Upper Bohemia
Page 18
A day or so later, Aunt Carolyn took me to Grand Central and put me on a train to Boston, where my father was waiting for me. It was already dark when we reached the dirt road that leads from Route 6 to Horseleech Pond. I was lying on the backseat, half asleep. My father was a good driver, but he went fast over bumps. If I opened my eyes and saw trees speeding by, I was sure we were going to crash into one of them. Every time we climbed a hill, I was afraid that when we reached the top, the car would keep on going up and we would be lost in the sky forever.
Except for the fact that Mougouch and my father had a new baby, Susannah, born in April, the days on Horseleech Pond followed their familiar pattern—walking on sand, walking on pine needles, fresh water, saltwater, avoiding lily pads, and, at the ocean, diving through waves or doing belly flops over them. At low tide I liked to stand in shallow water at one end of a sand flat and then step into the V where small waves coming from different directions converged and bubbled up around my ankles. Standing in this vortex was like being in the middle of the universe.
The only bad thing that summer was that Mougouch was exhausted from having two babies (Antonia was only one and a half) as well as four other girls to look after. Little things bothered her. She got furious, for example, when she found what she thought was my mother’s lipstick under her bureau. I didn’t tell her, but that lipstick had belonged to my father’s third wife, Dasya, not to my mother.
My father, Natasha, Mike (Blair’s boarding school roommate), and Maro in front of a turkey house porch, 1952
One night we had a bonfire on the shore of the pond. Mougouch told us girls to observe it carefully, because afterward we were going to draw our impressions of the fire and there would be a prize for the best drawing. She gave us a big box of colored pencils and drawing pads with beige cloth covers and beige cotton ties to keep them closed. These notebooks had once belonged to her dead husband, the painter Arshile Gorky, and there were a few of his drawings on the first pages of mine. I drew an orange and yellow fire rising from red coals and surrounded by a black sky. To my surprise, my drawing won the prize—a box of sugar doughnuts. Mougouch must have chosen my drawing instead of Maro’s to be nice. She was always extra nice to me, even better than a mother. I tried to be extra nice back. I did things like clearing the table or holding Antonia to earn Mougouch’s approval.
In August Blair and I took a train to Bath, Maine. Gaga picked us up at the station and drove us to her house high above the ocean in Small Point. Life here was much less formal than it had been at 63 Garden Street. Screen doors slammed, lunch was like a picnic on the porch. Since I didn’t have many summer clothes, Gaga took me into Bath and bought me a Lanz of Slazburg jumper. It was pink with two rows of rickrack above the hem and small pearl buttons down the front. It was the best dress I had ever owned. As she had when we lived with her in Cambridge, Gaga played the piano while Blair and I danced. We wore the matching ballet costumes from our Mexico City ballet school. Blair looked glamorous in hers. I just looked chubby and cute.
Near Gaga’s house was a steep path that wound through a thicket of small pines and down to a beach that was hemmed in on either side by rock cliffs. The sand was darker than our Truro beach sand and full of pebbles and small shells. Once, at low tide Blair and I walked around the cliff on the right side of the beach and followed a little path going up through some woods. We wanted to see where the path led. Suddenly Blair remembered that Gaga had warned us not to go around the cliff. By the time we had climbed back down to the shore, the tide had come in and waves were breaking against the outer edge of the rock promontory. I didn’t think we would be able to get around and back to Gaga’s beach, but Blair said we had to. “Wait until the next wave pulls back,” she said. “Then we’ll make a run for it while the water is shallow.” “Now!” she shouted, and we ran through the receding wave and made it around the rock just as the next wave came crashing down.
Blair and me (in Mexican ballet costumes) with Gaga’s dog, Echo, on Gaga’s porch in Smallpoint, ME, 1952
29 Betrayal
Back in Mexico City that fall, living with Carlos Basurco became increasingly tense. Once he got into such a rage at our maid that he pushed her down the stairs. At night I could hear shouting at the other end of the apartment. One Saturday morning my mother came into my room with a small canvas bag. “Pack up your nightgown, toothbrush, and your hairbrush. You’ll also need a change of clothes.” She looked scared, which was unusual for her. “We have to leave right now.” I grabbed Buttoneyes. “Can I take him?” She said I could, so I squished him into the top of my bag. Even with the living room door closed, I could hear the squawks and screeches of Carlos’s bow moving over his violin. We did not say good-bye to him, we just snuck out the door and raced down the stairs. The Coche de Mama was parked right outside. We jumped in and drove to San Ángel. My mother explained that she was leaving Carlos and that I was to stay at the Renoufs’ until she could figure out what to do next.
At the Renoufs’ I slept in Edward Renouf’s soundproof office where he occasionally saw patients for psychoanalysis. The room was close to the front door, so at night I had to force myself not to listen for intruders. One morning when I was making my bed, I found a scorpion tucked into the end of the mattress. Edward Renouf removed it with a pair of tongs. Even after he killed it, the scorpion’s tail rose up to strike. I pretended that I was used to scorpions. I was a guest. I should not make trouble.
