by Tad Friend
TEN
Frost
WHEN WE WERE young it was eight hours by car from Buffalo or Swarthmore to Woodstock, journeys that felt heroic. Once we got close, crossing the covered bridge over the Ottauquechee, we’d sing “Almost There,” a ditty that celebrated everyone we were about to see down to Mickle, the dachshund. Up the driveway we’d roar, honking, and Grandma Tim would charge out in a way I’d not see again until Addie, at eighteen months, began to do it when I came home: holding her arms wide and stamping her feet: stamp, stamp, stampstampstamp!
Grandma Tim was a carnival. Mom would sleep late at Maplewood, catching up, but we were down early to see what was going on. When you arrived at the table for Baba’s Baptist cakes, Timmy would poke you with a hard-boiled egg and say, “Good morning, cornucopia, your face is looking soapier. I’ve been out to the flower garden and I’m sweating like a June bride, as my mother used to say — it’s hotter than Dutch love.” Much of her conversation was scraps and tags that would have given a simultaneous translator fits: if she saw a wandering shrew or vole, she’d hail it with “Thar she blows, and sparm at that”; when skeptical, she’d scoff, “In a pig’s valise!”; and when she wanted attention, she’d cry, “I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips, let no dog bark.”
She swam nude in her ponds, wore diamonds with Keds, decorated us with tippets and muffs and the contents of her “beadlet box” — a bounty of necklaces, stickpins, and tortoiseshell combs that all smelled faintly of nail polish remover. She had studied painting with Guy Pène du Bois, of New York’s Ashcan School, and often spent the morning in her third-floor studio, working up abstract green black slashes or flappers doing the Charleston amid pasted-on biscotti wrappers. Then she’d attach the new canvas, along with a favorite postcard, to the bookshelves downstairs, turning the whole house into an atelier, a bricolage. She was not a surpassingly talented painter — daily life was her true medium — but her work had energy and it sold, often to her friends Mary and Laurance Rockefeller up the road, an elegant couple she called, jauntily, “the Rocks.” She was pleased by the stir she caused at dinner there when she set an ear of corn to cool atop her water glass: “With the very rich,” she said, “the most you can do is treat them to the pigpen.”
After coming to Woodstock to await her divorce from Grandpa John, she’d fallen for the place, as Wasps who came for the piney air often did; in this respect the town was like a British hill station. As early as 1918, a newspaper editor in Swanton, farther upstate, characterized Woodstock as “the favored haunt of the idle rich and the gilded Gotham youth.” Though Timmy was rather proud of having been dropped from the Social Register in 1944 — the Register took it amiss when she married Tom Bourne (who was not in the book) without having informed it that she had divorced Grandpa John (who was) — she belonged to New York’s exclusive Colony Club and remained very much a Robinson in her self-possession and prankish spirits. Following Timmy’s parents’ wedding in Utica, in 1905, a cousin recalled later, “Many of us went thence to New York on the same train as the bride and groom and in the same car, though John” — John Robinson, the groom — “strongly advised our taking another train. John bribed the porter to let him and the bride off at the front of the car and make the rest of us get off at the rear end so that they could get a flying start.”
One winter’s day when I was eleven, I was tossing a balsa wood plane around in Grandma Tim’s studio, bored, when she put her brush down and said, “I have an idea.” She laid a slick of Elmer’s on the plane’s wings, then sent me down for juice glasses so we could trap the flies buzzing on the windows. The plan was to glue to the plane a squadron of flies whose wing beats would lift it into the air. It turns out to be surpassingly difficult to get a fly to settle on a glue trap, let alone convince a group of them to beat their wings in unison. But the project took care of her fly problem for a while.
She noticed how children were feeling. When Jane Smith was twelve and my mother fourteen, they were slumped in the McDills’ living room one day, round shouldered and lank haired and glum. Grandma Tim marched them to the mirror and said, “Girls! Look at yourselves! You are absolutely beautiful. Put your shoulders back, and your head up, posture!” Her own grandmother was famous for never having let her spine touch the back of a chair. Timmy took out her lipstick and made up their lips. Assaying her handiwork, she pulled their shoulders back again and said, “Bustes en avant!” Mom and Jane giggled, not having any bustes to speak of but aware now of what to do when they did.
