―‘When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to…‘‖ my mother used to quote.
She also used to say, ―These are parlous times.‖
In these extremely parlous times it becomes necessary to write the story of my mother‘s life. She died in 2004 in satisfaction, knowing that my memoir, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water: A Memoir of the Sixties and Beyond, was finished.
―It‘s like coming home,‖ I told her.
My mother got engaged to Gordon Haight, a literary critic at Yale, when she was a student at Bryn Mawr. He gave her a ring. She got more and more miserable, and finally she broke it off and returned the ring. Her aunt, my Auntie Moll, the wife of Samuel Hemingway, a Shakespearean scholar at Yale, was very disappointed and disapproved.
She had thought that Gordon Haight was a fine match for my mother.
When Auntie Moll was giving my mother advice about marriage, she had said, ―One does not share one‘s ivory tower.‖
My mother met my father. When the Second World War started she was working as an editor in New York. He was inducted into the Navy and sent to teach meteorology at the naval academy at Annapolis. He came up to New York and they were married at City Hall. The woman who had introduced them, Betty Vaudrin, who worked at Oxford University Press, and her husband, Phillip Vaudrin, were witnesses.
I asked my mother what she wore. She said she wore a gray wool suit.
My father had to go back to Annapolis directly. My mother stayed with her friend Sylvia Wright. Sylvia told me that my mother wandered around the apartment singing over and over, ―Just Molly and me….‖ No more words, just that. Then she got on the train for Annapolis.
She called my father from the station. She told me that he was furious that she hadn‘t told him that she was coming, and that he went striding ahead of her – he was very tall and had long legs, and some woman told me that she felt as though she spent her life trying to keep up with Herb Robbins – and my mother said that she ran along side of him, ―so happy, like a little bird.‖
My mother worked at the Langen‘s boat yard on Spa Creek in Annapolis during the war.
She kept the books. She adored Kitty Langen. F. Townsend Morgan, the painter, kept a 40
boat at the boatyard and he used to talk to my mother. He said, ―Cast your bread upon the waters and it shall come back to you a thousand fold.‖
A little boy about nine, Bobby Cavanaugh, also used to hang around the boatyard. He would talk and talk to my mother. One day she told me he came in white as a sheet.
―Do you remember that there was a thunderstorm last night?‖ he asked.
―Yes,‖ said my mother, ―a terrible thunderstorm.‖
―Did you hear a plane circling over and over?‖
―Yes, I think I did.‖
―Well, the pilot was out of gas, and he couldn‘t land in the storm, so he bailed out. And he landed in a skylight. And the people in the house, in the middle of the night, heard someone calling, ―Help! Get me out of here!‖
―Whose house was it?‖ asked my mother, amazed.
― IT WAS MY HOUSE!‖
My mother said, ―Listen, I‘m going to write a book about you. I‘m going to call it The Adventures of Bobby Cavanaugh.‖
Bobby Cavanaugh looked terrified.
―Oh, no,‖ he said. ―You couldn‘t do that.‖
―All right,‖ said my mother, ―I‘ll call it The Adventures of Someone.‖
My mother and father had taken a bus from Annapolis to visit some relatives. On the ride back the road was very icy. My father was in his Navy uniform. The crest of the road was very high, and on the right there was a steep ditch, an embankment. It was dark. Very slowly the bus tipped over and fell in the embankment. My mother said she could hear it scraping along the bushes, on its side, and then it tipped over completely.
She said she must have blacked out, because the next thing she remembered is that everyone had left the bus, climbed up through the windows, which were now above them, and that my father was striding up and down on top of the seats, looking for his Navy hat.
He said, ―I mustn‘t be found out of uniform.‖
He picked up a Navy hat. It wasn‘t his. Then he and my mother climbed up out the windows. Everyone sat on the edge of the overturned bus with their legs hanging down, and waited for something to happen.
My father found the man whose Navy hat he had found. The man had his hat. They exchanged hats.
―What happened next?‖ I asked breathlessly.
