8.

MAID TO ORDER

My mother was famous for her pranks. A favorite story of mine is the time she and her childhood friend Lila Nields dressed up as maids and served dinner to my grandfather Rockefeller. He and my grandmother had invited ten prominent people to dinner at their house at 10 West Fifty-Fourth Street in New York City.

Grandfather was strictly punctual and he was clearly irritated when my mother and her friend did not show up on time. At two minutes past the hour, he insisted the group sit down without them.

The table was set with some of Grandfather’s best blue-and-white Crown Derby china. No sooner were napkins drawn to laps than two gray-haired maids with black uniforms and white aprons appeared with bowls of soup. True to protocol, my grandfather was last to be served. The maid holding his bowl of soup was wearing pince-nez glasses. Her hands and head had such a vigorous tremor that the old-fashioned glasses fell into the soup before him. She shrieked a little too loudly and plucked them out of the soup before my grandfather’s widening eyes. The maid was my mother.

Her friend Lila was waiting behind the screen at the entrance to the pantry. As my mother disappeared, there was a loud crash! of dishes falling to the floor. Grandfather winced as he heard his fine china shattering. My mother decided it was the time to reveal Lila’s and her identities. They came out from behind the screen and collapsed in laughter as they held their gray wigs in one hand and their pince-nez in the other. The dinner party erupted with glee and my mother explained that the broken china was just cheap plates they had bought for the occasion. My grandfather’s relief was palpable. After seeing he was the brunt of the joke and that no harm had been done, he joined in with good humor. The normally formal atmosphere had loosened like a tie.

My mother’s predilection for practical jokes had a long history. She boasted to us how one winter, as a rebellious adolescent at the Rippowam School in Bedford, New York, she slipped a wedge of Limburger cheese behind the radiator of her classroom. The stench grew so strong that they had to close the entire school for two days before discovering the cause. No one ever found out who did it.

Sometimes Mum encouraged us to conspire with her. I still remember the horrified look on my father’s face one night at our house in New York City. My mother enlisted Peggy, Richard, and me to help in turning each painting upside down in the morning room. It took two nights, and my mother’s prompt after dinner, “Why don’t we have our coffee in the morning room?” before Dad noticed. “We haven’t sat there in awhile,” she coaxed cunningly, her tone as smooth as honey. We children could hardly contain ourselves as we giggled behind our hands.

Dad sat down and looked around. His eyes blinked twice, as if he was having a dizzy spell. He turned to Mum and said in a mildly reproachful tone, “Why, darling, what have you done? This is shocking beyond belief.” I believe he coined the phrase then and there, but what amazed us most was it had taken him a day to notice. In retrospect, he probably had a lot on his mind at the office, and the Matisse looked pretty good either way.

The next summer my mother thought up another prank. She asked Donald, who was a born mechanic, to help her find some pieces of metal in a nearby junkyard and weld them together into a modern sculpture. They came home with an old tailpipe and several other pieces, looking like two schoolchildren who had just put Limburger cheese behind the radiator. Her plan was to see if she could fool my father into buying her “sculpture” from our art dealer friend, Mr. David Thompson, who summered in Seal Harbor. He had helped Dad discover several new artists and Mum asked him to be in on the joke. He agreed.

They set up shop in the garage and I helped hand rusty metal shapes to Donald as he welded the pieces together at Mum’s direction. By the time the piece was finished, we thought we had one up on Brancusi’s Bird in Space. The rather clumsy rendition of an abstract person with a very long esophagus and a bow tie at the top was wrapped up and brought over to Mr. Thompson’s house. He placed it on a stand in front of the sliding door, with a towel over it, so the light from behind would shine on the steel when it was unveiled.

At Mum’s request, Mr. Thompson invited my parents to lunch along with the three younger children for a viewing of “a very interesting piece by an up-and-coming young artist.” Mr. Thompson served martinis to the grown-ups. Small talk ensued. He waited until Dad was partway through his martini before disrobing the piece. “What do you think, David? Only five thousand.”

