Beyond the gardens of Box Hill, the Place was a quilt, every bit of territory patterned in its own way and fitted to the next. There was a cluster of outbuildings that we called the barns: a carriage house, its shingles black to brown, with a roofline that was bowed in front giving it the look of an open brow; the inward-looking stables attached to it; a very old barn that we called the cow barn; a stone garage for Grandma’s black Ford; a water tower; the chicken coops; and an enormous and progressively collapsing gray-shingled structure that had been built to house orange trees in winter and which we called the elephant barn. A three-story farmhouse standing right up like an ostrich among the barns was the home of my uncle Bobby and aunt Claire.
For most of my childhood, the stables were dead and empty, the sleighs in the carriage house gathering dust and barn swallow droppings and the saddles hardening on their racks in the tack room, except for Mama’s big taffy-colored sidesaddle which stayed soft. This sidesaddle had its own freestanding wooden horse and I liked to sit on it because the leather crunched deliciously. When I was very little, though, Angelina, Say When, and Steinway blew and munched and shifted their weight in the stalls. The stables were shadowy and the air was warm with the horsy smell and the smell of hay and manure, and the water in the concrete water trough was dark. Steinway was enormous and gentle, and later Mama loved to tell how, at age two, I rode him in the Smithtown Horse Show. I don’t remember the horse show, but I remember Steinway’s black mane and chestnut withers from the perspective of the saddle, on a scale that reflects a toddler’s relative size. I remember his shouldering gait beneath me and the look of the ground passing by beneath his big neck. I remember feeling just fine up there; it didn’t occur to me to worry; after all, I was on Steinway. At some point, I must have been in the stables at night, because when I wonder about the connection between people—about what it is that we are to each other truly—I think not of language and faces but of the shifting of warm masses in the dark, creatures in each other’s presence, there: the stables at night.
Right next to the stables was the water tower. It was octagonal and dark-shingled and rose from the barn cluster organically, three stories tall, thick and tapering to a flatly conical roof.
There was a spring on the shore of the harbor from which water was pumped up to the tower and stored, and from there carried through a system of pipes that carried it to the houses on the Place. My mother was touched by how this water manifested the blessedness of our locality, and even Mama, who was otherwise indifferent to the charms of Long Island, said years later, when the system was dead—and said it in a tone that came from depths beneath her usual personality—that in the bathtubs the water had been blue. When I was about six the pump failed altogether, and the tower was drained and the Place was switched to town water. After the switch, my mother would drive down the hill to the spring about once a week to fill bottles, usually empty gallon jugs that had originally contained Dad’s purple wine. Fresh from the spring, the water frosted the glass.
The water tower made the cluster of the barns charismatic. But the key to the cluster was the oldest building on the Place: the cow barn, swaybacked, with a weathervane on its witch-peaked roof. Most of the outbuildings—the carriage house, water tower, garage, and elephant barn—had been designed by Stanford and laid out by him in a knowing, chosen way. But the cow barn, belonging to the older, improvised countryside, was set stubbornly into a hill and had accumulated there the irrational authority of ancient location. With that authority it quietly undid Stanford’s balanced layout. Even though the carriage house seemed by far the most important structure there, and even though the tower had the most charisma, it was the cow barn, with its quirky placement, that gave the area its character: the organic character of the utilitarian rural landscape—Grandma’s landscape of Carman Hill Farm, to which the cow barn had originally belonged.
It was in the cow barn that Papa had had a studio built for Mama, which she had turned over to her son Bobby as soon as he was grown. This studio was at the back of the cow barn, at the end of a passage that, because the structure was set into a hill, was pitch-black. When you opened the studio door, however, you stepped into a high room painted white and full of light from windows set near the top of the north wall. There was grass up there, growing against the windows, and above the grass a blue sky. (In my memory that sky is always blue.) There was wet clay in Bobby’s studio, and plaster and armatures, and wet clay on armatures wrapped in plastic, with the clay messing the plastic. The statues were mostly male heads or torsos down to the penis, and the clay on the torsos was laid on in a coarse, thumb-swatch texture. There was at least one horse once, and one woman, and I also remember a time when many, many drawings of horses were pinned up all around in an impromptu way.
