Summer’s end in the New Hampshire mountains is a beautiful and poignant time. The short green-growing season is over, and the apples are ripening in the orchards above Silver Lake. Great sunsets flame across the sky as if there were huge fires being banked at the edge of the world. The days grow short and the nights become cold enough for the warmth of a fire. The furnaces belch to life. The leaves have not yet begun to turn their glorious colors, the wildflowers are scarce, the lake water suddenly freezing, and it is very hard to get out from under the covers into the cold, cold morning air. The bite of deadly winter with its blizzards and howling winds, its ice storms and freezes, is now just a nip in the air. It’s a time when you can literally imagine the earth slowly shifting on its axis away from the warmth of the sun, a time of reassessment and longing.
Finally, at the end of the summer of 1946, Cummings and Marion relented toward the woman who did not know that she was his daughter. Cummings asked his friend Billy James to bring Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt and her husband, Willard, to Joy Farm for tea. Truman was in office, and the United States was a world power. Dr. Benjamin Spock had just published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, the seminal parenting book that told mothers that they knew more than they realized. Cummings had finished writing Santa Claus, and he wrote to Allen Tate, then an editor at Henry Holt and Company, about illustrations. Even in this good time for his career and his country, Cummings kept up his questioning attitude. In another perfect English sonnet he wrote:
when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage—
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age
when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
—and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close
when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn—valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude—and march
denounces april as a saboteur
then we’ll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind(and not until)
The Jameses had been Cummings’s neighbors his whole life. In Cambridge they lived at 95 Irving Street, just across from the Cummings house; in New Hampshire they lived five miles away in the house where the James family had spent the summer for generations; the James presence at Chocorua was one of the reasons Edward Cummings had been originally drawn to Silver Lake.
The second son of the great philosopher William James, Billy James was two years older than Estlin Cummings and had always served Cummings as a kind of spiritual older brother. A few years after the death of Rebecca Cummings, when the Cummings house on Irving Street had been sold to another family, James wrote Cummings about his feelings on what was going on across the street. “There are three roofers on the roof of your house, and now there is a large black poodle barking below. I don’t like to think that there are Wagners across the way instead of Cummingses—particularly when I reflect that you were, in a sense, conceived in this room when Dad introduced your parents to each other.”
For the moment at least, Marion’s objections about Nancy had been overcome. Nancy was delighted at the prospect of meeting the poet she admired, one who possibly had been married to her mother at one time. She hoped he would be more open about the past than Elaine had been. When the guests arrived at Joy Farm, Marion and the Jameses—all of whom knew that Cummings was Nancy’s father—stayed outside, and father and daughter walked into the cool, deepening shadows of the house together.
Nancy was enchanted. Something was happening to her that she did not understand, but she sensed its tremendous importance. Cummings’s voice, which others had compared to the sound of an organ or a magnetic and masculine siren song, was superbly resonant to the woman who was his daughter and who had heard that voice throughout her childhood. She didn’t remember consciously, but she seemed to remember all the same. That afternoon in New Hampshire, she later told the biographer Richard Kennedy, Cummings’s voice “seemed extraordinary, like a bell, like something come from afar, almost echoing.” Little did she know that Cummings’s extraordinary voice, both whispery and powerful, was indeed something echoing—an echo from her own childhood.
The tea at Joy Farm went well. Nancy and Willard were an attractive young couple. Marion seemed to have been soothed by the meeting, in which nothing was revealed except Nancy’s admiration of Cummings as a poet. The two families—the Roosevelts and the Cummingses—began a low-key literary friendship. The next summer, the Roosevelts did not rent a house near Joy Farm; but when Nancy gave birth to her daughter Elizabeth, she wrote a note to Cummings announcing it. No one had told Nancy that Cummings was her father. The Jameses didn’t think it was their job, and although Cummings knew that Nancy would eventually find out, there never seemed a right time to tell her. Without understanding what she was doing, she brought his painful past right into the present.
Almost thirty years earlier, when Cummings was estranged from Elaine but still deeply attached to Nancy, when he was in the early stages of the heartbreak of being separated from his daughter, he had written about a visit with her in his journal: “goodbye dear & next time when I feel a little better we’ll ride on the donkeys and next time on the pigs maybe or you will a bicycle and I will ride a swan & next time when my heart is all mended again with snow repainted with bright new paint we’ll ride you and I.”
