How Precious Was That While, page 4
After that, according to my obviously imperfect memory, there were my parents. I came to know them, actually, in Spain. They really did mean well, but they were not naturally endowed for the job of parenting. Perhaps this is unkind, but I wonder whether the way they so eagerly volunteered for the challenging job of handling relief work in war-torn Spain was an indication of their incapacity as parents. They could not risk the children while the war continued, so we remained in England. When they were home, according to my mother, she tried to stay away, so as not to let us become attached, because then we would miss them when they returned to Spain. Thus it was that the attachment I developed was to the nanny—and my separation from her was just as bad as it would have been from my mother. Except that, in the case of the nanny, I was never to see her again. Thus my exile had no end.
Nevertheless, I did come to know them. I don’t recall my mother ever playing with us, but my father did. Once he had a magic trick, in which he put a coin on the top of a block, covered the block with a block-shaped shell, lifted the shell—and the coin was gone. Where could it be? He had a toy rabbit or something, perhaps one of our dolls, and animated it, looking all over for that lost coin. It was hilarious. Finally I tried to help. I thought it might be under the block, so I picked up the block. Instead of coming up whole, a block-shaped shell came up, and there under it was the original block, with the coin. Disgusted by my interference, which had ruined the trick, my father picked up block and shells and departed. We never saw that trick again. So it didn’t finish well, but it was fun while it lasted, and I have been interested in similar tricks since. It did show the way of it: my father was able to play with children, and did so many times; that was the only time I remember it turning out negatively.
In later years he was to tell us stories while we shared in some kind of work, such as digging in the garden, and they were always fascinating. Sometimes he would read the story just before we went out, then retell it, spinning it out. I remember a reference to a prince being given an army with a hundred men; later I checked that story in the book, and it was something like ten thousand men. My father had tailored it to our scale, and indeed, those hundred men made sense to us. He would read to us at night, and we loved those sessions. It was a favor I was to pass along to my own children, later. There is a special togetherness in reading together.
Again, I don’t remember my mother reading to us, but surely she did on occasion. She was there for the other things, especially illness, dressing, meals, shopping, and so on. The family fell into different aspects, as is the case with many families. Mother was there for comfort and routine and responsibility; father was there for discipline and fun. It was a workable system. We children had no hint of the ravages the people of Spain suffered; we were insulated from it.
My memories of other people in Spain are mostly slight and passing. There was the young man, Jorge, who sometimes played with us; I understand he spoke no English, so that was when we began to learn Spanish. There was a nursemaid who cared for us for a while; she taught us to brush our teeth and rinse our mouths by letting the discolored water go back in the glass. When we were finished, we each had a glassful of rinse water. Then, on her instruction, we drank the water. I don’t know whether this was to save water when perhaps it was precious, or mischief on the part of the maid. Later, with our mother, we started to drink the rinse water and she immediately said of course not. So I think she didn’t know. Perhaps it is my imagination, as I re-create the scene, but I think I remember the maid smiling with perhaps too-good humor, so it may have been mischief.
There were too many passing people to remark on when we came to America, so I’ll confine it to a few who had more of an impact. We were at Pendle Hill, a Quaker study center, for a while in 1940, and everyone there seemed nice. I remember a story my mother told later, of something I wasn’t party to: there was a party, and a fancy meal, but dessert had a problem. The hostess came to announce that they had had the ice cream in the oven for twenty minutes, but it still wasn’t soft enough to serve. I also remember being alone one evening while the others were out, and there was a phenomenal thunderstorm, with the lightning flashing and the thunder crashing. I loved it. I lay on the bed and gazed out the night window, watching it all. To me, light and noise were interesting, signifying action and excitement, like a war movie, though I had never seen such a movie. It was quiet that was lonely and frightening. Later the others came home. My mother was concerned that I would be terrified. How little she understood.
We left Pendle Hill, but later were there again for a while. We got a house in nearby Wallingford, and were often on the Pendle Hill campus. I went to The School in Rose Valley—that was its official name—covering grades five, six, and seven in two years, catching up to my grade level. It was the best school I attended, of nine, in my first nine years of schooling. One of the other students there was Herta Payson, who had long brown hair and glasses. She was twelve, and I was eleven, and I had a crush on her that I can’t to this day distinguish from love; it was as deep and enduring as any such emotion I have felt, though unreturned. She was on the Pendle Hill campus about as much as I was, so we interacted often. Once when she was bored she taught me to play chess. I was glad to learn anything she had to teach me, and I have been intrigued by chess ever since, though the pressure of workaholism was later to squeeze it out of my life except for the daily newspaper chess problems.
