It was such a huge offense, something I like to think not attempted before nor since the days when Brave Peggy and the Fair Viola walked the earth behind Plainfield Elementary School; my mind simply could not imagine the punishment. Miss Chapman, too, was speechless. She sputtered, but nothing came out. The rage came coursing through her hand as it seized my shoulder, talonlike, to carry her prey back to the nest to be torn to shreds. She shook Viola so hard she wet her pants. She must have shaken me as well, but I don’t remember it. As she dragged us—for I can only assume Viola was pinioned on the other side—across the long field, my senses registered only the wind howling in my ears, Miss Chapman’s brown wool coat flapping in my face.
There was no principal’s office at our school, no detention room, no escape from our dreaded captor. We were hers from 8 A.M. until 2:30 P.M. for an interminably long month of days. There was no morning recess for us. We sat with our heads down on our desks while the rest of the class was excused. No lunchtime with the rest of the school; we ate alone in the room under the watchful eye of herself, bread sticking in our throats. No afternoon recess, again heads down on our desk for the entire period while we listened to her breathe and swallow and clear her throat and smack her thick lips—all manner of terrible intimacy with the bodily functions of the feared one. It was the longest March in the long history of endless rural New England Marches. Mud season. The bowels of Mother Nature.
* * *
1. “Hapworth.”
14
Journey to Camelot
IT MAY COME AS a surprise, but throughout my childhood, my father was an ideal traveling companion, not just at home on our walks in the woods, but in public as well. When we visited New York, he would let me run down the hotel corridors, ride the store escalators five times, laugh out loud, go to the Central Park Zoo and only visit the seals if that was all I wanted to look at the whole time, visit the Museum of Natural History and head straight for the dinosaurs, with nothing “educational” in between. The New York I knew was Holden’s New York: the Museum, Central Park with its zoo and carrousel and lagoon with the ducks, the doormen and the lobbies of good hotels. After my grandparents and aunt moved from Park Avenue to a smaller apartment, we stayed at the Plaza when we were in town. I came to think of “Eloise” as a close relation. Like Eloise, “my absolutely most favorite thing” was room-service breakfast. Plates came with beautiful silver lids on them to keep eggs or pancakes warm, or rested on a bed of ice to chill the grapefruit or melon. Everything had to be opened like a present, even the heavy linen napkins, just the way I imagined the princesses in my fairy books would have breakfast served to them.
It was at the Plaza, in the Oak Room, that my father taught me formal table manners. I’ll never forget it, I was so impressed at the time. I still am. He told me that he didn’t care if I used the proper fork, that was my choice. But he wanted to make sure that it was a choice, and that I never embarrassed myself because I didn’t know any better. Or had to feel awkward on a date when I grew up.
After breakfast, we’d walk across the street into the park. Daddy always took me for a ride on the carrousel. I remember how happy my father looked, how he stood there grinning from one big ear to the other, waving to me each time I came around on my horse.
This time, however, we had to cut short our visit to the park because we were going to see Bill at The New Yorker. After Judge Hand died, my father asked Bill Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, if he would be my godfather. I had seen him many times before, but never at work. I could tell by the way Daddy talked about it that this was something special. Sort of like being allowed inside his Green house.
I always liked to see Bill. His face looked like an illustration of the old man in the moon in one of my books: kind and round and softly twinkling when he smiled at me, which was often. He moved at a slow, gentle, steady, and sedate pace across my path. His wife, Cecile, reminded me of black twigs blowing across the face of the moon on a windy night. I never really saw her face; it never registered, that is. She was all movement. Where a face might be, I remember a blur of jagged black scribbles and pink and the feeling that someone had just left the spot where she had been standing. She wore a black velvet bow in her hair, which I simply coveted, and beautiful black patent-leather high heels that clicked marvelously when she walked across the floor of their apartment.
We rode up the small elevator, got out, and said hello to a smiling woman at a desk whom my father seemed to know, then walked down a long hall to Bill’s office. Even though I was only seven, Bill stood up as though he were in the presence of a young lady, shook my hand, and offered me a seat. This is hard to explain, but I never felt as though he had mistaken me for somebody else, someone older or better-behaved. It was as though he responded to the person I really was inside, beneath the blankets of other stuff, like the ugly wool dresses and scowls I wore, piled on top. I don’t mean he saw someone perfect or fictional, separated somehow from the imperfections that are part of who I am. How do I say this? Ah! He was a born editor, a writer’s dream catcher.
