When I was in fifth grade both houses were sold and we rented a house in Hopkinton. Women and financial difficulties were driving my parents apart. The following year, my mother was hired by Nathan Arnold, Headmaster of the Arnold School in Pembroke, Massachusetts and, the three of us, my mother, my sister, Frances, and I moved to The Arnold School, which became home for us for the next eight years.
But, the year I started school we were living in Winthrop. There are two summer scenes with my father which come to mind when I remember that time. The first is the Fourth of July parade – this must have been the summer after a winter of continual illness and quarantine – when I was 5 and then six. My father dabbed me liberally with mercurichrome red spots and sent me off in striped pajamas, my “measles costume”. I was mortified by the inelegance of this costume but soon happily lost my unfortunate identity in the world of balloons and peanuts. The other, more substantial memory is of my mother’s 35th birthday in August of that year. My father invited 100 people – a huge crowd for those days,- and fed them on hot dogs, corn on the cob, cabbage salad, -a specialty of his-, pickled eggs, another specialty, and beer by the keg. We were making cabbage salad for days in advance. In lieu of the permit he would now have to have he invited all the local cops.. The woman next door, known to us as “Somebody Ann” took me out to buy a present for my mother. I think I bought her some horrid little china windmill thing. Years later I learned that “Somebody Ann” was the women with whom he was currently having an affair. There were others, before and after. He was something of a rake.
I remember standing at the bathroom sink in Winthrop while he bathed my hands in warm water and soap and explained to me how to keep my fingernails clear and filed down. The water was warm and soapy as he gently showed me how to push the cuticle down to avoid hangnails. These were the details he did attend to – postcards, thank you letters, clean fingernails. Other details, such as paying the mortgage or the grocery bill were ignored or pushed aside.
I remember going with him on some insurance calls near the Arnold School . We went to the home of a Mr. Knight and Daddy produced a print of one of Knight’s paintings, the original hanging in the Boston Museum of Modern Art, which he wanted him to sign. It was the only thing I took from my stepmother Mary’s house when she died. Once a boy threw a rock at us and before I could take in what was happening my father had turned the car around, and revved it up the hill as though to mow the boy down. The look of shock and astonishment on that kid’s face as we screeched to a halt only a foot· or two in front of him was mirrored by my own.
We were in Winthrop, another off year, during the famous hurricane of 1938 which ravished New England in a time before hurricanes were named and announced in advance. The wind blew with great fury and we watched out the window as bits of boats, the wreckage of wharves, and the accumulated beach litter of drift wood was swooped up by the receding tide, roiled in the crashing waves and finally left stranded by the sea wall in front of our house. When we went outside the wind was so strong I thought I would be swept away, but securely held by a hand on either side, I tried leaning back into the wind and was lifted off my feet. No one else was out, of course; wind and sea were filling the air with roar and crash, as I sailed down the road. I was flying, and I was safe.
After the hurricane my father called his insurance company. It took a long time to get through and the voice at the end was weary.
“We have hurricane insurance.” “Yes.”
“Well, I just wanted you to know nothing happened.”
I have recently read Where the Wild Things Are for the 200th time. My father was Max. He made mischief of one kind or another and he was always the first to shout: “Let the wild rumpus start!” But he also liked to be at home, where someone loved him best of all.
The Arnold Years
We lived at the Arnold School for eight years: my mother, my sister, Fran, and I. My mother got ten days vacation a year and then we fled to Bridgewater Hill, in New Hampshire, staying either in my Aunt Dorothy’s house or a rented cottage and for ten days my mother did nothing, catching her breath for the year to come. Otherwise The Arnold School was home. We worked on the farm, staff and students side by side for long hours. I wandered through the woods and ran around the pond. My mother taught four out of five of my high school courses each year. Except for the authoritarian leadership of the headmaster, Nathan Arnold the world was small, contained, safe and busy.
While we were at Arnold Pops was living and working in Boston. He came down frequently by car or train, and always for events like graduation and the carnival which we put on. Rarely, I went to Boston for a dentist appointment or just for a visit and stayed with him. One year he was living in a garret at the top of three long flights of stairs in a house on Beacon Hill – the former servant’s quarters in a remodeled town house. We climbed and climbed and the stairs got progressively steeper and narrower. At the top, where a final twist of the stairs created a small shelf he had a little Buddha with coins dropped around the figure – charms and wishes I thought. I loved that fat little Buddha and only now have seen any resemblance to my full-bellied father. I discovered another intriguing thing on that visit: a box of Kotex in the closet. That seemed a strange thing for a bachelor to be keeping.
