The Angel in My Pocket

by Sukey Forbes

  My branch of the Forbes clan: Edith Emerson Forbes with her children, their spouses, and her grandchildren.

  We had a family archive room in one of the upstairs bedrooms originally designed for servants, and Florrie took considerable care of filing family photographs, tintypes, glass plates, maps, and papers there until they ultimately outgrew the space and were taken to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

  As a child, I took refuge in that dusty room to pore over the family history. I wanted to know all about these long-since-deceased relatives. Given that none of my living relatives really spoke much about emotions, I tried to read their eyes and their faces, as well as their written words, to see if I could learn anything more about them as people.

  Another adjunct to our nuclear family was a man named Gerard who lived up on the second-floor servants’ quarters. When I asked my father once who Gerard was and what he did, my father answered, “He came with the house.” Curiously, my mother gave precisely the same response when, unsatisfied with my father’s response, I asked her the same question. The best I could figure was that he kept the wood box filled, and one year he painted the cellar. The only other thing I knew about him was that he came from Nova Scotia.

  My mother believed in what she called the “two door” theory—two doors between the parents and the kids—so, when we were small, my brother Jamie, my sister Heidi, and I were up in tiny garret rooms with rusty iron bed frames and horsehair mattresses just down the hall from Gerard. To make my room cheery, my mother agreed to paint the entire room—walls and ceiling—bubblegum pink. She then acquiesced to painting a rolltop desk inherited from her grandmother Ayer the same color pink. She even added my initials in purple. Because of my mother’s indulging my outlier desire for color, fresh paint, and design, this was the one moment in my childhood when I felt special and loved.

  But this tiny room was also the place that brought home to me just how much “You’re on your own” meant that I was going to have to provide my own nurturing. One scorching hot and still summer afternoon I was trying to unlock the sole window to let in some air when the sash cord snapped and the top section of windows slammed down like a guillotine. Or more luckily, like a bear trap, because all ten of my eight-year-old fingers were caught beneath it with no hope of escape. I felt like a witch in the stocks at Salem. The house was large enough that hollering for help would have been futile, and, truth be told, I feared raising my voice for fear of violating the Way of the WASP. I knew it would be a good long time before I was missed and someone came to look for me, but I stayed there mutely resigned to my fate. I recall only that my legs were very tired from standing by the time my brother Jamie finally came to tell me it was time for supper.

  Gerard had a television—we did not—so Jamie and I would sneak in to watch the Bruins and Lost in Space. Downstairs we had an old-fashioned kitchen, with butler’s pantry, larder, full-wall iron coal stove, and service area. Gerard would sit alone in the larder and have his meals. I would hear the sound of his cutlery on his plate as he ate silently in the pantry night after night and I would wonder if he was lonely. He never seemed to be. He, too, seemed bereft of emotion, though I do recall he had a quiet sense of humor and would laugh without opening his mouth.

  Gerard had a friend named Fred who also had a long history with our family and had been one of the caretakers back in Uncle Alex’s day. Fred was retired and also lived on the property, sometimes tinkering with the tractors. Fred had been a lifetime employee of the Forbes family. As a young boy, he was a cabin boy on William Hathaway Forbes’s 108-foot schooner Merlin, and in later years he was a stable groom for William’s son Ralph. My father Ralph, grandson of the previously mentioned Ralph, remembers Fred driving him by sleigh on winter days to attend classes at Milton Academy. Fred would also lead the entire family horse herd, he on horseback, from Milton to New Bedford each year to catch the steamer over to Naushon for the summer and then retrace his steps in late October. We leased out the pastures for sheep, and a few of our neighbors boarded horses with us, so there was still a modicum of agricultural work to be done.

  It never occurred to me at the time that any of these living arrangements were odd. Swapping houses. Living down the hall from a retired handyman who’d been passed along like a serf. A communal clothing in the laundry room in shared drawers. A family archive hidden in a dusty wing of the house until it was carted away to a museum.

