I liked field hockey and riding my bicycle. Janine and I took horseback riding lessons. I learned how to adjust the saddle and bridle and how to mount the horse and hold the reins. I loved the feeling of the horse under me and the excitement of the gallop.
Soon, Kem left us to live with a family of writers who had set up a kind of commune during the war. Joan Grant, her husband, and her daughter, Gillian, provided the sympathetic family Kem had never known.
Joan Grant wrote stories about previous remembered lives and gathered around her people of like mind, who saw in her a wise woman and healer. She later married a psychiatrist, and together they started a practice. These were the glamorous people, I thought, and felt awed and attracted when Kem described their lives. They must have encouraged Kem’s writing and provided a style of life that suited him, one that valued intellect and the arts over materialism and comfort. However, they had no interest in us, so Kem drifted away once again.
About this time, Jack Pratt’s mother, June Mullaney, reentered our lives: the grandmother we had fled in a midnight taxi ride soon after arriving in America in June 1940. She and my mother must have patched up their quarrel. She tried to convince my mother to return to America, where she would find us a place to live with a good school system. She would undertake to support her granddaughter, Janine, which would benefit the three of us with housekeeping funds.
I was being a teenage pain in the neck, my brother had left, and food and fuel were very limited. Sometime during that extremely cold winter, the pipes upstairs burst and water came cascading down the staircase, then froze.
My mother grabbed the lifeline that June threw out. Her continuing presence in our lives was the price we had to pay for her muchneeded management and support. Sylvia was simply not equipped to make a life for herself and two young girls. She was a war widow like many others but, instead of looking for work, she continued to inhabit the persona she forged for herself when she married Jack Pratt and accompanied him to southern Europe. I am sure she did not want to be an English housewife again and, even less, a working woman, certainly not a “shop-girl” or an “employee” as she called those who worked for others.
Her best qualities were endurance and cheerfulness. She learned to lower her expectations, to become thrifty and buy nothing but necessities. She became an enthusiastic and good cook using simple, basic ingredients. She would have made the right man a good wife.
Thus, about a year after we arrived in England, we re-immigrated to the United States, sponsored once again by our not-so-wicked grandmother. We packed up our belongings and had them shipped. This time, we sailed first class on the Queen Mary. What was my mother thinking? What I remember of the voyage is mainly the dining room, which was vast with multi-course dinners, most of which I didn’t eat.
CHAPTER 22
1947: America Redux
In the summer of 1947, two years after we had left America to return Home, we once again arrived in New York City. This time, we made our way to Winchester, Virginia, the town June had selected for us because of its endowed public high school. No one ever accused June Mullaney of being stupid: self-serving, despotic, and often cruel, but not stupid. She must have gone to the library, where there would have been a public record of high schools around the country with their academic standing and resources. It was a great choice.
Thus, we closed the door on Europe and on the dream of returning that had kept my mother going during the lonely five years of war and eventual loss of her husband. She proved once again to be resilient and optimistic. Her taste for adventure was an advantage here, unlike later when it became a reflex reaction to discontent and uncertainty. While most people react to disaster by digging in their heels and turning their backs to the wind, my mother always took flight. But this time, this move engineered by our wise ogre of a grandmother was the best one we ever made. It gave us nearly 10 years of stability, protection, and nourishment. It saw me through my teenage years and beyond. The path was somewhat rockier for my sister who, more closely tied to her grandmother, paid a higher price. Whereas June had no interest in my upbringing, she was determined to fine-tune Janine’s.
When we first arrived in Winchester, we stayed as paying guests in the home of Nellie and Sandy Baker. Their house was modeled on the Southern plantation, with white columns set on high ground above Washington Street in the old residential section of town. During the 1950s and later, when my generation began to make money, old houses like this one were snapped up by the new entrepreneurs who modernized them. But just after the war when we arrived, prosperity was a good 10 years away. Winchester was not badly off, as it had a regional hospital that provided jobs and attracted professionals to the area, and also a thriving apple business.
Nellie Baker, or “Miss Nellie” as she was known, was a small, dignified woman with white hair, a one-time beauty who welcomed us as family. We had spent the war years in Savannah, after all, where she had relatives and some of my mother’s friends were known to her. Sandy was a small thin man with a lock of graying hair falling over his forehead and a perpetual cigarette between his fingers. He did not say much.
The house was large, with many bedrooms—all poorly lit. Virginia creeper, a kind of ivy that turns brilliant red in the fall, covered the house and most of the windows. When electricity replaced gas, usually only one electric outlet was provided per room, so modern fixtures and lamps required extension cords. These increased over the years until they festooned the rooms, running along the baseboards, looping over the furniture.
My mother had agreed to let Janine live for a time with June in France so she might attend a French school and continue with the horseback riding she loved. When June arrived to collect her granddaughter, she was horrified by the possibility of fire. A Yankee, she was used to less primitive electrical systems. She located the escape routes— large windows far from the ground many with broken sashes that would not open.
