Grandmother objected, “Most of the time, he was only a prisoner of war.”
3.
Mumma in Boston
The next morning they made their farewells and left Wampanoag. Mumma had decided to find a place to live across the river from Boston, in Cambridge, within walking distance of the university. But of course the three of them would stay at the Louisburg Square house, Grandmother announced. In fact, they could settle permanently there, which would be in many ways convenient. (“I didn’t ask her what ways. She’d already told me twice in one morning that I needed to learn how to fit in.”) Once Grandmother had stopped protesting about their brief stay on and hasty exit from the Cape, Louisburg Square became the very place she wanted them to be, the best thing, really, despite Rida’s objections. “You’ll be perfectly adequately looked after,” Grandmother told Pops, as he and Mumma stood by the car’s open doors. “As you know, there is more than enough room—Take the girls’ rooms, they’re cooler. Also, Rida will be just around the corner from Dr. Irving.” She turned to Mumma; she knew Mumma couldn’t have yet found her own obstetrician. “Everybody goes to him for their babies, and Boston Lying-In is a wonderful hospital. We won’t be able to join you at home until after Labor Day,” she told them, probably disingenuously, although with Grandmother it was sometimes hard to differentiate between disingenuity and mendacity, “but there’s Martina. She has nothing to do all summer long. And she’s been with us since the Crash, so you can trust her with little Meg. As well as the two dailies. You’ll be well looked after and so will the new baby when he arrives.”
“By that time we’ll have our own home,” Mumma said.
“You have a home with us,” Grandmother repeated. “But,” she added, in response to a glance from Mumma’s mahogany eyes, “if you insist on paying rent to someone, we have plenty of friends.”
When Mumma’s expression only intensified, Grandmother predicted, “You’ll change your mind once you see what’s available. You haven’t forgotten that there’s a housing shortage, have you?”
Pops said, “We’ll see how things work out,” with which neither of the women could argue. The car waited by the entrance. It was a sunny day, and hot, there being no breeze that morning to cool the air. Grandmother was holding Meg close, her fingers spread protectively wide across the baby’s delicate back. “You have the list of names and numbers I gave Spencer?” she asked.
She didn’t, but, “I do,” Mumma said. (“I always tried to keep the peace with your grandmother, which wasn’t easy, it never is with a woman who’s so used to getting her own way—And just what is it you girls think is so funny?”) Then Mumma took Meg into her own arms and went to sit in the car, waiting until Pops joined her and they drove away.
They reached Boston in the midafternoon. Pops parked in front of a tall brick building, one of a ring of four-story homes that kept careful watch over the long oval garden they surrounded. Each home had its three layers of bay windows, each was topped by a pair of dormer windows. Looking at the Howlands’ house, identical to all the other tall houses, Mumma warned him, “I’ll unpack, but I’m not planning on staying one day longer than we have to. And that won’t be long, if I have anything to say about it.”
“Of course you have something to say about it,” he told her.
Mumma turned her attention to the central garden, a strip of green planted with well-spaced trees and flowers, kept safe from prying eyes by thick rhododendron bushes, entirely enclosed by its high, spear-tipped, black, wrought-iron fence. There were no pathways crossing the garden, no sandboxes and no swings hung from low branches. In fact, she couldn’t even see a gate through which one might enter. She knew there must be an entry, however, because the grass was mown as smooth and level as a golf course. She had seen plenty of golf courses out in California, and she knew the kind of care they took. She explained it to Pops: “Because I don’t want Meg living where she can’t go into a garden and play, and where even if she could, most of the rest of the world wouldn’t be allowed in. Or Junior either,” she said, laying a protective palm on her belly, which was just beginning to puff out.
Where they might live presented real difficulties, in the housing shortages of that postwar era, but it wasn’t an immediate problem. Grandmother had told them that they would want to take the girls’ rooms on the second floor, but Mumma decided to claim the attic, despite the steep back staircase that was its only access, despite the small windows and low ceilings, despite those having been the boys’ rooms and therefore furnished in blue and brown, stripes and plaids, and despite only two of the rooms being available, since Ethan had locked his door and the one remaining room was used for storage.
