Bookmarked

by Wendy W. Fairey

  Shaken, I realized I must find better ways to help students care about the books and to develop and express their own voices. I started assigning ungraded weekly free response papers, in which students could write anything they liked as long as they wrote something connected to the reading. They could say they loved the book or hated it; they could bring in parallels to their own lives. I wanted to disrupt the categories that box us in and constrain both our imaginations and intellects, to help students to find their own point of connection to the literature and to build from there. As I increasingly sought to do in my own work, I wanted them to join academic rigor with freedom of self-expression. I hoped to teach them how freer rigor—if you will—could emerge from this fusion.

  MY study of English novels has become a kind of extended reader response. I always ask students to surprise me, and I hope this book will surprise its readers as well. I have also asked it to surprise me, its writer. Though I approach each novel or pair of texts with a sense of initial direction, I have wanted to remain open to unanticipated detours and connections. Simply asking the question of what particular books have meant to me and to other readers, I follow the twists and turns of the emerging answers, seeking, too, to explore how the life of reading and other aspects of a life reflect one another. How does a figure in fiction come to “be” the reader? I am the orphan, I am the immigrant, though in literal fact I am neither. How can this be?

  I turn to my life outside of reading to understand better the power of literature and to literature to understand better the shape and impulses of a life. It’s my hope that by pulling them together, I can go deeper into both the books and the life and show, too, how they’re really not separable. Reading and living, the academic and the personal, modes of critical discourse and of memoir: to deny ways they’re enmeshed with one another is to tatter the fabric of experience. So if Sheilah and Freddie and Scott and other persistent ghosts have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never will be, I invite them to join with David and Becky and Tess and Isabel and Mrs. Ramsay, among others—and, of course, with me—to see where together we shall venture.

  David Copperfield

  I have always had a secret kinship with David Copperfield. He was the literary character with whom, early in my reading life, I felt the deepest bond of understanding and sympathy. Not only did I know and love him; I felt I was David Copperfield, so thoroughly did his sensibility and experience merge with mine. Reading on my bed in my pastel-wallpapered room, oblivious to the rustling eucalyptus trees outside my window, I was transported from my California Spanish-style house with its red tile roof and white stucco walls to a cottage built of stones on the green Suffolk downs. The green was a hue I could only imagine; it was not a color of the dusky Southern California landscape. But from the novel’s beginning, I gave myself over to David and his world. My destiny became that of the posthumous protagonist—Davy to his pretty girlish mother and stout servant, Peggotty—a child alive with fears and aspirations, the pages of whose story unfold to answer a portentous question: will he turn out to be the hero of his own life?

  Rereading now and recasting my life in terms of this link is a way of exploring the feelings as much as facts of my particular childhood—and perhaps every childhood’s poignant mix of bliss and loss. I, too, like David, lacked but hardly seemed to miss a father. I, too, lived with my pretty mother and a beloved servant, Stella. No matter that David’s mother was a silly, weak little thing and my mother a successful Hollywood gossip columnist. No matter that David’s father lay buried in the village churchyard, and mine, or at least the man I thought was my father, lived far away in London, dispatched by divorce. Or that our home also included my younger brother, Robert. I knew the prelapsarian paradise, along with its edge of anxiety, of having a mother who seemed both doting and elusive, a figure I yearningly adored but never quite possessed. I knew the reassurance of Stella’s calm Czechoslovakian presence and the pleasure of holidays spent at the homes, more modest yet cozier than mine, of her nieces Celia and Josephine and their respective sons, Leslie and Irvin. Towheaded, curly-locked Irvin was my first “boyfriend.” We played together in his backyard, and at five I planned to marry him. You might say he was my “Little Em’ly,” and his three-generation Czech immigrant family was my version of the Peggotty clan we are enchanted to meet in their wonderful beached boathouse when David goes with Peggotty to Yarmouth.

