They’d called the place Yiytzo, Russian for the egg, because it was to be their world within a world. The use of Russian constituting a sort of magical invocation for the good will of the Party penates who might otherwise be displeased. A vow that if their tastes leaned toward the North Shore their hearts were still full of the Soviet communion. Its thirty-two acres took in the main house and guest cottage, set in two formally landscaped acres near the north end of the property; a lengthy winding drive leading to the house and then splitting off in back to the cottage; a stable that could accommodate six horses and had a groom’s residence on the upper floor; several acres of riding paths cut through otherwise uncontrolled foliage; elm, locust, birch, maple, oak and alder trees whose bark was made invisible for a portion of each year by the Virginia creeper and honeysuckle that twined their ways up every available trunk and branch; thorny elderberry, blackberry and raspberry bushes; billions of blades of chive, known to us as onion grass; thousands of seedlings of the large trees; monumental stumps long since overgrown with prickly weeds and vines that made them impossible to sit on; an occasional animal grave, its small headstone visible only in the brief brown times before the first heavy snow of winter and after the last; innumerable streams running into a large pond; and beyond this the ten-acre dairy and vegetable farm run then by Mr. and Mrs. Okada, later by Mr. and Mrs. Facciolo, who lived in the small red farmhouse set between the barn and chicken coops and the planted acres of the farm, and who still managed to supply us and themselves with fresh vegetables for five months out of every year and sell their overflow, along with their eggs, to other local people.
So Yiytzo was to be their world, Josh and Lily’s, when the fund raising parties got too wild, the arguments too vicious, the justifications too arduous. To the extent that they had to venture into the outside world, Yiytzo would be their nourishment and their refuge.
Ironically, however, it had developed that whatever the place gave them in spiritual nourishment (a problematical question, anyway, in Lily’s case) it more than took back in physical upkeep. While the house, for example, had stone interior walls a foot thick and exterior walls over two feet in depth, both of which tended to keep the heat out in the warm months and in during the winter, it also had ten rooms in which the ceilings ranged from twelve to twenty feet (in the living room) high, so that during the cold months it took an enormous amount of heat just to warm up the rooms in the first place. There was a staff of three, aside from the Okadas. They slept in the cottage and their salaries were low but nevertheless, they had to be paid regularly and in cash. Relatively little was required in the way of furniture, for Yiytzo had been sold them with most of its furnishings intact. But then there were the visitors. True, Josh had bought Yiytzo out of a yearning for peace and solitude, but how much peace and solitude could be tolerated by a couple who’d lived on Barrow Street in the middle of everything that was happening for several years and whose previous idea of a country outing had been a picnic lunch in Washington Square Park? Then, too, if in their one-room Barrow Street apartment they had felt unable to refuse a friend who needed a place to sleep for the night, just a blanket on the floor would be fine, how were they now to turn away the homeless artists, the itinerant anarchists, the unpaid organizers who flocked the fifty miles from Union Square to Welford Heights even before they knew the extent of Josh’s good fortune or were certain they could count on what he later called his gelt guilt to make him their permanent host?
Josh’s expenses being what they were, how could he have refused the offer to make a filmscript of Our Blood when it came? They didn’t think of the move as being permanent. (I have read since that nobody did.) There was an absurd quality to the very thought of living permanently in a place like Hollywood. On the other hand, it was the bleak beginning of 1931 by this time and it would have been preposterous to thumb one’s nose at the moguls of the West. Josh’s book had been published a little over a year before and the reviews had been excellent but a combination of factors—greatly reduced book buying due to the Depression; a sudden glut of pacifist novels—had cut short its selling life. Lily was pregnant with a child she later claimed to have miscarried and their plan was to come back here for its birth, to stay for a few months and then to leave the child at Yiytzo while they finished out their Hollywood term. They could feel particularly easy about such an arrangement because Josh’s parents were coming to live at Yiytzo. Josh’s father, Hyman, had lost his job as a cutter a couple of months before when the cloak and suit house he’d worked for failed. Josh had talked about doing something for them; the job situation was hopeless- and Hyman was getting old, anyway. Leah was a quiet person with nothing of the old country disciplinarian about her and there would be a nursemaid at first to fulfill the more arduous demands of a baby.
