"The atomic bomb went off and I arrived with my left eye crossed, my nose pushed to one side, and my head squeezed skinny." So begins a humorous, lively memoir that takes you around the world and introduces you to over 100 people from billionaires to bums, all with a bubbling sense of humor that you'll appreciate.
Have you lived in Haiti and the Virgin Islands as a child? Played cannon in the 1812 Overture? Accidentally skied off a precipice in the Alps? Survived a quad bypass on a business trip (and written about it with humor)? Ever gate crashed J. Paul Getty Jr. in London?
Somehow, adventures just keep coming the author's way, and he shares them with you in a conversational style that you'll both enjoy and appreciate.
"The atomic bomb went off and I arrived with my left eye crossed, my nose pushed to one side, and my head squeezed skinny." So begins a humorous, lively memoir that takes you around the world and introduces you to over 100 people from billionaires to bums, all with a bubbling sense of humor that you'll appreciate.
Have you lived in Haiti and the Virgin Islands as a child? Played cannon in the 1812 Overture? Accidentally skied off a precipice in the Alps? Survived a quad bypass on a business trip (and written about it with humor)? Ever gate crashed J. Paul Getty Jr. in London?
Somehow, adventures just keep coming the author's way, and he shares them with you in a conversational style that you'll both enjoy and appreciate.
The atomic bomb went off and I arrived with my left eye crossed, my nose pushed to one side, and my head squeezed skinny. It was August 1945. My birth certificate advises the world that my name was E. Kent Hatch. My parents were Eric S. Hatch, writer, 43, and E. Constance de Boer Hatch, 25, Army Captain and homemaker.    Â
pictures:
Eric S. Hatch-1943
Connie Hatch in uniform ca 1944
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Thereâs a family legend around my naming. My great-grandfatherâs name was Alfrederic Hatch. His son was Frederic Hatch. My dad was Eric Hatch. They didnât know whether to name me Ric, Ic, or C, so they settled on E. Kent. The Kent part referred to the familyâs county of origin in England hundreds of years earlier. The genealogy gets sketchy, but there was a Thomas Ă Hecche (a gatekeeper for the local squire) in Kent, in the fourteenth century who knocked up the bossâs daughter, married up, and started the familyâs rise to prominence. Given the circumstances of my own birth, this account (which appears in a Hatch family history lodged in the Dartmouth College rare books room) may well be trueâit is at least consistent with family behavior ever since.
My father, Eric S. Hatch, was technically a civilian with the equivalent rank of Lt. Colonel, attached to the Psychological Warfare division of General Patton's army. If youâre the U.S. Army, what else do you do with a famous writer whoâs too prominent to be a grunt and too old to be commissioned? You finesse and put him in a job that should keep him out of harmâs way and maybe get a little mileage out of the guy.
My mother, E. Constance de Boer Hatch, was a captain in the Womenâs Army Corps (WAC) in London, making assignments for officers to join General Patton in Normandy, France. My father immediately hit on her, oozed charm (no effort for him), good looks, and fame, and asked her for a date. My motherâs answer, she claimed, was, âI know who you are, and Iâm sending you to France on Monday morning. If you come back, well, maybe.â
He did come back, and roughly nine months later, I was born in Easton, Maryland. My legitimacy was a near-run thing; it turns out my father already had a wife when I was conceived. I only learned about this when I was sixty or so; it had been kept dark until then. (My mother finally confessed this horrific secret to me and was really angry when I sort of shrugged and said it didnât matter to me, I was legit, so who cared? Not my most sensitive moment, Iâm afraid, but values have really changed in the decades since my arrival.)
My Aunt Squeaky (Allene Gaty Hatch) told me that when my dad turned up at the family home in Cedarhurst, Long Island, New York, squiring a pregnant girlfriend, all hell broke loose. His wife at the time, Gertrude, from whom he was estranged, had to be quickly and quietly removedâno, not THAT way, just financial inducements. Since my earn-it-spend-it dad had not enough money, the family didnât appreciate coughing up to cover his scandalânot his firstâand never made my mother altogether welcome.
