As It Turns Out, page 7
Edie on Rumpelstiltskin, ca. 1957
It turned out that these were not the only tensions on the ranch, under the mythic surface, because Bobby had begun having anxiety attacks (it started at school, and Mummy came east to deal with it; she said it was due to a chemical imbalance in his brain) and Minty was drinking too much. Perhaps that’s why my parents suddenly cracked down on me—maybe the explanation is that they were alarmed and took it out on me, because what they did was this: they stopped paying my tuition bills, and Fuzzy came east, went to the dean, and said all kinds of terrible things to get me kicked out. Then he came to me and demanded that I transfer to a women’s college on the West Coast. When I refused, he said I had to go into the army. We had a horrendous fight at my grandmother’s house on Long Island, after which Fuzzy took me to a dinner party with friends of his. On the way he said such awful things that I sat silent and weepy through most of the evening, and when we got home I went straight to my room. I was sitting on my bed, still in my evening dress, when Fuzzy came in, sat down next to me, and put his arms around me. Then he put his head on my bare shoulder and said he could understand how men felt about me; he was a man himself. It stopped there, but that was enough. I thought, So that’s what this has all been about? and for the first time I felt contempt for my father.
* * *
I mention this because when Edie got to New York she told everybody she had been subjected to Fuzzy’s sexual advances from the age of seven. Now, that’s impossible, because when Edie was seven she lived in the cottage at Corral de Quati with Sophie and the others, and according to Kate, they hardly ever saw him. But when Edie found she had an audience, she told so many tall tales about Fuzzy that people thought she was obsessed with him. For instance, she told Isabel Eberstadt that he had once made Suky and her take off their shirts and sit, bare-breasted like two sphinxes, on columns at either side of the gate to the ranch, and that he would beat them brutally if they so much as moved. That’s completely absurd, but when it comes to sexual advances, all I know is what Edie claimed, and the fact that I find it hard to believe doesn’t mean some of it couldn’t have been true.
* * *
Fortunately for me, I was able to show the dean a letter from my mother saying they had paid the tuition when in fact they had not. I don’t know what the dean made of my father’s behavior, but I was allowed to stay on. A friend lent me the money for summer school, but after that I couldn’t pay, so I withdrew, planning to earn some money and go back as soon as I was solvent. Meanwhile, I cut myself off from my family.
VI
A year or two passed. On the ranch, life went on and the surface continued to hold, and now Pamela got engaged. What’s more, to the great surprise of my family, so did I, and it looked as if I too had managed to follow my parents’ way. I had moved to Georgetown, where I shared a house with a friend of a friend and worked in a bookstore while looking around for something better. One evening I was sitting on the sofa reading The Tempest aloud with a guy I knew (this was the fifties, when single girls with no money could live on N Street, and when some people’s idea of a date was reading The Tempest) and my roommate came laughing through the door with a very tall, very handsome young man in a tan gabardine suit. I had never seen him before, even though it turned out we had been in the same year at college. She introduced him as her cousin, on leave from the army; we talked a bit, and the next day he invited me to dinner. He turned out to represent every single thing I had been taught that a man was supposed to be and do—not only had he been senior prefect at Groton and president of the Porcellian, but he had also graduated with honors in math and rowed on a legendary crew—and on top of it all he was a modest and honorable person. I was lost in admiration; however, I recognized, and was touched to understand, that with all that perfection he had not had much experience of life. As for me, I might have seemed sophisticated, but I was still really clueless, and except for that one affair in college I had never had a real relationship either. We were both twenty-two. I thought I was really old to be getting married, and I suspect he feared that he was really young, but in those days you just assumed that once you got on the conveyor belt of marriage it would carry you through all of life’s successive stages.
Pamela’s wedding was set for August 14, 1954, her nineteenth birthday, and mine was to be a few weeks later. I arrived at the airport in Santa Barbara the day before her bridal dinner, and I wasn’t feeling well; it turned out I had a fever of 104. Meanwhile, that same afternoon, on the other side of town, a car crowded my brother Bobby off the road on his bike, and he broke his neck. We didn’t know it then, but that was the beginning of the years of wreckage. Bobby was taken to Cottage Hospital, where he spent the night in traction, awaiting the operation that would save him from paralysis. I was put in isolation at Goleta, in the guesthouse, along with a nervous young German shepherd my parents had just been given. First thing the next morning, I called my brother to wish him luck, and he told me he had had a nightmare. He’d dreamt that he crawled on his knees down the little corridor that led to our parents’ bedroom door and begged them to give him another chance; he begged and begged, and they told him no, that he had used up all his chances.
But that was behind the scenes. On the main stage, I was told, the bridal dinner went off beautifully; so did the wedding the next afternoon, and a few days later Pamela and her new husband headed for New York in the canary-yellow convertible our parents had given them as a wedding present. Offstage, Bobby’s neck was successfully fused, and after a week or two he was taken home to the ranch in a huge carapace of white plaster with a cage at the top for his head, which was fixed to it by four rods embedded in his skull. All I had was a bad case of mononucleosis, but apparently it was contagious, so Grandma took me to stay with her in a very nice hotel in Santa Barbara until the doctor said I could go home. It was October and I had turned twenty-three before I was well enough to be married.