So Josh and Lily went to Hollywood forever, coming back often to Yiytzo, always the gay visitors who descended upon the household, sometimes with an entourage of their own, but always in either case being deluged with visitors when word got out that they were there; sometimes for a particular reason (Mimi’s birth; Hyman’s death; my birth; some mystical illness of Lily’s which she could trust no Los Angeles doctor to treat; my four incarcerations in the madhouse), sometimes because from the vantage point of Hollywood they became convinced that at Yiytzo they could really get some rest. Sometimes they swore that it was because they couldn’t stay away, they missed us so terribly. A new batch of snapshots or some clever remark of Mimi’s transmitted by Leah, who wrote about us copiously (they kept her letters in looseleaf notebooks which were bound permanently when they became full. Josh and Lily’s way of possessing our childhoods without living through them). In any event they had less of mine than of Mimi’s because I didn’t talk until I was four years old and after that I was seldom conspicuously clever—some such reminder would make them realize they hadn’t seen us in months and then they would whirl into our lives like two Method actors cast in the role of parents, question Leah closely about our diets and tonsils, beg for hundreds of kisses and yearn verbosely for the day when they could afford to get out of the rat race and come back home where they belonged.
• • •
Now Lily would waft in on the three-thirty train and Mimi would pick her up at the station, carrying to and from the station wagon her numerous valises, transporting her to Yiytzo, and Lily, in a pink linen dress a bit too jaunty for a woman of sixty-one, high-heeled black patent pumps setting off legs that had lost some of their flesh but none of their shape, a net kerchief keeping her hair in place, would stand in front of the fireplace, raising her arms in a theatrical gesture that was meant to be all-embracing, and say with a voice that had stayed younger and more tremulous than the rest of her, “My God, it’s good to be home! You have no idea how good it is to be home!”
“No,” I’d say. “How is it, Lily?”
But Mimi, with a warning look in my direction, would put an arm around Lily, squeeze her affectionately, say, “Of course we do, love, and it’s marvelous having you back.”
Having her there was unbearable. I hadn’t had a breakdown in many years but the times I felt closest to falling apart were the times when Lily was around; I didn’t know how I would manage if my bad dreams and strange moods hadn’t passed before she came. In the old days, no matter what the ostensible reason for their visit, she had spent most of her time with us in bed, being waited upon by Mimi and the others, visited by doctors as well as various friends who knew that if she had any illness at all, it wasn’t something they would ever contract. Now stunningly healthy in the years when she had a right to occasional illness, she fluttered around the house until someone took her someplace for an appointment, hovering at the ends of our nerves, waiting for Josh, who for nearly fifteen years had refused to live with her. Needing to be there so that when Josh called Mimi would tell him not to bring one of his girls. Hoping to lure him back into her future through a nostalgic voyage to the past. To the twenties, to the thirties, the forties—the very beg
inning of the fifties, if need be, but never any closer than that to here and now. “Ah, Lil,” Josh teased her, “it’s your only departure from type—you’d rather revel in the past than bury your age.”
