2

I didn’t know my grandmother. Or I hadn’t thought I did until, when I was about to turn eighteen and was just back from boarding school, a letter to my mother came from her in Paris, out of the blue, offering to pay for me to go to college, to Bryn Mawr. The letter put my mother in bed for a month.

I was at what people call the tongue-tied stage, though in my case it was just how I’d always been. So for days, weeks maybe, at the start of that summer of 1934, I let the tearful whispered discussions go on between Mother and Hughie. (To be strictly accurate, the tearful, whispering part of the conversation was all from her. His contribution was, as usual, soothing murmurs, flowers and Martinis.) I must have figured there was no point in getting involved or expressing a preference of my own, even though, as soon as I’d heard the offer, I’d started quietly hoping they’d eventually accept it. I imagined myself sitting in a huge dream library with a book in my hands, turning the pages and smiling. Zelda was going, after all, and Louise. In fact, all of my friends were going to college. I was the only one staying home after graduation, and not because we couldn’t afford school, either – the Depression hadn’t touched Hughie’s business, and Father had left Mother well provided for – but because Mother was old-fashioned and thought it right for an unmarried girl to stay in the bosom of her family.

I had no idea either what my future would be like once we got back home to New York and our town house on the Upper East Side in the fall. Our summer in the big family house on Shelter Island, where we were the first arrivals of a crowd of cousins who would turn up through July and August, was limbo time, before the detail was worked out. But I already felt listless at the vista opening up in my mind of an infinity of chintz, and of helping Mother arrange parties and flowers, and of hopeful introductions to smooth-faced young men like youthful Hughies. Maybe Hughie couldn’t see the point of a grown-up girl hanging indefinitely around the house, because he didn’t seem to be taking this college offer half so badly as Mother. But, even though I could guess that he might think it a good idea, and be minded to say yes, I knew it was important for me not to think too much about what was only a possibility. Nothing ever happened in our house unless Mother wanted it. The thing was just to sit tight until the matter was resolved, and accept the outcome. It was outside my control.

But I did pick up the photo left on the breakfast table with the abandoned letter that first morning, among the cold pieces of toast and the empty coffee cups Hughie and Mother had left. She’d let the letter fall and said, in tragic tones, ‘Now she wants to send my child away …’ and, blinking back a tear, trailed to the door. There, with both of us staring, she’d paused and added, ‘To “broaden her mind”, or so she says.’ And then she’d headed upstairs, followed by Hughie, who was already sighing and murmuring, ‘But, sweetheart …’

My first idea, left alone, was to read the letter and find out exactly what the fuss was all about. But I never got that far, because my unknown grandmother had also enclosed a picture of herself, half smiling into the camera, and that was what came out of the envelope first: an unremarkable woman in her late sixties, with a fullish face, thick grey-black hair, and just the hint of an amused smile on her lips. She was thin: the kind of slim that would maybe have just recently become scrawny. She was wearing a tweed jacket and skirt and a white blouse and spectacles. The spectacles had a thick dark frame across her eyebrows. Underneath that, eyes enormously magnified by the lenses looked out. She seemed a little nervous, shy maybe, but nice too. I could see she’d be fun. She looked ready to laugh.

I looked at that photo for a long time. That worn, slightly baggy face seemed so familiar. It had nothing of Mother’s blonder, rounder, more prettily girlish looks. But there was something in it not unlike my own thinner face and long scrawny limbs (even if my own hair was fair and cocked up in two widow’s peaks on either side of my forehead, like Mother’s). I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what drew me to it. It was just a pleasure to look at it, and daydream. And the more I looked, the more warmly I felt towards the woman in tweed.

I took her away. I put her up in my own bedroom, propped against my lamp, and went on looking.

And, very slowly, a kind of memory of my own began coming to the surface, though I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just my imagination. I did have an over-active imagination, from too much reading. I knew that. Mother was always saying so.

But, in my head, when I looked, I could hear a sort of gentle background music of ‘peekaboo’, repeated, like a bird’s call, in the soft singsong tones you talk to children in. I could see her laughing at me and me grinning back into those big eyes through the glasses. Maybe I was sitting on her knee. Certainly I was very small, and very close, and very happy. All of her was big compared with me, and the skin on her cheek was soft and wrinkled, with cords on her neck that I knew, with quiet regret for her, to be ugly. I could feel my little-girl fingers smearing those big glasses, pulling them aside, then hear myself laughing in puzzled astonishment that whenever those eyes didn’t have that thick glass in front of them, they were ordinary-sized.

