To the New Owners, page 17
At the same time Lydia embarked on training for her career as a psychoanalyst, having been led to do so because of her own analysis. Lydia said her mother was not tuned in to the needs of small children, proven by her oft-repeated conviction, “Children under the age of five are just rabbits.” The factors that brought Lydia to the couch belong to her, but after that experience she flourished, eager to act on her belief in the uniqueness of everyone’s personal story. One time, she had a studio built for her practice, and she chose to install a variety of windows, not one the same size or dimension. I know that she helped many people. Former patients kept in touch. One gave her a handmade quilt, which adorned a bed on the Vineyard. Another sent Lydia her first novel while it was still hot off the presses. The author was then in her late sixties, and it was long after treatment had ended. At a book award ceremony given by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a prize recipient told me how much he owed to her, as a person and as a writer.
She once told me about a patient whose daughter had returned from a semester abroad ravaged by drugs. The patient and her husband were about to put their entire life on hold when Lydia cautioned them not to, sharing the content of a letter she sent to them, but leaving out any identifying details.
The more you cancel your life, the more you are communicating to the child, “You’re so fragile. Look at what you have done to our lives.” And that is only going to make your daughter feel more vulnerable and chaotic than she already does. The more you can keep your own life going as usual the more she can hope to feel stable within herself and not further crippled by how disabled you have also become. You have to show her the path to separateness, stability, and life-ongoing. With that in mind, every time you look at her, every time you stand in front of her, speak to her, listen to her, laugh with her, get angry or worried about her when she is in your presence, you have to see her and the person you know her to be: gifted, intelligent, creative, empathic, sane, humorous, delightful, embraceable, and a success. That is the only way she will be able to reflect her view of herself. No matter what the reality, you have to reflect those known positives all the time. If not, you will all be caught in the trap of seeing only the symptoms of your fears and that will be her only reflection of herself.
Lydia’s favorite saying other than “Never write the ending”:
“Reality is overrated.”
In 1985 when Marg McNamara died, Lydia gave the eulogy at the National Cathedral. Several years later, in a reception line at the first Bush White House, both George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara, gave Nick and Lydia firm bipartisan handshakes and then, looking straight at Nick, said they would never forget the beautiful speech he gave on behalf of Marg McNamara. They misrembered the event in the apparent belief that powerful words must have emanated from a powerful man, not his spouse.
It was a telling moment for Lydia and one that encapsulated the feeling she had had about Washington for a long time: it has a way of making people feel invisible, especially women, regardless of their husband’s status.
In her work Lydia addressed the secret gears and inner workings of each patient—the opposite of Washington.
She celebrated what is invisible.
Born with a sense of design, she could make any interior within her range of influence a place of refuge and beauty. Her husband admired her photographic memory for color. One time she pointed out to me with pride that the exterior of a new Jeep blended perfectly with the landscape on the island. It bothered her that her grandchildren’s Fisher-Price toys were in bright unambiguous primary colors: Who decided that children would not like blocks in chartreuse and magenta and persimmon? She winced when the seam of a lampshade was exposed rather than turned toward a wall. She believed curtains were for the most part unnecessary, preferring blinds in a pinch. At one point when she was selling a house, the potential buyers passed on the property, but wondered if she might be available to decorate whatever house they did find. In her work as a psychoanalyst, she brought order to interiors of an abstract nature.
When my children were little, she engaged with them in a way that authenticated their autonomy. Being too mired in day-to-day tasks, I don’t think I understood this dynamic at the time nor did I admire it to the degree it deserved.
In grade school, my son, Nick, loved mud and speed and noise. When called upon to express his opinion in short essays, he declared himself dead set against homework: “It makes me miss most of the Celtics when they’re on TV. There’s better things to do. It takes too long. It’s a waste of time. It’s too hard. It’s very frustorating [sic]. There’s lots of stress, it’s boring, it’s no fun. My sister messes it up.”
“Should Recess Be Longer?” was the title of another composition.
The answer, in short: “Of course it should.”
He could cite only one drawback: “Like for example if you didn’t have a longer recess you would learn a little more. But personally I don’t care.”
Another essay stated: “If I am able to get a dirt bike, I would have a path that went around my house. My bike would be a Kawasaki. If I get a dirt bike, I would not tease my sister ever again. I would clean the dishes. I would ride my bike to get donuts. I would empty the trash.”
One time, he took his appeal for a BB gun all the way to the kid version of the Supreme Court, to his grandparents.
Lydia wrote back:
I am late in answering your wonderful letter about your urgent wish for a BB gun.
I am sorry to be late. Here are my thoughts and feelings about what you said.
First and most important, I thought your writing and how you expressed your ideas were beautiful. You have good ideas, well stated and well spelled. It is a prize letter. I have said that I would pay you one dollar ($1) a page for a story. Your letter comes so close to being almost a story about your feelings and wishes that I am enclosing double the amount. You wrote four pages. That would be eight dollars. That is too difficult to put into an envelope, so I am enclosing two five-dollar bills. Okay?
