“Why are you telling me this?” he asked her.
“He was falling in love with me,” Mumma assured us, “and when someone loves you they believe what you say, which makes it a lot easier to help them out. I told him he’d be good in a liquor store, or a bar, and I happened to know where there were some opportunities in that field in Boston, for his fresh start.” Thus Mr. Smithers moved out of our school system and out of our lives.
“Nobody is speaking to me!” Amy cried, all that summer. She had always been the popular sister and solitude preyed on her spirits, undermining her characteristic practicality, so that her every remark was desperate. “It’s all your fault! You ruined his life! I’ve ruined his life and they all blame me! I never said anything about him and you just decided you knew everything! They all hate me!”
Mumma predicted, “You’ll end up thanking me.”
“You don’t understand!”
Mumma knew better. Hadn’t she seen the effects on her sisters-in-law of growing up with a drunken bully? “People may be the ruin of their own lives, but it’s other people that get them started,” was Mumma’s analysis.
“I don’t care about Mr. Smithers!” Amy shrieked from behind the hands that covered her face whenever his name was mentioned.
“It’s not Mr. Smithers I’m worried about. It’s men,” Mumma told her.
Amy regained her practicality, muttering, “It’s not men who are so bad, it’s mothers.”
“What’s that, young lady? After everything I did for you this spring?”
“You mean ruining my life?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? Only you can ruin your life. But I’m not going to let that happen.”
ENTER OLYMPIA
Mumma asked our family doctor and he recommended Olympia Frieling, the silver lining to the dark cloud Mr. Smithers had spread over our family. Olympia, as she insisted everyone call her, became Mumma’s personal parental aid, and she helped us, too. She was our personal child aid. Except for me, that is.
Twice weekly, all that summer and on into the fall, Amy was dropped off at Olympia’s office in Hyannis, to be picked up an hour later. At first, Mumma grilled her on the drive home (“What did you talk about? What did she say? What did you ask her?”), then Olympia asked Mumma to come into the office. Amy delivered the message to Mumma, at dinner.
“I don’t know about that,” Mumma said to us, where we were gathered around a table piled high with corn on the cob and, probably, fried chicken. “I don’t have anything to hide.”
“Maybe it’s not you she wants to talk about,” grumbled Amy.
Mumma knew better. “You girls think you’re the center of the world, but I can assure you that’s not the case. I’m a pretty interesting person myself, aren’t I, Spencer?”
“I’ve always thought so,” Pops answered.
Satisfied, Mumma made eye contact with each of us, one after the other. We all ate in silence for a minute until, tired of waiting for somebody else to say it, I pointed out, “So’s Pops an interesting person.”
“I’m going to keep the appointment,” Mumma announced. “I’m doing it for you, Amy, so don’t say I never did anything for you. But only once.”
Olympia, of course, wanted to tell Mumma to leave Amy her privacy, and Mumma, uncharacteristically, cooperated; although, of course, she never reported back to us about her appointment. We pestered her, to find out, and deduced from her subsequent conduct what had been said, but, “It’s none of your beeswax,” she insisted. “I’m not going back, but I’ve got a lot of respect for Olympia.”
Amy, being practical, was the easiest sell on psychotherapy, and when the times came that Mumma wanted first Meg and then Jo to Talk to Someone, Amy’s experience made that a non-threatening suggestion, even for teenagers. “She used Olympia instead of dealing with us herself,” Amy says, and the others agree. “I guess I’m the only one who didn’t have the crazies,” I say. “Right,” they agree. “You and Mumma.” I throw my absolute proof down before them like a gauntlet: “I’m the one who never had to talk to Olympia.”
