Upper Bohemia

by Hayden Herrera

  Nineteen fifty-three—another Cape Cod summer with the usual activities: beach picnics, blueberry picking, riding ocean waves. Blair was sixteen, so she could go out at night with boys. Once when my father and Mougouch and Blair were out, Maro, Natasha, and I were allowed to sleep together on sofas in the main house rather than in our Turkey Houses. Blair came home from a date with Peter Chermayeff and told us that Peter had kissed her, but she didn’t really like it. (Another time she told us that he was a wonderful kisser.) She said that Peter had told her that he was going to marry Maro, Natasha, or Andrea Petersen, a pretty girl Maro’s age who lived right next door to Peter in one of our father’s army barracks houses on Slough Pond. None of my sisters knew about my crush on Peter. That night I cried into my pillow, but not loud enough for anyone to hear.

  Penny Jencks and her horse, Bobby, with Andrea, Maro, and Natasha, 1952

  31 Edward Norman

  Halfway through the summer, my mother called and said she wanted Blair and me to come and live with her in Provincetown. I did not want to leave Horseleech Pond. I think I loved the pond more than I loved my mother and father. The pond I could trust. It wasn’t going to leave me. When I was in the pond, every part of my body was held. Also, life with my father and Mougouch seemed more normal to me than life with my mother. I liked being one of a bunch of girls. My mother lived as if she were running at the edge of an abyss. Some of her adventures were exciting; others seemed destined to blast everything apart. I didn’t want to live in smithereens. I told my father that when he and Mougouch went to Italy at the end of the summer, I wanted to go with him. He said he would tell my mother that this was what I wanted. It was, he assured me, what he wanted, too.

  There was no getting out of going to live with my mother. She had rented two houses overlooking the bay in the west end of Provincetown. On the second floor the houses were joined by a bridge. The reason my mother could afford these houses was that she had a new lover and he was rich. When my father dropped Blair and me at my mother’s house, she came out and gave him a hug. I watched them closely to see if he had already told her about my wanting to go and live with him in Europe. My mother was relaxed, so I guessed that my father had not said anything yet. She showed Blair and me our new bedrooms on the first floor. Her own bedroom took up the whole top floor. Half of it she used as a studio. To get to it, you had to climb stairs that were more like a ladder and then raise a trap door. I was glad she was on another floor because I felt like being alone. In a few months I would turn thirteen, and I was moody. I missed Horseleech Pond. I spent a lot of time in my room.

  At what my mother always called “the legal drinking hour” (six o’clock), Edward Norman, her new man, came over from his house—the one next door connected to ours by a bridge. He was nice looking, slightly bald, and he had a soft, smooth voice. His manner was more formal than that of her other men. His clothes were more formal, too. He wore good-quality cotton slacks and Brooks Brothers–style shirts. Most of my mother’s artist friends dressed in old faded clothes. They didn’t have to go to offices. Also, they didn’t want to look rich. Edward gave Blair and me each a box of chocolates. He must have been trying to make us like him.

  During the first days in Provincetown, our mother took us along when she went to see friends like Roger Rilleau in his leather-working studio on Commercial Street. For Provincetown’s bohemians, Roger made Greek-style sandals with soles shaped to fit the wearer’s arch. My mother ordered a pair of sandals, and since they required several fittings, we went to Rilleau’s workshop often. I could see that my mother enjoyed having the handsome Roger touch her feet as he adjusted her sandals’ fit.

  Edward Norman, c. 1954

  Edward Norman and my mother, c. 1954

  We spent a lot of time at Herman and Sunny Tasha’s hilltop house on Provincetown’s East End. I knew them from other summers when Herman took our mother, Blair, and me out on his fishing boat for the Blessing of the Fleet. On Herman’s boat there was a lot of drinking. It didn’t matter: Sunny always made trays of brownies, and I ignored the rising hilarity of the adults’ tipsy voices. The only annoying thing was that my mother sat in the prow leaning back on her elbows as if she were relishing the sun and the breeze running through her hair. I thought she was posing for Herman Tasha’s benefit. She was what she called a “great beauty,” and she was flaunting it. My mother was wearing shorts and a wide leather belt, a low-cut shirt, and a huge Mexican silver cross that hung from a silver choker. The cross made me mad, too. My mother was against religion—she had been furious when I got christened. Even though she loved cathedrals, she disliked Catholicism, which in Mexico, she said, kept the campesinos ignorant and poor. I could tell that she wore the cross because it made her look poetic.