My husband was based at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, so we spent the winter in a farmhouse in hunting country, and after he got out of the army, we moved to Cambridge for graduate school. Pamela was already there with her husband, who was beginning his postponed senior year, and she was expecting a baby. She had just turned twenty. Bobby was there too, back in Eliot House, trying to finish his degree and seeing a psychiatrist for his anxiety attacks and mood swings, and meanwhile he and Peter Sourian had an exotic waif called Gregory Corso living secretly in a tent in their room. You cannot imagine what a sensation Gregory created in Cambridge. He was a street kid still, just out of Dannemora, the maximum-security prison where he had done three years for robbery, and while he was there an old guy had introduced him to reading. He had read everything you can think of, from Stendhal and the Russians to Joyce, plus the complete works of Will and Ariel Durant, and his idol was the poet Shelley. Somehow he had found his way to Harvard, and here he was, writing poetry and living from hand to mouth among the privileged, who couldn’t get enough of him. So some fissures had opened up in my brother’s life. He had turned away from our parents and the Porcellian Club and was reading about philosophy and Zen Buddhism. At some point he acquired an old black Porsche, and with his brooding good looks he cut quite a figure around Cambridge. I took him very seriously—he made me think of Stavrogin in The Possessed—and so did some of his teachers; others, however, were put off by his extreme ideas and erratic behavior. Of course I knew he was having difficulties and that they were painful, but at that point I had complete faith in psychiatry and all the new drugs that were coming out, and it never once crossed my mind that my brother was not going to be just fine. That’s how clueless I was. He got his degree and enrolled in graduate school to study Oriental art (as they called it then), so for the next few years we saw each other pretty constantly, and it was during that time that he became a doctrinaire Marxist. I didn’t know it until long afterward, but improbably enough it was Morty Sills, the proprietor of the gentlemen’s clothing store on Mount Auburn Street, whose name is now a trademark, who introduced him into the Communist Party. And then Bobby just vanished. It turned out he had taken off for Kansas City to work as an organizer for the ILGWU, and what with one thing and another, including a lot of suffering, he did not get back to Cambridge and graduate school until the spring of 1964, by which time I was long gone and Edie was there.
* * *
So Bobby was not around in February 1957, when that Groton letter came out, but my husband received it, and so did various Sedgwick cousins and a number of people we knew. For weeks everybody was talking about it and speculating as to who could have done such a thing. And then, as I said, my cousin Alexander Sedgwick came and told me. I was stunned and ashamed when I learned that it was my father, the descendant of generations of dedicated abolitionists on both sides, my father, who had written that letter, but at the same time I was relieved. I thought, My God, he’s crazy—this means he is really crazy, and now it’s clear for anybody to see. Until that moment there had been no overt evidence of my father’s dark side, and we children, who bore the brunt of it, had been taught from infancy to respect and admire him. I was sure this would be it, the end of his perfect public image, but in the event the school did not press charges, and the whole thing seemed to blow over. (Fuzzy himself was unfazed: after Minty died he sent out another letter to everyone associated with Groton School, in which he blamed the school and its headmaster for Minty’s suicide, and this time he signed it.)
* * *
I had always known people in Cambridge who were involved in radical politics, but at that stage and for a long time afterward, nobody I knew had anything to do with drugs. Then one day a friend who was getting a degree in psychology invited me to sit in on a program at Boston Psychopathic Hospital that was experimenting with a drug called lysergic acid diethylamide. He explained that it induced a state resembling schizophrenia, and they wanted to see if it was useful in treating mental illness. So for some weeks I watched as small groups of volunteers—all men, all medical or doctoral students from Harvard—sat around in a circle and did or did not react to randomly administered injections of LSD, grain alcohol, or just plain water. I personally never saw anyone develop the full-blown symptoms of schizophrenia, but I heard a horror story about a medical student who escaped in a psychotic state and ran all over town for days on end, and I did see a number of guys break down. Interestingly, it was usually the straightest guys, the all-American ones who looked the most confident and self-possessed, who would wind up sobbing and saying they had never lived up to somebody or other’s expectations, while the nerdy, neurotic ones just went on acting nerdy and neurotic. Eventually, I was assigned to a program that was investigating the use of drugs in mental hospitals to control violent patients, and I went to work as a volunteer in the locked wards at Waltham State. Then one day my cousin Johnny Marquand, who had heard what I was up to, called from New York and asked if he could bring a friend to stay. The friend turned out to be a rangy Scot by the name of Alex Trocchi, who knew so much about LSD and about drug-testing programs around the country that I assumed he was a doctor, but no, he was a writer, a very famous writer of pornography, he said, and he was living on a garbage scow on the Hudson. What he wanted was access to LSD. However, this was before the days of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, and the program at Boston Psychopathic was closed to outsiders. Decades passed before I learned that the experiments I had witnessed were part of MK-ULTRA, the secret program that the CIA had set up at Harvard in 1952, the real object of which was to study how drugs could be used to control human minds, or in other words, for brainwashing.
