My father went down first, following the diagonal path made by a summer’s worth of footprints. He walked slowly, the way adults do. Blair and I waited until he reached the bottom so that we could run down with no one blocking our way. I asked Blair if she would tell our father that I had changed my mind. She agreed and then, with a few ballet-like leaps, she was on the beach. I stayed at the top of the dune wishing I could cease to exist. Usually I galloped down the dune, but not today. I could hardly breathe. My father walked almost to where the waves came up. Blair joined him. I sat close to the bottom of the dune pretending to be absorbed in sorting pebbles. Knees drawn up, the two of them faced the ocean. They were very still. After a while they stood and walked toward me. “Let’s go back to the pond,” Blair said. “The ocean is too rough to swim.” She whispered to me that he was sad but not mad. My father said nothing. I wished the good-bye was over. I could not look him in the eyes. I would not be part of his family anymore. Already I had let them go.
The court case in Barnstable was dropped. I would not have to go there and tell the judge that I wanted to live with my father. It was not that I was choosing my mother. I was choosing not to choose.
What I never wanted to leave was the pond. People can come and go, but the pond is always there, always the same water, water that knows every part of me. It is intimate. It is mine. Stretching all the way from the lily pads right outside our porch to the hill beyond the far shore, the pond gives both a sense of possibility and a feeling of safety, a hunkering down, a permanence.
A few days later my mother told me that I was going to go to a wonderful co-educational boarding school in Lake Placid, New York. The pictures of North Country School in the brochure made it look like fun, but it seemed strange to me that after fighting for me to live with her, she was now sending me away. I tried not to mind. The one thing I was sure of was that I didn’t want to live in Mexico.
Before she flew to Mexico, my mother put me on a night train to Lake Placid. When she tried to give me a hug, it was awkward because I was holding my suitcase. Anyway, I didn’t want a hug. I wanted to climb the train’s steps as soon as possible and find my berth. I wanted to get it over with. I had not been on a night train since she put Blair and me on a train to go to boarding school in Vermont. That was five years ago. This time I was alone. I didn’t mind being alone. I was not scared, not really. I lay in my berth picturing my mother’s face through the train’s window when she waved good-bye. I remembered how my breath fogged up the glass so that I could hardly see her standing there getting smaller and smaller as the train pulled away.
Postscript
From the moment I landed at the North Country School in September 1953, my life stopped being haphazard. From then on it consisted of boarding school, Christmas and spring vacations with my mother in New York City and Mexico, a few trips to Europe with her and her new husband Edward Norman, and summer visits with my father in Italy or Cape Cod. The distance from my mother during the school year allowed me to find my own order. Slowly I invented a reasonably constant self. I lost weight. I felt valued. North County put the pieces back together. Even though I was dyslexic and had been to eight different schools before entering eighth grade, with a little tutoring and remedial reading, I caught up to my classmates.
For ninth grade, I was accepted by the Putney School in Vermont. The first two years were happy. I felt like a normal person, a person doing and feeling what everybody else was doing and feeling. I was popular. I had friends. Then in my junior year, a thick, dark, viscous fog closed in. Vacations lolling about in the Mexican sun at my mother’s house were a reprieve from depression. Sun on my body made me feel whole. But if depression retreated, my anger came forward. My mother’s outrageous selfishness continued to infuriate me. She would do things like promise to take us to Taxco or Puebla, and then, at the last minute, she would back out, saying that her back hurt, or some other fake excuse. I kept pushing away from her, reading or sulking in my room.
My squashed-down rage did not obliterate my fascination with my mother’s beauty and power. I couldn’t stop longing for her admiration. I tried to impress her by reading some of her books about ideas. During one vacation, she lent me a short book about Existentialism by Jean-Paul Sartre and after reading it, I decided that I must take charge of my own life. Boarding school and having two expatriate parents helped in my drive for independence. But, for all my newfound strength, I could not forestall depression.
In the spring of my junior year, my English teacher asked his students to write journals. Mine made him sleepless because it described how I felt when I was depressed. He also admired my writing. But it wasn’t his admiration I coveted the most. It was my mother’s, so I let her read the journal. It scared her, too. As a result, for my senior year, she removed me from Putney and took me to Paris, where I lived with her and went to an American school. For the first time and to my horror, I was given grades, and the students’ grade average, listed according to academic performance, was posted on a bulletin board. I decided I must work hard and be at or near the top of this list, which got me into Radcliffe College.