  Whenever I visited the Tasha’s ramshackle home, I entered through the back door, which led directly into the kitchen. Sunny would be at the stove flipping tinker mackerel. Although I didn’t like fish, I liked the crispy fish that Sunny cooked. I would make my way through several dark interior rooms and come out on the back porch where I would find my summertime best friend, Carla Tasha curled up on a beat-up swinging love seat. In the yard beneath a shade tree, a car tire hung from a rope. Carla and I took turns swinging on it. The Tashas’ goats and chickens would gather around, nosing and scratching about for something to eat.

  Our mother signed Blair and me up for sailing and ballet lessons. Other than dance classes, my mother had never bothered with lessons before, not even swimming lessons. Tennis and golf lessons were bourgeois, she thought. We spent most of the ballet classes preparing for a performance of The Nutcracker. Blair had a really good part—she was a seductive Arabian dancer wearing silk pantaloons and not much on top. I was a Russian dancer, a plump peasant galumphing around the stage.

  32 Beach Glass

  We had been living with our mother for a little over a week when she told me that my father had called and said that he wanted me to live with him in Florence. My mother said she would not allow this. She and my father were going to go to court to fight for custody of me. The court was in Barnstable, a big town about an hour away. I would have to appear before the judge and say which parent I wanted to live with. When she told me that I could not go to Italy, my mother seemed angry. Perhaps she was simply hurt. I had never seen her with hurt feelings, so I guessed it must be anger. She didn’t raise her voice, but her words had a glint, like steel. Her features looked as sharp as an Apache. Maybe it was true that she had Native American blood. I said I wanted to live with my father and that I didn’t want to go back to Mexico. I didn’t tell her, but I was tired of her succession of men. She refused to listen. I was sure she only wanted me with her because of her vanity. To have a daughter who did not want to live with her must have been humiliating.

  I stomped into my room and closed the door. I was so mad I couldn’t even cry, so I escaped from the house by a side door and went for a high-tide swim. Water always collected the pieces of me and put them back together. The bay was calm and clear with hardly any seaweed, but I liked our pond water better. At dinner that evening I refused to speak. I didn’t even look at Edward Norman. Blair talked and talked about a dancing party that she planned to give a few weeks hence. She didn’t notice that there was any tension.

  The next morning seagulls woke me early. They find clams on the sand flats, fly high up, and drop them on the rocks to break open their shells. Then they squabble about which gull gets to eat the clam. There is something melancholy about seagulls’ cries. They go on and on regardless of whether I hear them, and they will keep crying that same cry even after I am dead.

  With the tide out, the beach was hard and wide. Except for the tracks of seagulls, the first footprints were mine. When I walked under the old wharfs near our house, the air was cool and had a pungent smell that came from the bright-green ruffles of seaweed attached to the posts. To make my footprints disappear, I walked in the water for a little while. My mother would never find me. This beach had a lo
t of frosted sea glass. Every few feet I found another piece. Blue was the best, but hard to find. Maybe only broken Milk of Magnesia bottles made blue glass. Red glass was rare, too. There was a lot of brown and green and quite a bit of my favorites, a pale turquoise and a pinky lavender. I filled my pockets with the most interesting shapes. When I got home, I laid them out on my bureau. They were like little abstract sculptures.