Much of this coolness had to do with my motherâs own attitude. My mom was extremely brightâas was my dad, for that matter. Unfortunately, she used her intelligence and her Phi Beta Kappa key as shields in nearly every situation. Born in 1920, she was the younger daughter of a Chicago doctor, William de Boer, and Minerva Elizabeth de Boer, one of the first women in America to attend medical school (though she was prevented from finishing) and a highly talented painter of decorative chinaware. My mother attended Northwestern University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with a journalism major. The Depression had been really hard on the de Boersâgetting paid in chickens was not uncommon for Dr. de Boer, when he got paid at all. As a Depression baby, my mother knew all about managing pennies, and a damn good thing, because my father knew nothing about managing pennies or handling money at all. He had a truly wonderful capacity for spending it as fast as it came in, and during the Depression, it came in very quickly indeedâseveral hit novels and a classic movie (My Man Godfrey) enabled him to putter up and down the East Coast on a series of yachts, one the Willingdrift and the other the Caprice. He rode out the hurricane of 38 on the Willingdrift with, he said, three anchors, two bottles of gin, and prayer. Iâve seen the photosâthe devastation was amazing, and he was very lucky indeed to come through unscathed.
My mother, while bright and educated, was not Social in the New York 400 sense of the word. My fatherâs family certainly was. Though my mom never admitted it, she was overwhelmed by the lifestyle, assumptions, table talk, and outright snobberyâeven bigotryâof the Hatch family. She fought back with the weapons she hadâgreat verbal skills, lightning wit, and some solid family connections of her own (though none which anybody in New York would consider important). What was for my fatherâs family a natural flow and way of relating to each other was, when she tried it on, an affectation. Snobbery didnât come naturally to her; she had to work at it. That backed off toward the end of her life, but as a young man I got incredibly sick of stories of what a swell family background I had on both sides.
Hatch Family Portrait 1871
How much of this Hatch Family stuff was b.s.? It turns out, none of it. The family roots are more than a thousand years old. In recent times, my fifth-great-grandfather, Captain Joseph Hatch, fought in the American Revolution and could afford to give ten dollars in gold and fifty acres of land to Dartmouth College when it was founded in 1769. My grandfather, Frederic H. Hatch, was a founding member of the Mayflower Association. All this is documented. Remember Thomas Ă Hecche? Thereâs documentation of that, too, in the Rare Books room of Dartmouth College and the Norwich Vermont archives.How rich was rich? Well, that varied. The Vermont ancestors of my clan were somewhere between prosperous and well-off, with an occasional dip into âgetting by.â Captain Joseph had three sons. One stayed on the farm, one moved to Washington, D.C. and made money, and the third went west with Brigham Young; every Hatch in Utah is my cousin.
My great-grandfather, Alfrederic Smith Hatch, was the first Hatch since Captain Joseph Hatch to generate real wealth. He was president of the New York Stock Exchange in 1883 and 1884. In 1871 he commissioned Eastman Johnson to paint a family portrait of the whole throng in the familyâs Park Avenue living room. He paid $1,000 a head, including the newborn, and there are fifteen Hatches in the portrait, which hangs today in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's American Wing. (As a footnote, the baby in the picture is my great aunt Emily Hatch Nichols, a noted watercolorist whose will later funded my first trip to France.) Emily, at some point, altered the date in the portrait from 1871 to 1877 to make herself look younger. In 2022 dollars, that portrait would have cost more than $300,000.
But Alfrederic, in a word, blew it. He continued to back canals when railroads were coming in, and in 1901 he sold twenty miles of Long Island beach, from Jones beach to Rockaway, for $1,000,000. Who knows what it would be worth today? (Of course, a hundred years from now it may be $0âit may all be under water.) Worse, Alfrederic had eleven surviving children to be fed, housed, and provided for. So, he imported a castle, stone by stone, from Scotland, and erected it on the banks of the Hudson. The family lived there between 1880 and 1888, and it later became a girlsâ school. I have an Aunt Emily watercolor sketch of it as a ruin before it was demolished.
