Published in the US as
THE SUMMER OF '39
 

Chapter Two Boston, 1914-1925 Far back, on the other side of a closed door, is fear, memories so confused and indistinct that I can never be sure that I have separated the false from the true. I am six years old. I see myself curled up in bed, knees nudging at my chest as I squint up the side of a high white pillow to make a mountain of it and myself an intrepid skier flying down the slope. Beside the bed, a pink-shaded lamp creates an island of light, floating on the darkness. The curtains are unusually thick in order to keep out the gas lamps of the square over which only the mossy heads of Christopher Columbus and Aristides the Just, a tax-assessor, keep unpaid guard. I have allowed the curtains to be closed. Later, I will slide out of bed and pull them an inch apart, searching the shadows for any sign of the devil, fiery eyed and cloven footed, stepping lightly through the square in the high-collared black coat of a Boston gentleman. The faint, sooty smell of the central heating gusts up through the floor vent, making me cough and bury my face in the sheet.  I can hear the sharp click of the front door as my mother sets out for one of her evening meetings. Not for the first time, she has forgotten to kiss me goodnight. I have often prayed that I might become a little beggar-girl, since it is clear that my mother would find me a good deal more interesting if I was poor and helpless. My mother nearly died of diphtheria as a girl. When she recovered, she decided to become a missionary. Instead, she married my father and made causes her vocation. School Boards, Chinese missions and temperance societies occupy her time. I have never seen her show affection towards my father; I sense that she feels little for me. My brother Michael, a pushy, brashly handsome boy of fourteen, is the exception. I do not think Michael has ever known what it is like to feel unloved. The house is quiet, but it hums with expectation. Something is going to happen. Imperiously, nervously, I knock on the wall to make sure that my brother is awake. No answer. Either he is already asleep - unlikely - or he has locked himself in the bathroom to read something unsuitable. I know what he reads because I looked in the box in which he keeps his sports clothes. Hidden at the bottom are some bottles and a book of photographs, heavily-tinted pictures of pink and yellow flesh, legs in black stockings, bosoms that look ready to burst. I have studied them with care and can see plainly that my brother has been driven mad by years of proximity to Mrs Higgins, my nurse. Mrs Higgins has jowls that quiver like jelly when she nods her head. Cushions wheeze where she she drops her weight. The ironed front of her white blouse swells before her with the pride of a filled sail. At six, I, too, am in love with the thought of vast female bodies. Comfort is not far from the warm, sour odour which rises from under Mrs Higgins' broad lap as she dozes by the fire. This is Mrs Higgins' night off and she will be shut behind her door, chanting appropriate passages of the psalms to ward off the Beast who, in her mind and, therefore mine, is always prowling under the gas lamps of the square, ready to rift the earth with his tail and send us flying down to a lake of eternal darkness. By listening at the keyhole, I have learned to watch out for the Beast's accomplice, a lady dressed in purple and scarlet. Her name is Mystery and she is the mother of harlots and abominations of the earth. Miss Craven, whose house I have just begun visiting for Wednesday afternoon dancing-classes, is the most likely candidate. She wears a long purple dress and scarves of red chiffon swirl about her and brush our arms when she glides among us, urging us to droop like snowdrops or prance like little ponies. Mrs Higgins says that all forms of imitation are temptations sent by the devil, so I hold myself straight and refuse to droop or prance.  Now the pictures grow confused. I hear no footsteps. It is not I whose hand puts out the light. The room is thick with darkness. I call out, frantic: 'Michael! Michael!' Now the pillow is under my face, stifling me until I think my head will burst. My thrashing legs are pushed apart and fingers move up and between them, stroking and probing until I quiver and my body jumps. There is sighing, a groan and then a sudden sharp smell, strong as disinfectant. Sobbing, I twist and kick, trying to push the pillow away. I am sure I am going to die. I can't breathe. My body is all twitching and raw and strange to me. The pillow is lifted. A voice speaks close to my ear. It whispers hoarsely. The words are kind, but the voice is angry. It growls. It says: 'Dear Nancy, good Nancy, all better now, all safe again. The dream's gone. Time to go to sleep.' The voice is my father's, but it sounds so rough and I don't understand what he means or what is happening. I wait for my goodnight kiss, but he goes out of the room and closes the door behind him. I wait for the creaks to tell me he has reached the staircase before I dare move. I am squashing my body up against the wall to stop the shaking and the darkness which never scared me before has the smell of a wild animal. I should hate my father, but It's Michael I can't forgive. Why didn't he answer my knocking? Why didn't he come when I needed him?  