Jane was the second such person to be hired, part of a staff that included a cook, a laundress, a cleaning woman, and a chauffeur. An earlier full-time nanny—who was actually referred to as Nanny, as Jane was not, and who was properly trained in her calling, as Jane was not—had been hired before the birth of my sister Debra, the second-eldest. A slim, older woman, she gives off a dignified, almost regal air in the black-and-white photos where she appears, standing proudly, with her two identically dressed charges, one of them sitting up in a Silver Cross carriage. Nanny wore her hair in a gray bun, scarlet lipstick, and a starched white uniform (in contrast to Jane, who wore regular street clothes). Although she and Jane briefly overlapped, she left when I was still too young to have any memory of her.
I was, you might say, Jane’s first “baby”; she became the designated caretaker just as I came into view. And yet while I suppose this might have translated into a greater attachment to me than to the other children, it in fact meant nothing of the kind. Then again, her own history didn’t bode well: she herself had been the third of sixteen children in what must have been a tightly run and hardscrabble Catholic household—her father had lost a leg during the Allied bombardments in World War II—and I don’t think she had ever experienced much in the way of nurturing. Jane vastly preferred my two younger brothers to the rest of us but her capacity for rage was particularly focused on my older brother and me.
My parents traveled a great deal when we were young, my mother accompanying my father on business trips to Europe and to visit family in Israel; there were whole summers they were hardly at home. When my mother wasn’t around, Jane could turn savage—could kick and punch as well as beat us—but somehow my mother must have known what was taking place and decided to go along with it. Once in a while, one of us would put up a show of resistance. My sister Debra, at the age of ten, kicked Jane back when she was kicked, but this only ended up in Jane’s threatening to quit and leaving the house in a fury for several hours, to return by evening.
Which brings me to the inevitable questions: What was Jane, underpaid and overworked, doing taking care of us, with so much impatience and so little capacity for love or even affection? What were we to make of the instinct that had caused my mother to hire her in the first place, this dry well of a creature, transfiguring her from her former position as a cleaning woman who worked for cousins in London to the woman who scared the six of us into compliance?
Given that Jane was, in one sense, doomed to coexist with us just as we were unwillingly bound to her, she displayed a curious lack of interest in engaging with any of us. When I talk about Jane with one of my sisters now, she uses the word “schizoid” to describe her. And certainly there was that—a sense of chronic remove, an unwillingness, perhaps an inability, to connect. I’m sure I must have tried to elicit a convivial response from her when I was little, during those quick, silent baths she gave me in the tiny, dark bathroom off my brothers’ room where all six of us were bathed. I attribute my compulsively hygienic grooming habits to a lingering sense of horror I have about that bathroom, which in my memory always smelled slightly fecal, despite its narrow window overlooking East Sixty-fifth Street. I can still see Jane wrinkling her finely modeled nose after one or the other of us had used the toilet to detectable odoriferous effect and uttering her verdict: “Stinky.”
What I recollect most, though, about those grim, assembly-line baths is the cavernous sense of loneliness they induced in me, with just Jane, the gray-and-white-tiled floor, and the silent white-tiled walls for company. I was a fairly chatty child when in the right mood, given to asking a lot of questions, but somewhere along the way I gave up the effort at meaningful communication with Jane. I didn’t splash around or laugh or pretend the bathtub was a swimming pool and duck my head under the water as my daughter would later do during her bath times. Instead I would sit in the minimally filled tub, my skinny legs thrust in front of me, and obediently hand my limbs over for Jane to scrub at with a washcloth and then stand up so she could swipe between my legs. She used a set of washcloths, actually—one for my top half and one for my bottom half, as though I were literally sawed in two. I continued to use two washcloths when I started bathing myself and only stopped living under their bifurcating rule sometime in my late twenties.
