On another wall in Gaga’s house hung Emmet’s portrait of my father at about age six. With his brown shorts and jacket and long hair, he reminded me of Little Lord Fauntleroy. He looked wistful. As a child, he was sick a lot, and he told me that Gaga made him drink barley water. Gaga still had funny ideas about medicine. If Blair or I were grumpy, she assumed that we were constipated and insisted that we swallow a tablespoon of Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia, which tasted like chalk. My father was his mother’s favorite, perhaps because he was sickly or because he was her firstborn. Maybe her attachment to him was part of the reason he stuttered until he was in his twenties. Even though he was groomed to be a diplomat like his uncle William Phillips, who served twice as under secretary of state as well as ambassador to Belgium and later to Italy, my father became an artist. That way he did not have to talk.
Gaga was religious. I knew nothing about religion except the Lord’s Prayer that we had recited at the Truro school. On Gaga’s bedside table was a booklet called The Daily Word. I opened it up and saw that it had a holy idea for each day. I didn’t open it again. It looked boring. Going with Gaga to the Episcopal Trinity Church in Boston on Sundays was fun, partly because we got to dress up and Gaga was so proud of us when, after the service, she introduced us to members of the congregation. After church she sometimes took us to the Chilton Club, where we met some of her women friends. Before we went to bed Gaga taught us to say our prayers. I kneeled next to my bed and said, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” Aunt Madelyn later taught me a version that had no death in it: “Now I lay me down to sleep, Father in heaven watch over me. I pray my sleep be sound and sweet, and my waking happy be.”
We said Gaga’s version every night, but after a few weeks, since I hadn’t died yet, the death part lost its menace. With Gaga on her knees beside me, wearing a nightgown and a quilted pink silk bathrobe, I felt protected. Her face was shiny from Helena Rubinstein lanolin cream. I used to watch her sit at her dressing table, her hair covered with a cotton cap, as she squeezed an inch of the heavy pungent cream out of the tube and smoothed it over the thin loose skin of her cheeks and forehead. Once she had tucked us into bed, Gaga sang lullabies. She knew the usual ones such as “To and fro, so soft and slow…” That one was best for falling asleep, but she knew much more interesting lullabies. I always wanted her to sing, “Would you know the baby’s skies? Baby’s skies are Mama’s eyes. Mama’s eyes and smile together make the baby’s pleasant weather.”
Even though Gaga loved us and enjoyed having Blair and me live with her, she also liked to feel martyred. She sighed a lot. We were a big responsibility. Often, she said she was tired. Gaga also liked to blame and criticize. She especially enjoyed finding fault with our mother. Lybie was, Gaga said, irresponsible, selfish, unreliable, and overly concerned with her own beauty. Gaga almost never got angry. She just got grumpy. But once she got angry with Blair, because Blair and Aunt Nina’s oldest daughter, Nancy Washburn, found a snake in the garden and brought it up to the bathroom so that it could swim in the tub. When the snake vanished down the drain and reemerged in Gaga’s bathtub, Gaga was not amused. Another time Gaga got angry at me—I do not remember what for—and she spanked me with a hairbrush. I was outraged. I had never been spanked before. I went to my room and refused to come out. Blair played peacekeeper. She told Gaga that she should not have done that. Gaga felt sorry and I stopped being mad.
During the first weeks in Cambridge, Blair and I shared a room, but then Gaga decided that, because of the three-and-a-half years’ difference in age, we each ought to have our own room. My bedroom was large, larger than any bedroom I had ever had, but I liked Blair’s sunny corner room better. At the foot of her bed was a chaise longue with a salmon-pink flower print slipcover. Her bedspread was pink, too. My room was blue, a subtle grayish blue that made the room seem cold. Each of our rooms had two four-poster beds. The dark wooden bedposts were topped by carvings that looked like elongated acorns. I could hold onto two posts and swing between the beds. Gaga did not approve of this. She was afraid that her overweight grandchild would break the bedposts.
Without Blair in the bed next to mine, I was afraid of the dark, and Gaga’s room was way down the hall. After Gaga finished saying good night and closed my door, I tried to hold on to the comfort of her smell and song. I pushed away thoughts of danger. What helped was counting the beams of light that went around the walls of my room when cars passed on Garden Street. Counting how many beams came from the right and how many from the left lulled me into sleep.