I had thought my attraction to long hair dated from my association with Herta, because she had fairly long straight hair, but now I suspect that I had it backwards; she appealed to me because of the hair, rather than the hair appealing because of her. There doesn’t seem to be much way to know, for sure. She also wore glasses, and the woman I later married wore glasses; was there any connection? I doubt it; my mother wore glasses too. I can see beauty in a woman with or without glasses, but a short-haired or blond woman leaves me romantically cold. My sister had long blond hair, and apparently that squelched all possible romantic interest for me in blondes. In other respects, blond hair gives me no problem; I thought my blond cousin Dotsy was a sweet girl, and my daughter Penny has wonderful long blond hair. But for romance, for me, a woman’s hair had to be long and dark, not one or the other. This preference still affects me, and it remains overwhelmingly strong. But after many years of long hair, my wife finally cut hers short; I felt I did not have the right to demand that she never wear it the length she preferred. I now choose to wear a beard; she doesn’t fault me on that, either. Romance is not identical to reality.
One day several of us were playing with homemade slingshots, fashioned from coat hangers and rubber bands, firing small stones at each other. We agreed to aim below the waist, so no one would get hurt. But Herta was struck on the glasses, and a lens cracked. It is not possible to be certain, and there were at least two of us on each side, but it could have been one of my stones that did it. Yes, I was aiming below the waist, but that meant a trajectory that went higher, or the stones would never have gotten far enough. She was nice about it, but of course the game broke up at that point, and I don’t think we ever did it again. I remain chagrined, because it just seems too likely that it was my stone that did it, and she was the very last person I wanted to harm in any way.
In due course Herta went to another school, and we seldom saw each other thereafter. There had never been anything between us, other than in my fancy. But my love for her burned brightly for three years before fading, and never faded entirely. Once, years later, a young woman introduced herself to me: “I don’t know if you remember, but we knew each other. I’m Herta Payson.” Not remember her? Not remember? At age sixty I saw a picture of one of my correspondents, a woman in her thirties and something about it fascinated me. Then I realized: there was a faint resemblance to that twelve-year-old girl I had loved, fifteen years before my correspondent was born.
Once I saw a newspaper article about a grisly murder. A woman returned to the apartment she shared with another woman, to find blood all over and the woman dead. I don’t know the outcome of that case—I think a boyfriend had done it—but I remember it because the surviving woman was Herta. There too, others thought I might not remember her, and I did not enlighten them. But it would be like not remembering the sun and the moon. I don’t know what happened to her thereafter; I presume she followed a normal life course, married, and so on. But I wonder whether any man ever loved her as I did. I have never sneered at “puppy love,” because I have felt its power. Adults have more experience than children, and can make better decisions, and have more control over their destinies, so their romances can endure longer. But I’m not sure they are more intense.
After the first time at Pendle Hill we moved to Hilltop Farm in Vermont. Teresa and I had no notion why; only decades later did I come to understand the rationale. Here is my mother’s comment, from her journal entry of 1-15-1991, not long before her death:
When we arrived in America and spent a year in that haunt of peace-lovers, Pendle Hill, we got ourselves involved in a scheme to defeat the war people by living out the disaster on a hilltop in Vermont and then coming down to rebuild society; it didn’t take me very long to realize that something was very wrong with our high-flown argument.
Indeed it did not work out as envisioned. I mentioned an indication of that in BiOgre: an artist, Cliff Bennet, painted a nice picture of the house as a mural on the kitchen wall, and below it wrote “Let not the seeds of war be found on these our premises.” Later those words were erased, I think because it was discovered that the seeds of war—that is, disharmony—were indeed to be found there. I remember telling him that he had painted the roof of the house wrong; the lines of the roofing went at right angles to what he showed. He didn’t comment. Later I rechecked the roof: work had been done on it since I had looked, and I was the one who was wrong. I thought about his silence, and realized that I had made a fool of myself. Since then I have always tried to verify my information before challenging anything, and it has spared me many a potential subsequent embarrassment. A number of other people, however, have not learned that lesson, and have challenged me on details without checking, and so have been embarrassed by my refutations. Harlan Ellison was perhaps the most notable of these. Memory is treacherous stuff, and should always be verified before an issue is made. It’s like a finder telescope, useful to get you to the ballpark vicinity, but not to be trusted for detail.
My mother hated living, as she put it, like troglodytes, there where there was no electricity, no running water, and no vehicular access in winter. Subsistence farming was definitely not her style. She much preferred the conveniences of the civilized city. But her objection was primarily intellectual:
In the brief excursions I made out into the war-torn world, it became clear to me that it was the people who were living in it and coping as best they could who were in the morally superior position. Whatever their ideology, they simply were better people than we. When I broke away from that and became a fund raiser for the peace movement I still was tormented by ambiguity (I always remember, when I was interviewed for the job by Kitty Arnett. Lee, whom I then didn’t know at all, coming through the room and saying “You’ll make the bomb-cases but you won’t make the bombs—is that it?”)
My conclusion is similar. I don’t believe that the problems of the world can be significantly alleviated by retreat from them. They need to be actively addressed in some fashion. The conquerors and despoilers don’t desist when ignored by their neighbors; they take over their neighbors and often destroy their cultures. So Norma was right to get back into the world, philosophically.
