Said the little boy, “Sometimes I drop my spoon.”
Said the little old man, “I do that too.”
The little boy whispered, “I wet my pants.”
“I do that too,” laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, “I often cry.”
The old man nodded, “So do I.”
“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems
Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.”
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
“I know what you mean,” said the little old man.
Judge Hand died when I was five, the year Father John was sent to the South Seas. I miss him still. When I was a college student at Brandeis studying history and law, I often imagined conversations with him, wishing he were there to talk to, to share my excitement. Both he and Father John left a warm place in my life, though, not an empty one, the way the mouse in Leo Lionni’s book Frederick saves the colors of summer in his mind to sustain him through the long, dark winter.
THE WINTER OF ’59 was a long, gray, sleepless night. Even my father longed for spring when the sunlight returned and Judge and Mrs. Hand once again warmed our lives with their good company. In a letter to the Hands, my father writes of the endless winter, and how he misses them terribly. He tells them he wished they lived in Cornish year-round. But my father, at least, had escaped the snow and ice for many weeks at a time. He’d been in Atlantic City hotel rooms trying to finish a final draft of Seymour: An Introduction.
While my father was away, a terrible thing happened. It remained locked away, buried deep within my body, until nearly thirty-five years later, when all hell broke loose during the birth of my son. I had been in hard labor for some thirty-four hours when, suddenly, my water broke on the delivery table and I began to disappear. A three-year-old girl took my place at the window of my eyes and told the nurses what she saw. “I didn’t kill it, I didn’t kill the baby, I didn’t mean to,” she screamed, pleading with the nurses to believe her.
I’m three years old and terrible sounds are coming from the bathroom, sounds like the ones I hear in my ears now. My mother is in the bathroom, and I have to pee. I don’t dare knock on the bathroom door. I’m hiding in my room and stuffing my fingers in my ears, which doesn’t help. The noise stops. I hear the door shut and Mama’s footsteps fade down the hall to their bedroom. When the door is shut, I creep out quietly and steal into the bathroom. I haven’t peed in so long I just had to go in there or risk sitting in cold, wet clothes until somebody finds me. You never knew how long that could be. Just short of forever. I dash in and barely make it, plunk down on the toilet and pee. I get up and flush like a good girl. Mama’s shrieks reach me, too late. “Don’t flush the toilet. Don’t flush it!” I look and there in the toilet is a baby, all watery and bloody, but a small, real baby. And I’d killed it.
The attending nurse clicked her tongue and said in an Irish brogue, “It’s terrible, just terrible the things children see.” I asked her if we could all pretend that I was expelling a tumor, that there wasn’t any baby, any real baby that could die, that I might kill by accident. That helped until the god of mercy came, Epidural is thy name.
After my son was born, I asked my mother about what I’d seen, the flashback in the delivery room. She confirmed that she did indeed have a miscarriage well into her sixth month of pregnancy and there was a baby in the toilet. She said she was saving it for Dr. Balantine to examine. She had no idea that I’d known anything about it.
My own “not knowing” about it until childbirth when the experience broke through into my consciousness with the force of a tidal wave was not, in hindsight, watertight. It leaked through in dreams. Throughout my entire childhood, I was plagued with recurring nightmares, some of which visited me regularly for years. One that’s been with me nearly my whole life is my waterbabies dream and variations. I’m on a beach trying to rescue babies from a tidal wave. It is a gray day with blackish clouds on the horizon. I see tens, sometimes hundreds, of babies playing on the sand, their parents oblivious to the wall of water, the great tsunami casting a shadow of death across the sand. I yell, try to warn them, but to no avail. I’m the only one who sees it coming. I rescue several, grabbing their arms, legs, whatever I can reach, and carry them off the beach. I often rescue many of them successfully, but never all of them. Sometimes, after the storm passes, I’m in a flooded beach house, water up to my knees, and a baby, horribly jellyfish-like, and not-put-togetherable-again, swirls by my legs in a pinky puddle. One I missed.
