Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (31 page)

The schedule left Hyman very little time to work on the criticism book he was supposed to be writing. His deadline, originally December 1944, had already been extended to January 1, 1946. On January 6, he wrote to his editor at Knopf asking for another extension. His plan was to resign his post at the end of the spring term and devote the rest of the year to finishing the book.

Although the permissive milieu appealed to her in many ways, for Jackson, too, adjustment to life at Bennington was somewhat difficult. The “faculty wife” of the 1940s and 1950s was expected to concentrate her energy on organizing social activities and supporting her husband’s work. Jackson eventually channeled her feelings about this role into a satirical essay for the Bennington alumnae magazine. The faculty wife, Jackson wrote, anticipating
The Feminine Mystique
close to a decade before its publication,

has frequently read at least one good book lately, she has one ‘nice’ dress to wear to student parties, and she is always just the teensiest bit in the way. . . . It is considered probable that ten years or so ago she had a face and a personality of her own, but if she has it still, she is expected to keep it decently to herself. . . . Her little pastimes, conducted in a respectably anonymous and furtive manner, are presumed to include such activities as knitting, hemming dish towels, and perhaps sketching wild flowers or doing water colors of her children.

The illustrations for the piece—done by fellow faculty wife Helen Feeley, married to the painter Paul Feeley and a good friend of Jackson’s—depicted women without faces.

In addition to her professional career, Jackson’s housedresses and casual demeanor set her apart from the neatly-put-together faculty wives. In an early photograph taken on the Bennington lawn, she
relaxes in a sundress and sunglasses, a cigarette between her fingers, her hair pulled back in a ponytail; many of the other women dressed more formally, their hair carefully styled.

Jackson mingled in the Bennington community: she and Hyman often attended movies, concerts, or lectures at the college, and she occasionally read tarot cards for students. When Hyman invited students over to the house, Jackson was sometimes happy to play the role of hostess, especially for her favorites. She nicknamed Suzanne Stern “Mimosa” and complimented her beauty. Miriam Marx, who became close to the family and babysat for some of the children, remembers Jackson’s excellent potato pancakes. But Jackson could also withdraw or act hostile. “He would invite us over . . . and Shirley would be there looking glum and grim and say nothing,” remembers Joan Constantikes, a 1956 graduate. “She was kind of overshadowed by Stanley,” Marx says. “My mother used to enjoy feeling superior to the students he’d bring over,” recalls Sarah Hyman. “She’d say condescendingly, ‘Really, you’ve never cooked?’ . . . She would make sure that everyone in the house knew that they were her inferior.” When she drove to campus to pick Hyman up, as she often did in later years, she “always seemed a little annoyed or anxious to get him the hell out of there,” says Marjorie Roemer, who graduated in 1959.

In a very funny scene in
Hangsaman
, a novel largely set at an unnamed women’s college that is obviously Bennington, the wife of an English professor dresses down a student who is flirting with her husband. “I sometimes think that housework must be really the
most
satisfying work of all. . . . It must be
wonderful
to see—well,
order
out of
chaos
, and know that you’ve done it yourself,” the student coos in an transparent attempt to be ingratiating. “I suppose you’ve never scrubbed a floor?” the professor’s wife responds acidly. (The student’s comment to the faculty wife anticipates almost verbatim a line by Betty Friedan: “What kind of woman was [the housewife] if she did not feel this mysterious fulfillment waxing the kitchen floor?”) In her article about the faculty wife, Jackson was more direct: “By the end of the first semester, what I wanted to do most in the world was invite a few of my husband’s students over for tea and drop them down the well.”

MANY OF THE BENNINGTON COLLEGE
faculty lived on campus, in a grouping of red-painted wood houses called the Orchard. But the Orchard houses were small, and Shirley and Stanley were expecting a second child in November. They decided to rent a house in the village of North Bennington, about a mile up the hill from the college’s north gate. (The larger town of Bennington, several miles away, offered more shops, restaurants, and other businesses, but most faculty preferred to be closer to the college.) Their first home there, a Greek Revival house at 12 Prospect Street, was three stories and sixteen rooms, including a conservatory and two pantries—quite a departure from the single-floor Grove Street apartment. More than a hundred years old, it had four Doric columns across the front that led Howard Nemerov, who soon became a close friend to both Shirley and Stanley, to nickname it “The Church of Christ Hyman.” In
Life Among the Savages
, her best-selling memoir of family life, Jackson writes of her horror at seeing it for the first time: nothing had been touched since the previous resident died several years earlier, including two petrified doughnuts still sitting on the breakfast table. But the doughnuts were mercifully cleared away, the house was duly fixed up, and the Hymans moved in. There were four bedrooms on the second floor, a long narrow hall that would be lined with bookcases, front and back staircases, and multiple attics. Jackson called it their “little nest”—“lovely and sunny and dirty and agreeable and bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.”

“Our house is old, and noisy, and full,”
Savages
begins. A picture of the Prospect Street house, or a tidier approximation of it, appears on the book’s cover. “When we moved into it,” Jackson writes, “we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books. . . . This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well.” In fact, Shirley and Stanley had only Laurence, then age three, when they moved to Vermont; his sister Joanne was born there. But the way Jackson describes “falling into” her life as a mother rings true. Jeanou,
for one, found it hard to imagine the indolent teenager she had once known as a capable housewife, washing diapers and baking brownies. And Jackson, as she writes at the start of
Savages
, still entertained fantasies of a different kind of life, without children or books, in a quiet apartment “where they do the cleaning for you and send up your meals and all you have to do is lie on a couch.” But she had always loved a home filled with friends and conversation. And this busy, boisterous, stuffed-to-the-seams household suited her surprisingly well.