Alfrederic died with a load of debt in 1904, debt which my grandfather, Frederic, worked to make goodâthough he had no legal obligation to do so. It took him many years and a lot of resources. Frederic was stable and not as flamboyant as many Hatches. He played golf and belonged toâof courseâthe Rockaway Hunting Club, the oldest country club in the United States, that featured fox hunting and steeplechase racing. He later built a house called Summerleas, a three-iron shot from the clubâs door.
The 1920s arrived with a Bull marketâgood for Fredâand collapsed in the DepressionâFrederic died of a heart attack in 1930. Bad for Fred. The 1920s also rang in prohibition, which, ironically, launched my dad on his way to fame. And to a certain level of infamy.
For starters, my dad, born in 1902 or 1901, was sent to Westminster, a Connecticut prep school. His first escapade involved firing an air pistol at the facade of the chapel. It looked like stone but was actually made of tin. Claaannng! He abruptly left the school. My dad was sent next to St. Paulâs in New Hampshire. From there he was sent home because he was ill for most of a year and had private tutoring. Upon returning to St. Paulâs the following fall, he was again turfed outâthis time for cheating on a math test, on the grounds that someone as bad as he had been at math could not have turned in such a good paper without cheating. It turns out the private tutor had done his job all too well.
My dad was crushed by this false accusation, and he felt somehow vindicated when, forty-five years later, he became the chairman of the State of Connecticut Historical Commission. My dad was self-educated, deeply informed in areas that interested him, and largely ignorant in areas which did not. While I was growing up, he used to do the New York Times daily crossword in fifteen minutes and the Sunday version in an hourâboth in ink. This should tell you something about his mind.
Rusticated again, this time for good, my dad entered Fisk and Hatch, the family brokerage business. My dad hated Fisk and Hatch, indeed, the whole business of stock brokerage, and Iâm certain he and Fred quarreled often. At the age of nineteen, in 1922, he eloped with the prominent Sylvia Whiton-Stuart, a family with both Southern and Northeastern roots. She was sixteen at the time and pregnant with Evelyn Hatch, later Evelyn Hatch Holmes. According to a newspaper report from the day,
"The young couple fled to New Jersey. On Sunday, according to dispatches received from Matawan, young Hatch and his bride, accompanied by Miles Vernon, appeared before Mayor Sutphin at Matawan with the request that he marry them. He declined to do so on the ground they had no New Jersey license and had not complied with the state law requiring a residence of forty-eight hours in the state prior to the ceremony.
That was quite discouraging to the trio, but they didnât consider letting it stop them. They motored to Connecticut, apparently with the view of getting married there, it is said, but before long they were headed southward again, and finally arrived at Elkton, MD (where the ceremony was finally performed)."
The official in Maryland may have tied the knot, but it turned out to be a slip knot because by 1928 they were divorced, and Sylvia remarried. I donât know how custody arrangements were made, but I know that Eve grew up isolated and lonely.
My Uncle Alden, of whom I was fond, was five years older than my dad. Crippled as an infant by polio, Alden made an early success in life as a biographer of heads of state and the very rich. There was one notable exception to this string of ambassadors, lord mayors, and popes: fairly late in life Alden ghost-wrote My Life with Martin Luther King. The irony of this bigoted, whiter-than-white aristo writing that particular book boggles the mind. But it worked; Coretta Scott King liked him and loved the money, so all was well.
The Hatch household of the 1920s must have been a spectacular disaster. My dadâs sports involved water and horses. This is important, because, as a gentleman jockey and polo player, he rode other peopleâs ponies, not owning one of his own until 1965 or so. He knew everybody, wrote well, and could charm the birds out of the trees ... so, of course, he wound up writing about racing, polo, and yachting for the readers of the then brand-new New Yorker magazine. My father wrote his first novel, a successful one, called A Couple of Quick Ones, published in 1927. It was about a young man who was only worth a damn when well-oiled but who succeeded as a steeplechase jockey. Writing was my fatherâs way out of Fisk and Hatch, and he made the most of it. They say you write about what you know, and what my father knew was high life, horses, boats, and alcohol.