Bobby had chestnut-brown hair parted on one side and brushed over, just like Grandma White’s, so that his brow was open. Compared with his brothers, Peter and Johnny, he was short—he was about five feet nine. Whenever it was possible he was bare-chested and barefoot. His feet were small and broad, his insteps were high and tightly arched, and his gait was springy with impacted sexuality. When he sculpted he would slowly move his perfect body around the statue as if wrapping it in a sculptural dance. Bobby loved to talk, especially at meals. He might talk about wonders of nature—something he had read about fossils, perhaps, or something to do with the sea. He would talk as if to a great audience. He had warmth, but he was also far away, in his own dreams.
Bobby and Claire’s house was a plain farmhouse with high ceilings and tall windows on the south. Inside, each object was discrete and tranquil as if in a still life. There were paintings on the walls but there was also the skull of a cow, and a sword too, and they, and the furniture, and even humdrum things like a pipe or a plate, shone in those rooms like objects in a Vermeer. In Bobby’s environment objects acquired a singularity that cast a spell, that spun a dream.
Everybody was in love with Bobby, and so was I, from earliest days, I am sure, but in my case an even stronger feeling was the wish to be Bobby. He had a bow, and so, by the time I was seven, I had a bow. He wore a hunting knife on his belt; by the time I was nine, I did too. Bobby kept his bow over the double doors to the living room in his house. It was a fibreglass hunting bow, dark green and laminated, and bent back on itself in a double curve when strung. At night when guests were there, he would take it down and string it and talk about its seventy-pound pull. In the daytime I’d see him go with the bow to the Box Hill fields and shoot one arrow straight up. Just one. I’d do the same, though I never could stop at just one.
Bobby built an arbor in the garden around his house—just like an Italian arbor, with a little statue in it. Bobby’s arbor was built on four posts as if it were a room, and inside he placed a big wooden table with two benches and some chairs. At meals in his arbor, Bobby would talk. My aunt Claire was the poet, but it was Bobby who sailed the seas of spoken language, and it was always the high seas, and the wind was always fair, and the words plumed gorgeously under his prow and unrolled behind him in a sparkling wake of aristocratic English. I remember Bobby talking about proportions in his arbor: about Italy, where entire hillsides were covered with roomlike arbors that you could walk through, one after another, and they would all be nice, and then you would come to one in which the proportions were perfect. Bobby was at a loss for words to describe the effect of that mystical rightness of proportion—and when Bobby was at a loss for words it was dramatic. He would express the experience by showing awe in his face, and you would see him standing in that perfect arbor in Italy looking up and around, experiencing the awesome effect of the proportions as if it were a vision of God.
My mother’s brother Johnny was also around. He was in his twenties then, as were Bobby and my father, I realize now: so very young. They were boys, really, but to me they were men. Well over six feet, with a lock of black hair that fell across his forehead, Johnny was handsome without vanity, virile without salaciousness, and a vitality that seemed like rage surged in him always. He was always deeply tanned and always wore a green work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. I remember him on the lawn outside the stable by the water tower leaning back on one foot, drawing on his cigarette from the bottom of his lungs, his face tilted to the sky—a characteristic posture. His voice was resonant, his English clear, rich—Shakespearean, almost—and rounded with an inflected energy in it exactly like Papa’s.
Johnny had a kind of tragic yet heroic stature in the family, based on his good looks, his madness, and his horsemanship, which had a wild streak. When I was very small, and there were still horses in the stable, he would thunder around the countryside in the wee hours of the morning on Say When, with Steinway and Angelina running loose alongside, and startle the neighbors in their beds. He’d hitch up a horse to a trap and then gallop full speed down steep hills. He would ride onto the railroad tracks and then hold Say When there as a locomotive approached, allowing him to bolt only at the last moment. Bobby and my mother saw Johnny as romantic, but Johnny himself was absolutely unromantic in his outlook on himself or on the world.
My mother, Mary, had seven brothers and sisters, but she and Bobby and Johnny formed a subgroup in the middle of the family, bonded by experiences they had shared when they were growing up. One of those experiences was a sojourn in a school in Bavaria when my mother was between ages nine and eleven. During the Depression my grandfather’s architectural business dwindled to nearly nothing and my grandmother’s solution to the shortage of cash was not to cut back but to move with the children to the Schloss Neubeuern, an eighteenth-century Bavarian castle set on an abrupt outcropping of rock in a long valley of orchards and flowering pastures that wended its way into the Alps. This was in 1932. Papa stayed behind, minding the mostly moribund office, translating “The Divine Comedy,” and going through the McKim, Mead & White files, drawing out and destroying masses of material having to do with the private life of his father.