Daddy and Bill talked while I sat at his desk and looked at his pens and at the greens and browns and shadows and light of the room. It wasn’t brightly lit like a classroom or a doctor’s office. It was gentle like a pine forest. Bill said he’d join us later for lunch, and Daddy and I held hands as we walked down the hall to see Alastair Reid, who had a son named Jasper. The name fascinated me. My classroom had Butches and Mikes and Herbies and Howards. Jasper. Alastair gave me a book he’d written called Ounce Dice Trice and wrote “For Peggy from Alastair Reid” in it with a fountain pen.
Then we came to the artists’ room and that’s where I stayed. Someone helped me up onto a stool way off the ground. They had easels, like mine at home, only much taller. The paper wasn’t paper, but canvas and textured. The paint smelled wonderfully like gasoline in a puddle, and it stayed where you put it, unlike my watercolors, which ran too fast to catch up. These paints gave you time to think and plan things and daydream about the colors. And what colors! The red, yellow, and blue in my school and home didn’t resemble any known thing except finger paint and the floury food coloring of homemade play dough. These colors looked like melted flowers. They were shiny and bright and didn’t fade into the paper. There were dozens of tubes of paint with beautiful stripes on them; some were squeezed, and everything was used enough so that I wasn’t afraid to touch. Someone put a big shirt that smelled like warm horses over my dress. People I’d never met seemed to know me; they smiled and said hello but didn’t disturb me. That’s Jerry’s girl.
We went to the Algonquin for lunch with Bill and Lillian (Ross). We sat in a big round booth built into the wall that felt cozy like a clubhouse. I felt included, but not on display. Bill and Lillian and Daddy talked among themselves, and when the conversation turned my way, it happened naturally; there wasn’t the usual huge gap in tone that grown-ups do, suddenly getting all singsongy and poky and intrusive, that would make me sink behind my eyes and start hearing their words as though through watery cotton wool, like the blinding fright and disorientation of a diver’s light catching the eyes of a dreaming fish. When I was with Bill, I could inhabit my skin right up to the surface. I didn’t know the word for it then, but I relaxed. I enjoyed myself looking around the room at the cut-glass table lamps, taking in all the textures and shapes and smells.
Bill created a world where a tight-lipped little soldier like me could talk, at the lunch table, about the color of fall leaves against the sky. Lillian wrote to me shortly after:
The NEW YORKER,
No. 23 West 43rd Street,
New York, N.Y. 10036
OXFORD 5–1414
October 24, 1964
Dear Peggy,
Those leaves are so lovely to have and to look at, every single one. They arrived in wonderful shape, still damp and fresh and smelling of that ground up there, and a little of the air, too! We’ve had some blue-sky days here this past week, and I’ve held
the golden leaves up and looked at the blue sky through them just to get an idea of what you described when we had lunch at the Algonquin. Some day I want to come up, with Erik, of course, to visit you and really see what you were talking about. I’ve never had a more wonderful present than those leaves, and I’ve been showing them to Erik, one by one. He loves them (and talks to them) as much as I do. Thanks for sending them, Peggy, and a special hug from Erik. And love to all up there from Erik and his Mama.
Love,
Lillian
P.S. I took a picture of the leaves and will send it to you.
L.
And she did, on November 4, enclosing a little note:
I keep the leaves in the little basket shown here.
Erik looked at them so longingly that I gave him a couple.
He loves the way they feel and look.
I hope you’ll be able to visit us again soon.
My love to everybody up there.
Love Lillian
MY MOTHER AND I were talking about Bill one day, shortly after he died in 1992. I asked her about something that happened at the Plaza, a detail I couldn’t remember. She floored me by saying that during the entire time they were married, she never once came with Daddy and me on our “first-class” trips to New York. She said that when Jerry traveled alone or with just us children, he went first-class. When he traveled with her, he (himself) called it “third-class in Bulgaria.” She said it was all part of his attempt to keep her weak female soul pure, away from the seductive, evil goodies that life with a famous author could bring. Thinking back, I don’t remember her there specifically, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she wasn’t. I simply assumed she was there because these trips to New York were as much a part of my early years as our family trips to Florida each February.
