Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  There is far less information in the attic about Jessie’s parents, my great-grandparents Emma and Charles Adams, than about Arthur’s parents, but there is enough to draw some conclusions about genetic tendencies—and what we find isn’t all that comforting for those of us likely to have inherited them.

  Emma Coles, my great-grandmother and the mother of Jessie, was born in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1867.

  A twenty-seven-year-old physician named Samuel Holmes Durgin performed her delivery. Dr. Durgin, a graduate of Harvard Medical School, had recently returned from military duty in a surgical tent with the U.S. Army near Appomattox. He later, in a somewhat less dramatic résumé addition, invented the wooden tongue depressor.

  Other than these facts, I know nothing about young Emma; there is hardly a scrap about her in the attic except that at age seventeen she married Mr. Adams, said in family lore to be a direct descendant of an Adams my mother referred to as “the drunk son of the first President Adams.”

  (Between Presidents John and John Quincy, there are several sons who fit that description, and a cursory look on the Internet raises some doubts about this lineage.) The newlyweds decamped for Kentucky almost immediately so Charles could indulge his passion for raising racehorses.

  There’s an old joke question, “How do you make a million dollars raising horses?” I’ve heard this enough times that the reply is quick to my lips: “Start with three million,” and that’s just how it was with Charles Adams in Kentucky. Within a year of their arrival, my grandmother Jessie was born and the money, of course, was disappearing. Disgusted, Emma left Charles and with young Jessie returned to Braintree, where Charles eventually joined her, destitute.

  But later, after the arrival of Emma and Charles’s second child, known to me from my mother’s accounts as “bad Uncle Carlton,” Emma began a passionate and unconcealed affair with a married man down the street. In an unprecedented legal action that made headlines in all the Boston papers, she filed for divorce from Charles Adams for no other reason than having fallen in love with another man. And who was the other man? None other than Dr. Samuel Durgin, the attending physician at her birth, twenty-seven years her senior.

  As you might expect, divorcing an Adams in Adams Central, Braintree, Massachusetts, made for an ugly scandal, and it went on for some time. My grandmother Jessie was even called to testify at the trial, but eventually Emma got her divorce and married the doctor, whose wife had conveniently died in the meantime.

  What lessons Jessie took from this we can only guess, but by the time she was twenty-nine

  and her path crossed with that of the luckless Arthur Evans, I’m guessing that the characteristics of “inner turbulence masked by outward austerity” with which my mother described her were well in place. That outward austerity not only hid her roiling passions, evidenced by a wrathful temper that my mother often described, but it also managed to make more than a decade of extremely profitable marital infidelity appear normal, even routine.

  Yep, that’s right. After all he had been through, poor Arthur had married a woman who openly cheated on him.

  By 1923, six years and two daughters (my mother, Elizabeth, and her sister, Molly) into the marriage of Jessie and Arthur, finances were tight. In my mother’s journals is a suggestion that Arthur had run through a good deal of Jessie’s money, but no indication of how he had done so.

  Given what appears to be Arthur’s natural frugality, I find it unlikely that he frivolously spent them into poverty, so most likely it was bad investing. Arthur had a low-paying job as an editor for a trade magazine, Jessie had a taste for finer things, and neither of them knew anything about managing money. I can easily imagine the young couple getting into financial straits.

  I often wonder: was it money or love, or some combination of the two, that sent thirty-six-year-old Jessie into the arms of Harold Minot Gage?

  Perhaps proximity played a part. The Gages lived two and a half blocks from the Evanses, their impressive estate taking up a goodly stretch of Cedar Street. Its five acres were beautifully planted with formal rose gardens, arbors, and vineyards. Evergreens lined the road, protecting the tennis courts, greenhouses, and putting greens from view. It must have been most unusual in those times to have a three-car garage, but the imposing Gage house did, and within were two Packards and a Cadillac.