Occasionally, a melancholy mood would overtake Timmy, and after dinner she would strike up “The Whiffenpoof Song,” which Grandpa John had so often sung:
We’re little black sheep
Who have gone astray:
Baa! Baa! Baa!
Gentlemen songsters off on a spree,
Damned from here to eternity;
God have mercy on such as we
Baa! Baa! Baa!
TIMMY AND Tom together were a great puzzle. When not painting and gardening and playing paddle tennis, Timmy lived a life of noblesse oblige, teaching art at the Woodstock jail and working for liberal causes. She wrote a letter to the New York Times opposing the Vietnam War that began, “Perhaps the American people will not become aroused until they have been bombed themselves.” Where Timmy could orchestrate her giddiness, deploying it to create entrances and exits, Tom would sniff an apple and already be gnawing it, unawares. As a wrestler at the Taft School, he was known as “Man Mountain Bourne,” and later in life his bad hips seemed only to fuel his powers as he bent over his blowtorch, spot-welding a new cotter pin. He was Hephaestus, the god of fire, whose forge triggers volcanoes. When I was six, one summer morning over breakfast, I waved at Tom from the porch as he chugged up the drive on his tractor, but he never looked over, keeping his gaze fixed uphill. Timmy laughed and explained to my father, “It’s not manly! I learned that a long time ago. It’s not manly to look at the house; you look at the barn and the fields.”
When I was thirteen, I remember Tom shaking my leg at five a.m. to roust me to drive the cows in. When I tried to dive back into my dream, he said, “What’s the matter with you? Men don’t sleep in.” Once I was up, there was a pleasure in the daybreak, mist rising off the willows Tom had planted round the ponds, the cows snatching mouthfuls of clover as they jostled downhill to the barn. Afterward, Tom took me to the garden and said, optimistically, “We can get these onions weeded in jig time.” (His favorite thing, he once told his grandson Brett, was being on his knees in his garden.) Two minutes later, he looked over from the tornado path he’d harrowed and roared, “If we had to eat what you grew we’d starve to death!”
He had a genius for making you feel first neglected, then small. Nicki Bourne, the youngest of his three children, recalls that when she was seven, “He took me down to the end of a plowed field. I remember that I was barefoot. Then he said, ‘I’m going to be living with another family’ ” — Timmy and her children — “ ‘so I won’t be with you anymore.’ He left me there and went and talked with the farmer nearby, not at all upset. When he came back, I was still crying.” He neglected to mention these new arrangements to his older daughter, Nan, who didn’t speak to him for two years.
When Nicki was accepted to the Boston Conservatory of Music, Tom told her no, she wasn’t a singer. If she really wanted an education, she should work to put herself through college. So she began work at nineteen as a file clerk, making thirty-two dollars a week, and within a year Tom was arranging for her abortion after she got pregnant by a much older man. In the end, Nicki neither went to college nor became a singer.
His son, Tom Jr., says, “I kept away from my father for about thirty years — whenever we got close, I had to end up doing what he wanted me to. When his friends who owned the Yankee Bookshop in town wanted to sell it, he got hold of me and said, ‘We’ll buy it and you’ll come here and run it.’ I said, ‘There’s a difference between loving to read and running a bookstore.’ He said, ‘
No, there isn’t — that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard!’ ” Tom was the sort of man the Japanese have in mind when they say there are four fearsome things: Earthquake, Thunder, Fire, and Father.
Yet it was clear from the way he and Timmy clasped hands over cocktails that they loved each other passionately. Tom had broken with his first wife, also named Gertrude, when he’d met Timmy in Woodstock. In private he called Timmy “Mother,” which was peculiar, as they had no children together, but his tributes to his “darling consort” remained fervent, particularly when she’d leave Woodstock in the winter to visit her former mother-in-law, Goggy Pierson, in New York. On the one extended trip Tom took without her, in 1970, he wrote home constantly: “I got to thinking of you so in bed that I had to get up and write. Life is mundane and commonplace — really feckless — without you! You are my life. You give me strength and purpose and manhood. You are everything to me. I just had to say these things, dearest. My beloved. Your loving husband.” She expressed her love more whimsically, once remarking, as they left a restaurant and passed an iron pillar in the foyer, “Don’t pee on the lamppost, Tom.” You mostly can’t imagine your older relations having sex, fortunately, but with Timmy and Tom you could.
