But by June of second grade I had been absent so much that my teachers couldn’t comment on my reading record.
* * *
SO MANY DAYS I stayed home from school, resting in my bedroom. Mine was the smallest of the three bedrooms in the wing I shared with my sisters. It had slanted high ceilings and a large picture window that faced the garage. The furniture was white, with a canopy four-poster bed and a white bedspread with red eyelet trim. Here I played with my dolls and read my books.
My sister Jill was the one who got me interested in reading, giving me my first Nancy Drew, The Secret of the Old Clock. After that, I begged my mother to buy me each additional book in the series so that I could read them all. I loved the Nancy books with their familiar black-and-yellow spines and the brave girl detective whose life was so boldly different from mine. I’d been in school just enough to get the hang of reading, but after Jill gave me the confidence to read on my own, I started going to the library and coming home with stacks of books. I fell in love with reading, filling the long hours of my days with the stories I found in the pages.
I also watched a lot of TV. In my room, I had a small black-and-white television with a rabbit-ear antenna on the top, or I would go downstairs and watch TV in the den. I was addicted to soap operas. My favorites were Dark Shadows and General Hospital. I became attached to the characters and to their dramas. In the soap operas, children found out that their parents weren’t their parents. Husbands who seemed trustworthy turned out to be cheating on their wives. Siblings stopped talking to one another and stabbed each other in the back. In my own family, tensions simmered below the surface, exploding into arguments in ways I couldn’t understand. In the world of soap operas, the drama was constant and easy to predict. Drinks were thrown in faces, doors were slammed, cars sped away into the night, and everyone said exactly what they thought. You could depend on the characters to be as hurt, angry, and vocal as yesterday, and always at the regularly scheduled time.
News broadcasts also helped to break up the day. I watched the news on ABC religiously at 7:00 A.M., 5:00 P.M., and 11:00 P.M. I loved the handsome newscasters for their firmness, their solemn voices, and their confidence. Bill Beutel and Roger Grimsby were my heroes; no matter what happened, they took the world as they found it and explained it in terms even a child could understand. Back then every night on the news, they would read the body count from the war in Vietnam. Across the country, people were marching and protesting, against the war, for civil rights. I remember when Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, watching the news, seeing Robert Kennedy standing up on the back of a flatbed truck, urging for calm and unity in King’s memory. When two months later Kennedy was also shot and killed, it seemed as if the violence would never end. At home in my room, in my bed, via the little box of my television, I had a window on the strangeness of the world.
If my mother allowed it—if I was well enough and the weather was warm—I was allowed to wander through the woods at the back of our house through the tangled honeysuckle and raspberry bushes that grew on the property. On weekends I might go to play with Fay, the daughter of Sherman’s groundskeeper, who lived next door to the castle and who was two years older than I. But during the weekdays I was mostly alone or with my cat, Little. Little was a gray cat with white mitten paws, and everywhere I went, she would follow me. We’d play hide-and-go-seek in the cattails on our beach. I talked to Little; she was my friend; sometimes I thought she knew what I was thinking. Then we’d wander out onto our beach at the back of our house with its mottled sand, pitted with grasses and a small inlet, looking out across the gray waters of the Sound. There I’d sit on a rock and pretend I was someone else: a princess waiting to be rescued by a prince, or a famous model like my mother. Then, when the light started to ebb out of the sky, I’d go back to the house to see what the evening would bring.
Years later, I reconnected with the daughter of one of our neighbors on Long Island. She told me that she would often ride her bike by our house, to see if she could catch a glimpse of me at the window. “We knew there was a strange girl who lived there but she mostly stayed in her room because she was sickly,” our neighbor told me. “It was like a mystery—what was going on in there?”
CHAPTER 5
Carolyn
My mother in her Barbizon days is a person I barely recognize: so excited, happy, and hopeful, standing at the window of her hotel room looking out over a city that she felt was hers for the taking. She was so completely alone in New York, without any family support or a built-in safety net, yet determined not only to survive but to succeed.
In the evenings, both Carolyn and Grace did their homework. Carolyn wrote the next day’s modeling appointments in her notebook, scrutinizing her map of Manhattan, so she would know exactly where to go and what time to leave to get there. Then she practiced smoothing her hair and applying her
