoo. I was scared to enter the party with just a balloon, but I was lucky: the room was so crowded that nobody noticed.

  My birthday parties were simple. My mother painted a donkey on a big sheet of brown wrapping paper, cut it out minus the tail, and hung it on a wall. We each had a turn to be blindfolded, turned around three times, and given a paper tail to pin on the donkey’s rump. We also played blind man’s buff and musical chairs, for which my mother arranged two rows of chairs back-to-back, and we all walked around the chairs while she played music on the phonograph. When the music stopped, we rushed to find a chair and sit down. There was always one less chair than there were players, so somebody was always out. Finally, there were only two people walking around one chair. The winner was the one who sat in it first. I didn’t want to be out, but I really didn’t want to be the winner sitting all alone on a single chair. The nicest part of a birthday was when my mother came into my room and said good night. She would lean down and give me a real hug and kiss. On her way out the door, she would turn and say, “Good night, birthday girl.” A birthday girl was lovable.

  Blair’s birthdays were more fun than mine. For Blair’s tenth birthday party our mother brought a container of dry ice to Central Park and we all got to throw a piece of ice into a stream and watch it smoke and sizzle. Blair invited three girls and four boys, all Dalton friends. My favorite boys were Benny Potter and Johnny Myers. At Valentine’s Day at Dalton, the teachers placed a big cardboard box with a slit in the top in the school lobby and you could slide valentines into it. I made valentines for Benny and Johnny, but I didn’t write my name on them. I didn’t want them to know I had crushes on them. At Blair’s birthday picnic I watched Benny and Johnny without letting them see that I was looking at them.

  Except when we first arrived in New York and she left us with Ellie, my mother was not a big present giver. For one birthday, she gave me a thick book called The Jumbo Fun Book. It was full of games and poems and things to do. That was where I found the only poem that I could memorize, a poem that made me first sad and then happy. Blair and I made up gestures to go with it and we recited it together:

  There once was a puffin just the shape of a muffin,

  and he lived on an island in the great blue sea,

  and he ate little fishes which were most delicious,

  and he had them for breakfast and he had them for tea.

  But this poor little puffin, he couldn’t play nothin’

  ’cause he hadn’t anybody to play with at all.

  So, he sat on his island and he cried for a while,

  and he felt very lonely and he felt very small.

  Then along came the fishes and they said if your wish is,

  you can have us for playmates instead of for tea,

  so they all play together in all sorts of weather,

  and the puffin eats pancakes like you and like me.

  My mother gave me other books, too. Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats, The Story of Ferdinand, The Little House, The Runaway Bunny, Br’er Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, The Water Babies, Winnie-the-Pooh, Stuart Little, and a wonderful book called Poo-Poo and the Dragons, which had a dramatic picture of a dragon going under a bridge and humping his back until the bridge fell down. Of course, we had Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Beatrix Potter books, and a book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. I loved rhymes. They made the world seem a place where everything fit neatly together. Nothing would fall apart. Lying in bed at night I invented a poem that began: “Rabbits, rabbits, brown and white. Tell your babies to be polite.” My verse made me proud. I daydreamed that I might be a poet.

  Me age four, summer 1945

  Another present from my mother was roller skates. At first, she held my hand. She wasn’t a person who liked to touch, so holding my hand was not something she did often. It felt awkward, but I liked it. Skating down the sidewalk on the park side of Fifth Avenue was exhilarating, especially because the sidewalk was made up of hexagonal paving stones whose multitude of cracks created a clickety-clack noise as my skates rolled over them. I decided that these cracks were not dangerous. They would not break my mother’s back. Often I went home with a bruised knee, but I didn’t care. Blair never fell. She was better than me at everything.

  10 Thoughts

  I must have been four years old when I was walking down the long, narrow hall at Eighty-Fifth Street and I suddenly realized that other people had thoughts and feelings tossing around inside their heads. This was a comfort. I had worried that I was the only one. Now I knew that everyone was like me, even Blair, even my mother. I looked at their heads and I knew their secret—they had ideas inside. I wondered what kind of thought Blair was having. Her face never told me. I would never be able to see what she was thinking.

  The world at age three or four or even five is an unstable place. Gravity cannot be trusted. Indoors and outdoors are either all one thing or they are totally separate. My room and out of my room could be different realities. I began to think that the life Blair and I were living every day was just one life and that it might be going on inside another world, which might be inside yet another world. It was like one reel of film turning and turning inside another reel whose happenings we could neither see nor hear. If I could break through to that other reel, who would I find living there, what would they be doing, and would I land in a different piece of time? Outside of that reel there might be more reels. It could be worlds within worlds within worlds, and so on forever. I wished that I believed in God. God could be in charge of everything.

  Some nights I would lie in bed worrying about death. My mother had told me that, like my dead turtle, I would have to die. When I had the giggles and wanted them to stop, I thought of the saddest thing I could think of: “My father is dead.” I was afraid that my mother might die, too. Once I saw her fall down the stairs backward. It might have been a dream, but I can still see the exact look of terror on her face. It shocked me because my mother was never afraid.

  There were songs we sang and games we played that made me think of death. “Ring-a-round the rosie, A pocket full of posies, Ashes! Ashes! We all fall down.” We sang this while dancing in a circle, then we fell on
the floor pretending to be dead. I figured that if I lived to be old, I had a lot of years left, but still, the end of living scared me. It was much worse than thinking about the time before I was born when Blair and my parents were together doing things every day. That they might keep on talking and eating and laughing even if I was dead was chilling. The thought that my dead body would fertilize a tree gave no comfort. I pictured red and yellow tulips on my grave. That didn’t help either: I would not be able to see them. Seeing was the most important part of living. I had heard of heaven and God and angels in the sky. It was fun to think of someday cavorting with them on top of clouds. But I couldn’t believe in an afterlife. My mother was an atheist. After death, there was nothing.

  Besides death I had two other big worries—infinite time and endless space. The idea of time passing forever meant that if time were broken up again and again into incredibly minute bits, there would be no such thing as an instant, and you would hardly exist. There was nothing but time in front and time behind, nothing in between. And even if you did exist in an infinitesimal grain of time, the faster time swept toward you and vanished behind you, the closer you were to death. But once I had experienced how long a year was—getting through winter, spring, summer, fall, having another birthday, and moving from one grade to the next—I was less anxious about dying. The vastness of space, the idea that emptiness went on endlessly—that was still fearsome. Lying in bed I looked up at my ceiling and saw in my mind that at the top of the sky the universe was enclosed by an immense dome made of bricks. There could be more blue sky on the other side, but I didn’t want to think about that.