Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (58 page)

After three weeks, Shirley had lost four pounds; her blood pressure was also lower. She vowed to keep at it for a year. Stanley was not yet ready to join her, but he promised her a new fur coat if she got down to a size twelve (roughly the equivalent of a present-day six), a sign either that he believed such an achievement worthy of a rare extravagance or that he never thought she would manage it. In fact, she did not. In November 1956, with the family birthday season in full swing, she started to slip: “sinful” appears more and more frequently in her diet log. However, by the following February, she had lost about twenty pounds, putting her below 200. She was still dieting the following summer, although losing “slowly.” There were many slips, especially during the summer break. But Shirley more than kept her word, mostly sticking with the diet through the spring of 1958, though she eventually gave up. “stanley and i are a pair of stout, good-eating burghers,” and she dieted only when she felt “conscience-stricken,” she told a friend in 1960. “richness is all. . . . so it’s hard to buy clothes. who needs clothes? my mother is a size eighteen but she never had any fun.”

Dieting did not prevent Shirley from writing: she recorded the date she finished her first draft of
The Sundial
in her diet log (July 8, 1957), and notes for
The Haunting of Hill House
appear in another diet
notebook. But it is sad to look at all the notebooks she neatly filled with meal plans and calorie calculations and imagine what else she might have written there had she not expended so much mental effort on losing weight. It is sad also because her effort was in vain: she would not succeed in keeping the weight off, and the image of her that persists is the overweight, homely, unkempt Shirley of her late years. Based on what is now believed about yo-yo dieting, the repeated efforts at weight loss may even have damaged her health; certainly whatever weight she managed to lose did not forestall her early death.

But more than that, food was important to Shirley, both in her personal life and in her writing. She felt at home in the kitchen and took pride in having all the latest appliances. “If you wanted to spend time with my mother, you would go to the kitchen. . . . It was always very comfortable and emotional, a warm and safe kind of place,” Barry recalls. “There was comfort eating and comfort drinking and comfort coffee and comfort cigarettes. They were always consuming something. And enjoying it.” In her early story “Like Mother Used to Make,” the homemade pie baked by David and then appropriated by Marcia is a symbol of all the care he puts into his home. In “Dinner for a Gentleman,” Mallie, a fairy godmother figure who appears in a number of Jackson’s lighter stories, whips up a meal for a young woman to serve to a male dinner guest and leaves behind a magical cookbook filled with menus to be served during their future married life together. Meals prepared by Mrs. Dudley, the surprisingly good cook at Hill House, offer an oasis of consolation amid the psychological torments of the house. And
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
revolves around Constance’s kitchen and the food she lovingly prepares there after the fateful meal involving arsenic in the sugar bowl.

It would be hard for almost anyone to stick to a diet of a thousand calories a day. It was especially hard for Shirley—who sent Vermont cheese and apples to acquaintances every fall, who loved to try new recipes and trade them with friends, who sought out delicacies in New York to show off at her parties—to deny herself this basic comfort. Yet she managed it for substantial periods of time, even under significant external stress.

THE HYMANS CELEBRATED
Christmas 1956 with all the usual fanfare. Shirley had lost eighteen pounds since fall; as a concession to her diet, she drank bourbon while the others sipped eggnog. Laurence, showing off his carpentry skills, presented Stanley with a gigantic breakfront for the dining room in which he could store his collections; for Shirley, he made a special table for jigsaw puzzles with a cover to protect loose pieces. She and Stanley gave him a newfangled clock radio; there was a sewing machine for Joanne, a typewriter for Sarah, “who wants to be a writer,” and a punching bag for Barry. “altogether, an elaborate and wild christmas,” she recorded with satisfaction.

