The dining room in the Red Cottage had a wavy wooden floor that pitched down, with a twist in it, like a swaying field. Patched and repatched, the plaster walls were wavy too. The ceiling was low. There were two windows facing west, one of them partly obscured by a rosebush. Beyond the rosebush was a bit of garden, and then a barrier of trees. In the evening, beams from the setting sun would shoot through the trees into the dining room, filling it with radiance, and then dim to skewed rectangles of light on the wall. The light looked as if it were shining through mottled water, but the mottles on the wall were still. Sometimes when the rosebush was in bloom, the gray shadow of a rose would quiver and bob in the mottled light. One evening when I was a child my mother said of a rose-shadow: “That is the signature of this place.”
I grew up in the Red Cottage with my parents, Frank and Mary Rousseau, and my sisters Beatrice, Felicity, Madeleine, Isabella, and Gertrude, whom we called Trudi. My father was a composer in the neoclassical style, and my mother was a singer. The Red Cottage was a nineteenth-century farmhouse on the Place that had been built by a craftsman—because a house was needed, that’s all. On the outside it was unconcerned with its appearance and, on the inside, was without expectation that people be special or events be memorable. Yet when I was thinking of designing my own house, and cast about in my mind for rooms I’d known with pleasurable proportions, the Red Cottage dining room was one of them. What the dining room had in common with other rooms I liked was that it was almost but not quite square. The other rooms had been designed by architects, however, and there was about them a sense of knowing choice that gave one the feeling of being solidly positioned in an evolved society. The Red Cottage dining room, in contrast, had been built by a carpenter moving right along, and then had matured into waviness. Its rightness was a fluke: beyond choice—beyond luck, even. The flukiness could make you feel as if you were floating in a painting by Chagall, or could precipitate you into a long complicated train of thought that ran its course in an instant in the middle of a conversation about something else. Rooms conceived by architects usually convey a sense of relations between people, but the Red Cottage dining room was about internal experiences. At supper the wind would blow up through the floorboards and lift our dresses and gently blow our hair.
The context of the Red Cottage was different from the context of other houses. For other houses, the context might be society, or history, or the present day, or, as with Box Hill, the context might be fantasy. But the context of my childhood home was none of these things. It can happen anywhere that an abrupt silence can develop for no discernible reason—the crickets stop chirping or the traffic ceases—and in that silence your ears seem to pop and you momentarily forget not just the date but even what your name is. The Red Cottage was in such an unmoored stillness all the time.
The Red Cottage garden took its character from the traces of its varied uses in the days when it was a little farm. Around the house the terrain was stubbornly hummocky and, where the grassy places ran into the woods, wayward. There were some tumbledown barns in the woods, and a deep foundation where a larger barn had once stood: indeed the woods themselves were grown-up pasture with old fence posts running through under the trees. The anonymous presence of those who had lived and worked there lingered low on the ground like smoke, and in this there was a kind of cozy companionship. But it was wild there too. The birds racketed in the trees as if there were no people around. In midsummer a leafiness could seem to liquefy, almost to pulse. Even the most formal gardens have an animistic quality that comes out in the dark and belongs purely to nature. The Red Cottage garden had the quality of a garden in darkness even at noon.
For a long time, it seemed to me that the only way to describe my experience as a child in the Red Cottage was to describe the rooms. For a long time my experience was out of sight and reach; it was something there, but not in the picture, with the result that the physical character of the house seemed to me to be the telling thing.
The dining room was the piano room for a while when I was a tiny girl. The piano was a Steinway parlor grand, just one grade below the biggest made, “a foot longer than a regular grand,” my mother would say, adding, “nearly a concert grand.” The piano had been Stanford White’s and had come from Box Hill, but its enormous importance in the household stemmed not from its dynastic provenance, or even from its sheer size, but from the importance of the force of music in our family life. My father’s musical gift generated a sense of purpose that enveloped us. There was nothing my sisters and I might do that could compare in importance to that gift and the fulfillment of its promise.