The Schloss was the ancestral seat of the Baroness Wendelstadt, whose sister-in-law, the Countess Degenfeld, had been her partner in running a school for highborn boys ever since their fortunes were ruined in the aftermath of the First World War. Mama had heard about the school from her sister Hester, who had had an introduction to the Baroness and had visited her the summer before. The setup there was convenient for Mama, because the school-age children could be in the boarding school and the little ones with a nanny, while she herself could be a paying guest of the Baroness—yet a friend, sharing her social life.
The school had two divisions, one for older boys, which occupied one half of the Schloss itself, and one for younger children, situated in the next village, Altenbeuern, in a charming house called Hinterhör, which had previously served as a summer house for the residents of the Schloss. This is where my mother and Johnny, who was eight, were put; Bobby, at age eleven, was with the older boys in the Schloss. Aside from two girls at Hinterhör, who were day students, my mother was the only girl in the entire school.
The Countess lived at Hinterhör, and was theoretically in charge of the children who lived and went to school there, but my mother’s perception of her was that she didn’t give a damn. Compared with the regal Baroness, the Countess was not an aristocrat born but, rather, was more like a sexy adventuress—“the type who says ‘Oh, lovely, lovely, haw, haw, haw,’ ” as my mother described her to me. “She was charming and courtly, good-looking, with tremendous vitality, but cold and untrustworthy, too. She paid no attention to the school—none, zero.” As it happens, the Countess was the model for the character of the Marschallin in “Der Rosenkavalier” (“Marschallin” means “wife of a general”). The character falls in love with a younger man and is in despair when he leaves her, but then she gets over it easily enough.
The actual running of the lower school was in the hands of Fräulein Buss, a woman of Prussian extraction who was about six feet tall, had eyes like a Tartar’s, muscles like a man’s, and straight black hair that fell to her waist when loosed but was usually coiled around her head in an enormous braid. Fräulein Buss was in charge of the children night and day—in charge of teaching them all subjects and in charge of supervising their meals, the orderliness of their rooms, and their recreation. Whenever a student made a mistake, Fräulein Buss would hit him or her on the head, hard, with a stick. My mother found her studies very difficult. She was, for instance, trying to learn Latin from the perspective of German, a language she didn’t yet understand. She was therefore hit often. This was shocking to her as well as painful. She had experienced some abusive and erratic caretakers, but, she told me, “we had never been hit in our home.”
From the start, my mother was scared all the time at Hinterhör. Every morning before class she would throw up, and on her way to throw up she would run past the door of the suite where her three little sisters, Cynthia, Sarah, and Ann, were being cared for by their English nanny: in a scene of Victorian orderliness. Sometimes on holidays, the Hinterhör children ate at the Schloss, and on the way to the dining room they filed past the door to Mama’s suite. My mother would dart in and just sit there near her mother for a moment. Usually, Mama was scrutinizing newspapers from Paris and London, trying to figure out what the political situation in Germany was, and my mother did not feel particularly welcome. At other times, when she had Mama’s attention, she told Mama that they were being hit, but Mama didn’t respond—and this, in a way, my mother says now, was the scariest thing.
Johnny, being a year younger than my mother, was having even more trouble with his lessons than she, and so was hit even more. He was hit all the time. All the children suffered under Fräulein Buss, but none so much as Johnny.
Photographs of Johnny at the time of the sojourn in Germany show a sensitive-looking and very beautiful little boy. When Mama came for charming lunches with the Countess at Hinterhör, Fräulein Buss would put her arm around her and flatter her and tell her how beautiful her children were.
Everywhere one looked from the Schloss or Hinterhör, there were spectacular views of the Alps, rising singly and abruptly from the valley floor. The mountains had names—my mother speaks of them almost as if they had personalities, almost as if they had a capacity to love as well as to be loved: to the west was the Wendelstein, to the south the Toten Kirche, or Church of Death, so named because so many climbers had died there, and, to the east, most tenderly invoked by my mother, the Heuberg, or Hay Mountain. In the spring and autumn, the children would take bicycle trips in the valleys and hike in the mountains and in the winter they would be taken on ski trips. These expeditions usually lasted several days: they would stay in peasants’ houses, or in huts in the mountains. In winter, they would tie skins on their skis, so as not to slide backward, and would climb all day until they reached the top of their mountain, usually in late afternoon. A sublime image of our Red Cottage life was my mother’s descriptions of skiing down through virgin snow at sundown, around hemlocks—starting in sunlight and descending into night.