A shared bathroom connected Blair’s and my bedrooms. Instead of a roll of toilet paper, it had a metal box on the wall next to the toilet. Gaga showed us how to pull sheets of toilet paper out of it—not too many. She didn’t want to waste paper. The paper was stiff, like newsprint, but I got used to it. Next to the toilet was a huge old-fashioned tub. The water gushed out of the faucet fast, and, as the tub filled, the bathwater turned a very pale green and smelled of minerals. Sometimes I filled the tub up to my neck. I was not supposed to do this because Gaga wanted to save water.
Hanging on the bathroom wall, between two windows was a black-and-white print by my father. It was semi-abstract with two shapes that I could recognize—a checkerboard and a piece of crinkled paper going up in flames. It must have been a student work from the early 1930s when my father studied in Paris with Fernand Léger. Like Léger’s work at that time, the print mixed Cubism and Surrealism. To me, the burning paper was haunting. What did it mean? Why did he do it? My mother had been in Léger’s class at the same time as my father. Two 1932 photographs of her sitting close to Léger and certainly the most beautiful woman in the room, suggest that she was his prize pupil. A year later, Léger even wrote a highly complimentary text for the brochure of her first exhibition in New York. My father was not interested in my mother back then. She was too skinny and too melancholy, he said.
Gaga made us take naps. We didn’t have to sleep, just rest. In Blair’s room there was a shelf piled high with old National Geographic magazines. I picked up a copy because Blair was reading one and even though the print looked small, I thought I had better try. I carried a stack of them to my room and climbed onto my bed. Soon I realized that I didn’t have to read the text. I could just look at the pictures and read the captions. Until I saw these magazines, I had had no idea that there were so many different ways to live on this planet. At first the photographs of African women naked to the waist shocked me. Many of the women had long narrow breasts that hung straight down like a cow’s udder. I hoped that when I got older, I would have high round breasts like my mother’s.
Another thing I did during naps was to draw birds. Gaga had shown us the four volumes of our grandfather’s A Natural History of the Ducks. With reverence, she gently pulled back the translucent onionskin papers that protected each illustration. We were not allowed to take these heavy books to our rooms. Instead Gaga gave me a young person’s bird book and encouraged me to copy and learn the names of all the different birds. On the walls of our bedrooms hung Audubon prints—much too complicated for me to copy. The birds in the Audubon prints looked so alive I almost thought I should tiptoe in order not to disturb them.
Viera da Silva (standing left), Fernand Léger (center), and my mother (seated right), 1932
Afternoon tea was a formal event for Gaga. She sat in the middle of the sofa with the tea tray set on the low table right in front of her. She wore one of two tea gowns, one red, one blue, both full-length and made of soft silk velvet. After letting the Hu-Kwa tea steep, she would pour us each a cup to which she added milk and a lump of sugar. The best thing on the tea tray was the cupcakes with vanilla frosting that Bessie made fresh every day. Almost as good was the thinly sliced white bread spread with butter. At teatime the slices of bread were laid out on a plate in an overlapping row. You picked one up and folded it into four and put it on your small plate. Sinki
ng my teeth into the buttered layers was an immense pleasure. Hoping no one would notice how greedy I was, I took at least three slices.
Bessie showed me how she sliced the bread on a circular blade attached to a kitchen counter—a dangerous-looking machine that we were warned never to touch. Sometimes I went with Bessie to buy this bread at the bakery a few blocks away on Linnaean Street. She would also buy a newspaper and give me the page with the funnies. On weekends we were allowed to visit Bessie and Annie on the third floor. Their bedrooms had low, slanted ceilings and their beds had iron headboards painted white. Annie taught us how to knit. The hardest part was putting the first row of wool onto the knitting needle. I loved the click and then the sliding noise when I put a needle into an existing stich. As my ball of wool became a scarf, I marveled: I had actually made something!