Now for how I feel about the things you had to say. What I think may be quite different from what others might feel or think or argue, so you can put it all together in your mind and work it out with your mom and dad.
I am all for dreams coming true. Some, I guess, more than others. But dreams should not be at the expense of such promises to be sooooo good as you did in your letter. You would be an impossible person if you actually were as good as you promised to be. Nobody could always, all one’s life, be nice to a brother or a sister. It is terrific to try, and it is helpful to everyone. But occasionally being mean and nasty comes with the job of living and being a human person.
From what I know about you, you’d be very responsible with a BB gun. But the question is not so much if you know how to behave with a BB gun as it is whether or not your parents want the responsibility of your having a BB gun. Guns do cause lots of accidents, yet there are generations of young boys who want to learn to use and have fun with them. It is a very difficult problem for parents. Like many things in life (cars, motorcycles, fishing rods) they’re okay if nothing goes wrong and terrible if something does go wrong.
When Princess Diana died in a car crash in the summer of 1997, Lydia drafted a letter to the Boston Globe, which for some reason was never sent and instead simply pasted in the logs:
Of all the things said and written about Princess Diana’s life and death, David Shribman’s article “Already, Britain Is a Different Place” is the most powerful, insightful, and beautifully written. In the small world of family and friends, and in the large world around the globe, there seem to be two groups: those who “get it” and those who don’t. “It” is the imperative and recognizable need for symbol and metaphor, ritual and pageantry, heroes and heroines, story and fantasy in the lives of the highest and the most humble of individuals. Those writers and non-thinkers are concrete and cannot see beyond their choice of “data” in their thinking and intellectualizing re Diana. There is such a poverty of imagination and jejune understanding of life. The British monarchy, far from being dead, has been infused with new life. In her life and death, Princess Diana gave it a necessary transfusion. Thank you, David Shribman.
Lydia was without doubt the most definite woman I had ever encountered.
She had two words she could not stand: “just,” when it is used to belittle something that is important, and “appropriate,” when it is used as an excuse to do something you don’t want to do but think you should even if you feel it is wrong. Every year on her birthday she gave up something she did not like or thought was unnecessary: Lent, in reverse. One time she gave up making excuses. Before she moved to assisted living and her social life was curtailed, she gave up always being the one to initiate the conversation at formal dinners, and she gave up dinner parties with more than ten people in attendance. She said she would no longer attend what she called “résumé funerals,” at which the deceased’s public accomplishments are emphasized at the expense of any sense of his or her personal relationships.
She did not like wind chimes because she believed nothing should compete with the sound of nature.
She claimed to never once return a gift—not even the lemonade pitcher I gave her that had a red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes theme. Never a flag-waver, she thought the colors were too obvious. Patriotism to her was private. It was the act of sitting by and waiting with her young family when her husband stood up to bullies in the South while armed men, on the wrong side, looked on. It was witnessing the physical deterioration of your elderly husband, a process accelerated by the deprivations of prison camp, and bending down to tie his shoes when that maneuver was no longer in his power.
She must have had a certain degree of insecurity because she sometimes went out on a limb to be controversial. For instance, one of her bugaboos was Mother Teresa, whom she believed was a fraud who convinced the afflicted that their unmitigated suffering would get them a better berth in the next world while she herself took advantage of every single possible comfort in the Western medicine bag of tricks.
One time her husband was asked by some pro-choice supporters to issue a learned opinion about why abortion should remain legal. It was not difficult for him to come up with a statement thick with caveats and other impressive linguistic artillery. Lydia listened while he read his ornate opinion out loud and then said she wished someone had asked her for her opinion, which was “If men want to tell us what we can or cannot cut from our bodies, it’s fine as long as we can tell them what to cut or not cut from theirs.”
Oh, she was a strong taste, but I took pride in having her as my mother-in-law. I had heard other women talk about their mothers-in-law and none sounded as appealing, certainly not the woman with only one topic, her macramé, nor the long-divorced woman who liked to exchange unsolicited intimacies with her daughter-in-law (“Isn’t it always awkward, the first time you sleep with a man?”), nor the stay-at-home mom whose single joy in life was to deposit enough money in new bank accounts to win a prize, and thus every room of her home was overridden with free toasters, waffle makers, and coffee percolators.
In the summer of 1996, Nick and Lydia celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary with a small dinner at the Point with their four children and spouses, six grandchildren, and one nephew, Phelps Stokes Hawkins (PSH), along with his wife, Sandra Lea Earley (SLE), and their son, Robert Bradshaw Stokes Hawkins (RBSH). For the record, many members of the family often referred to themselves by initials. At times I felt as if I had married into the Monogram Lobby.
