Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (44 page)

The story Jackson would dedicate to Thomas illustrated that danger more starkly. “A Visit: For Dylan Thomas” was written in September 1950 and published by a magazine called
New World Writing
in 1952; later it would be reprinted as “The Lovely House.” The story, which Jackson more than once referred to as one of her favorites, is so mysterious and uncanny that to paraphrase it ruins the effect, but here an outline will do. A girl named Margaret (again) goes to visit a friend who lives in a beautiful house in the countryside, a storybook mansion surrounded by a river and hills, with stone sculptures and walls bedecked with tapestries and a room with a stone mosaic on the floor depicting a girl’s face, with lettering underneath: “Here lies Margaret, who died for love.” Soon the friend’s brother arrives, with Paul, a friend of his own, who charms and seduces Margaret, taking her on picnics and telling her the history of the house. Driven by curiosity, Margaret goes to visit the castle’s resident madwoman, a great-aunt hidden away in a stone tower: her name, too, is Margaret, and she is distressed to hear that Paul has returned. “He should have come and gone sooner,” she says, “then we’d have it all behind us.” Jackson’s dialogue is so subtle, the story
unspooled so carefully, that on first reading one may well not realize that Paul is an imaginary figure, visible only to Margaret. He cannot reciprocate her love; he can only return to haunt his manor, preying upon lonely girls with a propensity to die for love.

ONE MORNING IN EARLY JUNE
, Shirley awoke at around four o’clock to find Emma, the new maid, standing by her bed. “Come downstairs, I want to show you something,” she whispered to Shirley, who got out of bed and went to get her bathrobe. “That’s all right, come like you are,” Emma urged, and Shirley followed her downstairs barefoot, wearing only her nightgown. A little girl was in her bed, playing with a bluebird, Emma told Shirley; other people were outside. Shirley awakened Stanley, who listened to Emma babble for a few minutes and then retreated to his study. Shirley convinced Emma that she needed to go back to her parents’ house to rest and called a taxi; by the time the children awoke, Emma was gone. Shirley told them she had taken ill during the night—“which heaven knows was true,” she wrote to her mother. Apparently, as she found out later, Emma’s husband had just told her that he was leaving her for “someone younger and prettier,” prompting her to drink most of a bottle of whiskey. “it was a combination of mental distress and drink and, aside from the scare it gave
me
, not very serious,” Shirley explained. Geraldine was not fooled. “You sound as if the episode made you nervous,” she wrote back. “Don’t you know that things like that should not be taken seriously. . . . Anyway, it will be a story for you to write.”

The scare it gave her was considerable. Sweet, reliable Emma, whom the children and Shirley had so quickly come to love and depend upon, had turned, literally overnight, into someone unrecognizable. And all it took was a combination of infidelity and drink—two things with which Shirley, too, was well acquainted. “Can you cross a border line as easily as that . . . and never go back?” Margaret asks the man on the porch. For weeks Shirley refused to leave the children with a babysitter; she was loath to let a stranger into the house, even to clean it. She was so distracted by the incident that, uncharacteristically, she forgot about
Father’s Day—for which her mother promptly reprimanded her. Shirley apologized: “that was [the week of] our little difficulty with emma and i didn’t remember anything.” Geraldine, perhaps suspecting that her daughter could not manage long without a maid, took it upon herself—from three thousand miles away—to find Emma’s replacement. One day Elmira, “a nice girl from the South,” appeared on the doorstep. Elmira quickly won Shirley’s trust, perhaps because she reminded Shirley of the maid her family had employed during her childhood. Before long, Elmira’s mother, too, would join the household.

But the aftereffects of Emma’s crack-up lingered, first in the form of Shirley’s chronic headache, which started up again. Five years earlier she had discovered that codeine helped to ease the pain, and now she needed a new prescription. The “real fancy doctor” she went to, who treated all the Westport society ladies, examined her and decreed that nothing was physically wrong; the cause of her headache was psychological, “nervous tension.” He happened to be a psychoanalyst on the side—would Shirley be interested in a consultation? Certainly not, she told him; “i wasn’t fool enough for that sort of thing.” The doctor tried another tactic. Had she ever wanted to lose weight? She told him she “didn’t care one way or the other,” an obvious untruth—her letters to her mother often mention whether her weight has recently gone down. The doctor told her that “losing weight was psychological just as the headaches were, so that it would be very easy for me to go on a diet, and then through some psychic about-face i would then lose my headaches.” Whether Shirley believed this or not, she decided to give it a try—perhaps because the doctor assured her she did not have to alter her eating and drinking habits. She certainly didn’t have to give up alcohol, he said, “because in this hot weather everyone wants cold drinks.” All she had to do was report back to him once a week for an injection—at twenty-five dollars a pop—and take the “magic pills” he provided her.

