Upper Bohemia Page 8

  About halfway through our train trip a man came down the aisle selling candy and cigarettes. Blair and I shared a Hershey bar. She handed me the half with no wrapping, so my fingers got all brown and I licked them almost clean, then quickly, so no one could see, I wiped my hands on the fuzzy velvet seat. Our mother picked us up at Cornwall Bridge and took us to the cabin. Driving back to New York on Sunday nights, I slept on the floor of our car and Blair slept on the seat. But when we started down the West Side Highway I woke up. George was driving so fast I was afraid he would plunge us into the river.

  13 Dasya

  The summers we spent with our father on Horseleech Pond were my favorite time of year, not just because of the pond, but also because I was a little bit in love with my father. During the school year I never knew where he was living or what he was doing. Seeing him again in June was exciting but also anxious-making. What if he didn’t like me anymore? What if I looked too chubby? I wanted him to say how wonderful I was, but he never did. His mind was elsewhere. He would tease me and call me Hayden Wayden, but he didn’t play with me. He was always worrying about his properties—the army barracks houses and their tenants. He spent a lot of time fixing things up. He was good at repairs.

  Dasya Chaliapin at the Turkey Houses, 1947

  In the summer of 1947 I met my father’s third wife, Dasya Chaliapin. And I met her son, Hugh Robertson, who was just my age (six). Hugh’s father was a partner in Todd, Robertson and Todd, managing agents for John D. Rockefeller Jr. It was he who fired Diego Rivera in 1933 when Rivera had almost completed his Rockefeller Center mural into which he had inserted a portrait of Lenin. Dasya’s Russian mother had persuaded her daughter not to fight for custody of Hugh, presumably because she considered Dasya to be an unfit mother or because she believed Hugh would lead a more privileged life with his wealthy American father. Dasya rarely saw her son, but Hugh was allowed to spend time with us during Turkey House summers.

  Hugh was gentle and quiet, not like other boys. He quickly became my complete brother. When we were exploring the woods uphill from the turkey houses, we found a place beneath large oak trees where the ground was covered with bright green moss, the kind that if you pass your hand over it feels like mohair velvet. We made this place our hideout. Pushing dead leaves to either side, we cleared a path to the hideout through pitch pines and shrub oak. We tied strips torn from an old sheet on branches so as not to lose our way. I had thought of leaving pieces of bread like Hansel and Gretel, but I remembered that in that story, the birds ate the crusts and the children got lost and an old woman was going to roast them in her oven.

  Dasya’s son, Hugh Robertson, and me at Horseleech Pond, 1947

  In the middle of the moss carpet we found a hollow at the base of the biggest oak tree. This was our secret hiding place. In it we stored candy and peanut butter and a few dimes—if something bad happened, these could be our emergency supplies. Hugh and I would sit and examine the minutia on the ground around us—tiny flowers growing in the moss, pine cones, acorns, pine needles. We tried to imagine a perimeter for our hideout, the line where walls would be if it had walls. The ground and the trees just went on and on, but we knew exactly where our hideout ended and where the forest began.

  While he was married to Dasya, our father—usually not much of a present giver—gave Blair and me Russian shirts of heavy blue cloth with red and white embroidery around the neckline. Hugh already had one. I thought my new shirt made me look like a cute little Russian girl. I knew about Russia from a Russian folk tale told in a book called My Mother Is the Most Beautiful Mother in the World. My mother must have given it to me, or maybe Dasya did. Both of them felt beautiful. It was the story of a three-year-old Russian girl who lost track of her mother while farmworkers were harvesting wheat. The wheat fields were so high that the girl could not see over the top to find her mother. When she asked people if they had seen her mother and they asked who her mother was, she said, “My mother is the most beautiful woman in the world.” Finally, she found her mother, who turned out to be a plump and plain peasant woman.

