Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (4 page)

Members of Fern’s Old Money family had met George Washington, served as Senators and international Ambassadors, seeded the burgeoning lands with their sons and daughters and cotton crops, tended to those children and crops with slave labor, a fact that they had ceased to mention by the time Fern’s generation had come along. The truest luxury of long-term wealth was that no one in the family thought about money anymore. As if comfort was joined with the Westwood cells. They had not earned anything new for a hundred years and no one went to college in order to get a job—instead they went to learn for the sake of learning, to deepen their reservoirs of language, culture, philosophy, art. They spent a significant amount of time giving money away.

Evelyn Westwood, Fern’s mother, was an accomplished sculptor. Her father, Paul, when not suffering from crippling migraines four days a week, spent his time serving on the boards of
deserving causes. They lived in an eight-bedroom Arts and Crafts house on fifty acres of prairie a mile from Lake Michigan. They had two maids, a cook, a chauffeur and four Thoroughbred mares. Fern and her brother, Ben, had been raised by Irish nannies. In the attic were giant steamer trunks that the family had used many times to travel to Europe to look at art and architecture, to eat, to walk in Paris in the spring and Italy in the summer.

From the outside, Fern’s parents looked like the people Edgar’s parents hoped to become. Money was relatively easy to earn; status took generations.

But from the inside? Imagine Evelyn before Fern, Evelyn before Ben, Evelyn even before Paul: she had short hair though shoulder length was the style and naked lips though the girls were all slicking on red. Instead of a knee-length dress cinched at the waist she wore a red silk robe that was given to her mother by a Chinese empress. Her parents had built Evelyn, showing promise, a sculpture studio when she was fourteen, out in the prairie behind the family estate. Her parents were proud of her. Sculpture seemed perfectly safe—she made fawns, geese, children with watering cans—and the hobby seemed a nice complement to the rest of her grooming.

While all the parents thought about the Allies fighting Germany and Japan, Evelyn’s friends spent whole evenings in Lolly Roitfield’s fourth-floor turret parsing the football roster, taking the boys’ bodies apart in their minds like doll bits and restacking them into a perfect configuration—Chip’s chest, Edward’s height, Albert’s legs, Theodore’s hair and the beatific face of Crosly Marsh. They dressed this perfect man in a leather football helmet sometimes, then a suit and fedora, then, if they were feeling brave, a pair of swimming shorts with a backdrop of Lake Michigan in full heat, a gingham picnic blanket and all the girls in two-piece swimsuits despite their mothers’ best efforts to force them into the woolen
bathing dresses of their youth. But while the other girls constructed boys, Evelyn sat to the side, not because she was shy or unwanted, not because she did not think about boys, but because she liked the angle. She had a sketchpad out and she too was creating bodies. The group of girls on Evelyn’s page were both fluid and precise.

By graduation, a few girls already wore little sparklers on their ring fingers. They had been debuted in white charmeuse and shantung silk, bent into deep curtseys while the gentlemen of society had scanned the line. The girls who would go to college went because that was where they would meet the right men. There they would stay up late talking about which courses attracted which boys. Evelyn applied to all the same colleges but she also applied to the Art Institute. Her parents debated whether to let her go—she was not pretty enough to coast on looks—but in the end it was their status that gave them confidence. Theirs was one of the oldest families in Chicago. Their house, built by Evelyn’s grandfather, was pictured in more than a dozen books on architecture. Their rosebushes were so old that some of the branches were as big as ankles and when they bloomed they were just imperfect enough, as if someone had come out at dawn and carefully ruffled them. This was a family of such polish that Evelyn was desirable even if she showed some talent.

At school she was twice as good as all the men. The teachers always looked at her work with bright eyes, then at her. They squinted like they were trying to bring her into focus—was she really a girl? Too bad.

The only teacher who took her as seriously as she deserved to be taken, who lent her rare and expensive books on sixteenth-century sculpture, who stayed with her after class, the room still earthy with wet clay, the grey chalk of it in their nailbeds, talked
about a carved medusa he had seen in Istanbul and how it reminded him of her. She thought he meant her work, but no.