My father was tall and lanky and had narrow, rounded shoulders and a big head with a winged jaw, a mischievous, catlike expression, and curly dark hair that receded to make inlets near the temples. His ears were comely and large, with acoustical convolutions that were more complex than usual. My sense of his presence in the Red Cottage is encompassing, but in many of my childhood memories of Dad he appears in a visually incomplete form: a set to his mouth, a look in his eye, knuckles, the piece of foot with a brown birthmark on it. I remember the piano in the same disjunctive, cubist way—the amber insides of the hammers, the rigid parallel strings, the cracked and yellowing keys—the architecture around these fractured images is the Red Cottage, but it too is incomplete and often wildly skewed, as if from a perspective on the floor, or from the changing positions of tumbling. Always most vivid in these memories is the sense of my father’s presence which is almost apart from his physical features, so that my memories are like perceptions of one’s own body without mirrors: one is in it yet sees it in bits.
Sometimes Dad would jump up in the middle of the night and rush down to the piano to compose some music that had come into his head. Sometimes during the day he would sit at a drawing board near the piano and copy out his music for hours with a tiny quill pen and India ink as we tried not to run and jiggle the floor. Sometimes he would play the teeth of the leviathan, and an ocean of glory would roll through our matchstick house.
My father changed when he sat at the piano. He played effortlessly, his body still and relaxed, looking all the while around the room in an abstracted way—this is a whole image—and smiling occasionally at the music as if it were independent of his playing and had surprised him. At the piano, my father seemed supernally calm. He was at home with music and the Steinway, but he was not at home with his girls. Dad had an infectious laugh that conveyed the absurdity of life, and he would laugh at the fact that—one, two, three, four, five, six—we had all turned out to be girls. This great quantity of femininity pitching around one unit of gifted masculine force magnificently amplified by the Steinway was the overt structure of life in the Red Cottage when I was young.
My mother was beautiful, and famous for her beauty on the Place and in our house and in the world. She had black unmanageable hair, fair skin with high color, and greenish eyes. Her teeth were white and slightly transparent, and her smile was fresh and unreserved. I remember her hips swaying in a straight skirt—she was wearing stockings and heels, and a silk blouse, and a necklace and perfume—as she went up the stairs.
My father was a person of clefs and measures, sharps and flats, who advocated discipline and boundaries—especially the boundaries between children and grown-ups. In contrast my mother was a person of the inspiration of the moment, and of a mysticism that did not recognize borders or limits. She identified with aboriginal peoples—our local Indians, the Setaukets, for example, who had led a woebegone life of subsistence on clams. She was spontaneous, and her moods had a global quality. If she was sad, there was no space in which to stand outside her sadness. If it was raining in February, she would be thinking aloud about how dismal it must have been in February for the Setaukets and then we would all be sad. Her moods could have unexpected causes. When we went to the circus a woman wearing a pink tutu and riding on top of an elephant made her cry. Her crying, then, became my memory of the circus.
My mother was whimsical. Once at supper she drew her black hair around her face so that it looked like a beard. One night when I was six or so, she put autumn leaves in her hair and blackened her face with burnt cork. Some years later she followed our dog into the woods on all fours, smelling the ground, trying to pick up the scent that had the dog so excited. (She couldn’t.) We little girls were, of course, accustomed to our mother, but when others were amazed by the surprising things that she did we felt special, as we did because our house with the wind blowing through was not like the ordinary houses of children we knew in school.
My sister Beatrice was four years younger than I; a boy born in between had not survived. Two years after Beatrice, Felicity arrived and, a year after her, Madeleine. For a while, Mama provided what we called a “Scotch nanny” when my mother had a baby. When she had Beatrice, my mother recuperated at Box Hill, but thereafter she came home to the Red Cottage, and, for Felicity and Madeleine, the nanny came there too and had to take care of the rest of us as well as of the baby. A nanny, dressed all in white—including cap, stockings, and shoes—looked odd in the Red Cottage. The nannies (used to better) thought so too.
Isabella was born when I was twelve and was about to go off to boarding school, and Trudi came when I was in college. I remember Isabella and Trudi as infants vividly, because by the time they came I could care for them like a mother, and did. I can still feel Isabella’s little back fitting in my hand as I burped her, and the way Trudi would cling as I walked her to quiet her down.