But she left the children behind. Again. It was no fun life. It wasn’t abusive in the standard sense, it was just rough in certain ways, physically and emotionally. We had to walk alone through the forest to school, two and a half miles each way (later it was said to be three: they hadn’t wanted to make us wary of the distance), sometimes on snowshoes in winter. The snow could reach four feet deep at times, the temperature 30°F below zero. Sometimes the water I washed in was frozen, so I had to break the ice in the basin. But the emotional isolation was worse. I had already started wetting my bed at night; now I developed halfway involuntary twitching of the head or hands. That is, when you have a cough, each cough is voluntary—but you do have to do it soon. Again and again. Though you’d rather be rid of it. Ridicule or punishment won’t make it go away. This was that way. And just as a cough is the apparent evidence of a hidden disease in the body, my compulsive twitching and bedwetting was the evidence of the deep emotional distress I was suffering. Picture a child being punished for coughing or having a runny nose. I got punished in certain ways for those reactions. Until finally I figured out for myself what others did not, and began to repair myself, by weaning myself away from emotional dependence on a unified family. But that was a long and difficult process.
A mother’s love is traditionally unconditional. But my mother didn’t really know how to love. And in this time she was overwhelmed by her own problem. My father had a greater commitment to the family, and though he made mistakes, he was the one who was usually there for me. Unfortunately there was a kind of dichotomy, with male understanding male and female understanding female, so I got along better with our father and my sister got along better with our mother. I remember with some bitterness that in the many altercations I had with my sister, only once did our mother take my side, though I believe that an objective party would have seen the justice of my case at least half the time. Thus I was alienated for cause, and grew up to resent unfairness wherever I encountered it. Our father usually took my side, and so alienated my sister—and when our mother left, she was left in the care of our father. So she has her horror stories too, many also of the subtle kind that don’t have significance for those who don’t actually experience them. Later we both lived with our mother, and I was the odd one out again.
I remember examples, and to be fair will give one of each: the two of us were playing by a low wall in a garden, when my mother was advised that there was poison ivy there. She immediately hauled us both out of there, and thoroughly washed my sister. I was relieved at the time to escape that. But years later, pondering it, I inquired: why was she the only one? Both mother and sister chastised me for paranoia. So I didn’t bring it up again. My observations later in life suggest to me that it is often the one who makes the charge of paranoia who is the one causing the mischief, protecting himself by aggression. Folk hate to have biases exposed, so pretend they don’t exist. This also relates to the blame-the-victim syndrome: if the victim is culpable, then other folk, who presume themselves to be superior, will not be similarly hurt.
Now the other example: when we were with our father, Teresa once made a meal, doing what she could at an age when adult skills had not yet arrived. Our father criticized it endlessly: the salad wasn’t clean, the vegetables weren’t cooked well, the whole thing was slipshod. She finally fled the table in tears. He didn’t understand why. Later he asked me, and I explained about the stresses on her—a boy who hadn’t been interested, a friend in trouble, and lack of appreciation for the effort she had made. Sympathy for Teresa’s situation didn’t come naturally to him, just as sympathy for mine did not come naturally to our mother. Though in adulthood we all tried to paper over such schisms, they do remain below. Our parents just weren’t perfect at parenting, however well-meaning they were. They tended to think of us as small adults, and were impatient with our childishness, even when we were indeed children. Once, I put the question pointedly to my mother: “If you can’t be young when you’re young, when can you be?”
Were there times when I had differences with my father, and Teresa with her mother? Oh, yes, some serious ones. But in general—well, let me go to another analogy. Once in adult life I played badminton with an associate from work. His shots were fast and straight and true, while mine just didn’t have much force, if they got there at all. He tore me up. Then we changed courts, and the wind was at my back, and I tore him up. It had been so slight as to be almost unnoticeable, yet it made all the difference. Well, when we were with my father, the wind was at my back; when with our mother, it was at my sister’s back. On major issues the wind did not count, but in the myriad little ones that make up daily life, its effect was constant. My sister and I did not get along well, but I think she would agree with me on this.
At any rate, Hilltop Farm was our lot for about four years, and it had its positive aspects. I developed an abiding love for nature, and today, with the resources to live anywhere in the world I please, I live in a forest with our nearest human neighbor about a mile away by road. No animals are hunted, and we have seen deer, a wildcat, rare birds, and many other creatures close by our house. But we do have electricity, and all that goes with it.
As the group of people who set up Hilltop Farm with such ambition fragmented, replacements were needed. I don’t know how it was arranged, but a young—age nineteen, I think—college man came, and brought his girlfriend, later wife. They were Norman and Winifred Williams. They took to the primitive life and made something of it. In fact they were later to buy their own neighboring property and built their own house there. But meanwhile she got a job as a local schoolteacher, and the deserted school in Pikes Falls was reopened, and for two years we went there—all two and a half miles distant. Winnie was, for my taste, a lovely woman and wonderful person, almost too pretty to be seen in a backwoods region like this, and too intelligent to get along well with the sometimes bigoted neighbors. But she made the best of it, and I think it was largely her presence that made those years bearable for me.