  The source of their wealth is not clear to me. A descendant of the Gages said that “Uncle Skip,” as he was known to my mother, was a brilliant money man, although the money with which he was so brilliant appears to have come from his wife, whom my mother called “Aunt Ethel.” Otherwise Uncle Skip had no job, traveling into Boston once or twice a week to look after monetary affairs but in general passing the time with his lover, Jessie—and in the company, surprisingly, of Aunt Ethel and Arthur.

  Despite this flagrant affair the foursome was inseparable. Two nights a week they ate together and then played bridge late into the night. The two couples bought land and built a house on Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, although it was the Gages’ money that paid for it, and they spent every summer there together for more than a decade.

  My mother described tranquil days spent lying on the pier, her feet dangling in the water, reading. She listed the now-classic books in her journal: The Wind in the Willows, Winnie-the-Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, The Three Musketeers, Anne of Green Gables, Tom Sawyer, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, The Moonstone, Emma, Persuasion, and The Prisoner of Zenda. She gave credit to Uncle Skip for igniting a love of reading that she carried with her all her life.

  She described him as:

  Nearly ugly, with sparse reddish hair and a great beak of a nose, but at the same time most attractive, dapper, wonderfully charismatic and vital. He was witty and intelligent, incredibly well read and he dominated whatever group he was in with his brilliant mind and great humor.… He had an interest in everyone he met. He made people and books vivid and exciting.

  At the house on Lake Sunapee Uncle Skip would build a fire in the fireplace, gather Molly and my mother, whom he called “the two little dears,” and read out loud to them: Thackeray, the Bulldog Drummond novels, Trollope, and Dumas. He taught the girls to play bridge and tennis and to always wear red on the dance floor. My mother remembered it as the happiest time of her life.

  But the affair between Uncle Skip and Jessie also caused some disturbing moments at Sunapee. Once, when Molly and my mother were still very young, a violent argument erupted between the two lovers by a smoldering trash pile a short distance from the house. As Molly and my mother watched from behind the screen door, Jessie and Uncle Skip, both red in the face, screamed and threatened each other as mephitic wisps of smoke curled around them.

  When the two girls began to cry in fright and confusion, Aunt Ethel gathered them up and moved them away. By my mother’s account, this caring woman took the weeping daughters of her husband’s mistress into her arms and comforted them, murmuring that some things in this world can’t be understood.

  My mother and Molly, who up until the advent of Uncle Skip’s beneficence had a distressingly frugal clothes allowance, now were dressed in the highest fashion. Their medical and dental bills were covered, as were dance and tennis lessons, plus camp in the summers. The Evans house was refurnished, the mortgage retired, and Jessie, for the first time, sported jewelry. Even the cheating grandmother Emma and Dr. Durgin came in for Uncle Skip’s largesse: they received a beautiful antique dresser and a velvet sofa. Several times the two couples, with the Evans daughters (the Gages’ sons were already grown), traveled to Europe, always first class, touring the Continent in flamboyant luxury.

  And all this very obvious prosperity continued after the Evans household lost its only source of regular, if modest, income: Arthur was now jobless. But although there was no income (save what my mother would later refer to as “that which Jessie earned on her back”), when the girls were in lower grammar school they were sent to the private Thayerlands School, then on to Thayer Academy for
middle school, and finally, when it came time for boarding school, Uncle Skip decided that they should be sent off to the radical and expensive Stamford, Connecticut, school Edgewood.

  By this time, Arthur, pictured here with jauntily cocked hat behind Jessie, with Aunt Ethel to his right, was of course no longer sharing a bed with his wife and had been banished to a small bedroom in the attic of the house, which he mordantly referred to years later in a letter to my mother as his “sky parlour.”

  Down the steep attic steps he would tiptoe early each morning, softly unlatching the stairwell door by my mother’s bedroom and passing through to the tiny second-story bathroom. There my mother described hearing the click of the chamber pot against the enamel toilet bowl as he emptied its contents before tiptoeing back upstairs so my mother and Molly could prepare for school.

  It was from his attic bedroom that Arthur dispatched a thirty-four-page letter to Jessie, two floors down, passionately citing fifty-three reasons why their daughters should not be sent off to Edgewood School, several hours away. He handed his wife the letter on the back stairs.