  I read this book over and over, in part because it showed me how much little girls love their mothers and how much they don’t want to lose them, especially a beautiful mother like mine. But I loved this book also because I had a terror of getting lost. Even before getting lost on Lexington Avenue, I had been lost on Cape Cod. When I was two or three, my parents took me to their friend Jack Hall’s house on Bound Brook Island on Wellfleet’s bay side. Jack and his wife, Dodie, had a son named Darius who was born the same year as me. While the grown-ups drank cocktails, Darius and I went outside to play. We walked over a sandy hill carpeted with bearberry that in the 1940s, before the pitch pines took over, covered the hills and valleys of Bound Brook Island. Suddenly I found myself alone. Darius must have gone back over the hill to his home. Because of the hill the Halls’ house was invisible. I couldn’t remember the direction from which we had come. I found a dirt road and walked along it. It must lead someplace. After a while a Jeep came along, and the driver took me back to the Halls. My mother acted as though she had not noticed that I was gone, but Dodie knew. “There you are!” she said, as if my return was the best thing in the world.

  Blair once went wandering off, too. Before I was born, Blair, aged two or three, was in a playpen made of chicken wire that our father had erected outside the Big House. Hamlet, our red setter, was in the pen with Blair and he decided to dig a hole under the chicken wire to get out. Blair crawled out after him and walked about a mile along a dirt road to the home of Anna Matson whose five-year-old son, Peter, Blair adored. When she got there, no one was home. It started raining, so she turned around and retraced her steps. Blair wasn’t scared at all. She never thought that she was lost. In the meantime, our father telephoned the police and various friends to say that Blair was missing. Blair recalls that a truck came along—she thinks our father’s friend Lloyd Rose, then a young art teacher (later a master chimney-maker and Truro Selectman) was at the wheel. Rose picked her up and took her home. All she remembers about that ride was the window wipers pushing rain off the windshield.

  Dasya had the advantage of being thirteen years younger than my mother. She was plump with fair skin, big breasts, and soft, wavy, light brown hair. She loved to sing and play the accordion and to dance Russian dances. She taught us a Russian song, the words of which sounded like: “Cheesik, peesik, cadetskiville, nafontante…” That’s all I remember. Dasya said the song was about a drunken canary.

  Dasya liked to have fun. She had nothing of my mother’s hauteur. My mother always looked as though no one could approach her. She fended off people with her exquisite jaw line, with the aquiline bridge of her nose, her narrow nostrils, and her pale blue eyes. She reminded me of the fairy-tale princess on top of the glass mountain whom no suitor could reach. My father told me that when my mother was married to him, she was shy and didn’t talk much. She liked to be still, to look mysterious and poetic, slightly melancholy like Greta Garbo. She had a bit of Marlene Dietrich’s femme fatale attitude. My father was quiet and reserved, too, dignified without being cold. In spite of his humor and his elegant seductive manner, he was not entirely accessible. He was not cozy. Everyone remarked on his great charm, a charm that made people—especially his daughters—want to win his admiration. His understated wit was typically New England. Thoreau was his role model, maybe Emerson, as well. He liked to sit on a log in the middle of a forest. Being silent and observing nature was what made him happy.

  Dasya, on the other hand, was wild and uninhibited. Everything about her radiated outward. She didn’t take much in. Later I learned that she was an alcoholic. My father recalled his disdain when, during a period when it was hard to get meat because of the war, she ate two steaks all on her own.

  Edmund Wilson noted in his diary a piece of gossip about my father and Dasya that Hayden Walling had just told him: “Story about Jack Phillips when he was married to Dasya Chlyapin[sic]: she wanted him
to make love to her all the time and Jack had finally said there are other things to do besides making love. She had asked him what they were. Why, you can go fishing or take a walk.… Just to show you how cozy we are out here: Libby and her present husband (she had formerly been married to Jack) moved into Jack’s house with him last summer, and my former wife was living with them, too.”