In the winter of 1947 Nancy, with her two children, Simon and Elizabeth, and her husband, Willard, moved to an apartment in a complex at 5901 Thirty-ninth Street in Long Island City, across the river from Manhattan. Nancy again was invited to visit Cummings and Marion, this time in their apartment at Patchin Place. She was fascinated by her mother’s past, but Cummings wouldn’t talk about it. When Nancy tried to ask him about her mother or the man she thought was her father, his friend Scofield Thayer, Cummings changed the subject.
At tea, Cummings asked Nancy if she would be willing to sit for a portrait. She happily agreed, but the two of them didn’t start work on the picture until the spring of 1948. “Always the pictures came first,” Nancy wrote years later in her book about her father, in which he becomes Charon, the aging boatman, on the river Styx. “In and out of dreams and memories; then the poems round and about them, afterwards prose to link with the broken key in the present: with absence, with Charon.” Later, she explained that “the ferryman of the Styx represents not my father but my father’s absence.”
Nancy was a beautiful woman, with her mother’s dramatic coloring and her father’s grace and blazing blue eyes. Cummings first drew a small head of her and then started on another work, a larger, seated figure. When he and Marion returned from Joy Farm in the fall of 1948, the sittings began again. Nothing was revealed about the past. As Nancy sat for him, he entertained her with stories about his life and the lives of people he had known—omitting the one story that was of critical importance to his listener. He painted in his third-floor studio, and after the sittings the two of them went downstairs for tea. Marion seemed to hover at all times, so the conversation was cheerful and stayed on the surface. The afternoons when she crossed the East River to the row of tenements at Patchin Place and sat for Cummings became the bright spot of Nancy’s week.
Cummings was one of the great talkers of the twentieth century, and his simply told stories and comic asides, which he used to lighten the silence as he painted, fascinated Nancy. He was, after all, a great poet, but he also seemed to be in every way a great man. He delighted in the sparrow and raged at the injustice of the universe. He was a successful writer, but he was as angry about bad editing as a beginner would be. “if I could make you realize how an artist feels when his work is mutilated by the very person he trusted to cherish it, you would be a wiser and sadder man,” he wrote an editor who had corrected his syntax in October of 1948. “If I were a killer, you’d be in Hell now. Being only myself, am trying as hard as I can to forgive you. But don’t commit the blunder of reviving your crime.”
Taken up by the endless, mind-numbing dailiness of caring for two small children in an isolated apartment, Nancy found herself looking forward to the afternoons when she would sit absolutely still in his upstairs studio and listen to pigeons cooing, the distant traffic on Sixth Avenue, and the scratch of his pencil or the rough hiss of his paintbrush. Her marriage was difficult. Willard seemed lost without the structure of being a naval officer. He was trying to find work as a musician, teaching piano and playing occasional gigs. He was a brilliant composer, but that didn’t seem to translate into a paying job. Without the war or any need for action, the Roosevelt family depression seemed to be bearing down on him. The four of them were living on the dwindling trust fund left to Nancy by the man she still thought of as her father—Scofield Thayer.
Nancy was almost thirty years old, and with some distress she realized that she was obsessed with, falling in love with, the charming fifty-four-year-old man who was painting her portrait. She thought about him all the time. With his cascades of brilliant language and his intimate smile, which seemed to say that the two of them were in a world of their own, he had taken up residence in her head and in her heart. Marion was usually with them, but Nancy felt that she and Cummings were so close that the presence of a third person didn’t matter. Her connection with this older man had become one of the most important things in her life.
There were a hundred reasons why her feelings disturbed her. Marion was already acting jealous of her time with Cummings. At first this seemed unreasonable, but what if she was right? Nancy adored her children and believed in marriage. She decided to do the right thing and stop visiting Patchin Place, but she also decided to allow herself one last visit. It was a visit that changed everything—the culmination of a dozen coincidences.
On that afternoon, the afternoon she had decided was her last, Nancy sat as usual for her portrait. Marion hovered. Then Marion was called away by the telephone, or someone at the door. Alone with Cummings, Nancy immediately tried to take advantage of the few minutes she knew she had before Marion returned; she began to press Cummings harder about Scofield Thayer and the past. With Marion downstairs for once, Cummings was suddenly voluble. Something had shifted. He talked about her mother, Elaine, and her mother’s sister Alexis. Flirtatiously he suggested that Alexis might have been in love with him. Laughter filled the studio. Again Nancy asked about Thayer, referring to him as her father, and Cummings looked at her strangely. After a short silence, Nancy blurted out her fears that she was falling in love with him.