After my sophomore year at Radcliffe, I returned to Paris and lived with a French family until, sick of still being hungry after each evening’s stingy dinner, I rented an apartment in Montparnasse with my best Radcliffe friend, Anne Lindbergh. By December, Anne and I had both been dumped by our Cambridge and Oxford lovers, so she fled to her parents in Switzerland, and I fled to New York and transferred to Barnard College. By the time I graduated in 1966, I was married to a Guatemalan (he was born in Paris and raised in Locust Valley, New York), and I was the mother of a daughter and a son.
Being a wife and mother left no time for depression. I was determined to bring up my children in an entirely different way from the way my mother had brought up me. My husband, a writer and editor named Philip Herrera, and I lived comfortably on the Upper East Side and sent our children to Brearley and Collegiate, both elite private schools. My children were the most important thing in my life, and I tried to give Margot and John unconditional love and to give them the kind of physical affection and intimacy that my mother had not given to me. Nevertheless, much of my mother’s self-centeredness hung on inside me. I could be a neglectful and irresponsible parent. Oblivious to our offspring, Blair and I would sit in the Eighty-Fifth Street playground gossiping and soaking up sun with our skirts pulled up way above our knees. (Being attractive to men was all important, and a tan helped.) Another time, when Philip and I came home from a party, we found Margot and John in their footy pajamas sitting on the elevator bench and going up and down with the elevator man. Our babysitter, who lived downstairs, had gone home because we came home later than we had anticipated. I still feel guilty, and Margot has never forgotten.
In the early 1960s, I learned to type by writing children’s books that were much too long to hold a five-year-old’s attention. Philip read one of them, and said, “You are quite a little stylist.” This was momentous: Philip rarely gave compliments. When Margot and John were five and four, I wanted to understand what went on in their minds, so I took a job as an assistant kindergarten teacher. Once both children were in grade school, I decided that teaching art history to high school seniors would be more interesting. To that end, I got a PhD in art history. During my doctoral studies, I began writing for art magazines. My 1976 Artforum article about Frida Kahlo led to a commission from Harper & Row to write Kahlo’s biography. This book also served as my dissertation. During research trips to Mexico, I based myself in Tepoztlán, living with my mother and her fifth and final husband, Peter Gerhard, a historical geographer twelve years younger than herself. (Her fourth husband, Edward Norman, had killed himself in 1955, leaving my mother with the Tepoztlán house and enough money to live for the rest of her life.)
Me with my daughter, Margot, 1962
Me and my son, John, 1963
My mother seemed content in Mexico until, at the age of seventy-six she became sick of
its poverty—she grumbled about “open sewers,” the inefficiency of help, and the lack of decent medical care. She sold her house and bought a house in Provence, where she built a small studio and painted every morning for the rest of her life. When I visited once or twice a year, our relationship improved. Her guest room had a desk, and I spent time writing at it. Wanting to be with me, she rattled around watering the flowerpots right outside my window. Now that she was old, she needed me more than I needed her. She wanted to know all about my life, and she was proud of my writing. She even read what I was working on while it was still on my computer. Finally, I had won her admiration. She cared. I wasn’t mad at her anymore.
My author photo on the book flap of my Frida Kahlo biography, 1983
From this time on, it was my duty to make her happy. Maybe I had always wanted to make her happy, but now I felt guilty if I didn’t. When she died in 1995 at the age of eighty-six, something enormous, like sunshine, like the pull of gravity, went out of my life. But only for a while: I can still see and feel the golden glow radiating from her formidable strength.
Both of my parents’ fifth marriages were harmonious. My father, too, married someone much younger. Florence Hammond, the daughter of a Harvard classics professor, was twenty-eight years his junior and she gave my father his first son, Jonathan. My father stopped being an expatriate and bought a house in Cos Cob, Connecticut, where he resumed painting and printmaking and where he lived until his death in 2002 at the age of ninety-four.
After my biography of Frida Kahlo was published in 1983, I wrote monographs on the sculptor Mary Frank and the painter Joan Snyder. I followed up Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo with biographies of Matisse, Arshile Gorky, and Isamu Noguchi. I became involved with a group of feminist women artists and briefly participated in a feminist art journal called Heresies. The focus of my friendships and social life changed. Before, my friends had been Philip’s Harvard classmates and their families. Now I turned more to the downtown art world. Perhaps in part because of the confidence that came with the success of my Kahlo biography, in 1984, I garnered the courage to leave my husband of twenty-three years. The four years that led up to that decision were blighted with depression. It lifted after I was divorced but did not go away forever. It returns every autumn and subsides every spring. For six months of the year I still fight it with antidepressants.
In 1988, I met and eventually married Desmond Heath, an English-born child and adolescent psychiatrist who had recently separated from his wife. Our marriage has been happy: we both love to clear land, build houses, and plant trees. Shaping land and houses makes us feel rooted in the earth.