“You have that same fire,” he said. “Wrong hair, though.” She touched her flat locks, short against her skull. She changed the subject to the magic trick of sculpting eyes. “You have to think of the eyes as gesture more than organ,” he said, flicking his wrist. And then, without wondering if he had earned permission, he leaned in and kissed her with his whole wet mouth and all the compliments he had ever given her on her clay, the way she had summoned the reclining nude, how he had almost been able to feel her deer breathing, all of that was snuffed out. It was gesture. She was a woman and that fact would always matter more than talent.
She
would always matter less.

Evelyn had to get married if she wanted to keep working. It was 1944 and there was no place in the world for a single woman artist, at least not in her world. She had plenty of suitors and her parents pushed for a van der Rohe, a Tisch or a Kensington, as if they were all choosing a new accessory rather than a human with whom their daughter would spend all her remaining nights and days. Evelyn searched the men for the most benign, the least likely to pay attention. Paul had a firm jawline, the family stock was decent, the house a little new but not embarrassingly so, but her parents had eliminated him because he was crippled with frequent and debilitating migraines, headaches that made him blind, unable to speak. Evelyn felt sorry for him, suffering so, but it was the migraines that made her pluck him out of the reject pile—on the days when he had headaches she would be nearly husbandless, nearly alone. Indeed, for all their years together, when Paul noticed the first glimmer at the outer edge of his vision, Evelyn made him a cup of strong tea, settled her husband in the bedroom with a cold cloth and drew the
velvet drapes. Then she walked out to her prairie studio and fell into the clay as if she was nothing but a glorious pair of hands.

She wanted only to work, but Evelyn’s body still had ways in which to betray her. It held the bundles of tiny eggs, the little stirrings of life, and soon one of them was brightened with a mate, divided, divided, lodged and began to grow. Evelyn felt convulsed with sickness, immediately forsaken for the parasite. Though she had not expected to get out of motherhood altogether, she had meant to put it off.

Paul was happy for the news. He looked forward to a person in the house more helpless than himself. He was, so often, an abstraction. Half the time he lay alone, brain scrambled and so deep in ache and confusion that he truly was not part of the world. The days when he was well were spent waiting to be unwell again. He made just the gentlest motions towards living—ate meals, read about the tightening of the Iron Curtain, dressed himself, walked in the prairie and along the lakeshore, voted on one or another board’s agenda, went to the club to which all the men belonged, oaken and ancient, a place where money was like atmosphere: vital to every breath the membership took but completely invisible to them.

Evelyn said, “We’re going to hire help. Don’t think I’m suddenly going to turn into a mother with a stuffed pork shoulder in the oven.” In twenty years, when women burned their bras and quit getting married and slept with bearded men in parks, in communes, in apartments with full ashtrays and empty refrigerators, Evelyn would understand perfectly. If only she had been born a half-century later, she would have been the first one to set the world alight.

“Hire whoever you want,” Paul said. He knew that he would be little help, rendered useless by his own brain.

Evelyn got bigger and bigger, swelled past the point that made
sense. The doctor felt her belly and declared with glee “Twins!” Her body, her own ever-inventive ruin. Paul celebrated with chocolate cake and red wine even though he knew they were both headache triggers, knew that he would spend the next day in a cave of delusion and pain. He figured he might have anyway, and sometimes he needed a good thing, sometimes pleasure was worth it. Evelyn took a nap while the babies inside her roiled like they were their own storm.

By the time she went into labor she was so huge and uncomfortable that she could hardly walk, much less sit or stand to work. Her hands were nervy without their clay. Their driver took them to the hospital where Paul was as clear-headed as he could ever remember having been, where he paced the waiting room like a chained dog while the other husbands smoked and drank coffee.

To Evelyn, the doctor yelled, “A boy!” first, and she felt relief like a punch in the face. “Thank God,” she said. But then, a moment later, “A girl!” and Evelyn said, “Shit.” Paul was there then—had he always been there?—and he was holding the first baby, the boy, while the doctor had given the girl to Evelyn. In the girl’s scrunched face Evelyn saw the entire path: pigtails, dollhouse, riding lessons, foxtrot, engagement, white dress, all in service of the repetition of this very same moment. Another perfectly wasted life. Maybe the girl would care about something along the way—art or history—but it would be pressed out of her slowly until she was nothing but a woman, nothing but a mother. “I want to trade,” she said to Paul. He was happy to because he wanted to examine all of his treasure, these two pinkened elves that had suddenly fallen into his life. He looked forward to everything about them. The only thought he needed to banish was the fact that he would miss half their lives, locked alone in the dark while the children splashed in the rain, learned the Greek myths, fell in love.

