A week later, my brother and I, at fourteen and seventeen, were sent to New York City on our own, our first flight, for interviews with Stephanie Gallagher, the director of the Oceanics School. My father planned our removal from home, and my mother had no say in the matter. My brother was accepted as a student, and I was hired to begin that summer as the Director’s assistant and for the year as librarian for the school of forty students. I would work for room and board, instead of going to college. The four-masted barque, called The Antarna, would set sail from Miami, motor through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos Islands and then return through the canal, following the northern coast of South America before crossing to the Ivory Coast and north to Europe. This was an unimaginable escape for my brother, whose favorite books were the eleven volumes of C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series about life at sea during the Napoleonic wars. When I got home from New York, Alvin and I knew my father had finally succeeded in separating us after graduation. But we were certain he couldn’t keep us from loving each other.
In the spring, protest rallies against the Vietnam war spilled out in downtown Cincinnati around Fountain Square. Alvin and I held on to each other in a crowd edged with police in riot gear. Peter and I were part of a group that started an underground newspaper, writing articles and anti-war cartoons. The first edition had a clenched fist on the cover. We loaded up boxes of papers and headed into the city, selling to crowds of college students in front of the Esquire theatre and head shops on Ludlow Avenue near the university. Back at school our copies were confiscated from our lockers and we were held in the office until our parents picked us up.
Towards the end of the year, a pall began to settle over me that pulled me away from Alvin and my other friends. I thought it was the restlessness we all felt, on the verge of leaving home. We walked down the polished linoleum hallways dreaming of exciting lives. But like dew invisibly soaking a meadow overnight, a depression was slowly descending, gathering me into a subdued unhappiness. The moodiness of my teens, the rumbling anger and frustration I’d focused into finely honed sarcasm, was now turned on myself. I cross-examined myself in my journal or as I fell asleep. What was wrong with me? How could I make a difference with my life? I became distant, observing through a chill remove, watching high school vanish like a dream.
I started going home after school and falling asleep, just wanting to escape, not wanting to get up. I was worn out, weary, and flattened by a sadness that would subdue me for the next nine years. I read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and felt closer to her than to Alvin or anyone else. Until now Alvin and I had been inseparable, equally compelled to fall into each other’s arms and words. Now I began to drift into a distance and he clung to me, trying to call me back. I felt smothered and wondered if I loved him.
I was like the boy in the fairy tale of the Ice Queen: a sliver of ice had fallen into my eye, and I saw the world coldly. There would be no photographs of me laughing for the next nine years. I would stare out of photographs with a sad weariness behind a series of glasses: round tortoise-shell like Le Corbusier, wide aviator frames like Gloria Steinem, small wire-rimmed circles like John Lennon. I would explain, “I don’t laugh, I smile.” A small crooked sad smile that took effort. Numerous times over the years, strangers would come up to me on the street: “Life isn’t all that bad, you know.” The demons that sent my father to bed for months now breathed in my ear.
Graduation grew closer. In the fall, Alvin was going to University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Billie Jean to Oberlin, Linda to Kenyon, and Peter would wander until he became a Baha’i. Because my father had decided I was too young and immature to go to college, I was being sent to the ship. Even though it sounded cool, a chance of a lifetime, underneath was the knowing that my father had succeeded in mapping my future, in continuing to control my life. I had no say in the matter.
MEANWHILE MY FATHER had a big event coming. The Literary Club of Cincinnati always had an end of the year gala meeting for all members and their wives before the summer break. My father had invited them years before, but our gardens took years longer to finish than he had imagined. The date was postponed until this spring, when it was going to be held in our house and garden.