  But then when I was about ten I finally got my chance to be “normal.” My father was appointed special assistant to William Simon, secretary of the treasury in the Ford administration, and we moved to the D.C. area for two years. We went to public school in Montgomery County, we lived in a tract house in Bethesda, and I loved it. I had friends with names like Vickie, Dabber, and Chrissie. Our neighbors were not only within walking distance, they were within shouting distance!

  In her New England frugality, my mother decided to bring only essentials, and she had them packed in wooden crates for reuse for our return move. These wooden crates served as bases for our mattresses, side tables, and even the front entry table and coffee table in our living room.

  In a town that had less of an appreciation of old Boston culture, her thrift was seen as poverty. I was teased regularly in the schoolyard that our family was so poor that we couldn’t even afford furniture.

  I coveted the coziness and sameness of the houses on our Bethesda street, all mirror images of each other on tiny lots. Instead of inhabiting a photo spread from Town & Country, all riding clothes and Labrador retrievers, I wanted to live American life the way it appeared in the sitcoms on TV. In Bethesda, we were there, with a two-car garage, a television that no longer was stored in the closet when not in use, and a freight train running practically through our backyard. To my greatest delight, we even had an ice-cream truck that drove down our street on hot summer nights.

  But all this ordinariness, even faux poverty, was in marked contrast to the family picnics we enjoyed at cabinet softball games, or the quiet dinners we had with dignitaries and government officials. We thought it was great fun when Bill Simon and Francine Neff came to dinner one night and we compared their signatures on paper napkins to the ones they had made on the newly minted U.S. currency.

  After only a couple of years, though, we came back from Washington and my father went back to the bank and to the rest of his old Boston accoutrements, which included a great deal of gin and cigarettes. All through childhood I remember him arriving home after we’d eaten, then sitting down with a martini, and then the sound of the ice clinking in the glass as he came up the stairs many martinis later. He’d get slurry late at night, but never out of control. But after Washington he began to decline, and the once comforting sound of the ice clinking and the stairs creaking took on an ominous cast. I’d worry when I’d hear the car come in that he wouldn’t make it up the steps. Then I’d worry when I didn’t hear the car come in at all.

  In Forbes family fashion we simply carried on as if nothing were the matter. Each Sunday we would take our mile-long walk in the woods behind the house, traversing through the beautiful stand of trees that Great-Great-Uncle Alex had planted in a grid, then around the pond, and then over the stone bridge that spanned the brook where we’d play Pooh Sticks, dropping twigs over one side, then seeing how long it would take them to get to the other, à la Winnie the Pooh.

  For me, these woods were the next best thing to Naushon. They provided a sanctuary where I could feel something other than the numbness and emptiness that haunted me. I was aware of my own detachment from my emotions, but detached I remained. Whenever I’d have a flash of sadness, I’d remind myself of the Forbes/Saltonstall lesson learned all too well: You can’t cry—that’s weakness. So instead I’d bottle it up.

  My usual recourse was to sit in our stand of trees or to lie in the field nearby and feel close to God. It was all very Emersonian, without any reference to Emerson. Nobody told me, �
��God is here; this is our church.” Nobody talked about such things. Religion was pro forma like everything else, with the family attending services on Christmas and Easter. Many of my friends were having bat mitzvahs and confirmations and other religious rites of passage. The rites of passage that passed down in my family with reverence seemed to be attending the fall and spring “sheeping” and being invited to the autumn hunt or passing your sailing test to be able to captain one of the Herreshoff twelve-footers at the boat dock. At around this time I changed my affiliation from Unitarian to Episcopalian. It was hardly a radical shift, but the Anglicans had prettier churches, and I wanted something less abstract.

  I was also desperate for structure. When I was twelve, my father handed me the car keys. I had learned to drive a tractor as a child, and he said, “It’s the same idea. You’ll figure it out.” I didn’t want to figure out how to drive an old pea-green Volvo with floor mats strategically placed to hide the rust holes in the floor. We could see pavement through those holes and no amount of heat in winter could ever make that car warm enough. My father adored that car, but I longed for the wood-paneled station wagons driven by the families in the planned community down the street and back in Washington. I wanted to fit in. In my young life it seemed there had been far too much “figure it out.” I wanted somebody in charge. I wanted more God, and definitely more adult supervision.

