1952. New York City.
My mother was eight years old when her mother, Nanette Saltonstall, married for the second time. Nanette was a New York socialite—selfish and beautiful, famous for her lush, cruel lips. As a child, my grandmother Nanette had been wealthy—pampered by her banker father. But the Crash changed everything. Her family moved from their Fifth Avenue townhouse into a dark railroad apartment in Yorkville, where the one luxury my great-grandfather George Saltonstall still indulged in was his six p.m. vodka martini stirred with a long sterling silver spoon in a crystal shaker. Their eldest daughter’s beauty was the only currency they had left: Nanette would marry a rich man and save the family. That was the plan. Instead she went to a fashion design school in Paris and fell in love with my grandfather, Amory Cushing, a Boston Brahmin but penniless sculptor, whose sole collateral was a rambling old Cape house on the shores of a remote freshwater kettle pond in the Massachusetts woods. He had inherited the house and the pond from a distant uncle.
Grandfather Amory built our camp during the short time he and my grandmother were in love. He chose a long narrow stretch of shoreline, hidden from his own house by a sharp curve in the land. He had an idea to rent the cabins out in summer for extra money to support his glamorous young wife and two small children. On the outside, the cabins are solid—watertight saltboxes that have withstood endless harsh winters, nor’easters, and generations of squabbling families. But my grandfather was running low on funds, so he built the interior walls and ceilings out of pressed paperboard, Homasote, cheap and utilitarian, and nicknamed the camp the Paper Palace. What he didn’t count on was that my grandmother would leave him before he had finished building it. Or that Homasote is delicious to mice, who chew holes through the walls each winter and feed the regurgitated paper, like a breakfast of muesli, to the minuscule babies they birth inside the bureau drawers. Every summer, the person who opens the camp has the job of emptying mouse nests into the woods. You can’t really begrudge the mice: Cape winters are hard, as the Pilgrims discovered. But mouse piss has a warm stink, and I have always hated the terrified squeaks of dismay as they fall from the wooden drawers into the scrub.
After she divorced my grandfather, Granny Nanette spent a few months swanning around Europe, sunning herself topless in Cadaqués, drinking cold sherry with married men, while Mum and her little brother Austin waited in hotel lobbies. When her money ran out, Nanette decided it was time to go home and do what her parents had wanted her to do in the first place. So she married a banker. Jim. He was a decent sort of fellow. Andover and Princeton. He bought Nanette an apartment overlooking Central Park and a long-haired Siamese cat. Mum and Austin were sent to fancy Manhattan private schools where first-grade boys were required to wear a jacket and tie, and Mum learned to speak French and make Baked Alaska.
The week before her ninth birthday, my mother performed her first blow job. First, she watched as little Austin, his tiny six-year-old hands shaking, held their stepfather’s penis until it got hard. Jim told them it was all very natural, and didn’t they want to make him happy? The worst part, my mother said, when she finally told me this story, was the sticky white ejaculate. The rest she could, perhaps, have dealt with. That, and she hated the warmth of his penis, the slight urine smell of it. Jim threatened them with violence if they ever told their mother. They told her anyway, but she accused them of lying. Nanette had nowhere else to go, no money of her own. When she found her husband in the maid’s room off the kitchen screwing the nanny, she told him not to be vulgar and shut the door.
One Saturday, Nanette came home early from lunch at the Club. Her friend Maude had a headache and my grandmother didn’t feel like going to the Frick on her own. The apartment was empty—just the cat, who curled around her ankles at the front door, arching his back seductively. She dumped her fur coat on the bench, took off her high heels, and headed down the hallway to her bedroom. Jim was sitting in a wingback chair, pants around his ankles. My mother was on her knees in front of him. My grandmother strode over to them and slapped my mother hard across the face.
* * *
—
My mother told me this story when I was seventeen. I was in a rage because she had given Anna money to buy a new lip gloss at Gimbels, while I stayed home and did chores. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Elle,” she said as I stood at the kitchen sink, fuming over a pile of dishes. “You have to wash a plate . . . you don’t get a lipstick. I had to give my stepfather blow jobs. All Austin had to do was masturbate him. What can I tell you? Life’s not fair.”
9:20 A.M.