SHORTLY AFTER MY FATHER came home from Atlantic City, with the text of Seymour: An Introduction cradled in his arms, my mother became pregnant again. My brother, Matthew, was born on February 13, 1960.
Daddy and I drove to the hospital to pick up Mama. I moved to the back of the Jeep and watched as Mama sat on a red rubber inner tube in front. I asked what the tube was for and she said it was because of stitches. It wasn’t until we were nearly home that I heard a squealy noise and leaned forward, between the seats, to see what it was. I was stunned to see a baby’s face poking out of the bundle of blankets she was carrying. I knew she went to the hospital to have a baby, but it never occurred to me that she’d actually bring one home.
My mother said she noticed that I seemed to go into a profound depression after my brother was born. She said I seemed afraid that I’d injure the baby somehow. She was concerned about it but didn’t know what to do. My father saw in me only the apple of his eye, his little soldier, his “Dynamo.” He told the Hands, “Matthew is an intelligent and smiley baby. . . . He doesn’t have his sister’s toughness and bounce. But who does?”
TOUGHNESS AND BOUNCE: BE A swell girl, a good soldier. This message penetrated my being so intensely that I can remember the first time it was put into words. Once, when I was still at the age where I could pull my father’s nose and ears and get away with it, I wandered into the bathroom as he was preparing to shave. Daddy lifted me up so I could see better. I was perched on the little counter beside the sink, my favorite spot from which to witness the mysteries, the morning ablutions, of shaving. He dipped his hands in a basin of hot water, heated on the stove in a big pot by my mother, and splashed the water on his face. Then he took the lathering brush from its special stand. The stubby brush had a chunk of jewel-like glass on top that fit snugly into a half ring of metal and clicked perfectly back into place when you were through playing with it. Daddy made a beard of white lather. As he drew the razor down his face, neat strips of pink appeared beneath the lather. I thought about the strips of ice, beautiful skateable ice, that emerged from underneath his shovel as he cleared the deep, powdery snow off our pond a few weeks before.
I wasn’t sure where the razor came from or went to. I knew it was dangerous and not to be touched; I thought it might slice my eyes if I looked at it, but I never saw it except when he was holding it. I heard it scritch across his face as he shaved off each strip of lather. I only liked to watch the down part. The up part, under his chin, sometimes left little blood droplets; also it unnerved me to see him with his head bent unnaturally to the side. Daddy disappeared and all I could see was a bent neck, like the necks of unlucky birds or chipmunks that dangled from our cat’s mouth as she slunk past me emitting a weird, throaty growl to warn me off her prey.
Under the nose was last. Unlike the smooth, steady strokes on the rest of his face, lots of little scrapes happened so fast that he had to hold his nose out of the way with one finger of his other hand so that it didn’t get in the way of the razor. He rinsed his face, splashing up water with his hands and patting, and then we both paused and looked in the mirror to see what was there.
The reflection was all wrong. “Daddy, you don’t really look like that,” I said. He almost staggered, his knee bent as he looked at me with a smile as loud as a shout.9 I could see in his face that I must have done something wonderfully good. But I flinched inside the same as I did when my mother came at me suddenly—bad, bad gi
rl; any notion of what I’d done obliterated in the blizzard of her anger. I disappeared in the fog of the bathroom.
Years later he recounted his version of that story to me and said to me, with relief, that that was the moment when he knew I was going to be a good girl. It became clear to me, with the second or third telling, that he thought I had been being kind to him, in the opaque way of a child, telling a homely guy that he didn’t really look like that, that he really was the handsomest of all, and the mirror was wrong. I always thought, and still think, my father to be very handsome indeed; but that wasn’t what I’d meant at all. He has a very asymmetrical face: his big nose slants markedly to the left, his lips likewise are off-center. So when you look at him in the mirror, he really does look a lot different in his reflection than in person because all the off-center things are reversed, creating a very different-looking image. I was making a factual observation, not weaving a kind fiction about his appearance in the mirror. Although I realized he’d misunderstood me, I kept quiet, feeling like a liar.