I think it was on that visit he told me he was in therapy. “Every time I go to visit my mother (Nana to me) I get a cold”. I was intrigued, as a child is intrigued by bizarre associations. How could you get a cold every time you visited your mother? And what happened in therapy? Perhaps what happened was that he came to some self-realizations which enabled him to be a more responsible husband for Mary. I would like to think so.
He was smart enough. He went to Cornell because the Walters who came from Whitney Point, New York all went to Cornell. He entered the engineering college because that is what the Walters did, and found himself in classes for which he had no aptitude or affection, but found refuge in a fraternity house where the high jinks started with coffee to cure the hangover from yesterday’s high jinks. I don’t think he lasted more than a year. The family, chagrined, sent him back to Cornell in the school of arts and sciences which was a much better fit, but old patterns and playmates were too much and he came home again in disgrace. This time he began working with his father’s company, The Equitable, to sell insurance. Selling he was good at because he liked folks, but pressuring people to buy he could not do, and he was careless with details.
I remember going on the rounds with him through Fanuel hall to collect the premiums from the small shopkeepers there: the Chinese laundry men, the kosher butcher, the pawn broker, the man who sold pickles. We scuffled through the sawdust on the floor, peering into one little dark stall after another, sometimes stopping for a word with one man or another in a stained whte apron I stared at the chickiens hanging by their feet, the pretty stones in the pawn broker’s window, the varieties of olives and pickles in barrels. There were strange smells: fresh bread, olive oil, blood, and around us the familiar din of commerce. The shop keepers welcomed him warmly; they chatted about their families, and the vicissitudes of business. They invited him home to dinner, and when they couldn’t pay he carried them along anyway. Frequently we got the premium in goods: a chicken, a pretty bracelet for my birthday. On one of our excursions he popped into a grocery store, came out with a pound of raw hamburg and ate it, on the spot. I think I ate a little too.
Once in a while he would sell enough insurance to earn one of the Equitable’s bonus trips for a convention, and more than once he took me with him. One of the great moments in my life occurred at one of those conventions, composed primarily of men and their wives, with banquets, speakers and dancing. I followed my father around quietly or stayed where I was left, content with watching the people, the bustle of waiters, and absorbing the elegance of the hotel room, the long velvet curtain, the circular stairs. I was probably about eleven and imagined myself as a princess living in these rooms, and wondered at the snippets of adult conversation which drifted down. I was shy anyway and preferred being left to watch and dream along in my own world. Once he was talking with another man near by and I heard the stranger say,
“Doesn’t she get bored?”
“Oh no,” he replied lightly, “she has inner resources.” I didn’t quite know what inner resources were but I felt a warm flush of pride. That was one of three specific gifts my father gave me.
I will tell you about another gift, from roughly the same era in my life. One year my morning job at Arnold was to run the milk separator. I had to go down to the barn before breakfast and bring up the milk in two three -gallon pails, one for each hand. It was a considerable walk, and uphill. When I got to the top and put down the pails my arms flew up into the air, released. The milk separator was in a tiny room which had to be reached by another climb up a flight of dark, steep stairs. Every morning I set up the separator, with all it’s little plates, poured milk in the top and watched the milk stream out from the bottom into two pails: one for cream, one for the now almost blue, skim milk. When all the milk was separated I had to take the machine apart and wash everything very carefully. Each small part had to be carefully scoured. Milk stone, the crud which comes from old milk deposits, could cause serious illness. The milk was separated by being forced through a series of metal discs whirling rapidly, the centrifugal force driving the heavier milk, laden with fat, out of one spout, and the lighter milk, fat free, out of another. From the cream we made butter, and the milk we drank. Even during the war we had plentiful supplies of both. On this occasion my father had written me – another scrawled postcard – that he would like to follow me around to see what I did. When he came he did just that. He followed me to the barn, walked with me up the hill, and across the lawn, and into the school building, and up the stairs, and into the milk room.