Alden and my Dad loved each other but competed like mad. If Alden flew a solo flight, crippled leg and all, well, my dad did too ... and flew it under the Triboro Bridge at that. They were both reckless young men, having earned the distinct honor of being in the first car crash ever recorded on Long Island. Their favorite game was âbaby on the tracks,â which consisted of parking across a set of railroad tracks and only accelerating clear of an advancing locomotive at the last possible second.
My paternal grandmother, May Daly Hatch (1864-1952), wrote songs, music, and poetry for the New York Sun and played the ukulele and the nine-foot Steinway in the living room at Summerleas, the faux-tudor mansion Fred built around 1925. Itâs no real surprise that my father and Alden shared those creative genes. As do Cousin Denny, I, and my progeny, God help them.
The Depression hit the Hatches hard. They didnât go bust, but they went from being really rich to having to watch their budgets. The 1910 Census shows eleven servants in the house, but by 1920 it was down to a handful. And by 1929, poof! But bust or rich, the Hatches played in the big leagues socially.
My father continued writing at the rate of one book per year plus innumerable short stories. He also wrote for all the big magazines: Liberty, Colliers, Saturday Evening Post, etc. Then, in 1934, he hit the jackpot with a novella, serialized as 1011 5th. After a re-write, it was published as Irene the Stubborn Girl. It was picked up by Universal and re-titled My Man Godfrey, released in 1936. My dad was hired to write the screen play with assistance from Morrie Ryskind, the resultant movie being nominated for five Oscars (and winning noneâGoldwyn and Jack Warner hated my father, and the feeling was mutual). For this effort, he was paid $4,000.
In Hollywood my dad became close friends with film icon Humphrey âBogeyâ Bogart, and in fact, provided the venue for his affair with actress Mayo Methotâthough Ericâs then-current wife, Gertrude, absolutely disapproved. Iâve never seen him so sad as the day Bogey died. Later, he lost a bill clip in the shape of a U.S. dollar sign with a diamond in the centerâa gift from Bogeyâand that was another bleak day in the Hatch household.
My fatherâs other close friend in Hollywood was Harpo Marx. They would play chess in the evenings, to what level of expertise I donât know. Actor Mischa Auer, who played Carlo in My Man Godfrey, came to visit our home when I was a young teen and insisted on cooking shashlik, basically a grilled cut of beef that had marinated for at least twenty-four hours. Pretty good it tasted, too.
Itâs plain to see that the period from 1935 to 1942 was my fatherâs period of greatest fameâand that Hollywood was absolutely (and dissolutely) bad for him. All of this led to a home life of champagne taste with a beer budget. Our huge amount of social prestige did not pair well with no reliable source of money. Thank God for my motherâs firm hand from 1945 onward.
My dad had wisely told me that my empty first initial was purposeful. Because he was prominent, he had not wanted to saddle me with his name, unless I wanted it, a decision that could later be made. I suspect, though, that thereâs another reason. My mother had been christened Edna Constance de Boer, and she hated âEdnaâ with all the passion she could musterâand that was plenty. The day she turned twenty-one, she had it changed to E Constance De Boer. When she joined the U.S. Army, they had fits because her first name was E. Not E standing for anything, just E. So perhaps giving me an empty initial had more to do with her than with my dad. Sheâs Edna again in her 1949 passport, so who knows what happened. But I didnât learn about the Edna business until 2006 or so, and by that time, the matter was long moot.
This background goes some way toward framing the internal conflicts and socialization issues which have plagued me for most of my life.
I was born in Easton because my father got kicked out of Cedarhurst. The Hatches had arrived in Easton in May via chauffeured Rolls-Royce (my dad always loved Rollers, but they didnât always love him). At first, my dad rented a large house on the Miles River outside of town. According to my god-cousin, Laurie Driggs III, the telephone service in those days was subject to perpetual outages. My fatherâs solution was to buy a flare gun and signal his friend and neighbor across the water when my motherâs time arrived. The theory was that since this friend was the head of the phone company, his service ought to be pretty darned good, and he could alert the hospital.