The odd thing is, I think now as I walk down the path toward the kids’ cabin, my mother lost her respect for women but not for men. Her stepfather’s perversion was a hard truth, but it was her mother’s weak-willed betrayal that made her go cold. In my mother’s world, the men are given the respect. She believes in the glass ceiling. Peter can do no wrong. “If you want to make Peter happy when he comes home from work,” Mum advised me years ago, “put on a fresh blouse, put in your diaphragm, and smile.”
Think Botticelli.
3
1971. April, New York.
Mr. Dancy stares into a small square tub in the maid’s-room bath off the sunless kitchen of our apartment. Mrs. Dancy has moved out of the building. Mr. Dancy visits us often, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to reveal his muscular arms. The enamel faucets he closes now have letters on them, H and C. The old brass drain shines from underneath the cool water. A tiny alligator is swimming around the tub. Mr. Dancy bought it in Chinatown for his children as a pet. He was told it was a species of alligator that would never grow more than a foot long. Now he has learned he was conned. The alligator is just a baby alligator. Soon it will grow to be dangerous. Even here in this little tub it has a menacing light in its eyes. I lower a wooden chopstick into the water and watch it snap angrily in frightened, futile little grabs.
“Give me the stick,” Anna says, leaning perilously close to the water. “Give it!” Her long black braid trails the top of the water like a lure.
I hand it over to her and she jabs at the creature. Mr. Dancy watches, strokes his thick butterscotch mustache. After a while, he lifts the baby alligator from the water by its nubbly tail and holds it over the toilet bowl. It writhes in the air, snapping at his wrist. I watch in fascination as he drops it in the toilet and flushes it down.
“We couldn’t keep it,” he says. “It would have grown into a monster.”
“Carl,” my mother calls from somewhere in the apartment, “do you want a drink? Supper is almost ready.”
1971. June, New York.
Anna’s and my first week in our father’s new apartment. It is a grubby walk-up on Astor Place, but he makes it seem exotic and adventurous. The air is heavy, hot, no air conditioning—the wiring is too old for that—but he has gotten us our own rotating fan. And he promises, as soon as he gets his next paycheck, he will buy us each an International Doll. I want Holland. He promises us many wonderful things that we will eventually learn not to expect. “From here on out, it’s just me and my girls.” We jump up and down on our new trundle bed, dance to the Monkees, and eat Dannon blueberry yogurts. If you keep stirring the fruit up from the bottom the yogurt becomes darker and darker, he tells us when he turns on the evening news.
On Monday morning, our father dresses himself with precision in a blue pinstripe Brooks Brothers suit and brown wing tips that he shines to a high gloss with a chamois. He smells of Old Spice and shaving foam. He looks at himself in the hall mirror, parts his hair with a small tortoiseshell comb, adjusts his tie so it sits exactly right between his starched collars, pulls his cuffs, centers his gold cuff links. “Your father was famously handsome when he was young,” our mother tells us. “They called him the Belle of the Ball when he played football at Yale. That silly game ruined his knees.”
I hold on to the edge of his suit jacket as we go down the dark creaking staircase. My hair
is a tangled mess. No one has reminded me to brush it. I have a nervous feeling in my stomach. Today is our first day at Triumph Day Camp. Anna and I are taking the bus alone. We are both wearing our camp uniforms: navy blue shorts and white T-shirts that say TRIUMPH on the front. On the back, they say All Girls Are Champions.
“There are very few girls in the world who are lucky enough to wear a shirt like that,” our father tells us. On the way to the bus, he stops at Chock full o’Nuts and buys us cream cheese and date-nut bread sandwiches for our lunch. I don’t want him to be mad at me, but the tears come on their own, betraying me. I hate cream cheese, I say, when he asks me what’s wrong. He tells me he’s sure I will like it, and hands me the paper bag. I can see he’s annoyed and it worries me. When he loads us onto the camp bus, I beg him not to make me go. He can’t be in two places at once, he says. He has to earn a living. Book reviews to write. Time-Life is waiting. But he’ll be right here waiting for us when the bus comes back. And I will love camp, he promises.
