That first day was a catastrophe. It was bad enough being stared at like aliens, but to be ridiculed by our peers, taunted, pointed at, left alone at recess and lunch with only each other to talk to—we were outcasts in a monstrous country. And by far and away the worst part was the sense of confusion and betrayal we felt. It was one thing to be different from everybody else, but to find it out like that? Why hadn’t Mother told us? “Mother,” we shouted, charging through the vestibule, the kitchen, the dining and living rooms, to find her at last, supervising the hanging of a side of beef in the cold-storage room. “Why didn’t you tell us how terrible it is to be a movie star? What is a movie star? Why can’t you be like other parents? And why did you tell us our hair looks adorable when everyone else thinks it just looks funny? And why can’t we take our lunch in paper bags?” (Mother had made a project out of decorating our new lunch pails with her fingernail polish.)
“Oh, my darlings, what an awful day you’ve had!” Mother appeased us breathlessly. “Now listen to me. Sometimes people are cruel just because they’re jealous and insecure and they don’t know how else to get attention. You must learn not to pay the slightest bit of attention—that’s just what they want, and if you act hurt they’re one up on you—you must just ignore them—but be polite! And say to yourselves, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.’ And never be afraid to be different—you don’t want to be exactly like everyone else. How boring that would be!”
And so we went back to school and never quite fit in. We were way ahead of our grades in every subject, which made us self-conscious, and our clothes and shoes were unlike anyone else’s, as were our sandwiches—cut in triangles, with the crusts neatly trimmed off, and stuffed with exotic fillings like cream cheese and olives or deviled ham, while the other children brought hunks of salami and cheese and gooey chocolate-covered marshmallows, which were forbidden us because they were bad for our teeth.
Bill was excluded from the nightmare of school because he was too young. Up to this point, Bridget and I had thought of him as a younger extension of ourselves, with a few savory, even enviable physical characteristics thrown in (one of Bridget’s first paintings, for which Mother was hurriedly called to a conference at nursery school, was entitled “Bill with a Beetle Crawling up His Pants”; in the painting, the infant Bill stood facing front with his arms outstretched and his blue suspender shorts raised to display, in scrupulous detail, what could only be a black beetle securely affixed to the tip of his penis), whom we could mold and pattern as we wished. Either he was beginning to change or we were; it was hard to tell. He even smelled subtly different from us, and as he instinctively moved away from the center of our control, we were only too happy to let him go—just as long as we could yank him back if we felt like it.
“Dear Bill,” Bridget coaxed him in her best handwriting on her best notepaper, “would you be so kind as to get in bed with me? It will be very kind if you do. Love, Bridget.”
Or, if he fell from disfavor, a harsh denunciation in blue crayon, written October 21, 1945:
Bill is a duck.
Bill is a toilet.
Bill is a wee wee
Bill is a B.M.
Bill is a frog
Bill smells terrible
Bill is a dish of ice cream.
(relenting, as usual, at the last moment).
Although we went on assuming that Bill was our property, we also began to be aware that there were more than anatomical dissimilarities between him and us. His personality was toughening up. Of the three of us, his disposition had always been the best—that is to say, the least moody or mercurial—but he was starting to get into the kind of bold trouble that would never have occurred to either Bridget or me to think up.
One night after we’d gone to bed, Mother was making the rounds of the house. She noticed, feeling absurd, that all the classic ingredients of a conventional horror story were present: she was all alone, a little nervous; it was Emily’s day off and the cook and butler slept in another wing; Father was in New York City rehearsing his new play, State of the Union; there was a storm raging outside, thunder and lightning, windows banging, floors creaking, and branches scraping the side of the house. On her way up to bed, she turned on the light in Bill’s room for a minute to make sure he was all right. He was lying in Grandfather’s big mahogany bed, sound asleep and covered with blood. Mother thought he was dead, murdered. In a second she had him in her arms. The pillow and sheets were blood-soaked, his scalp was scored with gashes, and there were tufts of hair all over the place; she looked around wildly and suddenly noticed, under a glass ashtray on the bed table, a bloody razor blade. She shook him awake. “Bill!” she shrieked. “What have you done to yourself? Why?” Bill looked at her with total calm. “Oh,” he answered, yawning, “I fell out of bed.” If there was anything that made Mother see red—like waving a flag in front of a bull, as she said—it was a lie. “I’ll give you one more chance to tell me the truth,” she’d say, “while I count to ten. Ready? Now think carefully. One, two, three, four …” In this instance Bill was as obstinate as she. He stood his ground, hoping that she would go away so he could go back to sleep, and wondering what would happen if she didn’t. She went to the bathroom and got his hairbrush. “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you,” she remonstrated, a line of dialogue that accompanied our spankings as inevitably as “Think of the poor starving children in China” went with dinner. Bill was resolute. He got his first spanking. Then he and Mother fell into each other’s arms and they both cried and he promised that he would never never tell another lie, and she said, “Now tell me the truth; what really happened?” And