There he squeezed a chair into the tiny room and just watched, without comment, while I went through all the motions. I had to work fast if we wanted to get any breakfast. When we left he didn’t say much but I got a letter, later, in which he described what he had seen, in detail, and commented on my efficiency and grace. Almost as good was the sensation I had while he was watching me, of watching myself: seeing myself through the eyes of another, seeing myself as efficient, and graceful and competent.
The third gift I want to recount occurred a few years earlier, one of the West Newton years, when I was seven or eight. That wonderful year of third grade we were in West Newton and I was attending the local public school that, I later learned, was a model progressive school. That too is described in “Memories of a Massachusetts Schoolgirl”. Part of the “model” involved sending children home at noon on Tuesdays so teachers could have time to plan and work together. My father decided that it would be good for me to do something interesting on Tuesday afternoons so he took me into the Natural History Museum in Boston, and we went up to a secret room on the top floor. He asked the staff if they could give me something to do when I came in, and, a little bemused, because in those days museums didn’t have children’s programs, they gave me a picture of a scarlet tanager to color and said, yes. After that, on Tuesday afternoons I walked down to the train station in West Newton, got on the train there, got off at Back Bay and walked perhaps three blocks to the Natural History Museum, which is now, or was, Bonwit Tellers, a large square red stone and brick building of monumental elegance.
I was much too shy to do as I had been instructed and present myself to the office so I spent those afternoons wandering happily around the museum, peering into dusty cases at funny looking rocks, getting lost in dark display rooms, and hiding behind the animal displays if anyone ever came in. They seldom did. I knew all the dioramas and how to make their season’s change. I studied the skeleton of the dinosaur hanging in the main hall and tried to imagine it dressed in flesh. I pretended I was a princess, again, and this was my mansion. When the closing bell rang at 5:00 I slipped out and hoped I would be able to find my way back to the train station. I always did, but there was often a little thrill of trepidation, particularly in the winter months when the light faded out in the late afternoon. I don’t remember anyone inquiring what I did on those Tuesday afternoons.
Imagine now sending an eight year old into Boston to entertain herself in a museum for an afternoon. Even then it may have been unique. I remember overhearing· a conversation in which my mother demurred, but “Daddy” prevailed.”She can do it. She knows how to take care of herself. ”
Do we love people for what they see in us? The person I was as reflected back to me in these three stories may have been both description and prediction; affirmations which solidifed what might have been only a possibility in the development of my evolving self. In addition to what felt like unconditional love my father held up the mirror of his perceptions so that I might see and respect myself through his eyes.
He wasn’t always right, -of course, but his intentions were good, and often artless. I remember how he sent me off to Carleton, my first college experience, and how he helped me through that traumatic first year. We met at South Station – me coming up from Arnold, he coming in from his office on Milk Street. We had lunch together before he put me on the train for Minnesota. I was three months shy of seventeen, very frightened, and very excited and a total innocent in the ways of the world. At Arnold I had learned to cook dinner for fifty people or manage a three room walk-in freezer but I had never worn make-up, never had a date, never been to an unsupervised movie. We ordered lunch in the midst of the station bustle and I became aware that he was embarrassed about something – a very unusual state. He played with his food for a few minutes, looked down at the table, and then blurted out: “I don’t know what your mother has told you but I want you to know that if you get pregnant, you can just come home, we would love to take care of the baby.”
I don’t suppose in this age of candid talk and overt sexuality it is possible to understand the way in which this announcement came to me – as though from another planet. I barely knew what he was talking about. We never talked about sex. I had never seen a movie or read a book with any overt sexuality and he had no idea, I am sure, of how cloistered my life had been or how far from my conception of myself any such activity might be. I had a boy friend at Arnold – we met for long talks in the woods – but we never kissed. I knew how babies were made, of course, my mother had seen to that, and through the shock of his words came back the memory of a girl several years ahead of me in school whom I had admired. Marylou went home one semester and didn’t return. It was rumored she had hung herself from the heating pipes in her own cellar when she found she was pregnant.
Girls did that in those days. There was another girl from school, the daughter of the music teacher, who – rumor again – was said to have been shipped off to a home until the baby she was carrying was born and given up for adoption. What my father was doing, I dimly realized as we both struggled to restore composure, was assuring me that I need not fear wrath or disgrace, I need not think about suicide. Indeed, that I could count on his loving help and support if I should get pregnant. What I also realized, faintly then and more clearly later, is that, first, his own experiences in college could easily have led to an extra baby or two and, second, that he had very little understanding of what I knew and didn’t know, or the extent of my lack of sophistication and underfed experience.