Soon afterward, though, Shirley noticed that something was troubling Sarah, always the strangest and most sensitive of the children. At first she wondered whether her younger daughter—“brilliantly intelligent,” with moods that ranged from “wild and defiant” to “tender and perceptive”—was just going through a difficult developmental adjustment. Every day she came home from school, went straight to her room, and shut the door; when Shirley tried to coax her out, she would say she wasn’t feeling well. When she did leave her room, she was “unbelievably cross,” snapping at everyone, even Barry, to whom she was closest among the siblings. Always thin, she lost her appetite entirely, and often left the dinner table in tears after being told to eat. At night, she woke screaming from nightmares. Begging to stay home from school, she complained constantly of stomachaches, headaches, a sore throat, colds; at school, she made excuses to see the nurse. As a result, she missed a significant amount of schoolwork, and her grades began to drop. But when Shirley took her to Durand, she refused to cooperate, screaming “like a wild animal” when the doctor tried to draw her blood. With shades of
The Bird’s Nest
, Shirley privately wondered “if she could possibly be demented, out of her mind.” Durand tried to reassure her that there was nothing physically wrong with Sarah, nor, he suspected, mentally; but something was frightening her terribly. At bedtime, Shirley implored her to explain what was going on. “What can you do when you’re so scared of something and you don’t dare say what it is?” was all
that her daughter would say. Shirley tried to console her, came downstairs, and “cried all over the story i was writing.”

In early April 1957, Shirley got a call from the mother of one of Sarah’s classmates. Had Sarah ever mentioned anything unusual about Florence Holden, the third-grade teacher? the woman wanted to know. Her son—whom she, too, had taken to the doctor because he was “generally not well”—had told her that Miss Holden was systematically abusing him and several other children in the class, including Sarah, who had been whipped with a yardstick and had a clothespin fastened to her ear. The teacher called her a liar and a thief, and made her stand in front of the class to be humiliated. Sarah still remembers the incident more than half a century later: “She was a bitter woman and she did not like me.” Other children were tied to a metal beam in the room as punishment for “being naughty”; the teacher had allegedly even banged one boy’s head into the radiator. They all were told that if they said anything to their parents or anyone else, their punishment would be even more severe.

The teacher’s behavior was unjustifiable under any circumstances. But it is not surprising that Sarah was among the children singled out for punishment. When she felt like it, she could be captivating: after Shirley brought her to visit the literary agency Brandt & Brandt, Baumgarten wrote that Sarah had “the whole office in the palm of her hand.” But she also had a rebellious streak. Laura Nowak, whose daughter Alison was in the same class, remembers Sarah as “the most mischievous” of the Hyman children. (Alison recalls her as “very intense . . . very intellectual.”) Early in the term, she had come home wondering whether it was all right to correct the teacher’s grammar. Shirley and Stanley told her not to, but that is no guarantee she obeyed.

Shirley and a group of other parents showed up unannounced at the next school board meeting, on April 17, demanding that Miss Holden be immediately dismissed. Shirley believed, naïvely, that no other response to the children’s testimony was possible. “These poor little kids have been going along for months absolutely defenseless . . . at least now we may have given them some confidence that they will be protected and do not need to be afraid to tell about such things.” Instead, the town split
into factions. Miss Holden, generally well-liked, was a thirty-nine-year veteran who had taught the parents of some of Sarah’s classmates. She was known to be a strict disciplinarian—in fact, the previous year she had been placed on probation for similar actions—but what child didn’t deserve a little physical punishment from time to time? Many of the townspeople had come through her classroom; they had all survived, and so would their children. “When a teacher hit a kid, that was just expected back then,” says Joanne.

The controversy, covered almost daily by the
Bennington Banner
, galvanized the insular village. By the following week, it was clear that Miss Holden’s supporters outnumbered those who wanted her fired. The school board held another meeting at which the pro-Holden group submitted “letters of appreciation” for the teacher signed by more than fifty parents, testifying to her “integrity, diligence, and understanding.” Meanwhile, the
Banner
portrayed the anti-Holden group, which numbered around twenty, as a small band of upstarts who had flouted the chain of command by disrupting a school board meeting rather than making their complaints privately to the principal. Miss Holden claimed that the boy who had hit his head on the radiator did so accidentally after she startled him when approaching to admonish him for not paying attention. Tensions were so high that the reporter who covered the tempest for the
Banner
found himself under fire for not giving sufficient space to the pro-Holden faction, despite the fact that his reporting was distinctly biased in their favor. In no article did he quote any of the parents who had made complaints.