―A snow plough came along and took us to a hotel,‖ my mother said.
She told the whole thing as if it had been nothing.
It was war time.
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It was war time.
At the Plaza in New York my mother met an RAF fighter pilot. They took the Fifth Avenue bus up and down the length of Manhattan, talking and talking. He gave my mother his RAF pin, which I still have. He was called overseas, and then he was listed as missing in action.
She told us a story that she thought was very funny. On a battlefield on Christmas Eve the American and the German troops were facing each other and there was a Christmas truce.
The Germans put up a sign that said, ―Gott Mitt Unts.‖ The American boys put up a sign saying, ―We got mittens, too!‖
My mother went to the Foxwood School and then to the Greenvale School and then to Shipley and then to Bryn Mawr. She loved all her teachers and all her schools, especially Bryn Mawr. That was where she knew Sylvia, who became an editor for Harper‘s, and Ann Goodman, later Ann Freedgood of Random House, and Janet Thom, who became an editor at Collier‘s, and Alexandra Mellon Grange, heiress to the Mellon fortune, who was my godmother. She knew Mary Reisman, the sister of David Reisman who wrote The Lonely Crowd, and we knew David and his wife Evie who lived a couple of blocks from us when we lived at Shepard Street.
My mother was very beautiful. At Bryn Mawr her friends called her ―Marlene.‖ She told me that she was so happy at Bryn Mawr that she would set the alarm for 4 a.m., and then for 5 a.m., and then for 6 a.m., and then for 7 a.m., just so she could wake up and feel so happy. I told this to my friend Jaklin, who is now Chair of the Linguistics Department at Syracuse, and she said, ―It‘s wonderful to think of someone being so happy.‖
―Willy boy, Willy boy,
Where are you going?
I will go with you,
If I may.
―I‘m going to the meadow
To see them a-mowing.
I‘m going to see them
Make the hay.‖
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This was one of my mother‘s favorite songs.
―Life is too short. Art is too long,‖ said my father.
―I‘ve got the sun in the morning
And the moon at night,‖
sang my mother.
―The blackbirds here whistle. They shriek,‖ I told my mother.
―Really?‖ she asked.
―Oh, Nahna, pull up your socks!‖ said my mother‘s mother.
When my mother made an apple pie, in Vermont, sometimes from the apples in our orchard, she would make a pine tree with a fork in the middle of the crust. She would role out the dough, and I would stand beside her, making a tiny pie in a ginger ale bottle cap.
―Pat a cake,
Pat a cake,
Baker‘s man.
Make me a cake
As fast as you can.
Roll it and pat it
And mark it with B
And put it in the oven
For baby and me.‖
My mother told me that when she was a child, one of her favorite jokes was about a man who went into a bakery and asked the baker, ―Can you make me a cake in the shape of a letter S?‖
―Yes,‖ said the baker.
So the man came back the next day, and the baker had made him a cake in the shape of the letter S.
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But the man looked disappointed.
―It‘s not quite what I had in mind,‖ he said. ―Could you make me a cake in the shape of a Gothic letter S?‖
Yes,‖ said the baker.
So the man came back the next day and the baker had made him a cake in the shape of a Gothic letter S.
―Yes!‖ said the man. ―That‘s exactly what I had in mind.
―Shall I wrap it up for you?‖ asked the baker.
―No,‖ said the man, ―I‘ll eat it here.‖
The last time I talked to my mother, when she was dying, I said, ―How are you?‖ and she said, ―I‘m eating raspberries and blueberries and….‖
―Is she eating?‘ I asked Mistletoe hopefully.
―In her mind,‖ Mistletoe said.
My mother was the most wonderful cook. She made a casserole of noodles and ricotta cheese which was heavenly and which I called ―mother‘s milk.‖
Once before she died I called her and she said, ―‘I‘m writing.‖
―What are you writing,‖ I asked.
She said she was writing a story about a woman who lost her husband and went and became a cook in a man‘s house and cooked the most amazing things.
It sounded absolutely wonderful.