Dad looked at it with mild interest at first, but as he took another sip, and looked at my mother’s approving eye, he cocked his head and spoke with typically measured tone. “Well, I think five thousand is not an unreasonable price.” This was a most satisfactory answer to all of us scamps, most of all my mother, who could no longer contain her laughter. Tears poured down her cheeks under her glasses and we all joined in the merriment, to the detriment of my gullible and very forgiving father.

In my dad’s defense, most of the time he had clear and well-studied views on art, but he thought very highly of Mr. Thompson’s opinion and even more of my mother’s. He and Mum always bought art together. When all was said and done, he still contended, perhaps for his pride as much as the truth, “But I still think it’s quite a wonderful piece.” We kept it in the garage for years afterward.

My favorite story of all was when Mum convinced Peggy, Richard, and me to steal a ram from an island in Maine. We were sailing overnight on my parent’s forty-foot Hinckley yawl and had just put down anchor in between Merchant and Harbor Islands. Dad stayed on the boat while Peggy, Richard, Mum, Donald, and I rowed ashore to Harbor Island. We had seen sheep grazing and wanted to try to pet one.

It was the late sixties, and everyone seemed to be blasting through the edge of conformity. Streakers ran through executive boardrooms, women burned their bras in public, and men dodged the draft. So what was the harm in stealing a ram for a little boat ride?

I was twelve at the time and Peggy and Richard were in their mid-teens. We pulled the dinghy up on the beach and headed toward the grazing sheep. They turned out to be quite tame, and as the ram came forward to protect his flock, Mum had a sudden inspiration. “Let’s take him up to the boat to see if your father will believe us that we want to have lamb chops for dinner.” She might as well have said, “Let’s eat the whole tub of ice cream.” We were in. Donald shook his head with amused resignation and grabbed the ram’s horns while Mum straddled it. Richard, Peggy, and I flanked the poor beast, helping to push and pull our captive down to the water’s edge.

I steadied the rowboat while the others lifted the astonished animal into the bow. Mum quickly removed her blue jean jacket and held it over the ram’s head before he could think about where he was or whether he wanted to jump out. She sat in front of him on the bow. Peggy and I sat to either side at midships and dug our fingers into the ram’s thick fleece on either side of his back to help steady him. His wool smelled sweetly of lanolin and sea lavender. Richard took the oars from the stern as Donald pushed us off with a twinkle in his eye. The four of us and the blindfolded ram put the water up to the gunnels. We hoped our stowaway would not protest as we headed for my father and his sailboat.

Dad had somehow missed all the commotion. When we came alongside the Jack Tar II, my mother yelled for him in her most endearing tone, “David? We have something for you for dinner.” He came quickly then, and when he saw what we had in the boat his eyes widened large as crabs. “Why, darling, what have you done?” The ram was beginning to squirm, but she was undaunted. “We just thought you might like some lamb for dinner.” Her smile belied her impishness, and we all waited for his refrain. “But this is shocking beyond belief! You can’t steal a sheep from someone else’s island!”

Even as he said this, he knew she would relent. The ram was already increasingly agitated, swaying from one side of the dinghy to the other. He would soon have us in the water if we didn’t row him back quickly. We returned to the island and the ram jumped right out, shaking his coat with indignation. We traded him for Donald. Laughter trailed over the water in the quiet of dusk as we grilled lamb chops off the stern and hoisted a small pirate’s flag up the mast, just in case anyone was looking.

Mum’s stories gave me early permission to try my own practical joke. An idea came to me one Saturday when I was eight, while visiting with my father’s beetle man, Freddie Solana.

Freddie was my pal. He had a soft spot for children, and my friend Lisa Diethelm and I liked being around him. We tromped down the stairs to the basement and found him amid the smell of camphor and cedar wood organizing my father’s collection of coleoptera. In between the lineups of carefully pinned and labeled beetles he gave bucking bronco rides on hands and knees to my siblings, friends, and me. He was our playmate and teacher. When we visited him, he often had some especially interesting specimen pinned under the microscope for us to see close-up. We learned that beauty is not always apparent at first glance.