He repeated this story to me many times growing up. After the part where I say “Daddy, you don’t really look like that,” he says, with as much relief at a disaster narrowly skirted as pride in the achievement, “That’s when I knew you were going to be a good girl.” A “swell girl,” as his character Babe Gladwaller put it while he looks at his ten-year-old sister, Mattie, sleeping. Babe thinks about how short a time it is to be a child, to be ten; “all of a sudden little girls wear lipstick, all of a sudden little boys shave and smoke.” He wants her to “try to live up to the best that’s in you.”
If you give your word to people, let them know that they’re getting the word of the best. If you room with some dopey girl at college, try to make her less dopey. If you’re standing outside a theater and some old gal comes up selling gum, give her a buck if you’ve got a buck—but only if you can do it without patronizing her. . . . You’re a little girl, but you understand me. You’re going to be smart when you grow up. But if you can’t be smart and a swell girl, too, then I don’t want to see you grow up. Be a swell girl, Mat.
(“Last Day of the Last Furlough”)
I didn’t read these words until I was long grown up, but the message—if you can’t be smart and a swell girl, too, then I don’t want to see you grow up—was imprinted in the marrow of my bones. It became part of the curse whispered in my ear, my personal Semper Fi, do or die. Whatever happened, I wanted to be a swell girl.
With my increase in rank to “big sister” came the responsibility for those under my command. Sometimes it nearly broke my back. One hot August evening, my brother, Matthew, now seven months old, and I were put to bed as usual long before dark. Matthew had learned to pull himself up in the crib. He was holding, teeteringly, on to the crib rail with one hand and throwing his precious bottle out of the crib with the other. He began to wail “ba-ba,” which was his word for bottle.10
Mama swept into the room in a tight-lipped fury, plunked the bottle back in his bed, and said to him, “Next time it will stay on the floor till morning.” At seven months old, he didn’t know that she meant it, but at four and a half years old, I was sure as hell smart enough to know she did.
I watched him with the horror of watching someone who can’t read the danger sign walk into a trap. Again, he laboriously pulled himself up and threw the bottle out of the crib. He began to wail. When Mama didn’t come, he threw out his teddy, his blankie, his socks—one by one the contents of his world, as if on some life-or-death fishing expedition where you gamble all you own, including the last of your food, in hopes of hooking the big one. I got it instinctively: I understood the game and understood just as well that Mama did not. I knew he just wanted to know, had to know, that if he threw something away, it would come back. I knew that was all he wanted and that, however many times it took, at some point, he’d finally be satisfied, he’d know he could keep the bottle and drink it and go to sleep.
He needed to know that it was safe to love it because it comes back. I didn’t say all the words in my mind, but I knew. My parents used to joke about my knowing what he wanted when they didn’t have a clue. They’d say, “How come Peggy is the only one who can speak his language?”11
I didn’t think it was at all amusing or cute. It enraged me that they could be so obtuse. I also began to have a sense, which grew rapidly into conviction, that I was the only grown-up in the house. Oddly, though, the fact that I often knew better than my mother what the baby wanted gave me a great gift, a compass of normalcy as it were: I became aware that something was wrong with her that wasn’t wrong with me.
Matthew threw his bottle out of his crib again and, of course, began to cry. I knew she’d think he was just being naughty and punish him. So I snuck out of bed and tiptoed across the room, frightened that she might relent and come back into the room and we’d both be in big trouble. I picked up the bottle and, as quietly as I could, dragged a chair up to the crib so I could reach him. He took the bottle and put it in his mouth. Through his residual sobs, he watched me pick up the blanket and teddy and socks one by one. I climbed down and put the chair back, but before I could get into bed, out came the bottle, out came the blankie, and the socks. This may go on all night, I thought, but I was grimly determined not to let her come in and spank him. The second time I retrieved the contents of his crib he smiled. The third time he laughed, the fourth time he laughed so hard that I was afraid she’d hear us. “Shhh! It’s our secret.”
