Upper Bohemia Page 9

  Mougouch and my father finally settled in Orgeval, a town north of Paris. They got married in Paris by a justice of the peace at the Café de la Mairie in the Place Saint-Sulpice, and they held a reception at the Closerie des Lilas, a Left Bank restaurant frequented by artists and intellectuals. At this time, my father had a job as front man in the promotion of the Marshall Plan. With a diplomatic passport, he traveled all over Europe helping to organize traveling exhibitions that exalted the American way of life. The exhibitions moved through Europe in custom-built trailers whose sides folded down to form platforms with plexiglass walls. When my father got tired of being a sort of traveling salesman for American values, he was given a desk job in Paris, but this demanded being in an office and talking on the telephone, both of which he hated. The stammer that he had suffered in his youth returned, so he quit.

  Maro and Natasha in Europe, 1948

  15 Hickory Ridge

  My mother and George’s fights became increasingly acrimonious. His rages made me wish I were invisible. The paper butterfly above their bed was a menace. The bed itself was a battlefield. George kept going out west on his secret missions. One day when he was away, our mother told Blair and me that we were going to go to a wonderful boarding school in Vermont. It was called Hickory Ridge and it was a feeder school for Putney, a progressive boarding school just a few miles away. Our mother made it sound like so much fun. There would be lots of nice children my age and there was a farm with animals to play with. She helped us pack a few clothes in a small duffle bag. The rest of our clothes she packed into a trunk to be shipped later. She took us to Grand Central and put us on an overnight train to Brattleboro, Vermont. She was going to Mexico to get a divorce.

  I had the upper berth. We closed our heavy brown curtains that faced the aisle so that no one in the train’s narrow corridor could see us. I left the curtain for the small window that faced outdoors open because I wanted to see what went by. Every time the train hooted, I looked out to see if there were lights from a town. With Blair on the berth below me I felt safe. The clickety-clack of the train’s wheels lulled me to sleep.

  The next morning when we stepped down from the train at Brattleboro, there was a man from Hickory Ridge to meet us. Fall term had begun a month earlier, so for the time being they put Blair and me in the same room. When our trunk arrived, the best things in it were two lavender taffeta duvets that our father’s mother had given us. (We called them puffs.) At night Blair and I discovered that if we rubbed the corners of our puffs together sparks would fly. Competing to see who could make the most sparks, we shook our double decker bed so strenuously that after a couple of weeks it broke down and the school decided to separate us. Blair moved into a room with girls her own age and I moved into a room with a girl who was almost eight like me. Her name was Patsy Getz. Blair soon became one of the popular girls. At meals, she paid no attention to me. I felt abandoned.

  A short walk from the school was a pond with a muddy bottom. I knew from turtle catching on Cape Cod that this was an ideal habitat for turtles. In the muck at the edge of the pond I found two small painted turtles. They had black backs with a little red at the edge. If you turned them over, the shell that shielded their tummies was yellow-orange. I always felt pity when I picked them up and they waved their legs with their tiny claws and then shut themselves inside their shells. But I wanted so much to have them. I carried the turtles back to my dormitory and put them in a bathtub that I thought no one ever used. With mud and grasses I built them a home. I was proud of my turtle house, but a few days later, the school’s director came and remonstrated with me. She took me to the turtle’s bathroom and asked, “Didn’t you realize that the older girls need to use this tub?” She made me take the turtles back to the pond. I was shocked by her meanness. From then on, I hated this woman.

  There was a girl at Hickory Ridge a year older than Blair called Aube Breton. She loved Blair, and I think she loved me, too. My mother or father must have asked Aube’s mother, Jacqueline Lamba, to ask Aube to look after us. Jacqueline Lamba had left her husband, the Surrealist writer André Breton, and had gone off with Monty Hare’s brother, the sculptor David Hare. That must have been the reason she put Aube in this boarding school.

