Blair and me, Horseleech Pond, summer, 1941
Me, 1941
I had adventures that I didn’t tell about. I could fly. If it was a dream, I wouldn’t have known. In those days, dreams and everyday life slid into each other. I would be lying in bed and suddenly I would remember that I knew how to fly. All I had to do was breathe in and concentrate on rising. Breathe in again and I went higher. I had little control of the direction I was going in. Usually I floated in a fetal position with my face toward the sky. Sometimes I flew stretched out with my stomach facing the earth. There were times when I thought I had gone too high. I looked down at treetops and wondered if the branches would be soft if I crashed into them. But then I remembered that I could stop any fall just by taking a deep breath. I breathed in, kept floating for a while, sinking lower and lower until I found myself half asleep in bed.
My father told me how he came to own our house on Horseleech Pond. When he was in his last year at Harvard his great uncle by marriage, Dr. William Herbert Rollins (1852–1929) left him about eight hundred acres of land along the ocean in Wellfleet and Truro. Since Rollins and his wife, Miriam Phillips, had no children of their own, Rollins, a dentist, scientist, and inventor, took my father under his wing and taught him how to experiment and how to make things. In a May 1919 diary entry, Rollins wrote that he had helped my eight-year-old father make a pin-hole camera with which my father took and developed a photograph of rain. Rollins was also busy equipping my father with “chemicals, lanterns, scales, [and] gramme weights” for my father’s upcoming solo canoe and camping trip in northern Maine. In 1930, one year after my father inherited the land, a fellow scientist wrote that, as a “lover of nature,” Rollins had “left lands of shore and forest on Cape Cod as a sanctuary for birds.” Rollins had hoped that my father would buy pieces of land in between the parcels of land bequeathed to him and eventually donate the whole thing to the Audubon, a society dedicated to conservation and to the protection of birds.
Mother in the Big House holding Blair, 1937
Parents, Blair, and me, 1940
On the land that Rollins gave my father there were five sandy-bottomed kettle ponds and a long stretch of dunes and beach. Horseleech Pond, in the town of Truro, and shaped like an 8, was the closest pond to the ocean. Around 1910, at the east end of Horseleech, in a spot separated from the ocean only by a hill that turns into a sand dune, Rollins built a 14-x-28-foot cabin, or rather he assembled it. The cabin was a Hodgson portable cottage, an early version of a pre-fab. In the second half of the 1930s, my father and mother expanded this cabin and made it their home.
My grandfather advised my father to sell the land that Rollins had given him. Bostonians did not want to go to Cape Cod, he said. There were too many black flies and mosquitos. And there were taxes, so onerous to privileged Bostonians. But the warm, almost celestial light in a painting of Horseleech Pond that my father made not long after he inherited the land, shows that he came to love this place far too much to sell it. “The atmosphere was one of complete solitude,” he recalled of an early visit to the pond. “Not a soul around and we shared that little tent. And I thought, my God, if I’m really going to inherit it from my father’s uncle! Well, I was impressed.” In May 1930 he wrote to his mother from the camp he had just inherited: “Living conditions down here seem pretty good. Expect to stay almost indefinitely.”
After graduating from Harvard in 1930, my father spent the next four years studying art, first at the Art Students League in New York, then in France, at the American Art School in Fontainebleau, and from September 1931 to May 1934 at various Parisian artists’ ateliers including those of André Lhote and Fernand Léger. He married a fellow art student, Helen Schroeder, whom he described to his mother as a “swell girl… a blond Scandinavian type.” When he returned to the United States, his marriage unraveled and early in 1935 he and Helen separated. He always told me that he already knew he didn’t love Helen by the time they got married, but the wedding preparations had been so far advanced that it couldn’t be stopped. He told my sister that it was a shotgun wedding: Helen thought she was pregnant, but that turned out not to be the case. His letters to his mother show that the relationship was not that unhappy. It lasted some five years until his affair with his and Helen’s close friend, a married woman, broke things up and his outraged parents briefly cut off his allowance.