I stood on the chair on tiptoes, my arm hanging over the crib rail, and was prepared to pat his head until he dropped off to sleep or until my arm dropped off—whichever came first. Luckily, he drifted off, and I crept back into bed.
As my brother lay sleeping in his crib, from my bed I could hear his snuffly breathing. He always had a cold, it seemed. Or was crying, one or the other. As his breath deepened, I let mine out. I knew by the sound that he would not wake up again soon. I listened to the night noises gathering, the songs of the grasshoppers and evening orioles as they faded seamlessly into the deeper night songs of crickets and owls, the world a monastery where the treble chant of the novices as they fall asleep is overtaken by the bass voices of the elders of the night watch.
The night-light in our room cast a gentle glow. I pretended that I lived on the ceiling. The ceiling tiles were my floor and I imagined walking around on them. After playing in the corner for a while, I tried to get down off the ceiling, but my bed had disappeared. The tiles disappeared, too. All I could see was gray, like a thick fog. I opened my eyes and I tried to get a breath of air. I was horribly hot. My sheets were all around me, tucked in so tightly that I couldn’t lift them off. I sort of breaststroked forward, and they only became tighter and tighter. I tried every direction but, like a lost traveler, I began to turn circles. My skin prickled with heat and panic. If I yelled for help, I’d wake my brother. Finally, I gave up, stopped struggling, and lay there, a “swell girl,” resigned to suffocate.
Mama came in around midnight to check on us. She undid the sheets and found a dripping-wet, glassy-eyed four-year-old girl.
“How long have you been like this?” she asked me.
“I don’t know, Mama,” I whispered.
“Why didn’t you call me when you got stuck in the sheets?”
I thought I was in trouble, but I had to answer or I’d be in worse trouble. I said, “Because I can’t wake up Matthew.”
She bit her lip, and the weather, the prevailing winds behind her eyes, shifted. She took my hand gently and brought me outside onto the lawn bathed in the moonlight. I had never seen the world by moonlight, and like the little raccoon in my book by Garth Williams, Wait Till the Moon Is Full, I “wondered.” I drank in the clear night air. She led me up to the low stone wall that was built to keep the children playing on the lawn from falling down the steep side of the meadow. I looked over the wall, and there, in the valley below, were hundreds of tiny twinkling lights dancing the entire breadth and height of the meado
w. Fireflies.
* * *
1. (Billings) Learned Hand, 1872–1961. In a fifty-two-year career as district judge, appeals court judge, and chief judge (1939–51) of the second U.S. Court of Appeals, he issued some three thousand opinions touching virtually every area of law. His opinions were so highly regarded that he became known as “the tenth judge” of the U.S. Supreme Court (excerpted from Who’s Who in America).
2. I reviewed their income tax returns documenting payments to Christian Science practitioners who, presumably, prayed for me long distance.
3. James Russell Lowell on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
4. This is not something I grew up knowing about. She, generously, told me on a “need to know” basis when I was grappling with my own teetering luggage. The doctors who evaluated me noted that the bizarre symptoms I exhibited were common to the community of what they called “torture babies,” infants who had experienced repeated and sustained trauma over time.
5. The names of M.D.s and amounts charged were listed on the following year’s income tax return as my father paid back “Uncle” Edward, as we called my widowed grandmother’s new husband.
6. Archibald Cox, born 1912. Professor of law, Harvard, 1946–61 and 1965–84. Solicitor general of the United States under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson (1961–65). He became widely known as director of the office of the Watergate special prosecution force (1973) and was fired when he demanded that President Richard Nixon turn over possibly incriminating tapes. In 1980 he became chairman of Common Cause.
7. Not unlike the matriarch of my father’s fictional Glass family, Bessie Glass, in her behavior toward her privacy-loving boys.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 15