  I also lived the disruption of the idyll. David’s world is shattered when his mother marries Mr. Murdstone. Mine suffered the entry of a detested stepfather, whose nickname was Bow Wow. A hulking football coach in a Southern California prison, at thirty-six, twelve years my mother’s junior, Stanley “Bow Wow” Wojtkeiwicz gained an introduction to her from the actor Glenn Ford. He sought her aid in raising money for his pet project, Bow’s Wow’s Boys Town, arriving at our house with an impressive blueprint that he spread out on our living room coffee table. BOW WOW’S BOY’S TOWN read the words in bold caps at its top. There were dormitories and classroom buildings and a refectory and playing fields. I remember his telling us the nickname Bow Wow came from the frisky way he used to play college football, and we all—my brother and I as well as our mother—were charmed by him at first.

  There never would be a Bow Wow’s Boys Town, but after a six-week courtship Bow Wow and my mother married. As she later described the attraction, she had responded to his warmth and energy and to sex. Bow Wow moved into our house, as Mr. Murdstone moves into David’s. My ten-year-old self watched while seemingly endless cardboard boxes of his shoes were carried up our curving staircase into my mother’s bedroom. Later Robert and I would sit near the top of that staircase, listening to the raised angry voices audible behind the closed bedroom door. As Mr. Murdstone asserts his sway over David’s mother, imposing his will on her, inhibiting her spontaneity, so Bow Wow sought to influence my mother. Giving up his job in the prison, he became her unofficial manager, trading the running of football plays for running interference in her influential name with the studios and publicists and stars, though often my mother had to curb his zeal. He never had the power of a Mr. Murdstone—my mother was too strong for that and perhaps Bow Wow too weak, notwithstanding all his bluster as he strode around in football jerseys covering his girth. But he and I quickly assumed our battle stations of open enmity, and his very presence in my mother’s bedroom inhibited the unthinking access my brother and I had always had to her and to her room, the magnetic center of our universe before his arrival. In the mornings, especially on weekends, we had loved to climb into bed with her, one of us on each side, and make our plans. “What shall we do?” she would ask. “Shall we go to Ojai? To Palm Springs? Shall we go to Malibu and ride horses?”

  I have always blamed Bow Wow for destroying our family happiness. It didn’t right the balance that after three years my mother, as she said, “kicked him out,” having discovered the diary in which he had written that I was a brat, Robert a sissy, and our mother a terrible bitch and, to her even more alarming, recorded the mortgage payments he was secretly making on our house with the aim of later claiming community property. Before they reached a settlement, he did everything he could to harm us, even calling up my school to say Sheilah Graham was a Communist and sending the ASPCA to our house to investigate a mistreated dog. “Is this a mistreated dog?” asked my mother, grandly indignant, as Tony, our Dalmatian, trotted to the door wagging his tail. It was one of her finest moments. But after Bow Wow, she was never the same. He didn’t kill her the way Mr. Murdstone kills Clara Copperfield. But he killed an essential part of her spirit. She gained weight. Her nerves were bad. She shouted and wept at the strain of the divorce, sometimes going so far as to say it was all too much for her and she should just take him back. “No!” I would cry. “No! You can’t do that!” In the end she got a tougher lawyer and they nailed Bow Wow on adultery. But getting rid of Bow Wow still came at a high cost—and money surely seemed the least of it. My world divided, like David’s, into pre- and post-step
father segments, the stark and abrupt transition defined by the intrusion of the hated rival.

  There was other loss as well. Just as Peggotty leaves Davy to marry her persistent suitor, Mr. Barkis, so, too, our Stella went away to marry. One day, walking me the six blocks to my elementary school as she did every morning, she broke the news with a final hug that she would be gone when I got home that afternoon. Stella left us to marry Al, an alfalfa farmer in Thousand Oaks. I visited her for a weekend in her new home, a one-story concrete structure amid flat fields of alfalfa stretching over the desert landscape towards the distant blue mountains. As I lay there in a narrow bed at night, a lugubrious train whistle cut through the night air. When I got home and was sullen, my mother got mad at me and said I should have stayed with Stella.