Beyond this, I can’t remember feeling anything but fear of and caution around Jane. She regularly administered full-scale, over-the-knee, British-boarding-school-style spankings to my siblings and me, sometimes with her amazingly strong hand and sometimes resorting to a Kent hairbrush. I know being a witness to these fervent spankings—especially those she gave to my second-to-youngest brother, who was the only one of us born with blond curls and who was Jane’s clear-and-away favorite—affected me deeply, skewing my sexual tastes for years afterward. It eventually led me to write a much-discussed New Yorker essay about erotic spanking, where I examined the ways in which emotional pain could be transformed into a sexualized scenario, but I have blanked out on the experience of being spanked myself.
11
Undoubtedly in response to my own experience with Jane, I became obsessed with the idea of nannies, both real and fantastical. I devoured P. L. Travers’s Mary Poppins series, and when I was in the fifth grade Mrs. Berle, the school librarian, helped me locate Travers’s address in England so I could send her a letter in which I inquired whether she was planning to write any more books after the fourth, Mary Poppins in the Park. (She never answered me.) I loved reading about the Banks children, Michael and Jane, followed by the twins and then by baby Annabel. They all resided on Cherry Tree Lane with their fretful mother, their irascible banker father, the cook Mrs. Brill, the overwhelmed children’s nurse Katie Nanna, and various other staff, until one day the “spit spot”–intoning, wryly affectionate, magic-spinning creature known as Mary Poppins arrived with the East Wind to take firm but loving charge of all of them. They seemed like a shinier and much cozier version of my own family, a tribute to a lapsed golden Edwardian moment. And whatever was wrong with Mary Poppins—there was an undeniable crustiness, even chill, to the original fictional character, as opposed to the sweet-as-spun-sugar version of her that Julie Andrews played on-screen—seemed minor compared to all that was wrong with, or merely missing in, Jane.
Later on, I read Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s The Unnatural History of the Nanny, about the venerable British upper-class tradition of trained nannies, with its assortment of supremely good and horrifyingly bad examples, the sterling mother-substitutes as well as the evil anti-maternal stand-ins. It was here I first learned about Winston Churchill’s beloved nanny, Mrs. Everest, who was the mainstay of his youth, his “dearest and most intimate friend,” as Churchill described her in My Early Life. I thought his nickname for her, “Womany,” was much the most moving appellation anyone could come up with, as though she stood in for all that was most female and nurturing about her sex. She in turn wrapped him in endearments like “Winny,” “my lamb,” and “my darling precious boy.” I wondered who I might have become with a Mrs. Everest behind me, who worried whether Winny would catch a chill even as he stood by her deathbed. Then there were the nannies who sexually fondled their charges or maltreated them so egregiously—like Miss Paraman, who looked after the young Lord Curzon, beating him and his siblings savagely and making them parade around in conical caps with words like “Liar,” “Sneak,” and “Coward” emblazoned on them in enormous letters by the children themselves—that it’s hard to believe no one called the police.
* * *
The particular incident that led to my own release from Jane’s absolute domination occurred one Friday afternoon in early summer out at our second beach house, when I was twelve years old. I had loved our summer house in Long Beach, but I had switched my allegiance when we moved two years earlier to a house with—miracle of miracles—a swimming pool. This one was in Atlantic Beach, a small enclave tucked on the far side of the Atlantic Beach Bridge about an hour out of the city, frequented by a sprink
ling of Mafiosi and a growing Orthodox Jewish community.
The house had an unsavory reputation that conspired to make it something of a white elephant, and my parents had bought it for a ludicrously low price. (The previous owner had been a doctor, and rumor had it that he used part of the house as an abortion clinic. There had originally been ramps to some of the rooms, and the house came equipped with enormous bathrooms, which gave the rumor some credence.) It stood at the end of the block, bounded by a high wooden fence, across the street from the ocean and the various pastel-colored beach clubs, each with its own booming loudspeaker alerting guests to missing children and misparked cars.