In the end, Miss Holden suffered no consequences. She was allowed to finish the school term, and the following year she was eligible for retirement. Shirley felt just as she had when confronted with the “sweet-faced old lady” who had hit Laurence with her car in Westport. She was certain that her side was in the right: she knew Sarah and the other children were telling the truth, and she never dreamed that Miss Holden would be allowed to keep her job in the face of such obvious abuse. She and the other anti-Holden parents had been outnumbered, but they had also been outmaneuvered. She had underestimated the strength of the North Bennington village community, which closed ranks when
challenged by a relative newcomer—all the goodwill generated by the Little League notwithstanding.

The author of “The Lottery” and
The Witchcraft of Salem Village
ought not to have been taken off guard by the way the locals banded together. Previously, the harassment Shirley and Stanley had endured was fairly minor: gossip about her housekeeping, the boozy parties they threw, their African-American friends. But it was one thing for the villagers to make her suffer and yet another for them to defend her daughter’s abuser: like Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter
, Shirley took punishment willingly on herself but fought fiercely to protect her children. After the school board incident, the harassment of the family became more vicious. The Hyman children remember finding garbage dumped in their yard and even swastikas soaped on the windows. It took Sarah several years to recover from the trauma of her abuse: by 1960, Shirley could finally report that she went off to school each day “without terror.” Though her health and her interest in academics returned, she continued to struggle with authority through high school.

Shirley could not admit her defeat. She told her parents that “the old sadist had been bounced”; a few years later, recounting the episode to a friend, she said that the teacher had ended up “in an institution, of course.” She did confess the truth to Baumgarten, who took her side completely and reassured her that one day it would make “a tremendous story.” Shirley never would try to turn the episode into a story—she left unfinished the notes she made about it. But it infected the tone of much of her future writing, especially
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
, in which the villagers who torment Constance and Merricat are portrayed with particular venom. “The people of the village have always hated us,” Merricat confides. As usual, the novel’s setting is not identified, but in every way it suggests New England.

Jackson began her fourth novel,
The Sundial
, in the late fall of 1956 and finished writing it about nine months later, shortly after the school fracas. It seems especially influenced both by the threat she felt to her family’s security and the generalized unease about the developing atomic age that was in full throttle by the mid-1950s. It is a novel about apocalypse—the characters all come to believe that the world is about
to end—but also about control: like fish in an aquarium, they end up sealed inside the estate that serves as their fortress against what they imagine will happen. They are Jackson’s most absurd group of characters, and she mercilessly milks the comedy from their grandiosity and pretension. But on another level she must have envied them. Eventually she, too, would shut herself within her house, barricaded against the chaos outside.

14.

WHAT IS THIS WORLD?

THE SUNDIAL
,
1957–1958

“I keep figuring how it will be.” She spoke very softly, very clearly, to a point just past him on the wall. . . . “Everything that makes the world like it is now will be gone. We’ll have new rules and new ways of living.”

—“The Intoxicated”

T
HE FIRST COMPLETED HYDROGEN BOMB WAS TESTED OFF
Bikini Island in March 1954. A thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the bomb generated a blast so strong that scientific instruments were unable fully to quantify its force. Its detonation rattled an island 176 miles away and shot a nuclear cloud more than forty thousand feet in the air—“thirty-two times the height of the Empire State Building,”
The New York Times
reported. Americans got to see the bomb’s force with their own eyes in
Operation Ivy
, a short documentary film made by the government to chronicle an earlier experimental test. In an apparent effort both to reassure the public about American superiority and to demonstrate the enormous power of nuclear weapons, President Eisenhower declassified the film and it was broadcast repeatedly on national television on April 1. As sailors watch from afar, a gigantic fireball engulfs the horizon, then fades into a slowly
unfurling mushroom cloud. The sequence of the explosion is played twice for maximum effect. “The fireball alone,” the film’s narrator intones, “would engulf about one-quarter of the island of Manhattan.”