But it was Beatrice, Felicity, and Madeleine with whom I experienced a shared fate, whose personalities are embedded in my soul like no others in the world. Still, I felt different from them and apart, as skinny and long when they were roly-poly, as made to do the dishes when they were not, as put in charge. As the oldest, I was exposed. They in contrast had protection in numbers, or so it seemed to me. There was in any event a feeling of numbers in the Red Cottage; of babies coming one after another and later of knees and shins and feet of different sizes: I know my sisters’ bodies nearly as well as I know my own. Our mother bought us dresses that were long, so that we would have room to grow into them, and after we grew out of them they were handed down. I have an impression of us barefoot in our long dresses, of an unruliness, of the problem of combing hair. Beatrice had thick, dark-brown straight hair, whereas mine was red and curly. I was powerful and tyrannized Beatrice. The famous funny story of her retaliation was that by calling me a teacup she made me cry.
As musicians, both my parents were fanatical about sounds. Quite ordinary sounds hurt them—a radio on the beach, or a truck rattling on the road, or we children getting raucous. I wanted to protect my parents from being hurt by sounds, particularly my father who was especially hurt by popular music. (My mother had an iconoclastic taste for Elvis and Cole Porter.) My father found it difficult to go to movies, because of soundtracks, or to shops where Muzak played. The incidental use of classical music in restaurants was trying for him too. With the exception of those times when my parents were working on a performance, we did not hear much classical music at home either. My father said that he never heard in actual life what he heard in his head. As a result we experienced music largely through its absence. Even the phonograph was silent since Dad preferred to read the contemporary music that he admired from scores. As she approached adolescence Beatrice surreptitiously listened to Elvis on the radio, and Felicity, in turn, played the Beatles on the phonograph, eliciting from our furious father the statement that this could ruin the machine. I, however, never dared violate the silence in this way. I was the defiant, confrontational one of us sisters, but when I was small the force of that silence was such that even the thought of challenging it never crossed my mind.
It was in that charged quiet that my father would occasionally sit at the Steinway and play. Then notes would roll through the house and up the stairs and out the windows, and we would all be awash, yet awash not in something abundant, exactly, but in something breathtaking that we knew might, at any moment, stop. Once, when I was seven, Dad played a boogie-woogie on the piano and I thought I would pass out with joy. Once or twice, he took out his trumpet and played a few measures. I remember the concentration on his face as he lifted the silver trumpet to his lips. I remember the trumpet itself, its silveriness, the flared bell, the valves, and the looping tube. Then came a sound that sliced me vertically, effortlessly, like a blade.
Yet there were also times when music was folded into our daily life. My mother’s mezzo-soprano voice was crystalline and the most beautiful thing. She might sing through her exercises in the morning. She might practice with my father on a cycle of songs in the afternoon. She sang French, German, and Italian as well as English, with every word clear and rich in linguistic pleasure. When they had perfected a cycle they would perform it, usually before a high-level musical crowd in a rich person’s home in New York (and those of us children who were old enough would go), but sometimes in the Red Cottage too.
My mother’s musicality was intuitive and responsive, bridging the separation between herself and her listeners. My father’s art manifested itself as mastery and musical intelligence, and accentuated the division between himself and his listeners. My father’s majestic casualness at the piano was the underpinning of these performances. He would bear my mother along in a net of notes and then the net would pop her up, and she would soar. My father’s precision on the keyboard was infused with an almost aromatic masculinity. He was powerful in his ease, his solid privilege in the musical dimension: a kind of heaven on earth that he just naturally inhabited, glorious as an athlete, as he played with the seductive femininity of the artistic male.
My parents also performed songs written by my father, settings of poems by Robert Herrick, Ezra Pound, Mother Goose, William Shakespeare, and Claire Nicolas White, my uncle Bobby’s wife and my aunt, among others. Back then, Dad composed in a style which was lyrical yet disjunctive, melodic yet modernist. The neoclassical style presumes a familiarity with the classical tradition and then defies expectation by breaking the classical rules. It is a style of staircases that go nowhere, vaults that support nothing, a breaking-out-of-conventions music whose materials are nevertheless conventions; a music of ruins; a music that was decorous yet revolutionary, that paid homage to the past yet also, in an insouciant way, destroyed it.