He had never divorced her. Their marriage certificate lay in a yellowed envelope in the bottom drawer of the massive living-room desk where Mimi did the bills. It was hard for me to admit what was obviously true, that what the certificate symbolized still existed in part, that something was still there. They weren’t woven through time to this or any place but parts of them were woven together into time. Nothing they said to each other was simple; they spoke a sign language perhaps more perfect than it had been when they were together and one or the other often chose not to understand. Single words had complex shared meanings. Lily’s father had been a fireman in Vincennes and her first husband had been a fireman in Vincennes and the word fireman invariably set off smiles, jokes, reminiscences. Once during one of their reconciliations Josh had showed up at Yiytzo in a red sports car with ladders strapped to the sides. Names evoked places, years evoked events. 1926. Oh, yes, that was the year that twenty-six-year-old Josh Cohen had zigzagged through the United States, stopping in Vincennes overnight and at an all night diner introduced himself as Josh Cane to a pretty young waitress who turned out to have a husband who was a day-shift fireman and an eleven-month-old baby at home but who left Vincennes with him forever the next day anyway. Fireman, oh yes, did you ever hear the joke about the fireman who . . . remember the fire at the hotel in, when was it, thirty-eight . . . Mimi loved them to reminisce but for me their stories had the quality of a book someone reads you aloud while you are trying to concentrate on something of your own.
Not in my earliest memories do I remember missing them when they weren’t around. Nor did I feel anxiety when they were about to leave after a visit. I never called them anything but Josh and Lily; I think that until I understood the biological meaning of parenthood I didn’t believe they had any closer relation to us than the numerous adults, some nameless, others friendly to me, who lived in the guest cottage, coming and going independently of us. As a matter of fact, I think I may have preferred the others, for they did not invade the big house itself, and even as a child I had strong feelings about privacy and outsiders. I can remember quite distinctly (although Mimi swears it isn’t possible as she swears many of my memories aren’t because she has none of her own) the first time she brought a friend home from school. I’d only begun walking around the time of my second birthday but when school began for Mimi I would walk with Leah the length of the long driveway, arriving at twenty past three, when the school bus let off my sister at the entrance. It was a girl named Carol who came home with her that day; they were in second grade. Mimi put down her briefcase and picked me up and kissed me, as she always did, then said (she always talked to me in a normal way, understanding that I understood even if I never responded in words) that she wanted me to meet her friend.
“No!” I screamed at the top of my lungs, my first and last words until another two years had passed. My foot lashed out at Carol’s shins and then I wiggled out of Mimi’s arms and ran into the woods where I hid for so long that a good part of Carol’s visiting time was used up in the effort to find me. And eleven years later when in her first year of college Mimi began to bring Barney home weekends my reaction was very much the same except that instead of shouting I sulked. And when she and Barney married early the next year and Barney came to live with us, it took me a year to regain some semblance of my usual self, a year or two more before I could accept his friendship, longer for me to really care about him.
Now I was occasionally eager to see who Mimi would bring home to me yet always some remnant of that early resentment persisted, some feeling that an invasion, however pleasant, had occurred. There were people in the house who didn’t belong there, even if I was happy to have them. When they left, both the house and I would return to our normal selves.
Vincent, on the other hand, could not exist without people around him, people to declaim at, people to question, and when I try to imagine him growing up in Vincennes, or Chicago or Los Angeles or any of the various places that he and his father tried for very brief periods after Lily ran away with Josh, I cannot understand his surviving a time when he was so isolated as to need to write to an eleven-year-old girl who was a stranger to him lest he have no one to write to at all.
After the war things changed, of course. Vincent lived with us for three years while he was writing his first novel, Celebrations End, a hymn to the older forms of combat, which was published in 1949 when he was twenty-four and had an immediate if limited success. The book began as a parody of Josh’s pacifist novel, although all but one of the critics failed to see this, and that one an old political enemy of Josh’s who took great pleasure in praising Vincent at Josh’s expense, a lengthy piece called “Beyond Pacifism” the burden of which was that in Josh’s book one felt a savagery undermining the ostensible plea for peace, while Celebration’s End, a war novel, was permeated with a love of man as he really was that belied its young author’s surface bellicosity. Stapled to the clipping of the article (Josh, like all of us, always kept his records in the attic of Yiytzo, part of out hared feeling that what was there was permanent) there was an index card with a copy of the answer Josh sent to the Times, which of course was never published:
In many a pacifist a warrior’s heart
’Neath many a nun’s veil a manqué tart
In many a soldier a peaceful part
’Neath many a critic a fat old fart.