I could imagine my fingers, too, pulling at a rope of enormous rough golden beads until the skin on her neck puckered and I let go. I must be making at least that part up, I thought, because, in the picture, there was no jewellery visible at all. But I could almost feel those beads, warm to the touch and so big my hand could hardly cup the bottom one. Strung together with brown thread.

Peekaboo!

Silly, of course. I knew that. A story I was inventing for myself. After what seemed a very long time, I sighed and hid the picture inside a book.

Mother never mentioned that the photo was gone. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed it? Her migraine – the drapes-closed, weak-voiced, oh-please-just-a-little-dry-toast-and-water variety – stayed with her, on and off, for days more.

I don’t remember the sequence of the days that followed the letter’s coming very exactly; just that it was the kind of tense time when you want to spend a lot of the day in your room, on your own, reading. I didn’t mind. Even though I was still so young that I didn’t much notice the world outside my own small world – the bigger world that contained the Depression – I already didn’t want to go to the half-empty beach on my own that summer. There was something so sad about the boarded-up holiday cottages, and all the remembered people who weren’t there any more. It was the evenings that kept going wrong. Dinner would start all right, with carefully bright questions between the three of us about Hughie’s day and Mother’s symptoms and who’d be going to the island when and what had been in the newspapers. We’d be sitting among the silver and flowered plates and cut glass, waiting till Florence entered, blinking back steam as she planted the tureen on the table. But our conversations kept fizzling out once the maid had gone, and soon afterwards the meal would end too, with Mother hastily leaving the room, blinking back more tears. Once the details of the offer from my grandmother had become clearer, though not the reason for Mother’s reaction, I do remember asking, cautiously, ‘I was wondering … why is she even interested in me and in my schooling? When I didn’t know she even knew I existed?’

I could see at once that I hadn’t requested this information nearly carefully enough. The question was enough for my mother to turn her beautiful, brimming, accusing eyes on me. My heart contracted. I’d given offence. With what I could muster in the way of defiance (because what was wrong about my question, after all? Why couldn’t I ask?) I looked back at her, keeping the innocence of my enquiry clearly displayed on my face, like a shield.

There was a long, dizzy-making silence, broken only by the clink of a single spoon, when Hughie, after a brief glance, went back to his tomato soup, as if nothing important were happening. Mother made sure I was aware of her looking at me, then she gathered herself, dropped her napkin on the table, and rushed off again with a stifled sob. She didn’t shut the door. We could hear her footsteps rushing up the stairs. I wasn’t yet far enough removed from our family life to be able to judge this manoeuvre in the way I did later: to feel exasperated by the melodrama of her distress, or at any rate to know whether I felt exasperated, or what I felt at all. This was just what things were like. So I sat looking down into my soup, making myself small, crumbling my bread with my fingers, crushed by knowing I’d made things worse with my thoughtless question, wondering why we couldn’t be more like the cheerful, robust families that I was always reading about in books, and wishing most of all, wishing like hell, that I’d just kept quiet.

Hughie was already by the door, going to her, when he looked around and noticed me.

He’s a kind man, my stepfather. He’s big and good-natured, with his gut bulging smoothly over his waistband and his round cheeks pink and unlined. When he’s not at the office, which mostly he is, he’s fond of his golf and tennis and the big shots of bourbon any man would need to keep up with Mother’s demanding crises. He’s always calm. And perhaps I looked extra downcast. He smiled at me.

‘Your mother’s a very sensitive woman,’ he said, looking for the blandest way of calming the situation. ‘And you know she’s always had a hard time with your grandmother. She’s only upset because she loves you … and wants to protect you.’ He nodded, as if convincing himself. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’

I pressed my lips together. ‘Oh, I’m not worried,’ I said, as defiantly as I could. ‘I just don’t understand. I don’t know my grandmother. She doesn’t know me.’

It was more than ‘didn’t know her’. My grandmother was a part of the past we didn’t ever discuss. Mother’s life before me, as far as I could piece together from her accounts of it, had consisted only of family vacations with her cousins during school breaks, along with shopping, piano playing, and her brief romance and marriage with Father before he went to the war in Europe.

Father had been a hero, often invoked, painted in unreal bright colours: a distant cousin, invited up here from DC by Aunt Mildred when Mother was eighteen, because choosing your own kind is best; a brilliant advocate for the Preparedness Movement, a rising star in the War Department until he’d volunteered for active service himself because he was a crack shot. Yet his fighting prowess had been tragically wasted. He’d died of influenza when I was two on his way to the Argonne Forest. By the time I was three, the year after the war had ended, Mother had married Hughie, a calm, stolid, moneyed older man, who’d been Father’s boss at the War Department but was now in the defence business for himself. She’d known him four years by then. He’d been the best man at her wedding to Father.

