In the seventies and eighties it was a custom in the family to have a summer party, with dancing, in the carriage house. Family parties at Box Hill sometimes had an upper-crust ambiance, albeit a faded and eccentric one, but the events in the barn were frankly bohemian. The character of the family on these occasions was that of a community of artists, somewhat bibulous, with a new generation of babies coming up but life going on much as before: with Bobby kissing the girls, for example. In the summer of 1985, three years after my house was completed, he was kissing my cousin Pamela, Johnny’s daughter. She was sixteen by then: it had been her turn for a while. Pamela visited every summer, but this was the first time her visit had overlapped with a barn party.
One of the charms of these gatherings was that no distinction was made between the mad and the unmad—all family members were included and accepted—but in retrospect it seems that there was mass madness in the failure to distinguish between the mad and the menacing. As if there were a genetic virus travelling in the family line, William, one of my younger cousins, had for many years been preoccupied with sex in a frightening way. In his teens, William also became obsessed with guns. By the time he was twenty-five, he drank excessively. By then he was a strong young man (stronger even than Johnny had ever been), well over six feet tall.
By the mid-eighties the women in the family—especially the very young women—were afraid to be alone with William. And yet for those of us who had been around in the days when Johnny roamed the Place with his shotgun, it was easy to tolerate that fear without ever speaking about it to one another, much less doing anything to restore safety. At a family party one thought of William as just another element in the mixed bag that included the sometimes deranged cousin who talked his head off and, indeed, Johnny in his greatly deteriorated and harmless condition.
And so at this barn party, as at others, William would be there dancing with his cousins, who weren’t always thrilled but put up with him, just as they endured partners like the neighbor with famously big feet, or were amused by the portly relative who came dressed as the Pope and ended up after a polka flat on his back, his face as puce as papal silks, and gaping like a blowfish. Halfway through the party, a small owl appeared on a rafter, from which it looked down on all of us like a minor deity—the deity of the whimsical blessedness of our tribe in its giftedness and its drunkenness, its glories and its failures, its charming idiosyncrasy and terrible disturbance. Even as late as that summer, when my sense of the world as a zombie planet had become entrenched, I was still capable of being touched by an occasion like this, in which the mad and the unmad danced in our ancestral barn among our houses great and small, cradled in our landscape of sacred spots that held our love for one another in trust.
With Johnny as her father, and her mother an otherworldly poetess unsuited for motherhood, Pamela was in effect without parents: a convent boarding school in England had been her actual home. The family world was therefore to her a magnetic one to which she felt she had only a tenuous admission. Above all, Pamela longed to be accepted. At the party in the barn, she got tipsy, and she met William for the first time. “Oh, another cousin,” she said. Because the fear of William was like an animal fear, existing in silence, no one had warned her about him. So Pamela danced with William, as others did, and went outside with him—as others did not—and he took her arm in a strong grip, propelled her behind the barn, and, after discharging a stream of filthy language, raped her. Between ten and ten-thirty in the evening on July 13, 1985, a Saturday, William was raping Pamela behind the barn while in the barn people danced. The light in the barn was mellow, but behind the barn it was dark.
In the midst of being raped, Pamela became aware of the beam of a flashlight sweeping back and forth across her assailant and herself—across the rape—and then a male voice called, “William!” Whoever this was, perhaps he had noticed William leaving with Pamela and become concerned. (Indeed, my mother had noticed the disappearance and was out in the dark, shouting for Pamela, though in the wrong places.) When his name was called, William got up abruptly and left. Whoever it was who had come with the flashlight did not then go to Pamela. The flashlight went away. She was left lying there in the dark.
Later Pamela could not remember how long she had lain there, but eventually she got up and tried to straighten her clothes and brush herself off so no one could tell that anything had happened. That was her first concern after the rape, and it remained her primary concern. She found her way to a bathroom in an apartment in the upper part of the barn and fixed herself up some more, and then got herself back to the Red Cottage.