Not long after that, my marriage came apart. We were not grown-up enough to deal with our difficulties; it turned out we had been playing house all along, living “as if.” So in the fall of 1958 I moved to New York and through friends I got a job at a settlement house in East Harlem working with Black and Hispanic kids. Areas were being razed all around, housing projects were going up, drugs—mainly heroin—were infiltrating everywhere, and the tension between the two communities was fierce. I found that out on the first day when an eight-year-old boy asked me for a black crayon so he could draw a picture of Eddie’s mother. Eddie shot out of the room, and next thing I knew, back he came with his father, who was carrying a knife. And then, within seconds, my supervisor appeared and took care of the situation. Agnes Preston was her name; she was a tiny elegant Black lady in her forties with a bunch of advanced degrees, and there she got an angry young guy to back up and put away his knife. Then she called me into her office and told me some basic things I needed to know about the situation between the two communities. It was the first of innumerable lessons I learned from her. I had had absolutely no notion of the Hispanic presence in New York, and up to then I had encountered very few people of color. In Cambridge I had been aware of Jane Bunche, the president of my class, whose father was undersecretary of the UN, and Lena Horne’s daughter, Gail Jones, and I had known a remarkable girl called Dorothy Dean. Dorothy and I had been students together in the fine arts department, and she was so clever and sharp-tongued, and always kept such clever company, that to me she was just another super-smart Radcliffe girl. Bobby had been talking a lot about slavery and the situation of the Blacks (“Negroes,” we still said) in American society, but he always spoke in abstract terms of capitalist exploitation and class struggle, and I don’t know if at that point he knew anyone who was directly involved (although he did have friends later on who went to Selma). Here in East Harlem, the situation was on everyone’s mind, and the atmosphere was electric, not least because Malcolm X was speaking and holding meetings blocks away. Agnes Preston was going with a colleague, and there was a lot of discussion among the staff. I wanted to go too but was told I would not be welcome, which was an important lesson right there. I would go out to dinner with Agnes and her friend, and they had to pick the restaurant, because in midtown Manhattan in the 1950s there were very few places that would serve them, and that was another lesson: I had had no idea that their map of the city was so different from mine. They talked about the drug situation (Agnes Preston’s view was that the Mafia was deliberately anesthetizing the Black community to keep things quiet around their operations), and they argued a lot about Malcolm. They would pit his vision against what Martin Luther King was preaching in the South, and both of them came down on the side of Malcolm. Then when I ventured to ask about James Baldwin, whom I admired, I was surprised to hear that neither Agnes nor her friend took him seriously at all. In fact, Agnes made wicked fun of him (more lessons). You have to remember, at that point Brown v. Board of Education was only a couple of years old, and down in Montgomery the boycott was in progress. All the rest was to come, and the world around me felt pregnant with it.
Edie, meanwhile, had gone off to boarding school at Branson’s in the fall of ’56. She was only thirteen and had never been off the ranch, never been anywhere on her own. Although she had always dominated whatever situation she encountered, when she went away to school she couldn’t manage, and by spring she was back at home. I heard she had a serious disease—somebody said it was leukemia, but clearly that was not the case. My guess is that already at that stage it was bulimia, but it could simply have been severe homesickness, or perhaps it was a combination.
Whatever it was, for the next year and a half she was kept at home on the ranch; only Suky was there. Everyone else was away at school. When they came home for Christmas in 1957, Edie was not to be seen, and they were told she was sick. All they knew was that she was being kept in bed, and every few days the doctor came and sedated her. It was years before they heard Edie’s side of the story; then what she told them was this:
Edie said she walked into the blue sitting room one day, and there was Fuzzy on the floor like a dog, mounting a beautiful young wife we all knew. She ran out of the room crying, Fuzzy followed her and smacked her, then he called the doctor and said she was crazy; the doctor came and put her to bed and shot her full of tranquilizers; Edie told Mummy what she had seen, Mummy wouldn’t believe her, no one would believe her, and after that she was kept in a darkened room, half-drugged all the time.
When I first heard this story I couldn’t see how it was possible. To begin with, the doctor might have believed my father, but why would Mummy have refused to believe Edie? She knew Fuzzy was unfaithful; she had been covering for him for years. He didn’t even conceal it from her when that beautiful young wife or another needed an abortion. (I know because Fuzzy wrote to his psychiatrist telling him all about it, and years later I saw the letter with my own eyes.) How then is it conceivable that she could look her favorite, most beloved child in the eye and say she didn’t believe her?
Ah, but on the ranch the line was that Edie was mentally ill, so there was no reason to believe a word she said.
Edie’s story means that on the ranch the truth was whatever our father and mother said it was. It means they could and did compel their children to live as if it were so. It also means that our mother’s sole enterprise in life was to sustain her husband and their common understanding at whatever cost to herself or her children, even Edie.