Thus Shirley became one of the many 1950s housewives to diet with Dexamyl, a combination pill that included both amphetamines and barbiturates and was also used to treat depression and anxiety. Stanley, whose waist size by now was up to 40, took it as well. Over the years other prescriptions would be added to the cocktail: Miltown, the
spectacularly popular “mother’s little helper” introduced to the market in 1955; later Valium and Seconal; and eventually the antipsychotic Thorazine, which may have exacerbated Shirley’s anxiety rather than alleviating it. The drugs were believed to be safe; Sarah remembers her parents offering her Dexamyl to help her lose weight as a teenager. And Shirley was initially successful: by September, she would lose twenty pounds. But using prescription drugs can be another of those borders that is all too easy to cross, with consequences impossible to foresee.

EVERY SUMMER, THE NEW YORK CITY
papers ran appeals for the Fresh Air Fund, a program established in the late nineteenth century to bring underprivileged city children to the country for a brief summer respite from the heat and the crowds. “Think how much . . . a two-week escape will mean to boys and girls who call the tenements their home,” readers were urged. Some children went to camps paid for by the fund; others were hosted by families in “Friendly Towns” who offered “board and lodging—and love—to their young guests.” A little girl reported that she “went swimming and on picnics. . . . They taught me how to play tennis and Bad Mitten and [the family] loved me very much and I got to love them too.”

Eager to share the family’s new riches, Shirley volunteered as a host. She asked for a boy of eight and a girl of five, as playmates for Laurence and Joanne, specifying only that they not insist on going to church. Her rationale shows that she had swallowed the program’s rhetoric wholesale. “Perhaps these days, when we are all growing up most horribly, a certain basic humanity is essential in even the tiniest things . . . it seemed to me important that before my children knew how bad the world could be, they might learn once, for two weeks one summer, that human love and affection is deeper than anything else, even charity,” she wrote in “Fresh Air Diary,” her chronicle of the experience. Anxious the night before the children’s arrival, she imagined herself in the position of their mother, worried about sending her child off to a stranger’s home. “Is she wondering if, in a world gone all dirty and black, there is any hope of some small clean place for a child to live a little longer? Because,
God help me, I am wondering so too.” The looming Korean War, which broke out that summer, may have contributed to her fears. But she wondered also if she herself—“and this is the ultimate question, of course”—was adequate. She knew the house was up to the task, with the wading pool and the playhouse and the sandbox. But what about her? Would she be able to comfort a stranger’s homesick child? Would she be cross and unjust, as she feared she too often was with her own children, or kind and tolerant? Could she genuinely love a child not her own, or was what she offered merely charity?

Things did not go as planned. To the dismay of the society ladies who assembled at the train station, the Fresh Air children were “unattractive and undernourished.” She was appalled to hear the other Westport mothers making loud comments like “Imagine having that one over
there
” and “I’m so glad I got a pretty one.” Instead of the boy and girl she had requested, Shirley wound up with two boys; the girl, it turned out, had missed the train. Bobbie was stout, unhappy looking, and anxious; Larry, stupid, sly, and greedy. Both were devout Catholics. Joanne cried all afternoon because “her girl” had not shown up. Laurence decided that he hated both boys; he was selfish with his toys and jealous of Shirley’s attention.

In virtually all the stories she wrote about her family, Shirley used humor to disguise any serious problems. Now she could not—likely the reason “Fresh Air Diary,” despite multiple submissions, was never published. It is simply too honest. She was unable to hide her contempt for Larry: he was kind to Joanne only when he knew Shirley was watching; he called Bobbie “Fatty”; he was “alternately ingratiating and insulting.” “My granny makes hamburg like that, only hers is better,” he told Shirley. Bobbie was relatively more agreeable, but cringing and apologetic, and Shirley resented his obvious efforts to curry her favor. Their Brooklyn accents were so strong—“aks ifn they should go inna watah”—that Stanley had to translate. Finally, a girl named Kathy arrived and Larry was transferred to another family, but Kathy spent the first evening running away. The whole situation made Shirley so tense that on her weekly visit to the doctor, she burst into tears and could not stop crying. He offered her a sedative and told her to
send the children home. Her mother agreed, advising Shirley—rather belatedly—not to “overtax” herself.