They have had to concede the point. We all know how unusual it was for one of us not to do what the others had done. “Those mothers who play favorites don’t do anybody any good,” Mumma told us. “I don’t want you girls having a mother like that.” Mumma’s standards required that all four of us be offered, and accept, the various activities that marked well-brought-up girls of our era—lessons in piano, ballet, sailing and tennis in the summer, riding in the fall and spring; we went to Sunday school three seasons a year and, when we were old enough, to the ballroom dance classes offered at the Club at Hyannis. Mumma drove us to our various appointments and commitments, fulfilling our separate schedules. Of course, in spite of the careful similarities in our upbringings, Mumma also wanted us to be individuals, separate and private, and this complicated the schedule. “I grew up with eight girls to a room,” she said. “I want my girls each to have her own room, and decorated the way she chooses.” She told us, “You’d like a cheerful yellow,” or, “You’re the feminine lacy type, with flounces,” and we tended not to contradict her.
In fact, I liked my Spartan bedroom, with its wooden bookcases and desk, its dark blue curtains and rag rug. It was the kind of room a person could study in, Mumma said, and I was the kind of person who studied. “Like your father, you’re just like your father,” she told me, explaining me to myself.
Olympia advised Mumma that their adolescence was easiest on the families of girls who had activities, so Mumma made sure we each developed one of our own. I was easy: I studied. Meg played tennis well enough for that to count. She won at least two Club trophies a year, which Mumma displayed in a living room bookshelf so that anyone who noticed could ask. Jo was dramatic and creative, one summer taking drawing lessons, the next an acting class, then a ceramics course, until she was old enough to volunteer at the Hyannis summer theater, where she painted sets and rehearsed lines with professional actors, some of them famous. Amy was a problem, until Mumma decided that her third daughter had a gift for languages, specifically French, so she took French language and conversation courses at the high school and was even sent off to Maine one summer for two weeks of French camp, where she spoke only French and ate only French food.
Being nothing if not symmetrical, Mumma also assigned to each of us some activity we particularly disliked. Amy tried to avoid having to cook, which made sense to Mumma since “We’re all such good cooks, both of her big sisters, which is sibling rivalry, and don’t forget me. Whatever people might say, a girl can have sibling rivalry with her mother. Why should she want to compete with us and lose?” I myself hated tennis and Jo dreaded the sailing classes offered by the yacht club, so unimportant a place at that time that it didn’t even have a pennant. Jo actually liked boats, and being out on the water, where the rhythms of wind and waves and the sun-warmed air enabled her to lose herself in her own thoughts. But sailing classes involved four or five teenagers packed into an eighteen-foot Lightning, one of them transformed into a skipper and desperate to win, and this as far as Jo was concerned sucked all the pleasure out of the sport. She hated those classes, although she has always owned a kayak, which is the only place in Jo’s world where, once she discovered smoking, cigarettes were never in evidence. However, none of us could equal the intensity of Meg’s dislike for dance classes. Then again, we didn’t have her reason.
MUMMA AND MEG
The nadir of Meg’s youth was the dance class into which, in the fall of 1959, Mumma enrolled her. The Boston Cotillion was a full school year of instruction in ballroom dance, which Grandmother assured Mumma was necessary for a Howland. Through the Boston Cotillion, Gemma Hustling and her husband had for decades offered well-born young Bostonians an opportunity not only to learn the dance steps but also to gain experience in social behaviors. The Cotillion’s classes led up first to a Christmas Ball and then to the great May Cotillion, to which the three previous graduated classes were
also invited, for the purpose of giving the girls a chance to look over the crop of possible escorts for their debutante year.
Predictably, Mumma objected, until Grandmother reminded her, “Even Spencer attended Cotillion, Rida. You don’t want the child to be socially inept, do you?” Unspoken: Like you. And Grandmother had read Mumma correctly; she planned for her daughters to have any advantage they could, and she determined that Meg should do it. “The rest of you will get your chances after,” she promised us.