The weather that weekend would have been worse only if the storm had lived up to its promised status as a hurricane: the water came down in daggers, trees bent sideways, thunder roared. It was a wonder that the road did not wash out. As the outdoors was doubled over in darkness, even at midday, we held a trivia contest in which the members of the family guessed the answers to fifty questions that had to do with family history, courtship, and sibling warfare.
“What did Grandfather do the summer after high school in 1939?”
“He took a bike trip to France with his friend Ward and a boy who died in World War II. They ate tripe.”
“Where did he spend his junior year abroad?”
“As a POW at Stalag Luft III. He read two hundred books supplied by the Red Cross.”
“What was Grandmother’s mother the first to do?”
“As a reporter for the Knickerbocker News, she was the first woman allowed into the press gallery in Albany to cover the state legislature.”
“What was the name of Grandmother’s first crush, the caretaker at her family’s house on Pearl Island in the Adirondacks?”
“Tuffy.”
“What was the most missed item when the family lived in Switzerland for a year?”
After several false wild guesses and one good one (“the dogs”), the answer came in the form of Anne’s pacifier, a small clown called Wawa with a long dunce cap with a nipple on the top. It had been lost in transit by accident, creating a tumultuous time for the youngest member of the family.
Anne: “Still paying for it.”
“What dead Austrian does Grandmother think wrote The Book of Life?”
“Freud.”
“What is the real color of Grandmother’s hair?”
Lydia: “White with splotches of gray.”
“What dance step was Grandmother famous for when she lived in Washington?”
Lydia: “The Monkey.”
“What is the secret to a long and happy marriage?”
John: “We ought to make them answer that secretly in an isolation chamber.”
Anne: “It’s only forty-eight hours. We can give them the perfect family they wished they had.”
Later Lydia wrote this formula for a happy marriage in one of the logs:
(1) Find a man with a strong chin, a huge head with room for a big brain, and a large heart, who believes that “life is an outside job.”
(2) Find a woman, almost totally original, who acts out for him all his wild and creative secret wishes, who loves him and produces with him some truly glorious children, who breaks all the rules/laws he upholds, who believes in vibes and auras and that “life is an inside job,” mix that up, and assure that each one is responsible for his or her own happiness and then you top this with joy and you have fifty years plus!
Lydia was the guiding force behind one of the best parties ever at Thumb Point. She used the excuse of her eightieth birthday party to hire a local company to prepare an indigenous clambake, the kind that the Wampanoag tribe has practiced for hundreds of years. All day, a low-grade fever of anticipation as first the tent was pitched, and then the tables set, and the pit dug. Rocks were placed in the bottom, a wood fire was started, and, when the heat was steady, the food was placed in layers: potatoes first, then corn, then fish and clams and lobster at the top, all of it covered with seaweed so that the entire meal steam-cooked over the course of about five hours. We had eight tables for ten people each in a clearing. Each table had a different color cloth and a centerpiece of brightly painted coffee cans containing wildflowers assembled in such a way that they embodied the casual grace of dancers who radiate perfection even when they slump.
As a finale, Lydia had all the August babies (of whom there were many—the children of late summer who come from love in the early winter) get up and dance to “Zombie Jamboree” sung a capella by the Vineyard Sound. The guys in the group—many of them music majors at their schools, who thrilled at the luck in spending an entire summer being paid to sing on an island at public events, parades, and private parties—had their routine down pat. After several “free encores,” they helped themselves to food and drink and put up with older adults telling them either about the fun they had at their age, or the fun they wished they had had.
I think Jane Austen said this, but if she did not, as Miss Pith, she should have:
Everything happens at parties.
I looked around that night and realized that at certain signal moments the people you gather and the place where they assemble can be in and of itself a work of art, as real as any painting in a museum.
The built-in vanishing act underscored the power of the moment.
“The greatest heartache about getting old,” Lydia once wrote, “is wanting so much, yearning, to be around and to see and be with the next generation, with their talents and passions and possibilities and graduations and passages and achievements and joys and knowing you can’t or won’t be there.”
But since you can’t celebrate a major wedding anniversary or a milestone birthday every year, the next best bet for Lydia was the annual feast in which she and her guests got to name their lobsters after people who had offended them in the preceding year. Then the lobsters were thrown into the roiling water. Many families have their own rituals, an annual bonfire or a final hike, some moment of togetherness to mark the season and then to treasure later during the bleak winter months. In The Big House by George Howe Colt, the author describes how his family on the Cape had an elaborate ceremony for saying good-bye to departing guests, with everyone gathering on the capacious porch, known as the piazza, waving white hankies and simulating end-of-the-world sobs as a final salute. Once a year, one of our neighbors, David Lewis, supervised his own fireworks display. Each time he detonated colorful crackling sprays of light, he would say, “Now that’s popcorn, eh?” The men played with fire, while the women and children sat to the side and watched. Across the pond near the red barn, a family used to have a reunion every first weekend in August, when tents bloomed all over their property. On Saturday afternoon, they would have a wooden boat derby. (Somewhere along the line that stopped, and another annual marker bit the dust.)
