Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  8

  Love Is a Parallax

  Swampscott, Smith College, Cape Cod, 1951–1952

  In early June 1951, Dick drove Sylvia to Swampscott, an affluent seaside town on Boston’s North Shore. They were doing reconnaissance, trying to catch a glimpse of the waterfront mansion at 144 Beach Bluff Avenue where Plath would spend her summer. The house was difficult to find, and they had to ask several people for directions. Finally, just when Sylvia was convinced that the house “had been blown out to sea,” they found it tucked inconspicuously behind an “aristocratic hedge” and “sweeping driveway.” The Mayo family compound consisted of a large house atop a vast expanse of green lawn that sloped down to the sea, along with two smaller cottages, all white with black shutters. Plath described the “cars and shiny beachwagons parked carelessly about,” while a tennis court and a yacht lay “modestly in hiding.” She could not believe that she would soon be joining this world.1

  In April, Sylvia and Marcia had been the first to respond to a post for a pair of summer nannies at the Smith vocational office. They were hired that day. Sylvia would take care of the three Mayo children—Joanne, 2; Pinny, 4; and Freddy, 6—from mid-June to Labor Day. She would earn room and board, plus $25 a week, with one day off each week. Marcia was placed with Mrs. Mayo’s sister, Mrs. Blodgett, who also owned a mansion on Beach Bluff Avenue. The two friends jumped up and down when they were hired, but neither had any real sense of what she had signed up for. Sylvia began preparing for the job as if it were a professional position, telling Aurelia she wanted to learn child psychology. But Sylvia would see little of Mrs. Mayo, who spent most of her days and evenings socializing. All the child care, and many household tasks, would fall on Sylvia.

  “I blithely assumed,” Plath wrote later that fall, “that I would be spending most of my days lolling on the beach, swimming when the spirit moved me, writing sonnets, and keeping an occasional vigilant eye on the children.”2 Her second-floor room, with its own bathroom, balcony, and view of the sea, was enormous. But she had hardly unpacked on June 18 before she was called to help with the children’s bath and bedtime. Between Pinny’s night terrors and Joanne’s five-a.m. rising, Sylvia did not get much sleep. Then the real work of the day began: “Picture Freddy striking Pinny and shouting and screaming,” she wrote to Marcia, “while the poor girl does the same for several eons, and all the while you’re pulling them apart, Joanne has been squatting cheerily in the corner stuffing her rosebud mouth with sand. God! Slight items like daily baths, helping with laundry and doing beds and such while keeping the three darlings alive—at the same time—challenge my homicidal tendencies no end.”3 On their own, the children were sweet, but together they were unmanageable, with “the most wicked combination of ages possible!”4 Sylvia began to look forward to the “blissful silence of the cellar where I did the daily mountain of laundry.”5

  She was unprepared for fourteen-hour days of breaking up fights, mopping floors, and doing secretarial work for Dr. Mayo, and she was shocked when Mrs. Mayo “casually” mentioned that she would have to cook all the children’s meals. Instead of protesting, Sylvia felt “guilty” and embarrassed about her inferior cooking skills. (“Ann, I actually don’t know how to cook eggs!”) She blamed Aurelia, who had “spoiled” her “by always being so capable and never making me work in the kitchen.” In letters she mocked herself for scalding soup and burning rolls, and for poor chopping skills; she became adept at running water over her hands “to hide the dripping blood.”6 If Mrs. Mayo saw Sylvia reading a book while the children were napping, she would exhort her to try a new cake or pie recipe. “There was no time during the day when I had a legitimate hour to rest, free from disturbance,” Plath later wrote.7 Mrs. Mayo would give Sylvia a good reference (“She was an intelligent, honest, well mannered girl with a pleasing disposition,” she wrote to Smith),8 but her son Frederic later recalled that his mother “did not find Sylvia easygoing or easy to manage,” and that Sylvia “did not give her the support that she needed.”9 Both women had set their expectations too high.