Nobody, especially Meg, agreed with Mumma that Meg needed to do this, but every Saturday that fall, Mumma and Meg drove off after lunch to the Louisburg Square house, and for three hours every Saturday evening Mumma joined other mothers on rows of folding chairs set up behind the line of slim pillars at the back of the ballroom of the Park Hotel to watch their sons and daughters learn the box step, the foxtrot and waltz, the three-step and the tango, all the basics for ballroom dancing. Sunday mornings, while back on the Cape Pops delivered the rest of us to Sunday school at Saint Stephen’s in Wampanoag and Meg went to Trinity Church with Grandmother, Mumma made a tour of her properties and talked to her managers, picking up the bills and receipts for the week. On Sunday afternoons she brought Meg home, the car loaded with pastas and Parmesan and porcini mushrooms from the North End, greens, sauces, and sometimes even fortune cookies from Chinatown.
After ten such weekends, it was time for the Christmas Ball.
Meg didn’t want to go.
“You never want to,” Mumma pointed out.
“This time I really, really don’t want to,” Meg said. “All the other times you get your way, so why can’t I get mine this one time? It’s not fair.”
“I never said I was in the business of fair. Did I, girls? Did any of you ever hear me say that? Spencer?”
“They hate me,” Meg told her.
“You mean you hate them,” argued Mumma the psychologist. “And you don’t,” added Mumma the humanist. “Hate’s a big word.”
“I’ll have a terrible time,” Meg predicted.
“No you won’t. I’ll be right there, and your father, too.”
Maybe Meg believed what Mumma said, or maybe she just gave way to the inexorable. On the Saturday of the Christmas Ball, Pops, in his tuxedo, escorted Mumma, in a scoop-neck, floor-length, orange, white, and black plaid taffeta gown with some family diamonds around her neck, and Meg, who wore a green velvet dress with lace at the cuffs and collar, to the Park Hotel. Meg was delivered into the hands of the Hustlings, after which Mumma led Pops to the front row of the seats assigned to the parents. (“I don’t know who they thought they were, these Hustlings, or these parents, either, the way we sat to watch like we were an audience, or maybe like those society people in ancient England. You’ll know I’m right when you read her books, Jane Austen. And those dance cards with little gold pencils attached, and everybody wearing white gloves? As if Boston was England. And England in 1815, which even in 1815 Boston wasn’t. Boston’s America.”)
Except for Jonquil and Francis Cartenbury, with whom she didn’t mix, Mumma didn’t know the other parents, and while Pops had grown up with many of them, he had nothing to say to them. They, in their turn, had no interest in the Spencer Howlands. So Mumma and Pops talked to each other over the background noises of friends greeting one another, offering brandy from sterling silver flasks, offering flames from golden lighters to cigarettes concealed behind cupped hands.
The occasion began with a procession, the young people circling the dance floor arm in arm, an equal number of boys and girls, in their finery, on parade. This display completed, the girls went to one side of the room, where gilt chairs had been set in a line, and the boys to the opposite, chairless side. The Hustlings put on a Frank Sinatra record and boys drifted over to the girls’ side of the room and girls wrote with tiny pencils on their dance cards. That done, Lester Lanin’s arrangement of Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” was played and the couples went out onto the dance floor. Girls placed their gloved hands on boys’ right shoulders, boys placed their gloved hands at the backs of girls’ waists, they joined remaining gloved hands, and couples danced.
Nobody had asked Meg for the first dance. She remained seated.
Skirts swirled in a two-step, and dark-clad legs executed turns. When the music stopped, gloved hands clapped in muted thanks, as if the record player were a real band, while couples left the floor, speaking in murmurs, then separated to change partners for the second dance, the girls consulting their dance cards before looking around, waiting to be claimed.
Nobody had asked Meg for the second dance either. Records changed and partners changed and Meg, sometimes the only girl sitting alone, occupied a chair at the side of the long room, during the third dance, the fourth.
Mumma and Pops fell into a silence. Pops took Mumma’s hand. This, he knew, had to be endured. He had been born in Boston, he had grown up going to cotillions. Admittedly, he was aware that it was up to the Hustlings to make sure that a girl danced at least a few times in the course of the two and a half hours, to see that the boys understood that no girl was to be embarrassed in this way. He remembered, further, that other boys would cut in on the unlucky fellow, that they all understood what was expected of a gentleman. Pops also knew the parental roles on such occasions. He knew, for example, that even though Mumma first asked him to, then told him in a furious whisper that he should, and even though he desperately wanted to, he could not cross the dance floor and ask his daughter to partner him, putting her into the protection of his arms.