Perhaps because our parents valued art and beauty beyond anything, all four Phillips sisters along with both of Gorky’s daughters chose work that had something to do with art, and we all think we have a good eye for what is beautiful in art and nature. Indeed, one of our husbands called us “aesthetic fascists.” Susanna Phillips and Maro Gorky became painters. When Blair married a second time to the painter Paul Resika, she took on the role of muse, model, and his most trusted critic. She organized her husband’s exhibitions, designed his catalogs and posters, and created a splendid monograph on his painting. She is also a singer and an excellent photographer.
All the Phillips sisters spend summers on our father’s pond. Blair and I share the so-called Turkey Houses and Antonia, Susannah, and our brother, Jonathan, share what was our father’s and Florence’s house, just a stone’s throw away on the same pond. Blair and I used to feel cast out when our month on the pond was over and it was the other sister’s turn to occupy the Turkey Houses, so both of us bought houses in North Truro. The fear of abandonment and loss that came with a childhood of being yanked from place to place and from school to school was assuaged by home ownership.
We filled our houses with things that we deemed beautiful. We are especially fond of chairs, wonderful shapes that, to us, are like miniature houses, very secure, very satisfying places to be. By owning houses, Blair and I have made our own permanent places, places that, when we are in them, leave no confusion about who we are or where we belong. No one can tear us away from our houses, no one can destroy the beauty of our worlds. For the last decade, Blair and I have lived in the same building on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. Her entrance is on the building’s north side and mine is on the south. We don’t even have to go outside when we want to visit each other and, when we look out of our windows, we see the same river.
The four Phillips sisters (me, Antonia, Susannah, Blair) with our father and brother, Jonathan, Cape Cod, 1992
Acknowledgments
My sister, Blair Resika, was and is a crucial part of my life and I thank her for helping me to travel back in time and for sharing the photographs that she took as a child. Blair’s enthusiasm for my version of our story (often different from hers) has made the sometimes befuddling and other times painful pursuit of the past seem worthwhile.
Our childhood friend Penelope Jencks read my manuscript, added to my memories, and scanned innumerable photographs. I owe a debt of thanks to her. Penny Ferrer, always my favorite reader, went through many drafts. Her suggestions did much to shape and clarify my story. Mary Gordon, another wonderful reader, wrote notes on pages of the manuscript, each one insisting that I tell how I felt about things that happened. Rachel Urquhart, my daughter-in-law, read an early draft and gave me excellent ideas about structure and narrative flow. My son, John Herrera, had good ideas about building characters. His encouragement was important to me. Knowing how awkward it can be to read a parent’s writings, I am deeply grateful for the generous help that my daughter, Margot Herrera, gave me. It was with trepidation that I gave her my memoir to read: Margot is a professional editor with a keen critical intelligence. While always kind, she can be fierce. And she is always right.
Many friends have shared their memories of childhood summers on Cape Cod and many sent me photographs to illustrate my text, among them Peter Chermayeff, Nicholas Macdonald, Reuel Wilson, Peter McMahon, Peter Matson, Kate Mannheim, and my cousins David and Barbara O’Neil. I also wish to thank Dean Rogers, special collection assistant at the Vassar College Libraries, for providing a photograph of Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson.
My thanks go also to Jeff Posternak, Mia Vitale, and Andrew Wylie of the Wylie Agency for believing in my book. At Simon & Schuster I am grateful to Priscilla Painton, Megan Hogan, Hana Park, Jessica Chin, and Patty Bashe for their diligence and help. Carly Loman’s designs for the book’s interior are just right and I thank her for that.
Finally, I wish to thank my husband, Desmond Heath, for his ideas and encouragement. Knowing that I had an insightful and willing reader by my side helped hugely in moving from draft to draft.
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About the Author
© BLAIR RESIKA
Hayden Herrera is an art historian, critic, and biographer. Her doctoral dissertation about the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo became her first book: Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo (1983). Her other biographies include Pulitzer Prize nominee Arshile Gorky: His Life and Work and Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography. To pursue her research for her Gorky biography Hayden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. A Japan Foundation grant made it possible for her to travel to Japan to conduct interviews with people who knew Noguchi. Hayden has contributed articles and reviews to such publications as Art in America, Art Forum, and the New York Times. She has lectured widely, taught art history at the School of Visual Arts and at New York University, and curated several exhibitions, among them a show of Frida Kahlo’s paintings that toured U.S. museums in 1978 and a traveling Kahlo centennial exhibition (cocurated with Elizabeth Carpenter) that opened at
the Walker Art Center in 2008. Hayden earned her BA at Radcliffe and Barnard colleges and her PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She lives with her husband, Desmond Heath, in New York City and Cape Cod.
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