I knew, in an abstract way, that Mother’s own father had died young, just like mine, even though her father had been a diplomat and not a soldier like mine. Her father had been blown up, along with several others, by a terrorist bomb in Imperial Russia on his first foreign posting. It was easy enough to see why he didn’t figure, because Mother, born in 1896 after his death, hadn’t even known him, but it was where her mother had got to in the story that was more mysterious. If ever I dared ask Mother about her mother, she’d just kind of wilt. I’d tried once or twice, while watching her brush out her pale hair at the end of the day, preparing for evening, concentrating on the smooth strokes. But as soon as I mentioned my grandmother, Mother would do a slow unhappy thing with her eyebrows, while I cringed, in a quiet agony of contrition. Then, after an eternity of silence, she’d sigh. ‘Some things in life are just … difficult. It’s best not to dwell on them … Just be thankful for your own happy upbringing,’ she’d say, and I’d have to leave it at that. All I knew was that my grandmother was called Constance and lived far, far away, in Paris, France, and never came home.

‘You did know your grandma,’ Hughie added eventually, as if he’d been weighing whether to say even this. ‘But maybe you won’t recall. You were very small.’ He measured the air with his big pink hand, bending slightly to get it down to beside his knee. Toddler height.

This surprised me, all right. But I didn’t want him to suddenly remember they’d decided not to talk about it in front of me. So I turned the alert flicker I felt pass across my face into a look of half-remembering politeness – a kind of visual ‘Uh-huh? Oh, how interesting.’ It was the sort of thing I’d got good at, at home with Mother, with her dangerous sensitivity to slight: staying buttoned up; not doing very much.

It was working, too, I thought. Hughie’s face lightened as he started to reminisce.

‘It was the only time I ever saw her, either, come to think of it. She showed up from the south of France to stay here with us, a couple of months after your mother married me – right here on Shelter Island. Just after she’d married, too – her Russian count. She brought him with her. I don’t expect your mother could have stopped her. It’s your whole family’s holiday house, after all.’ His lips twitched. Keeping my mind blank yet receptive, I smiled and widened my eyes encouragingly. ‘You don’t remember him either, I guess? The Russian count? Well, he was a real piece of work. Tall, stood like a soldier, impressive to look at, at least till you got close enough to know what you were seeing. And then, well … to my mind he had too much grease on his hair, collars all gone, even if he did bow all the time and kiss ladies’ hands and wear white gloves – grubby ones – at breakfast. Too darn knickerbocker for me. Couldn’t stop telling us all the usual stories: about how grand he’d been before the Revolution … and how tragic his life had become since … how he’d walked for days across a lake of ice to get to safety … about the priceless jewels sewn into his dead first wife’s corset, you know the kind of thing?’

Despite myself, I felt my smile get more uncertain. It was good talking to Hughie, even if he never told Mother to stop when, for weeks at a stretch, something upset her and the whole rhythm of our life got messed up. We weren’t close, exactly, and I sometimes worried that he’d maybe have preferred it if I weren’t there and he could enjoy life with his beautiful, emotional wife without the quiet child who’d come attached to her. But I liked his slow way of talking. As he was saying all this, I told myself that I’d figure it out later, when I was alone: put the pieces of this unfamiliar story together in my mind. But what I couldn’t understand, right now, in this strange conversational byway we’d somehow gone down, was this: how could any of those wild, romantic stories possibly be called ‘usual’?

Hughie’s grin broadened. ‘You won’t have come across many of them yet, either: Russians? Well, you soon will. The world’s full of lost Russians these days, all waiting for someone to buy them a drink and a meal. Just go to the Russian Tea Room any day: you’ll see crowds of ‘em, and every one with a title and a tall tale, getting taller every time they tell it. Not that I blame them. That’s revolution for you. There’s nothing to stop them exaggerating, now that the place they came from has disappeared. None of them has two dimes to rub together, mind, but they all have plenty to say for themselves. The con man, that’s what I called Constance’s count.’

He chuckled. I did too.

‘So, he spent the summer drinking his way through my wine, which I’d been hoping to impress my new wife with, though nothing I’d brought could impress him; he’d always drunk far better with the Tsar or a grand duke, back in his glory days; and bending anyone’s ear who’d listen about how he was going into town in the fall to sell Marie Antoinette’s earrings to Mrs Hussey Degen, and make enough money to keep Constance – your grandma, that is – in luxury for the rest of her days.