When she stood at the center of Pops’ boyhood sanctuary, considering the brown-striped wallpaper and the shelves of old schoolbooks, the framed photographs of statues of Greek gods—Zeus with his arm held high, about to throw a thunderbolt, and what Pops identified for her as the Winged Victory—the twin beds jammed in under the eaves, covered with brown-and-blue plaid spreads, Mumma just nodded. Brundy’s room, joined by a connecting door, had shelves lined with trophies and corners crowded with sports paraphernalia, lacrosse and ice hockey sticks, bats, gloves, balls of all shapes and sizes and colors. “Meg can sleep here. She doesn’t know she’s female, so what does she need a pink fluffy room for? She’s not sleeping downstairs and neither am I. I don’t know why anyone bothers getting married if they’re going to keep half a house apart,” she said to Pops. Pops didn’t answer. He had no desire to argue with Mumma, since he shared her marital bed and bedroom preferences; also, he had no desire to think about his parents’ sex life, whatever it might be, in their separate bedrooms, one at the front, one at the rear of the second floor, both with twin beds, and the distance of the three girls’ rooms between them.
“Your sisters are fenced in by their parents down there,” Mumma observed.
“Given the way Anne runs around, that makes sense,” he answered.
“As if your parents are the guardian watchdogs,” she continued.
“Girls these days need protection, even if they resent it,” he pointed out to her. “Don’t you plan to protect our daughter?”
“Yes. But not from life, and not from sex either. That’s the double standard and you know how I feel about that. We’re going to push these two beds together, aren’t we? It’s not as roomy up here as down there, or as pretty, I know, speaking of the double standard, but it is private,” she pointed out.
What precisely the double standard had to do with the bedroom arrangements at Louisburg Square we had to work out for ourselves, later in our lives. While Mumma spoke easily of sex, she didn’t talk specifically about it. We deduced that the three boys, up in the former servants’ rooms, didn’t get the same close supervision as their sisters. They could come and go as they pleased, which they did. Or, as Pops told it—disclaiming for himself any wild youth and Ethan having been one of those children able to seem not to be disobedient no matter what they get up to—Brundy could come and go as he pleased. Grandmother never seemed to notice when Brundy hadn’t slept at home. If he appeared at the breakfast table still wearing his tux, she didn’t notice. If his shirt and trousers had obviously been slept in or vomited on, she kept silent about that, too. All three boys could be in or out for all three meals without informing Grandmother or Martina or Mrs. Cook. The daughters, however, were closely monitored, their escorts required to meet visual, oral, and social-placement standards, their curfews strictly enforced, their clothing purchased under Grandmother’s surveillance, their plans subject to overrule, and their friendships proscribed: the double standard. As it happened, only one son took open advantage of his freedom, and only one daughter rebelled against her confinement, and I’ve never figured out just what that says about human nature.
About Brundy in his youth, the double standard meant that he was a real boy, sneaking down the back stairs to join packs of friends to go prowling around the Square, or Charles Str
eet, or even across the Commons, looking for trouble. Later, it meant he was a real man, unlike Pops, who spent hours studying and reading, and enjoyed playing Monopoly with Juliet, when she could persuade him to a game, or jacks with Anne. About Anne, at that time, the double standard meant she was fast. What fast meant, in the ’40s and early ’50s, we could never be certain. What did they actually do, those fast girls? There were, of course, no fast boys.
Even safely removed to the top floor, tucked away into former servants’ quarters with no neighbors, Mumma held firm. “I want to be out of this house by Labor Day, Spencer. And so do you,” she told him. What Mumma exactly wanted was: first, not to live among Howlands, and second, her own home, decorated by her in the bright fabrics and colors she liked, with meals cooked by her and served on her own plates, eaten with her own utensils, its rooms cleaned, its windows washed, its laundry folded and ironed by her. (“What did I know? Once I had all the work of keeping house on my plate, every day, every week, it took about two months and then I saw the light, I can promise you that. I was always grateful that your father had money so we could afford to hire Polly. I’d have murdered him in his bed, if he didn’t. Or one of you. Or all of you. Nobody has an easy time of it, not even housewives, not that I’ve ever seen, whatever things look like. I can see what you’re thinking, and you’re right. I have an easy time of it. Who knows why? Maybe somebody up there likes me.”)
