Embers of Childhood

What am I now that I was then?

May memory restore again and again

The smallest color of the smallest day:

Time is the school in which we learn,

Time is the fire in which we burn.

“DELMORE SCHWARTZ
“Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”

In 2001, Sydney Biddle, my second husband, and I had been married for twenty years. He had never seen the dream house of my Aiken childhood. We decided to visit Joye Cottage.

There were conflicting reports about its redecoration; people either loved it or hated it. I was determined to keep an open mind. Approaching my mid-seventies, I hoped to continue to explore the new in art, literature, theatre, music—why not a renewed Joye Cottage? (Make it new—cried Ezra Pound.) In that spirit, I set out to see how Joye Cottage’s new owners had changed the house. Driving to Aiken past the familiar jack pines and cotton fields, I wondered, too, whether I’d discover other things from my past.

Today, most of Aiken’s streets are paved, but Easy Street, in front of the house, retains its soft red clay. We parked in the driveway. There were the same small yellowish pebbles, the same embracing wings of the house, the same flight of painted blue-gray steps off to the right, leading to the wide verandah.

The front door looked exactly the same as it had in the early seventies, when I was last there and my parents appeared in the doorway with welcoming halloos and hugs. The current residents, our hosts, Steve Naifeh and Greg Smith, greeted us. We took off our shoes—as they’d asked when they opened the door—and padded along the polished wood.

We followed them into the hall, where a few handsome Far Eastern sculptures sat on polished round tables. My father’s chronometer was gone, with its message of precision soothing to him. Although I used to think my parents’ lives were ordered and predictable, I understand that they, too, had been vulnerable to disorder and suffering.

The living room was dazzling white. In my time, from the 1930s to the 1970s, and for about fifty years before, when my grandparents and great-grandparents had lived there, rich colors suffused the walls and floors, sofas and chairs. The furnishings and the accompanying multitude of objects had reflected the taste of generations—flowers, silver, textiles, porcelain, paintings, books, guns, clocks, electric trains and an extinct bird in a glass bell had filled the sixty-odd rooms. Now, save for a few recent works of art, everything was plain. No trimmings. Lots of space.

Light poured through uncurtained windows. A piano stood in the same corner where we once practiced our endless scales and exercises; the peak of my achievement Schubert’s Moment Musicale. (Lev now has that piano in a house he’s built in Florida reminiscent of Joye Cottage.) Steve and Greg’s piano faced the porch, not the wall of books that I remembered. Judging by the locked French doors and the few little tables and hard chairs scattered on the broad expanses of the verandahs, once intrinsic parts of the living room, the porches weren’t much used. But there was a card table similar to ours in the far corner of the living room, and I instantly pictured my parents sitting on the rosy window seat, playing Canasta or pasting photographs into their albums. The past appeared before my eyes, even if the gleaming white walls and spare furnishings challenged the memories teeming with color. Shiny blue brocade covered the small firm sofas and chairs. Where J. D. had once stood by my father’s cornstalk blind, there was a Japanese screen. The room felt cool. It was quite beautiful. I complimented Greg and Steve, noticing—for the first time—the intricate, newly accentuated moldings of the ceiling, fireplace, and denuded windows, as well as the stairs to Pam, Whit, and Sis’s rooms. All designed, they told me, by Stanford White—that, too, was new information for me. Past the living room, my parents’ bedrooms and the dove room were unrecognizable. Through the diamond-paned windows of the long hall to my former bedroom, I glimpsed my old school across the street. It was not a school any longer, but someone’s home.

Steve led us through a nearby door. Once it led to the dark, scuffed stairway winding to the cramped rooms with undersized windows where my mother’s tiny French maid, Josephine, had washed, ironed, and slept. The gloomy, damp spaces were gone, replaced by a wide, well-lit, carpeted stair opening to a large windowed bedroom and a huge bathroom—who’d have guessed that so much space existed under the eaves! It was inviting in its airiness, with views over tall trees to the lawn. It was their best guest room.

“We sleep in all the different bedrooms,” they told me. Their permanent bedrooms, however, were in what I formerly knew as the spooky wing, down a flight of stairs near my parents’ bedrooms. Except for my father’s studio at the end of the hall, opening onto the garden and pool, the wing had once been dark and forbidding. Now, it was full of light, like the rest of the house.

I wondered if the changes merely signified a change in fashion. Did Steve and Greg’s vision of my home capture its original spirit? In my ancestors’ time, Victorian excess had been the principal motif. My mother, putting her own sunny mark on the house she’d inherited, had added bright splashes of yellow, purple, and chartreuse to rooms already filled with color and objects. Today the house is stark; it is one of the two greatest differences between then and now.

Joye Cottage will always define home to me. As perhaps it does for its current owners, too. They have taken extraordinary measures to recreate what had utterly deteriorated, copying bronze sconces from the front hall and installing them everywhere, as well as restoring kitchen cabinets, bathroom fixtures, moldings, mantels, and even bits of furniture. Everything they have added is well-crafted and appropriate. Although the walls are white, in each room a different Scalamandre fabric on a bed, chair or sofa floods the eye with color. Ancient sculptures, Japanese screens, a few paintings and drawings, make exquisite additions to the newly pristine rooms. Trying for detachment, I told the new owners how I admired what they’d done. (Was I being insincere? Reverting to the over-politeness I learned in these same rooms as a child?)