Was it just that once, or were there other occasions? Did nobody notice, nobody have the courage to speak out? Did I only suffer from nasty dreams, as my mother always insisted when I clung to her and begged not to be sent to bed? 'We all have nightmares, Nancy. You're the kind of silly child who can frighten herself into a fit just by thinking. Go upstairs with Mrs Higgins and mind you say your prayers. God always knows if you've forgotten. He never forgets.' There were other times. I'm sure of it, but that's the only occasion I still have as clear in my mind as the night it happened. And still, after all these years, I can wake and find tears streaming down my face as I fumble for the light. The debt has been paid off long ago and I would not have written this down if I didn't accept that good can come out of evil. Nothing seemed good to me then. I lost my appetite. I couldn't sleep without a light burning in the room and the window opened wide in case I needed to be heard by strangers. I begged for a bolt to be put on my door and, when this was denied, I took to pulling my bed over the floor to bar the entrance. I rubbed at the dry slit between my legs whenever I was alone, as if rubbing would take the memory away. I was sent home from school one morning for behaving dirtily. 'Miss Lenox says you were touching yourself,' my mother said, and she wiped her mouth with a corner of her handkerchief as if to take the words away. 'Touching yourself in class. In public. Do you understand how horrible it is for a mother to hear that said of her own child?' 'She made it up,' I said, weeping. 'I didn't do anything.' 'I'm making an appointment for you to see Dr Rowntree,' she said. 'And we'll see if he thinks Miss Lenox is lying.' The doctor was a thin, worried young man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a watch on a long chain which he allowed me to play with while he questioned me. I couldn't say the things I wanted to, not with my mother watching us from her chair in the corner of the room. The doctor made light of my behaviour at school. Little girls don't always know what they're doing, he said to my mother and he gave me a hard yellow sweet out of a jar on his desk. He seemed more concerned by the fact that I was underweight for my age. He must have said something else to her when he sent me to sit in the waiting room. My mother took me to a shop on the way home and bought me a little musical-box with a picture on the lid of mountains and a lake made out of fragments of mother of pearl.  'But my birthday isn't for two months,' I said, holding it tight in case she took it away again. 'It isn't', she said, 'a birthday present.' When the holidays began, I went on my first visit to Point House, away from my father.  The fear of dark rooms has never left me. * * *  I was a gangling eleven-year-old, no better at dancing than I was at making friends or getting a coveted school star for my class work, when the cable arrived. The maid came into the drawing-room, where I was being measured by my mother for a new winter coat while my father sat reading his paper. 'It's from France, Mr Parker,' she said and, dropping the envelope on the centre table, she scuttled back through the door like a crab under siege. Slowly, my parents went towards the table, facing each other across it. 'Aren't you going to open it?' I was puzzled by their stiffness, the silence. 'Is it about Michael? Have they made him a captain?' This was the only military rank I had off pat and I thought it sounded awfully fine and swaggering. 'Quiet,' my father said, and I saw his hand shake as it crept over the cloth towards the envelope. My mother's hand was quicker. She pulled the envelope free of his limp grasp, slit it open with the little ivory knife which was always in her pocket. She held the piece of paper up to her eyes for a moment before placing it on the table and smoothing two creases out of it with the careful tips of her fingers. When I looked up at her face, she seemed to be smiling. 'I knew,' she said. 'I knew.' 