The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  There was only one way into the Dungeon, which was through a heavy trapdoor in the kitchen floor. The Dungeon was my father’s name for a small stone subterranean room, permanently wet, adjacent to the Moat. My father only waded into the Dungeon when something had gone terribly wrong. He said that escaped slaves had hidden in the Dungeon on their way up north. When he got angry he’d say he’d send us to the Dungeon, but never did because the Dungeon was home to the pump, which delivered water from the well but also pumped errant seepage back into the Moat, thus keeping the Moat’s memory of water from flooding the kitchen. The rattling clanging pump sat in a murky pond of fluctuating ooze that, according to my calculations, had been fermenting like yogurt since well before the Civil War. When he waded into the Dungeon, my father explained, he was just like the old millers centuries before who’d gone down there to adjust the great gears of the milling operation that transformed the force of Mill Creek into the energy that ground grain.

  I spent hours down at the creek, perched like a bird on top of a glacial erratic my father called Giant Rock. I reached the top by shimmying up a silver maple that grew close to its base. From a scary height, I peered down at the creek that once fed the Moat, watching scarlet crawdads stirring things up in emerald pools of moss. I counted bright red maple leaves swirling and flirting with the current, imagining they were open palms waving at me until they disappeared under the bridge and out of sight. When I was young, I didn’t think about where the river was going, about how most everything in life fits some glorious or inglorious pattern, ending up somewhere, and sometimes pretty close to where it started. I certainly didn’t think about the connection between landscape and family, that the river at the Old Mill and the Sawkill at Milford were both tributaries to the Delaware and that I’d grown up like my father had, spending countless hours in a little mill inspired by a big mill far away.

  While I was jumping off the wall on my pogo stick or riding my unicycle, my mother was bemoaning her lightless kitchen, my brother was uncovering omissions in the Information Please Almanac, my sister was claiming that something that belonged to me belonged to her, and my father was tinkering with bolts under the king’s car. In my memory, he spent most of his time in the garage or mowing the lawn or in a corner of the upper field where it smelled like something had died and where, one summer, he tended a patch of sunflowers. He never went to work but I didn’t think that was strange because no one in my family ever went to work. Since we lived in the country with no one around, I didn’t notice the tidal pattern of my father’s comings and goings.

  When he wasn’t fixing things, my father was taking photographs with his Rolleiflex. In 1965, he took three photographs of me at the Old Mill in a particularly cute stage. In January, he posed me under a lone pine tree. In February, I was surrounded by my stuffed animal ark that looked like FAO Schwartz had capsized at the mill, and in April, he arranged me in a scene by the Moat. After that, he started to disappear. He came back from time to time, but I decided I wouldn’t bother him anymore while he was working under his cars. One time, the sharp snout of the Peugeot’s hood was propped up and I looked down at him through the engine compartment and called him “Daddy.” He snapped and told me never to call him that ever again. I was to call him Papa, he said. Places had names and people had names. After that, I kept the names straight.

  In the summer of 1967 he took a trip to France and another to Morocco. By the summer of 1968, when I’d learned to call him Papa, he’d finished fixing everything, and that’s when he vanished.

  I remember sitting by the Moat with my trolls when my mother said he’d left for his girlfriend Therese in the south of France. She’d found the letters between them sitting in plain view. She said we’d been marooned in the Old Mill. Mother wasn’t a club person or a joiner, but every day on our way back from school we’d pull into the liquor store where she was paying her dues at the not-so-secret society of pain relief.

  Around the time my father left, all my thoughts about what was creepy in the world came together in a vision, not by my mossy, mildewy moat, but in my bedroom over the garage. In the middle of the night, I saw a tall figure dressed in white coming down the hall. I thought it might have been my father dressed as a ghost and that he’d come back to surprise me. I lay completely still and hoped it wouldn’t come any closer. I pulled the blankets over my head, lay as flat as possible, and held my breath until I fell back to sleep. I never saw it again or told anyone about what I’d seen, but my greatest fear was always of that figure in white.

  My father probably missed the Old Mill from France, where his girlfriend lived, or Morocco, where he kept a pied-à-terre. He sent postcards from exotic places like Andorra, where there were big fluffy sheep, and Gibraltar with its apes and men in fuzz y hats guarding the Straits between the Rock and Tangier. Someday, he wrote, we’d go back to see these places. He signed the postcards love, so I knew he loved me. For a while I thought he was just off fixing something and that he might come back but he never did, except occasionally on Sundays when he’d drive up to the Old Mill in one of his cars, symbols of everything that drove my mother insane. He’d take us out to dark empty restaurants with belly dancers, or we’d cross the Delaware River at New Hope, where there were bumper-sticker purveyors and candle stores. We’d walk around not saying much because mother didn’t want us to. She was mad as hell, so she hid the postcards or lost them in her newspaper collection and hired the meanest, most expensive New York attorneys she could find, with a handsome senior partner who told her to sell my father the Old Mill for $18,000 so we could rent a house that didn’t require a full-time mechanic. This was just the beginning of the bad legal advice she received for which she paid top dollar. Nineteen sixty-nine was the last year she would ever own a house. She rented progressively smaller houses and apartments the rest of her life.