Meg knew this too. That would be a humiliation worse than being a wallflower. She never once looked over to where Mumma and Pops were sitting. By unwritten rule—most rules in these situations being unwritten—the overseeing parents were like the audience at a theater, in the theatrical convention not present.
Mumma knew none of this, and when it was told to her in apologetic whispers, she was unconvinced. After half an hour, perhaps a little more, she had stood as much as she intended to. She rose from her seat, a plaid avenging apparition, her red hair flashing more brightly than her diamonds. She marched around to the Hustlings, to whom she had a thing or two to say, and then down the length of the dance floor, cutting her swathe through the foxtrotting couples.
Meg’s face burned red with embarrassment. Mumma’s face burned red with anger. Meg tried to deter Mumma by shaking her head, and tried to refuse the hand that Mumma held out to her by putting both of hers behind her back.
(Years later, when she could talk about it, Meg said that she thought her mother was offering to be her dance partner. She had thought she had been doing a good job of sitting there with a smile fixed on her face, her eyes fixed on the hands clasped on her lap, joining in the pretense of her own invisibility. She knew that all she had to do was wait out the time. That was what you did. You endured. She could do it.)
Mumma had no intention of offering to partner Meg. She just wasn’t willing to sit there and watch her daughter be treated like this, in this apparently acceptable way, or anybody else’s daughter, either, but other people’s children were their business. Meg was hers, so she seized Meg by the elbow and walked her along the dance floor, past the dancing couples and the record player, past the Hustlings and out the door.
Pops waited in the lobby, ready to take them home. He had his own chesterfield on and carried the other two coats over his arm. He held out Mumma’s fur for her to slip her arms into before he took Meg’s coat to hold it open for her. By that time Mumma had decided on her course of action. “Take us to the Rose Room,” she told Pops. “You can dance with her there. She’s a good dancer.” But Meg was in tears, tears streaming down her cheeks, and Pops gave her his handkerchief and Mumma was thwarted in her attempt to make it all up to her child. “I couldn’t take her anywhere, looking like that,” Mumma said later. “I don’t know what people would have thought.”
Meg wept all that evening, and all the next day, weeping into her pillow at night and then
oozing tears out of swollen eyes at Grandmother’s Louisburg Square breakfast table, where Mumma announced, “She doesn’t want to talk about it. Don’t ask her.” Meg wept all the way back to the Cape, first in the back seat and then, in an unprecedented privilege, in the front seat, Pops having been relegated to the back. “Don’t ask her,” Mumma told us, when they arrived home.
The next day, Monday, Mumma promised Meg, “You’re never going back there,” to which Meg, being the firstborn, didn’t respond that she hadn’t wanted to go in the first place and had, moreover, specifically asked not to go to the Christmas Ball. “And neither is any other one of my daughters,” Mumma decreed. She called Olympia then, and Meg got to have therapy all that winter and spring. “I don’t want there to be any long-range repercussions from this,” Mumma said, and when Meg became one of the popular girls in high school, with boys standing in lines to ask her to parties, dances, movies, sailing, ice skating, roller skating, drive-in eateries, drive-in movies, and riding around in cars, Mumma was satisfied with her handling of the situation. “Don’t ever think I wouldn’t do everything I can to make you happy,” she told us. “You girls think life is like Christmas, nothing but presents all wrapped up in pretty packages. Or maybe—I know you; nobody knows you as well as your mother, never forget that—maybe you think life is like a birthday, only for you, your special day when everything goes the way you want it to and everyone gives you what you want.”
“Not me,” I said. “I don’t think that.”
“You always want to be different,” Mumma observed.
“Unlike you.” I was in the sarcastic stage that lasted, for me, from about third grade until Mumma decided I was old enough to be left at home alone, not dragged around behind her to her every commitment and activity, which might have been when I was about in tenth grade.