'He's coming back!' I crowed, pleased to have discovered the answer. She made a movement with her hands, pushing space away from her. 'Go upstairs, Nancy,' my father said. 'Go now.' I went to the door. Turning, I saw my father take out his handkerchief and start to polish his spectacles with small, fierce movements. My mother stood by the table, staring straight ahead. I understood then that Michael was dead and that I was not to share in their grief. Crying, I ran across the hall and up the stairs. I cried for Michael, dutifully. The tears that hurt were for myself. The official explanation came a week later. A shell had landed in the back of the open truck which a captain from Michael's regiment was using as an auxiliary ambulance. He was carrying ten wounded men and one of them was my brother. The truck caught fire. The driver was the only one to survive and he had to watch them burning where they sat. He couldn't reach them through the flames. Michael's death took whatever life there had been from our house and left it cold and empty as a church on weekdays. My father never came to my room again. Maybe he took it for a punishment; I wouldn't know. He retreated into his study, where he spent hours arranging books, poring over old letters and photographs and planning a history of the family in which, I am fairly sure, Michael was intended to feature as a credit to his ancestors. (Which was a lie. I knew my brother and he never did anything creditable, except to die. By accident.) My mother chose to defeat grief in a fury of philanthropic activity which culminated in the stirring news that she intended to run as the first woman mayor of Boston. I felt like a ghost. I was used to taking second place. But death raised Michael to a level with the angels. I could never match him now. I felt that the wrong child had died. I understood that what my father had done to me was done in indifference, because I was without worth. I was endured, not loved. At the beginning of each year, I started crossing off the days until I would go back to Point House, where Michael's name had no magic and where I, I myself, was loved.     Turning out a chest of oddments the other day, I came across a few yellowing copies of Life magazine. Two were from nineteen twenty-five. It amused me to see how remote the world they presented was from the one I had inhabited and, good daughter of Brahmin Boston that I was, assumed to be invincibly superior. Looking at Life again, I wonder at my youthful arrogance. The experiences I missed! Mary Astor drooping backwards in John Barrymore's arms. Clara Bow showing off what it meant to have It with a shiny maroon pout. Tall Bill Tilden gracefully swooping to retrieve the wristwatch of an over-excited female spectator. Gershwin on the piano and W.C. Fields on the boards. Coca Cola ('the charm of purity') soda fountains sneaking up on Coty's face powder direct from Fifth Avenue and the smartly gloved and hatted couple whose outstretched arms beckoned us to join them for the next crossing of the Mauretania. I turned eighteen in the summer of nineteen twenty-five. Two years out of school, I felt no regret that I had not gone on to college like the rest of my class. I was torn two ways. I wanted to engage in noble acts of self-sacrifice which would win my mother's admiration, but I would also have liked to roll down my stockings and go dancing to a jazz piano. I was invited to dances, of course, by virtue of being my parents' only daughter. I had been given my inaugural tea at the Chilton Club and smiled upon by the mothers who mattered. But I was shy to the point of dumbness, and I had not inherited what my mother always referred to as 'the Armstrong face'. (An old family photograph can still astonish me with the porcelain delicacy of my mother and her sister Sarah, nestling together like swans in billows of pale organza.) Circling the dancefloor, I intercepted the frantic glances by which my partner beseeched his friends to rescue him, and saw from their smiles that they would not. Drowning in self-consciousness, I could take no comfort from the thought that I was probably the only girl in the room wearing a homemade dress, that the material had been cut from a silk remnant and that every girl there must be aware of it. The nearest I had come to romance was a midnight drive along the banks of the Charles with a boy called Ned Shiplake, who, just as we came level with Harvard Bridge, pushed up my skirt and put his hand between my legs. I gripped his hand so hard that he yelped; I saw the white mark of my fingers on his skin. I told him to take me home and that was the last I ever saw of him. Alone in my bedroom, I touched my breasts