  Sylvia had thought she would be treated as a member of the Mayo family—“presumably above the caste level of outright maid and governess.” She was a Smith girl, after all. But to them, she was simply the help: “My status in the family was vague and often uncomfortable.”10 It was a depressingly familiar feeling, one she had experienced when dusting the school offices or visiting her grandfather at the Brookline Country Club. She was again learning to know her place: “I betcha I don’t lift a tennis racket or sail a yacht all summer long,” she wrote Marcia.11 Sylvia watched enviously as the two college boys who lived in the compound’s smaller houses took their “girls to cocktail parties, yacht club dances and sailboat rides.” She would always have to work for a living—a point she emphasized in a drawing of herself with baby cereal in her hair. “I am a mess,” she told Ann, “and feel most unattractive.”12

  She made light of her unhappiness to friends. “As you can imagine,” she wrote Ann, “for an undomestic, un-maternal creature like I am, this 14 hour day is a wee bit of a strain.”13 She even joked about her “homicidal tendencies” in her mock-up of the Swampscott Daily News:

  EXTRA! EXTRA!

  “HIRED GIRL RUNS WILD”

  A shocking event took place today in the home of Swampscott’s beloved & respected Doctor M. A hitherto outwardly normal teen-age girl was found chortling hysterically over the mangled bodies of three angelic children. Our reporters rushed to the scene and found her sobbing hysterically in the kitchen. When asked what she had done to the eldest, she cried, “I fed him down the chromium-plated disposal unit in the kitchen sink.”14

  Five months later, Plath would write a real newspaper article for The Christian Science Monitor about her experience with the Mayos, titled, “As a Baby-Sitter Sees It.” The sentimental article, filled with sweet stories about her innocent charges, gave little hint of her misery.15 In a despairing letter to Aurelia that summer, Sylvia revisited a similar theme as she signed off: “ ‘My head is bloody, but unbowed / May children’s bones bedeck my shroud.’ ”16 Sylvia felt physically and emotionally trapped by the house and all its demands: “Learning the limitations of a woman’s sphere is no fun at all.”17

  Visiting Dick, who was waiting tables on Cape Cod, was not an option. “My face is a mess, all broken out, my tan is faded, my eyes are sunken. I look hideous,” she wrote Aurelia.18 The “old dungarees” and the plain shirt she wore each day were a far cry from the elegant, colorful outfits she donned at Smith.19 She was “so dead” by eight p.m. that she went straight to sleep. “So I sit here exhausted, seeing no way out, seeing only slavery from six in the morning till eight at night,” she wrote her mother after just one week with the Mayos. “I feel that I’m cut off from all humankind.”20 These letters provide, perhaps, a clue to the riddle of her suicide twelve years later, when she was a single mother in a foreign country with little help, company, or money, caring for two sick toddlers in a cold flat with intermittent electricity and hot water.

  Sylvia nearly quit three weeks into the job but then began to imagine how “shut-in” she would feel in her “little room” back home in Wellesley: “How closely the trees and houses and familiar paths would crowd upon you, stifling you, smothering you, enclosing you,” she wrote in her journal. “Here, the house is big and spacious and luxuriously comfortable.”21 She soon realized that the only way she would survive seven more weeks at the Mayos’ was by writing about them. Once she saw herself as a writer, she no longer thought of herself as a slavey: “I must learn more about these people—try to understand them, put myself in their place….I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue.”22 Life became bearable again as she recorded WASPy snippets from cocktail parties and yacht club dances. She even accompanied the Mayos on their yacht, the Mistral, which was staffed by a crew of three and large enough to accommodate a dozen guests. “At last I feel
somewhat a master in my own domain.” Looking at the sea from her private porch made her feel “infinitely placid, infinitely calm, infinitely spacious….Something there is about the ceaseless, unperturbed ebb and flow…that heals all my uneasy questionings and self-searchings.”23 When she returned home to Wellesley for a weekend, she began to miss living amid the Mayos and their grand, carefree life:

  Somehow, I think, I have a delicious feeling of presumptuousness which comes perhaps from a secret enjoyment of living with rich people and listening to and observing them….How hard it will be to return home, where the little green pine trees grow in such a close square around the house, where you can’t move freely in a room without bumping into the furniture, where mother serves cranberry juice in cream cheese glasses on an old white celluloid tray….How to return to the smallness, the imperfection, which is home?24

  Like Jay Gatsby, Plath had been seduced by a fantasy of wealth. When the Mayos left for a weeklong cruise in August, she “felt the intangible steel cord of subservience loosened” and began to imagine that she was mistress of the house.25 She played the piano, swam, and lounged on the porch. But when the Mayos returned, she again felt “crushed under a machine-like dictatorship.”26 She learned to hide her anger and weariness “under a necessary veneer of bright willingness.”27 It was a trick she came to master.

  Marcia, only “two mansions” away, was luckier—she had no cooking or housekeeping duties and “knew about the key to the bourbon.”28 When the Blodgetts were out, she invited Sylvia to impromptu parties where the maids and cooks drank, played piano, and shot pool. The two spent their days off together on the beach, tanning their bodies over the sun-warmed rocks. Sometimes they met local boys at beach parties, but there were few opportunities for dating given their busy schedules. Sylvia was intrigued by Marcia’s literary beau, Mel Woody, who sent regular letters and poems. She wrote him a flirtatious fan letter in June, urging him to marshal his “character and convictions” to succeed at Yale: “the easy way is to be avoided. Lord, how I despise the rosy path, which breeds only flabby, weak-minds [sic] slugs of individuals.”29 She told Mel she got “seething mad at civilization, dogma, prejudice,” and quoted for him the first two stanzas of a sardonic poem she had recently written, “I Am an American.” A cynical response, perhaps, to Elias Lieberman’s jingoistic 1916 poem “I Am an American,” Plath’s version shows the influence of both Eddie Cohen and Mr. Crockett, and looks forward to Bell Jar themes of capitalism, advertising, affluence, chauvinism, xenophobia, and hypocrisy.30 It was a dangerous poem to write in a nation roused by McCarthy’s witch-hunts:

  We all know that we are created equal:

  All conceived in the hot blood belly

  Of the twentieth century turbine;

  All born from the same sheet

  Of purple three-cent postage stamps;

  All spewed like bright green dollar bills

  From the same government press;

  All baptized with Chanel Number Five

  In the name of the Bendix, the Buick, and the Batting Average.

  We all know that certain truths are self-evident:

  That we believe in liberty and justice for all

  Like the great green lady with the bronze torch

  Lifted beside the door marked “Members Only.”

  That we are all free to speak our piece from the ivory soap box

  And to letter our liberal opinions

  In white exhaust on the spacious skies:

  That we can all pursue happiness…

  (Say, even the jets can’t fly that fast, brother.)

  We all know the easy democracy of mind:

  For we are averaged daily

  And our predilections are displayed

  On every billboard from Tacoma to Pensacola

  From Beantown to Frisco, all along the super highways.

  Two out of three of us prefer our ideas

  Bite-size and pre-cooked for lasting freshness

  Or you can feed them to us in ten easy lessons

  With a money-back guarantee if proved unsatisfactory.31

  Working as a nanny for the Mayos roused Plath’s class consciousness. When she looked back on the summer in 1961, she wrote another poem about her time in Swampscott with Marcia, “The Babysitters,” full of resentment and nostalgia:

  O it was richness!—eleven rooms and a yacht

  With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water

  And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.

  But I didn’t know how to cook, and babies depressed me.

  Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red

  With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.

  Plath ended the poem with a memory of herself and Marcia rowing out to Children’s Island and reading Generation of Vipers aloud.