As the bus pulls into Sixth Avenue traffic, I watch him getting smaller and smaller. I tear a piece of paper off the edge of my lunch bag and chew it into a ball. What will I do if I need to pee? How will I know where to go? I want a swim badge, but I’m not allowed in over my head. Anna chats to the little girl next to her, ignoring me, and eats half her sandwich before the bus reaches Westchester.
Triumph Day Camp is on a lake. We drive in past baseball diamonds, a field covered in big dart boards, a giant teepee. The driver pulls in behind a long line of yellow buses. The parking lot is a sea of girls. All of them wearing the same Triumph T-shirts.
My counselors introduce themselves as June and Pia. They both wear Triumph shirts, but theirs are bright red.
“Welcome, five-to-sevens! For those of you who are new: if you need to find us, look for our red shirts,” June says. “Raise your hand if you were at Triumph last year.”
Most of the girls in my group raise their hands.
“Then you are already champions!! First things first. Let’s head over to your cubbies to put away our lunches. We’re in Little Arrow.” She lines us up behind her, leads us to a big brown building. Pia walks at the back of the line. “To make sure there are no stragglers. Rule number one: Never, ever leave your group. But if you ever do get separated, don’t move. Sit down right where you are and wait. One of us will come back for you,” Pia tells us.
On the edge of each cubby is a piece of masking tape with our names and birthday written in marker. Eleanor Bishop, September 17, 1966. I bite my finger. Now they will all know I haven’t even turned five yet and they won’t want to play with me. Barbara Duffy has the cubby next to mine. She is seven and has a Beatles lunch box.
“Grab your knapsacks!” June calls out. We’ll have a potty break and then change into our bathing suits. Who here knows how to tread water? That’s the art studio.” She points as we pass a room that smells of construction paper and paste.
The changing room is lined with little curtained stalls. I go into a stall and pull the curtain shut. I’m in my underpants before I realize my father has forgotten to pack me a bathing suit. By the time I get dressed again, everyone has already gone to the lake. I sit down on a wooden bench.
June and Pia don’t notice I’m missing until snack time, when they do the after-swim head count. From the changing room, I hear them calling my name again and again. A whistle blows, shrill and panicky. “Everyone out of the water,” I hear a lifeguard scream. “Now!”
I sit quietly, waiting for someone to come back for me.
9:22 A.M.
The cabin steps—three old pine planks attached by struts that have been on the verge of rusting-through since before I was born—bow under my weight. I bang on the kids’ door. It is one of those metal-framed doors with screens and glass windows that can be raised or lowered and, with a satisfying click, slot into place. My three children are tucked safely into their beds, the brightly painted yellow floor covered in wet towels and bathing suits. My mother is right. They really are pigs.
“Oi! Breakfast!” I pound on the door. “Up and out.”
Jack, my eldest, turns in his bed, gives me a look of cold disdain, and pulls his scratchy wool blanket over his head. He is being forced to bunk in with the little kids for a few nights while my mother fumigates his cabin for carpenter ants. Seventeen is a vile age.
The younger two emerge, bleary-eyed, from their cocoons, blinking in the morning light.
“Five more minutes,” Maddy groans. “I’m not even hungry.” Madeline is ten years old. Astonishingly beautiful, like my mother. But unlike most of the women in our family, she is small-boned and delicate, with pale English rose skin, Peter’s gray eyes, and Anna’s thick, dark hair. Every time I look at her I wonder how this creature came out of me.
Finn climbs out of bed in his sweet saggy underpants, rubs the sand out of his eyes. God, I love him. His cheeks have tiny sleep wrinkles on them from the pillowcase. He’s only nine—still on the verge of being a small boy. But soon he, too, will come to treat me with utter contempt. When Jack was born, I looked at the tiny baby in my arms, suckling, pig-perfect, kissed his eyelids and said, “I love you so much, and someday, no matter what I do, you will hate me. At least for a little while.” It’s a fact of life.
“Okay, my lovelies. Come, don’t come. But your father is making eggs, and you know what that means.”
“A total nightmare and a huge fucking mess,” Jack says.
“Correct.” I bang down the stairs. “Language,” I call over my shoulder as I head down the pine-needled path.