My father skinny dipping, British Virgin Islands, 1935
At this point he fell in love with my mother, Elizabeth Cornell Blair. “I met Lybie at a dance at some women’s club [in New York City].… We danced together a good bit; but nothing happened after that. Later, during a long, grim winter, I met her at the 86th Street subway station—she asked me up for a drink, then one thing led to another.” At that time, my mother was unhappily married to John Potter, a handsome athletic young man who owned a sporting goods store in Manhattan and with whom she had starred in a film that was never completed. She had married him, she told me, to get away from her manic depressive mother.
My father recalled that after “one thing led to another,” in March 1935, he and my mother “escaped to the British Virgin Islands” (Tortola and Guana) for over a month. “We came up here [to the Rollins cabin on Horseleech Pond] after we got back from the islands and she had gone to Reno for a divorce.” My father always chuckled when he remembered that he had three women getting divorced in Reno at the same time. Beside my mother, there was his wife Helen Schroeder, and the married woman with whom he had had the affair. My parents married in 1936.
My mother, photographed by my father in the British Virgin Islands, 1935
My mother, British Virgin Islands, 1935
Back on Horseleech Pond, my father and mother began to expand Rollins’s cabin. My father believed that houses should not interfere with nature. Our house was painted gray so that it would be almost invisible to someone walking in the woods. Room after room stretched across the brow of a small hill overlooking the pond. We called it the Big House. They lived simply on a small allowance from my grandparents and occasional gifts from my father’s mother, but they did manage to have milk and groceries delivered every day. With vegetables from the garden and the occasional duck shot by my father, they were, he said, “living high.” In 1937 my father’s mother paid for the construction of a new “babies’ room,” and that May, Blair was born.
To avoid Cape Cod’s bleak windy winters, each year in late autumn, my father and mother piled their Cape Cod furniture into an enormous box-shaped dark green metal truck (a 1928 Dodge) they called the Blunderbus and drove to Manhattan. Because of the Depression, they could rent an unfurnished East Side brownstone or a Fifth Avenue apartment for almost no money. Once a week they gave dancing parties. My uncle Horton O’Neil remembered a party they gave in February 1940: They had decorated the living room to make the house “look like their own with easels and pieces of driftwood placed ‘casually’ about.” They provided the music and guests brought bottles. Blair has a vague memory of a piggy bank on top of the piano into which non-bottle-toting guests could put money.
My father was supposed to be a painter. After Blair was born, he built a large studio in the shape of a lean-to on top of a sand dune overlooking the ocean. The tallest side of the studio was mostly glass. It was difficult, my father said, to paint in a place with such a beautiful view. And the wind was enervating. Years later my mother shuddered at the memory: “Oh! That wind!” she groaned. Another reason it was hard for my father to paint was that he became curious when he saw friends enjoying themselves on the beach below. I have no memory of him painting in his dune studio. Instead my parents held dancing parties there. Over time, windblown sand etched the glass until most of it was frosted. The world outside became blurred like memories of moments half-forgotten.
When I was in my twenties I went inside the abandoned studio. I was trespassing. Neither the studio nor our Big House belonged to us anymore. The studio’s interior was spare and luminous, but so empty. As the sand
dunes receded, the studio became cantilevered out over the beach. Then it fell down the dune. Thirty years later all that was left was a section of well pipe sticking out of the sand some ten feet from the bottom of the dune. Every time I saw that pipe there was a clench like a fist in my chest. The past is so very past, and the present will soon be long ago. Another ten years went by and even the pipe was gone.
My father’s dune studio
Perhaps because he wasn’t painting, in 1939 my father took it into his head to study architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. To have an example of his work to show to Walter Gropius, who headed the school, he built a flat-roofed modern house out of Homasote, a construction material that resembles thick cardboard and that is made out of recycled paper. He called it the Paper Palace. Gropius immediately pointed to the place where he could tell the house must leak. For a year my father followed the curriculum designed for second-year graduate students. But my mother persuaded him to withdraw from architectural school and to return to Horseleech Pond. It was the Depression. Not many people were building houses, she said. And in November 1940 in Boston, I was born.
