Personal History (8 page)

In my early childhood, there was a household staff of roughly ten to twelve servants. Most of them stayed a long time and became acquaintances,
confidants, and sometimes friends. There were two bells in each of the bedrooms by which you could summon a maid or the butler. I never did, but I think my older sisters did, and my parents certainly did. In addition, there were the chauffeur, Phil, and the groom and his assistant, who cared for as many as eight or nine horses.

All this was supervised first by a farm superintendent named John Cummins, and after him by the head gardener, a Scottish gentleman named Charles Ruthven, who lived in a nice white farmhouse on the place. His daughter, Jean, and her younger brother, George, were my playmates when we were in Mount Kisco. The groom and his wife lived in another cottage, and Al Phillips and his wife lived in an apartment over the garage. Their son, Tom, was another of Ruthie’s and my playmates. We all had a happy time together, picking fruit in the orchards and riding on the hay wagons in the afternoons, after mornings spent on lessons.

All my life I had ambivalent emotions about Mount Kisco. On one level I deeply loved it and had happy times there when I was young, largely because there were children on the farm. As I grew older—say, from twelve to eighteen—I went on thinking of the farm as wonderful because as a younger child I had thought it was, but in reality, throughout my later childhood I had no friends in the neighborhood and felt completely alone there.

It was not until I was much older that I realized we were almost totally isolated. Though we had many visitors for weekends or longer, there was little or no local social life. Only later did I learn that my parents had suffered from local anti-Semitism. They had, I believe, been warned when they first started to build the large stone house that they would be snubbed socially. And, in fact, they were never invited to their neighbors’ houses and were excluded from the country club until it went broke, at which time they were asked to join (and, I think, may have, just to help). But I never went there or even saw it.

Until the end of my mother’s life, after countless return visits either with my children, who adored the farm, or later to visit one or both parents, I looked forward to being there, only to have painful realities return five minutes after entering its beautiful large front hall. The older I got, the more I disliked the loneliness of the farm, but in my childhood days, it was, as I wrote my father when I was ten, “a great old Place.”

D
URING THE YEAR
I was in the fifth grade, we moved out of the Woodward house, which had been sold, and into a red-brick house on Massachusetts Avenue, a couple of blocks from Dupont Circle. My commute to school was a little longer. I used to walk up the avenue every morning, about eight blocks uphill, carrying my roller skates. Coming
back was easy—I simply whizzed home downhill, carrying my book bag in one hand and reserving the other to grab the lamppost at each corner in order not to go flying into the street.

After a two-year interim on Massachusetts Avenue, we moved to a large house owned by Henry White, an ex-ambassador to France, at 1624 Crescent Place, just off 16th Street. I was then in the seventh grade, and this was the real house in which I grew up, my home in Washington, and where my mother lived for the rest of her life.

The house on Crescent Place, which my father rented for several years before eventually buying it in 1934, was designed in 1912 by the well-known architect John Russell Pope and initially had forty rooms. It was a very grand and rather formal house. The only somewhat cozy room on the main floor was the library, in which we spent most of our time. My sister Ruth and I again shared a large room, but as the older girls left for college, the house was done over and I was allowed to choose my own room and decorate it. I said I would like it to be modern. A special modern designer created a plaster fireplace, painted white, with no mantel, and the room had quite beautiful made-to-order modern furniture. It was a strange contrast to, and an odd oasis in, a period house full of Chippendale furniture as well as paintings and sculpture—Cézannes, a Manet, a Renoir, two Brancusis, a Rodin, and, in the upstairs hall, the Woolworth water-color series by Marin. In the front hall there was a beautiful Chinese screen, a bronze Buddha, and a gilt mirror, which later went to the White House to join its twin, already there.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the atmosphere of the Crescent Place house intimidated some of my friends. One of them remembers lunching in the vast dining room, just the two of us and my governess, attended by the butler and a maid. When my mother was there, she was served first and ate at once and so quickly that she would finish before the last person had been served. We called that unfortunate seat “Starvation Corner” and tried not to sit there. We learned to keep a hand on our plates; otherwise they would be removed before our forks returned from our mouths. To this day, I eat much too fast. It’s odd how long childhood habits stay with us.

When I was in high school, one friend, Mary Gentry, came home with me for the weekend and remembers coming down to breakfast alone. She was seated in the huge dining room when the butler approached and asked what she would like. She was so terrified that all she could think of was Grapenuts. The Grapenuts were brought and set before her by the butler, who stationed himself behind her chair. Mary remembers her horror as the sound of each bite echoed from every corner. She says she just stopped coming down to breakfast, even though she spent several weekends with me when her father and mother were away.

Wherever we were living, in Washington or at the farm, we were invariably busy. We always existed on a strict regimen of lessons and a multiplicity of planned activities after school and during the summer, too. We spent a lot of time riding, especially on the miles of trails surrounding the farm, or in Rock Creek Park in Washington. When I was nine, the
Washington Evening Star
carried a photo of me on Pete, my small horse, giving me credit for being an “accomplished equestrienne.” I actually wasn’t very good at riding and didn’t like it much, either. Nonetheless, riding was part of our routine, and I had to do it.

There were music lessons, carrying on the traditions of Mrs. Coleman. There were even posture lessons, for I was thought to stoop too much—and still do, despite the lessons. We also all received instruction in the Dalcroze method, a kind of dance that gave you a sense of rhythm. One thing I remember is using my arms to a one-two-three beat as my feet were marching to a one-two beat. It wasn’t easy.