One day, Fräulein Buss was showing around the wife of a general—a Marschallin—who had a son in the school. As they entered the dormitory where the children, including my mother and Johnny, stood waiting, Fräulein Buss was flattering and fawning over the Marschallin. Eager to show off how tidy the children were, Fräulein Buss pulled back a curtain in front of some shelves where the children’s belongings were kept. The belongings were in order except for some of Johnny’s handkerchiefs, which were not lined up evenly in their pile. Fräulein Buss turned and hit Johnny on the head as hard as she could.
It seemed to my mother that the Fräulein’s motivation was not so much to punish Johnny as to show off to the general’s wife how strict she was. Watching—but, of course, unable to do anything—she thought in that clinically lucid way that children can think, That blow destroyed Johnny. At the time, my mother tried to tell Mama about that incident in particular, but Mama was unresponsive. Throughout her adult life, my mother occasionally tried to tell Mama what had happened to them at Hinterhör, but especially to Johnny, and each time Mama would just let her run her course as if she were complaining, as if she were a pest. It’s true that my mother was difficult to listen to when she talked about Germany. She became pent up and seemed to be trying urgently to communicate something that would not come out—as if what she was saying weren’t strong enough.
Echt was a word that entered the family vocabulary during the sojourn in Germany: it means authentic, or real, as opposed to ersatz, and my mother applied it particularly to a peasant way of life in which, as in the Alps, she found connection and comfort. Hinterhör itself was echt, in that it had originally been a rich peasant’s house and there was still a big pig-farming operation there, and a plum orchard, from which quantities of plum jam were made in a waist-high cylindrical stone vat cut out of a single boulder. There were also pear trees, and from the pears a mildly alcoholic pear wine, called Most, was made in a big stone trough. My mother loved the plum jam—“We lived on plum jam,” she said—and the Most: she even came to like the cold pickled herring that was served with a boiled potato on Fridays. She liked Regina and Emma, young local women who worked in the kitchen at Hinterhör and waited on table; they were kind to her. She liked the clothes that the Bavarians wore—the dirndls and lederhosen, the knickers and loden capes. She liked the sculptures of butter that peasants would bring to weddings and other events at the Schloss—“The Baroness was something high and mighty: peasants came all the way from Switzerland to honor her,” she said—although the children were left to run unsupervised at these events and after nightfall the peasant men would drink beer and become raucous and frightening.
She liked the peasant houses where the children sometimes slept on trips—houses warmed in winter by cattle kept on the ground floor. She liked the bone closet in the graveyard in Altenbeuern, where old bones were put helter-skelter on shelves to make room for new bodies. She liked the way the men smoked and talked on the balcony in the church during Mass. She liked a narrow passage between the church and a big barn—she liked the smell of manure there and thinks that she may have gotten high on it—even though sometimes there was slaughtering going on in the barn when she passed by.
In 1933, the second year of the family’s stay, my mother walked through the manure-smelling passage every morning, because she had graduated to classes in the Schloss, though she continued to live at Hinterhör. Every day, she walked the mile from Altenbeuern, leaving Johnny behind at Hinterhör with Fräulein Buss. Life at the Schloss was somewhat more tolerable, in that, although there were beatings, the rules were clear, and beatings took place only when rules were broken. But that year a different kind of danger arose. The Nazis came to power, and peasants all around turned out to have been in the Nazi underground. Abruptly, they appeared in brown uniforms, each with a red armband imprinted with the Hakenkreuz, or hooked cross—the swastika—black, in a white circle inset in the red. Overnight, the peasants stopped saying “Grüss’ Gott”—“Great God”—when they met you, and instead, without exception, said “Heil Hitler.” You might be walking down a track beside a field, my mother said, and along would come a peasant on a bike, and everything about it would be normal except that he would be wearing a brown shirt and a red Hakenkreuz armband and would say “Heil Hitler” as he passed.