My father didn’t see music as in any way related to the heart, or the soul, to life, to meaning, to anything other than itself. He felt that music ought to be only about the musical materials themselves. It ought to be only aesthetic. This was a view that many—Stravinsky included—shared at that time. Certainly it was the view of the French neoclassical school, the group that had the greatest influence on my father. That school affirmed my father’s belief that music should be a quest for beauty, originality, and the expression of musical thoughts entirely independent of feeling or narrative. This belief was, in many ways, a natural, generational reaction against the excesses of late romanticism—a return to the astringent classicism of the eighteenth century. It is the most respectable aesthetic ideology, in that it is purely aesthetic, undiluted by what my father calls Soap Operas, meaning our real lives.
My father was charged and masterful and magnificent and yet he was also, in my perceptions, blanked out. Sex was everywhere in the Red Cottage—Daddy kissing Mummy at the bottom of the stairs, grazing, grazing—and yet the feeling of sex there largely hid behind blankness, as if there were no sex at all. There was a cloistered part of our experience in the Red Cottage that didn’t show up on the mental blueprint of our lives. I might, for example, have a memory without any emotion attached, so that it had no significance, or I might simply seal it off in the cloister. There was also a part of our father that was cloistered from himself, a domain that belonged to the jewel-like amber in the bottle of Heaven Hill bourbon on the kitchen sideboard, the gallon jug of purple-black wine on the floor.
The parlor was the only part of the house that had a cellar underneath. This was a dirt-floored cellar, walled with a foundation of boulders cemented together, and gloomy too, with cobwebs and mildew and a moldy smell of old earth. In winter my father would go there twice a day to feed the furnace with coal. When he opened the door of the furnace the light inside was a deep, pulsing orange—a dark kind of light which flickered but could also roar and become bright. Through a vent in the door I could see the coals pulsing. Sometimes I would sit on the cellar stairs while Dad took care of the furnace: this was before Beatrice was born and just my parents and I were in the Red Cottage. In adulthood a kind of memory came to me of a small violent scene that seemed to be less the recollection of something outward in history than a kind of waking dream image that led downward into a cave—a neolithic past. Here I am on the stairs, a pretty little girl with curly hair wearing a pretty little dress with my daddy shovelling coal, and I am happy in the femininity of me and the masculinity of him. Then my Daddy comes around from the furnace with a change in his eyes that makes him strange. Then, with the dispassionate objectivity of children, I note that strangeness. Then my Daddy reaches up and pokes me between the legs. At this point in the sequence I always wince and often experience an impulse to kick viciously, as if my body itself were remembering in a way that brought the event into the present.
I have come to believe that there are mind memories and body memories. Mind memories are documentary, grounded in who, what, when, where. Body memories are a reliving of sensations and have a tendency to blot out the documentary factors. Another recollection—half-solid, half-unsolid—in which the two are mixed is a memory of lying in bed in the corner room that had one window overlooking the potato fields to the south. The first part of the memory is of seeing the brown glass doorknob turning. This is documentary—very vivid and almost in slow motion. Then I saw my father’s brown wool wrapper, and his foot with the brown birthmark coming in. This too is documentary. It was daytime, I saw the doorknob turn from the perspective of lying in bed; from the sense of my length and skinniness I would guess that I was about six. While the doorknob is turning, the room is squared off properly, but, as he comes in, the room, in my mind, becomes skewed, like a partially collapsed box. In adulthood the documentary memory was followed by unstable images that escaped the cloister. First there was a picture, observed without emotion, of a plane exploding in air, and body parts, the foot with the birthmark among them, flying. As I never saw a plane exploding, this picture is not a memory in the documentary sense at all. I think it was a displaced body memory, because as I began to come to terms with my childhood, instead of seeing the silent explosion of the plane in the sky I would experience a sense of interior exploding, an overload of mixed feelings, including rage (again a wish to kick viciously), all of this in chaos, as if blowing out a nervous system too small-gauged to contain it.
Body memory has a visceral density that is like bedrock beneath the shifting sands of narrative memory. Yet its connection to factual narrative is at best intuitive. Nevertheless body memory is also the most primitive reality, the inchoate realm out of which narrative arises. Within the mute dark realm of my body-life where the explosion took place, I have come to understand that, with the explosion—whatever it was, for it was something: it was not nothing—a long, slow shattering was initiated that would extend outward through the years, fracturing both the little things in my life—a household task, a wish to read a book from start to finish—and the large.