‘To do her justice, Constance didn’t have a moment to spare for his émigré talk. She just laughed whenever she heard him start on about the past, and left it to me to listen – though she did it with charm; she’s quite a woman. She was more interested in the future. And I don’t just mean reading out improving texts from The Delineator, either, about New Women playing golf and driving automobiles, because it was 1919.’

He raised an eyebrow, enjoying drawing me into his story. ‘She spent that summer campaigning for female emancipation.’

I couldn’t help the quiver of astonishment that went through me at that.

‘Well, you can imagine how that went down with your mother,’ he added.

I shook my head. Even then, years and years after the Nineteenth Amendment, Mother, unlike almost every other female I knew, still had no time for women working, or voting, or taking an interest in social improvements, or in fact leaving the home much at all. Mother, when she wasn’t upset, was kittenish, or maybe butterflyish. She thought women were for fluttering.

‘Do you mean giving out pamphlets?’ I asked weakly.

He laughed out loud. ‘Oh, worse than that. Far worse. She was a whirlwind: committees, readings, meetings, you name it …’

He paused. I waited. ‘But her really big idea was the parade,’ Hughie continued. ‘She’d read about one like it in The Delineator, and she was hell bent on copying it here. She was organizing getting on for a hundred women to go stand outside Prospect House in yellow sashes, holding yellow parasols.’

I thought of those yellow amber beads I’d remembered.

‘And this is where it all went so wrong. You see, she asked Jeannie to head the parade, dressed as the Statue of Liberty.’

I felt my eyes widen. In fact, I was so shocked I hardly knew how to make my body take in air.

‘She was quite insistent. And when Jeannie refused, and had me promise to take her right back to town on the weekend of the parade – I made it all right, you know; told Constance there was a dinner we couldn’t get out of – well, Constance just came right back and asked, very briskly, if she couldn’t “borrow” you instead? Put you in your best white dress up at the front instead – as the woman voter of the future?’ He caught my eye and nodded. ‘She was very keen on you, you know. She spent a lot of time playing with you.’

I was having trouble breathing again. ‘… And … did she?’ I eventually managed to ask, gulping a bit. ‘Did I?

He smiled regretfully. ‘Your mother would never have allowed it. You know that.’

I nodded. Of course.

‘We took you back to town with us. Just in case, Jeannie said. She didn’t want Constance getting ideas.’ He looked more serious now. ‘And once we were home, Jeannie wrote Constance a letter, the kind of letter that’s probably more about all the things that have happened between people in the past than about whatever’s got on their nerves today, I’d say …’

Hughie looked away from me, but even so I could see how carefully he was picking his words. I was guessing he’d decided not to interfere when this letter was being written.

‘A terrible letter,’ I hazarded. ‘The sort that says, “Never darken my door again.” ’

Mother wasn’t a forgiver. When Mother fell out with a person, that person fell utterly from grace, suddenly turning out to have committed many, many earlier misdemeanours, stretching back through time, all detailed in faint, hurt tones to anyone who’d listen. Any such person stayed away from beach and card parties ever after.

‘It was about you,’ Hughie continued. ‘On the face of things, anyway. Jeannie told Constance never to think of trying to influence you to be like her, and a whole lot more besides. And that she could stay on the island until after the damn parade, but that she had to be gone by the end of the week, when we’d be coming back. And that was that.’

He spread helpless hands.

I ran through a mental list of things I should say: ‘Poor Grandmother’ or ‘Poor Mother’ or maybe something about having seen the photo Grandmother had sent. Or how I’d remembered those yellow beads, and were they connected with the yellow of the parade?

Instead, into my mouth came other words. ‘I would like to go to Bryn Mawr,’ I heard myself saying.

Whatever could have gotten into me? I’d broken my number-one rule for avoiding trouble: never say what you want, or it will be too disappointing when you don’t get it. But when I finally dared look up, when the silence had gone on too long not to, I saw that Hughie was looking back at me with a faintly surprised smile, and nodding.

‘Well, then,’ he said calmly. ‘Let’s see if we can make that happen.’ And although I didn’t yet know the way he’d find to ‘make it all right’, which this time he would achieve by telling Mother I should be allowed to go away, but that he should pick up the bill instead of Grandmother, I could already see in his eyes that everything was all settled.

I would go to college. To Bryn Mawr.