  After my father left, I started straightening things in the landscape. But a nine-year-old who was bent on straightening didn’t have much to do in Princeton, New Jersey, in the late 1960s. There were tie-dyed antiwar protesters besmirching the public parks and there was a poor, bedraggled, black neighborhood on Witherspoon Street abandoned to its crumbling infrastructure, withered street trees, and buckled sidewalks, but other than that there wasn’t much in the way of dishevelment. Live-in gardeners tended the velvety lawns, nipped back the rhodies, and kept the elms in postcard condition so that there wasn’t a leaf out of place on streets like Hodge Road and Bayard Lane. The proud old Princeton streets with their Norman-inspired palaces on sprawling properties looked just like they had for the past eighty years, if not better.

  The landscape in Princeton was so orderly that I was on the lookout for signs of dissent. When I spotted a sunken fencepost or a lawn gone wild, I became embarrassed and felt sympathy for the person living there, thinking they suffered or someone had left or there had been a fight. But part of me breathed a secret sigh of relief, thinking someone had simply escaped the tyranny of keeping things up, had dropped the gin and tonic on the lawn one night in a spasm of suburban ennui or smashed it against the curb in a paroxysm of stultifying boredom, spouted something about Madison Avenue and commuter trains and the goddamned grass and finally, grudgingly admitted that life had gotten the best of them, at least for the time being. A slovenly front lawn was a public admission that not everything is perfect about the world and one might as well admit it.

  By fifth grade, I had developed a preternatural understanding of how things fell apart. I was too small to go around fixing things like sunken fences or broken pavement, so one day I undertook a project that was quite manageable. I went into the backyard of our rented house and started planting concentric circles of zinnias and marigolds. But it didn’t stop there. I discovered the tall wall of paints and varnishes at the hardware store and instead of going to a friend’s house to play, I’d go talk to the big men in aprons about my next home-improvement project. After school, I read pamphlets on flowers and bulbs and I set up a little work area
in the basement where I sanded tables and stripped garden furniture and repainted it. I’d taken a woodworking class in first grade, where I’d learned to glue and clamp things together but I wasn’t just gluing and clamping: I was halting the downward slide toward dishevelment. I wanted to reverse the chronology of chaos.

  BIBI: 1968–1986

  I was nine years old in the summer of 1968 when my mother came home from a meeting with her samurai Park Avenue attorneys armed with The Good Housekeeping Guide to Camping. That day in New York, she told her attorneys that my father was on the warpath. They smiled their Park Avenue smiles and agreed that my father was a dangerous man. They said it was a good idea for my mother to get out of Dodge. They’d take care of things.

  Mother was adventurous and had a flair for the dramatic. With her love of history, she decided we would head west, following the route of Lewis and Clark. We weren’t about to hang around coiffed, insipid Princeton with its country clubs and normal mothers. Princeton was provincial, she said, and when pressed, my mother put the whole East Coast in that category. We’d just pack up the car and drive across the country—no pearls, no maids, no big deal.

  She chose a good time to beat it. The summer of 1968 was one long season of trauma, bookended by the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April, Bobby Kennedy in June, and the Chicago riots in August. Mother was always forming brief fixations on American heroes, and perhaps because hers had been one of the first classes that admitted women at Harvard Law School, her heroes were usually men. Not small men, but men of vision—chief justices and presidents, Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark. Ironing my clothes before school, she’d turn on the Today Show. My hero was Barbara Walters, but my mother went all out for Hugh Downs. Barbara Walters actually looked like my mother, and for some reason I knew Barbara had one hell of a time getting to where she had gotten. A lot of people thought my mother could have gone there, too, or someplace even better. Her professors at Harvard Law School seemed to think the Supreme Court.

  When Dr. King died, my mother went into a tailspin, chanting Negro spirituals and knowing, as did many Americans, that the nation’s brightest light had been snuffed out. About the same time, she tired of Thomas Jefferson when the stories of his dumbwaiter and his connubial slave began to remind her of all men in general and one in particular. When she announced we were going out west, she launched her Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea period, deciding that we’d be like a latter-day Corps of Discovery in a warm, dry station wagon. The story of Lewis and Clark had everything—adventure, landscape, drama, tragedy, love, bravery, and at last there was Sacagawea, the guide. Jefferson had, of course, commissioned the Corps of Discovery, but Lewis and Clark discovered that a woman was essential to the mission. Sacagawea wasn’t sitting around Princeton in a chaise longue working on her base tan.

  It was the practical time to go. We were on vacation waiting around for attorneys who were on vacation waiting around for judges who were on vacation, so in the meantime, we’d scout out the Oregon coast where my mother dreamed of opening a bookstore. After a week studying the guide to camping, Mother made a list, then piled my brother, sister, and me into the Ford Fairlane her mother had bought her and we headed over to Sears, where a battalion of buttoned-up clerks greeted us in the camping aisle. We trooped in and out of huge canvas geometries pitched on the linoleum floor, fingered the plaid-lined sleeping bags, and sniffed the ice chests; and before we left, Mother ordered up one of everything with the brand name “Coleman.”

