Upper Bohemia

by Hayden Herrera

  My mother in the window seat in the Big House living room, c. 1942

  My father was not always brave. He was afraid of heights. He told me that once he had climbed down a mountain to a ledge where he discovered that he couldn’t go further down, nor could he climb back up. I don’t know how he finally escaped, but his story left me with a terror of narrow ledges and precipices. Also, I think he was afraid of rats. Off the short hallway that led to Blair’s and my bedrooms was a door that opened onto cellar stairs. I had never been down there. It was a dark and scary place. One evening, when he heard scurrying noises coming from the cellar, our father flew into a rage against varmints and went down with his gun and shot rats.

  Other animals that irritated my father were my mother’s baby pigs. She maintained that pigs were intelligent and adorable. Without consulting my father, she accepted two piglets from a friend, and she made a pen for them. Some of the time she let them loose in the house. She was not squeamish and didn’t mind picking up their droppings. But my father was furious when they rooted about in his vegetable garden. Years later he told me that when my mother went to New York City, probably to see a lover, he became so fed up with her pigs that he put them in her closet. They had diarrhea. When my mother returned, opened her closet, and saw her ruined clothes, she said nothing. No reproach at all. I guess she felt guilty about her trip.

  Things had not been going well between my parents since the miserable period when he was working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was probably then that my mother began a love affair with a scientist named George Senseney whom she met through my father’s younger sister, Madelyn O’Neil. My uncle Horton O’Neil recalled that in the spring of 1943, he and Madelyn had cocktails with my parents at Manhattan’s New Weston Bar. They were joined by George Senseney, an old friend of Horton’s. After about three drinks each, everyone was, Horton said, “fairly crocked.… George and Lybie got into a cab to leave and Jack, in trying to go with them very nearly pulled the door off its hinges.”

  By the summer of 1943 my parents were separated. From Cornwall, Connecticut, my mother wrote to my father’s mother saying that she was sorry that the marriage had failed. Blair and I were, she said, “well and good and happy… easier to manage, calmer and sweeter than ever before.” She attributed this improvement to her own contentment. But, she said, “Hayden has boils.… She is incredibly good and patient about them even when they are most painful.” She told her mother-in-law that Blair and I would go to Dalton in the fall. “Hayden yearns for school. She looks just like Jack and is adorable.”

  My grandmother wrote back (August 30, 1943): “I think that you both have made a fetish of your own happiness and that seems ironically to defeat its own ends. You had a lot to put up with, for you were not meant for domesticity and solitude and should marry a rich man.” On that same date, my father wrote his mother that he and our mother were “trying to adjust the children as gradually as possible.” Sometimes we stayed in the Big House with both our parents, and sometimes our father came to see us after our mother took us to live in New York in October 1943. That fall he stayed on Horseleech Pond. When it got too cold, he moved to Manhattan. My parents applied for a divorce in the Barnstable Court. In those days, cruel and abusive treatment was grounds for divorce. “He put pigs in my closet,” my mother told the judge. The divorce was granted on July 11, 1944.

  4 Divorce

  For a long time after my mother left him, my father was sad. He thought that if he just waited, she and George Senseney would tire of each other. He arranged a meeting with George’s red-haired wife and tried to persuade her to keep calm and wait. But she was in such a fury that divorce was the only answer. My father thought his marriage was a good one. My mother’s intelligence, beauty, and strength made life interesting. He enjoyed her adventurous approach to the body. She was fearless, game for anything. Years later he still maintained that she was the right wife for him. They came from similar backgrounds. They both wanted to live simply, to be close to nature, and to paint. In addition, they had two small daughters. The marriage should have worked.

  Even if he had waited, my mother probably would not have gone back to him. Sexual desire was not the problem. It was my father’s lack of drive. It made him seem weak. He had just enough money from a family allowance to not have to work for a living, and he didn’t work hard at being an artist. My mother liked men with ambition, men like George Senseney who bristled with energy.