My private plan was to break the window and climb down the vines for help, as Nancy Drew, girl detective, would have done. Although we tried not to touch any of the wires, mild shocks were an everyday occurrence.
June had spent the war years at Sunnytop, her farm in New Hampshire where we had landed seven years before from Portugal, and whence had fled on that midnight taxi ride after Sylvia and June cataclysmically clashed over loyalties. Remember, our stepfather had hired a German nurse for his children in the ’30s. I suspect he and his mother admired German culture, and some of that admiration lasted into the early war years. But a lot of dark water, both historic and personal, had flowed under the bridge. June was now a benefactor; her son was the devil.
We ate our meals with the family, cooked and served by Mary, the black maid. Miss Nellie treated her like a slave, beating her (it was rumored) when displeased. No one else entered the kitchen; it was a room of black encrusted pans—and cockroaches. When I found one in my stewed tomatoes, Mary took away the plate, removed it, then returned it to me.
Almost every family I knew had one house servant and a man who did yard work. Otherwise, the black population was invisible to the white world. It went to different schools, different stores in different parts of town. As newcomers from another, older world, we simply accepted what we found. We were welcomed as family members from the old country, and we, in turn, accepted and were grateful for the hospitality.
Years later, after I moved North, I realized how different things would have been for us if our language had not been English or if we had landed in some other part of the country. The North would not have been as welcoming, nor would the West or Midwest. Like a homing pigeon, my mother moved South during the war until she found Savannah. Our second attempt to find a home in America, aided by June’s intelligence, was even more successful. This time, we found our English community in Virginia.
Through Nellie Baker, I met young people of my age—children of her friends and relatives—and they became my first friends. Some were aristocratic Southerners whose families
had been planters in preCivil War days; all of them were connected to leaders of the community. This group of young people even had a name. They called themselves “The Crowd.”
All of us were about 15, one year into high school. For many of these young people, high school was the cut-off between public education and preparatory school. Even Handley High, with its large endowment and high academic standing, did not fulfill the social or perhaps educational requirements for this privileged group. With one or two exceptions, all my friends were enrolled in private schools to prepare them for college. I was shocked and disappointed when I discovered none of my new friends were going to be my schoolmates. I was once again going to school with strangers.
My other, more profound problem was that the principal of Handley High school, Mr. Browning, would not give me credit for work I had done in England and insisted I enter the first year of high school— ninth grade. This put me a year behind my age-mates. I protested that I had been near the end of secondary school in England but he was unyielding. It was a matter of credits. I was angry and humiliated but in those days you did not argue with the principal.
John Handley High School was named for the judge who endowed it. An Irishman, he immigrated to Pennsylvania and made his fortune in the steel mills. Although he never lived in Winchester, he often visited close friends and is said to have felt a deep connection to the town. He gave a public library and an endowed public school system. These were the years before integration. Besides Handley High School, there was William Douglas high school for African-Americans as well as separate primary schools. These schools were built and are maintained today by public funds and the Handley bequest. “Barring some financial disaster, this fund will remain, as Judge Handley intended it to remain, as a perpetual contribution to the education of the children of Winchester.” (Quarles, John Handley and The Handley Bequests to Winchester, Virginia.)
Handley High is a Greek Revival building with white Doric columns set on high ground, surrounded by green grass and shrubs, above the football field and surrounding neighborhood streets. Its generous endowment enabled the school to offer programs and hire teachers of a higher quality than many public schools. Those of us in the college-bound program were expected to take combinations of Latin, a modern language, algebra, geometry, general science, chemistry, physics, biology, numerous English courses, and a variety of other electives. I chose typing and shorthand, as I had one eye on earning a living as soon as possible. My other eye was kept firmly on what I loved: English literature.
For some months after we departed Nellie Baker’s firetrap, we lived in a duplex on the extension of Loudoun or Main Street while we waited for our furniture to arrive from England. Across the street lived a family who became our friends. Irving O’Connell was Irish: a tall, large, white-haired man with a limp. His wife, Beatrice, had served in the Woman’s Army Corps during the war, and had parked her two children with relatives for the duration. Little Bea, as her daughter was known, was beautiful, with the dark hair and white skin of the Irish. Her brother, Evan, was said to be highly intelligent and was away at school even as a child.
This family befriended us in very practical ways. Irving’s profession as a contractor/plumber made him a lot of money. He liked my mother in the way that men always liked her. I don’t think they actually had an affair, but he was always hanging around. He repaired the plumbing for us and fixed the broken switches. Beatrice, who did not seem to worry about the nature of her husband’s interest, was also a friend. “A diamond in the rough” was Sylvia’s characterization of Irving (like her brother-in-law, Harold, who heaved the tomato at my sister). She believed Beatrice had married beneath her (like her own sister, Jesse), but she never discouraged Irving’s interest.