Suddenly the third-floor room was as still as a church. The pigeons cooed, traffic rumbled by far away, to the west the afternoon light was fading, the room smelled of wood and paints. Cummings required absolute silence for his work. Now the quiet seemed to require a revelation. For the four years of their casual friendship, Cummings had known the truth about Nancy and she had been kept in the dark. Why hadn’t he told her before this awful moment? Now, he asked Nancy: “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that I was your father?”
To be told by a charming, famous, and talented man she thought herself in love with that he was in fact her father must have been nothing short of earth-shattering. “I hope never to forget the force of rejection, (at the moment of discovery) of what was too much dreamed about to be real—so that the force was the measure of the dream,” she wrote to Cummings later. When Marion came back into the room, Cummings told her, “We know who we are.”
The deep connection Nancy had felt to Cummings was not love at all, or at least not the kind of love that she imagined. Nancy was indeed shattered. She didn’t believe it at first, but once it was out in the open all the pieces fell perfectly into place. She even looked like Cummings, with her ski-jump nose, slender body, and long, narrow face. The two of them embarked on a new relationship, one that would be difficult but based on the truth—unlike the secrets and lies that had been the foundation of all Nancy’s previous beliefs. Nancy and her father had been apart for twenty years. In the remaining fourteen years before Cummings’s death, they had a difficult, loving, and infuriating friendship. “The very thing which I’d have given my heart for 25 years ago, today knocks me down,” Cummings wrote.
For Cummings, Nancy was confusing, but for Marion she was competition. “it seems to me that she is real, & that my life here (with M.) isn’t,” Cummings wrote later after one of Nancy’s visits to Joy Farm, which ended awkwardly. Cummings had given Nancy a pile of old letters from Thayer, Dos Passos, and Elaine. Nancy had confronted him with a card from Thayer written the day after her birth: “For Value Received.” “What are all my salutings of Chocorua & worshippings of birds & smellings of flowers & fillings of hummingbirdcups etcetc?” Cummings wrote, sounding a little bit in love himself. “They’re sorry substitutes for human intercourse generally & particularly for spiritual give-&-take with a child or a child-woman whom I adore.”
Torn between being Nancy’s father and Marion’s lover—he apparently did not have the time or energy to be both—Cummings had to choose Marion, who had taken care of him for years. He might have been half in love with his own daughter, but he needed Marion. Physically she took care of him in a way that no one else was willing to do. He was too old to be alone. It was a painful situation all around, but Nancy Thayer was certainly the innocent—she had been lied to all her life, floated along on secrets; and now that she had stumbled onto the truth, it sometimes seemed more difficult than the lies. Cummings was torn between the past and the present. “While part of me is her tragic & immediate father,” he wrote in his journal, “I am wholly and permanently someone else.”
Marion was far less ambivalent. In the summer of 1951, Nancy visited Joy Farm again, without her family, and slept at night in her father’s studio, which was also the guest room. One day she commented on the versions of a poem he had left scattered across his desk. Cummings bristled; no one commented on his unfinished work! The next day Marion asked Nancy to leave. “You know how hard it is for your father to have anyone around while he is trying to work,” Marion dictated. “It is time to go.”
Nancy, always forgiving, always trying to make it work between them, recouped her standing with Cummings later the same summer. When she had the energy and wit to send a red wooden wheelbarrow—like the one in his favorite poem by William Carlos Williams—to Joy Farm as an early birthday present, he practically crowed with delight: “thank you a millionmillion times for the marvellous gift!” Later, when her first book of poetry was published and got very little attention, he wrote her a fatherly letter about the stupidity of the public. Hailing her book as a miracle, he wrote “Anyhow: from my standpoint the only thing—if you’re some sort of artist—is to work a little harder than you can at being who you are.”
Are the sins of the fathers and mothers really visited on their children? Nancy’s connection with her father, with the charming Cummings, did not break up her marriage in the way that Nancy had feared it might when she felt herself falling in love with him. Yet the marriage, which was already shaky, certainly received its death blows in that small, cluttered studio above Patchin Place off Tenth Street. Nancy’s confused drive and furious intelligence came crashing up against her husband’s troubles with disastrous results. “She was a critical person,” Robert Cabot remembers. “She didn’t give anybody any leeway. You could see it in the way she looked, she had a tight mouth. There was a lot of argumentativeness in her and a resistance to sloppy thinking.”