―How did you think of it?‖ I asked.
―I dreamed it,‖ she said.
―Are you really writing it?‖ I asked.
―I wrote it in my dream,‖ she said.
―I think you should really write it,‖ I said.
―I am writing it,‖ she said.
My boyfriend Lance who was a Vietnam vet and a street person and I went to my favorite ice cream parlor, Emack and Bolio‘s, when he had had his hair cut and shaved off his beard and we were quite hysterical. I usually got a vanilla frappe. ―I‘d like some cake,‖ I said. There was a wedding cake in a glass case, with little figures of a bride and a groom in a top hat. ―That cake,‖ I said.
―That cake,‖ Jeff said.
―Yes,‖ I said.
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―Do you mean it?‖ Jeff said.
‗Yes,‖ I said, completely hysterical by that time.
―Just say the word,‖ he said for the millionth time, ―and we‘ll get married.‖
He used to ask, again and again, ―Are you my old lady?‖
With a great effort I controlled myself and we had vanilla frappes.
When my mother was at Bryn Mawr, she told me that she was giving a surprise party for one of her friends, and a whole lot of women crowded into her suite with a cake. The woman whom the party was for quite unexpectedly opened the door before everything was ready, ―Quick! Hide in the closet!‖ my mother said. They all jammed into the closet in gales of laughter. Tina Appleton wet her pants, and she sat on the cake.
In the 60s, a group called The Tops had a song called, ―Someone left the cake out in the rain.‖
My mother sang it over and over.
My mother‘s friend at Bryn Mawr, Blanca Noel – Blaa Blaa, they used to call her – had a collection of stuffed animals called the Mowies which she kept on her bed, and when she got married she took them on her honeymoon.
One night at Bryn Mawr my mother had a dream that all of the cold cream bottles on her dresser had pushed up their lids. In the morning she opened her door to get the two little bottles of milk that were delivered to her by the milkman every morning, and the milk had frozen and the cold cream had pushed up their lids.
When my mother was a child her family went to Hartwood, on the New York – New Jersey – Pennsylvania border. All her cousins went there, too. When a young couple decided to elope, my mother and her friends overheard them planning it and they snuck out that night and put a potato in the exhaust pipe of the young man‘s car. The couple came out all dreamy and excited and got into the car. The young man turning on the ignition and put his foot on the accelerator. The car wouldn‘t start. He tried again. He was very embarrassed. Finally he called the garage. The man from the garage came and tried to start the car. It wouldn‘t start. He got out and went around to the back of the car and felt in the exhaust pipe and took out the potato.
―Potato in your exhaust pipe,‖ he said, and drove away.
When a faculty couple at Bryn Mawr was getting married, my mother and her friends tried the same thing. The man started the car and drove off, and the potato rolled down the street.
My mother told me about the time some boys at Yale took a car apart and put it together in another boy‘s room. So that when he walked into his room he saw a car standing there.
My mother‘s English friend, Hugh Solesby, at the conclusion of Vedermann in Austria, drove his car up the ramp on one side of the stage, across the stage, and down the other side.
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There are more stories from my mother at Bryn Mawr and Shipley: The time a girl got up to introduce a faculty lecturer, Mr. Pitt, and said, ―Mr. Spit will peak tonight.‖
The professor they called ―Spitty Blodgett.‖
Miss Horty, Hortense Flexner King, Freshamn English professor at Bryn Mawr, whom my mother adored.
The professor who pounced across the stage quoting, ―Chewwy wipe, wipe, wipe.‖
The French professor who cried. ―‘Cahn zee Eesiopiann chahnge is skann, or the leeopar
‗is spo?‘‖
The professor who was late to class but had left his hat on his desk. Everybody waited and waited for him to appear, and eventually they left the classroom. At the next class they came in and he had written on the board, ―If my hat is here, I am here.‖ The next class the professor arrived to an empty classroom, and on every seat there was a hat.
