by Sukey Forbes
I loved the rustic life, but as the mother of three small children, I began to feel housebound and often isolated, so over time it became for me a little too rustic. It also cost a lot to live in Silicon Valley and in Santa Cruz, and so our kids rarely saw anyone who didn’t have money. I began to wonder if raising the kids in such a rarefied environment, top-heavy with the “haves” and “have mores,” was really such a great idea.
I loved the way the wind blew off the Pacific, the feel of it and the smell of it. We had a view of Monterey Bay, and the ocean was just a five-minute drive down the hill. There were the wild sweet peas and the very tall redwoods, and it was incredibly vast and beautiful and picturesque in the way that a national park would be all those things. But the Pacific is cold, the feel of the sand is heavy and grainy, and it was always a reminder to me that I wasn’t home.
And yet I can remember sitting in the gazebo with the three kids nestled in under a blanket and waiting for the sound of Michael’s car coming up the hill from Highway 1 at twilight. We could hear him slow down or accelerate as he took each gentle twist and turn of the three-mile drive. The children were drifting off to sleep in my arms. I listened to the wind through the redwoods, and I remember thinking that the wind was whispering to me, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”
Michael and I were standing in the dining room once, looking out the window over our garden and the redwoods and to the bay far beyond, and he said, “You know, we’re going to look back on this as the happiest time in our lives.” Six months later Charlotte was dead, and everything seemed smashed to hell.
I was dropping Cabot off at school one day when one of the fathers pulled in in a well-appointed pickup with blood dripping down out of the bed. He had just shot a couple of wild boars on the way in and I got this sudden rush of nostalgia, remembering how I would follow my father around during hunting season. One year he hacked off a turkey claw and gave it to me to take to show-and-tell. The next year it was an entire deer leg. My fellow classmates did not share my enthusiasm for this specimen, and I remember both times being sent home early from school with my burlap-and-twine-wrapped treasure in hand. Eventually my father taught me how to field dress a deer—the kind of thing that not all young ladies from fine old Boston families know how to do.
In that moment outside the school in Santa Cruz—after all that time away and all my complaints about needing to be “free to be me”—I realized just how much I missed the crusty old WASPs who were, after all, my mother and father, my aunts and uncles, my grandparents. Our trips home to Naushon had become increasingly wistful. “Too bad we can’t come here year-round,” we said to each other. And so we’d begun looking at real estate in Massachusetts.
Michael had been doing a little consulting and limited investing with venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, and when one of those outfits invited him to become a partner, he told them, “Well, we’ve been thinking of moving back east.” They said, “Great. Open an office for us.” So the idea of moving back east slipped into high gear.
We focused our real estate search in Concord, where my mother lived, but then someone said something about the Meadowbrook School in Weston. We took a look and we liked it, and then we happened to drive down Orchard Avenue and thought how much it seemed like a country lane in Vermont. We looked at the meadows on either side of the road and the huge oak trees and agreed that we’d move tomorrow if we could find a house right here. Then a home came up and we made the decision to buy it even before we stepped inside.
It was the caretaker cottage on three and a half acres of the old Hubbard estate. The house had a certain 1840s charm, but it had also been subjected to some horrendous renovations. We didn’t really care, because what we really loved was the old blacksmith’s forge with the bellows still in place that stood just a few feet away. Our idea was to live in the house for a couple of years, then knock it down and build a new place with the forge as the kitchen and family room.
We bought the property, and then I spent the next six months coming back on weekends to check in on the painting and the carpeting and other work we’d commissioned to make the place livable. That’s when I discovered how incredibly welcoming the neighbors were. Everybody came by with a cake or cookies, and we especially loved our next-door neighbors, who were Livingston Taylor, the singer-songwriter, and his wife and manager, Maggie. We would always find her out wheeling a wheelbarrow around her garden, and she was very sweet with the children. I liked her immediately, but I think she was wary of me at first, seeing me as a bit too materialistic. She had a bumper sticker that read, “Want less.” Looking back now, I see it as an omen, or perhaps a koan that encapsulated all the world’s lessons about human vulnerability.
• • •
Our weekend visit with my cousin on Nashawena had been the briefest of interludes. Camp was still going on back in Weston, so on Monday morning, bright and early, the pilot was waiting at the dock with his seaplane to take us back to the mainland. Even as we left, though, we knew we’d be back. One of the reasons we’d chosen Weston was that it was hardly more than an hour from Woods Hole, the tiny town on Cape Cod where the ferries left for the islands. Weekends nestling back within the old enclave were going to be a regular part of our lives now.
On August 14 we came back to Naushon for Members Meeting. This is the annual family council for making big decisions about managing the property, but it’s also a family reunion with big feasts and, WASPs being WASPs, lots of games.
Psychologists say that a joke can be an epitaph for an emotion. For New England clans like mine, competitive group activity and high jinks may be necessary as a way to fill the otherwise stony silence of emotional restraint.