  But it didn’t matter what his feelings were: Uncle Skip was paying, and off they went.

  Among her admonitions to her growing daughters, my mother reported that Jessie often repeated this one: “Marry and divorce as often as you think you have to, but don’t be any man’s mistress.”

  This counsel must have been foremost in Molly’s mind in the summer of 1927 when Uncle Skip, Aunt Ethel, Jessie, and the “little dears” set sail for Europe on the Empress of France. Their first-class stateroom suite, with its gilt Empire furniture and plush carpets, had a connecting door between the Gages’ cabin and Jessie’s bedroom.

  Somewhere halfway across the ocean, Molly witnessed a sexual act between Jessie and Uncle Skip, the nature of which is suggested by the fact that she immediately developed a painfully sore throat. She insisted she was hemorrhaging, as she had the summer before when her tonsils were removed, although there was no evidence of inflammation.

  After landing at Cherbourg, Uncle Skip engaged a doctor whom my mother remembered as a Napoleonically short Frenchman to examine the hysterical child. Speaking only French, he calmed Molly enough to look down her throat but found nothing wrong. But he could not convince Molly that she was not bleeding to death, so within three weeks of their arrival Uncle Skip booked Jessie and the girls return passage on the Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic.

  By the time they disembarked in New York, Molly was restored to perfect health. Arthur, who had not been part of this grand European tour, met them at the harbor. Making sure his daughter was all right, physically if not mentally, he took the night train alone back to Boston.

  It was not until four years after Molly’s throat episode that Jessie was apparently struck by the inherent contradiction between her affair with Uncle Skip and her stated position on being a kept woman. She sat the teenaged sisters down, telling them with candor about the nature of her relationship with Uncle Skip. My mother, apparently ignorant of what Molly had seen between Jessie and Uncle Skip on the ship to Europe, naïvely inquired, “But, Mama, did you go the limit?” To my mother’s abiding amazement, Jessie dreamily replied, “Yes, and it was wonderful!”

  So after fifteen years of a profitable and sexually satisfying liaison, Jessie abruptly severed the relationship with Uncle Skip. In my mother’s words, “Mama sent him off on a ’round the world cruise to find someone else.”

  He went on this cruise with Aunt Ethel, of course, and they were successful, returning to Braintree with a Mrs. Butler, whom he and Aunt Ethel immediately brought to dinner at the Evanses. My mother vividly remembered the event—it was a summer evening, and she and Molly had helped Jessie cook, serve, and clean up after the meal, which, however bizarre, was apparently quite congenial. After the Gages and Mrs. Butler left, my mother laughingly recalled “a delectable little touch,” Jessie’s indignant harrumph: “That woman dyes her hair.”

  The dyed hair must not have bothered Uncle Skip (or Aunt Ethel), for Mrs. Butler continued to live with them as Uncle Skip’s lover until 1937, when he died in the Roosevelt Hotel of stomach cancer (incidentally, the same form of cancer that would kill Jessie a few decades later). At the funeral, on one side of the aisle was Aunt Ethel, the two sons, and their wives, and on the other side were Jessie, Molly, Mrs. Butler, and a hitherto unknown mistress who had preceded Jessie, a Mrs. Hamblin.

  For all the years after Mrs. Butler was installed, Uncle Skip’s payments to Jessie never stopped. Money continued to arrive at the Evans home in envelopes Aunt Ethel addressed herself with postmarks from all over the world: Europe, the Far East, South America. Even after Uncle Skip died, Aunt Ethel continued to pay for my mother’s and Molly’s tuition and expenses, all the way through college (during which time Molly suffered a breakdown and attempted suicide). With the exception of one short-lived reconciliation with Jessie, characterized by fiery and violent nighttime arguments that sent my mother crying to her room, Arthur Evans continued to live in the attic.

  What a story. Imagine my dismay, week after week up in my own attic surrounded by journals and piles of string-tied letters, piecing these facts together, cross-checking and confirming as the picture got bleaker. Every improbable account is documented: it’s all true and in so many ways surpassingly sad.