  Written by Philip Wylie and published in 1942, the book may seem strange reading material for a pair of college students on their day off. It is best remembered for its vitriolic attack on overbearing mothers, who, Wylie claimed, were producing a generation of emasculated men. Marcia said “that kind of pithy, caustic, tough talk was very appealing to us.”32 He coined a term for this phenomenon—“Momism.” Wylie was not the only one manufacturing this crisis. Harvard professor Anne Harrington notes in her history of psychiatry that “bad mothers” were called a “threat” to America’s very “survival” by some of the most prominent psychiatrists of the day; articles with titles like “Are American Moms a Menace?” appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal and The New York Times throughout the 1940s and ’50s. Such fears played into Cold War insecurities about American masculinity.33

  Wylie’s radical criticisms of America’s sacred cows—especially mothers—resonated with Sylvia, who would come to view Dick as a victim of Mildred Norton’s “Momism.” This junk philosophy also gave her a useful tool to rationalize her own complicated feelings toward Aurelia. Sylvia was so close to her mother that she sometimes did not know where Aurelia began and she ended. She had no father to provide another perspective or offer a respite from her mother’s anxious hovering. Like most adolescents, she needed to differentiate herself from her parents. In her journal that summer, Plath wrote, “And you were frightened when you heard yourself stop talking and felt the echo of her voice, as if she had spoken in you, as if you weren’t quite you, but were growing and continuing in her wake, and as if her expressions were growing and emanating from your face.”34 Wylie’s book, and perhaps other articles Plath was reading in newspapers and women’s magazines, justified her need for space. Indeed, her letters from this time suggest that she was beginning to view Aurelia’s solicitousness in a more sinister way. Had her mother’s need to protect her from unhappiness and tedium stunted her growth, made her soft? Had her mother pushed her into a relationship with Dick to keep her close to home? If only her mother had not taken over all the household tasks, she would be a more “capable” person—and so on. Sylvia told Marcia that she “hated” Aurelia, and in 1958, Plath would feel immense relief on hearing eight simple words from her psychiatrist, Dr. Beuscher: “I give you permission to hate your mother.”35 Wylie’s book provided an earlier form of such “permission.”

  Anxious to see Marcia and curious about Sylvia, Mel Woody hitchhiked from New Jersey to Swampscott that summer. After Marcia showed him around the Blodgetts’ mansion, he joined her and Sylvia at a nearby beach in Nahant. He was traveling light and had almost nothing with him except Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. On the beach, he read Plath Rilke’s third sonnet, from Book 1 (“Where and when do we exist?”).36 In retrospect he realized this melancholy poem had been a poor choice. Mel, who had just met Sylvia, remembered that she was downcast that day.

  “Sylvia was feeling very sad because she couldn’t write, and
I had no inkling of what clinical depression is, and I read her this poem. So my line was—and this really played a major role in my relations with Sylvia for many years—‘So just stop. Give up writing.’ I always had this antagonistic relation with Sylvia’s poetry. I thought it was her enemy. Of course this was exactly the wrong thing to say.” When Sylvia started swimming far out, Mel became afraid that she might drown. He started swimming after her, then yelled that he couldn’t make it out any farther. She turned back, thus saving her own life and, he felt, his own, for he might have drowned himself trying to save her.37

  Sylvia worried about her separation from Dick, who she imagined was working alongside pretty, seductive waitresses on Cape Cod. She had a nightmare that June that suggests some of her insecurities and unconscious conflicts:

  Seems I broke a date (trivia, trivia) with him to go out with a rakish fly-by-night male. On returning from a vile time, I was greeted by mother and Dick (who had taken Jane Anderson to the Prom.) It all ended by my holding my children (Freddy and Pinny) in my arms, and seeing Dick recede step by step, never coming back, just shaking his head sadly and saying reproachfully as he faded off, “Oh, Syl.”