Nancy was her father’s daughter—he was also a critical man with a penchant for argument. As he got older, his critical brain seemed to grow while his ability to be loving and tolerant faded. As he wrote in a late poem that might have been addressed to Nancy:
old age sticks
up Keep
Off
signs)&
youth yanks them
down(old
age
cries No
Tres)&(pas)
youth laughs
(sing
old age
scolds Forbid
den Stop
Must
n’t Don’t
&)youth goes
right on
gr
owing old
Nancy and Cummings wrote to each other while both were living in New York, but even after Cummings’s revelation their meetings were rare. Now, raising her two children with less and less help from Willard as their marriage disintegrated, she began to feel hurt all over again by Cummings’s failure to give her the kind of welcome long-lost children dream of getting from their parents. Then, one night in New York City, Nancy went to a cocktail party for some friends of her husband’s. For once, Willard stayed home with the kids. She wore a white dress.
Kevin Andrews, a summa cum laude Harvard classicist, was one of the Harvard class of 1947 who had dropped out of school to fight in World War II, been on the front lines in Italy, and returned to classes at the war’s end. Handsome, dashing, and a little bit crazy, Andrews found life changed when he won a fellowship to study the ancient world in Greece after college. “Really … he went to Greece and never came back,” remembers Robert Cabot, his classmate and friend. Andrews used his fellowship to work on a book about Greece, Castles of the Morea. Greece after World War II was impoverished and still at war, and the Marshall Plan, the American aid that was working so well in the rest of Europe, was being so badly administered in Greece that Andrews became convinced he should go to Washington and tell someone.
In Washington, he stayed with the Cabots and looked for work. Disguising his epilepsy, a disease that he had always had but that had become worse after college, he went the rounds of government agencies telling his story of the disasters in Greece. No one listened. No jobs were available. He headed north for New York, where he moved in with his mother and tried again to find a job, or at least a sympathetic ear.
Then, one night at a cocktail party in 1953, he looked across the room and saw a slender woman dressed in white. She was pretty, with long, dark hair and a look of utter detachment from the rest of the party. It was Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt, and by the time he crossed the room to sit down next to her, he felt that he was being drawn to her by some mythic power. He was right. No one else had listened to him. She listened.
“Across that vacuous room, through the circulating trays of drinks and canapés, I glimpse a young woman. Alone, sitting in a window seat, obviously bored or uncomfortable with the scene,” thinks Aidan, the character based on Kevin Andrews in Robert Cabot’s wonderful novel about his friend, The Isle of Khería. “She is different definitely different. A poet, and something about her seems seeking to escape. That’s for me. I drop whatever manners I still had, sit down beside her, announce that she and I would shortly be husband and wife.”
Andrews talked incessantly about Greece, the country that he had used to build what became his entire identity. He was more than in love with the place and wanted desperately to share it with Nancy. He had sunk deeply into the life of the Greek villagers while writing Castles of the Morea, and he longed to return.
“I could lie in bed all day and know the village from its sounds,” Andrews’s biographer Roger Jinkinson wrote.
In the morning there are cockerels, in the evening the sound of goats and sheep and all day dogs bark and children play. Then there are the voices of the women, their own private language low with chuckles and laughter round the oven as they bake bread, strong as they talk to a friend, or a sister, or a child further away. The tourist boat comes at its time and leaves with the flotsam and jetsam that is the European tourist trade; Danish, Dutch, German, Italian, a babble of barbarian voices and hysterical laughter. Now and then the ferry boat arrives, chains tumbling to the sea as the anchor seeks purchase against our strong winds. I hear the winds too. They play with my shutters; Trasmontana, Sirocco, Meltemi, Maestros. These names are ancient and Venetian; they remind us of what we were and tell us something of what we are. And then there is the sea, never silent, never still, the waves washing the stones in rhythms in the summer or pounding rocks when winter comes.
Nancy’s love affair with Kevin Andrews was the final end of her marriage to Willard Roosevelt, but it improved her fragile relationship with her newfound father. By the time he and Nancy rediscovered each other, Cummings was becoming an old man who counted on his dragon of a companion to protect him from the world he had come to despise. He and Nancy both tried hard. In a letter to Nancy, Cummings remembered his own heartbreak when she had been taken away from him. “Perhaps some day you will remember the time (in Paris) I was allowed to take you for one whole hour to some sort of little foire—where we rode a variety of tremendous animals including chevaux de bois,” he wrote to her. His heart was broken; he would “never forget how my staunch (then as now) friend Sibley Watson, by way of comforting our unhappy non-hero, gently reminded him that the great (to me) wise Freud says a child’s self … is already formed at whatever age you were when we lost each other.”