In the morning she lay in bed in the Red Cottage, listening to a cousin talking to my mother downstairs in the kitchen, and she became gripped with terror that someone might find out. The terror was that if it was known in the family she would be rejected definitively. Accordingly, she told no one until she returned to school in the fall. Then, fearful that she was pregnant, she confided in some friends. With their help, she was tested and was found not to be pregnant. Six months or so later she told her mother about the rape. Her mother wasn’t sure whether to believe her, but she did, eventually, tell my mother in passing on the telephone. My mother knew that what Pamela had said was well within the range of possibility, and told Pamela’s mother that that was so, and then spoke to Pamela. Pamela’s chief concern was still that no one know. She swore my mother to secrecy.
My mother nevertheless told me, and Isabella and Trudi, each separately, and passed on Pamela’s fervent wish that the information be kept secret. And there communication stopped. We did not tell others. I rarely spoke to my sisters in any event. We did not relate to each other: we spoke to our mother. It was as if it was not safe for us to talk to each other, and when we did—especially if there were several of us—we fell back on a style of truncated girlishness that guaranteed that no interchange of emotional significance could take place. Certainly, our relationship with each other was not one that could bear discussion of this rape.
I did not even see the rape as an event that had happened in a family, whether the subgrouping of myself and my sisters or the larger family as embodied by the Place. I did not see it in a context of any kind. Certainly, I had no thought of confronting William, or bringing him to account, either within a family forum or a court of law. Indeed I hardly thought of it at all. I would not think of the rape when I encountered William, or even when I saw William and Pamela in the same room at a family event. It’s not that it disappeared from consciousness altogether, but, like a fox killing rabbits in the woods, it was somehow not a part of history. My knowledge of it disappeared into the old family silence, in which the world appeared unchanged in a nitroglycerine air.
Ironically, the only person able to speak of the rape with impunity was William himself. As Pamela later recounted, the next time he saw her he flirted with her and offered to give her a ride into the city, and when she refused he laughed and said, “Don’t worry. I won’t rape you again.” This remark is a measure of how lost William was. He had no gauge of the meaning of his act.
As I look back and see myself in my forgetfulness, making no effort to avert a repetition of what had happened to Pamela, I see myself at an advanced stage of separateness from self and well into the despair that this brings on. I also see myself—though I had no sense of this at the time—as, like William, a part of a family history that in some ways had devolved down from Stanford with the same mechanical predictability and hopelessness as had governed Stanford’s own life. There is no force that I know of that can reach into this kind of dead momentum and effect lasting change other than grace.
The grace of the quotidian that was celebrated on the Place, however, is a conservative kind of grace that enriches and thus reinforces the texture of the status quo. It says nothing need be changed, because the miraculous is close at hand. To break the iron grip of an unconscious mechanical progression, a revolutionary grace that disrupts the status quo is required. Revolutionary grace strikes at a given moment after which nothing is ever again the same—Saul on the way to Damascus, for example, though it need not be so dramatic and can happen to a group of people as well as to an individual. It is, in other words, a historical kind of grace. Revolutionary grace did come to me and my sisters, but as I look back I see in my own life a third kind of grace that is neither conservative nor able to effect lasting change, but is a premonition of that possibility and perhaps prepared me for it. This third kind of grace comes in the form of moments of perception, a deep layer of being that is always there in the world but usually imperceptible. It’s very different from quotidian grace in that it’s eerie, conveying a sense of different realms of reality lying alongside.
In the years surrounding Pamela’s rape, the beauty of the world seemed to me to be a lie, a kind of shellac sealing over a horrific emptiness. Yet I might see a cock pheasant in a clearing, looking a little ridiculous, a little off balance in his gaudy getup, and there it would be all around him—the old world, a world that was true. My son’s vocabulary could do it. He called the outdoors “outie,” and one day when we were already outdoors he said he wanted to go “outie.” I said, “You can’t get any more outie than this,” and then it struck me, with the world seeming a lie under shellac, that you could get more outie than this: that there was something inside the outside world—something more real, more exposing, that was hidden from us. I’d slice open a beet, and there was the undiscovered planet in the beetroot. I’d take a walk and, for no reason at all, there it would be, the world hidden in the world breaking through the shellac like the back of a whale.