Back in Boston, Pops settled down to studying, classics this time, the professors he’d talked to having assured him that there was no future in linguistics. “There’ll always be a need for classicists,” they promised him at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and Pops didn’t argue. He had his doubts, but he enjoyed the field, so he took down from his bookshelves the Cassell’s dictionaries, the Chase and Phillips Greek textbook, Liddell and Scott Greek-English Lexicon, the Scudder Second Year Latin, all the worn books of his prewar studies. He submerged himself in the languages and histories of the ancient world. (“Besides,” he told us, “it was no small consolation to realize that humankind has always been if not equally efficient at war, at least equally vicious.”)
Mumma, meanwhile, despite being at the end of Jo’s second trimester, moved energetically around Boston, Meg thrust in a pram out before her, shopping for a home of her own. She was confident that this second child would be a boy, which meant they needed not only three bedrooms but also a yard. Any son of hers would, she knew, be a lively child, so a yard was essential. She read the classified ads and talked to rental agents. She didn’t need Grandmother’s help, thank you. She had always looked out for herself. Mumma liked having possibilities spread out in front of her, looking them over, comparing them, and finally selecting the best. (During the season of her life when she read Emily Dickinson, Mumma relentlessly quoted, “‘I dwell in possibility,’” continuing on with a raised voice over our outbursts of laughter at any claim of her similarity to the reclusive, self-effacing spinster of Amherst, “‘a fairer house than prose’ I don’t know what’s so funny.”)
That August, the pre-air-conditioned city of Boston sweltered in such heat and humidity that its citizens spent as many hours as they could outside, preferably in rain. They crowded the garden spaces, waiting for the sun to make its nightly retreat behind the horizon, dragging the temperature down with it, and as they waited they complained to one another in companionable misery. Mumma, however, never complained about the weather, or minded it. Maybe she didn’t notice it. Certainly it couldn’t affect her mood, or her plans. She had set herself the goal of finding them a home. Across the river in Cambridge would be most convenient, but given the housing situation, anywhere in the city would do. Anywhere, that is, except Louisburg Square.
“I can’t walk on these streets,” she explained to Pops, as if the cobbled streets of Beacon Hill were his personal responsibility, or at least his family’s direct doing. “I could break an ankle, and then where would you be?”
Pops would never point out to her that the high heels Mumma wore to make her legs look longer and to exhibit the delicate bones of those same vulnerable ankles should never be worn on the steep and cobbled streets surrounding Louisburg Square. Nor did he warn her that the streets of Cambridge, although not at all steep and entirely uncobbled, were surfaced with bricks that surged up and sank down with the winter freezes and the spring thaws, making them a pavement to which high heels were equally unsuited. On matters of her dress, Pops left Mumma strictly alone. Also on matters of politics, home décor, religion, friendships, food, and finances. He quarreled only, and that rarely, about education and about family, that is, his own family, their own children. (“Your father and I saw eye to eye on everything. Everything important, anyway, except he had a real stubborn streak about you girls.”) Pops was occupied by his studies and that left Mumma free to drive across the river to Cambridge, where she parked on one of the broader streets, Brattle or Mount Auburn, and walked around the residential areas, Meg in the pram. Mumma looked for signs in the windows of houses, of which there were none, this being New England, and even more, being Boston, the self-appointed heart of New England. She sat on a bench on the green that faced the old Unitarian church, reading the classified pages as well as the newspaper that preceded them, and striking up useful conversations with the strangers who stopped to coo over Meg. She inquired among shopkeepers. She left no stone unturned, as she often told us. She even overcame her inherent distrust of bureaucracies and inquired at the Office of Student Housing at Harvard, but they were entirely unsympathetic to someone who already had living quarters, even if Pops was a war veteran and entitled to preferential treatment.