  My battle against Bow Wow stands as one of my life’s defining experiences. Its imprint doesn’t fade, and as a reader and rereader of Victorian fiction, in which so many children do battle with adult tyrants, I continue to find its traces. I take note, for example, when Jane Eyre, the retrospective narrator, reflects about her young self’s defiance of her unkind aunt, Mrs. Reed: “A child cannot quarrel with its elders, as I had done—cannot give its furious feelings uncontrolled play, as I had given mine—without experiencing afterwards the pang of remorse and the chill of reaction.” And I think about the cost of my own defiance. I opposed Bow Wow, just as Jane Eyre does the Reeds, stripping away their false faces, naming them as bad people. I ought to claim kinship with passionate, outspoken Jane Eyre more than with passive David Copperfield. It’s odd that I don’t; I was certainly as reckless as she. When Bow Wow kicked our dog Tony, when he caught him chewing one of his shoes—he, Bow Wow, was the only person in our house ever to mistreat a dog—I openly challenged the tyrant. “You can’t kick Tony,” I said, placing myself between my angry stepfather and the cowering animal. My mother, who was watching, later said she’d been afraid in that moment that Bow Wow would kick me. But he didn’t. It was one of the unspoken rules of the house that he mustn’t lay a hand on me or my brother, though once when he found me reading in bed after I was supposed to have the light out, he did come in and cuff me on the head. I wonder on which of my cherished nineteenth-century novels I was shining my flashlight under the covers. David Copperfield? Bleak House? Vanity Fair? Jane Eyre? Wuthering Heights? By the end of sixth grade, I had devoured all of these. By eighth grade I was on to the Russians. War and Peace. Crime and Punishment. The Idiot.

  The price of being Bow Wow’s enemy was that I cut off the possibility of being his friend. There is a passage in David Copperfield that I find particularly poignant. David reflects on how easy it would have been for Mr. Murdstone to win his allegiance:

  God help me, I might have been improved for my whole life, I might have been made another creature, perhaps, for life, by a kind word at that season. A word of encouragement or explanation, of pity for my childhood ignorance, of welcome home, of reassurance to me that it was home, might have made me dutiful to him in my heart henceforth . . . and might have made me respect instead of hate him.

  The one day I can remember Bow Wow’s being nice to me, I melted instantly. My younger brother, Robert, occupied the position of Bow Wow’s favorite, but that day, because of some small transgression, Robert had offended him. My mother and Bow Wow used to drive separate cars from Malibu Beach, where we rented a beach house, to our regular home in Beverly Hills. Normally Robert would have gone with Bow Wow and I with our mother, but for once Bow Wow asked me to accompany him. I was flattered, even thrilled, to be preferred. Bow Wow could be charming, and he exercised the full weight of that charm, joking with me and drawing me out, as the metallic blue Chrysler station wagon—the car my mother had received as a gift because Chrysler was the sponsor of The Sheilah Graham Show—wound along the Pacific Coast Highway. By the time we turned off Sunset Boulevard onto our street, North Maple Drive, I was his. But only for a day. I quickly resumed my role as his enemy. It was a role, however, that left me feeling unlovely, even unlovable.

  Many years later, in Paris where my grown son, Sean, had settled, I went with him, a young zestful father, and his two-year-old daughter, Louise, to a little neighborhood playground that had a slide. Sean made feints at scampering up the slide while Louise swept down it. “Papa! Papa!” she cried in glee, as she stood at the top of the slide preparing to reenact the ritual. That’s what I had missed, I thought to myself. Being a father’s daughter. My mother might have married anyone, and she married Bow Wow, an uncouth, uneducated man who hated me and whom I hated. Bow Wow, of course, did not read nineteenth-century novels, though he did teach me to recite in chronological order the list of presidents of the United States—something I can do to this day.