  Dasya had a July birthday. She was turning twenty-six. She told Blair and Hugh and me that it was a Russian tradition for children to decorate a birthday girl’s chair with flowers. The yellow wicker chair that she chose was like a throne. It had a tall rounded back with elaborate floral designs woven into the wicker. The three of us set out in a search for flowers. The problem was that almost no flowers grow near Horseleech Pond. Perhaps we found honeysuckle, sweet pepperbush, goldenrod, or a bit of wild laurel. We wove leafy branches and whatever flowers we had been able to collect into the weave of the yellow chair. It was magnificent. It would make Dasya feel like a queen.

  Just before the guests arrived Dasya came in dressed in a full peasant skirt, a wide black elastic belt, and a white, low-cut blouse. She had tied a narrow black velvet ribbon around her neck. She thanked us for the decorated chair and then, at the sound of car doors opening and closing, she went off to greet her guests. As she ushered them into the house, she asked Blair and Hugh and me to go outside. It’s a grown-up party, she said. I was horrified. How could anyone be so mean, especially after we had worked so hard on her chair? We went behind the house and stood at the window looking in. Dasya put Russian music on the Victrola and began to dance, at first all by herself. Her full skirt went straight out, and you could see her underpants. Her cleavage was more and more in evidence because her blouse kept coming untucked and when she tucked it back under her belt, her neckline got lower and lower.

  Hugh’s skinny shoulder was pressed against mine. I looked at his sad face and asked him if he wanted to go to our hideout. He did. We went and lay down on the moss. It was almost dark when my father came to collect us. We went home for a quick supper (the birthday cake was gone) and then to bed.

  When Dasya and my father drove to Wellfleet to buy groceries or to visit a friend, Hugh and Blair and I played a game we made up. Blair and I were princesses who had fallen asleep by a magic charm. Only a prince could wake us. We lay on the living room floor with our legs slightly apart. Hugh would come and tickle our arms and then our legs and finally he found his way to between our legs. Hugh found the spot that could undo the spell and let the princesses wake up. It was just a game; nevertheless, I would have been ashamed if anybody found out.

  My father once drove Hugh and me to Hugh’s father’s summer home in the fancy part of the Cape—I think it was Chatham or Woods Hole. I hadn’t realized that Hugh’s visit to the Turkey Houses was over until we got there. His father’s house was called a cottage, but it was huge, room after room full of antique furniture and oval hooked rugs. Hugh took me up to his room, and we sat on the bed and talked or tried to talk. Hugh was not crying. Like me he was a holder-backer of tears. It was obvious that he didn’t want to be with his father. The house had a dark atmosphere. It had too many unused rooms. Usually I liked visiting rich people’s houses. The Fifth Avenue apartment of my mother’s younger sister, Aunt Carolyn, was full of polished mahogany, upholstered furniture, and heavy, lined curtains that pulled back with a string. Going there made me feel grand. But the Robertsons’ house had nothing fun in it.

  When I was in my twenties, Anna Matson told me about Hugh turning up at her Cape Cod house. He had not been in these Wellfleet/Truro woods for over twenty years. Hugh asked Anna where his mother was. Anna did not know. I did, but I wasn’t there to tell him. If Dasya was still alive, she was in France. In 1957, when I was going to school in Paris, my mother and I had Thanksgiving dinner at Dasya’s home north of Paris. Now she had a jolly Russian husband, a drinker like herself. For the Thanksgiving feast she cooked two geese. The ballet dancer Serge Lifar was the only other guest. At lunch, he explained how he had avoided being arrested by the Nazis. He acted out his story with gestures, taking his penis out and demonstrating how he had shown the Nazis that he was not circumcised. Everyone at the table roared. I do not remember what Dasya said about what Hugh was doing at that time. Not long after visiting Anna in the 1960s, Hugh committed suicide.

  14 Mougouch

  In the autumn of 1948 my mother and father decided that it would be a good idea to join forces for a weekend in the Big House. He had separated from Dasya. They had not needed to get a divorce because, according to Massachusetts law, their marriage was not legitimate: when they married in 1946 they had not waited the required two years after my father’s divorce from my mother. (They were three days short.) Now my father was in love with somebody else, a woman named Mougouch. I had just started third grade at Dalton. Blair was in sixth grade. In the last few months my mother and George had been fighting a lot. Given the friction between them and given the fact that George was a guest in my father’s house, it was weird that over that weekend George seemed so relaxed. It was as if he owned the place.