The second great difference is in the number of occupants. No one was cooking in the huge, magnificently equipped kitchen. Everything was immaculate. Who was keeping it so well? Who was making dinner? There were no enticing smells. No food at all.

In a side wing, my mother’s once-gaudy New Room contained banks of desks with computers where a few scholarly-looking men and women were quietly at work. Steve and Greg write books. They continually update volumes listing the best doctors and attorneys throughout the country. The books are commercially successful. In 1990, their biography of Jackson Pollock won a Pulitzer Prize.

In the warm, sunny fall afternoon, Sydney and I toured the Hitchcock Woods where I’d spent much of my childhood on various horses. The woods were the same. No cars, except for the open jeep of the generous botanist who’d offered to show us around. A few riders. The same sandy manege where Captain Gaylard had drilled us in British cavalry maneuvers. There were the very same lines of Aiken fences where I’d jumped, always excited, often terrified

As we drove through the beautiful woods, I wondered about the effect of all those rides. Did they influence me in some far-reaching way? Of course they did. In ways both good and bad. Gaylard’s discipline, the concentration he demanded, and the constant challenge to learn more and to do better, helped me in all that I subsequently tried to accomplish. The assurance I gained through riding carried me through many a bad patch. As I’d grown older, however, I’d held onto the belief that if I could control my environment as I had once controlled my horse, all would be well. Sometimes I tried to manipulate a spouse, a child, a friend or a business associate—which was not good for relationships. At the same time, I made unrealistic demands on myself, trying for perfection in the kitchen, the garden, the nursery, the bedroom. When I couldn’t live up to my goals, I became frustrated and dejected. My own children taught me, by example, that perfection is an unworthy and unattainable goal. Their example, their tolerance and love, have been indispensable to any growth I’ve achieved.

In the woods that day, I felt almost as I once had so long ago on my best days—eager, nervous, my lithe, young body alert yet at ease. Sand River, Cathedral Aisle, Lover’s Lane, the horseshow grounds, all, all still there. Happy as I was to be in the Hitchcock Woods, my mind was drifting as we bounced along the soft forest roads back to Joye Cottage. The woods were full of memories, but they didn’t have their previous magic. Perhaps because they hadn’t changed. Joye Cottage, transformed, had a more powerful impact than the unaltered lovely woods. Perhaps nature, in the end, does not touch me as deeply as human creations.

As a child, often alone, I longed for the companionship and play that my grandchildren take for granted. Taught by my English nurse to be stoic, and never, never to complain of boredom (or anything else), I learned to amuse myself. My friends were the characters I found in books. When a beloved horse or a dog was in pain; when David Copperfield was beaten; when Beth in Little Women was ill, I wept. I was terrified for days by The Hound of the Baskervilles. I rejoiced when Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. I developed my attitudes from books, as I did later from other forms of art. Like many bookish children, writers and artists formed my life.

Later that day, we had dinner with a friend whose brother had been killed a month earlier in the World Trade Center. She told us of a memorial service, of her work in New York with the Red Cross. Later that night, CNN brought the news of the bombing of Afghanistan to our bedroom. At the end of our trip to Joye Cottage, when we flew home, the National Guard was patrolling the airport.

The world and Aiken at last seemed entwined, unlike when I lived there as a child.

In many ways, revisiting Aiken was a blessing. So much came back to me. The longing for my mother; the frustration of being a powerless child; the happiness of food, school, my friend Marianna, my teachers, my horses, my dog. There had been a sense that the life we had would last forever.

My identity, embedded deep within me, reaches like the roots of a tree to Aiken. Circumstance has modified, but not quite obliterated, that early self. The changes in Joye Cottage are parallel to the changes in me—I’m glad to discover that we both have a capacity for transformation and for growth.

Until our visit, I had imagined Joye Cottage as it used to be, in all its complicated glory. I was sure that I remembered everything, but now, I understand that my vision is blurred. Ubiquitous white has cooled my image of reds, yellows, blues and browns; flattened the corners; and illuminated warm shadows. The house’s current look has become a kind of encroaching microbe, invading the membrane of my memory.

I’m grateful that my home has been so lovingly cared for. Its very survival seems a miracle. It isn’t a restoration, but a new creation. And why not? It’s the new owners’ home, not mine. So why don’t I feel happy? My appetite for the new seems to have evaporated. Perhaps I’m not, after all, that old lady I envisioned: eager, curious, ever-young, with open mind and eyes. The aesthetic of purity doesn’t suit what I know is the disorder of life. The truth is I want my Joye Cottage back. Just as it was. I want to be that innocent, dreamy child again. I want to have a second chance.

Does change always imply loss? Well, that depends on one’s perspective. In the middle of my life, I found a new romance, a new job, a new home. A glorious future lay ahead. All would be well. Better, actually, than before. Yet faced with unwelcome change, how differently I now feel. When people took actions I abhorred at the Museum that I loved and once led, I was ready to fight.

Although I know that change is inevitable, even desirable, seeing Joye Cottage again touched a raw nerve. As memories flooded my mind and heart, some devil in me wanted to splash red mud on the gleaming floors, spill chili on the spotless Viking stove, and rumple the covers in what was once my bedroom. The transformation of Joye Cottage brought home a sense of loss. Time passing. People passing. Everything passing.