But at the time of the book’s publication we hadn’t seen Vincent in more than a year, for from the day he had come home from the war to live with us, he and Mimi had proved totally incompatible, and once the manuscript was finished and Vincent wasn’t shutting himself away for the great portion of each day, the squabbles between the two of them—invariably provoked by him—had become frequent and increasingly bitter until finally Vincent had left and taken an apartment of his own in New York City.
I was eight when he came back at the end of the war; Mimi was thirteen and had been carrying on a steady correspondence with him since his first letter to her. It was I, not Mimi, who was apprehensive, for aside from my usual fears, the two of them had become tremendous friends through their letters, and although Mimi had tried to include me in their long-distance warmth—always detailing my activities as carefully as her own—Vincent had failed to display interest in even the barest facts of my existence and had even expressed his concern that no one should be permitted to get in the way of their intimacy.
Mimi’s last letter to Vincent:
I’ve asked Lily and Josh if it’s all right for you to stay with us when you return and Josh thinks it’s a wonderful idea, Vincent. Beth and I have been embroidering pillowcases with your name on them. Beth is already better than I am at the chain stitch and the feather stitch although Mrs. Cushman says it is very unusual for a child of eight to be doing decent embroidery at all! I am so excited to be meeting my brother!!!
And Vincent’s reply:
I don’t think you know what I need. I need a bed and food—at least one meal a day—and I need to talk to you, not because I think you’ll understand my ideas any more than you understand, my needs but because I require a sympathetic presence and not necessarily a piercing intelligence. You are to be a sort of extension of myself. I have a lot of things to say. Some of them I’ve partly said in my letters although I don’t expect you’ve understood them, only that you’ve saved them as I told you to. You don’t understand me when I tell you that war is to men what sex was to the Puritans, the forbidden pleasure, but it doesn’t matter, it only matters that you’re there so I can tell it to you. If I said it to anyone here I’d get thrown in the hospital if I was lucky and the stockade if I wasn’t. I hope your house is big with plenty of room where two people can get away and talk and not always be getting interrupted. I hope there’s a decent bit of land outside where we can wa
lk and talk. In Vincennes the house had two feet on each side of it so the old lady next door heard me when I talked to myself and told everyone I was crazy.
That was the entire letter. No word about when he would come, no suggestion that if he was aware of my presence at all I could be anything more than a hindrance to his work. He appeared at our front door on a cold grey November day and without saying hello to me when I opened the door, asked for Mimi. When I told him my sister was in school, he got something to eat from Mrs. Cushman, then went to sleep with instructions that Mimi should wake him instantly when she returned. My diary for that day reads:
Vincent has starey eyes and stiff hair. Mimi kissed him to wake him up and he sat up so fast he hit her she said she was sorry to friten him she couldnt wait to see him she was so exited and he asked her was she always like this and she cried and said she was not always like this. Mimi says Vincent does not like her. He tells her not to fuss over him she said she only wanted to make him happy he said nobody can so don’t knock yourself out. She sent me out to look for him because he did not come to dinner. He asked me when does Lily come I said I don’t care. He said why I don’t care I said Mimi takes care of me and Mrs. Cushman. He asks me did I know if his father was a fireman and a very good man not like Josh. I said I didnt know that. He asks do I know what is war I tell him Josh wrote a movie about that he says Josh does not know anything about anything. Mrs. Cushman does not like how Vincent talks.
Mrs. Cushman didn’t really like anything about Vincent, and doesn’t yet. I remember Mimi’s reassuring her, that first day, that she would come to like him. As she had reassured Mrs. Cushman on the day three years earlier when Josh and Lily had come East to attend Leah’s funeral and hire a replacement for her, had found Mrs. C. and brought her to Yiytzo, and Mrs. Cushman, widowed during the first year of the war, had watched their car move up the long driveway as they headed back toward the airport, and burst into tears with the words, “I don’t know if I can stand it here in the country.”
Nine Months in the Life of an Old Maid Page 2