Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (26 page)

It was far from inevitable that Shirley would become a mother. In the literary circles she and Stanley were part of, having children was considered unusual. Visibly pregnant at a
Partisan Review
party, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling’s wife, was approached by the wife of another writer who asked her incredulously if her husband was letting her have the baby. Midge Decter—who, with her husband Norman Podhoretz, the future editor of
Commentary
, was friendly with Jackson and Hyman in the 1950s—remembers that “it was the men who needed looking after. . . . They had many demands.” It was an area in which she—who also had children—felt a connection with Shirley. “It was very tough for women to admit, even to themselves, that what they wanted was children or a household. It was not part of the bohemian life,” Decter recalls.

But it was a life for which Shirley was instantly, innately suited. Stanley was physically distant—a kiss on the forehead was enough for him—but she, unlike her own mother, was intimate and warm, inviting the children to cuddle in bed with her. Every night, even if a party was in progress, Shirley came upstairs at bedtime and went from room to room, bidding each child good night. She sang them all kinds of songs, from the Child Ballads her father loved to a gruesome ditty called “The Grattan Murders” that would eventually appear in
The Haunting of Hill House
: “The first was young Miss Grattan—she tried not to let him in, / He stabbed her with a corn knife, that’s how his crimes begin. . . .” When Laurence had trouble sleeping as a baby, she played boogie-woogie records by her old favorite Meade Lux Lewis—the only way he would be consoled. She was indulgent enough to send the children to bed at night with a piece of candy or a glass of orange soda, and she could be permissive—or absentminded—to the point of laxness. Laurence was allowed to roam more or less wherever he wanted, but the younger children had to stay within a certain distance of the house. She would sit on a stool in the kitchen, looking out the window, to make sure they were still where they were supposed to be. “She was afraid she would lose us,” Sarah remembers.

At times Shirley could be a tough disciplinarian—one of Sarah’s friends would later recall, with lingering terror, a slumber party at
which Shirley sternly quieted a room full of giggling girls. But she also had a sense of humor about the children’s misdeeds. One day Laurence, twelve or thirteen years old, balked when she told him to take a bath. Shirley went into the kitchen, came back with an egg, and smashed it on his head. “Now you need a bath,” she told him. When others accused the children of misbehaving, she could be fiercely protective, whether they deserved it or not. Once she jumped out of her car to confront Laura Nowak, a neighbor in North Bennington, over a minor altercation involving their daughters and a lollipop. Her fits of temper, however, were brief. In
Life Among the Savages
, she tells of screaming over the phone at a neighbor whose son Laurence had accused of bullying him (falsely, as it turns out). The two mothers are so furious that each hangs up on the other, but all is forgotten when they meet in the grocery store the next day.

Shirley had always had an imaginative, even magical mind, filled with witchcraft lore, myths, and fantasies of her own devising. Stanley, ever the rationalist, had limited patience with that aspect of her character. He tolerated no suggestion of religious belief and scolded her for believing in ghosts, though he later refused to read
The Haunting of Hill House
because he found it too frightening. Now she lavished her imagination upon her children, who became happy participants in her fantasy life. When Sarah had a series of dreams about an imaginary country, Shirley encouraged her to draw maps of it and (perhaps recalling the language she once invented) make up languages spoken there. When eight-year-old Laurence asked his mother how he ought to spend a dime, she suggested that he give it to the birch tree in front of their house. He promptly went outside and asked the tree for a dime’s worth of wind. To Shirley’s amusement, a massive hurricane struck that night. “All we could figure was that wind must be very cheap indeed for him to get that much for a dime,” she wrote to her parents. Her moods could be volatile. “She could go from happy to upset in the blink of an eye,” Joanne remembers. “You never knew what you were going to get.” Later, when Shirley was suffering from the agoraphobia and anxiety that troubled her final years, Joanne, arriving home from school, would “listen to the house” as she entered, trying to gauge her mother’s mood.