Little Bea became the wife of the poet Theodore Roethke, her teacher in college. The wedding was across the street. Our hosts served mint juleps, a Southern tradition. Disappointed because there seemed to be no bourbon in my silver goblet of ice, sugar syrup, and mint, I complained to Irving, who was always teasing me. He frowned the way he had done when he caught me reading one of Frank Yerby’s bodicerippers, disguised as a historical novel. Not having a resident father, I did not recognize the protective impulse. I thought he was being critical or, worse, treating me like a child.
Theodore Roethke was a known drunk as well as a known poet. Little Bea was required (according to her mother) to bring him whiskey before he could get out of bed in the morning. Beatrice and my mother mourned the fate of this beautiful young girl in the thrall of an old goat, even if a famous poet. Drunk at his wedding, he danced with all the women in turn, taking each one in his arms for a spin. He could not read them his poems, so he danced with them instead.
Slim volumes of his poems had been placed on a small table in the corner of the room. I watched someone pick up one of these and turn it over without opening it as if it were a shard of ancient pottery: a mysterious object from another world. When I started reading and writing poetry, I found his poems generous and accessible in a way that poetry often was not. Later, I studied poetry at Syracuse University with Tess Gallagher, one of his students,.
My mother started looking for a house to buy and settled on one in the country on the main road to Berryville, a small, historic town where many old families owned property. They all had cars, of course. We had had no car since my mother’s minor accident with the milk truck. What would happen to you, she said, if something happened to me? I have spent a lot of time asking myself that question. The possibilities, unthinkable at the time, later seemed almost sensible. I would have been sent to England to live with my father, and Janine would have been brought up by June, as was Jack’s daughter by his first wife.
I suppose this imagined scenario is a version of the kidnapped-byfairies or adopted-child story: alternative lives imagined—or wished for—by dissatisfied children with active imaginations. My sister would have been worse off, as June was a proven tyrant, intolerant of dissent—as Janine discovered when she dropped out of college. I would have lived with a stepmother and sister in postwar England, but I would probably have been educated and trained as a teacher. I would also have known my brother. I believe this would have been good for me. As it was, Mummy, Janine, and I struggled to keep our rudderless boat afloat.
The house was new and small, another brick bungalow similar to the one in Savannah. Set back from the main road on a plot of treeless and rocky terrain, it must have seemed private and manageable to a single woman with two children. Perhaps the house triggered happy memories. There were small grocery stores that still delivered to your house, and my mother’s new friends all agreed to come and carry her to town for bridge and luncheons. I would be dependent on the bus for getting back and forth to school, as would my sister when she returned from France.
Our furniture arrived from England in crates. In one crate, we discovered a mouse that had somehow survived the trip. Mummy nurtured the mouse as she had nurtured the squirrels we brought home in Savannah. It was an English mouse after all, a fellow creature, far from home. Soon, however, the mouse made friends with local mice, and a new family of international mice appeared. Finally, traps were bought and set. The mice either died or fled to the wild.
Meanwhile, I entered the ninth grade at Handley High with a huge chip on my shoulder. Once school began, I very quickly became a star of the English classes, since I read everything long before it was due for class. Grammar was a bore, I thought, but providentially 10th grade was devoted to it and, combined with my appetite for books, I became a competent writer and excellent speller. One year, I even won the essay prize.
At first I would have little to do with my classmates, all of whom were a year or so younger. I continued to hang out with my new friends on weekends and soon started dating somewhat older boys, some in high school, some already out of school and working. Mainly, I was a sponge, soaking up everything that would help me grow up. I had no way of discriminating what would suit me, so I did a lot of disca
rding along the way. This did not seem a problem at the time. For all my reading, I did not acquire any real ethical sense until later. Hunger drove me: for experience, acceptance, and pleasure. I certainly did not know what I liked or what I could do, but I was trying to find out. Fortunately for me, the culture in which I was living was extremely protective of smart, pretty white girls.
It has become an accepted belief in our democracy that money equals class standing. This was not always the case. Genteel poverty and its pretensions have been with us as long as outrageous poverty. Tennessee Williams wrote about it in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire in the mid-20th century and more recently we have seen Grey Gardens, the documentary, and later the musical, about the impoverished relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
I continued to see members of The Crowd, who were one or two years ahead of me in school. I also cultivated a friendship with the daughter of the principal, a tall, shy girl with few friends. She was older than I was, but this did not seem to matter. I often went to her house after school and spent the night or the weekend. This soon began to anger my mother, who thought I should come home. She called me selfish. She was right. I did not care. I hated living outside town in a small, new house on a rocky hillside: that was not the old Winchester I had fallen in love with, the one covered in Virginia creeper.
The next summer, June returned from France with Janine. I had been invited to a party by one of The Crowd but had no party dress. June, having spent years in the fashion industry, set to work making me a dress from an old one of hers. It was pink taffeta with puffy sleeves and probably a sash. This was my first dancing party, so I had no idea what was the right thing to wear. I had taken dancing lessons during the war when we lived in Hendersonville but had probably not danced since. I must have been very nervous but determined.
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