Sometimes I could see the world hidden in the world, too, when my grandmother was in it—when, for example, Mama appeared coming through the rhododendrons on her afternoon walk, debonair in a woolly hat, with her cane, the thinness of her ankles revealed beneath the wide cuffs of her slacks, and the narrow length of her feet full of gesture. In great old age, Mama had become exaggerated, her shins sharp, her long nose longer yet, long with inquiring into the world, with savoring this little spot of Long Island for which she’d had such contempt for so long but which from the perspective of great old age was now just the world and, in that, international—as good as Italy.
In January of 1984—the year before the rape—quite suddenly, at the age of ninety-six, Mama began to die. A light flu precipitated it: having been quite well, she simply started to go. Snow was on the ground. Julian was three. I was living on Lower Fifth Avenue. The dying took several weeks. Hers was not a passive fading away; it was active—the hardest thing she had ever done, she said. In the first part of her dying, she had my mother read to her from a technical book abo battles in the Revolutionary War. She’d lie in her bed with her $$ scrunched tight, listening intently, and if she didn’t understand a passage she would peremptorily instruct my mother to read it again. She was alert and aware of her surroundings. One day she bewildered the young Italian-American doctor who was attending her by saying to him, “Io sono Romana.” (“I am a Roman.”)
Then she went into a two-week period in which her dying seemed to require an entirely absorbing interior form of concentration, though occasionally she would open her eyes and say something. Once, she held her big, handsome hands in front of her face and said, “I don’t need these anymore.” Another time, when my mother was sitting with her at two in the morning, sipping a glass of whiskey for fortification, Mama opened her eyes suddenly and said, “Man does not live by bread alone.” My mother asked her what she meant, and Mama said, “Sometimes he eats his hat.” My mother then said, “Mama, do you want to eat your hat?” and Mama thought for a few minutes and then laughed and said, “No, it would be much too tough,” and then asked my mother what she was doing drinking whiskey at two in the morning. Mama was one hundred per cent up for the challenge of dying and she did it not in the manner of someone on whom fate was closing in but in the manner of someone who was breaking out.
I would go to St. James on the train from New York to sit with Mama and hold one of her hands, as family members did in turn. On one hand she wore her wedding ring together with a diamond engagement ring, and the other hand was bare. Her ringed hand brought to my mind a vision derived from an ancient Chinese poem: A nobleman is being carried along a riverbank in a sedan chair, surrounded by courtiers of varying ranks, who are dressed in rich fabrics embroidered with symbolic designs. Along the river is a carefully arranged, cultivated landscape, but in the background there are snowy peaks. When I held her ringed hand she was a part of the scene on the riverbank, but when I held her ringless hand, I had a sense of her as already half out of the world—up in the snowy peaks where, stripped of her worldly definitions, she was becoming her essential self. I too had a wedding ring on one hand and another that was bare. When I held her ringed hand with my ringed hand my sense of the texture of society around us became so dense that I could not imagine a world outside it at all. But when I held her bare hand with my bare hand there it was: the mystery and namelessness of identity, how exposed we are, the fatality of how we conduct our lives, and our irreplaceableness to each other.
