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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1933 to 1941, when I was between the ages of seven and fifteen, I spent nine summers in a big white house in the Adirondacks. The house had no electricity, no heat, and no gas for cooking, but it had a great many bedrooms, and our four-person New Jersey family ballooned to fill them. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends of my parents (with or without children), friends of my older brother, and friends of mine came for visits of varying length, and the long, classic American summer, which began with our arrival a few days before the Fourth of July and lasted through Labor Day, became the whole of life for me.
Each morning, we drove ten miles, in three or more cars, to Westport on Lake Champlain, where we played tennis and swam, or sailed, or aquaplaned behind an ancient, breakdown-prone Chris-Craft. Then back to the Big House for lunch, served by George, our houseman, whose duties ranged from filling the kerosene lamps and hauling blocks of sawdust-covered ice for the two iceboxes to assassinating the porcupines that invaded the kitchen porch and, once or twice every summer, planted a dozen quills in the unteachably inquisitive nose of Ivan the Terrible, our moronic Labrador. After a long adult siesta, we went down to the pond, in the farmer's field below the house, where the older kids commandeered a flotilla of small boats (two rowboats, a kayak, a canoe, and various inflatables) for naval warfare, while the grownups lounged on a makeshift sand-and-grass beach and Ivan, barking non-stop, swam frantically from one capsized warship to another, trying to rescue survivors. If you let him get too close, his nails would leave deep scratches down your back; the trick was to get behind him, grab his thick, heavy tail, and let him pull you to shore. Ivan was a big presence in our summers up there, partly because he kept running away and having to be fetched, for a price, from some distant farm or household. This happened in New Jersey, too. My father once had a dream in which he spoke very sternly to Ivan after one of these escapades, saying, "Ivan, where have you been?" and Ivan replied, "I've been to Montclair."
The pond, the farm, the Big House, and the mountain behind it all belonged to the Milhollands, whom my mother had known as a child. John E. Milholland, the son of an Irish immigrant, had made a fortune around the turn of the last century by backing a system of pneumatic underground mail tubes. His system was installed in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, and Chicago, and its success propelled his wife, Jean (known as Mater), into London society and sent Inez and Vida, their daughters, to Vassar and their son, John Angus, to Harvard. Old John E., who had grown up in a log cabin in the Adirondack township of Lewis, bought five thousand acres of land adjoining his ancestral home, fenced in fifteen hundred of them, which he stocked with deer and elk, and built several houses, including the Big House, whose fourteen bedrooms were meant to accommodate the international statesmen and religious leaders attending conferences at the Norman castle he was planning to build, about a third of the way up the mountain.
The castle never got built, because in 1918 Woodrow Wilson vetoed the mail-tube appropriation bill. Mail delivery reverted to the trucking industry, and Milholland's financial house of cards collapsed. But in 1910, when Milholland was still on the rise, he became friendly with my mother's father, a Southern-born journalist and lecturer who was then the editor of William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and as a result my mother's family was invited to spend that summer and several succeeding ones in the Green Cottage at Meadowmount, as the Milhollands called their land.
Mother's diary for those years records many of the same activities we enjoyed more than two decades later at Meadowmount--tennis, swimming in the pond ("in corset and brassiere") and in the Bouquet River, making ice cream, playing charades or croquet or Run Sheep Run with visiting friends and relatives--along with her recurrent anxieties over whether she would ever be attractive to boys.
She was fascinated by the beautiful and imperious Inez Milholland, a recent Vassar graduate, who would soon emerge as a militant advocate for women's suffrage. Sex to her was a distant and threatening mystery. "Watched a black fly sitting on the back of another," she writes in 1912, "and am pretty sure and afraid that there must be some such contact between man and woman--it worries me--I dread it--but maybe not when I know."
Her childhood diaries break off seven years later, on the eve of her wartime marriage to my father, a newly commissioned lieutenant in the U.S. Army's aviation branch, and she has not yet let him kiss her on the lips. "I understand, dear,"...
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