One of the most familiar beetle families is the ladybug (family Coccinellidae), which nests in windowsills. In the beetle room on one particular Saturday morning my friend Lisa and I chanted, “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire. Your children are alone.” Freddie listened while hunched over the label he was painstakingly penning with permanent ink in tiny but neat handwriting.

I loved to lie on my stomach at the edge of our pond and watch the whirligig water beetles (family Gyrinidae) twirling like tops on the surface. As a girl in the basement with Freddie I practiced being a whirligig on the rug behind his chair. At other times I imitated the dung-rolling scarabs (family Scarabaeidae), pretending I was in the African savannah walking behind an elephant. Freddie was the elephant. My favorite was the blue metallic jewel beetle (family Buprestidae). This wood borer comes in many different colors, from green with purple heads, to stripes of yellow, blue, green, and red, to glossy metallic blue. It is also a large beetle. Lisa and I dressed up as Buprestids, donning extra swaths of shimmering material from the dress-up drawer to dance around the beetle room. Freddie admired us and we felt like jewels.

One day, Lisa and I decided to surprise Freddie with a different kind of costume. It was February and for my eighth birthday I had been given a cowboy outfit, complete with leather chaps, fringed vest, gloves, and cowboy boots. I put them on and buckled up my holster and toy metal gun over the chaps. I felt just like Red, the cowboy who managed my uncle Laurance’s ranch in Wyoming. Lisa found a cowboy hat in the dress-up drawer and I coiled up a rope to give to her for a lasso. We stomped down the linoleum-covered stairs to the beetle room, feeling very tall and tough. Freddie heard us and turned his bald head toward us, laughing. His voice sounded like velvet.

Lisa’s father was a doctor. He was gone from home almost as much as my father. She and I did not understand the connection between our yearning for our fathers’ company and Freddie, but he was a good stand-in and he was not going anywhere. We would make sure of it. We asked if he would let us tie him up, just for a little while. His work must have reached a slow point, for he agreed.

First, we tied his ankles to the legs of his chair. Lisa took one side and I took the other. I used my best wrangler knots. Red would have been proud of me. When we finished, the knots looked like snakes wound around his ankles.

Next, we took his arms and put them behind the chair, crossing one wrist over the other, like we had seen in cowboy movies. He struggled a little bit and we assured him we would untie him very soon. I loved Freddie for his patience. He let us put slipknots around his wrists, tying them together. We took the remainder of the rope and made more square knots.

There was only one more thing to do. We tied a red bandana around Freddie’s mouth, just to make sure he did not kiss us.

Just then my mother called downstairs to tell us lunch was ready. We had to come right away. We were hungry and, not daring to delay, we hurried upstairs, promising Freddie we would be right back.

Lisa and I kept our conquest a secret. We looked at each other across the dining-room table during lunch and smothered giggles amid the din of conversation between my mother, several brothers and sisters, and our nanny. When Mum asked who wanted to go riding after lunch, Lisa and I forgot everything and eagerly raised our hands. We were cowboys, after all. We had forgotten that Freddie was still downstairs, trying fervently to untie himself while calling for help. His voice was muffled under the bandana and no one heard him.

It took Freddie two hours to untie himself before going home. He probably wasn’t too pleased at the time. Perhaps he blamed himself for being so gullible. How could two eight-year-olds have tied him up so well? He clearly underestimated our skill in knot tying. Lisa and I had underestimated the strength of our desire for a father at home.

My biggest fear was that Freddie would stop coming on Saturdays. The next week, when he appeared as usual, I quickly offered to give him a bronco ride. He politely declined, putting extra camphor in the corners of the cedar boxes as an added protection against invasive pests and little girls. He lined up the specimens on pins in neat rows, like schoolchildren, on the white cork surface. I was glad I was not a beetle. When he offered me another bucking bronco ride, I knew he had forgiven me and I quickly promised never to tie him up again.