I had been living with the Renoufs for a week when my mother came to pick me up. I stuffed my belongings into my bag, said good-bye to the Renoufs, and went out to the Coche de Mama. I almost didn’t get in. Carlos was in the driver’s seat. As we headed north along Insurgentes Avenue, no one spoke. Finally, Carlos turned his head and fixed his obsidian eyes on me. “I hear you are afraid of me,” he said in a mocking voice. Now I hated Carlos even more than I had before and I hated my mother, too. She had betrayed me. She should not have told Carlos what I had said. It meant she cared more about him than about me. In the days that followed, I refused to speak to Carlos, and I answered my mother with monosyllables. Luckily, my life at Parque Melchor Ocampo didn’t last much longer. A week or so later, my mother told me she was leaving Carlos for good and that I was going to spend the rest of the school year with my father, who had bought a whole house on Myrtle Street on Boston’s Beacon Hill. There was lots of room for me.
This time my mother and I flew to New York together. We stayed with Aunt Carolyn while we visited Granny. The walls in Granny’s apartment were even browner than they had been in 1948 when we left New York. Although she had been treated several times with electric shock, her cycle of depression and mania continued. When she was manic, she talked on the telephone nonstop. My mother would hold the receiver far from her ear or she would put the phone down and leave the room. In her manic phases, Granny would go to Bloomingdale’s and shop as if she were a millionaire. Aunt Carolyn had to return everything she bought. When depressed, Granny would grab my hand and ask, “Is everything all right?” I forced myself not to pull my hand away. “Everything is okay,” I told her in the most soothing voice I could muster.
Aunt Carolyn was my mother’s opposite. She was good-looking but not quite beautiful. When they were girls, my grandfather was seduced by his oldest daughter’s beauty. It was obvious that my mother was his favorite. She remembered being allowed to read at the table even though her parents knew it was bad manners. Aunt Carolyn was not given this privilege. She was less fascinating, less of a rebel force. My mother was given permission to leave the Chapin School early each day in order to study painting at the Art Students League. She longed for freedom and sometimes she took it. With a friend, she made a plan to climb onto Chapin’s roof to meet some boys from a school next door. Her friend got scared and backed out, so my mother went to the roof alone. She was caught. When she was brought before the student council, its president, Anne Morrow (later Lindbergh) said she would pray for my mother.
Aunt Carolyn
and her son, Jim Sheffield, with Blair and my mother in Central Park, 1938
My mother and Aunt Carolyn ice skating in Central Park, c. 1920
Aunt Carolyn moved in high social circles. She was married to a prominent lawyer named Frederick Sheffield. Their friends were people like Herbert Brownell (Eisenhower’s attorney general), Laurance Rockefeller, and John Lindsay, who, after graduating from Yale law school in 1948, joined my uncle Freddy’s law firm and later served as New York’s mayor. Aunt Carolyn’s Fifth Avenue apartment was furnished with proper upper-class furniture—lots of mahogany. She always wore subdued, expensive, non-body-revealing clothes, and she belonged to a fashionable women’s club. My cousins went to the best schools. Even though Aunt Carolyn’s youngest daughter Ann was a year younger than me, I was in awe of her. She must have been really smart to do so well at the Brearley School. I didn’t think I could ever get into that school. Even though I did not want Aunt Carolyn to be my mother, I wished my mother were more like her. After a couple of days, my mother could no longer tolerate Aunt Carolyn’s critical gaze. Before taking off to visit an artist friend in Springs on Long Island, she put me on a train for Boston, where my father picked me up and took me to his new house at 83 Myrtle Street.
30 Myrtle Street
The Myrtle Street house was at the top of Beacon Hill not far from the State House. This area, called “the back side of the hill,” was considered to be a slum even though it was only a few blocks from the hill’s fashionable section. Most of the narrow brown houses with stoops were occupied by Italian families. Their children played on the street, but Maro and Natasha and I never played with them. They already had their cliques and hangouts. We were new people. They didn’t need us.
When I arrived in Boston, Maro and Natasha had already started at the Brimmer and May School. Mougouch charmed the headmistress, and I was allowed to join the seventh grade immediately. The teachers were good, especially the art teacher. Team sports were a problem. I was outfitted with a dark blue gym costume complete with navy bloomers. They gave me shin guards and a hockey stick, and a bus took the hockey players to a field outside of the city. I also learned to dribble a basketball across the school’s gymnasium and how to shoot baskets. At both games I was the worst player in my class, so I just tried to keep out of my teammates’ way.