  Unfortunately, this was the seventies, and the culture was moving from Emersonian self-reliance to simple self-indulgence. Neighborhood parties increasingly involved bonfires, lots of alcohol and cigarettes for the parents, as well as pot. At one Sunday evening neighborhood gathering I walked through the living room of a neighbor’s home and found a large pile of marijuana in the center of the floor, covered by a tarp. Their father, my cousin, had harvested it from their garden earlier that afternoon.

  And then there was the night on Naushon when I was coming up the path from the beach and heard singing coming from the outdoor shower at Shore House. There must have been ten people in there, my parents and their friends, all clearly overserved at cocktail hour and beyond.

  My father had developed a roving eye, and my mother’s primary mode of coping through tough times was neighborhood high jinks. She put a “Loch ness monster” in the pond, to be discovered at the bottom when we drained it. Pink flamingos would appear on our neighbor’s front yard. I think this was striving to survive, even be creative and clever, within the confines of a numbing marriage that was now officially falling apart.

  Mum attributes my father’s breaking out of the traces to his time in Washington. His job in the Treasury Department had been the first time he’d really been tested, the first time his pedigree alone could not carry him through. It was not long before he left Bank of Boston and went to work at J. M. Forbes and Company, managing the family assets. This involved much smaller numbers but far more hand-holding, a task for which my father was not well adapted.

  I remember one day sitting in the tiger lilies in the backyard when a Cabot cousin said, “Everybody knows your father is having an affair with Amy.” I was twelve or so at the time and a student at Milton Academy, and this was news to me. Amy was a teacher at the school. She was also my mother’s best friend.

  It was not long afterward that my nine-year-old sister called me to say Mum and Dad were in therapy. How nice, I thought; they’re working on their relationship. I don’t know if that naïveté was real or an attempt to blunt the anxiety that was beginning to overwhelm me.

  During this time my mother began a period of self-discovery. She went on Esalen retreats, started speaking New Age Goddess Movement psychobabble, and was more physically demonstrative with us, although the obvious awkwardness of it on both sides made it difficult for me to receive the loving overtures in the way they were intended. When she told me that she loved me one day, I was mortified. All day I wanted to crawl out of my skin. That evening at dinner I could not look her in the eye because the intimacy that she shared with me was so uncomfortable. This open, sharing creature was not my mother and bore no resemblance to my other relatives. Deeply lonely and looking for acceptance, I wanted to like the sudden attention, but it frightened me.

  On the night of my thirteenth birthday my parents were out with Amy and I was feeling sorry for myself. It was my birthday, after all, and I was all alone. I was sorry that my parents had chosen not to be with me, and sorrier still that they had chosen to be with Amy. For just a moment, a stab of profound sadness went through me. I felt tremendously empty and disengaged, hopeless, and the fear of feeling more emotion overwhelmed me. Perhaps my adolescent brain formulated the thought that a person who felt like this would probably kill herself.

  This thought sent a tremor of fear throughout my body. I was sitting on the floor outside the library at home, and I picked up the black rotary phone to call my parents at the restaurant. But then I started calling other people instead, beginning with my cousin Beth, but I couldn’t reach anyone. I was desperate to connect with someone, but too scared to wake my brother, still fearful that any display of emotional excess would land me in McLean.

  Eventually I got in bed, and I started having these images of going down to the kitchen and picking out a knife and plunging it into my chest. I even knew which knife—it had a rusted blade (my mother still has it in her kitchen; I use it regularly)—and the vividness of the image made me so terrified I might do it that for the longest time I remained wide awake, all the more terrified that if I dozed off I might sleepwalk and actually go downstairs and kill myself. I thought of writing a note saying, “I don’t want to die. It was a mistake,” and as I began to compose the note in my head, mercifully, I dropped off.