  Later that day I walked two blocks east on Commercial Street to Dyer’s hardware store and bought copper wire. Back in my bedroom, I made a choker out of twisted wire and then wound copper wire around pieces of beach glass, crossing and recrossing the wire to create a strong design. I gave each piece of glass a three-inch length of wire so that I could attach it to the choker. Once I had enough necklaces, I set up a card table on the sidewalk. Passersby stopped. Some of them bought. My necklaces cost $1.50. I also made mobiles and a few collages out of beach glass. Nobody bought those. Occasionally I took necklaces and some clamshells that I had painted with seascapes and sold them on MacMillan Wharf. I timed it so that I would be ready when the Boston boat pulled in and hundreds of tourists poured down the wharf and into town. Some of them threw dimes into the bay so that local boys could dive for them. When one of them saw my wares, she cried, “Oh, look at that cute little Portuguese girl!” I was delighted to be taken for a fisherman’s daughter.

  My mother’s friends—especially her artist friends—loved my necklaces. One buyer was a rich lady who lived in one of my father’s beach houses. She ordered a necklace with green and brown glass to go with her brown eyes and dark brown hair. When I delivered it to her, she didn’t have the $1.50 to pay for it. She said she would pay me next time. She never paid, and I never forgot her debt. I liked making money. With money of my own I was safe. By the end of the summer I had made over one hundred and fifty dollars, which I deposited at the Seamen’s Savings Bank. I was so proud when Provincetown’s Advocate ran an article about me and my necklaces and how much I had earned.

  This was the first summer that I cared about getting a suntan. Edward bought Blair and me good-quality blue-and-red canvas air mattresses upon which we floated to get the backs of our legs brown. One day there must have been an unusual current and we suddenly found ourselves halfway across the bay. The sky beyond Long Point was turning dark. There was distant thunder. Paddling as fast as we could, we made it home just before the rain. Our mother had not even noticed we’d been gone. It was unfair: she gave us complete freedom, but she still wouldn’t let me go and live with my father.

  After a few weeks in Provincetown, I realized that the little bridge between my mother’s bedroom and Edward Norman’s bedroom in the house next door had a purpose. One morning I needed to ask my mother something and I climbed the ladder and pushed open the trap door. There was Edward naked and just about to climb on top of my naked mother. She screamed, and I closed the trap door and backed down the ladder. My heart pounding, I went into my room, shut the door, and tried to erase what I had seen from my mind. Neither my mother nor Edward ever mentioned the episode. I can still see my mother’s horrified face when she saw me.

  Being naked usually did not bother my mother. She loved her body and was happy to show it off. But for her, nudity was not an invitation. She was an aesthetic object. That summer, she hung a photograph of her naked breast with a cluster of wet grapes on top of it on the living room wall. I knew this photograph was meant to be artistic, but I didn’t want Blair’s and my friends to see her breast swelling like a sand dune and covered with goose bumps—the grapes must have been cold. I kept turning the photograph to the wall and my mother kept turning it back. You can still see the thumbtack holes.

  There were days when I forgot how angry I was with my mother. She was good at thinking up things that were fun to do, like taking us to the breakwater to gather mussels. The breakwater stretched far out into the bay and, leaping from rock to rock, I felt fleet as a deer. The sound of the water rushing through the gaps between boulders added to the feeling of risk. After lying on a rock to renew her tan, my mother would climb down into the water and pry mussels off the barnacle-covered boulders. At home she scrubbed the shells, cooked the mussels with a little wine and, together with melted butter and garlic bread, that was supper.

  My mother’s breast

  Maria Petrucci, Mary Grand, Edward Norman, and my mother in front of our Provincetown house, 1953

  She was having a good time introducing Edward Norman to all her friends. They liked him and were probably glad that he had money—his father had made millions as a founder of Sears Roebuck. But her friends surely noticed how high-strung Edward was. I overheard my mother telling a friend that he was wonderful but “hypersensitive.” That was a term she used for me, too. It felt like a compliment. She said that Edward had once had a nervous breakdown, but he had learned how to control his feelings. He was recently divorced from a beautiful and brilliant woman named Dorothy Norman (the woman who stole Alfred Stieglitz from Georgia O’Keeffe). She was a photographer, a writer, and a patron of the arts who was deeply involved in social causes. In late August, we drove to the other end of the Cape and stayed in Edward Norman’s large shingled “cottage” in Woods Hole. I loved being in a place where everything was good quality and where nothing was haphazard. My bedroom had twin beds with matching bedside tables, matching lamps, and matching bedspreads. The soft cotton towels had monograms. My mother never had anything that matched.