  My father was not a man to stay long without female companionship. In February 1944 he met Dasya Chaliapin, the twenty-three-year-old divorced daughter of the renowned Russian opera singer Feodor Chaliapin. In January 9, 1945, from his apartment at 1407 Third Avenue, he wrote to his mother that he was about to marry Dasya, whom he described as “a lovely, talented creature—of great warmth.”

  Occasionally our father would collect Blair and me and take us to Central Park. I do not remember ever visiting him in the apartment he shared with Dasya. During our first autumn in New York, he photographed us in the park with Hamlet. We were so happy to see our Cape Cod dog again and happy to see our father, too. He was attentive. We did our best to be jolly because he was sad. We tried to be good children so that he would stay with us forever.

  Me in Central Park, NY, with Hamlet, 1944

  Blair, Hamlet, and me, Central Park, 1944

  In the mid-1940s, my father made a series of black-and-white etchings that reflected his unhappy state of mind and his distaste for city life. He set up a small printing press in Dasya’s mother’s apartment on Central Park South. The etchings he produced were as sardonic and bitter as George Grosz’s caricatural images of decadence in 1920s Berlin. Some prints had a similar cast of characters: prostitutes, fat lascivious businessmen, alcoholics at a cabaret. One etching was of a subway car packed with naked people holding on to leather straps. My favorite was of an apartment building imagined as if one whole wall were removed. In the grid of small square rooms, he drew naked men and women—some of them up to no good. In 1947, one of his etchings graced the cover of Life magazine and, thanks to Serge Chermayeff, who was now president of Chicago’s Institute of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago gave my father an exhibition.

  To make these prints he invented a new etching technique. My father had a scientific bent—something encouraged, no doubt, by his father and by Dr. Rollins—and printmaking allowed him to experiment with different chemicals and different ways of drawing on the copper plate. He mostly avoided color. He was, I think, afraid of self-expression. Carrying on about your own emotions seemed self-absorbed and vulgar to him. Most of his subsequent art explored the landscape. He was steeped in Thoreau. He wanted his images to be about the observation of nature—not nature filtered through a temperament, but nature itself.

  When he was in the Big House, my father had various projects to keep him busy. He moved six small turkey brooder houses and set them along the shore at the west end of Horseleech Pond, the place where the road he had bulldozed between the ocean and the pond ended. Five turkey houses became bedrooms. The sixth, placed behind the others, served as a bathroom. He named the pine needle path in front of the five bedroom houses Commercial Street and the path in front of the bathroom Bradford Street. These were the names of the two main streets in Provincetown. For a living room/kitchen he built a one-room, eighteen-by-twenty-foot cinder block house with a roof that pitched upward toward the pond. The wall that looked out onto the pond was mostly glass. In the middle was a fireplace. My father explained that the house resembled a lean-to and the fireplace was like the fire in front of a lean-to’s opening that a camper might light in order to keep out wild animals at night. On the pond side of the building he added a perfectly proportioned porch whose front edge, depending on rainfall, was only two or three feet from the shore.

  Turkey Houses

  We began to spend summers at this camp, which we called the Turkey Houses. At first, I missed the Big House. It was a real house with real walls, and with one room le
ading to another. The turkey houses were shacks, just barely shelters. Instead of a hallway we had pine-needle-covered paths. We had to go outside to go to the bathroom and at night, I tried not to run from the bathroom back to my cabin, because if I did run, I saw murderers behind every bush. A few years later, my father’s fourth wife persuaded my father to sell the Big House. This was a loss. Even now, when I swim or canoe across the pond, I get a momentary pang when I look up through the trees to see the patches of gray clapboarding that, eighty years ago, my father nailed up. The Big House is the place where my mother and father were together. And they seemed happy.