The professor who, when the first news of the bombing of Britain by the Nazis reached the campus, exclaimed in anguish, ―I hope they didn‘t get Dove Cottage!‖
At Yale, my mother and her Auntie Moll and her husband Samuel Hemingway and the English professor Chauncy Tinker went to the theatre. In the intermission Auntie Moll mysteriously disappeared. Chauncy Tinker cried, ―We‘ve got to find her! She‘s the only wife we‘ve got!‖
We made mud pies assiduously in the sandbox in Vermont. Pour water from the watering can on the sand, slap them together, and let them dry in the sun.
Later, at Brearley, we had Shop: ceramics, and clay, and tiles. I made my mother a red clay basket and put some dried flowers in it for Washington‘s Birthday. The tiles were little ceramic squares that we put in grout. I made her a box carved with a flower and her initials, and stained.
Much later, Emil told me that his landlady asked him if his bathroom had been grouted.
―I never heard that word before,‖ he said.
―Oh, I have, ― I said. ―At Brearley we used to make ceramic tiles with grout.
Emil smiled. A liberal education,‖ he said.
The carpentry shop at Brearely was a hallowed place. Sun streamed in through the huge windows overlooking the Esplanade and the East River, strong, wonderful things: a coffee table for my mother with joists, fish and rabbit cheese boards, and a box with a sliding cover painted with flowers for her paintbrushes. Indian paintbrushes were our favorite flower in Vermont, and the most plentiful.
I enlisted my grandmother‘s aid with the secret of the coffee table, and when it was finished and the shellac was dry my grandmother arrived in the navy blue oat and hat with a veil that she always wore, and we picked up the coffer table, she at the front and I at the back, and we coordinated our steps, and we marched it down East End Avenue 46
from 83rd Street to the 79th Street bus stop, and onto the 79th Street crosstown bus, and then off of it at Madison Avenue and up to 80th Street and up our front steps and in our front door and up three long flights of stairs to the fourth floor and into the living room.
We set it down in front of the sofa, and covered it with a sheet. It was a surprise for my mother‘s birthday. I was eleven.
―You‘re a very determined little person, aren‘t you?‘ my father said to me when I was four.
I still have the coffee table, in my apartment with my tuner on it.
One of my mother‘s friends at Bryn Mawr had a father who taught at Princeton, and he had told her the following alphabet that remains in our family to this day: Aphorism
Beef or lamb
See for yourself
Deaf or dumb
Eva LaGallienne
Effervescent
Chief of police
Age before beauty
I for myself
‗Jever see a dream walking
Kaffir corn
Elphabet
Emphasize
Enfer hell in French
O for the wings of an angel
Pee for mama
Queue for tickets
‗Arf a league, ‗arf a league, ‗arf a league onward Es for you, my fine young man
Tea for two
Euphemy
Vive la France
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Double you for drinks
Ex for breakfast
Wife or husband
Zephyr breezes
My mother thought of ―‘arf a league, ‗arf a league, ‗arf a league onwards.‖
My mother‘s father‘s family, the Dimocks, claimed to be descended from bastard English royalty. They had an engraved plate, which I still have, with a bar sinister and the motto, Ego Dimico Regis, I fight for the king. The Dimocks were the King‘s Champions: when the king was supposed to fight, the current Dimock fought in his place. There was a Dimock castle, Scrivelsby, in England, which our neighbor in Vermont, Marshall Dimock, had visited, and which was razed in the 1960s because there wasn‘t enough money to keep it up.
My mother thought the whole notion was ridiculous, and when later a geneologist told my grandfather that his family had been Welsh pig farmers, she was very happy. She said she‘d much rather be Welsh.
After the divorce, my mother worked at Roy Publishers in the East 70s in New York. It was a tiny publishing house in the basement of a brownstone, run by the Kisters, who had owned a large publishing house in Warsaw and had escaped from the Warsaw Ghetto.