TIMMIE, PIER, and I loved hanging around with Nicki Bourne’s daughters from her first marriage: Anne Greene, a placid girl a few years older than I, and her lively younger sister, Lizz. We would all play hide-and-seek in the hayloft of the Golden Cow barn, leaping the manhole-sized gaps in the floorboards, then go for a canter on their horses, Pistol and Parsley. In the afternoon, when we went swimming, our stepcousins would work for Tom, hoisting hundred-pound sacks of grain and feeling jealous of our ease, as Nicki had once been jealous of our mother.
Timmy paid for Lizz’s flute lessons and pottery and theater classes, and she’d remind Anne to stand up straight and keep her chin out. Function follows form — bustes en avant! But from Timmy’s remarks about Nicki’s second husband, who was missing a few teeth — “She won’t need to buy a jack-o’-lantern at Halloween” — and from the way she’d dance away from Anne and Lizz while whistling “Hoo hoo,” it was slowly borne in on me that she viewed these efforts as necessary stopgaps, and that we and they were on diverging roads. We would leave and go to college, and they would stay and have children young.
Such decisions came down to money and expectations. Because of the force of Tom’s hugs, real breath-squeezers, it was hard to imagine him losing a battle. But as I got older I began to see that he and Timmy had a kind of morganatic marriage: Timmy wrote the checks and held the purse strings, and she and Tom often had door-slamming fights about expenditures, usually after she’d told him to “Forget it!” about a new tractor, or he’d bought a new tractor anyway on the sly. She believed that Maplewood should be a gentleman’s farm, particularly as no one was making a go of dairy farming: in 1960, Woodstock had twenty-eight commercially operated dairy farms; by 1982, only nine.
But Tom had dreams. He had been a successful salesman in Boston, earning $10,000 a year during the Depression and sending his older two children to Milton — and then he’d uprooted his family to buy Maplewood in 1940 and be a landed patriarch, to stand for something. Or rather, he’d uprooted his family and had his first wife buy Maplewood, with her inheritance (he and Timmy later bought her out). Tom would tell his granddaughter Anne, rather proudly, that he’d never handled money his whole life.
Tom saw himself as a man of ideas and believed his innovations would eventually enable him to expand his operations to a kingly thousand acres, giving him the largest and most profitable farm in Vermont. To that end he spent whatever came into his hands: after the new milking parlor and the silage trench, there was the English method of tilling fields and the introduction of round bales (which occasionally began rolling downhill at high speed), and on and on, each innovation certain to reverse the farm’s fortunes. I believed it all: he had such confidence, or bluster, anyway. He devised an ingenious belt relay to transport hay from his wagons into the Golden Cow barn’s hayloft, then used his bench grinder and blowtorch to weld the necessary parts from scrap. Once in action, the cables broke, the hitches broke, the pulleys broke, and finally the thimbles broke. “None of these was terribly serious, indicating a fault in the idea,” he wrote afterward. “The only indication was that the installation was imperfect.” Tom was so impatient to try his jerry-rigged tools that he wouldn’t even drop his face shield when welding, a habit that burned out his retinas.
As his funds dwindled, Tom turned from dreams of expansion to dreams of auction. Once Timmy’s mother died, in 1969, after years of dementia, Tom began selling Timmy chunks of the place that she paid for with her inheritance, beginning with the best 128 acres, which included the house and bottomlands. Then he looked for other investors. My father says, “In the late seventies Tom wanted me to put all the money we had into buying his back land. He was extolling its virtues, saying, ‘It’ll make you rich, richer.’ Tom had this galling assumption that I already was rich.” My parents decided to pass. “What I didn’t fully understand was that Tom already needed money again. Mom and I began to see him as a kind of massive parasite.”