Birthdays and Christmas—a holiday Stanley also embraced, in contradiction of both his background and his atheism—were celebrated lavishly. Shirley spent months poring over catalogs from New York department stores, antiquarian booksellers, and other far-flung merchants. She took pride in coming up with uncommon gifts that would surprise and delight every member of the family—even her brother Barry’s son, whom she hardly knew. Since all four children were born in the fall, the period from the beginning of October through Christmas kept her “reeling from one birthday cake to another.” If the Brooklyn Dodgers made it to the World Series, as they often did in the glory days of the early 1950s, Laurence’s birthday celebration usually involved at least one game at Ebbets Field. The celebrations could send the family into debt: Shirley’s files include an irate letter to Gimbel’s department store in response to a series of increasingly stern notices of overdue bills, explaining that because of her “irregular income,” she would have to wait to pay her bill until she received her next check.

Shirley’s collection of Christmas ornaments included some that her father’s family had brought over from England as well as cardboard cutouts from her first Christmas tree as a baby; she also hung up the same Christmas lights that the Jacksons had used during her childhood, the wires becoming more frayed every year, until the entire strand had to be wrapped with tire tape. But she also created her own family traditions. On Christmas Eve, the family trimmed the tree together, but when the children went to bed, the living room was bare of presents. By the time they came down in the morning, it would be filled, with a separate area for each child. “They would put sheets over the doors so we couldn’t see, and then it would be our heart’s desire,” Sarah remembers. At one Christmas alone, gifts for the children included a trumpet for Laurence; for Joanne, a puppet theater; for Sarah, a desk stuffed with all kinds of drawing and writing supplies; and for Barry, an eight-foot wooden train. Shirley and Stanley celebrated each other no less extravagantly: his Christmas presents to her over the years included a set of four-thousand-year-old Egyptian scarabs and an antique magic ring from England; among hers to him were an antique flintlock musket and, in 1953, a tape recorder, then costly, cutting-edge technology. Friends
and acquaintances in New York and elsewhere received shipments of Vermont apples or cheese. Geraldine and Leslie rarely joined their daughter’s family at Christmas, but they sent gifts—usually impersonal ones—for Shirley, Stanley, and the children. (One year Shirley and Geraldine both sent each other ice buckets, which, Shirley joked, reflected their lifestyles.) Instead, the Hymans usually celebrated with Frank Orenstein and June Mirken, their old friends from Syracuse, who were Laurence’s godparents, and later with June’s husband, anthropologist Sidney Mintz, and their son, Eric. When the Ellisons joined them, Shirley always remembered a box of “dog candy” for their beloved pet.

In the Hyman household, intellectual curiosity and creativity were cultivated and nurtured. There was singing around the piano and dancing in the living room and art projects at the kitchen table: Shirley’s old clothespin dolls even made a reappearance. One year, dismayed to discover the children’s lack of familiarity with the Bible, Shirley and Stanley read from it every night at the dinner table. Shirley also read her favorite books aloud to the children at bedtime: the Oz series,
The Hobbit
by J. R. R. Tolkien (which she preferred to
The Lord of the Rings
), fairy tales. At age nine, Laurence was given a set of oil paints; at twelve, he took up jazz trumpet. By the time he was fourteen, he was performing in nightclubs with professional musicians, a pursuit Shirley and Stanley supported and encouraged. For years, the family played poker together on Sunday afternoons, whether the children wanted to or not. “Shut up and deal,” Stanley would growl.

The children, too, nurtured their mother’s imagination. Fascinated by the evolution of a child’s consciousness, Shirley delighted in their developing minds. She would write of her astonishment at overhearing Laurence and Joanne talking about the colors in a sunset, or Sarah sitting down at the piano and announcing that she was going to compose a piece that would sound exactly like the cats running down the stairs. Such episodes provided Shirley with a deep well of material that she would draw on many times for the comic essays she published in women’s magazines throughout the late forties and fifties and collected in
Life Among the Savages
and
Raising Demons
. The children were not always happy about the way she gobbled up their accidents and
adventures to regurgitate for public consumption. Sarah, often the family troublemaker, was especially annoyed when Shirley punished her for misdeeds, only to translate them later into cute stories. She smarted when kids at school teased her about her mother’s revelations: “Every month, our family was exposed again in
Ladies’ Home Journal
.” Shirley, whose memory of her own mother’s very different invasion of her privacy as a child remained acute, did not seem to be aware that she was committing a similar violation.