Textbooks were suddenly changed. History that had already seemed odd to my mother because of its German perspective was now distorted beyond recognition. It turned out that a number of the students had been in the Hitler Youth, and they too were not only suddenly wearing uniforms with the Hakenkreuz but giving orders to their teachers. Favorable mention of the French was impermissible, for example, and the ban was enforced by students in brown uniforms. One of them—“a princely boy,” according to my mother—appeared to be a kind of officer. He wore an officer’s cap with his uniform and always stood with the headmaster and the Baroness at school reviews. He also appeared to have the power to give orders to both of them. A teacher was found to have a cache of guns under his bed—he was probably in the anti-Nazi underground—and it appeared to be the princely boy who gave the order that he be fired.
The fact is that the Baroness and her entourage, while appearing to conform, opposed the Nazis; indeed, the private half of the Schloss was a scene of intrigue, with royals passing through incognito on missions of good in a “Der Rosenkavalier” ish way. Once, the butler/head valet guessed the identity of a Russian count by the crown on his underwear and silently acknowledged him by decorating the table with autumn leaves of the count’s colors. There was an air of excitement. High-level gossip swirled. Mama, my mother has said, was having the time of her life. For the children in the school, though, life was simply difficult in additional ways. Gym became a martial drill. You had to stand very straight, and at first my mother stood so straight that she stuck her stomach out, and then she was punched hard in the stomach by the instructor. She learned to throw hand grenades. Instead of games like hare and hounds, the children now played war games. Bobby developed heart trouble from being made to run up mountainsides with a heavy pack on his back.
That same year the mountains became infested with machine-gun nests, and the sound of machine-gun practice ricocheted around the Schloss. Military gliders coasted off the mountainsides. The gliders were a way of evading a provision of the Treaty of Versailles that forbade Germany to train military pilots in airplanes. “We were in the middle of an enormous war machine,” my mother told me. There was a bad incident concerning Jews in Munich, which she heard about. Papa came over for Christmas that year, and on the way to Kitzbühel, in Austria, for New Year’s, the family passed through the town of Kufstein, near the Austrian border, where they saw a pool of blood in the square that somehow had to do with Jews. My mother also heard stories of people getting smuggled out of Germany in coffins. “A child can sense political terror like a smell and it was rising around us,” my mother told me. “It was an atmosphere of terror in which we had to turn to our abusers—who were themselves vulnerable and endangered—for protection.”
When I was growing up, terror might be provoked in my mother at any time—by a strange dog on a familiar path, by an unexpected noise. World-flooding terror. She never seemed to protest being in a condition of terror: indeed she almost seemed to expect it, as if terror were a part of her; as if it lay in her like an aquifer. As an adult, I came to understand the extent to which that aquifer paralyzed her; came to see that Hinterhör held her hostage and her failure to protect me arose from that. As a child, however, I understood only that things had happened in Germany that were very bad. Yet most of my mother’s references to Germany in the Red Cottage were made in a tender tone—were to the butter sculpture, or to skiing into the valley in the evening. My mother sang German in a particularly language-loving way, turning its masculine fierceness into sounds that conveyed a depth of heart, as if the language were a membrane against which unspeakable love and sorrow pressed. There were some old wooden ski poles with leather webbing in the Red Cottage when I was growing up, and a pair of lederhosen that I wore for a while, and several rough brown loden capes. All these objects were luminous with a benevolent significance. The combination of the terror and the tender sense of benevolence was confusing, though a kind of confusion that was familiar to me, and that I accepted. Only as an adult would I come to understand that the depth, the luminousness, and the benevolence reflected the desperation of a child inventing warmth and safety out of things.
At Christmas in the Red Cottage we would have real candles on our Christmas tree (as they did in Bavaria). Our Christmas tree was usually in the dining room, and the tiny flames would cut into the atmosphere of the room in an unearthly way as rays from a midafternoon winter sunset shot through the oaks to the west like spears that landed in the room. Then the atmosphere would become dusky and waterlike, the kind of half-light in which electric bulbs have no power (but tiny flames stand out). Dad would stand by with a bucket of water as we’d sing—our mother’s voice in the lead—“Lo! how a Rose e’er blooming” in the gloaming in our tinderbox house.