The little family hadn’t been long at Louisburg Square when Anne arrived. “Only for a night or two,” she said. Anne was working at the hospital in Bourne, but she hoped to be able to move back into the city, to which end she had a job interview, maybe, in the morning, at Boston Lying-In, and wouldn’t it be fun, she asked by way of distracting Mumma, if she were the nurse on duty when this baby arrived?
“No,” Mumma said, undistracted.
“Anyway, I have a date tonight, I won’t need dinner. And don’t wait up,” Anne said. “There’s no need for you to go waiting up for me.”
“A date with who?” Mumma asked.
“You wouldn’t know him. Spencer might, but he’s just someone. We have dinner every now and then. It’s not serious,” Anne told Mumma.
“He’s married,” Mumma guessed.
“His wife doesn’t understand him,” Anne told Mumma.
Mumma warned Anne, “You don’t understand him either.”
“What do you know about it?”
“Nothing, and that’s how I plan to keep it,” Mumma told her. “Don’t ask me to meet him.”
“Don’t tell Spencer,” Anne asked.
“What is it about your family?” Mumma demanded. “What is it with all these secrets? Why would I marry a man so I could keep secrets from him? Or sleep in single beds or not have my own house, don’t you people know anything about anything?”
Anne backed away, going up to bathe and dress and get away from Mumma, which was the usual result of Mumma’s exasperated response to the Howland modus vivendi and also, not incidentally, exactly the response she wanted. Anne went out to dinner with her married man and did not return until the next midday, at which time she left to return to the Cape. Whether or not there had been a job interview, Mumma didn’t know. But she overcame her own reluctance and accepted the help of Grandmother’s connections to solve the housing difficulty. She did not, however (“Not that I didn’t think of it. Not that I wasn’t tempted”) say anything to Grandmother about Anne’s dinner escort, an older man, as she deduced from the graying hair and silver-dollar-size bald spot viewed from her bedroom window, an older man in a lawyer’s dark three-piece suit, his fedora held in the same hand as the bouquet of flowers he presented, his other hand free to hold on to Anne’s shoulder as he leaned forward for a prolonged kiss, while a tax
i waited. Anne was over twenty-one, had a profession, and had been assigned by her family a reputation that this particular date would merit. Grandmother already knew Anne’s reputation and Mumma was already reluctant to ask for the help she was about to have to ask of Grandmother. Any further conversation would have been excessive.
As it turned out, her reluctance was well-founded, if ill-informed, being a prejudice or intuition rather than a reasoned conclusion. If the space on offer (“We’re only making it available to our kind of people”) wasn’t a tiny garage apartment, unoccupied and uncleaned since an unreplaced chauffeur went off to die in North Africa, it was a carriage house whose owners set restrictions, on animals (“No animals, not any kind, not even a goldfish, you know how people take advantage, my dear”) and children (“No more than one. Oh? You are? Did Dorothy know about this when she telephoned me? Well, then, no more than two, and they will of course be in bed by seven.”)
Distant cousins were willing to rent out bedrooms in their own now inconveniently and expensively large homes, or to offer apartments in buildings acquired during the Depression, when there had been so many bankruptcies and so many buildings had come onto the market at such good prices. There was a single floor of one of the tiny houses originally built to house Civil War widows (two widows per house, four small rooms per widow) in the back streets between Brattle and the Charles; the house had been in the family forever, originally constructed as a patriotic gesture and, really, more trouble than it was worth to maintain and keep occupied. Mumma looked at all of these but saw nothing that suited her needs, nothing desirable either, and certainly nothing at a fair price, not in this seller’s market.
“You’re related to a lot of slum landlords, did you know that?” Mumma asked Pops, who hadn’t known and was sorry to hear it. “Your parents’ friends treat their servants like dirt,” she told him. When thwarted, as in this matter of a home of her own, Mumma’s critical faculties grew sharper, especially when she was predisposed against a person, or a situation or, as in the case of the Howland-Spencers, most of an entire large family. “I’m glad I don’t have to be one of their fancy friends,” she said. “I’d have to worry about what a creepy Crawford I was, if I was one of those friends. Or maybe I wouldn’t,” she decided, “because they do think well of themselves, don’t they?”
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