  When my friend, Grania Gurievitch and her mother, Nemone Balfour, came to visit us in Provincetown, Grania and I went to the movies and saw Anna Magnani in The Golden Coach. Flagrantly sexual with her cleavage bared like a weapon, Magnani had just started singing in a sultry voice when the theater’s door opened letting in unwanted daylight. My mother and Nemone marched down the aisle shouting, “Grania! Hayden! Come out immediately!” Heads turned. Crouching as low as possible so as not to disturb people in the seats behind us, we moved out into the aisle and followed our mothers onto the street. Full of rage and shame, I asked myself how could these women who slept with men who were not their husbands and didn’t feel in the least guilty about it decide that an Anna Magnani film was unsuitable for us?

  For her dancing party, Blair decorated our mother’s upstairs room with fishnets. Fishnets were the rage in Provincetown’s bohemia in the 1950s. Some people even wore pieces of fishnet on their heads. For music, we had a stack of Arthur Murray’s dance records. Blair and I had been playing them and practicing dance movements for days. Blair invited everyone from the Horseleech Pond area and from Wellfleet and Provincetown as well. The only friend my age was Grania. The trouble was that she was so good-looking and could act so grown-up, that Charlie, Mike, and Reuel danced with her but not with me. Maybe that was because Grania knew how to dance and how to talk to boys. I didn’t even know how to do the fox-trot, and I never learned to follow. Halfway through the party, Blair turned the lights down. Couples started necking. Grania and I went downstairs to bed.

  Me and Grania on Constant Dickinson’s boat, Provincetown, 1953

  Grania (in hat), Charlie Jencks, and Mike Macdonald on the beach, 1954

  In July 1953, my father wrote to Gaga about the progress of the custody fight:

  The conference yesterday between Lybie, myself and our two attorneys was rather a disappointment to me, although my lawyer seems encouraged.… It’s all very mysterious to me, and frankly Mougouch and I are thoroughly fed up with the whole business, and as far as I am concerned I’m going to put it completely out of my mind.

  He had already been through a nasty custody battle with my mother three years before. Then, as now, he grew tired of arguments and lawyers, and the whole process was irritating to Mougouch, who just wanted to get on with her life.

  All summer I held out the hope that my mother would relent, and I would sail to Italy with my father and Mougouch and my four younger sisters. My mother didn’t want to talk about it. When we did discuss it, my stomach churned, and my arms got tense as if I w
ere about to hit somebody. I would go into my room and shut the door. The problem was that I did not want to appear at the Barnstable Court to choose between my parents. The possibility of going to Italy with my father began to seem like a dream—a dream that combined the comfort of being part of a family with the fear of being lonely and lost in a new home in an unknown land. For weeks, my mother had been telling me that I couldn’t go to Europe, and I kept telling her that I did not want to go back to Mexico. She gave many reasons why I would be happier with her—places we would go, all the fun we would have. I was twelve years old. I acquiesced.

  In late August, on our way to visit our father on the pond, I told Blair that I had given up. I had known for at least ten days that I wasn’t going to Italy with my father, but I had not had the courage to tell him. Our mother dropped Blair and me at the top of the Turkey Houses driveway. As we walked down toward the pond, I realized that this was my last chance to say something. After a pond swim, we walked along the narrow deer path to our ocean beach. My father went first, then Blair. Scared of what I had to tell my father, I lagged behind. He had fought to keep me. I had betrayed his love. We walked through shrub oaks, past the bearberry-covered knoll where Blair and I used to practice handstands, then up past stunted pines to the top of the dune. There we paused to survey the beach and ocean far below.