  My father came to the gathering at the Big House with his new love, Mougouch Gorky (née Agnes Magruder), and her two daughters, Maro, age five, and Natasha, age three. He had been introduced to Mougouch in late August at a party in New York given by Serge Chermayeff. Chermayeff took my father aside and told him to be nice to Mougouch. Her husband, the painter Arshile Gorky, had killed himself that July. My father and Mougouch were charmed by each other. He was a great dancer and so was she. Except for her slightly beak-like nose, she was beautiful. She had masses of brown hair and a mischievous twinkle in her blue-gray eyes. She and my father planned to meet again soon.

  A few weeks after Chermayeff’s party, my father was in Truro checking on his various rental properties. When he arrived at the Turkey Houses, he heard music. He went inside and there was Mougouch dancing with the Surrealist painter Roberto Matta Echaurren, who had been my father’s Paper Palace tenant in 1942. That June 1948, Matta and Mougouch had had a brief affair. When Gorky found out, his jealousy was one of the torments that prompted him to hang himself. My father, always confidant about women, assumed that Mougouch was there on Horseleech Pond because she wanted to see him. He and Matta spent the rest of the afternoon vying for Mougouch’s attention. My father must have won the battle, because a few months later, he and Mougouch and her daughters sailed for Spain.

  Mougouch was, she told me later, horrified by the bizarre situation during that fall weekend in the Big House. Matta was still in her life, and George and my mother, though still married, were at odds. Blair and I were on our best behavior, hoping that our parents would fall in love again and remarry. I remember being asked to take Maro and Natasha down to the shore of the pond. Maro was cantankerous. She came with me, but she made sure I noticed how reluctant she was. Looking back, her anger is not surprising: Gorky had died only two months earlier. By contrast, Natasha was scrumptious and sweet-tempered. She had dark corkscrew curls and she still had a bit of baby fat. Maro was skinny with a face that was beautiful but melancholy, the furthest thing from cute. She had olive skin and large brown eyes, and she looked like her Armenian grandmother, but I saw this resemblance only many years later. With the help of a lot of wine and bourbon, the adults managed to get through the weekend.

  Mougouch in Orgeval, France, c. 1949

  In October, after depositing Maro and Natasha in a Catholic school in Barcelona, my father and Mougouch looked all over Spain for an affordable place to live. Next, they searched for a home in Italy and settled in Positano for the winter, after which they decided to move to France. During this period, Matta was still in pursuit of Mougouch and she, ever restless and seeking adventure, traveled around Europe with one or the other of her two lovers. My father told me that once in Paris, after he and Mougouch quarreled, she jumped on a bus, and he, right in the middle of a boulevard, and with cars going by on either side, chased the bus and managed to jump on the back
. “For a Bostonian,” my mother once said, “your father was very passionate.”

  While carrying on this back-and-forth life, Mougouch installed Maro and Natasha in a Swiss boarding school, a deed for which Maro never forgave her mother. Natasha, who was only three, was spanked and shamed when she peed in her pants. She remembers being given a candy with a flower design in the middle as a reward on a day she didn’t wet her bed. While being courted by my father and Matta, Mougouch got pregnant, she was not sure by who. She had an abortion. Perhaps that is why she placed her daughters in boarding school. Years later Mougouch insisted that she had camped in a tent near the school, thus, to her mind, she had not totally abandoned her daughters. Even so, her leaving such young children in Spanish and then Swiss boarding schools, like my mother’s installing Blair and me in a Manhattan apartment with an Irish woman to look after us, might now seem horrifying to anyone for whom bringing up children was the central pleasure, duty, and purpose in life. Upper bohemian women like my mother and Mougouch defied the norms of decent behavior. They believed that there was a moral imperative to follow their desire.