  I think the most significant issue that deterred me from killing myself was my concern about the terrible mess it might make. I didn’t want to be so much trouble, and I certainly didn’t want to disappoint my parents with my loss of emotional control. It never occurred to me that they might be sad if I died. I was only concerned that killing myself would present an inconvenience to them and I wondered how they would explain my death to friends and family.

  The next day I told my mother, but her reaction—she looked at me wide eyed, as if thinking, “Oh my god, my daughter’s going insane”—gave me yet another cause for panic. This was, of course, my worst fear that she was validating. With my schizophrenic grandmother, and all the disdain for emotion, I was sure they would lock me up in no time.

  I could see that my mother wanted to be there for me, but she simply didn’t know how. I felt bad for her that she was so ill equipped. But at least she got me to go see the school counselor, who assured me that everything I was feeling was “normal” for girls my age. Her reassurance allowed me to open up into a crying jag or two, during which I told her that all I wanted was to not feel numb. Again, her counsel was that this was all very normal for girls my age. “Now, is there anything else I can help you with?”

  Shortly thereafter my father staged an uncharacteristically extravagent fortieth birthday bash for my mother, with limos and a boat, and shortly thereafter the affair with Amy became broadly known. Consequently, my mother stayed in Milton and my father took an apartment on Commercial Wharf in Boston. Following the divorce, they sold the house, and I never felt that I had a secure place with either of my parents. It’s really no wonder that Naushon feels like home.

  • • •

  That first summer back from California, our long residence on Naushon in July had given us a chance to get back in touch with the rhythms of the place, which include not just the seasons and the tides, but all manner of living things. For two hundred years, the first event each day has been letting the sheep out of their night pens, then gathering around for breakfast on the lawn. This is followed by the parade in front of the house at seven, when our herd of thirty-two horses is let out to pasture. They all walk and trot in a line through a large red gate, across the meadow and into the stable to get their bre
akfast. Being Forbes horses, they have a strong sense of tradition—a herd order that they always follow—with Jax in the lead and Blitzen bringing up the rear.

  Horses in pasture, Naushon Island.

  In 1995, two years after Michael and I were married, we assumed responsibility for Mansion House, a pleasure—and a financial burden—we shared with my sister Heidi and her husband Bjorn. One of thirty or so family homes now on the island, the place was huge, and pretty ramshackle, and we could have bought quite a nice new house for the cost of the deferred maintenance projects we launched into. At first, when the rain came through the roof, we simply set out washbasins and leather “fire brigade” buckets. One of these had become the resting place for a mummified seabird. I checked the date stamped into the leather. It was 1797.

  Built in 1809, the full house didn’t have electricity throughout until the 1950s, and some of the wiring put in at that time still remains. The kitchen and backstairs rooms were hooked up first in the mid-1920s, and then only because of complaints from the servants. To the old-line gentry of my grandparents’ generation, electric lights in a summer place seemed somehow wrong, a frill unbecoming to a true Yankee.

  In the mid-1800s, to the basic Federal architecture John Murray Forbes had added an east wing, including a billiard room. A west wing came along in the late 1800s, and then my great-great-uncle Cam, John Murray Forbes’s grandson, added staff rooms, a four-story elevator to a widow’s walk, and an observatory. By the time his nephew (my grandfather David) took over, much of this had fallen into disrepair, so David simply hacked off about a third of the place. But that still left a lot of old house weathering winter storms and summer salt air. We re-clapboarded the front, added a new porch, updated several bathrooms, and put on a new roof.

  In purely economic terms this made no sense, but Mansion House has always been a labor of love. It’s built on a hill surrounded by sheep meadows and horse pastures, and yet it sits right in the center of things, with its veranda providing a commanding view of the tiny harbor. Anyone traveling up island must pass along one of the trails in front or back, so sitting out on the porches on summer mornings, I have come to learn the walk of almost every family member and frequent visitor.