The nannies were Irish girls who would stay on until it was time for them to get married, and Evelyn had chosen the least beautiful applicants in hopes that they would take longer to find suitable mates. After the birth, Evelyn stayed in bed as long as directed by her doctor and then handed the little pink and blue bundles of Fern and Ben to the nanny and went back to her clay. Evelyn had wriggled out of wifedom by marrying a cripple and now she wriggled out of motherhood by paying other people to do the work for her, but she could not wriggle out of being a woman. Her sculptures were purchased all the time but she was never paid well. She knew, and she was right, that if she were male her work would have been collected in museums, but because she was female it all ended up in cemeteries.

The Cold War began, the first monkey astronaut was shot into space and the President ended segregation in the United States military. That was all peripheral, reported on the news. Meanwhile Evelyn marched through her universe’s particular vision of womanhood: luncheons in fine homes, fundraiser galas, horse shows, thank-you notes, condolence letters, garden tours. Much later she would wonder why she had not skipped all of it and become a recluse, going outside only to walk between studio and house. It was not a sense of duty that had made her go to the events but her abiding fury. To see the other women, the little wives, shuttling across the house like game pieces, everything from waistline to fingerbowls to rose varieties suffered over, made Evelyn’s own prison seem a little bigger. Her social life was like entering a zoo; leaving it made her feel, at least for a moment, almost free.

—

The babies turned into children. Evelyn paid minimal attention to Fern, who seemed sweet but ordinary. She played with dolls like all
girls played with dolls. She also ran and climbed trees when no one was looking, not realizing her mother would have been relieved to see her attempt something dangerous, something dirty. Ben, no matter how hard Evelyn tried to see him as strong or quick, the picture of masculine ease, remained a vague smudge of a boy, someone passed by and passed over. He was hugely tall and it was as if he did not have enough self to fill that whole body. He was quiet and so pale as to look out of focus. As time wore on, Evelyn slowly gave up on him. She had hoped that because he was a boy he would not have to suffer or fight, that his voice would be easily heard in a room. Not Ben.

And what about from the inside? He wanted just like every person wants; he had an encyclopedic knowledge of predators and prey. He imagined exploring caves and caverns in faraway continents where the click of the bats and the echo of water dripping were the only sounds. He liked the idea of being sealed off. It was a relief to think of being intentionally alone.

Even though he was big, Ben had a way of blending into the background. Fern sometimes felt as if she hadn’t seen Ben in days, though he had been right there all along, his huge frame seated at the kitchen table, silently reassembling with tweezers and glue the skeleton of a dead sparrow he had found and dissected. Still, Fern counted on Ben. His vagueness made her look and feel specific, normal. Her father was sick and her mother did not like to look at Fern, the girl of her. The siblings watched the family’s color television where news of the world filtered in between cartoons. Segregation was ruled illegal, a black woman refused to give up her seat on the bus, a pretty actor died in his car. All of it felt far away. The place in which they lived was an unrippled surface. Fern felt safe, yet even as a girl she sensed that safety was a lie. Everything else was also true.

Fern and Ben shared a bed, and in sleep their twin bodies did
not recognize their separateness. For Ben it was the kindest the world ever felt. Fern liked it too—lying beside him was the only place where the searching hum of the world went quiet.

They went on this way, Fern ahead and Ben a few feet behind, a quiet shadow. They were silently together in grammar school as the pen of obedience was slowly built around them, silently together in the wring and wrench of middle school, silently together as they walked their new bodies through the high school halls, little adults, little pretenders. Alone at home, Fern sat close to Ben, talked to him about his latest interest—the migration of the monarch butterfly, the boneless structure of the shark. Again they sat in the blue light of the television and the anchors reported the facts of all the elsewheres: in Berlin, a wall was built between East and West; for thirteen days, everyone believed that the Soviets might launch an atomic missile from Cuba; the president was killed. Fern confessed that she felt tangled inside, not realizing that everyone did, that there was no person free of this. Ben listened and nodded and she knew he understood.