One day when I was sitting with Mama, I accepted my aunt Claire’s offer of relief and went out in the snow for a walk. I walked up the Privet Path, and since it was leafless I could see right through to Johnny’s field, more grown up now, with beards of leafless vines weeping from stunted trees, and to my house in plain sight beyond. I wished to reinforce Mama in her passage, and the only way that I could think to do this was to say a prayer. So, not having said a prayer in a very long time, I now said the Our Father. This was as earnest and open an attempt at prayer as could be, yet phrase after phrase fell meaningless to the ground. “Our Father.” Who was that? “Who art in Heaven.” What meaning was there in that? There in the providential landscape of my childhood, life seemed haphazard, and without significance, as if Providence had once again fallen away like a deceiving scrim. There was only myself, and the violence within me. Yet there can be a kind of opening in the falling away of significance. Perhaps it’s required, even, in order to break through to connection, that one become able to sustain all that one feels in an atmosphere of abandonment by God: that one be willing to undergo that; to be present to oneself, alone. Standing in that bare place, I knew only that Mama was dying and that I loved her.
I was not there when she died—no one in the family was—but the caretaker with her reported that she opened her eyes and made the little ciao sign with her fist, to signal goodbye, as Roman children do, and then she was off. Looking back on Mama’s life, it sometimes appears to me to have been, in so many ways, like the party in the barn with a rape occurring on the other side of the barn wall. In other ways it had the simple depth and perfection of her little ciao sign on leaving the earth. It is as if these two parts of her lived alongside. During her dying I felt as if, as always, she had taken me to the edge of a territory that she herself had not been able or willing to enter: but she could show it to me. It was as if out of a concealing darkness that was right there in the light she had slipped me a golden apple, without a word, without a look.
The full textural panoply was rolled out for her funeral, my father on the organ, the Noroton graduates singing her out to the Gregorian “In Paradisum,” gorgeous texts read by her children gorgeously, and our family priest—our exquisite cousin—presiding, saying from the pulpit that Mama had once told him that good manners were no more than a manifestation of charity. The larger family was drawn in by Mama’s death, from the farther reaches of the Chanler cousinage and from the nearer reaches of descendants of her six brothers and sisters: a family sensing yet one more time its continuing existence as an entity. At the end of the funeral that ecumenical entity joined in a triumphant rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” composed by Julia Ward Howe, Mama’s great aunt on her mother’s side. Then Mama was buried in the graveyard behind the Episcopal church—with Stanford and Grandma, Papa, Natalie, and little Richard Mansfield White, Stanford and Grandma’s baby: the ground had been selectively blessed by a priest for the Catholics. Later her name was chiselled on the slab of pink marble under Papa’s, so that the whole slab read:
LAWRENCE GRANT WHITE
Architect
1887–1956
and his wife
LAURA CHANLER WHITE
1887–1984
Almost from the start, but more and more as time went on, the name on her gravestone seemed like a snare from which the quarry had slipped.
The family had configured itself in a pattern around Mama, and that pattern became somewhat disorganized after her death: in retrospect, it seems that perhaps this condition of incoherence was propitious for the disrupting power of revolutionary grace. But I have learned that grace is not dependent on conditions of any kind and can lightly, at any point, reverse the chronology of a hundred years. It’s independent of the sequential, evolutionary ways in which our earthly stories normally unfold. Thus grace, while it creates narrative where there was none, also creates unusual narrative structures, for in ordinary narratives the outcome arises out of character, out of preceding events, and in good time whereas a story that turns on grace turns on an unprecedented factor that is inherently lawless and unpredictable, an unconditional transforming force that flashes suddenly like lightning.
Our moment of grace in the Red Cottage family happened in the Christmas season four years after Mama’s death. In the context of the Place, so dense with charm and poetry, the event was extraordinarily plain. Madeleine, who lived in Europe, called each of us sisters before she arrived for the holidays and asked that we meet by ourselves. She wanted to talk to us about something having to do with our childhood, she said. The suggestion of our meeting by ourselves was in itself revolutionary. Years later Beatrice told me that the mere proposal of the meeting filled her with an overwhelming sense of danger. At an ordinary time, resistance would have intensified until the plan fell apart. Instead—this was the first sign of the presence of grace—the plan went forward easily, seeming almost to fall into place by itself.
