Blair and me on the end of Captain Jack’s Wharf, Provincetown, 1949
After my mother drove away, promising to be back next summer, I lay on my back under a huge pine tree below the front steps of the Big House. The pine-needle-covered earth was like a mattress. I wanted my mind to be just as soft, but the inside of my skull felt chunky and hard, full of sharp corners. Everything awful was in there, and it kept tumbling around. I did that crunch down thing on my heart, and instead of missing my mother, I studied the patches of blue sky in the spaces between the pine tree’s branches. High up there were pine cones, black against the sky. If they moved, I knew they were birds. When the wind picked up, the blue pieces of sky changed shape. Embraced by the pine’s limbs, these blue shapes seemed both close and far, so near that I could have climbed the tree and put my arm through them, and so far away that they were part of an emptiness that went on forever. Now that I was eight, I no longer pictured a brick dome enclosing our sky and blocking out infinity. The vastness going on and on and the whirring sound of the wind in the pine’s branches made me feel alone. I went indoors where familiar objects—the ivory crocodile, my father’s desk lamp—offered comfort. And Blair was there.
Ralph and Mary Manheim, Cape Cod, 1949
Kate and Nora Manheim, 1949
Every morning Ralph drove Blair and me out to Route 6 where we waited for the Truro public school’s principal to pick us up and drive us to school, a long, white clapboard building in North Truro. As usual when Blair and I entered a new school, fall term had already begun. When the teacher walked me back to my desk at least twenty heads turned and looked at me. I hated to be looked at. If someone looked closely, they would see so many defects, especially my tummy even though I tried to hold it in. Luckily there was one girl I already knew from last summer in Provincetown, Gaby Rilleau, the daughter of Roger Rilleau who made Greek-type sandals in a shop in Provincetown’s East End.
At the beginning of the school day, the teacher asked the class to stand and say the Lord’s Prayer followed by the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. Both were new to me, so I just moved my lips. We were supposed to stand on the left side of our desks and salute the flag with our right hand placed across our breast. On the first day I saluted with my left hand and stood on the wrong side of my desk. I was mortified, but no one seemed to notice because just as we finished the pledge, there was a commotion. A boy was bent over his desk with a pool of vomit at his feet. This boy vomited almost every morning, I was told. He must be so ashamed. Someone brought a pail of sand and poured it over the mess and the whole class filed out of the classroom while the vomit was cleaned up.
At recess, I went out and sat under a pitch pine. Gaby Rilleau joined me. From that day on, at every recess, we sat together under this tree. I didn’t want to know anyone else. The rest of the people in my class were not gentle like Gaby. I don’t think they liked the idea of a person who had lived somewhere other than Cape Cod. Even though I had come to Cape Cod straight from the Boston hospital where I was born, I was considered to be a “wash-ashore.” I taught Gaby how to make pine needle chains—another thing that George Senseney had taught me. Recess was long enough for us to each make a necklace or a crown. Blair had recess at a different time from me. She told me that during recess boys threw pebbles at her ankles. It didn’t hurt, but it made her know how much the boys disliked her. To them, she was a foreigner.
Teaching at the Truro Public School was rigidly programmed, and I was far behind my classmates in arithmetic and grammar. At Dalton and Hickory Ridge I had always printed my letters, but at this Truro school I learned to write cursive script according to the Palmer Method. Making loop after loop run across paper was a pleasure. I had to work hard. Public school was different from Dalton and Hickory Ridge. At those “progressive” schools, there were no marks, and no competition. Here our work sheets came back with our mark written in red pencil at the top.
After school the principal drove Blair and me to the end of our dirt road and we walked the mile and a half to the Big House. The first part of the walk was fun because we passed what we called Turtle Pond (now named Black Pond). We always approached it on tiptoe in order not to disturb the turtles. I didn’t dare step into the pond’s muck, but if a turtle was about two feet offshore I could grab him, take him home to Horseleech Pond, and set him free. There were turtles in Horseleech, too, but not as many. And there were huge snapping turtles with heads bigger than a grownup’s fist and strong mouths that could snap your arm off or drag you down to the pond’s bottom.
The walk home from school took us past Anna and Norman Matson’s driveway, then came Herring Pond on the right, then Slough Pond on the left. Here we might stop to swim. About six feet out from shore under about three feet of water was a cement box half buried in sand. Someone had told Blair that there was a dead man buried inside, so we kept our distance. A little farther along the road, if you looked carefully you could see the sluiceway between Williams and Gull Ponds. Next came the Chermayeffs’ driveway and finally we arrived at our own driveway with Horseleech Pond on the left.
The only bad part of this whole walk was going up a long hill and past a black house said to be a hunter’s cabin. No one lived there. Even the windows looked black. I was convinced that murderers lurked inside waiting to rush out and attack whoever passed. Long-legged Blair was always far ahead of me. Trying to sound really plaintive, I would cry my usual “Wait for me!” Blair did not listen. Once I screamed for her to stop because, just before the murderer’s house, a long black snake lay curled on the sandy road. She did not come back to see the snake, and it slithered into the bushes. I had no problem with garter snakes. Indeed, one summer I took my pet garter snake with me when I spent the night at a friend’s house. In the middle of the night I woke up with my snake wound around my neck. I put it back in its can and the next morning it was dead.