and my hips and shivered at the passion with which I kissed my own mirror lips. In May, when I went up to spend a month at the Point House with Uncle Caleb, a widower by then, I lay on my bed with the pink and white curtains blowing wide open to the seawind. A love like the wind was what I wanted, wild and free as the elements, a love that could carry me up to the sky and make me glorious, make me shine. Caleb was lost without my aunt. He never smiled. Down in Falmouth Harbour, the Dryad danced and chinked on her mooring, eager to be off, but her sides needed repainting and there was rust on the fittings. Once, I succeeded in persuading Caleb to come for a walk, when I told him that the gypsy-moth nests needed coating with creosote if the woods were not to be plagued with them. He left all the work to me and after a time I was so overcome by his sadness that I threw the brush down and told him we were going back to the house. He followed me back, unprotesting, shuffling his feet along the path. That was the only summer when I looked wistfully at the life of the Gold Coast crowd. I fell into conversation one day with a black-eyed, black-haired stranger walking along our part of the shore in nothing but his scarlet bathing costume and a pair of patent leather shoes. He asked me to a party up at their house along the shore. I put on my best silk dress and went, but the room was full of naked backs and bird voices and cigarette smoke so sour it stung my eyes. I walked out through the open windows and down the wooden steps to the beach. Then I pulled off my evening shoes and ran home across the sand in my stockings. What I craved most was not love but a purpose. My offers of assistance to my mother in her political campaign were firmly rejected, although no explanation was given. It may have been that the presence of a strapping eighteen year old was considered a disadvantage when she herself looked so slight and girlish. It may have been that my awkward ways would have made me an embarrassment. Denied a public role and informed that my uncle would prefer no visitors at Point House in the foreseeable future, I was at a loss as to how to entertain myself. A short spell of charitable work ended in disgrace when I was discovered to have been providing gin to a mother of six who had horrified me by admitting that she kept her spirits up on wood-alcohol. Word got out that her new supplier was the daughter of our prospective mayor and my parents received a visit from a lady representing the charitable society. Shortly after her departure, my mother called me into the drawing-room. Truly, you would have thought I was a criminal, to hear the way my mother spoke to me that evening. There was no respite to be gained from my father; he, as usual, had buried himself behind the paper, finding safety in detachment. Her voice wwent on like a funeral bell, tolling out my crimes as if they had no end. Taking gin from the cellar made me a thief. I had disgraced the family name. I had jeopardised my mother's hopes of becoming mayor and made a mockery of her prohibition work. Had it never occurred to me that alcohol induced apathy and bad habits and that this woman's job - she was a maker of lace inserts for blouses - was likely to be affected if she drank gin all day?  'And wouldn't you drink,' I said, 'if you lived in a North End tenement with a husband who beat you and six children under the age of eight. You'd need more than water to comfort you.' My mother lifted her pretty oval face to smile at me like an angel from under the lamp where she was repairing the tattered cross and lilies in an altarcloth. 'If', she said, 'I found myself in such an unfortunate position, I would ask my husband to curb his appetite.' I stared at her. 'His sexual appetite, Nancy.' A faint blush tinged her pale cheeks. 'I don't propose to go into details in your father's presence. You know perfectly well what I mean. Now, if you had really cared to help this poor woman, you should have reported her to the prohibition committee,' she went on calmly, stitching away at her embroidery. 'It's the weak of spirit who need us most. You understand that now, don't you?' I folded my arms. 'I understand that you're happy to have one law for them and another for us.' Thrust and draw, thrust and draw, went my mother's small steel needle. 'Meaning what, Nancy? And do keep your voice down. We don't want the whole house listening.' I took a short step towards her. 'Anything's better than telling the truth, isn't it, Mother?' She was ready for my stare, but I saw her hand trembling as she drew up the red silk thread and snipped it off. 