On this afternoon, Jane and the three youngest of us—along with a collection of cardboard boxes containing groceries and various cooked dishes—had been driven to Atlantic Beach ahead of the rest of the family by Jimmy the chauffeur, who wore gold-rimmed glasses and a reddish toupée. The toupée fascinated me; I watched it carefully for signs of movement and wondered whether Jimmy wore it for his own vanity or to please his wife. Jimmy delivered the six of us to school every morning, on which trips he would regale me and my food-obsessed siblings with the details of his dinners, which always concluded with a slice of pie and a big “glash of milk,” as he pronounced it. I loved the way he shuffled his s’s (probably because of dentures, as I think back on it now), softening the sibilance.
After dropping us off, Jimmy had returned to the city, where he would pick up my parents and the other kids and bring them back before Shabbos. There was still a chill in the air, enough to dissuade us from taking a dip—or perhaps Jane had forbidden it. In any case, she was busy in the kitchen, unpacking the various boxes of food, when my mother happened to call. While I was talking to my mother on the phone, my second-to-youngest brother—Jane’s darling—grabbed the receiver out of my hand. Instead of giving in, as I usually did, something inside me rebelled and I snatched the receiver back. My brother hit me and I hit him weakly in return. He was stronger than I, despite being two years younger, but I didn’t care.
We were still tussling when Jane suddenly intervened and turned on me with the ferocity of a wolf guarding her young. Pulling me off my brother, she dragged me into the downstairs guest bathroom to the right of the staircase. The former owners had fixed up this bathroom with gilded faucets, smoked mirrors, a marble sink, and fancy gold-printed wallpaper; although this nouveau-riche décor was emphatically not to my mother’s taste, she had left the bathroom intact when she redid the rest of the house before we moved in. Here Jane began banging my head against the wall, even as I tried to push her off me. My uncharacteristic show of resistance, faint as it was, infuriated her even more and she banged my head with greater force. I imagined myself blacking out, the calm of a beach town on a Friday afternoon shattered by a screaming siren as an ambulance took me to a nearby hospital.
Again, I can’t call up the pain or humiliation of it—it seems to have happened to someone else, someone whom I have but the vaguest sense of inhabiting—so much as I can visualize the space in which it took place, my face bobbing somewhere in the smoked mirrors as Jane asserted her authority. What I remember best is how I focused on the details of the bathroom as though everything depended on them—particularly the two little glass bottles etched faintly in gold that stood to one side of the sink. They, too, had been left behind by the former owners and were probably once meant to hold cotton balls and Q-tips—I can imagine a whole other, more delicate kind of life they had been envisioned for—but now they stood empty. They were fragile, those bottles, and it surprised me that they hadn’t broken once my family took up residence in the house.
When my mother arrived later that afternoon I reported the incident to her. I remember considering the thrilling possibility that she might actually fire Jane, although a part of me also suspected that Jane’s abusiveness wasn’t exactly news to her—that she knew who Jane was and what she was capable of. Indeed, perhaps the two of them were in cahoots, with Jane acting on my mother’s orders. I felt distinctly uneasy telling my mother about the head-banging—would she think it was justified by something I had done?—and when I started crying midway through, I remember thinking that I should cry harder, or not at all, that this specific amount of tears was the wrong amount, would not elicit her sympathy.
My mother was not visibly upset by my story. Nevertheless, something in her must have responded to my efforts to defend myself in this instance—when there had been so much else that passed uncommented upon—because she clearly said something to Jane. After that day Jane no longer felt free to bend my will to hers with brute displays of strength; I became less afraid of her, although still wary.
Somewhere along the way I left Jane behind, in her mouse-hole of a room at the back of the nursery which became effectively her home. (One summer during high school my sister Debra and I, as part of our first trip to Europe, visited Jane’s family home in Eindhoven, in the southernmost part of Holland, where her mother still lived with two aging daughters. My mother had suggested the excursion and I was curious to see what origins Jane had sprung from. I remember being made uncomfortable by the tiny, cramped house and the inedible food that we were served for lunch, food that had been prepared so as not to violate any of the kosher dietary restrictions but seemed all the same unpalatably alien. For a fleeting moment, I felt sorry for this tormentor of my youth, wondering at the constricting circumstances that had produced her.)