  After the war my father bought a group of prefabricated, portable army barracks. They were military surplus, thus cheap. The only big expense was shipping them from Georgia, which cost $400. Although he was averse to spending money, these could be rental houses and he could live on the income. The summer before the houses were shipped, my father took me to the places where he might put them. Three would be built on Slough Pond (about three hundred feet from Horseleech), and two were to go on the dunes overlooking the ocean.

  Walking along Slough Pond’s shore with our feet in the water, my father and I stopped at possible house sites. When he asked me if I thought this or that patch of land would be a good place for a home, I always said yes, even though the only kind of house that I could picture so near the pond was a stick hut, like Eeyore’s in Winnie the Pooh. I stepped carefully, trying not to crush the pickerel reeds with their pointed purple flowers and making sure not to splash and scare away any turtle that might be sunning himself on a broken branch. Bullfrogs leapt into the water as we passed. My father didn’t like frogs. They kept him awake at night, so one summer he caught some big ones and put them into Slough Pond. Maybe these frogs that were now jumping away from our footfalls were those exiled frogs, but the racket that Horseleech Pond frogs still made at night made me wonder if the bullfrogs had returned home.

  When in the middle of winter, the army barracks arrived at the Wellfleet depot on a flatbed open rail car, their disassembled parts were warped and stuck together from exposure to rain in the South and then freezing temperatures in the North. It took a backhoe to pry the frozen sections apart and to lift them off the train. My father bulldozed roads to the houses’ sites and, one home at a time, the barracks were placed on a trailer and towed by a tractor into the woods. After putting the sections together, he added fireplaces, bathrooms, and concrete patios. For several years my father rented these cottages and then he sold them, most often to his tenants. The house on the hill was sold to an architect named Henry Hebbeln. The next house went to editor and film critic, Dwight Macdonald and his wife, Nancy, and the third one was bought by Peter and Vita Petersen (he was involved with export, and she was a painter) who six years later sold a half share to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and his wife, Marian. What we lost in privacy was made up for by having lively company. The children who lived in these houses became lifelong friends.

  Dwight Macdonald, c. 1950

  5 Manhattan

  When our mother picked Blair and me up from the Big House and took us to live in New York City in 1943 we did not at first live with her. She parked in front of a six-story building on Ninety-Sixth Street just east of Third Avenue and we climbed dark and windowless stairs to the apartment she had rented on the fifth floor. Our mother rang the buzzer, and Ellie opened the door. Ellie was an Irish woman she had hired to look after us. She had curly white hair held in place by a hairnet. Her pale, wrinkled skin sagged into folds at the bottom of her face, and it jiggled on the inside of her upper arms. Her hands moved a lot when she talked to our mother. To us she didn’t say much more than hello. Our mother had told us how much fun we were going to have with Ellie. Ellie didn’t look mean, but I wasn’t sure. Some old ladies in fairy tales want to put children in the oven or make them go to sleep for a hundred years.

  When our mother finished talking to Ellie, she bent down, kissed us each on the cheek, turned, and stood with her back to us in the doorway. Her body filled the opening. To me she was golden, luminous like the sun, different from our father who was silver like our pond. Her shoulders were set. She did not look back. I wanted to hold onto her, but I knew she wouldn’t like it, so I just stood watching the top of her head disappear down the stairs. This is when I learned to squeeze my heart into a stone. Nothing can touch me. I am somewhere else. What is happening is not happening to me. When I lost sight of my mother, I tried to be like her and to tell myself that everything would be wonderful. I thought of food: yes, Ellie would cook us a delicious supper with ice cream for dessert.

  Ellie liked me, but she did not like Blair. I could tell because she let me sit on her lap and not Blair. When she brushed my hair, she would pat my head, and if I had a tangle, she would carefully work the hairs loose with her fingers so that it didn’t hurt. I was about to turn three, and I had a round face, blond hair, hazel eyes, and a wide smile that showed the gaps between my front teeth. Everything new in life enthralled me. Blair had long brown hair, blue eyes, and perfect classical features, but she was not jolly like me. Ellie used to trim our nails and save the little quarter moons that she cut off. “I’m keeping these,” she explained, “because when your mother comes, I can show them to her, and she will know that I am taking good care of you.”