He had ordered special cases of wine years before to age to perfection. He and my mother planned the menu, hired rental chairs and tables. Rena organized a crew, including my brothers and me, to set up and serve. Woodie was on us relentlessly to get the final touches done on the gardens. He had followed a timetable of jobs for the last year. We finished the granite spiral of stones, creating a thirty-foot-diameter terrace that would last as long as a Mexican ruin. After years of cover crops, grass had been planted. Ground covers filled in. Azaleas and magnolias bloomed in the Japanese gardens where crushed white stone was poured into place and raked in patterns. The orchard was established and an acre of vegetable gardens was well cared for. The work of every weekend for the last five years of our childhoods was ready to reflect our father’s magnificent plan.
BUT WHAT HUNG over my father was the paper he had to deliver that night. Every time he wrote one of his Literary Club papers, he felt intimidated by the intellectual wordsmiths in the club, the lawyers, theologians, and professors, whose distinguished papers left him feeling humbled and unworthy. He stuck with what he knew, knowing he brought an unusual flair to his Literary Papers over the years as he delivered talks addressing his passions: “Auto-Biographical” about this love affair with cars, “Bugattism” for his passion for the finest Italian racing car.
In 1967, he had delivered “You Make Your Nest,” describing the process of building our house. Now was the follow-up, “And Then You Feather It,” on the landscaping of the grounds. A spring paper was shorter and livelier, and suitable for the ladies. But as he dreaded and agonized over writing the paper, his project took over the Eames coffee table, piled with yellow-lined legal pads filled with his illegible script. He leaned back in his leather chair scribbling furiously as lit cigarettes sent up spirals of smoke. We could hear the furious slashing of his pencil across the page, the crumpling of paper thrown to the ground, his rifling through the thesaurus and dictionary and his spine-crushed copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. We tiptoed out of his way. Being an architect dealing with design and engineering problems all day, he felt woefully inadequate as a writer. Now that his architectural work was drying up, he felt even more insecure. Years later, he told me that as he wrestled with his papers for the Literary Club, he built up to a point of such anguish that he considered suicide.
As I wrote my last research papers that year, I too stayed up late, sometimes all night, in my room under a spotlight, stroking my eyebrows and lashes over and over, until the hairs fell out and I stuck them into a glob of white glue to collect them. I tried to force my mind into designing a thesis sentence, organizing an argument, crafting a conclusion. Under the pressure of the deadline, I too felt weighed down by a feeling of failure. Sometimes I was blessed. Sometimes this alchemy of pressure brought leaps of inspiration, startling my teachers who praised the insights, but wished I was more solid with arguments based on research.
But other nights, in the long dry hours stretching though the darkness outside my long window, an intensity built up that brought me to the place where suicide became the only solution. I doubted I could complete the paper, which meant I wouldn’t pass, which meant I couldn’t get into a good school, and so on, until I felt my life balanced on the success or failure of this paper. The anguished thinking of my father had flowed into my mind unannounced. When suicidal dreams live in a house, even unspoken and unfulfilled, the veil between life and death is torn, leaving a hidden wound in the psyche of the family, a sickness seeping tastelessly like a gas, a poison enveloping children as they sleep.
At school I’d gotten a list of graduation requirements for seniors: when to pick up the gown, when to practice marching, when to show up at the football stadium for the ceremony on June 14, 1971. I stared at the date. The sam
e night as the Literary Club dinner.
My mother sounded calm as she told him at dinner that night. “It’s really not a problem, Woodie. I’ll get the dinner ready to serve, and Rena is here. I can just duck over to the ceremony for an hour and be back. Easy. No one will notice I’m gone.”
He raged, “You aren’t going anywhere.”
He turned on me, spitting the words. “You know your high school graduation means nothing, absolutely nothing!” This was a supreme inconvenience that I wouldn’t be there to help serve his dinner. But no one else would leave. “This dinner has been planned for years. Nothing is going to interfere with it.” Eventually he allowed my brother Wood to go to my graduation for just an hour.
Gazing up at the bleachers filled with parents, as I sat in a sea of six hundred blue-gowned figures on folding chairs filling the football field, I could see Woodie’s point. It was boring and endless. In the bleachers, my brother Wood recognized me by my long striding walk, saw me cross the stage as they reeled off names and diplomas as fast as popcorn popping in a pan. Then he biked home.