after thinking for a minute, he answered, “It was just an accident—I banged my head on the headboard.” She spanked him again. By this time, Bridget and I were sitting bolt upright in our beds across the hall, speculating in excited whispers about what crime our four-year-old brother—the treasure, the apple of his mother’s eye—could possibly have committed to produce such an uproar. The sounds coming from his room coupled with the sounds of the storm outside were horrendous. They went on for a long time. He held out for thirteen different stories and thirteen spankings. Bridget and I didn’t know that until the next morning at the breakfast table, when we also found out why he had lied. It was very simple. Buck Crouse and Howard Lindsay, the authors of State of the Union, had spent the previous weekend at our house. Bill, after watching one of them shave Sunday morning, had salvaged the used razor blade from the guest-room wastebasket for some useful future occasion, which came along sooner than he expected: Mother made the unpleasant announcement that he needed a haircut and she was going to give it to him. Bill, who had seen the damage that Mother’s scissors could do, waited until the night before the scheduled event, got out his secret razor blade, and hacked away at his locks in the total darkness, occasionally missing his hair and nicking his scalp. (“My big mistake,” he told us later, “was to hide the razor blade under the ashtray afterwards—I forgot it was glass and she could see through it the whole time.”) But what he then did to cap off the morning, that morning after thirteen spankings—an endurance record that left Bridget and me baffled, yet extremely proud of him—seemed so exquisitely perverse to us that he passed heroically into some eternal hall of fame. When Mother came into his room to say good morning as if nothing had happened the night before, she found the walls of his bathroom decorated with freshly squeezed toothpaste, tubes and tubes of it. “Bill,” she said, shocked, “why on earth did you make this mess?” “I didn’t mean to,” he responded, innocently widening his eyes; “it just happened. The toothpaste slipped out of my hand,” and Mother froze. “I’ll give you one more chance to tell the truth,” she began. “Here I go—one, two …” Bill had his fourteenth spanking before breakfast. He was unable to sit down for a week.
State of the Union, which opened in November, was a success. Father was away more and more, attending to business in New York an
d on the Coast. He would drive out to see us on weekends, trying, with as much good humor as he could muster, to disregard the menace of wild goldenrod, which bloomed crazily all over the place during the autumn months and which he felt was somehow deliberately bringing his hay fever to a peak. By staying indoors and never venturing out, he thought he could lick not only that problem but a new and even more fearful one that had unexpectedly presented itself: snakes. Copperheads had been seen sunning themselves near the house; Andrew had taught Mother how to pin them down with a pitchfork and deftly sever their heads. Once Father knew of their existence, he was in a state of panic. “God help us all,” he’d groan if the word “snake” was mentioned. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, if the lions don’t get us the pythons must.”
The best thing about living on a farm, said Mother, was being able to observe firsthand all the miracles of nature. She was disappointed for us that we would have to wait until spring to witness Agnes the cow giving birth to a calf; there was no more thrilling and beautiful experience in life than watching the first moment of it take place. “Crap,” said Father. “There are a helluva lot more beautiful and thrilling moments to watch that I can think of—almost any moment you could name, as a matter of fact, except the moment of death, which might possibly give it a run for its money.”
“Now, Leland,” said Mother, “have you ever seen an actual birth? You know damn well you haven’t, so you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Maggie, darling,” said Father, “guess what? For once you’re right, you’re absolutely right. I don’t know what I’m talking about, and what’s more, I don’t want to know what I’m talking about, nor will I go on talking about it if it’s what I think it is. I have deliberately spent my whole life, all forty-odd years of it, avoiding contact with pain, and that includes the sight of it, and when Agnes the cow gives birth to her damn calf I want more than anything to be as far away as possible. Hear that, children? I have no one to count on except you. Notify me wherever I am, day or night, the instant Agnes or any other animal around here goes into labor, so that I can take the next plane to California.”
That did it. Although she knew he was only half serious, Mother disapproved of what she called his fastidious attitude and worried that its influence on us would be stronger than hers. A few days earlier, our dog, Stewart, had been run over in a dreadful accident right in front of the house. Stewart was a young pointer given us by Jimmy Stewart to replace Mr. Duchin. He’d rushed to the edge of the driveway to bark at a motorcycle roaring past on Long Meadow Hill Road, a seldom-traveled byway, and the driver had swerved deliberately onto the gravel to run him down. Bridget, Bill, and I were squatting in the middle of the driveway; it was midday, the best time of day to hunt for tiny pieces of glinting mica mixed in with the gravel. The motorcycle hit Stewart so hard it knocked him twenty feet out onto the road, where he lay whimpering, totally disemboweled, with two legs severed. Steaming lumps of blackish-red blood, almost indistinguishable from the shiny hot tar itself, lay all around him. We screamed for Mother and he died in her arms a few minutes later while the three of us stood on the side of the road sobbing.