'I think', she said, 'you ought to go and lie down for half an hour. You're over-exciting yourself again. The best thing we can do now is to forget this incident ever took place.' 'Michael drank,' I said. 'He was drinking long before he went to France. And you knew. He wasn't so perfect. Not until he was dead and you could make a saint of him.' My mother leaned forward over her embroidery. She made no sound, but I could see that she was crying from the movement of her shoulders. The longcase clock sweetly chimed seven from the hall. My father laid his newspaper on his knees and carefully folded it to a quarter of its size. 'You owe your mother an apology,' he said. I shook my head. 'I'm not making one. I'm waiting for one.' His eyes met mine. 'Meaning what, exactly, Nancy?' He dared me to say one dangerous word in that quiet, respectable room and he was right. I couldn't do it. Walking past me to the chair where my mother bravely hid her face from us, he laid a hand on her arm, excluding me. 'It's probably time for us to go upstairs and get dressed for dinner, my dear, don't you think?' I went to the Athenaeum the following afternoon to collect some books for my mother. Standing near the entrance was a new and beautiful statue of a young girl holding a knife to her flowing hair. The librarian told me that it represented a young Carthaginian and that she was shearing her tresses to provide bowstrings for the warriors defending her city. Sitting in my room that night, I unpinned my hair and brushed it down to my waist, a shining auburn mass, my one claim to beauty. Watching my eyes in the mirror, I chopped it until I stood in a waving sea of red. Scooping it up, I scattered it down the passage all the way to my parent's bedroom. 'A peace-offering,' I said in the morning when my mother, cold-eyed, asked if I had lost what remained of my wits. Two days later, my father told me that they thought it would be better if I left town for a while. I was to go and stay with my mother's niece Kitty. Kitty had married a banker called Jim Archer. They lived in New York. 'New York?' I said. I had never travelled more than a hundred miles from Boston. 'New York!'  I caught the trace of a smile of my father's face as he bent his head to polish his spectacles. 'Don't go getting ideas in your head, Nancy. You are not being rewarded for some act of virtue. Although, just between the two of us, I don't view your foolish behaviour with quite the same dismay as your mother. It seems to me that a little fun would do you no harm. A young girl shouldn't be too serious.' He's sweetening me, I thought. He's afraid of what I might say. That's why he wants me out of the house. 'I haven't met Kitty since I was twelve. Why would she want to have me to stay?' 'She's looking forward to it,' he said calmly. 'We had a cablegram yesterday. Kitty has turned into a nice, sensible young woman. And she's made a good marriage. We all approve of Jim.' He glanced up at me. 'You might ask your cousin to recommend a hairdresser while you're there. The new cut doesn't do much for you.' I looked at him thoughtfully, wondering why he should be so in favour of Kitty's husband, a man he had only shaken hands with at their wedding. It was, I realised, Jim Archer's status that commended him. Kitty had always been considered a little flighty and careless of the family name. A troublesome Boston girl could always be brought into line with her parents' expectations by marriage to a Wall Street man, preferably from one of the old merchant-banking families of Boston. Jim's mother was an Armstrong from New Hampshire, I remembered. Jim was one of us. 'So you're hoping to make another Kitty of me, are you? I'm to be found a suitable husband and taken off your hands.' My father finished polishing his spectacles and replaced them on his long shiny nose. 'Your mother was just nineteen when we married,' he said. 'Girls shouldn't wait about. Waiting takes the bloom off them.' Well, I thanked him for his concern and thanked him again for the news that I would be allowed twenty-five dollars a week on which to transform myself into marriagable material, although that was not quite how he expressed it. I asked my mother for the money to buy myself a dashing cream hat with a spotted veil which I had seen in the display window of Jordan Marsh. Instead, she gave me a lemon straw boater which had belonged to my grandmother and which, she said, looked good as new now that she had stitched a fresh white ribbon to the crown. 'You'll get more wear out of that than from the rubbish they sell in Jordans,' she said as she supervised the packing of my valise. I didn't trouble myself finding an answer.  Ó Miranda Seymour 1998

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