In August of 1953, Nancy, Kevin, and her two Roosevelt children had a happy visit to Joy Farm, where Cummings and a relaxed Marion were in residence after the ordeal of the winter in Cambridge and the anxiety of the Norton Lectures. Castles of the Morea had just been published in the United States, and Andrews had studied with John Finley, who had been one of Cummings’s friends during his Norton semesters at Harvard. On his own turf and with Marion apparently placated by the presence of Nancy’s new lover and her children, Cummings was an expansive and loving father and grandfather—a personality that was often less than evident during the fourteen years he and Nancy tried to forge a new relationship as father and daughter.
Although Nancy’s affair with Kevin Andrews was good for her relationship with her father—at least at first—it was eventually dreadful for her relationship with her children. Soon after her fine summer visit to Joy Farm with Kevin, Nancy was divorced from Willard Roosevelt. The newly constituted family—Kevin, Nancy, Simon, and Elizabeth—embarked on a slow boat to Piraeus, the Athenian seaport, and the Greek islands. The trip was glorious—until the little family arrived in the hut on the remote island of Ikaria. Here, a clueless Andrews had imagined that Nancy and her children would learn to share his love of Greece. Ikaria, named after the mythical Icarus, who despite his father’s warnings flew too close to the sun and plunged into the sea and drowned, is a tiny island off the coast of Turkey in the Aegean. Nancy and her children had never lived without heat, electricity, or running water, and they didn’t like it.
Like much of Greece, Ikaria suffered horribly during World War II, occupied by the Italians and then the Germans and often besieged by famine. It was hardly one of the Greek islands in Homer’s wine-dark sea, or even in Andrews’s own Castles of the Morea. “You took us there in the dead of winter,” Cornelia, the character based on Nancy, remembers in Cabot’s novel. “Our home was a goatherd’s hut thirty-five dangerous minutes up a precipitous rocky track. We had plastic sheets for windows, and the roof was just rusty tin on an occasional sagging beam … Our light was a single lamp, stinking and sputtering on watery paraffin.”
By the second winter in Greece, in 1955, Nancy’s children had rebelled against the physical hardships of life on a rocky island and the impossibility of fitting in to the local school, where no one spoke English and no one wanted to help the little American children learn Greek. Nancy had little choice, and she sadly sent her children home to live with their father in New York City. Her marriage to Andrews began to be troubled—how could it not? Living in Greece was not negotiable for Kevin Andrews; not living there was just as nonnegotiable for Nancy’s children.
Eventually, Andrews consented to move to Athens, where the ragged family—Nancy and Kevin now had an infant daughter, Ioanna—lived in a farmhouse with an orchard above Athens on Mount Lycabettos, looking down on the Parthenon and the Acropolis. “It was a treasure of a place at the edge of a park,” remembers Robert Cabot. “But their relationship was terrible. They were at each other’s throats, they were violent and throwing things at one another.” Cabot and Andrews went off on a climbing trip in the mountains and returned to Nancy’s furious jealousy. “I think she thought there was some homosexual connection between Kevin and me—which there was, but it was one-sided. Kevin was a definite bisexual,” Cabot recalls.
Reading over Nancy’s correspondence with her father as well as Richard Kennedy’s biography, which is based on extensive interviews with her, one comes away with the heartbreaking sense of how hard both of them were trying to repair their father-daughter connection, trying to heal. Their last visit together, however, was as ill-fated as Nancy’s time with her children in Ikaria with Andrews. In the summer of 1960, Nancy suffered complications from the birth of her second daughter with Andrews—Alexis—and eventually her condition deteriorated so badly that she was flown to London, where she got the medical treatment she needed. This got her father’s attention.
Frantically, Cummings tried to place a transatlantic call, and he finally reached her at the hospital in London. Belatedly he decided that, as her father, he should rush to her and be helpful. In those days, rushing was a slower matter than it is today, especially for Cummings and Marion, rushing to the aid of the daughter Marion had never quite accepted. At the end of September Cummings and Marion sailed for Europe on the Vulcania. More solvent than they had ever been, they treated themselves to a visit to Italy, which depressed them. By this time, Nancy had returned to Greece from London, and so Cummings and Marion headed south.
Finally, in Athens to visit Nancy—which had been the original goal of the trip, although typically Cummings had not mentioned this to Nancy—he and Marion checked in to the Hotel Grande Bretagne. Cummings immediately objected to the hotel’s recent renovation, which, it seemed to him, had turned a grand hotel into a series of little boxes. Unmoved by the hotel’s luxury status or by its astonishing view of the Parthenon, which seemed to float like an apparition from the ancient world just outside the windows, Cummings became his worst self—crotchety, impossible to please, sulky, and deferential to Marion.