Maybe it did mean nothing, even though I had worked hard for my honors. I stood near Linda’s parents as they took photos and she told me about the car they had given her. I didn’t say what I got was twenty-five dollars so I could pick out my own Mexican necklace at my father’s favorite store in New York.
I pushed through the crowds of families and waited while Alvin’s family congratulated him. Then Alvin and I went to a party in Glendale. Kids were getting stoned or drunk, saying stupid things. Some parents were flirting with kids. I had nothing to say. Alvin’s best friend from Walnut Hills was visiting. I hugged Alvin good night. “I’m tired. I’m going home.” I walked up the line of darkened mansions on Sharon Avenue, and turned down Lake Street. There was our house, sparkling with luminaries around the gardens, the stone circle, and down the drive.
I followed a little path around the hill covered in hemlock trees and could see the lights in the house were turned down. The sliding glass doors were open, and I could hear a Getz/Gilberto samba playing on the stereo. My parents were cleaning up in the kitchen. Everyone was gone, the tables and chairs taken down. I walked through the yard, keeping in the shadows, past the empty cases of wine, a different variety for each course, and some bottles still floating in galvanized tubs of melting ice. I didn’t want to go in. In the dark off to my right, I heard giggles. I walked through the orchard, sparkling with fireflies, to the little hill where Alvin had hidden in the snow watching the house last December. I heard my brother Wood talking with his friend Tom. I called up to them. “What are you doing?”
More giggles. “Taking our pay. Come on up.”
I took off my sandals and climbed up the rough slope. On top, lying on a wide slab of limestone, were two fourteen-year-old boys looking at the sky. I sat down and asked wearily, “How did the evening go?”
My brother Wood sat up. “That motherfucker bragged about how we had happily planted six thousand bloody plants.” In our father’s paper, he had counted up the numbers. “We shoveled seventeen tons of sand for the terrace. The happy family!” My brother’s voice continued in quiet fury. “What was really disgusting was when he described Jo like he was a fucking slave owner, how her shoulders got bigger and her hips narrower from all the work. That fucker.”
He shook his head. “But damn,” he lifted a bottle in the dark, “this wine is amazing. Take a sip.”
I put a long narrow-necked bottle to my lips and took a sip. It was not like wine, it was thick, intensely sweet. I put it down instantly and hissed. “Wood, this is one of those priceless bottles of Trockenbeerenauslese. What are you doing with it?”
He laughed. “I’m taking my pay. He never gave us a bloody cent for all the work we’ve done, so I take it in wine.” He leaned towards me, clearly tipsy, “Now, doesn’t that taste amazing? We’ve been up here trying to figure all the ways to describe it, haven’t we, Tom?” Tom nodded.
Wood patted the stone next to him. “Relax. You’ve had a hard day. Just look at the stars for a while.”
Elizabeth on board the Antarna, 1971
THE SHIP
Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.
—LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE
SEPTEMBER 1971, TWO WEEKS BEFORE WOODIE sent his “problem children” to the school on a sail training ship, Sander Hall dorm was due to open. The night before the opening, Woodie was pleased. “I can truly say I’ve done something fine for these students. I’ve given them a place to live and thrive.” At 61, he was a man at the pinnacle of his career.
The pressure had been relentless, finishing every detail in a building so big. Full speed ahead, down to the wire. The landscaping would be finished later. My father was on the site every day those last few weeks, and personally oversaw the installation of the modern furniture in the large ground-floor lounges. Each night at home, at the dinner table inside glass walls overlooking the gardens, we listened to his day-by-day reports. We drove by the construction site countless times. This was it, the tower was finally done.