On New Year’s Day, 1989, Beatrice, Madeleine, Isabella, and I—Felicity was not able to be there and Trudi came later—met in a room in my house that we called the studio, a room that was not part of the eighteenth-century house but newly built. We bracketed eighteen years—I was forty-four and Trudi was twenty-five. The room was large and square, with a pine floor and a tray ceiling, the walls white with rough wainscoting. The furniture was a wooden table with benches for dining, a library table, a sofa, and an armchair, and a sofa bed in one of two bay windows that flanked the door and looked south across Johnny’s field. Now, in winter, we could also see right through the trees to the peak of the cow barn, embedded in its hill, with its large top window for Bobby’s studio. In the west wall were three windows set together through which, to the left, one could see the carriage house, the stables, and the water tower, all together a continuous shape, an inscape or kind of sub-form that paintings sometimes bring out, in this case embodying the essence of what was deeply loved on the Place.
It was midafternoon when we gathered: the sun was already low and fierce, its rays piercing like spears through black trees and into the room. We sat tentatively, a little awkwardly, gathered around Madeleine, who sat on the sofa with the bank of three windows behind her. As we had no precedent for talking together in a serious way, it was one of those moments in which there was no illusion of translucence between present and future. No preliminary chatting, no preamble, no warming up seemed possible and, in the vacuum that developed, Madeleine had no alternative but to come out immediately with what she had on her mind.
She had been seeing a psychoanalyst in France, she said, and had mentioned to her that she had been sexually fondled by our father at night in the Red Cottage when she was a child. She had told her doctor that she had always known this, but that the knowledge had been drained of feeling and seemed insignificant. The psychoanalyst, however, thought what had happened was very significant, and also that it was important for Madeleine to talk to her sisters about it. Her plain words were spoken calmly. But as she spoke I had a sense of something like a sound barrier breaking, a psychic reverberation that reached to the edge of the cosmos and down to the subcellular level at the same time. With it, the world cracked open. And inside was the world.
Beatrice instantly, explosively, burst into tears, and then said that she too had been visited by our father in the night. When she was fifteen he had gotten into her bed and lain on top of her, his body hot and sweaty, she said, and then, after a time, had gone away. Later, she had told herself that this was not a sexual act, an account that allowed her to preserve the idea that her childhood was safe. I told about the cellar stairs, the exploding airplane, and another memory, far firmer, of a sexual embrace by my father, in pajamas, with an erection, when I was about fifteen. Except for Isabella, each of us had one clear documentary memory. Isabella, nevertheless, was in tears as well. She said that she didn’t have such memories, but then again she remembered almost nothing of her childhood. Trudi arrived, and sat down, and we told her what had transpired. She said, almost offhandedly, Oh yes, that had happened to her too, but it was nothing. We said it wasn’t nothing, and she, in her turn, burst explosively into tears. In her case, our father had had her masturbate him when she was five years old. Beatrice had continued to vacillate between crying hysterically and anguished attempts to continue to downplay her experience. Trudi’s account broke down her last reserves of hope that a vision of our childhood as safe could be maintained.
We remembered how it was a story about Dad that he walked in his sleep as a child, and the idea was—perhaps from our mother—that he walked in his sleep in the Red Cottage too. As adults we knew that alcohol was a likelier cause for what had happened. But the idea that our father had walked in his sleep had helped put these incidents out of the realm of consciousness—not only his but ours too—and thus we all became somnambulists ourselves. Each of us had lived with her memories for a long time by herself. None of us had had any idea that such things were happening to anyone else. Where, by themselves, our memories had seemed isolated and in that somehow bloodless and irrelevant and easy to downplay, when put together it was clear that sexual violation was a condition of life in the Red Cottage. That danger had been in the atmosphere we breathed though ahistorical, without acknowledgment. Now the danger was in the picture. It was a part of history now.