  It prompts the question: What part of these lives, of this dolorous DNA, has made me who I am? Looked at in a certain way, this is not such a promising inheritance: the calculating, cheating, explosive, manipulative women and the maudlin, sentimental, self-doubting, alcoholic, family-abandoning men—“ppp,” as my father would occasionally note at the bottom of his medical records: “piss-poor protoplasm.”

  But in much the same way that I have begun, years after her death, to reevaluate my mother, I have also gradually come to realize how strangely modern my ancestors were: sexually adventurous and exigent, they confronted in their own ways personal dilemmas and proclivities for which society at the time offered no resources or guidance. So maybe I needn’t worry overmuch about my flawed genetic makeup: out of all those possible ancestral traits, the one my mother was convinced I inherited so directly as to be intravenous was her father’s Welsh sensitivity. All things considered, there’s nothing terribly ppp-ish about that. I’ll certainly take it over the unmeltable sliver of ice that those same ancestors stabbed into my mother’s young heart.

  It wasn’t until I read the line about “stepping back” in her journals and pieced together the complexities of her family relationships that I began to understand what had so damaged my mother. She kept the sorrows of her past hidden, like the stolen fox secreted beneath the cape of the Spartan youth in the ancient Greek morality tale. The young man, rather than reveal the dishonorable truth when waylaid by his elders, answers their questions with unblinking equanimity, all the while squeezing the fox tightly to him. Finally the grown-ups are satisfied and allow him to pass, but by then the fox has torn the boy’s abdomen to shreds. I believe my mother discovered, like that stoic Spartan youth with the gut-gnawing fox, that when we cloak the past, like the fox, it will injure us. Now, when I push her oral history cassettes into my old player, I can hear the pain in her voice that she attempts to disguise with a wry, detached amusement.

  Unfortunately, I am one of those women, and I know a lot of us, who somehow can’t seem to get over our anger and hurt where our mothers are concerned, and who are determined to do better with our own daughters. We don’t, of course. We fall into exactly the same patterns, or new ones equally damaging, and watch ourselves do it as helplessly as bystanders at a curbside shooting. Now, when I speak to similarly angry women whose mothers are still alive, I press upon them this advice: try again, and this time, listen better.

  I am ashamed to open up the bulging folder of Maternal Slights, many written in a hand shaking with fury on scraps of paper snatched up the minute the door closed behind my departing mother’s back. Of course, they say as much about me as about m
y mother: the mean pettiness of my impulse to document her failings, my complete inability to see myself mirrored in her, and my indisputable tendency to hold a Balkan grudge. But the folder is also a how-to manual for not becoming her, and many of the stories within are hilarious.

  There is hardly a Christmas that my own daughters and I don’t at some point sing out in unison, “Oh, thank you, Grandma! Best Western! My favorite shampoo! And in such cute little bottles!”

  She was a master of the backhanded gift

  and, still clearly remembering those pre–Uncle Skip years of poverty, was extremely frugal. On Larry’s fortieth birthday, she subtracted the $17.38 cost of the freezer-burned leg of lamb she had given me to cook for his dinner party from his $40 birthday check.

  For years I bore particular rancor at her perverse refusal to participate in the births (or the subsequent lives) of our children. After Emmett’s delivery we shouldn’t have been surprised at her birthing behavior with the next two, but each time we were. On the evening I went into labor with Emmett she came to the hospital with my father, the éminence grise of the OB floor, and watched my labor from the doorway. But just before eight, as I was being wheeled into the delivery room in that delicious ten-centimeter interregnum between pains and pushing, she disappeared. My father reported later, as he sat with me in the recovery room, that she hadn’t wanted to miss M*A*S*H.

  Two years later, when I went into labor six weeks prematurely with Jessie, we called my parents at 2:00 a.m., scared and in need of someone to stay with Emmett while we went to the hospital. Larry heard my mother roll over and say, “You go” to my father, who did.