For a time I shared a room with my sister Beatrice, a room that also served as a passage to the corner room with the brown glass doorknob, that was taken over by my father in this period for sleepless nights. Dad would read in bed there and late at night Beatrice and I would hear him laugh. The titles of the books that made him laugh joined the bits of information that circulated in the house. Three titles that I remember are “Tristram Shandy,” “Jacques le Fataliste,” and “Don Quixote.” Dad read “Don Quixote” in French, and he pronounced it in the French way, “Dawn Keyshut.” Indeed I grew up with the idea that somehow Dad was French—Parisian in particular—even though another bit of information circulating in the Red Cottage was “310 Donohoe Street,” the address of my father’s childhood home in Palo Alto, California. When Dad spoke French, or of France, he became elegant and intellectual in a sensual way, and projected an impression of an inner circle of cosmopolitanism beyond the ken of Americans. When he said “310 Donohoe Street” his Western accent got stronger, and a quality of masculine practicality and immediacy became dominant. At these times he spoke from a dusty and obscure place, where people said “wanta” and “awringes” and where the weather, at least, was a comfort.
Dad shared 310 Donohoe Street with us in the upstairs rooms at bedtime, occasions that had a clandestine quality of being apart from my mother but were not cloistered. They were, rather, good times in which Dad seemed to enjoy us and we felt close. Incantatory phrases of this world were “Bethlehem Steel,” the name of the company where Dad’s father had worked, and “machinist.” Another was “all his life.” Dad’s father had “worked as a machinist for Bethlehem Steel all his life.” Dad said “Bethlehem Steel” with a deference that he accorded no other entity. “The Depression” was another term of the upstairs rooms. Dad’s father had been “laid off” in “the Depression.” This brought up “squabs,” the word for the pigeons that his family had raised on three acres behind 310 Donohoe Street and that, together with the fruit trees there, had fed the family during “the Depression.” The word “squabs” was new to me, and to my girlhood ear cut through the mystique of Box Hill like a buzz saw. I heard it as a flat word of brute survival—of what’s left when all mystique, even that of Bethlehem Steel, fails.
Dad had warm hands, and smoked a pipe, and wore a workman’s cap at a slight angle. Often he had on a rough wool jacket and he smelled of tobacco and fresh air. His cheeks were like sandpaper. He had a sensitivity about him, a flexible artistic precision like that of the quill pens with which he wrote his music. He liked to swim. He taught me to swim. When the family went to the beach he’d swim so far out into the Sound that we, on the shore, couldn’t see him. Sometimes there were schools of dolphins out there, from the shore a frolicking disturbance on the surface of the water. When Dad came back, he’d tell us that he’d been swimming with the dolphins, that they’d bumped him and nudged him in a joshing way, that they’d been playing with him. He’d say it casually, but there was awe in his face, an expression of speechlessness, of emotion.
The spankings started early, though not, I think, right away. I think there was time to fall in love, time to feel safety in my femininity as I was encircled in the masculinity of him. I didn’t know why Dad came at me as he did—he did not spank my sisters in this way. I can speculate now that perhaps it was the result of tensions generated by his experience in the Second World War—he was overseas when I was born—or perhaps it was that he identified me with my mother’s family. I was almost two when he first saw me and was ensconced in the world of Box Hill, spoiled rotten, he said later: “They thought you were the reincarnation of Stanford White.” The spankings were formal, but my recollection of the experience is of something like a gale coming at me, and of my eyes squinched closed: I don’t want to see.
My mother was a flicker, an inflection, a summer dress. She was gifted with the accessories of love: a smile, a hand cupping a head, a way of saying “darling.” I’d lunge for these flickers. But then if I did something bad, she’d say, “You’ll get a spanking when Daddy comes in from the studio.” Cold, unreachable, she would hand me over. Or sometimes the sentence came directly from him.