Whether or not the flare gun was employed, the baby arrived and the money departed. The Rolls went first, and smaller quarters came next. The Hatches visited and then moved in with my godparents, Laurie and Ethel Driggs of Easton. The Driggs family lived in a tiny cottage called Seventh Haven, overlooking a tributary of the Tred Avon River, into which were stuffed Ethel, Laurie II, Laurie III (age seven at the time), my god cousin (who is still a friend seventy-seven years later), my dad, my mom, and a dog or two. Plus me. The house was not winterized, but in summer, that was not foremost in anybodyâs mind. Ethel, who was Main Line Philadelphia, became fast friends with my motherâthey talked weekly for the next sixty-something years. My mom died in 2007, at age eight-seven, and Aunt Ethel, as I called her, lived to 100.
Somehow this mĂ©nage-Ă -plenty lasted for at least six months. My dad wrote a few things, and some royalty checks appeared, so he was able to acquire, along with his infant son, a large home called âWesterlyâ overlooking the Peconic Bay in Hampton Bays, Long Island; a black Labrador retriever named Talbot; and a float plane. (My dad had three planes within five years or soâa Stinson, a Cessna, and a wheeled Piper Cub. I donât know for sure what order they arrived in, but I think the Stinson came first).
On the way from Easton to New York, I became ill. Really ill. It was pneumonia, which at the time carried off three out of ten infants who contracted it. My father put the plane down in New Jersey and sought out the nearest doctor. The doc had just received a sample of penicillin, then newly released for civilian use. It went into E. Kent, and I survived. This was the first of many close calls in my life ⊠many, many close calls.
Early in 1948 my father moved us to Haiti for some months. We came back to Westerly, and during one of my hated afternoon naps, I watched, fascinated, as the snow buried our rounded front steps and the lawn in soft white fluff. It was beautiful, and I still enjoy watching snow cover our hillside lawn in Ohio.
At the base of our Westerly driveway we had a dock that stretched out into a salt-water pond. I got to fish and crab from that dock, hauling in baskets laden with blue crabs. I also enjoyed blueberrying in the local woods. If you crossed our lawn and descended a steep bluff (Iâm guessing thirty feet high) by a footpath, you arrived on a narrow strip of beach on the Peconic Bay. Thatâs where the floatplane lived, along with two boats, Big Boat, an overgrown wooden rowboat, and Little Boat. The motor for Big Boat lived in a large wooden crate on the beach; today they are called Beach Boxes. Little Boat didn't rate its own motor.
My mother, who was a mermaid, encouraged me to swim. Things started out okay, but I got scared to death by the zillions of horseshoe crabs, looking like the prehistoric monsters they really are. To a toddler, they were terrifying, and to this day, they give me the willies. I didnât actually learn to swim until I was six.
Our dog Talbot always went to the beach and always went swimming. He had the bad habit of thinking my mother, to whom he was devoted, was drowning, so he persisted in trying to rescue her. My dad used to paint my momâs back with Mercurochrome (a non-stinging antiseptic used in those distant days) in the shapes of musical notes to cover the scratches left by lifeguard Talbot.
One day my mom, my dad, Talbot, and I went fishing in Big Boat. My parents used hand lines to fish. For what seemed like hours, my dad fished in vain. Finally, my mom put me down and grabbed a hand line. (These were square frames with a fairly heavy line, hook, and sinker attached; you unrolled them, then if you were lucky, rolled them up again with a fish attached.) A bite! A fish! And then another. I looked over the edge of the boat. There was my motherâs line, and the white, glimmering shapes of fish literally lined up single file to take it. For my dad? Zilch. The ribbing from that afternoon would resurface periodically for decades. Talbot was wildly excited by all the flopping around but behaved himself superblyâas, rescue attempts aside, he usually did.
When I was about three years old, a big yellow cardboard box caught my attention, and I played in it along with my new young brother. Jonathon Stow Hatch, known to all the world first as Jon Do (he couldnât pronounce âJonathon Stowâ), then as J.D. The multiple meanings of his initials became more apt as he and I grew up. Jon Do was born in New York City on December 10, 1946, just sixteen months after my arrival. When Jon Do was barely a toddler, the yellow box appeared. We took it down to the bay and tried to use it as a boat (supervised by my mom or the maid, I donât remember which). The boat dissolved from underneath us, to our huge disappointment. Shortly before my mom died in 2007, I mentioned this to her.