After tea Gaga read to us. Her favorites were Kipling’s Jungle Books and what she called the “Lobster Books,” which had stories about lobsters living at the bottom of the sea. Sometimes Gaga had guests for tea, mostly men. Like my father, Gaga was a brilliant flirt. She was brought up that it was good manners to make other people feel they were delightful. Her intelligence, wit, and her charming dimple drew people to her. A frequent guest was the poet Archibald MacLeish, who had just started teaching at Harvard. He was so distinguished looking that I didn’t dare open my mouth. In any case, in those days everyone told us that “Children are to be seen and not heard.” So, it was okay to be shy. Another formidable Harvard professor who came to tea was the lawyer Archibald Cox, who twenty-three years later was appointed special prosecutor during the Watergate scandal and whose firing by President Nixon became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Arthur Schlesinger, then an associate professor of history at Harvard, came at least once, and there was a man named Mark De Wolfe Howe, a Harvard Law School professor who was Gaga’s close, close friend.
Mr. Howe had three daughters. The younger two, Susan and Fanny, were Blair’s and my ages and they became our Cambridge best friends. Fanny had straight blond hair and a roundish face—gamin might be the word to describe her. She was smart and funny, full of mischief, and game for anything. When her parents rented a house on the bay side in Truro, I spent nights there. (That’s where my garter snake died.) At low tide Fanny and I would walk out in the salt marsh below her house and look for shells among the reeds. Normally I was afraid of mud, especially the smelly mud under the reeds on the bayside. I had seen crabs come out of holes and worse still, long sea worms. With Fanny everything seemed safe. Her older sister Susan was beautiful, but more severe than Fanny. She had a temper. Susan is the only person with whom I have ever had a physical fight. I can’t remember what it was about, but we rolled on the ground and tore at each other’s hair. When they grew up, both Fanny and Susan became poets.
Fanny Howe, me, and Mary Barton Potter, Cape Cod, 1950
Soon after we arrived at 63 Garden Street, Gaga expressed her shock at our shabby ill-fitting clothes. Part of her disapproval was prompted by her disapproval of our mother’s neglectful ways. She took us to Filene’s department store in downtown Boston. In the children’s department, she found a section where they sold a line of clothing for fat children called Chubbettes, and there she outfitted Blair and me with clothes that would get us through from winter to summer. Gaga seemed pleased with her purchases, which was a relief, because she wasn’t one who liked to spend money. On our Boston outings, Gaga would treat Blair and me to a ride on one of the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. The boats were paddled around the pond by a man concealed in a paddle box that was hidden inside a huge white swan. Gaga also liked to feed the ducks, tossing them crusts of bread. I guessed that she liked ducks so much because of her husband’s fascination with them.
Gaga wanted Blair and me to know about Boston and about our Bostonian background. She wanted us to know about her heritage, too. Gaga was from Bath, Maine. Her maiden name was Eleanor Hayden Hyde. Her father, Thomas Hyde, was, according to Gaga, the youngest brigadier general on the Union side in the Civil War. In the midst of a battle he had heard a southern officer shout, “Shoot that little general on the white horse!” When the war was over, Thomas Hyde started the Bath Iron Works, which made boats, especially ships for the navy. Now the Bath Iron Works extends over a huge stretch of Bath’s shoreline, and much of what it is building is a military secret.
Recognizing her daughter Eleanor’s lively intelligence, Gaga’s parents let her apply to Radcliffe College. Gaga loved to tell us the story of her admissions interview. She wore a fashionable wide-brimmed, feather-decked hat that she had just acquired in Paris. The hat was a mistake. The admissions people thought Gaga was frivolous, so they admitted her only as a “special” student. Nevertheless, she loved her years of study. Every day she did her homework—mostly short essays—while traveling from Boston to Cambridge on the streetcar.
Because Gaga was from Maine, she felt that she had married someone from a higher social stratum than her own. She told us that our grandfather was from one of the great Boston families. We learned that our ancestor George Phillips graduated with two degrees from Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University, in 1617, served as vicar of Boxted in Essex, and came to America in 1630 aboard the Arbella, the flagship of the Winthrop fleet whose eleven boats carried seven hundred Puritans from England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the crossing, Phillips’s sermons boosted morale, and Governor John Winthrop praised him, saying, “We have much cause to bless God for him.” Phillips probably wrote and was one of the seven signers of Winthop’s Humble Request, a polite but subtly sarcastic parting missive to the King and Church of England. Upon arrival in Salem, George Phillips and Richard Saltonstall traveled up the Charles River and founded Watertown for which Phillips wrote the Covenant signed by forty-one men. That same year, 1630, Phillips founded the First Congregational Church in Watertown, Massachusetts, where he served as minister until his death in 1644.