Shirley with Laurence in Greenwich Village, c. 1944.

What is most evident in the stories Shirley told about her children, however, is her deep pleasure in them. That pleasure is evident in a beautiful fragment written sometime in the midfifties, inspired when Joanne, thrilled to find a new litter of kittens, remarked, “The nicest thing about these kittens is we got them for nothing.” Children, of course, do not come “for nothing”; and Shirley’s children, especially Laurence and Sarah, would eventually exact a high emotional toll. But in her happiest moments she felt as she depicts herself in this unfinished essay, marveling at “the kind of gratuitous abundance which is lavished upon us everywhere,” as in moments when the whole family is suddenly overcome by laughter while sitting at the dinner table. To live
with four children, to watch them grow and develop skills and talents, to be allowed to share their most intimate thoughts and ideas, was an “indefinable luxury. . . . Our investment is clothes and food and education and a few well-worn aphorisms, and our return is deep pleasure and delight.” After her own difficult childhood, in which her mother never seemed to take “pleasure and delight” in her idiosyncrasies, she was determined to do just the opposite.

SHIRLEY’S JOY IN LAURENCE
is palpable in a letter written in early 1943 to Louis Harap, who was then serving in the Army. Shirley filled in her friend on every quotidian detail—Laurence’s height, his weight, the progress of his teeth—and covered the pages with hand-drawn pictures of the baby. She was quiet, though, on the subject of her work. “i do very little writing these days,” she confessed, with an accompanying cartoon of Laurence sitting on top of her head. She was learning to squeeze her writing into the in-between moments: when the baby was napping or after his last nighttime feeding. In the afternoon, she would take him out for a walk and perhaps a chocolate milk shake. Stanley was more sardonic about the experience of new parenthood: Laurence “looks just like every other baby but slightly uglier,” he told Harap. But even he, Shirley reported, was succumbing to the charms of fatherhood: Stanley pushing a baby carriage around the block was something to behold.

Her drawings, however, suggest a different story. In the cartoons Shirley drew after Laurence’s birth, the eagle-penguin “familiar” is largely absent: now the focus is on Shirley and Stanley, and the humor is more sarcastic. In one cartoon, captioned “6 o’clock feeding,” Stanley, freshly shorn of his New Hampshire beard, sits next to baby Laurence, dressed in an identical shirt and posed in an identical posture, as Shirley approaches—her hair, as usual, sticking out in all directions—with a tray holding a wine bottle and a baby bottle. (The wine is labeled Sauternes.) “Dear, you know the doctor said you weren’t to carry anything heavy,” he admonishes from behind
The New York Times
as Shirley struggles in, laden with groceries. (Stanley’s
Times
reading is a frequent
motif in the cartoons; Shirley preferred the
New York Herald Tribune
.) In another, Shirley, holding the baby by his ankle, discovers Stanley taking a nap: “I did three paragraphs all at once and it tired me out,” he says. The typewriter sits conspicuously in the background.

As the reference to Sauternes suggests, with its unfortunate reminder of the recent Florence Shapiro episode, Laurence’s arrival had not diminished Stanley’s interest in other women or Shirley’s anxiety about it. In another cartoon, Shirley depicts their living room filled with voluptuous beauties, Stanley leering amid them, as she opens the door to friends. “Oh, no, we haven’t got company—just a few friends of Stanley’s dropped in,” she says. Others seem to be revenge fantasies. “Honest to God, Stanley, the butcher
swore
it was roast beef,” she says as her husband tucks into a plate of something that looks suspiciously like entrails, two of the cats looking on with interest. In another, she steals up behind him, brandishing a hatchet, as he relaxes with the newspaper.