The Hyman house on Prospect Street in North Bennington.

The house was less than half a mile from the village’s central square, which opened out from the corner of Prospect and Main Street. There was a public library, a post office, and a smattering of businesses: Percy’s newsstand, which also served as a taxicab company and a pool hall; Jimmy Powers’s boot and shoe store, also selling men’s work clothes; Peter Panos’s ice cream parlor and restaurant; a drugstore and a barbershop. Up the road was the North Bennington Village School, which served students from elementary through high school in a single redbrick building. A little farther out, supplying employment for many of the villagers, lay a sawmill, a woodworking plant, and several furniture companies. At the top of the hill sat the railway station, from which a direct train at one point ran daily to New York. The village was—and still is—anchored by Powers Market, a grocery store then run by
Michael Powers and his son Larry, who joined his father in the business in the spring of 1945 after he came back from the war, right around the same time as the Hymans arrived. Although many of the locals preferred to do the bulk of their shopping at the less expensive A&P on the outskirts of town, the market was the main gathering spot for the village. Anyone who dropped by for a loaf of bread or can of vegetables got a healthy serving of gossip along with their groceries. In
Life Among the Savages
, Jackson writes of her surprise at discovering, on her first visit to North Bennington in search of a house to rent, that Michael Powers “not only knew our housing problems, but the ages and names of our children, the meat we had been served for dinner the night before, and my husband’s income.” She may not have been exaggerating.

Some of the villagers were welcoming. Within days of the Hymans’ arrival, a neighbor brought over a mother cat and four kittens, to Shirley’s delight. But North Bennington, like so many tucked-away New England towns, was not an easy place to be a newcomer. Many residents had lived in the village for generations. Brooklyn-born Malamud, another uneasy Vermont transplant, told of an acquaintance who was corrected by the local mechanic after describing as a Vermonter an octogenarian who had lived in town since he was seven; the man had been born elsewhere. “Vermonters generally wanted nothing to do with you unless your family had arrived before the American Revolution,” Malamud’s daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, writes wryly. “Natives were polite but deeply reserved and wary.” They weren’t always polite, especially the children. Three-year-old Laurence was beaten up by two boys who lived next door. Barry, the youngest of the family, remembers kids throwing stones at him as he walked down the street.

The adults’ surface politeness often masked deeply held biases. For starters, the locals were highly suspicious of the college. It was a source of employment—Larry Powers’s mother worked there for a time as a maid—and sometimes of fascination: when the Bennington dance students, lacking space on campus, started using the North Bennington school gym for rehearsals, Larry and other local boys would peer curiously through the windows at the scantily clad women. “Those young ladies were like models,” Powers remembers. But the ultraliberal
Bennington College community could not have been more culturally removed from its socially conservative, bedrock Republican neighbors up the road. “The students were seen as sort of weird, kooky, by the townspeople,” recalls Anna Fels, whose father, William Fels, was president of Bennington from 1957 to 1964. They were thought of—not entirely without reason—as “Commies” or “pinkos,” Barry Hyman remembers.

Shirley socialized in the village: she shopped at Powers Market, greeted her neighbors at the post office, joined the PTA. But she and Stanley could never truly integrate themselves into the community. The Hymans “added color to the village,” Larry Powers says—a polite way of saying they stood out. Shirley “wasn’t your ordinary housewife,” remembers Laura Nowak, whose husband, Lionel, a composer, taught at the college. Stanley was even more conspicuous, with his professorial beard and horn-rimmed glasses, strolling down the street carrying one of the canes he had begun collecting: one, made of python vertebrae, once belonged to James Joyce; another, which was hollow, he filled with brandy. In later years, there was a French restaurant at the bottom of Main Street called the Rainbarrel that he and Shirley patronized; some evenings the whole family would parade down for dinner, all in a line. “I would walk in the back, trying to be invisible, because I knew I would get beat up the next day,” Barry remembers.

Sometimes the village talk was friendly: extra tomato plants were offered, or a puppy from a new litter. But often it was not. The atmosphere of North Bennington in the late 1940s had much in common with the town in Grace Metalious’s 1956 novel
Peyton Place
, which depicts in vivid detail the poison that can lurk beneath New Englanders’ politeness. The garbageman gossiped to Larry Powers about the number of liquor bottles he collected at the Hyman house. In addition to the parties they regularly threw, Stanley also participated in a rotating weekly poker game that included Howard Nemerov, Lionel Nowak, the artist Paul Feeley, various presidents of Bennington College, and the man who ran the local garage. The game often went on all night: Laurence remembers heading off to school in the morning with the “remnants” still going. People criticized the way Shirley kept her home: her
Greenwich Village ways were not up to the standard of country women, who had little to do but scrub their floors. At a time when women were urged to embrace the role of housewife, Jackson’s ambivalence and self-consciousness about housework is evident throughout her work, both fiction and nonfiction. In “Men with Their Big Shoes,” a story written soon after the move to North Bennington, Mrs. Hart (her very name suggests her vulnerability), pregnant and recently transplanted to the country, hires Mrs. Anderson, an older local woman, to help her around the house. Mrs. Anderson turns out to be bitter and passive-aggressive; she despises her own husband and implies that Mr. Hart is cheating on Mrs. Hart. She gossips about Mrs. Hart in the grocery store and reports back what others say: