Christmas mornings were altogether overwhelming. We invested them with so many expectations, such conjecture and petty rivalry, that when they arrived like long-awaited guests, we were stricken by shyness. The big question was whether or not Santa Claus would come through. That year, Bridget, Bill, and I, with Emily and George Stearns in tow, had spent several days on his trail. After unsuccessfully canvassing all the Beverly Hills department stores, we pinned him down at Sears. Our desires were precise. Bill asked for a flashy red fire engine with an extension ladder, and Bridget, as she did every year, a life-size doll baby with all the attendant paraphernalia. I had never been interested in dolls; to me they were clumsy facsimiles of life, with their artificial smiles and limbs, and I couldn’t understand how Bridget could spend hours dressing and undressing them or sticking bottles of water into their mouths to wait, fascinated, for what would come out the other end. I had spotted, in the toy store, a doll’s house, which I instantly coveted; the idea of moving furniture from one room to another made perfect sense, I confided to Santa Claus. What I remember about Christmas morning that year was coming downstairs, cautiously negotiating each stair as if it were slippery with ice, and, at the bottom, Mother and Father waiting to lead me to the center of the room and a doll’s house, surpassing in magnificence anything I had ever imagined, towering, it seemed, over the tree and everything else in The Barn. It was a marvel of craftsmanship, a Gothic confection of some twenty rooms, every one wallpapered, carpeted, hung with a tiny chandelier, and crammed, like San Simeon, with a prodigious supply of furniture. George Stearns stood beside it, beaming; he had built and decorated it entirely himself, working secretly every night for weeks—an old hobby, he said, carving and cabinet work, and a great pleasure to discover he had the skill to make some furniture for me to move around. Mother nudged me gently. I had forgotten to say thank you. My legs felt so wobbly I didn’t quite dare reach inside to see if the furniture really moved. “Brooke,” Mother whispered, “George has worked so long and so hard on this doll’s house and it’s so very special—of course you know Bill won’t be interested, with all his cars and fire engines—but do you think you’re grown up enough now and generous enough to share it with Bridget? I’ll bet you are. Think! Wouldn’t it be nice for her to be able to play with it, too?”
I thought. That question, Mother’s simple question on Christmas morning, 1944, about the doll’s house that George Stearns built was to me the most complex question anyone had ever asked. I thought for a whole minute while my heart stopped and my eyes blinked and my face flushed with fury. It was a trick question, two-sided, flipping back and forth, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t, the trick of a supreme magician who could—with cunning legerdemain under a silk handkerchief—transform a few seconds of tranquility into an eternity of chaos. The truth: no, I did not, under any circumstance whatsoever, wish to share the doll’s house with Bridget (unless, uncoerced, the next day, or week, or year, I felt like changing my mind and giving it to her outright). Or the truth: yes, of course I wanted to share the doll’s house with Bridget, because not only would that please Mother and demonstrate how generous and grown up I really was but because I knew that I loved Bridget very deeply and identified with her yearning as she tentatively touched the miniature grandfather’s clock in the miniature hallway. (Get your nasty little fingers out of there, I wanted to scream, until I give you permission.) Bridget was blissfully oblivious of my pain, my conflict. I had not, before that question, ever been conscious of hating her or of loving her so absolutely. I never felt, or had the ability to be unaware of feeling, the same way about my sister again. And I could never bring myself to play with the doll’s house. Eventually it had to be given away.
Then it was spring. The time had come to leave, even though nobody seemed to know exactly why. We were moving not to a house just around the corner but to a farm in a distant place called Connecticut. For years Father had maintained that California was, deservedly, about to be bombed into the Pacific Ocean by the Japs, but now the war was almost over, and in any case Father didn’t pretend to be naturally inclined toward a rural existence. Mother, on the other hand, was enthralled with the idea of country life, and enthralled the three of us with her descriptions of it. We did know, in a subtle way, that she hoped to wean Father away from the agency business, the bulk of which remained, for him, in California, and that she wanted to decontaminate the atmosphere in which we were being brought up. It was phony, she claimed, all phony—Hollywood, New York, movies, the theatre. She wanted to retire and never work again, to become a real wife and mother. We had no idea at all what that meant, and neither, apparently, did Father, who swore that he didn’t believe a word of it.
“Goodbye,” Mother wrote in our scrapbooks above a series of Johnny Swope’s lovingly detailed photographs of the house and grounds. “Goodbye to the red barn—To 12928 Evanston Street—To the scarecrow [a symbol of our Victory garden, that quarter acre of lawn plowed under and laid out in rows of vegetables, where Bridget, Bill, and I were diligently picking green caterpillars off the tomato vines at a penny apiece when V-E Day was announced on the radio]—Goodbye to the stable where Sonny [my pony] lived—To the tree on the terrace and our statue [a primitive stone sculpture of three small children gathered in their mother’s arms]—To the birdhouse—The weather vane on Elsa and Otto’s house—And the angel! [a recumbent wooden figure in white relief against the sky, blowing a trumpet to the winds that spun him around and around on top of The Barn]—Goodbye.” The last picture was of the driveway, where, somewhere in the gravel, my first tooth still lay—and where, at the far end, between the pepper trees curving over them, the front gates were drawn across the entrance, tightly shut.
We came to Brookfield, Connecticut, in 1945 with the last spring lilacs. From the moment of our arrival, the three of us ran wild. There was nothing to stop us, really—at least nothing like the previous physical boundaries or disciplines. We developed a new awareness of time; it, not Mother or Emily, seemed to discipline and define everything, even the space around us, the pastures and meadows and woods, which changed perceptibly from hour to hour, from morning to evening, from season to season. We also found that we could change like the seasons, as could our attitudes about each other, even Mother’s about Father. And we acquired the unforgettable knowledge that violence and danger lay everywhere, under any surface, around any corner, even in the most deceptively beautiful and serene places.
The farm itself was named Stone Ledges. It was a ninety-five-acre estate and lay on a natural shelf in the hillside fields that rolled down to it, continued beyond as gently sloping pastureland, and leveled out way below in mysterious woods and stagnant marshes. Most of the land was situated on one side of a little country lane, Long Meadow Hill Road, and bordered its length with low stone walls. On the other side, also belonging to the property, was a lush meadow of corn and alfalfa, grown as fodder for the livestock, and, in the far corner, a fragrant patch of waist-high clover, which, on hot summer days, was our secret refuge. The field, enclosed by split fences, sloped up to a dark pine forest; at any point along the crest of the hill, one could look down and catch glimpses of the white clapboard farmhouse through towering maple trees, hundreds of years old, whose massive trunks and spreading foliage formed a solid ring around it.
There were three red barns, as Mother had described in her letters, scattered around the property: the main barn, large enough to contain a hayloft and sheep pen, to which we added a modern annex for milking the cows; an adjacent barn where the tractor and other heavy machinery were kept; and, off to the other side of the house, a third barn, which was a general storeroom for tools, paints, and carpentry equipment. There was even a fourth barn, considered to be a unique feature, because at some point it had been converted into complete guest quarters and linked to the main house itself by a series of interconnecting service rooms. These rooms—a laundry room, a storage pantry, and a dairy room—were, in a form of reverse snobbism, our favorite part o
f the house. They had a peculiar quality of seeming to be the center, the heart of the house, and at the same time the stillest place in it. The floors were paved with flagstone, ground down by age and wear to a fine cool smoothness, unlike any other surface our bare feet encountered inside or out.
The main house was a rambling colonial structure built in 1781 and skillfully renovated in the thirties. Every room retained its original fireplace or stove, wide-planked pine floors, and low ceilings punctuated with exposed beams. Leading up to the bedrooms were two angular staircases, tilted with age and impossible to go up or down except in single file. Over everything ran a vast attic, cedar-lined and studded with dormer windows that, like a captain’s walk, commanded a 360-degree view of the countryside. The attic was the only place in the house that could resist Mother. She repeatedly attacked it with the intention of transforming it into a playroom for the three of us, but was always defeated by the unbearable summer heat or winter cold that it sucked in from every direction.
She had her way everywhere else. As if lifted from the pages of an exhaustive botanical catalogue, flowers of every color or variety, single-stemmed or in bouquets, were strewn across all the walls of all the rooms; floral chintzes covered every chair and couch, flower-printed curtains hung from every window. The house was filled with braided or hooked rugs, rustic colonial furniture, hurricane lamps, and a second profusion of flowers from the cutting garden—roses, tiger lilies, peonies, snapdragons, sweet peas—bunched on each table in every room.
Father couldn’t stand any of it. The flowers gave him terrible hay fever. We could tell exactly what room he was in by following the explosive sound of his sneezes. “A-a-a-a-choo! A-a-a-a-choo!” They had a unique cadence, starting with a prolonged howl of agony and ending like a violent expletive. Mother teased him mercilessly and called him a hypochondriac as, room by room, he sank limply into one flowered chintz chair or another, wiping his eyes with a soggy handkerchief and gulping down antihistamines by the handful. His legion of allergies had no place in her scheme of things, and besides that, it was important that he set a good example to the three of us, to whom, worst of all, he had passed them on in one dire form or another. Something about Brookfield, Connecticut, not only instantaneously activated them but bred new, unheard-of mutations.
“Just my luck,” Father would moan, secretly pleased at the power of his genes and also the fact that he was not altogether alone in his misery. “A case of god-awful history repeating itself right under my nose—a nose that can hardly breathe any more, by the way, it’s so damned stuffed up, thanks to the fifty different kinds of pollen that have contaminated my respiratory system. Well, it may be too soon to tell whether the three children have inherited any of my good points, but by God it’s obvious by now they’ve inherited all of the bad, poor things—it’s triple jeopardy.”
To Bridget he bequeathed his skin, a skin so sensitive that it would break out in hideous rashes or eczema or hives at the suggestion of an allergen wafting through the air an acre away. Hives were one of Father’s specialties. He got them from eating strawberries or shellfish. Once he was put in charge of Bridget and me for one of our cross-country trips from New York to California (“Make sure they brush their teeth twice a day and wash their hands before meals and change their dresses once in a while and go to bed at a reasonable hour,” Mother warned him), and, in a reckless gesture before assuming his unaccustomed duties, he treated himself and us to strawberry sundaes (“God, I’m going to regret this,” he said); as the train left Grand Central Station, his eyes began to puff up with red blotches and then, inch by inch, the rest of his body. For some reason he had forgotten to bring his ever-ready pigskin suitcase stuffed with pill bottles and ointments like a miniature pharmacy (and outfitted with a collapsible stand on which Father could perch it while he pored over its contents); so, unmedicated, he rolled himself up in a sheet and retired to his berth in our private compartment, where he lay like a caterpillar in a cocoon without saying a word for the entire four days and three nights. Bridget and I had a wonderful time running up and down the aisles and ordering whatever we wanted in the elegant dining car; occasionally we would prod Father into a semi-sitting position, pry his swollen lips open with a soup spoon or straw, and siphon liquids into him. Emily and Bill met us in Los Angeles, and we went straight from the train station to the doctor’s office.
However, it was Bridget who polished off the topic of hives in our family, carrying it to extremes Father had never dreamed of. Inexplicably she got them for the first time at lunch soon after we arrived in Brookfield, gorging on fresh strawberries and Agnes the cow’s celebrated double cream. Within hours she had to be taken to the nearest hospital, seven miles away in New Milford. Still, as bad as it was, the sight of Bridget with hives was nothing compared to the ghastly spectacle of Bridget with a ripe case of poison ivy. A crimson rash would spread like wildfire over her slender little body, ruthlessly sparing no area, not even the cracks between her toes. Then came a period of unendurable itching that sometimes necessitated tying her hands down or stuffing them in gloves so that she couldn’t claw at herself. The next day began a long cycle in which, concurrent with the overall swelling of her body that would deform it past recognition, the rash consolidated itself into grotesque blisters that erupted, burst, oozed an evil sticky fluid, unbelievably erupted again, became open lesions, and crusted over at last into a solid orange scab, like a grisly coat of armor, which cracked and bled when she moved. We would soak her for hours in tubs of Epsom salts and boric acid, compress her with wads of cotton-soaked medicinal remedies like Burow’s solution, pour calamine lotion over her, swab her with anesthetic salves, and wrap her in yards of gauze to keep the flies off.
“Oh, my God, Maggie!” exploded Father at his initial glimpse, having been spared the first stages by sequestering himself in New York City for a few welcome days of business. “The child’s got leprosy, for Chrissake! What the hell are we doing in this godforsaken place, anyway? It’s the tail end of civilization—she never looked like that in Los Angeles, never before in her life.”
But she looked much worse many times afterward, because poison ivy was just a common weed on the farm, hard to avoid brushing against even when we became familiar with its distinctive three-leaved configuration—a seductive plant, shinier and greener than any other in the summer, turning, in the fall, to glossy red. Bridget developed the unerring instinct that wild animals have about their natural enemies; she could feel a clump of poison ivy growing behind a tree or stone wall and would stop in her tracks, with her nose to the wind, quivering, until Bill or I led her past it. Since we ran around all summer barefoot and practically naked, Emily took the precaution of scrubbing her down every evening with a big cake of smelly carbolic soap—a suggestion of Dr. McKenzie, the kindly Brookfield doctor, who had become resigned to making at least one emergency house call a week on behalf of one or another of us. Often in the middle of the night, he chugged up to Stone Ledges in his old car, shaking his head with sleepiness and disbelief. “Nothing like preventive medicine,” he said, as the incidence and virulence of Bridget’s rashes steadily increased. “This stuff should disinfect an army.” But the soap was of little use. Bridget could get a major case of poison ivy even when she stayed in the house and went nowhere near it. Mother and Dr. McKenzie took a long time to figure out how, but they finally deduced that if Bridget so much as patted a dog that might have walked through a patch of it days earlier, she was in trouble. Or, in the autumn, when the farmers burned their fields, in which, of course, poison ivy grew along with everything else, the slightest contact of the smoke on her skin—even if she was standing a long distance away, fully clothed, with only her face exposed—did the trick.
As for Bill and me, we inherited all of Father’s other allergies, the most prevalent of which was, on a farm, hay fever. There were variations: if Bill ingested certain shellfish, his throat swelled up to the point where he couldn’t breathe and required hospitalization; and
it was said that, at birth, I was so allergic to all milk (“including your mother’s and anything else we could round up, goat, monkey, whatever,” Father used to say with a semblance of pride) that until some weird formula was devised, nobody was quite sure how to keep me alive. But by and large, Bill and I were besieged with hay fever much worse than Father’s. We—particularly I—might come down with an attack if we walked through any enclosed space with dust in it, dust or animals or hay. Barns. Cows, sheep, horses, chickens. A serious enough attack landed us in bed, sneezing and wheezing. “Lousy respiratory systems, just like your father,” Father would remind us comfortingly when he came upstairs to visit us, propped up with our bed trays in the heavily vaporized room, steamy and pungent with eucalyptus oil, sealed off by Emily from the rest of the house. I was more allergic to more things than Bill, and wheezed louder, convincing myself that eventually I would stop breathing altogether and die and that nobody except Emily believed me or cared, except maybe Bridget and Bill, who, on the other hand, might be only too delighted to have me out of the way so they could divide up my books and games. Whoever was sick was regarded by the others with light-headed relief and, only as an afterthought, compassion. It was really at mealtimes that the absence of the bedridden sufferer was disturbing, when the dining-room table—at which, at long last, we were allowed to eat with the grownups—was overcast with a nagging sense of loss, of broken unity, as whichever two of us who weren’t disabled tried to ignore the empty chair of the third.
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