This incident had a disturbing effect on us and Mother verbalized her concern. While she didn’t want us going through life totally desensitized to violence, neither did she want us to be delicate hothouse flowers; it was important to instill in us an overall sense of balance and continuity. As to the matter of what to protect us from and how, she was ambivalent. There was, on her part, a hunger for simplicity, a great romantic notion of living a simple life, as opposed to what other people thought of as romantic, which was living in Hollywood. She felt it was imperative to shield us from the consequences of her career as an actress, because to her they represented life at its most dangerous—that is unreal, illusory. It was equally imperative to expose us to the simple facts of nature, because they didn’t just represent life, they actually were life; they had substance, whether or not that substance was pleasant. To dramatize what she meant, and at the same time counteract in us what she suspected were the unhealthy beginnings of squeamishness, she came up with an unusual idea.
“The most honest-to-God revolting idea you’ve ever had, Maggie,” we could hear Father protesting from the next room where he, Mother, and Emily were in a huddle.
“Children!” announced Mother breezily. “I have an idea for an experiment. Although your father pretends he doesn’t approve at all, he’s willing to give it a try.…” The idea sounded intriguing. We would all go together down to the chicken coop, and watch Mother take a lesson from Andrew Tomashek in how to chop off a chicken’s head. Andrew performed this chore every Saturday morning in order to provide us with chicken for Sunday dinner, and once we saw how simple and perfunctory it was, just a chore like any other—and if even Mother could do it—it would prove to us that there was nothing so terrible about the sight of blood, or death, for that matter, when it was a question of necessity.
So we all trooped down the dirt path to the chicken coop. We had about three hundred chickens, so the coop was sizable; there were nesting houses and a shade tree in the middle, and under the tree a broad flat stump, bloodstained and scarred with old hatchet marks. It was a warm morning; while Mother was explaining to us the highlights of what we were about to see, such as the chicken flapping around the enclosure for a minute or two after its head had been chopped off, and how not to worry because even though it was really dead, its nervous system, interestingly enough, continued to twitch involuntarily for a little while just like a worm’s or a snake’s, Father shuddered and began to perspire. I stared at the pasture beyond the coop, intent on the long grass shining as a light wind moved through it and wondering if it wouldn’t be more fun to go farther on down the dirt path to the swimming pool, which would be lovely and cold, freezing, since it was fed by natural springs (water so pure we could drink it right out of the ground, and so icy it made our foreheads ache), which also fed the brook running through the pasture just below.
“Maggie,” I heard Father saying, “I’m really lousy at these things, no help at all—I’ll stand outside the coop and wait.”
“Me, too,” I said, grabbing his hand.
“Come on, you two, don’t be fainthearted,” called Mother, concentrating on how to hold the axe and taking a few practice strokes at the stump under Andrew’s direction. Father and I walked around the side of the coop and stood in the pasture. Father leaned down and picked a thick blade of grass, which he stretched out tight between his thumbs and pressed against his lips to blow on; it made a strange buzzing whistle. I hooked my fingers through the chicken wire with my back to the action, listening vaguely to the sounds of chickens squawking as Andrew chased them around and of Father blowing on his blade of grass; if I squinted, I could just see—or imagine—against the pale shimmer of the lower pasture, the wide loops of the brook meandering along.…
“Brooke, Leland,” called Mother, “come here—Bridget and Bill will set a good example for you. Look how brave they’re being.” I glanced back; Bridget, Bill, and Emily were grouped around the stump; Andrew had a chicken expertly pinned down on it, and Mother had raised the axe.
“Don’t look,” said Father without turning around. “Think about something wonderful. Vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce—Christ, I can’t stand the sight of blood, I can’t stand the sight of suffering, I hate pain. Look at that big bird out there, what do you think it is? A hawk? Beautiful the way it catches the wind. God, I wish, I wish I still had my airplane—” Behind us there was the loud thump of the axe, chickens squawking, Bridget and Bill squealing. I looked back again. The body of Mother’s chicken was flopping all over the coop, headless, with fountains of blood spurting out.
“Oh, no,” I said, stuffing my head against Father’s stomach.
“Let’s walk up to the house,” said Father, shaking his head.
“But Mother will get mad at us,” I wailed.
“She already is,” answered Fa
ther, pulling me along. “Your mother is a remarkable woman, the bravest person I know, and I happen to be the most squeamish. That’s that. Your mother can’t understand squeamishness at all, and she can’t tolerate what she can’t understand. If she wants to call me a coward, I can’t argue with her—she’s a hundred percent correct. One drop of blood and I almost faint. Christ Almighty, when I hemorrhaged, couldn’t stop bleeding, I thought I would die from fear long before I bled to death.” He smiled down at me. “Cheer up. You take after me, so at least we can keep each other company—we’ll be in hot water together at the lunch table, kid.”
That was the first time I had a glimmering of insight into the difference between Mother and Father; up to then I had seen them as counterparts of the same person, Mother and Father, with diametrically opposed points of view, perhaps, but the same identity. It was also the first time I had to make a choice between them, but while disobeying Mother or in any way allowing myself to fall short of her expectations was a terrifying position to put myself in, I wasn’t sure there was a choice after all. (Which was worse, my watching her kill a chicken or her anger at my not watching her kill a chicken?) I was very grateful that I had Father, who was much bigger and smarter than I, to express myself for me.
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