On Naushon, the games include High Seas, a quintessentially Forbes activity invented by my great-great-uncle Cam, which is basically Capture the Flag on horseback. The playing field is an up-island square mile bisected by the main island road, but the action begins with each participant picking up a horse at the stables, then gathering at the sundial in front of Mansion House. There, everyone endures a ceremonial reading of the rules, despite the fact that anyone over the age of six knows them by heart. Certain players are designated “Merchants,” and they have to take a playing card from their home port to their destination without being caught by the “Pirates.” The Merchants have “Cruisers” who can accompany them, either as foils or spies. There are various jails and other significant landmarks, but you’ll get caught in an instant if you rely on the main paths, so it pays to know the woods well enough that you can bushwhack and gallop back and forth. The horses love the competition and the excitement of the pack, and like some of the riders they get incredibly frothed up.
Etching of the old English sundial given as a gift to the family, with original verse composed for the dial by friend John Greenleaf Whittier in 1855.
On this particular weekend, High Seas was followed by the Bennet Yacht Club regatta, named after John Murray Forbes’s older brother Robert Bennet Forbes, a pioneering sea captain in the China trade who was known as “Black Ben.” His hobby had been constructing scale models of sailing ships, which were given to the Forbes children and lovingly preserved. These are fully rigged schooners and sloops, three to four feet long, but the “Yacht Club” business is all very tongue-in-cheek. There’s a commodore and a registered burgee, created in response to the fleet of New York Yacht Club boats that used to descend on our harbor every August, en masse, with passengers and crew then coming ashore for cocktails. This was back in the day when everyone who was anyone knew everyone else who was anyone. Now not so much.
The racecourse is in the outer harbor, where there is a prevailing southwest wind. It’s one straight tack from the ledges to the Uncatena dock, so it’s all about having the rudder and rigging set properly. There are different classes, a committee boat, trophies and medals—the whole nine yards. Observers go out in kayaks, Whalers, rowboats—wh
atever’s available—to follow the competition, and the typical WASP refreshments of cheap lemonade and Oreo cookies are served throughout. Cocktails come afterward, followed by lots of jumping off the docks.
These silly summer pleasures were allowing me to renew the oldest roots and tendrils of my life. The time was packed with powerful, intensive memories of the way I used to live, and the promise of getting to live that way again. But more than that, it was the chance to see my children in this beloved and familiar context, absorbing their own rich sensory impressions, like the smell of Hudson Bay blankets that have been kept in storage too long, or the scanty portions of overcooked food, or the sound of ice tinkling in glasses filled with very good single-malt scotch or cheap gin, both brought over in vast quantities. Wine was rarely served in my youth. Those who did not care for liquor drank sherry.
Island picnic, 1894.
Sheeping, circa 1960.
One of my most treasured childhood memories is of being on the island late in the season and using one of the frosted-glass half-gallon jugs that had been filled with water and warmed by the hearth to then warm the bed in my unheated room. Nine o’clock would have me climbing the stairs, not with a teddy bear but with a repurposed Gilbey’s gin jug tucked under my arm.
• • •
WASPs are supposed to be God’s frozen people, brought up close to our horses but at arm’s length from our emotions. Sounds right to me.
We were a clan with a perverse sense of pride for mastering an austere life of deprivation despite multigenerational wealth, confirming our assumption of genetic superiority. A regal carriage with a swift gait gave the message of importance and quiet arrogance. Words were to be chosen wisely; one was meant to be able to defend one’s opinion without raising one’s voice. Anything that threatened the cool veneer—and that included being passionate or, God forbid, shedding tears for any reason—was seen as weakness. A cross word. Excitement over an upcoming trip or adventure. Anything that steered off the straight and narrow and gave insight into one’s humanity was to be avoided at all costs. Not an unkind group but certainly more aloof than approachable. Manners, after all, were very important.
My grandfather David Cabot Forbes worked for the J. M. Forbes Company, which managed family investments. He was a lawyer, trained at Harvard, and he was also head trustee of Naushon. Apparently he did a fine job of it, because he was consulted by other families with large land trusts—the Rockefellers, the Kennedys—to see how we pulled it off.
My grandmother had serious emotional problems, which meant that David’s son, my father, Ralph Murray Forbes, was raised mostly by his older sister and by his aunt, and his relationship with his mother was more that of a caretaker. As a young man he would receive calls from the manager of the Chilton Club in Boston. “Please come pick up your mother. She’s causing a ruckus.” Eventually, my Forbes grandfather divorced my Forbes grandmother, after which my grandmother took up with her chauffeur.
Ralph, my father, was named after his grandfather, who was named after his grandfather, who was the famous Ralph Waldo. With this treasured appellation allotted only once every other generation, family expectations were high, and my father did his part at Milton Academy, and then at Harvard, and then by becoming senior vice president of Bank of Boston. If the right look and the right pedigree were all it took, then he was every bit the young go-getter destined for great things. He was athletic, gifted, and charming, the eldest son destined to take over the family reins, including the Naushon Trustees.