Matters came to a head when a weekend guest arrived with his new wife, who volunteered that she had once been a Fresh Air child and now bitterly opposed the program. “How would
you
like . . . to have someone show you a kind of life you couldn’t ever have, and then take it away just as you found out how wonderful it was?” she asked Shirley. When another guest asked Shirley if she could conceive of sending her own children off to a stranger, she was forced to admit that she could not. “Were we, then, actually benefiting anybody, by doing something for others we would not have done to ourselves?” she asked. Did the program actually inscribe class distinctions rather than erase them? Was it hopeless for her to expect her son to understand that “these people are his brothers and that these kids are kids like himself,” despite the difference in their circumstances? When the two weeks were up and the children prepared for their departure, Shirley decided that she had failed. “Somehow, while trying very hard, I had not been able to stretch my initial sympathy for [Bobbie] over two weeks . . . I had not been patient enough, I thought, I had not been tolerant.”

Shirley did not question the program’s underlying paternalistic assumptions—only her own ability to live up to them. She held herself to an impossible standard: in fact, her “Fresh Air Diary” reveals the multitude of small kindnesses she bestowed upon these children. Though she was relieved to see Larry go, she kissed him good-bye and told him that if he didn’t like his new hosts, she would come and get him. When Kathy, homesick, cried inconsolably, Shirley sang to her until she fell asleep. But in her mind it was not enough, because she did not come to truly love the children: proof that she was “inadequate,” just as she had feared.

ON A BRIGHT FALL
morning two days before his eighth birthday, Laurence rode his bicycle down the driveway and onto Indian Hill Road without looking and was hit by an elderly lady who could not stop in time. Thrown off the bike, he suffered a severe concussion, a bad gash to
his shoulder, and a broken thumb—miraculous, considering what could have happened. “Laurie just got killed by a car,” the friend who had been with him ran up to the back door to announce. The impact was so severe that Laurence’s bike had to be pried off the car’s bumper. A neighbor who happened to be a policeman took charge of the scene; he put temporary bandages on Laurence’s wounds and offered Shirley a lit cigarette, saying, “Don’t
you
lose your head.” She and Stanley both rode in the ambulance to Norwalk Hospital in Bridgeport. There they waited for hours, Laurence crying alone in a room they were forbidden to enter, until a doctor was summoned. Finally they were told that their son’s skull was fractured and he had been put into a dark, silent room to be observed for brain damage: they would not be allowed to see him again for several days. After they came home, late that night, Stanley poured a water glass full of whiskey for both of them. For days, Shirley needed a combination of whiskey, Ovaltine, and sleeping pills to fall asleep.

Within a few days, Laurence was out of danger. His skull was not fractured, after all, though he had to stay in the hospital for several more weeks. He also was acting like himself, “hopping mad” at the nurse for giving him baby food and begging for extra helpings of ice cream. “Except for a splitting headache he seems to be in perfect possession of himself,” Shirley wrote to her parents. He did not remember the accident and wanted to know all the gory details, which she found painful to recount. Family and friends rallied around the Hymans, especially Stanley’s father, who doted particularly on Laurence and was still traumatized by the memory of a similar accident that had taken place when Stanley was twelve, leaving him in bed with a concussion for nearly two months. But Shirley remained in a state of high anxiety. She wrote to Geraldine and Leslie nearly every day with updates on Laurence’s condition, then regretted the letters. “there is nothing at all to worry about now, and the main thing is to take it easy and try to forget it,” she reassured them. But for her that was impossible. One evening Stanley persuaded her to go to a
New Yorker
dinner party. His editor, William Shawn, whom Shirley described as “a highly neurotic and frightened little man,” was so anxious about the disasters that might befall his own children that it took him much
of the evening to work up the courage to ask about Laurence. “it is the last time stanley will ever persuade me to go somewhere against my better judgement—i told him so perhaps fifty times last night and today,” Shirley vowed.