Roy Publishers published mainly reprints. My mother did everything – the editing, the jackets, the publicity – and sometimes my sister and I were called in to help put the jackets on. Mrs. Kister was a tiny, indomitable woman who wore her gray hair in a tight knot at the back of her head. Mr. Kister cooked lunch for my mother and the secretary, Violet Walker, and Mrs. Kister every day. My mother told us that at about noon he would say, ―Prepare yourselves morally for hamburgers.‖ He also made hamburgers in lime Jello, which amazed my mother and was called Hunter‘s Stew.
The Kisters‘ daughter, Risha, owned a house in Vermont, on the way to Randolph. She was married to a well- known criminologist, Caesare Lambroso, and they had a daughter, Claudia, and a son, Paolo, whom we later knew when he was a student at Harvard. Risha had published a wonderful cookbook. The house was beautiful and sunny. We and the Kisters used to follow each other up from New York every weekend, and we would stop at Risha‘s and then continue on to Randolph.
When we turned onto the Merritt Parkway, my mother would shout joyfully, ―Kids, we‘re in Vermont!‖
After she worked for the Kisters, my mother went to the Art Students League. To her it was a hallowed place. Her teacher, Howard Trafton, whose god was Cezanne, taught the class a series of exercises that included African Sculpture and Exaggerated Perspective, 48
in the latter of which you drew the prone model as those her feet were on 42nd Street and her head were on 96th Street. He taught them composition, which I think mainly consisted of balancing an area of red on one side of the painting with a spot of red on the other side, and S curves.
My mother had always painted and drawn us children and flowers and Vermont. She was a natural artist. To her it was like breathing, and I would look at her pastels of the orchard and the hills in Vermont and feel her belly breathing.
Trafton took her aside one day and said, ―You have taste.‖ He said, ―All you have to for the rest of your life is draw.‖
When we moved to Cambridge, she worked at the Gray Herbarium at Harvard for Rolla Tryon, whose specialty was ferns, doing botanical drawing. She was very good at it. She had to look through an electron microscope and draw spores. My mother invented a new way of drawing shading. Until then, illustrators had used ―stippling,‖ making a lot of dots to show a shadow. My mother thought that this was terrible, it wasn‘t true to life, there weren‘t a lot of dots on the spores, and so she simply drew shading as she would on one of her own drawings. The articles were published, and she received a letter from the Director of The New York Botanical Society commending her in glowing terms for her work.
My mother loved children. She had had a book when she was a child called The Little Fairy Sister. It is large, and has engravings and color plates. ―The Fire Fairy‖ was the most beautiful thing I‘d ever seen.
She had had a series of books called The Little Maids and she read them to us. They were about little girls during the American Revolution who each, in the course of their family and social lives, performed some feat of great daring and courage for the revolutionary cause. When I was seven I thought that ―Tory‖ was the worst thing that you could call a person. The books had beautiful plates, and later they were reissued. There was our favorite, A Little Maid of Naragansett Bay, and A Little Maid of Old Maine, and many others. That was how I really learned to read. There were Little Golden Books, including Ukelele, my mother‘s favorite, about a little girl who lived a grass hut in Hawaii – ―it‘s so simple,‖ my mother said – and Doctor Dan, The Bandage Man which we wanted our parents to read to us so often because it had real band aids that we could put on, that my father finally called it Doctor Dan, The Goddamned Bandage Man. The Big Golden Book of Elves and Fairies had illustrations from which all my fantasies still come. Pirates, Ships, and Sailors was terribly real and had a picture of The Flying Dutchman sailing out of the mist with a black flag with a skull and cross bones on it which my mother thought was too scary, and she glued the pages together so we wouldn‘t have to look at it. And there was Pat the Bunny, which is still very much in print today.
Of course there was Winnie the Pooh, and later Mary Poppins. There was Babar, and Babar and Celeste, and Babar and Father Christmas. We also had a Babar record, which began, ―In the forest a little elephant is born. His mother names him Babar,‖ and had songs like, ―You‘re only an elephant to them,/But you‘re mother dear to me,‖ and, 49
―Celeste and me/Go over the sea,/Oh here we go ballooning./The sky is blue,/ The sea is, too,/And we are honeymooning!‖ which I sang to my father on the phone during the two years in which he was dying, along with a lot of other songs.