When I was six or seven, my father fashioned a spanking stick. It was made of a board, three to four inches wide perhaps, and half an inch thick, two to three feet long with one end whittled into a handle. If he was using the stick, the spanking would be outside, behind the lilacs in the Red Cottage garden. If he used his hand, which often hurt more, he’d do it upstairs in the bathroom or downstairs in the laundry. The laundry, off the usual track of our lives, was disorderly in an especially uncontrolled distraught-seeming way that was also static. Dad would spank me there amidst the wild, stale piles, and the old-fashioned washing machine with a hand wringer and the potbellied stove. When he was done he would hug and kiss me in a false, lizardy way, telling me how he loved me, and I would submit because my convulsive crying would leave me without the psychic muscle tone to resist.
Music lessons started when I was three or four. They consisted of ear training and finger exercises and simple pieces to learn, but our lessons were not a simple matter for me. Dad, beside me, was an overwhelming presence. Even today the thought of those lessons can disassemble my body, so that I feel as if my chest were caving in till my torso disappears, my head becomes big, and my tongue lolls without my knowing it; as if I have an enormous bottom and thighs, and long shins, and skinny, pigeon-toed feet, but, above all, tiny, palsied arms with shrivelled hands that cannot play.
I strove to play anyway, through the frozenness. We were both frozen, I think, our individual coastlines submerged in a Gondwanaland of rage. Playing like a little robot yet full of strain, I would inevitably fail, and when I failed Dad would sometimes recall, with puzzlement, that before I could talk he had heard me in my crib in Box Hill singing the melody of “Speed Bonnie Boat”—a complex, difficult melody, he would always point out—perfectly. This gave me the idea that there had been a golden time when I was musical, and then my body had gone bad. This is my idea now: my father discharged rage into my body, making it radioactive in a way that rendered it deformed as I experienced it from the inside. Sometimes I think that, as a result, I hid my musicality so deep within me that it became lost.
Music drew me like a moth to the flame. It attracted me urgently, yet was a torture because it stirred my deepest being and at the same time caused great pain. Despite my father’s aesthetic of detachment from feeling, the music my parents performed often seemed highly expressive and deeply felt. My mother sang Schubert: “Mein Herz! Mein Herz!” “La Bonne Chanson,” a setting by Fauré of poems by Verlaine, was lyrical in a way that made me swoon even before I understood French. For me the actual music that I heard in the Red Cottage was almost too stimulating of emotions. It invaded me with feelings, or, in a way, it invaded me with the feelings that it felt for me, materializing grief and love, despair and ecstasy, flooding the room with that which was forbidden: leaving me like a delta—splayed, silted, and defenseless.
As a girl at concerts, I could see in the eyes of the audience how much they liked the way my parents were so young and handsome, so much in love. That my mother and father were in love was as important a part of our idea of life in the Red Cottage as my father’s musical gift. Our poverty was a part of the romance of my parents, along with their extreme youth, their art, their in-loveness, my mother’s beauty and sensitivity, my father’s gift and future as a great composer. We children were a part of the romance in that there were a lot of us. My mother was in fact exhausted often. We knew that as a Chanler she was meant to live in a big house with a long driveway, that it was hard for her to be with us in the Red Cottage without help. As soon as possible I was put in charge. Thrashed, I thrashed my sisters, though with less formality. Thus my life careened out of control too. Thus I too became the agent of unfeeling, unaccountable violence. There was conscience—a glimmer—but helplessness. I had no idea how to become responsible for the force in me that arose out of nowhere, overwhelming; and so there was despair. There were only children in the Red Cottage—orphans. And it was not safe for children there.
In the gale of Daddy coming at me there was no twoness, no sense of constellation: no him and me. How was I to get a purchase on myself? I was a nobody, flattened, dispassionately degraded, and that’s the way it was. Just so, when I spiralled out of control with my sisters—and this I did recognize as violence—there was in turn just me discharging force and my sisters were nobodies. My selfhood was lost with the annihilation of theirs, and my place in the constellation with my sisters was lost too. It was a paradox of my situation in my family and on the Place that in that complex network of people, there was, at the core, no relatedness. Rather, within that dense, rich tapestry there was isolation. This was more than I could have borne to register at the time, or for many years. Even now it is the part of my life that I am least able to open, the saddest thing.