In November and December, it was almost dark when Blair and I reached home. I was so happy to see the lights on in the Big House and even happier when I went inside, and Mary Manheim was at the stove dropping doughnut batter into a huge vat of boiling oil. She gave us doughnuts to warm our hands. To me Mary Manheim seemed the nicest woman in the world. But, remembering her sometimes desperate face, I think she made doughnuts to stifle her rage.
Things got bad when Mary found out that Ralph was having an affair with Anna Matson. Ralph and Anna were both good-looking, highly sensual, and passionate about issues of social welfare. For Anna, living such an isolated life in the Wellfleet woods and married to a man much too old for her, being with Ralph must have been liberating. Norman could be tyrannical. He had a weak heart and, according to my mother, he warned Anna that he would have a heart attack if she left him. One time when he found out that she was being unfaithful, Norman took his revenge by taking their two children away and having them baptized as Catholics. Anna had no idea where Little Anna and Peter had gone.
Mary Manheim was increasingly miserable. I do not remember Ralph being around much. It was just Mary, Blair, and me, and Kate and Nora. The doughnut making became more frenetic. Mary looked as if she wanted to hit somebody with the tongs with which she pulled the doughnuts from the bubbling oil. As winter closed in and it was too cold to play outside, Blair and I sat on the living room floor and played dominos, Parcheesi, checkers, and card games such as War or Go Fish. These days when Mary came through the living room to get to her bedroom a tension filled the air like a hum. I could almost feel it with my fingertips. One day when Blair and I were playing Parcheesi, Nora and Kate grabbed some of our Parcheesi pieces and ran off with them. Blair and I were furious—this was our house and our Parcheesi set: Kate and Nora had no right to take our things. Mary came in and screamed at us as she swept our dominos off our father’s desk and onto the floor.
Ralph must have written to our parents to tell them that the situation had become untenable. We couldn’t live with the Manheims anymore. What to do with Blair and me was a
problem. During the next months my father and my mother fought over where Blair and I should live. He started a custody case at the Barnstable Court on the grounds that our mother had deserted her children. He wanted us to come and live with him and Mougouch in France. Our mother refused to let us go. She decided that Blair and I should join her in Mexico, and she kept writing us letters telling us what a marvelous time we would have if we lived with her. Blair and I had, Ralph Manheim told our father, “been sold and unsold on Mexico two or three times.” Our father thought that our mother’s Mexico propaganda was immoral.
After a while our mother said she would come to Cape Cod and live with us in the Big House. But she didn’t come. She stayed in Mexico because it turned out that she wasn’t needed: our grandmother had offered to have us live with her. For a while our father kept trying to get custody, but in the end, he was too busy with Mougouch and her daughters and his Marshall Plan job to continue fighting. He wrote to his mother: “The only way I could get custody now would be to drop everything and come right back to U.S.” And he wasn’t willing to do that.
18 Gaga
That Christmas we had two Christmases, one with the Manheims and one with Gaga, who lived alone in a big house at 63 Garden Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When Ralph explained that we were going to live with our grandmother I was glad. Cape Cod in December is dismal—windy, bleak, and dark by three-thirty in the afternoon. The summer people’s houses are closed up. It is lonely. Anyway, I loved Gaga. She was my happy, well-heeled grandmother, not desperate like my mother’s mother. She had elegant clothes, broad-brimmed hats, real pearls, and she always smelled like expensive talcum powder. She lived in a three-story house on the corner of Garden and Linnaean Streets. It had a huge garden enclosed by a solid wooden fence, a safe place for Echo, Gaga’s big beautifully groomed brown poodle, to run around in. We were to live with Gaga until summer, so she enrolled us in the Buckingham School where we started on January 3, 1950. Every day, as we set out across Garden Street on our walk to school, Gaga would wave to us from a second-floor window. Her waves felt like hugs.
Mary Manheim’s doughnuts had made Blair and me fat—or fatter. Gaga called us her two pet elephants. She made our big stomachs seem adorable. At meals, we would slide down the banister and race each other in order to be the first to stand behind our grandmother’s dining room chair. Gaga liked to have us pull out her chair and then push it back in as she sat down. We believed that if we did this, she would love us even more.
Gaga had two servants who lived on the third floor, a cook named Bessie and a maid named Annie. They were both elderly Irish women with white hair and pale fat arms. The food cooked by Bessie and served by Annie was the best I had ever eaten. For dessert Bessie made Floating Island, which was a molded pudding made of egg whites over which we poured a light-yellow custard sauce. Between courses Gaga rang a little bell. Annie would come in and clear the table. Gaga asked Blair and me to help by taking our plates into the kitchen. She told us to compliment Bessie on the delicious meal. Gaga taught us manners. Our mother never bothered about things such as how you place your fork and knife on your plate when you have finished eating. At Gaga’s house we even had finger bowls.