I wait until my cabin door slams shut behind me before allowing myself to take the breath I’ve been holding since Peter startled me on the porch. The normalcy of everything in our room seems impossible: clothes hung on ancient metal hangers along a makeshift wooden pole. Our oak dresser with a bottom drawer that sticks when it rains. The bed where Peter and I have slept for so many years, curled together like fiddleheads, entwined in sweat and sex and kisses, his sweet-sour smell. He has left the bed unmade.
I hang my bathrobe on a rusty nail that serves as a hook. Next to it is a cloudy full-length mirror aged by half a century of moisture and frost. I have always been grateful for its dim reflection, its pockmarks. I can look at myself through a mottled scrim of silver that hides my bumps and imperfections: the jagged scar on my chin that has been there since the night Peter and I were burglarized; the long thin scar that splits me across my belly, still visible after fifty years; the small white scar beneath it.
Jack came right away. But after Jack, nothing. No matter how hard we tried, what position, legs up, legs down, relaxed or tense, bottom or top. Nothing. At first I thought it was Jack. Maybe something had torn during my labor. Or maybe I loved him too much to allow myself to share him. In the end, the doctor made a small cut above my pubic bone and put a camera inside me, plumbing for answers.
“Well, young lady,” he said when I came out of anesthesia, “someone made quite a mess in there when you were a baby. It’s like a Spaghetti Western with all that scar tissue. What’s worse, the surgeon managed to chop off your left ovary in the process. But there’s some good news,” he said as I started to cry. “Your healthy tube had a kink—got tacked to a bit of scar tissue. Eggs were piling up behind it. I’ve cut it free.”
Maddy was born a year later. And Finn eleven months after that.
“Congratulations,” the doctor said to me and Peter as I lay on the exam table. “You’re having Irish twins.”
“Irish twins?” Peter said. “That’s not possible.”
“Of course it is,” the doctor said.
“Well,” Peter said. “If you’re right, I’m going to find the drunken Irishman who fucked my wife and throw him off the highest cliff in Kilkenny straight into the sea.”
“Kilkenny is landlocked,” the doctor said. “I was there for a golf tournament
a few years back.”
* * *
—
I position myself in the largest remaining patch of mirror and stare at my naked body, assessing it, looking for something on the outside that might give away the truth, the panic inside me, the hunger, the regret, the breathless desire for more. But all I can see is the lie.
“Breakfast!” Peter shouts from the Big House. “Chop-chop.”
I pull on my bathing suit, grab a sarong, and sprint down the path, banging on the kid’s door. As I near the Big House I check myself, slow to a walk. It’s unlike me to snap to attention, as Peter well knows. I push through a thicket of bushes onto the damp shoreline, dig my toes into the wet sand. Out on the pond, my mother’s steady scissors kicks leave a white trail behind her. The water is blue-ing up. Soon even the transparent brown-greens of the shallows will be mirrored over. For those few hours at least, the minnows and largemouth bass hovering over their sandy crop-circle nests will be invisible. What lies beneath will be hidden from us.
1972. June, the Back Woods.
I am running through the woods in my cotton nightgown along the narrow path that connects our camp to my grandfather Amory’s house. The path follows the shape of the land uphill and down around the pond’s ragged shoreline. My father cut it between our two properties when he and my mother were first together. Granddaddy Amory calls it the “Intellectual’s Path” because, he says, it wanders around and around without ever getting to the point. Where the path approaches my grandfather’s house there is a steep downhill run. I race along it, careful not to stub my bare toes on the stumps of the bushes my father cut down. Those nasty little stumps are my father’s only other legacy to this place.
I tiptoe past my grandfather’s bedroom window, careful not to disturb him, then sprint to the end of his wooden dock. I sit down, dangle my feet in the water, scratch my itchy stomach, try my best to sit perfectly still. Microscopic bubbles cover my feet in a carbonated sheath. Soon they will come. Hold still. Don’t move. Let your feet be lures. Then the swift dart from the shadows. Their courage gets the best of their fear, and at last I feel a little sucking feeling. One by one the sunfish are kissing my feet, sucking off little bits of dead skin and the crumbs of forest floor that have attached themselves to me. I love the sunfish. They are the color of pond water, with dappled backs and sweet, pursed lips. Every morning I bring them this breakfast of fresh feet.
The Paper Palace Page 3