  Aube was slender with a handsome, leonine face (like her father) and long, wavy light-brown hair. She was sure of herself and acted almost grown up, almost motherly. Like Blair and me, Aube wore full skirts and blouses that her mother bought for her in Mexico. Blair and I each had a red skirt with tiny flowers printed on it and a wide elasticized waist—good because we were overweight, and the waist could stretch to any size. After supper Aube and Blair and I often played records of classical music—Debussy’s Afternoon of the Faun and Stravinsky’s The Firebird and The Rite of Spring. We cleared a space in the dining room and danced around in bare feet. When the music got dramatic, we made dramatic gestures. Mostly I twirled. Twirling made me feel compact, all put together in one piece. Swimming did this, too. When you are dancing or swimming, air or water swirls around your body so that every part of your skin feels like one thing.

  During morning assemblies at Hickory Ridge I learned a lot of songs. My favorites were “Flow Gently Sweet Afton” and “All Through the Night,” gentle songs that I still associate with the view of long sunlit grasses on the hill outside the dining room widow. Aube taught us games, Surrealist games that she must have learned from her father. With Aube we made cadavres esquisses, a game in which each player draws a part of a figure starting with the head. The first player folds the paper so that the next player can see only the bottom lines of what she has drawn. The next player does the same thing. When we unfolded the paper, the resulting bodies were hilarious. Aube also taught us Truth, Consequences, or Over the Rooftop. If you were caught without your fingers crossed and someone said “Jinx!” you had to either answer any question with the truth or, if you chose consequences, you had to do whatever the person who said Jinx told you to do. This could be embarrassing, like having to kiss a boy. If you chose Over the Rooftop, you had to imagine that you were on a burning roof with two people that you loved. You could save only one person. It was awful having to choose who to save and who to leave behind in the fire.

  Me, Aube Breton, and three girls in Blair’s class at the Hickory Ridge School, 1948

  Me in my Russian blouse, Hickory Ridge School, 1948

  Schoolwork at Hickory Ridge wasn’t too hard. For the first time in my life I was asked to write a story. I took it very seriously and was afraid it was no good, but the teacher liked it. Getting to the classroom building was a problem. I had a pain in the back of my ankles when I walked. Someone, maybe a doctor, told my parents it was because of short tendons. After that my father always teased me about my short tendons. Years later I learned that short tendons can be a tightening of the ankle tendon due to stress. Sometimes it hurt so much I could barely walk to class.

  In my Hickory Ridge diary, I wrote, “Daddy is coming.” A few pages later I wrote that he did not come. But in the middle of winter he did come. Blair and I had just learned to ski, and our father wanted to see us ski, so we started over to the ski hill. Walking on skis in deep snow, I fell and was so ashamed and angry that I just sat there. Blair and my father were far ahead of me. I lay down and put snow over my eyes to wash off tears. My father and Blair came back and stood over me. I refused to get up. He tried to cajole me by calling me “Hayden Wayden,” but it felt insulting instead of loving. I wished I could melt away into nothing.

  16 Toads

  At the end of the school year, we went to Cape Cod. Since our father was in Europe, our mother, who was back from Mexico and now divorced from George, had persuaded him to let her use the Big House. Perhaps this was instead of child-care money. She planned to support herself by taking paying guests and by selling Mexican folk objects, silver jewelry, and indigenous clothing—embroidered blouses, long shawls, and serapes—to her upper bohemian friends.

  A friend of my mother’s named Sta
n Thayer helped with the paying guests. He was about thirty, had movie-star looks, and taught philosophy at Columbia University. Stan slept in one of two extra-long turkey brooder houses that my father had moved down from the dune and placed near where we parked our car. To make room for the paying guests, Blair and I moved out of the Big House and into the other brooder house. Our mother fixed it up with army cots and a big flashlight that she set on a wooden fruit crate. Every night when Stan Thayer put us to bed, he sat on a chair and told us long stories that he made up as he went along. We were spellbound. Before he left, he made sure that our flashlight worked and that we could reach it. Then he would kiss us good night just like a father.

  We were alerted that some very rich New Yorkers were coming to stay. There was a flurry of tidying the house and making beds. These paying guests had a daughter my age. She was going to sleep in my vacated room. I thought it would be nice to welcome her with a gift of the tiny toads, no bigger than your thumbnail, that appear on the shore of Horseleech Pond in late summer. I loved to put them on the palm of my hand and feel the touch of their miniature feet as they hopped. Unlike turtles, who hate to be picked up, these toads were not afraid. They liked being with me, I thought. The afternoon before the rich people arrived, I collected maybe thirty toads in a basket and put them in the girl’s room. I was sure that she had never seen such miniature toads and that she would be thrilled and would become my friend.