Even at seven years old, I knew the places we stayed in Florida weren’t like the fancy ones where we stayed in New York. I didn’t care; I just noticed they were different. I assumed that staying in a small, ten-unit, one-level motel with the rooms in an L-shape around the swimming pool, many blocks from the ocean, was part of the game, albeit a serious one, of traveling incognito. After Time magazine came out in ’61 with my father’s face on the cover, it reached even the wilds of Cornish that Daddy was getting famous, and my parents began drilling me about appropriate behavior around strangers, not getting into cars and taking candy and so on, before we went anywhere. When we traveled to Florida, we did so under assumed names. I chose Annabelle; it was like my middle name Ann only much fancier. My brother’s was Robert because that is his middle name and he therefore had a slight chance of remembering it. My father’s was John because it was the most anonymous name around. My mother chose Mary to complement his, but my father dubbed her Ruby. I was swell about it, you can imagine: “Ruby red nose! Ruby red nose!”
We left Lebanon airport wrapped in snow and gray and heavy coats and mittens. We changed planes at La Guardia in more of the same and took off for Florida. Mama had us change into other clothes before we landed. When I stepped out the plane door into the sunshine, warm air touched my bare arms, startling me so that I stopped short and looked where it had touched my skin. “People are waiting, dear, hold on to the railing.” These days when one “deplanes,” one steps directly into a tube connected to the airport building and walks down carpeted corridors that could lead to any one of a hundred cities on several continents. By the time one is outdoors, there’s the hustle and bustle of buses, taxi queues, rental car vans, things to be done routinely and expeditiously. The whole muffled process neutralizes or at least mitigates the shock of transition. Back then, the otherness of the place, the climate, the air, the smells, hit one squarely in the face as one emerged from the plane onto the tarmac, like Dorothy emerging after her wind-flown house landed in Oz.
We checked into our motel in Fort Lauderdale. The door of our room opened up onto a cement walkway surrounding a pool. While my mother unpacked and got us “settled in,” whatever that was, Daddy and I went for a walk. Each morning, Daddy and I would take a walk together around the neighborhood. I don’t remember if Matthew came along or stayed with Mama. As I run through my memories of these walks, I realize that I didn’t notice people or cars or buildings much, but instead I noticed the kinds of things that were of my forested world in Cornish. The smells carried on the breeze, the trees and the variegated shade patterns of the palm fronds, were all so unlike the scent of pine and the dappled pattern of oak leaves and maples.
I loved walking on the ledges, like balance beams, adjacent to the sidewalk. As with a sailor’s rolling walk on dry land, conditioned from months at sea, my view, and therefore the things I remember, was shaped from a long habit of walking in the woods at home. In the woods, on or off a path, you automatically focus your eyes on the ground a few feet ahead of you so you don’t trip over stumps or stones or bumps in the ground. On the flat sidewalks of Florida, I took in little of anything above shoulder height, but not a thing on the ground escaped me. I collected things, a small coconut the size of my fist miraculously dropped within reach, the fleshy head of a red flower blossom rotted off a tree, a bright orange kumquat. The plants and lawns all had the thrilling look of dollhouse toys, or illustrations in books: everything was shaped into neat squares and rectangles between the sidewalk and the lawns, not real-life wild and scraggly all over the place.
My brother and I couldn’t wait to go to Wolfie’s, where Daddy said they made the best seven-layer chocolate cake in the whole world. Daddy had been all over Europe in the army, so he knew what he was talking about. We made our pilgrimage. Wolfie’s restaurant seemed a world unto itself. When we walked in the front door, the lighting wasn’t the plain white light of puritan New Hampshire restaurants; it was like a lush stage set. Hidden lights flooded different areas selectively, highlighting some, mysteriously darkening others, and nothing was quite the right color. I think that’s where my love affair with bar scenes in science fiction books and movies began. So exciting.