MY FIRST memory of stout, pinkish John Harcourt McDill is of him propping King Lear on his chest as we and the Smiths were all reading Shakespeare together one summer, taking the speeches in turn. “ ‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport,’ ” he declaimed — then laughed with pleasure: “Oh, marvelous!”
Though John wept at the 1812 Overture, his favorite poet was the flinty Robert Frost. We were always meeting up with the Smith girls at PineApple Hill or Line Farm, and though it was our vacation, John would school us in enjoyment by having us read poems aloud and focus on the punctuation, on seemingly transparent phrases such as “before I sleep,” and on the vital, linchpin words. When I began “Fire and Ice,” he raised his hand. “Don’t mumble — read it out, now!” he cried. “ ‘Some say the world will end in fire’ — this is about the end of the world!”
Eighth in line to be the Earl of Harcourt, John grew up well-bred but not well-off in Manila, where his father was posted as a doctor, and he tutored rich students to put himself through Yale. Mom loved to talk about how he went on to be a brilliant English teacher there, a Cleanth Brooks in the making. And then, in 1935 — her voice would drop, as if, half a mile up the road, he might overhear — John had a nervous breakdown, and with his wife, Julia, retreated to her parents’ former summerhouse in Woodstock.
John and his classmate John Pierson were the Barbaro and Charismatic of their age, fragile, mettlesome thoroughbreds who ate up the track before snapping an ankle. But where Grandpa John got back in the race, John McDill remained in Woodstock, sustained by his wife’s money. Julia Lee McDill was a descendant of Frederick Billings, the first lawyer in San Francisco during the gold rush, and the family had considerable land in the Woodstock area, including a private nine-hole golf course.
None of the Smiths ever spoke of John’s breakdown to us (or even among themselves). And John hardly seemed a shattered recluse: he was president of the Woodstock Winter Sports Association, the Woodstock Country Club, and the local Norman Williams Public Library; a board member of countless other organizations; and a member of the Bridgewater Cellar Hole Club, whose other two members joined him in tramping the woods to map every pioneer cellar hole in the Bridgewater area.
It was all in the admirable Wasp tradition of public service, of the committee for beautification, the panel on good government, the anonymous gift. John did much of this pro bono work alongside his wife, who personally introduced birth control to Vermont, delivering brown-wrapped books on the topic from her Nash Touring car to women in the backwoods. A Yankee who wore a cotton scarf on her head, churned her own butter, and pulled her groceries home from Gillingham’s on a sled during the war, to save gas, Julia McDill was often mistaken for a farmer’s wife.
John was never mistaken for a farmer. He could type with his
eyes shut; was a graceful dancer and loved to call square dances — “Now dive for the oyster, dive!”; made perfect corned-beef hash, flipping it only once; was a beautiful, slow swimmer, backstroking around the island in the pond at Line, his stomach shining whitely like a tiny arctic kingdom; and loved to putter down to Maplewood on his tractor bearing a single tomato (“to-mah-to”) from his garden. A Yankee friend of Grandma Tim’s who’d seen John gazing at the horizon and very slowly rubbing one of his tomatoes on his shirt sleeve tartly remarked, “It says a lot about a man if he’s got time to polish a tomato.”
John was charming, though he’d have balked at the word: Wasps admire attractiveness and courtesy but mistrust personal charm, any striving to conciliate. A sort of Thoreau with money, he felt that his talent was for pastoral appreciation. Yet Mom and Grandma Tim, who loved John, would shake their heads about the waste of him. They had a lingering belief in a Calvinist “calling” — the idea that the elect are called by God not only to perform their duties as Christians, but to use their gifts in the world. Wasps have a horror of being at loose ends, believing you could at least be doing needlepoint. (When a Wasp happens on a friend playing tennis or golf, his jovial, cutting remark is invariably along the lines of “Don’t you ever work?”)
I wondered if John’s true calling might have been for serving as a whetstone. He wrote a lovely poem for Julia Smith on her twenty-first birthday:
There’s a magic in the time of twenty-one
The fuss and fumes of Teen Age left behind:
The blaze, the darks, the enormous inner being
Vast joys, deep hurts, the surging thrill of life,