  We could hear the New Yorker’s car as it followed the long dirt road that leads to our house. A big black Buick descended the hill, so slowly—they must have been afraid of the bumps. My mother’s eyes narrowed as she watched her paying guests getting out of the car. She scorned people with fancy automobiles. Buicks were vulgar, she said. I couldn’t wait to see the girl’s delight as she encountered my gift of toads. She and I would play with them and set them free. My mother ushered everyone to their bedrooms and when she came out of the girl’s room, she was furious. The toads were lying all over the floor, dried up and dead. The girl’s mother was horrified. It was like the turtles at Hickory Ridge: I was shocked that no one appreciated the sweetness of toads. My mother gave me a brush and a dustpan, and I swept up the toads and took them outside to a place under a tree where I covered them with leaves. It was my fault that they died. That paying guest girl did not become my friend.

  Blair had friends her age and I did not. Her friends, Mary Day Lanier and Penny Jencks were usually nice to me—especially Penny. She included me in their play even though Blair would have preferred that I go away. We had a costume trunk and once, when Mary Day and Penny were at our house, we all dressed up in pink tulle ballet skirts and wreaths of flowers in our hair and we danced on the brick terrace. Blair took photographs. Mary Day, who already had breasts, wore no top and I wore no underpants so that my fat stomach was visible through the transparent skirt.

  Penny often spent the night. When she was there, Blair didn’t try to get rid of me. Penny would hide in a closet and then come out with her eyes crossed and walk toward us with stiff arms and legs as if she were a zombie. Blair and I fled, but we laughed so hard I had to hold my crotch in order not to pee. Penny told ghost stories. “The Green Man” was the scariest. In a low voice, she would say, “I’m on the first step, I’m on the second step, the third step…” The higher up the stairs she got the more scared we became. The story ended with, “Gotcha!” She also taught us a song about a witch: “There was an old woman all skin and bone, woo, woo, woo, woo,” etc. Penny sometimes turned up at our house on her horse Bobby. She let us climb on his back. Bobby loved Penny and she loved him more than anything else, I think.

  Me in a ballet skirt outside the Big House, 1949

  Penny Jencks outside one of my father’s army barracks houses overlooking the beach, Cape Cod, c. 1955

  Later that summer our father returned from France and took Blair and me to Lobster Lake in northern Maine. His mother, whom we called Gaga, had inherited a fishing camp from one of her brothers who had been gassed in World War I and died young. She and my grandfather had spent many vacations there accompanied by their four children and a group of servants who they put up in a large tent. To get to the Lobster Lake camp, we drove to Greenville on the southern end of Moosehead Lake, bought supplies, and then drove on to North East Carry at the lake’s north shore. There we met up with Jack Hall and his second wife, Jean. (His first wife, Dodie, had run off with a Provincetown fisherman.) We packed our things in two long canoes, to which the men attached small outboard motors, and we started down Lobster Stream.

  Blair and me on the way to Lobster Lake, 1949

  Part of the river was clogged with logs upon which stood lumberjacks prodding the logs with poles that had hooks and spikes at their ends. I watched to see if a log would roll and a lumberjack would fall in the water. They never did. It took quite a while to get through the log jam, and this annoyed our father who had a huge boil covered with a gauze bandage on his left hand. He didn’t complain, but I knew it hurt because he was even quieter than usual. Blair and I scanned the shore for moose. Way ahead we would see something large and dark and sometimes it wasn’t a boulder. Sometimes it was a moose with its nose in the water eating vegetation near the river’s edge. When we got close the moose would rise out of the river dripping, and, with its strange, ungainly gait, vanish into the brush.