There were also French lessons, with a woman who lived with us for years at a time to teach us. She was not a relative, but her last name was the same as ours, Mademoiselle Gabrielle Meyer. On weekends we would be called on to give recitations in French. To this day, nearly seventy years later, I can still recite bits of La Fontaine’s
Fables
and certain speeches from
Cyrano de Bergerac
, which I adored. For some reason, Mademoiselle Meyer departed for France when I was nine. Even though I went on with French through high school and my French today is fairly fluent, it remains nine-year-old French.

Sports were a major part of our program. In summers, there were tutors for my brother, one of whom organized the making and flying of kites. Bill even had a wrestling teacher, and my sister Bis occasionally inserted herself into his lessons. As we grew older, there was tennis all the time. For a few years in the very early 1930s, a tennis professional lived with us in the summer and worked as a coach, mostly for Bis. I had one short lesson a day.

My mother was more actively involved with us on the every-other-summer camping trips we took, although at least one of the governesses usually came along. My father never took to camping the way my mother did; he didn’t like the cold and was uncomfortable in it. He would ride for about ten minutes into the wilderness, then turn to the guide and demand, “Is there a phone anywhere around here?” (Of course, now there would be.) One night, on a later trip, the full moon lit up the sky so brilliantly I heard him call out, “Someone turn out the moon.”

My mother’s diary about Bill’s first camping trip contains some of the few negative notes she ever wrote about the children. This time, they—I was still too young to go—were described as quarrelsome and “need much careful handling. I had not realized that they have been getting rather selfish
and spoiled.” She was distressed at the difficulties of three as opposed to two children, comparing them to a basket of eels.

Mother saw these trips as bringing us closer to the realities of life and making us more independent. She once said that this was a way to show us life outside large houses. I suppose it did, but the lesson had its limits. There were five ranch hands on the trip to California, eleven saddle horses, and seventeen packhorses—not exactly roughing it.

I was taken on the last of these camping trips, one to the Canadian Rockies in August of 1926. We rode through the mountains on Western saddles and camped at night, with occasional fishing excursions. Again, there were a lot of packhorses carrying our gear and cowboys to put up the tents. We children and our guides caught fish, and my father caught colds. Mother kept a brief diary of this expedition, too, and the following excerpt represents an aspect of her philosophy that she imposed on us:

Mountain climbing was one of Mother’s favorite occupations, but she never succeeded in inculcating this passion in any of us.

Some years we would make trips to Europe, my first when I was eleven. One of the few diaries I ever started and kept was from this trip to Europe in the summer of 1928. We went from France to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and back to France. My diary reflects all the interests of an eleven-year-old: noting that our cabin on the old British liner the
Berengaria
was the “Prince of Whales suite,” giving the number of steps between floors on the Eiffel Tower, and retelling the story of the opening of Napoleon’s casket when it was moved to Les Invalides. I remember being reinforced in my idea of being separate from the older children by having to stay with Ruthie in Switzerland in our hotel while my mother climbed to the top of the mountain with Flo and Bis, as well as staying on in Switzerland when the older children and my parents went to Italy. Ruth and I were deemed not old enough to appreciate museums; instead, we were parked in a resort hotel with the governess, where we took part in diversions created by the hotel to occupy their little guests. One
old photo shows a fancy-dress party, which I actually remember enjoying; I went as a goosegirl with Ruthie as my goose.

Despite swimming in the Marne and visits to Notre Dame and Versailles, my only really vivid memory of this entire trip is of the suffocating, swirling cigar smoke in the car with all the windows closed as I rode with my father. He smoked only cigars, long rich expensive cigars made of Cuban tobacco, and had one lit pretty constantly. It was almost unendurable in small spaces, usually cars or trains with closed windows, but I gradually got used to it or at least came to terms with it. He had a private keg at Dunhills, where they kept his special brand of tobacco. He also had his own brand of extremely strong bourbon, with his name on it. I still have the top of one of the barrels.

Three years after this first trip to Europe, we returned, this time spending a lot of time in Germany. Most memorable for me was a visit to Einstein at his home, which I described in a letter to my father, who had remained at home at work:

In 1929, my father bought a ranch in Kelly, Wyoming, in the Teton Valley. The ranch, Red Rock, was beautiful, and in those days very remote, reached only after a two-hundred-mile drive from Rock Springs, the last thirty miles over winding mountain roads. Red Rock Ranch’s seven hundred acres lay right at the foot of the beautiful Tetons, a dramatic red clay range. Dad took Flo, Bill, and me there in September of the year he bought it, when I was twelve, and we spent time riding, fishing, hiking, and target shooting. Because we were teenagers or soon to be and preoccupied with our various activities, we were somewhat unenthusiastic about going, although we loved it once we arrived. It makes me sad that my father sold the ranch after some years because he couldn’t get us interested in it.

All of these trips and lessons did a great deal for our informal education. Our more formal education developed in some ways as oddly as did our informal one. The older children had started at the progressive Lincoln School in New York. When we moved to Washington, they went to
the Friends School. I began my education in a Montessori school, another progressive school, where we were encouraged to pursue our own interests at our own pace—in other words, to do the things we liked most to do whenever we wanted to. I started by learning to tie shoelaces and progressed to reading a lot, which I enjoyed, and avoiding math, which I didn’t. As a result of a rhythmic-dance class, using fancy tie-dyed scarves, I became adept at standing on my head and turning cartwheels. I spent the years from kindergarten through the equivalent of the third grade there and left happily proficient in acrobatics and sadly delinquent in arithmetic.