  It took us ten days to cross the country and might not have taken as long if my brother, my sister, and I hadn’t argued every day about who would sit in the front seat. On the second day, my mother established a rotation system that allowed us time to stop everywhere. We stopped at the Grange Barbeque in Sioux City where we ate burned meats with real live cowboys, and the Corn Palace in South Dakota where I bought a necklace of corn strung on deer gut, which at the time I thought was disgusting, and Mt. Rushmore, America’s most bizarre built landscape, and the Black Hills where the scenery became scary and contorted. After a day of mysterious overheating in the Oregon desert, we reached the Columbia River where Mother was finally able to remove the bucket of ice she’d positioned by the accelerator to cool her feet, and her beer, from the heat of the engine. That afternoon the air became heavy with the scent of leaves and moss, so we rolled up our windows. Heading west on Interstate 84, Johnny Cash was on the radio and Mother was in a very good mood. I thought we had finally reached the place she wanted to go, the opening to the Pacific. But no, she said, we had reached a place she’d read about in her books on Lewis and Clark and the Mobil Travel Guide, the Columbia River Gorge. By midsummer’s half-light, I gazed out the window at a long green tunnel of space, snaking pools of platinum, tall trees, waterfalls, and the biggest moat I’d ever seen.

  I learned a lot about my mother that summer. Radcliffe and Harvard Law hadn’t taught her a thing about cars or camping, but she’d learned the wisdom of neutrality and the skillful means of dodging certain subjects, or when that didn’t work, staging a fit. As far as subjects were concerned, my father and his family would be ruled out of order, and the only exception to the rule was my father’s brother, James Gaston. Her voice became wistful when she spoke of him. He was a hero who had rescued us from my horrible father. He was a marvelous dancer, she said. I had no idea what she was talking about, so we drove on.

  About an hour east of Portland, we came to a natural land bridge, the Bridge of the Gods, and as I looked up through slapping windshield wipers, I saw a sign that read GIFFORD PINCHOT NATIONAL FOREST. The name “Gifford Pinchot” stirred something, so I got up my nerve and asked my mother who Gifford Pinchot was. For the first time, without hysterics or threatening to stop the car, she answered a question about my father’s family. “Gifford Pinchot was related to your father,” she said. “He was a man like Meriwether Lewis who’d done good things for our country. He was the first chief of the United States Forest Service and set aside most of the public land in the western United States.” I was old enough to know that if Gifford Pinchot was related to my father and he had done good things, he was also related to me. I lodged the name in my brain for safekeeping and wondered if I’d ever hear another word about Gifford Pinchot, and if someday I could say he was my relative, too. We drove on through the wet night, and I felt as though I’d discovered a special raindrop sparkling like a prism on the windshield through which I could see another world. There was someone to be proud of in the constellation of my family. Someday I’d escape the tyrannical boredom of places like Princeton and I’d straighten the landscape and I’d do something good for our country like Gifford Pinchot. But for now, driving the slippery roads of Oregon, I decided not to ask any more questions. It wasn’t good to get my mother upset while she was driving.

  Like Sacagawea, Mother pushed deep into the forest that night and cajoled the whining Corps of Discovery into setting up the big blue canvas tent by a beautiful river. The next morning we continued west along the Historic Columbia River Highway toward Portland. Just before the basalt cliffs of the Columbia River Gorge flatten out into the broad plains of the Willamette, we came to a series of waterfalls, each one lovelier than the last: Horsetail, Oneonta, Multnomah, Latourell, Bridal Veil. These were the last truly audacious natural landmarks the first Corps had reached on April 9, 1806, before reaching the Oregon coast. Lewis and Clark reported the route: “We passed several beautifull [sic] cascades which fell from great hight [sic] over stupendious [sic] rocks. The hills have now become great mountains high on each side are rocky steep covered generally with fir and white cedar…. the most remarkable of these cascades falls about 300 feet perpendicular over a solid rock.”

  I told my mother that Multnomah Falls was the most amazing place I had ever seen, and I didn’t know why we needed to get back in the car and keep driving. For me, Multnomah Falls was the end of the Oregon Trail because its bowl-like formation made me feel safe. A
ccording to the handsome U.S. Forest Service ranger in his green suit, there were enough stories about that waterfall to think about for the rest of your life. No one ever agreed that the Oregon Trail begins or ends anywhere, but my mother had her argument down: the last stop was the Pacific. Perhaps she was braver than I. She longed for vastness, for the late sun in the western sky, for the marine air to penetrate her bones the way it had when she’d lived with my father in Morocco. Where the great maw of the Mediterranean opens to the Atlantic, she’d had her three children. She’d written guidebooks and articles with my father on the landscape and the people. But now he was back in Morocco and she was in the dewy muck of Oregon pounding Sears tent stakes into the ground. She didn’t know who she’d married. She didn’t care anymore. The attorneys were taking care of things.