My mother and father liked a lot of privacy, so their bedroom was way at one end of the Big House. Using a Japanese-style folding screen upon which she painted a series of oddly juxtaposed motifs: bi-plane, star, cloud, boat, seashell, pinwheel, Greek temple, and open book against a royal blue ground, my mother divided the bedroom in two. Half of it became her painting studio. At the other end of the house was the kitchen and a pantry/bar whose counter held glasses in various shapes and sizes and all kinds of implements that I guessed were for making drinks. I could just reach up and touch these mysterious objects. In the bar was an icebox that was filled once a week when the iceman came with his wagon full of ice. With his ice block tongs, he lifted a huge hunk of ice and carried it into our house. The ice had beautiful lines in it that looked like cracks, but the chunks he carried never fell apart.
A door in the pantry/bar led to Blair’s and my bedroom wing. My room had red cotton curtains with tiny yellow and blue flowers. During naps, I liked to lie in bed watching the curtains move in a breeze. What was outside my window—trees and grass and, in the distance, beyond the scrub oak, golden dunes—mixed with what was inside and with the flowers on my curtains. When the sun turned the curtains bright red, I felt safe. No one, not even a wolf, could get past my red curtains. During the day, the dark things hanging on hooks inside my closet door lost their menace. At night, I closed my closet door so no bad person could come out.
Besides grass and trees outside my bedroom window, if I looked to the right and way down to the bottom of the hill, I could see my father’s vegetable garden in a swampy area that ended where the dune rose up. My father made ditches so that the raised part of the garden was planted, and the low part turned into little canals. When he took me down to his garden to show me how to pick beets, I had to jump over the canals without landing on any beets. My father took his garden seriously. I had to be very careful. He looked so tall, so capable, and, as my mother said, so dark and handsome. I was proud of him and I was sure he could protect me if something happened.
After the dining room came the living room. It had a large corner window facing the pond. Beneath this window was a built-in seat where my mother liked to read in the afternoon. On the mantel over the fireplace was an elephant’s tusk carved to look like an alligator with scales. Blair and I liked to run our fingers along the bumps and indentations on the ivory. The smooth parts were cool and made you think of all the years that had gone by since it was made by someone in China. Our father told us not to drop it. It was precious. Usually he didn’t care about material things, but this tusk he loved. When we played the game of jumping off the mantel onto sofa pillows spread over the floor, we had to remove the tusk first.
Blair’s and my favorite game was to tip over chairs and take down all the cushions to build a house just big enough for us. I could crawl backward into my room and crouch in its doorway like a bear guarding his cave. When we were done, our mother always made us put the cushions and chairs back, a melancholy job. Although the living room was mostly for grownups, we were allowed to listen to a record of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The music went perfectly with the voice telling the story—it sounded scary when the wolf approached and it sounded funny when the wolf swallowed a duck whole and the duck kept quacking. Peter’s wolf was more dangerous than the wolves in Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Little Pigs. But I liked to be scared. As long as Blair was there beside me, I knew that the story was not real.
Our mother had a beautiful speaking voice, cool and clear with a slight English accent, which made her sound superior. But she had a terrible singing voice, so she never sang. It must have been our father who taught us songs: “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “The Bear Went over the Mountain,” “On Top of Old Smokey,” and “Yankee Doodle Went to Town.” In my mind, these songs were stories and I could picture everything that happened. I saw Mary’s snow-white lamb following her to school. I saw a brown bear reaching the top of a mountain and looking sad because the other side was just the same as the world he already knew. But there was one song that I sang over and over and that put no pictures in my head. The words sounded like nonsense: “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey, A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?” Years would pass before I could decipher the meaning of these syllables. It turned out to be all about what mares, does, lambs, and kids eat. I liked the song better when I didn’t know what it meant.