Johnny was part of the threesome with my mother and Bobby, but Johnny was not a part of the life of art and talk because he was not an artist. He was not an intellectual. He was not an enthusiast either. He was just Johnny. In the war, he had served in the Navy in the Pacific on at least two ships that had gone down, though he could not recall those experiences. Another anecdote about him that had somehow gotten back to the family was that he had stayed at his post as a gunner on the bow of a ship under direct air attack by the Japanese when everyone else had run for cover—he stayed because he had not been ordered to leave. Even on the Place this was not regarded as romantic or heroic. After the war he was accepted by a college in Annapolis that specialized in the classics, one of the toughest colleges in the country. A few months after matriculating, he called from what turned out to be the railroad station in Philadelphia and said that he didn’t know where he was. After that he gave up trying to get into life. One day on Grandma White’s lawn there was an incident in which Johnny got into a high-spirited argument with a man who was doing some kind of work for Grandma. Johnny was carrying a shotgun, and when my mother came along and tried to intervene in the argument he put the shotgun to her temple, and they walked to the Red Cottage that way. Later, when my mother said, “Johnny threatened me with a gun,” nobody paid any attention, as if the words were somehow weak, unable to cut the air. Even decades later, if my mother, trying to get at the truth of Johnny, said, “Once he threatened me with a gun,” the words still didn’t cut the air.
Johnny’s room on the top floor of Box Hill was manly and sane, with a sleigh bed, a Navajo rug, a jackknife on his bureau, and his gun leaning in the corner. Johnny looked good with a gun—a shotgun was in just the right proportion to his body, and the brown stock and the black metal barrel would rest naturally in his excellent brown arm. No one thought to take the gun away from him after the incident with my mother.
It was like that with Johnny: the frightening aspect of him didn’t register as alarming. Sometimes at Box Hill, when I was four and five, he would swing me around by the arms far too hard and fast, and after it was over it would be as if the experience hadn’t happened. The world would return to itself unaltered except for a little fissure, a little crack from top to bottom in my actual vision. In that crack, the texture of the world swarmed, the way it does in a heat mirage on the road in summer: sometimes a day would pass before the swarming fissure went away.
* * *
My father and Johnny went riding together often, and Dad developed some fairly wild habits on horseback this way. Dad was a “natural,” my mother always said, meaning that he could take up tennis or riding with no previous experience and would almost immediately be right up there with the best of them. One day Johnny and Daddy took Aldo Bruzzichelli, a Florentine man in his forties who lived nearby, out riding. Aldo had had no previous experience on horseback, and I guess he wasn’t a natural. There was a straightaway by the railroad tracks where the horses were used to galloping, and then a sudden right-angled turn which the horses also knew and took without breaking stride. Aldo was unprepared for the turn, however, and he flew off and broke his back. Though Aldo fully recovered, my father was so deeply remorseful that he never rode again. Mama, in contrast, conveyed the opinion that anyone who couldn’t stay on a horse on Long Island probably deserved what they got.
My father realized that he couldn’t have a regular friendship with Johnny after a day in the Red Cottage garden when I was three and Johnny held me with the small of my back resting on the top of his head and said he was going to bend me from both ends till my back broke. My father says he locked eyes with Johnny and held him there, talking to him, until Johnny threw me into the bushes and ran away. I do not remember this, but it’s consistent with my sense of him then. And even so, I did not register that Johnny was crazy. The attitude I learned was that if he rode crazily that showed what a good horseman he was, so comfortable on horseback that he once fell asleep at a gallop.
One day when I was still very little, Mama said casually at Sunday lunch that maybe it was too costly to continue to keep horses, and after lunch Johnny went out and shot Say When in the head right there in the stable. Shortly afterward, there was a fire in Smithtown, and Johnny followed the sirens on his bicycle, carrying a machete, and when he got to the burning house he climbed up to the second story and tried to save the clothes in the bureau drawers. The police came and arrested him, though it’s not remembered for what crime, and he was released only on condition that he be institutionalized for insanity. Johnny then went to a series of places, including the Hartford Institute where he was treated by the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow, but there was no improvement. This treatment was very expensive and eventually Mama and Papa felt that they could not continue to pay for it, so he ended up in a Veterans Administration hospital. There he was given seventy-five sugar treatments which caused his weight to go up to two hundred and fifty pounds, and a hundred and fifty electroshock treatments. He came out, and went back in, and then the word “lobotomy” became a part of the family vocabulary, and in particular “frontal lobotomy”: “full frontal lobotomy.” He was back on the Place, and then up in Vermont or back in the hospital after that, though he would come for long visits: to me he was the same old Johnny. One of the things that I learned about a full frontal lobotomy was that it was supposed to turn you into a vegetable, and it showed what fine stuff Johnny was made of that he could come through a full frontal lobotomy and not be a vegetable at all.