Jane inhabited two successive mouse-holes, to be exact, over the almost fifty years she lingered on in the apartment I grew up in. She eventually moved into the even tinier maid’s room behind the kitchen, where she sat and smoked and ate skimpy cheese sandwiches and wrote birthday cards in her unmistakable forward-slanting handwriting. She never forgot the birthday of anyone in the family, not once during all the years, nor did she forget the birthdays of any of the next generation—the proliferating grandchildren who eventually came to a whopping twenty-one in total. That was touching of her, I suppose; just as it was touching that, like it or not, my family must have become more of a family to her than her original one.
Jane died at the age of eighty-eight one hot July day in 2004, after a brief hospitalization; she was a wizened version of her former self by then, still hobbling around in my mother’s employ, still given to her meager, straight-backed pleasures. I cried at her funeral, where she lay in full cosmeticized glory in an open casket—so different from the Orthodox Jewish tradition I was familiar with, which dictated a closed pine box without ornament. The service took place in a little side room at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue that my mother had paid for, with pitifully few in attendance.
I’m not sure whom or what I was crying for, those noisy sobs erupting out of me; I remember my mother looking at me incredulously. (Most of my siblings were in attendance, but they managed to keep their emotions in check.) Perhaps it had to do with the discrepancy between the elegant milieu of Campbell’s, where I knew the funerals of the rich and famous were often held, and the barren reality of Jane’s life. Or perhaps I was crying in response to the words of the resident clergyman who guided the brief service. This priest spoke in the most gentle of Father Christmas affirmations, to the effect that Jane—whom he compared unconvincingly to the biblical character Ruth—was an enterprising spirit who had crossed the Atlantic to take care of us and had loved all of us like her own. His sanguine belief was in stark contrast to the sense of bereftness the occasion inspired in me: a lack of grief, more than anything, just a sense of bewilderment that Jane had grown old and vulnerable and I was middle-aged and there was a void where a bond should have been.
Sometimes it seems to me when I look back that things could not have been so bleak and cold as I remember them. Then again, I can find no evidence that they were otherwise. So you see where all this has left me: outside most people’s frame of reference and without any illuminating context except my own. There are Jane’s outlines, waiting to be filled in, if only so that she
will get up off the page and make herself felt as something other than a flickering, ominous shadow in my head. Or perhaps it is already too late for that. For when I look around, everything is gone or in the past—my childhood, Ed Sullivan, Indian Walk shoes, Jane herself—and I am left to conjure with ghosts.
12
The simplest test for gauging depression that I know of—infinitely more efficient than answering a long list of questions about how much you’ve been sleeping, or how little you’ve been eating, or how often thoughts of suicide have flashed across your mind—is the arrival of the first beautiful day of the year. The sort of day Dorothy Parker balefully serenaded: “Every year, back Spring comes, with the nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off.” The sort of emblematic day they’re always composing song lyrics about, when the normally indifferent world nudges you, like a persistent shoe salesman, and says: Try me, I’ve got a couple of tricks up my sleeve that will make you smile. The kind of day that hints at green shoots, and splashes of yellow light: nothing autumnal or wintry in sight. It might arrive right on schedule at the start of spring, or it might arrive radically out-of-season, but the symptoms are always the same: the sun is out, the skies are clear, the air is charged with the possibility of happiness, and everyone suddenly seems to be holding hands with someone else. It takes a day like that to make me realize that the way I feel—which is like sticking ever closer to the walls of my home, clutching at my skin for cover, avoiding unnecessary distraction from the deadly beat of my own deadly thoughts—is not a natural or even an inevitable condition.
This Close to Happy Page 8