To make things worse, his back immediately went into painful spasms, and the heating pad brought from New York didn’t work with the Greek electrical system. The hotel staff was no help. Nancy and Kevin Andrews had no phone and no way of knowing that Nancy’s father was fuming just a few miles away. By the time Marion had reached them by mail, Cummings’s funk had achieved epic proportions—abetted by Marion, who was furious, too. When Kevin Andrews himself appeared with a Greek heating pad, Marion slammed the hotel room door in his face. She angrily plugged in the new heating pad without following Andrews’s directions, and it blew a fuse. This was the limit! With the help of the hotel staff, the heating pad finally started to work, but Marion’s mood was not amenable to a new plug—she had already blown her fuse. Finally Nancy, who had still not seen or spoken to her father, wrote him a heartbreaking note, delivered to the hotel. In it she called him by his given name, as he had requested, rather than calling him “Father.” “We are as Kevin tried to say, at your disposal at all times but, not wishing to intrude & being perhaps rather too much aware of this possibility it seems best to leave the modus up to you—even at the risk of seeming, Estlin, less loving toward yourself than I feel; this has always seemed the lesser / or better / risk & very possibly I have always been wrong; I have very little to go on.”
When Cummings and Marion finally appeared at the Andrewses’ lovely farmhouse, anxiously shepherded by Nancy, Marion “behaved in a hoity-toity fashion about being invited to a mere family lunch with grandchildren present, implying that Cummings was too important a man to be asked to join the children at the family table,” Kennedy writes.
On another day Cummings, Marion, Andrews, and Ioanna climbed Mount Hymettus to see a monastery. Whenever Marion was in the same room with Nancy, her displeasure was enough to make the experience unpleasant for everyone. A few days later, when Nancy and her father were finally alone in order to say the goodbye that turned out to be their final meeting, he seemed tremendously uncomfortable, Nancy told Kennedy. He commented on her love for her children. He said that he had come to see her and that he was glad she was well; this was the first time Nancy learned that he had traveled to Athens just to see her. The discomfort didn’t lift until Cummings and Marion were leaving. Personal encounters were hard for both father and daughter. Letters were easier.
In a voluble letter to Nancy in London in 1961, the year before he died, Cummings complimented her on her poems, and asked her to help him with a translation of Rilke’s poem “The Panther” if she had time. Writing about those years that, in retrospect, seemed like a golden dream for their father-daughter connection, he revisited the time before Elaine separated them and erased any memory Nancy might have had of her real father, before their twenty years apart, before their supremely uncomfortable reunion. In the story he included in the letter, he had gone to visit the MacDermots on the promise of getting to see her. What he was allowed during the visit was to watch her sing. “Your pluck was wonderful!” he wrote. “You hated being made to showoff, but your singing teacher’s reputation was at stake & you didn’t hate me. Long before, your mother had assured you your father was dead (or a little bird?) but you sang your best. The song was enchanting.”
In another letter—he was much more loving in letters than in person, perhaps because Marion didn’t vet his correspondence—he sent Nancy an old snapshot of himself in his twenties, a glamorous-looking kid with a lot of combed-back hair and a mustache. “Do you know at all, I wonder, what you sent me?” she asked in her reply. The photograph seemed to have produced a shock of memory; she wrote, “Strange that I should be able to forget so long.”
Cummings trusted his analyst, Fritz Wittels, and he had come to respect the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Certainly the story of Nancy Thayer Cummings Roosevelt Andrews suggests that the damage done in childhood—especially the damage in relation to people of the opposite sex—plays itself out over and over in adulthood. “You can not turn the wheels of history backward,” Cummings has Sophia say in Eimi.
Nancy Cummings had married two intensely intellectual, distinguished, and difficult men, and both marriages ended badly. Andrews, who was born in China, was a famously flamboyant guy, a “wild man” with epilepsy and a passion for all things Greek, who ended up swimming out into the sea and drowning—perhaps accidentally, perhaps as a suicide. He and Nancy had already separated. In 1968, complaining that she didn’t want to raise her children in a country ruled by a corrupt junta, but really sick to death of her marriage to Andrews, Nancy took her children and moved back to London, where she spent the rest of her life. “I always had the feeling she was on the verge of depression,” Robert Cabot remembers. “Later I saw her while she was living alone in her flat in London—a very solitary soul, quiet and judgmental still. She spent a lot of time doing yoga.”