  Just as David Copperfield is sent away to school at Salem House, I was sent to Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut. The idea of my going to boarding school had formed when Bow Wow was still with us. It was a way for my mother to get me out of harm’s way at home and also to see me advance in the world. By the time I was fourteen, Bow Wow was gone, but the boarding school plan had gained momentum. Of course, to equate prestigious Rosemary Hall with miserable Salem House, our austere but fair-minded headmistress, Miss McBee, with Salem House’s sadistic headmaster, Mr. Creakle, is patently a stretch and a distortion. Boarding school was meant to be my opportunity. The educational trajectory my mother conceived for me was modeled on that of Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, who had gone to Ethel Walker, an elite girl’s school in Schenectady, and then on to Vassar. This was the route to being an insider and an Easterner. Mine would be the education my mother hadn’t had.

  My mother’s schooling in the Jews Hospital and Orphan Asylum in the Norwood section of London’s East End, where the girl then named Lily Shiel lived from 1910, aged six, until she “graduated” at fourteen, was the real parallel to Davy’s Salem House. On her admission to the orphanage Lily had her golden hair shaved to the scalp as a precaution against lice. Students who failed to live up to the codes of conduct had their punishments recorded in the “Sulking and Punishment Book.” This was an experience one could—and my mother in hindsight did—call “Dickensian.” But no slightest hint of the grim conditions of Salem House troubled either of our minds as she whisked me to New York’s Saks Fifth Avenue to buy me jodhpurs and riding boots because riding at a nearby stable was one of Rosemary Hall’s many extra-curricular activities. She didn’t want me to miss out on any pleasure or privilege.

  Yet I remember the boarding school as desolate much of the time. We called it the “pink prison” because of our confinement within its faded rose-colored stucco facade. I moved through cold, ill-lit corridors, off which, through doors left ajar, you could glimpse the dorm rooms, small and austere, no matter how girls tried to brighten these with a poster or a rug. We ate our meals in the dining refectory, a large high-ceilinged room modeled on the dining hall of an English college. The teachers sat at a raised high table and we students in rows of rectangular tables beneath them. The food was institutional—overcooked and bland. Often as I lingered, captive in my seat, a fast eater waiting to be allowed to rise and go back to studying, I would stare at the dulled gold-lettered plaques on the walls, bearing the names of girls who had won prizes for Latin or English, or who were former captains of the field hockey or tennis team. Who were these girls? They seemed alluring and remote.

  In the chapel, plaques hung as well, these with the names of the Optima girls, the students, one each year, deemed simply the best. We attended the chapel every weekday morning and again, for a full service, on Sunday afternoons, as Rosemary Hall was nominally Episcopal and chapel in that era still an unquestioned staple at most Eastern boarding schools. I welcomed any distraction from the oppression of enforced religion, silently parsing the gold-lettered names on the plaques as the congregation intoned the mellifluous yet automatic words of the Nicene Creed: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son our Lord
. . .” Although I had willingly joined the choir, I had also decided I was an atheist with a personal rule that I would sing but wouldn’t pray. While my schoolmates knelt in prayer, I would look all about me, scanning the rows of bent heads from my conspicuous place in the second-soprano section of the choir stalls. Many didn’t like this scrutiny and told me so. I wasn’t popular. As David learns, a world has its rules and culture. If you fail to conform, you will at the very least be teased—your bed short-sheeted, as mine was. I was a studious girl, often with ink on my fingers, three thousand miles from home.

  But somehow I managed. Like David, who worships the charismatic but deeply flawed James Steerforth and takes decent Tommy Traddles for granted, I made a few friends, who seemed sufficiently ordinary for me to relax with, and I fixed on an object of veneration in the class above me.

  My best friends were Pam Wilkinson, a wry scholarship girl from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, who used to stick pins in a little doll effigy of her mother—my own mother was alarmed to learn about this—and Sue Stein, dark-haired and overweight, one of the very few girls in the school who was Jewish. At that point, I didn’t know about my mother’s Jewish background. By the time I learned of it, at age sixteen, my friend Sue had already left to finish high school back with her family in Brooklyn. One year at Rosemary Hall had been enough for her. I remember confiding in Pam that I was half Jewish and being counseled that it wasn’t necessary to broadcast this inconvenient alteration to my identity.