  After an hour or so, Lobster Stream opened out on to Lobster Lake. We crossed the lake, entered a small cove, pulled up the canoes, and hauled our knapsacks and food supplies uphill to the camp, which comprised several log cabins. The two biggest, one for eating and the other for sleeping, were connected by a wooden walkway. Above the entrance door of the kitchen-dining room cabin was the head of a stag. To the left and right of the mammoth stone fireplace in the sleeping cabin hung dark brown bearskins. It took a while to get used to all these dead animals, testimony to hunting and killing and violence. The adults slept in the two ground floor bedrooms, and Blair and I climbed a ladder to a loft equipped with camp beds. Here, under the eaves, were relics from the past—a wind-up Victrola that actually worked. The adults put away the groceries. There wasn’t much. Our father was indifferent to food. Also, he had an ethic that if you were camping, you were supposed to travel light and make do with the most basic provisions. Mostly we ate canned ham or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Blair and I got really sick of canned ham. It was cold and the jelly around it was disgusting.

  My father on the walkway between log cabins, Lobster Lake, 1949

  It didn’t take long for tensions to arise between Jack and Jean Hall. I don’t think my father liked Jean. She was tough and always red in the face from alcohol. Jack was a drinker, too. During his temper tantrums his face became dark and scary. Jean just shrieked. She hated our camp. It was too isolated and there was no electricity, no plumbing, and no telephone. There were two outhouses, and at night, because there might be a bear, she was afraid of walking the short way downhill to get to one of them. Jean Hall became so crazy that Jack had to take her home to Wellfleet. Good! Now Blair and I had our father all to ourselves. Also, with the Halls gone, he didn’t drink so much whiskey, and during the day he took us on canoe trips to picnic beaches all over the lake. My favorite was called Hayden’s Rock where, beneath an enormous boulder, big enough to climb on if you were brave, lay a beach of shiny, smooth black pebbles that got hot in the sun. I liked to think that this rock was named after me. Later I learned that it was named after Gaga’s mother, Annie Hayden Hyde.

  One excursion that took us away from the lake was to a logging camp deep in the woods. The ground there was thick mud and there were pigs rutting about in it. Off to one side were several log cabins and some menacing logging machines. A few large unshaven men watched us from their cabin steps. My father strolled up to them. Blair and I kept our distance. In his best Brahmin accent, he asked them how they were doing. They grunted in reply. Our father asked if it was possible to buy some pork. They said they didn’t have any. It was clear to me tha
t they just wanted us to go away. I was sure they had guns, and they looked at Blair and me as if they were sizing us up like trees they planned to fell. When we were finally on our way back to our camp, I told my father that I thought they were bad men. Oh no, he said. They’re just lonely and being lonely makes men angry.

  Our father was lonely, but we did not know it. One morning he announced that he was taking the canoe and going to the little grocery store at North East Carry to buy a box of Hershey bars. It was amazing—he would make that two-hour trip just in order to buy something that Blair and I liked. Years later he told me he had gone to North East Carry to see if there was a letter from Mougouch who had remained in Europe and was probably enjoying a tryst with Matta. My father returned from North East Carry with the promised chocolate bars and a bottle of milk, but without a letter. He looked sad. That night I stayed awake for a long time listening to the loons calling to one another.

  17 The Manheims

  Photographs show that at some point late in the summer of 1949, Blair and I lived with our mother in a rickety house on a rickety wharf in the west end of Provincetown—I think it was called Captain Jack’s Wharf. Here, if the tide was high, I could hear breaking waves beneath the old floorboards. Stan Thayer was in and out of our house all the time. He must have been my mother’s lover.

  Early in September, our mother took us to the New York Store opposite the MacMillan Wharf in the center of Provincetown. She bought us winter clothes, and she bought us each a peashooter, which is a wider and firmer version of a drinking straw and into which you insert a dried pea and then blow it out into the world. We moved back into the Big House, and a short time later she told us that she was going to Mexico again and that a nice couple, Ralph and Mary Manheim, were going to live with us in the Big House. The Manheims had two daughters: Kate, who was four, and Nora, who was about two. It would be lots of fun. We would go to an excellent public school in Truro. Ralph had a soft voice, and he always looked concerned as if he was worrying about the state of the world. My mother told us that he was a well-known translator who had lived in Germany and had translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Ralph talked about serious topics like politics, which my parents ignored. Mary, of Irish Catholic descent, looked anxious and worn and much older than Ralph. She made an effort to be cheerful and most of the time she was loving.