When I sang for my father I recited Walt Whitman‘s poem, ―On the beach at night/
Stands a child with her father/Watching the East, /The evening sky,‖ which I had recited at Brearley. ―Weep not child./Weep not, father,/…The Pleiades will again shine.‖
My mother used to sing to me:
Rest, rest,
On mother‘s breast,
Father will come to thee soon.
Sleep, sleep,
Rest and sleep,
Father will come to thee soon.
Father will come to his babe in the nest,
Silver sails all out of the West.
Blow him again to me,
While my little one, while my pretty one sleeps.
When I was about two I made up a poem about Vermont that my mother used to say to me when I was going to sleep:
The dark green hills
And the pale green grass
And the brook
And the apple trees
And the fireweed
And the fuzzywuzzies next to the window.
The farmer, Paul Webster, who was our neighbor in Vermont, taught me to drive a tractor right up the steep old stagecoach road above our house. He taught us to milk cows, and to pull gently. He still remembers that we took two kittens that we couldn‘t part with back to New York at the end of the summer. They didn‘t like the car, so the next summer we sent them on the train, and the vet met them. We gave them to some children on the farm 50
below us. The little female cat liked to hang around the barn, but they wouldn‘t see Starlight, the big male cat, for days. Finally he disappeared.
Paul Webster called us up one day.
―There‘s a cat that looks a lot like Starlight living in the barn here,‖ he said.
We drove over, and there was Starlight. After car and train trips and a winter in New York, he had gone back to the place where he was born.
My mother told me that when I was tiny Paul Webster carried me on his shoulders when he showed us all over the property, and that I cried, ―Up in the ‗ky, up in the mountings!‖
My mother used to give us children a spoonful of fish oil for vitamins A and D every night. I liked the taste and would keep the spoon to suck on. One morning I woke up and found that the spoon had gotten down in the bed, and I realized that I had been kicking it around all night. I told this to my mother, and she said that that night she had dreamed that she was swimming with an enormous spoon between her feet.
During my parents‘ separation, my mother took Mistletoe and me to Altman‘s every Saturday and bought us dresses. We had a tiny apartment on East 83rd Street, two blocks from Brearley, with a long closet filled with dresses exactly alike for both of us –
polished cotton Roman stripe, white dotted Swiss with lace. We were living in Yorkville, in new building in a very poor neighborhood, and we used to raid the stores in the block –
red winter jackets with hoods, turquoise corduroy fake Alpine dresses with laces on the bodice, scarves and winter hats, Mary Janes, Hummel figurines, and a little wooden black carved horse which I named Free Courage.
We went to the movies – The Little Carnegie, The Paris, The Translux 72nd Street and the Translux 79th Street. We saw Leslie Caron in ―Lili‖ seven times – it was my mother‘s favorite – and twice when we moved to Cambridge, ―The Glass Slipper,‖ ―Gigi,‖ Audrey Hepburn in ―Love In the Afternoon,‖ ―Three Coins In a Fountain,‖ ―Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,‖ ―Wee Geordie,‖ ―White Christmas,‖ ―The Wizard of Oz.‖ My father took us to see ―Twenty Thousand leagues Under the Sea.‖ He took us to see the ball go down in Times Square on New Year‘s Eve.
Later, when we had moved to 80th Street, my father got tickets to see Mary Martin in
―Peter Pan.‖ That morning I woke up with a temperature of 102. My mother called our pediatrician, Dr. Damrosch, the son of Walter Damrosch. ―Well,‖ Dr. Damrosch said, ―it is Peter Pan.‖ We went.
We used to eat at Mary Elizabeth‘s or Chock Full o‘ Nuts or the drugstore across the street from Altman‘s after shopping. Mary Elizabeth‘s was a very ritzy sandwich shop, and once we heard a man order a chicken sandwich on whole wheat with very little mayonnaise, and the waitress called to the chef, ―Chickie whea