The front door clicked shut. He slumped into a chair at the dinner table. His face drawn. “It was like a line of ants. I saw it from my office and went down to see what was happening. I thought it was students moving in.” But off-campus students and residents from the tenements in Corryville and Calhoun Street next to campus were carrying off the sleek steel and leather furniture my father had picked out and placed. “The campus police didn’t do anything!” By the end of the week, the lounges were stripped bare. And that was only the beginning.
1971. 1300 students. 27 stories. One supervising adult per sixty freshmen from cities, small towns, and farms all over Ohio assigned to live in a high-rise tower.
Students complained about not being able to open their windows. They felt trapped in a glass box. The rooms were too small. Too high. Too scary. Quickly dubbing it “The Zoo,” neighbors watching the dorm said it was mayhem. Students left the bars and kept partying, the mirror glass walls in each room lit up in chaotic patterns over the face of the tower. All night long.
A DAY BEFORE we left for the ship, Woodie waited until the sunlight poured in from the west porch and from the clerestory windows above. He moved the dining room table out of the way of the walnut cabinet wall that separated the kitchen sink from the living room. The Polaroid camera was ready. He called to Wood and me, “The light’s just right. Let’s get these photos done. Wood first.” I waited in my underwear with a towel around me in my room waiting until he called me.
My fifteen-year-old brother walked out of his room in his underpants and stood in front of the wall. Dad said, “For crying out loud, take off your underpants. This is to see how your body changes with puberty and how your muscles develop from a year of good hard work.” Wood pulled off his underwear and stood at the wall, exposed on both sides by glass walls, his face staring at the floor as our father barked, “First shot, forward. Second shot, profile right. Back view. Left profile. Okay, you’re done.”
Living in a glass house, forbidden to close doors or use curtains, we were visible to anyone coming up the stairs or approaching across the lawn. We lived an over-exposed life, and now this, our naked bodies, photographed and documented, to be studied. We were living in an era of pulling down the barriers. Glass-walled houses allowed the private world to be made visible to the outside. We lived overexposed, in a life designed by an architect determined to break the tyranny of Victorian modesty. How many architects became tyrants, designing the lives their clients or families would live?
Our father wasn’t the only parent in the 70s photographing his children nude. His modernist-inspired nudism had merged with the sexual revolution of the 60s. An era of overexposure, exploitation and violation in the name of freedom and liberation. Woodie gave himself full license over his children’s bodies, since he considered our bodies his property until we were twenty-one.
The camera flashed and whirred, spitting out
white glossy cardboard squares with black squares. “Hub, help me with these photos.” Hubbard, at twelve, took each photo as they came out of the camera, lined them up like cards on the table, turning his head down, looking away. I watched our mother who was in the kitchen, staring down at the counter as if she was paralyzed, her jaw tight, looking down. My
brother raced to his room and slammed the door.
Woodie shouted, “Elizabeth, out here, your turn.”
“Do I have to take off my underwear?”
“You shouldn’t have to ask that question. The body is a beautiful thing. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Haven’t I been telling you that your whole lives?”
I came out with a towel around me, seventeen years old, and unwound the towel and set it on the table before I stood with my back to the wall. Hubbard turned so his back was to me and kept his head down. He was not going to the ship, so he didn’t have to have photos taken.
My father barked at me, “Stop hunching over. Stand up straight. Be proud of your body. You are a beautiful young woman. All right, forward shot.”
I stared across the room at the Bertoia sculpture hanging in front of the stone wall. “Turn, profile.” I will freeze my body. “Turn. Back view.” I will feel nothing. “Profile. Done.” The camera whirred and spat black-squared photos.
He said, “Now that wasn’t that bad, was it?” I grabbed my towel and ran back to my room. He called out to both of us, “When you get home next spring, we’ll take a second round to compare.”
My brother was dressed and standing in his doorway next to mine. We stared at each other. Wood growled, “Over my dead body, will he ever do this again.”
I nodded, and we whispered the same words to each other. “That bastard. I hate him. I hate him.”
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