Gaga’s placemats were made of some kind of board and each one had an image of a different kind of duck surrounded by a gray-green border. In the middle of Gaga’s mahogany table lay a mirror upon which swam two Chinese porcelain Mandarin ducks, a colorful male and his duller brown wife. One day when I was lifting the male duck’s lid to look inside, I broke off the tip of his wing. This was the end of the world, I thought, but Gaga didn’t punish me. I knew that she loved these ducks very much, especially because her late husband had been a duck expert. Gaga’s not showing her sadness was kind. Maybe she had brought those ducks back from China when she went there as a young woman and met the Empress. She had many Chinese and Japanese objects, which she kept in a cabinet with a glass door and a light inside. Gaga would take lacquer medicine boxes out of the cabinet and show us how they opened into several compartments and she let us handle her collection of carved ivory netsuke. The figures of wise men squatting or children playing set off stories in my mind.
Blair and me, 1949, in Gaga’s music room. Behind Blair, a lion skin rug from a lion supposedly shot by our father
Gaga (our paternal grandmother, Eleanor Hayden Hyde Phillips)
Some of these objects had been bought by my grandfather John Charles Phillips, who traveled all over the world acquiring artifacts for Harvard’s Peabody Museum as well as bird and animal specimens (horns, antlers, and heads of mammals) for the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology. He had trained to be a doctor but, after graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1904 and a two-year stint at the Boston City Hospital, he decided he did not want to practice medicine. The only time he did practice was when he was in charge of a field hospital during World War I.
What he did do was write books and articles about wildlife conservation, hunting, ducks, animal breeding, and genetics. (Like many well-heeled Bostonians, he wanted to keep races pure and wrote articles about Eugenics.) My grandfather also traveled. In1896 he accompanied Robert Edwin Peary as far as Greenland on a North Pole expedition. In 1906 he traveled from Japan to Korea and then on to hunt tigers in the south of China. Later he traveled all over America spending part of one winter hunting mountain lions and peccaries in the Arizona mountains. There were several trips to Egypt where, legend has it, in March 1908 my father was conceived at (actually on) the Temple of Luxor. Two years before I was born, while grouse hunting in New Hampshire, my grandfather died of a heart attack just as his dog came to a point, the bird flew, and he raised his gun.
While my grandfather traveled, Gaga mostly stayed home and looked after their two sons and two daughters. Sometimes she accompanied her husband, for example, on an African safari in 1923. She and her three younger children had been living in Paris for a year while my fourteen-year-old father attended Le Rosey, a fancy boarding school in Switzerland. When he had completed the second volume of A Natural History of the Ducks, my grandfather joined his family for two months in the south of France after which he took Gaga and my father on a safari in Kenya. On this trip he collected fish, birds, small rodents, and occasionally, my father recalled, heads and horns. My father loved telling me about saving Gaga’s life when a lion came after her and she climbed a thorn tree and he shot the lion. To prove it, he pointed to the lion skin carpet on Gaga’s music room floor.
When her husband was gone for months and months, Gaga became depressed. I think they then called it “having the vapors.” In spite of her active social life, living with young children on Mount Vernon Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill, or, during the summer months, in a grand house overlooking Wenham Lake west of Boston, must have been lonely. And not being able to fulfill her wish to be an opera singer was painful, especially when her cousin Emma Eames (who, like Gaga was brought up in Bath, Maine) had a career as a major diva, singing to great acclaim at venues such as the Paris Opera, London’s Covent Garden, and New York City’s Metropolitan Opera. In my grandfather’s circle, it was considered inappropriate for a Boston lady to go on a public stage, so Gaga took part in opera performances at the Vincent Club, a women’s organization. For a while Gaga was so unhappy she had to stay at Dr. Riggs’s sanatorium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
In Gaga’s music room there was a trunk full of the costumes that she had worn for her opera performances. The most exotic was her costume for Aida. With the help of a few safety pins, it fit Blair, but it was way too big for me. Gaga had two grand pianos. She would play, and Blair and I would dress up in costumes and dance. Or we would stand behind the piano and sing songs that Gaga taught us. My favorite was “The April Girl,” the lyrics of which describe the advantages enjoyed by girls born in March, April, and May. The best were April girls. Being born in May, as Blair was, was pretty good, too, but there was nothing special about November girls like me. When we sang, Blair stood cl
osest to Gaga so she could read the notes and words on the score. I couldn’t see that far, so I never really learned to sing. When she grew up, Blair became a singer. I learned to play the piano instead. Probably Gaga was just trying to encourage the ugly duckling when she told me that I was more musical than Blair, but I wanted to believe it. I knew enough not to repeat what she had said, but I kept it in my head, something to hold on to, something that gave me a secret strength.
Around New Year’s, Aunt Madelyn, the elder of my father’s two younger sisters, came to visit. She had recently played the lead in South Pacific, probably not on Broadway, and during her visit she sat on the floor next to the Christmas tree and sang “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair” while pretending to rub shampoo into her scalp. Such a glamorous woman! Before she came, I had known my aunt only from a large Lydia Field Emmet portrait of Madelyn and her younger sister, Nina. Dressed in filmy pale pink dresses, the girls looked so well cared for. It was as though they lived in a secret garden, a garden with no worries.
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