And if the objective had been to create Boston society’s Golden Couple, then the perfect partner for Ralph Forbes was my mother, Natalie Saltonstall. They had grown up in the same Brahmin circles. Their parents were friends—they had ski houses near each other in New Hampshire, and my mother’s family had visited Naushon for generations as dear family friends. The Saltonstalls had arrived in the New World via the Winthrop fleet in 1630 and, aside from the Winthrops, were the only family in Boston with legitimate rights to display their heraldic crest. They were also one of the few families that could joke about the Forbeses as parvenus.
My mother was warm, but not emotionally accessible, and I think my parents had a comfortable and convenient marriage with so many childhood friends and family friends in common as well as common family. My mother’s sister Sukey married my father’s first cousin Mark; thus we are both first (Saltonstall) and second (Forbes) cousins with their children. This cross-pollination is not unusual in our family and further reinforced similar family traditions and parenting styles. Both Mum and Dad were products, as well as avatars, of the benign-neglect school of parenting. I often felt that we four children were an inconvenience to them. Both were very decent people but neither was naturally suited to interacting with young children. Dad chose to spend his weekend time with us supervising our work clearing brush, splitting wood, mending walls, and mowing fields on our property. Mum was by no means domestic, and she streamlined her housekeeping duties so she, too, could spend more time outside. This meant that we lived on the same four meals served over and over, and all of our clothing went from dryer to an inherited eighteenth-century highboy dresser in the laundry room, where we all would gather in the morning to pull miscellaneous underwear, socks, T-shirts, and pants out of the jumble. There was no clear title to most of this stuff, so it was best to show up early if you had your mind set on the blue underwear or the Beatles T-shirt. A housekeeper was on hand for the nastier chores, but we were expected to pitch in. This included fixing our own toilets and leaking radiators, as well as repairing loose tiles in bathrooms. Duct tape was the all-purpose remedy. All of this was framed in such lofty terms as self-reliance and character building, but the more direct message was “You are on your own.” I was raised with a great sense of duty and responsibility, but there was no tenderness that pulled us together as a family. Working side by side was the way in which we showed intimacy.
Whenever we could break away from Dad’s character-building chores, Mum would take us on “expeditions.” Her favorite Saturday destination was the Milton town dump. I pulled a lovely red bicycle off the heap one year that was missing only one bumper. Laura, my youngest sister, spent her infancy in a crib that was the grand prize from one of these visits to the dump. If we behaved well on these trips, we would stop at Bent’s Cookie Factory on the way home, where my mother would purchase a deeply discounted bag of broken cookies for us to eat as a treat. My parents would good-naturedly tease each other about which of their families had more members who were “a bit queer.”
Whenever my mother pointed out how crazy the Forbeses were, my father would counter that the Saltonstalls simply covered their tracks by exiling their oddballs to faraway places and countries so nobody could see them. The Forbeses put theirs out to pasture at Naushon. When things grew really dire on either side, there was always McLean Hospital, where relatives would go for a “rest.”
Objectively, the best that could be said about my father was that he was a nice man, that he was kind, intelligent, and cultured, a gentleman even when drunk. He was sensitive, which is not to say warm and nurturing, and he made great efforts to hide his vulnerabilities under a stoic veneer.
And yet, as my father, he was my hero, and adoring him was part of what my childhood idyll on Naushon was all about. In summer I would sit on the bow of our small outboard as we put-putted around the island and he taught me all the rocks in the channels and how to read the ripples in the water. When I was a little older, my uncle, who was a geology professor at UMass and spent every summer doing research in Labrador, bought a red freighter canoe named Tanager. With a twenty-horsepower Johnson, this became our WASP-eccentric motorboat. It must have been quite a sight to see all nine of us first cousins ages one through thirteen piled into this nineteen-foot canoe, each decked out in matching white tennis hats and scarlet T-shirts emblazoned with the boat’s name in white iron-on letters. But antique charm meant nothing to
me. I wanted an Aquasport with twin Evinrudes.
Our winter home, located on Harland Street in Milton, was a ten-bedroom mansion on a ten-acre estate with a clay tennis court and a big barn. There was no pool, but then we had a pond in the woods. It had been part of a much larger family property that Emerson’s daughter Edith had subdivided. During the time that we lived there, we still shared a good deal of common land between the other houses that had remained in the family, which made for a greater feel of community and space. My great-great-uncle Alex built the house, which later passed to us in a swap with our aunt Charlotte, Alex’s widow, who no longer needed such a huge place. Most of the furnishings were conveyed to us with the real estate. Our clan tended to furnish a house only once and even then mostly with repurposed family pieces in varying stages of decrepitude. To complete the decorating of the house, Mum and Dad purchased a grand total of two modern swivel chairs and a love seat for the library. Florence, Aunt Charlotte’s daughter, had built another house on the property, and throughout my childhood, and much to my parents’ chagrin, she would simply traipse through the old place—our place—as if it were still hers.
But Florrie was great fun for us kids. On snowy days she would hitch a wooden toboggan to one of her horses, which would pull us at top speed around the snowy fields as we did our best to stay on board. During the Christmas season, she and her husband, Andy, would dress as Santa and Mrs. Claus and ride their horses around the woods.