2 Friends
My parents invited their upper bohemian friends for cocktails or dinner. Most of these were people born to privilege but chose an unconventional way of life. My father recalled: “The back woods were very, very neighborly in the Forties, and there were about fifty people in the three towns of Wellfleet, Truro, and Provincetown that one saw.” I loved it when guests came. All afternoon my mother would be in a good mood, washing lettuce and preparing something like a thick pea soup with cut-up carrots and linguiça floating in it. She always made hot buttered garlic bread with a long loaf that came from the Portuguese bakery in Provincetown. During the cocktail hour Blair carried around a bowl of peanuts. I followed her around carrying nothing. The grownups chirped like a flock of birds. I never knew what they were saying, and I didn’t care.
My parents’ best friends, Anna and Norman Matson, lived on the same dirt road as we did. Norman was a writer. Years later my mother told me that Hemingway had modeled the hero of A Farewell to Arms on Norman, so he must have been more interesting than he seemed to me. He was much older than Anna, and less loving. Maybe he was too old to care about children. Once when I spent the night at the Matsons’ house, Anna put me in a room next to Norman’s. In the middle of the night I heard something that sounded like a growling wolf. Rigid with terror, I pulled the blankets over my head and did not move. In the morning Anna told me that the sound was just Norman snoring. When my father painted Anna’s portrait, it was agreed that Norman would pay for it if a play he had written and that was being produced in New York was a hit. If the play flopped, my father would pay Anna forty cents an hour for posing. At some point during these years, Anna and my father are said to have had an affair, one which neither of them took very seriously.
Anna was my mother’s best friend. She was at the Big House all the time, and she was like an extra mother to Blair and me. Her mother, Anna Strunsky, was a Russian Jewish immigrant and a prominent Socialist. Anna’s father, William English Walling, belonged to a wealthy Louisville family but turned to Socialism, worked as a labor reformer, and helped to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Anna must have inherited her parents’ social conscience. For years, she worked for the International Refugee Committee. Perhaps it was she who placed a German refugee couple in my parents’ home in 1939. The man served drinks and helped with dinners and with the vegetable garden. His wife cleaned and took care of Blair and me. I do no
t remember what either of them looked like, but they must have been nice to us, for I can see from photographs that we were happy.
Anna Matson, c. 1940
The Matson family: Norman, Anna, Little Anna, a friend, and Peter, 1951
In her social activism, Anna was the opposite of my mother, who never read the newspaper and who took no interest in current events. In our house, politics was a dirty word, almost as bad as golf. My mother disdained business and businessmen, too. All she cared about was art and music and books.
On the shore of Slough, the pond next to Horseleech, my father built a one-bedroom cottage with the help of a man named Howard Snow. When the building was almost finished, Snow looked down from the roof’s peak where he was nailing the final shingles, and said to my father: “Well, Jack, it’s a nice little place you have here, but it’s on my land!” Fortunately, Snow was mistaken. My father called the episode “A kind of New England joke.”
He rented the cottage to the Russian-born architect Serge Chermayeff and his English wife, Barbara, who, with their two sons, had immigrated to the United States in 1940. Chermayeff liked it so much that in 1944 he bought it. Serge and Barbara became lifelong friends. Barbara was mild and soft-spoken, but Serge frightened me—he was very tall, and he had a huge hook nose, a commanding voice, and piercing eyes. All he had to do was stand up and there was drama in the air. He was famous for his temper. When my parents visited the Chermayeffs, they kept Blair and me out of the way. Perhaps because we were not allowed in the house, what I remember best about the Chermayeffs’ place in the 1940s was the outhouse. Its seat was painted white and it had two holes cut into it, a big one for adults and a small one for children. This seemed to me to be so thoughtful, so kind.
Upper Bohemia Page 2