  Me and Blair, New York, 1943

  When our mother came to see us, she brought chocolate éclairs from a nearby bakery. Or she brought presents, for me one of those push toys with a short pole attached to a cylindrical wooden cage containing small red, yellow, and blue balls. Pushing my toy down the hall and making the bouncing balls go pop, pop, pop, I felt so proud of myself, so strong. Every time our mother visited, she had to leave before reading a second story. If I begged her to stay, she got that angry look. I stopped asking.

  After a while our mother came and packed our suitcases. From now on we were going to live with her, she said. My chest pumped up with gratitude. She really wanted us. I was not at all sad to say good-bye to Ellie. My mother was the best person in the world. I loved the way she walked. I loved the way she talked. Her voice was a song. We took a taxi to 124 East Eighty-Fifth Street where she had been living. In the taxi, she explained that she had a new husband. His name was George Senseney and he was a scientist. We had to climb four flights of stairs to get to our top-floor apartment. My mother called it a railroad apartment because the rooms were laid out like train cars. The living room looked north onto Eighty-Fifth Street and east toward Lexington Avenue. My mother put potted geraniums in the sunny east window. There wasn’t much furniture, just a dining room table, a sofa, some ill-assorted chairs, and a Persian carpet upon which I lay and tried to count how many different kinds of flowers were woven into it. There was also a phonograph. In the late afternoon my mother played Bach and Vivaldi and sometimes Mozart. The music made all the air in the room seem peaceful, right up to the corners of the ceiling.

  The adjoining room, open to the living room, was meant to be a dining room, but my mother and George had put a big bed in there. Over the bed hung a red and orange paper butterfly kite from Chinatown. Blair and I bounced on our mother’s bed but after a few months, after our mother and George started bickering, both the bed and the butterfly began to have a bad atmosphere, so we stopped.

  Me, c. 1946

  After this bedroom came a long narrow hall off which were doors to the rest of the rooms. The first room was full of George’s electronic machines. They were huge and scary. We were not allowed to go into that room alone. He showed us how one of the machines worked. He called it an oscillograph. If you made a sound, wiggly lines of green light came on the screen, and if you made different noises the green lines changed shape. George was a specialist in radar. Sometimes he vanished without telling us where he was going. He went out west on secret missions. Later my mother told me he had worked for the Manhattan Project and he was at Los Alamos when they exploded a bomb in July 1945.

  After George’s equipment room
came my bedroom. It had a window looking out onto the building next door plus a small high up window that opened onto our long hall. Then, at the south end of the hall were the bathroom, the kitchen, and Blair’s room. Blair’s room was almost as big as the living room and it had an upright piano against the far wall. Blair took piano lessons. When I was old enough, I did, too, but I didn’t get much further than Diller-Quaile exercises and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Sometimes Blair had to move out of her room when our mother took a paying guest. The only paying guest I remember was a handsome young Swiss man named Hans von Somethingorother, who had sailed alone across the ocean in a small boat. Blair had a crush on him. I was in awe of him, so I didn’t dare open my mouth in his presence.

  My mother must have been doing her friend Nemone Balfour Gurievitch a favor—this man was Nemone’s lover. I do not know whether Nemone knew that around 1943 my mother had an affair with her husband David Gurievitch, the Russian-born doctor who became such an intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt. If Nemone knew, I guess it didn’t matter, for she and my mother remained lifelong friends. Both were rebels. Nemone astonished her aristocratic English family by becoming a singer and by marrying a Jew. She sang and recorded Scottish, English, and Irish ballads which she accompanied by playing the lute or the Irish harp. Her daughter, Grania Gurievitch, was and is my oldest friend. At Nemone’s musicals, Grania and I tried to look attentive, but the songs’ romantic intensity and Nemone’s earnest face were embarrassing.