By January I had made a friend, Pattie Sullivan, who was the only other fat girl in my class. Pattie seemed not to mind being fat. She felt popular anyway, and she was—perhaps being rich and clever gave her extra confidence. She always wore a plaid pleated skirt and a dark blue wool Scotch cap with a band of plaid trim. Her white blouses were perfectly ironed. Most days she and I walked home from Brimmer and May together. We crossed Chestnut Street and started the climb up Beacon Hill to Pattie’s red brick house on Louisburg Square, one of the fanciest places on the Hill. As I continued on alone up to Myrtle Street, the streets got darker, the houses looked squeezed together and were less well kept.
Mougouch treated me like another daughter, just as my father treated Maro and Natasha as if they were his own children. That they called him Daddy no longer bothered me. By now I thought of them as real sisters. For a time, they even adopted Phillips as their last name. To ward off the winter cold, Mougouch had a navy-blue woolen cape (a copy of a French policeman’s cape) made for me. Maro and Natasha already had identical capes. I was grateful to be included. When we walked to school, we felt like triplets.
For Gaga’s sake and for the sake of Mougouch’s mother, Essie Magruder, Antonia and Susannah were going to be christened at Trinity Church. I asked if I could be christened, too. I wanted to be christened because I wanted Mougouch to be my mother. For godmothers I chose her and Anna Matson. My father chose Fuller Potter to be my godfather. Mougouch took me to the Chubbettes department at Filene’s to buy a new dress for the christening. It was turquoise, too bright a color for a christening, I thought, but it was the only dress that fit. Maro, Natasha, and I started going to Sunday school. I listened attentively to Bible stories, and I treasured the pictures of Jesus and Mary and saints that they gave us to take home. Learning about Christianity was for me a little like learning about birds: just as I had memorized the images in the bird book Gaga gave me, now I stored Bible pictures in my head.
Gaga and Essie came to the christening. During the ceremony, which, since there were three of us, took quite a while, Mougouch had an amused smile. My father looked serious. Even though he was not at all religious, he was solemn in churches. I was solemn, too. I figured that being christened was a way of attaching myself to God and of making him love me if he really did exist up there. For a christening present, Essie gave me a Bible with very thin crinkly paper, a black leather cover, and a ribbon to mark your place. After being baptized I became devout. I put a stool next to my bed and on it I placed a candle and my Bible. Before going to sleep at night I read a few pages, sometimes the Old Testament, sometimes the New. This phase only lasted a few months. By the time I got to Horseleech Pond in June, I had forgotten about God.
Until a French au pair girl named Almut arrived to help with the cooking and cleaning, Mougouch had had to clean the house by herself, and it had four floors with a steep, narrow, carpeted staircase. When she vacuumed the stairs, Mougouch wore a red cotton bandana to keep her hair out of her eyes. It made her face look red with anger. We learned to keep away from her when she was wielding the vacuum. At Myrtle Street I did everything I could to make Mougouch like me. I didn’t want to be a burden. If I was agreeable and a good influence on my younger sisters, she would be glad to keep me around.
Maro was two and a half years younger than me, but she acted the same age. She was funny, mischievous, and not at all shy. She was my best friend. No matter who was in the room, Maro always had to be the most powerful and dramatic person present. Her background was much more interesting than Blair’s and mine, she said. We were just boring New Englanders, whereas her father was Russian from the Caucasus. Or maybe he was Armenian; she wasn’t sure. My father was just a talented printmaker who sometimes painted. Her father was a famous painter.
Arshile Gorky’s paintings hung in the living room of our Myrtle Street house, and Mougouch did her best to keep the art world aware of Gorky’s importance. I hoped that my father didn’t mind being married to a woman who believed so passionately in her first husband’s genius. Maro and I used to look at her father’s paintings and try to figure out what his forms meant. In one canvas we saw a rabbit with perfectly depicted rabbit ears. Bugs Bunny we called him. Gorky’s curving, swooping lines and his visceral shapes made me wonder why on earth he had painted them the way he did.
Maro used to take out all of her dead father’s art books and study them as she lay on her stomach on the living room carpet. Often, I joined her. The book that I liked best was about Toulouse-Lautrec. It was a view into such a different world—women doing the can-can in a music hall or drinking absinthe alone at a café table. Maro was convinced that she drew so well because she had inherited Gorky’s genius. But when Brimmer and May had a contest and all the girls were asked to make a poster for a lecture that the cartoonist Al Capp (who created the comic strip Li’l Abner) was going to give at the school, Al Capp chose my poster as the best of all. The prize was Fifty Centuries of Art, a book about the history of art for young people published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Memorizing the paintings in this book was even more fun than memorizing birds in my bird book or the holy images I took home from Sunday School.
We loved Natasha, but Maro and I teased her by running away from her, racing from the front hall to the kitchen, through a swinging door into the dining room, and then back into the front hall. Since all three of us were laughing, it didn’t seem mean. Natasha lived a fantasy life inside her six-year-old head. We often called her “poor Natasha.” Even my father teased Natasha. She spent a lot of time cutting up paper to make little things, and when he passed the door of her bedroom, he would say, “Little tiny pieces of paper!”