There was a kind of involuntary combustion to the way these terse factual statements shot out, accompanied by explosions of tears. But the air, in contrast, was no longer explosive. The air had become stable and calm. I was sitting in a chair which was the height of a child’s chair from the ground but was built for an adult, with a wide rush bottom and ample, curved wooden arms. I felt myself sitting in this chair with my knees apart, my hands cupping the curved ends of the wooden arms, my chest open, my breath easy and deep, my back light against the back of the chair, my weight even in my buttocks, and my feet evenly and comfortably on the floor. I felt very calm, as if I could sit there forever. I felt connected to my sisters, calm with my sisters, with them—a true familial connectedness. I saw them in the context of our history together, not only the history we had just uncovered but all of it, a whole picture. I saw them, in a sense for the first time.
Beatrice, who follows me in age, sat next to Madeleine on the sofa, the rays of the sun creating a coppery halo of her dark-brown hair. Thirty-nine at this time, she was wiry and fit from having made her living fishing for cod off Nova Scotia, as well as apple and tobacco picking, though now she was a professor of law. In ordinary times, Beatrice had an air about her of deploying rationality as a peacekeeping force in an emotional environment that threatened, at any moment, to go out of control. Mixed with this was an intuitive artistic nature that showed especially in her hands and the way she used them. Her hands were the big beautiful hands that run in the family—Mama’s hands—and she painted with them, as Mama did, and used them expressively when deploying rationality as well as in more creative modes. In the moments after the breaking of the sound barrier, however, one hand was in her lap and one was hanging over the arm of the sofa, at rest. The peacekeeping force had vanished. There was something very full, very occupied, very calm about her presence, though she said that she was having an experience in which her childhood seemed to be erasing itself like a movie.
Madeleine, next to her, also with a coppery halo from the sunset, was olive-skinned with brown eyes, hair that was blond when she was a child but nearly black in her adulthood—as black as our mother’s. I mention the blondness because, for us who grew up with her, Madeleine will always have a nimbus of light around her head. The fourth-born, she is pretty in a fine-boned way—probably the prettiest, though there might be some disagreement about that. There is a softness about her and yet a highly intense vibration as well, and both the softness and the intensity are often present in her eyes at the same time. A dancer, her body lithely strong, she usually seemed active even in repose, often taking difficult positions and holding them as if they were entirely normal. But now she was leaning back, sinking into the sofa, relieved, almost smiling. Her age showed in her face from the strain, but she was relaxed: we were all, for us, extraordinarily relaxed, but Madeleine, who had taken the initiative—who had known in advance what was to come—was exhausted as well.
Isabella, the fifth one, long legged and slim, with straight, long light-brown hair, our father’s winged jaw, and long, nimble fingers that played the classical guitar, was, of us all, the gentlest, the most quiet, and the most hidden. She was also the best clown. Isabella could be very funny, and being funny was her most assertive mode. Indeed, for some years she had pursued the circus arts before becoming a musician. A difficult marriage, however, and motherhood under those circumstances, had made for a hard life that had begun to show through both her gentleness and her humorous take on life. Gifted but modest, rangy yet feminine, and pretty in a cozy way, she was now slumped in her chair, her face wet with tears and upsetness still showing in her features—upsetness for us, upsetness at information that required a drastic revision of the picture of what our childhood was like. Ordinarily her expression was veiled, but not now. She looked her age, which was one day short of thirty. Her posture was easeful, conveying a sense of connection that did not need to be artificially sustained.
Sitting in a chair beyond Isabella was Trudi, the youngest, and the athlete among us, with the physicality of a horsewoman, a quality that she later turned to a relationship with metals and gems and the minute engineering problems that arise in the making of classical jewelry. She had always been the difficult one, the black sheep, the one who fought with our mother where we protected her, and who later didn’t bother disguising what had gone wrong in her life. Trudi, like Isabella, had straight hair, long and light brown. Her eyes were green, and at this moment they were bright. She too was slumped, relaxed, in a cocoon of privacy, inspecting her hands—another edition of Mama’s hands. Her face was flushed, with the sense of release and connection, but with turbulence too—we all felt much, much grief in this moment. I saw Trudi for the first time as a full-fledged adult. There were no truncated girls here.
There were women in the room.