The waitress asked what I’d like to drink, and Daddy suggested a Shirley Temple. Oh my gosh. It came with a whole tower of ice cubes in it, with bubbling fizzy stuff on top and a sweet, slow red layer on the bottom. But best of all was what dangled deliciously on the rim of the glass. A green toothpick in the shape of a sword pierced several triangles of orange slices and a big juicy maraschino cherry that was all mine, and I didn’t have to watch some grown-up’s drink, like a covetous hawk, sip by agonizing sip, hoping to be offered the olive or cherry at the bottom of the glass. Hanging off the end of the toothpick sword was the treasure, like a ruby in my beautifully illustrated book of Indian tales. A red glass monkey, about one inch tall, hung by his tail from the sword’s hilt. You were allowed to keep it.1
Daddy had the seven-layer cake for dessert. We all did, but I don’t remember mine; I was watching him, his expression of furtive pleasure, the naughty thrillingness of it all. He devoured it. Said it was “poison.”
We went back to Wolfie’s several times during our two-week stay, and my brother and I collected the coveted monkeys. I lined mine up on the bureau at the motel to keep me company and give me strength as I slogged through the stygian pile of worksheets my teacher had made me take along in order to be excused from class for two weeks. Mom had to nag me every inch of the way. What was so weepingly awful about it was that it broke the dream, like going to heaven, sitting on a golden cloud, listening to sweet strains of the harp, and an angel suddenly puts a pen in your face and asks you to sign for a package from the IRS. Just a little paperwork.
The evening brought cool relief from the worksheets. I stepped out the door into the night air and behold! Each of the palm trees surrounding the pool was lit from below by floodlights of blue and green and red and yellow. The blue light illuminating its palm tree like some sort of terrestrial moonstone was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. The next day by the pool, I met two sisters, one a year older and one a year younger than I. After playing together f
or a while, we were friends, and friends tell each other secrets. Laurie told me something about her mother’s hair color. I had a good one, too. I told them that Annabelle wasn’t my real name. Nor Smith either. Somehow it got back to my parents via her parents, but my father, strangely, wasn’t angry with me.
The following day we took a trip to the Miami Seaquarium. The highway was like a board game: all the roads had signs and names and you could make your way to the Seaquarium just by reading and following the arrows. At home, you navigated by places: Go up the road past Day’s farm, take a right, and go about two miles; as with Maine’s “Burt and I,” if you don’t know where you’re going, “you can’t get theya from heya.” Believe it or not, I didn’t know the road we lived on had a name until I got a Christmas card from my dad’s new wife, about 1994 or so, and she had a little “personalized” address sticker affixed that said Sander Hill Road, Cornish. Our address was always just R.F.D. #2, Windsor, Vt. Our postman, Mr. McCauley, knew where we lived.
We found our way to the Seaquarium without a single fight—“discussion,” dear. The first thing we saw after we parked the car and entered the gates was a long, straight brook made out of rectangles of cement. It didn’t look deep and you could watch all the fish swimming in the same direction. Oh, boy, something was winging its way through the water past us, graceful, dark; I held my breath. Someone told us it was a manta ray or stingray. We walked along the brook in the direction the fish were swimming. A few yards ahead, separated from us by the brook, was a bird sanctuary. Flamingos really exist! And they’re even brighter and pinker than in books. Parrots. The Froot Loops toucan. At home I’d catch a glimpse of the red epaulet on a red-winged blackbird as it took to the air, or the Baltimore oriole’s flash of orange and black, or the goldfinch’s bright yellow darting against the pine trees a few times each summer. I invariably missed the scarlet tanager when my mother said, “Look!” Twice in my life I saw a bluebird with its soft reddish chest. The birds that hung around our bird feeder in plain view were all browns and grays, chickadees or nuthatches, or the weird algae-yellow of evening grosbeaks. I was used to bright colors as rare flashes like the northern lights or a shooting star. But here were all the colors I’d ever marveled at stuck together on one darn bird just hanging around to be looked at at leisure. These tropical birds seemed almost motionless compared to the speed of our chilly birds. I almost got sick from the colors, like overeating at a dessert buffet.
Dream Catcher: A Memoir Page 22