The next two important ancestors were Samuel Phillips, who founded Phillips Academy Andover in 1778, and his uncle, John Phillips, who founded Phillips Exeter Academy in 1781. Samuel Phillips’s great-grandson was Phillips Brooks, a brilliant preacher who was rector of Trinity Church and who oversaw the church’s rebuilding after the Great Boston Fire of 1872. He also wrote the lyrics for the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Another ancestor named John Phillips served as the first mayor of Boston in 1822. His son, Wendell Phillips, was an abolitionist famous for his powerful oratory. Wendell Phillips joined the anti-slavery movement after witnessing the (failed) lynching of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, with whom he became a close associate. He also fought for the rights of women and Native Americans. Wendell Phillips was the ancestor of whom Gaga was most proud. She took Blair and me to see his statue in the Boston Public Garden and she told us that, because of his speeches against slavery, he was stoned in the streets of Boston. In his statue he is holding a broken chain. I was amazed to have come from such people. I hoped that I might have inherited some of their courage. Living with Gaga, I began to feel like a Bostonian. It was, after all, the city of my birth.
In May, Gaga gave Blair and me boxes of pansies and trowels with which to plant them beside her garden’s fence. The idea of putting something into the earth and having it take root gave me a feeling of everything being ongoing. Luckily, I did not know that pansies are annuals.
Portrait of John Phillips, founder of Phillips Exeter Academy
19 Naked
In June 1950, while he was still in France, my father let my mother use the Turkey Houses. She acted as though she still owned the place, holding up one of Dasya’s flowered plates, remarking on how vulgar it was, and then pushing a stack of Dasya’s dishes behind a stack of her own Mexican earthenware bowls. She took the old bureaus and bedside tables out of the cabins, stood them on the pine needle–covered path, and painted them in different interesting colors—yellow-ochre, rust red, gray-blue. She even took a knife and paired down the edges of
the bureau drawers to make them slide in and out. That was the part of my mother that I loved. She could fix up the world.
During those weeks, my father sent Blair and me photographs he had taken of Maro and Natasha and Mougouch who was five months’ pregnant, but you couldn’t tell. To celebrate our future sibling’s birth, Blair and I took our knitting needles and balls of pale yellow wool up to the bearberry-covered knoll on the back side of the high dune below which lay our beach. There we sat—knit, purl, knit, purl—as we struggled to follow knitting instructions for baby’s booties and a sweater. When we became tired of knitting, we practiced backbends, handstands, cartwheels, and flips. If we fell, the bearberry was soft and springy. Flips and cartwheels were among the few things that I could do better than Blair.
Blair and I often rowed across Horseleech Pond and climbed the hill at the far end. Back then the hill was covered with bearberry. There were almost no trees, and from the summit you could see all the ponds. Once we took sleeping bags, flashlights, and peanut butter sandwiches and spent the night there. Blair did not always agree with me about the choice of camping spot. She preferred a place partway up the hill sheltered by four or five pine trees. I wanted to be on top of the hill, out in the open. Blair usually had her way because she would say, “Fine, you can sleep wherever you want, but I am going to sleep under the pines.”
Mougouch, pregnant with my sister Antonia, Orgeval, France, 1950
This was the summer when I learned to be modest. It happened in an instant. I walked over the hill to Dwight Macdonald’s house—one of the three army barracks houses that my father had constructed on Slough Pond. Dwight’s son Mike was there with his two friends, Charlie Jencks (Penny’s younger brother) and Reuel Wilson (Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy’s son). The boys were in the water and I was about to take off my clothes and plunge in when I noticed that they all had on bathing suits. They were a year or two older than me. Something had changed. Maybe if I had been thin, I wouldn’t have minded them seeing me naked, but my nine-year-old body felt like something that eyes might notice and appraise. Feeling sad because I liked the feel of Slough Pond’s water, I sat on the shore and watched the boys. Horseleech Pond’s water is velvety, perhaps because so much vegetation grows in it. Slough Pond has fewer lily pads and less animal life. I always imagine it to be full of minerals that keep its water transparent and clean.
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