We got through that moment and I loved him for it, but the awkwardness was soon submerged in the greater awkwardness of my unquenchable tears. When he put me on the train for Minnesota I began to cry, and I cried for most of the next two weeks. As the train pulled out I was stationed at the window, snuffling through my tears and waving as he ran beside the train jabbing one finger persistently at a nickel. I was supposed to change in Buffalo. When I got to Carleton there was a postcard waiting for me with a simple greeting scrawled across the back. There was always a postcard waiting for me when I arrived at some new place: in Tacoma, in England, at home.
The next memory from the Carleton years comes a few months later, following the first grading period. (In those days, college grades were sent home to parents every quarter). I was very embarrassed by mine – a “D”, 2 “C”s and a “B”. At Arnold I had been an all “A” student. The scrawl on this postcard read, “Well, you didn’t do as well as your mother, but you did much better than I ever did.”
When I left Carleton after two years “to go home and grow up” as I told them, Pops was anxious for me to get out of the orbit of the Arnold School and to finish college. He had good friends, men he had worked with during the war at Raytheon, who were now at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. One was the President, Douglas McGregor, famous in management circles for theory Y and theory X ,and the other, his friend, Nick Knickerbocker. Pops arranged a trip to Yellow Springs to visit the McGregors, loaded a barrel of lobsters into the trunk and we set off. I was 18, and by now considerably more knowledgeable about the ways of the world, but still shy and unsophisticated. We stayed two nights with the McGregors, in the President’s house. One of the McGregor sons graciously took me to the movies and Nick quizzed me about why I wanted to go to college. I remember squirming under his questioning, still painfully self conscious, and painfully lacking in self-confidence in these unfamiliar arenas. I remember the lobsters crawling all over the kitchen floor and counters while we squealed and laughed hysterically. A barrel holds a lot of lobsters. Later, they asked him about Mary and I wondered who she was.
To this day the trip home remains clear in my memory. It was a lovely fall day, cool but not too cool. I was leaning towards the open window, feeling the breeze on my face, watching the fields of Ohio flash by, when he said that he had a friend, Mary, who was sometimes “as homely as a mud fence and sometimes so beautiful she took your breath away”, and then, casually, that he was thinking of getting married again. I was completely unprepared – dumb struck.
“Don’t you need to get a divorce first?” I asked.
“Didn’t your mother tell you?” he demanded. I knew my parents were officially separated – we had been living at The Arnold School for eight years and Pops lived in Boston – but he continued to manage most of my mother’s business affairs and on his frequent visits to the school they always greeted each other affectionately. Sometimes they talked together in a friendly fashion for a long time while Fran and I played outside of a restaurant or sat in the back of the car. Indeed, I never heard him say a word against her, and once they separated I never heard them quarrel. He was always willing to intimate that he was responsible for the failure of their marriage.
But no – we had never been told about the divorce, nor, I suppose, did we question it, Fran and I. They just didn’t live together. Some time later, perhaps after this trip, when I asked my mother about the divorce she also expressed surprise that we didn’t know about it. But then, in an aside of some kind, she told me a little story, which I have cherished for several reasons. She said that the divorce was finalized sometime during the first year we were at Arnold; that she went up to the court hearing in Boston, and that when they came out of court he took her arm and said, “Well, dear, shall we go to a motel for the night?” Which, I gathered from the tone of the story, they did. In that context it is not surprising that “divorce” with its connotations of radical separation, had not been obvious to their children.
Pops and Mary were married on his sister’s birthday, my aunt Blanche, in my grandmother’s flat in Auburndale. There weren’t many people there: Fran and me, a few of Mary’s good friends and a few of his; Blanche, her husband, Jack and Nana herself. He told me with glee before the wedding about what he was going to give Mary as a wedding present. “I knew we’d need towels so I went up to Stearns and I found these wonderful big white fluffy towels with a striking black band. So I bought six dozen.” There were still black-banded white towels in Mary’s house when she died, more than twenty years later. For the wedding reception there was champagne, crackers and cheese. And cheese. A wheel of Swiss, a huge wedge of gruyere, a brick of cheddar, a wheel of Camembert, and assorted others. We knew who had done the shopping.
With Pops everything seemed bigger than life. He was big, at least to my young eyes, generous to a fault, exuberant, fun loving, expansive. He ate too much, drank too much, and loved too much. There was no one who was not his friend. He loved to work in the garden, to invent things, to go to ball games and parties, to try out new things. He loved his children, his family, and life itself.
I didn’t go to Antioch, not then, but when I returned to college it was in Providence, at Pembroke College in Brown University. Aunt Blanche and Jack lived in Providence, Pops and Mary in Aurburndale and my grandmother in an apartment near by. I used to go once a week to have dinner with Blanche and Jack; and frequently spent weekends in Auburndale or the five of us would go to Jack’s summer place at Warren on the Rhode Island coast. There is a memorable picture of my father, very red in the face, either from the imperfect photography but more likely from sun, oysters on the half shell and Martinis, lounging on the lawn in Warren. We went to some football games together and fall and spring I helped him with the garden he was trying to create out of a vacant lot behind the cross-the street neighbor’s house. We picked out a lot of rocks and rubble from that unkindly soil, and he lugged in car loads of manure to the dismay of his very suburban neighbors.
After Pembroke I went first to England for the summer and then to Tacoma, Washington to teach at The Anne Wright Seminary. He suggested that I stay. In England as it was 32 miles closer. My mother had to pay for the trip to England, as she had had to pay for all my college expenses not covered by scholarships, and I will never forget the look of repressed hurt and anger on her face when she saw the camera he gave me as a graduation present. It was, as my photographer roommate exclaimed – state of the art: ” Wow”!This camera will take pictures in total darkness!’ The price of a state of the art camera in 1954 was exactly the price of a two months study tour in England.
In the fall of my second year of teaching at the Annie Wright Seminary, early in the morning, just after breakfast, but before morning chapel I was called to the office for a telephone call. It was my Uncle Jack who said, “I have bad news.”
“Dear Lord, don’t let it be Frances.” I prayed, to my own surprise. Jack told me my father had been killed in a car accident the night before. Coming home from a big sale. Had called to say the deal had gone through. A big commission. But the night was foggy and he was probably sleepy. The car went off the side of the road at a place where the white line ended, and crashed into a tree in front of an empty gas station. Jack also offered voluntarily, “He was on the wagon. He wasn’t drinking. He’d just made a big sale.”
The protest sounded odd but I pushed that down with grief and only recently in comparing stories with Fran realized that, of course he had been drinking: the obligatory context for the sales’s comrade and another one or two for the pleasure of success. I didn’t go home for the funeral. Tacoma was over three thousand miles away and I had just come back to school; flying was possible but not common place, and in our family we tend to repress our grief and wear the stiff upper lip. It was, from the descriptions I heard, a lengthy, emotional process. Mary had risked excommunication from the Catholic Church to marry a divorced non-Catholic and in this time of shock and mourning she reverted to all the trappings: a wake, an open casket, a large funeral, a proper headstone. My mother joined in the funeral arrangements and through their tears the two women became fast friends, a friendship that endured until Mary died.
Fran will have other memories of our father, perhaps less positive then mine. Three years younger and with an extroverted personality more like his, my interactions could be as though with a different person. My memory of these events is like crayon resist. There is the picture before you, waxy and richly colored, the way I see it now, but when some of the crayon is scratched away there is another picture below, and below that, other colors, possibly other shapes. I don’t know how many successive layers would need to be scratched away to find the original event – perhaps there was no such thing.
Pops’ Recipe for Cabbage Salad
Take one or several heads of cabbage, the fresher the better, and slice thinly into a big wooden salad bowl. Add one or more onions, whole but well scored. Add vinegar, salt, pepper, celery seeds and olive oil to taste. Let it sit for at least a day. In that time the cabbage wilts into the dressing but still has some crunch to it. The onions flavor the salad but aren’t eaten, – well not by most of us. He probably popped them in his mouth and downed them like oysters. I have been known to add whole cloves of garlic, also scored. I don’t think he’d mind.
=====================================================
Westmoreland, NH 2000
Comments
Post a Comment