She said, âOh, I remember that box. It was the box our first TV came in. How on earth can you remember that? It was 1948.â
I remember the TV and watching Gabby Hays fire oats from a monster cannon at the end of his show each day to makeâin theoryâQuaker Puffed Oats.
My parents used to let us play on the lawn without direct supervision because Talbot was always on the job. He wouldnât let us get into danger, and especially wouldnât let us go down to the beachâsomehow he just knew, and my parents trusted him to keep us alive, if not out of trouble.
One episode recounted by both parents regards one of the floatplanes. It had developed some leaks in the pontoons, and trust me, a waterlogged float plane might make a good ski boat, but it doesnât want to take off. The mechanic was called in.
He arrived and pumped out the floats. Then he fiddled with the engine and lit her up. Talbot heard the noise and made a run for the beach. He hurled himself at the mechanic, straight into the spinning prop. The mechanic saw him and raised his hand palm-outward as if to ward him off. Talbot, field-trained, took this as the âdropâ signal, twisted in mid-leap, and dropped to the sand, unharmed.
The same cannot be said of the mechanic, who was seriously shaken. By this time my parents were on the scene and escorted dog and mechanic to the house, watered the dog and fire-watered the mechanic, tipped him, and sent him on his way. He would do no more work that day.
Late that year my dad moved us again, this time to the Virgin Islands. Talbot flew as a passengerâand it ticked me off because he got the window seat. This was on a TWA Constellation, the tri-ruddered passenger planeâno jets for eight more years.
Three more memories from Westerlyâthese are from after our return from Haiti. First is admiring the bar my parents had set up in the dining room. It was made of planks of Haitian mahogany. It was illegal to export mahogany from Haiti at that time, so my mother had the wood made into a crate and used the crate to ship Talbot home. (He didnât get the window seat on that flight.) Then she took the crate apart and made the planks into a bar; I think she did the work herself. It stands in my living room todayâcrude but interesting and definitely built to last.
The second memory is from that same room. It was morning, and the sunlight was streaming in. I wanted to learn to whistle. I kept at it and kept at it â must have driven everybody else nuts. But by the end of the morning, I could whistle. It wasnât tuneful, but I could do it. I was shocked when in 1967 the French family I was staying with told me whistling was reserved for the stables. Fie upon them.
The final related memory is trying to spin a coinâI think it was a pennyâon the smooth dining table surface. I was fascinated by what happened when it slowed down and the vwum, vwum, vwum sound it made as it settled to rest. Sometimes Iâd flick the penny too hard and it would ricochet off the centerpiece on the table or vanish onto the floor. But again, I kept at it until boredom eventually settled in.
The amazing thing about these fragments isnât their detail (and Iâm not stretchingâI can SEE or hear these things as I write). But simply having this many memories from such an early period of my life is wonderful. I was precocious in many, many ways. These Westerly memories are doorways on a past now so distant in time and social space that most Americans wouldnât recognize it, let alone identify with it. But they were my early childhood, strange and enriching. They provide early pointers to my personality and interests.
There are other Westerly fragments: the peeing contest with my dad (I could pee farther, but he had me on volume) on a walk through the woods. Being told we were to stay indoors as deer season had opened. Watching the mangle iron sheets. (A mangle was a foot-operated pressing machine.) Gathering blueberries.
During the Westerly years, my dad used to fly into Manhattan to talk to his literary agent, Paul Revere Reynolds. Later he worked with Dorothy Olding of Harold Ober Associates (their stable included Fitzgerald and Faulkner, so why not my dad), an agency now owned by Jeff Kleinman at Folio Literary.
My dad also wrote TV plays for Lux, Kraft, and Hallmark, so the floatplane wasnât totally stupid. He would fly into the midtown seaplane dock on the East River, take a cab to his agent on 34th Street or to TV production meetings, then fly home again afterward in time for dinner. Beat a six-hour drive each way. (No LI Expressway then, just country roads).
One family story concerned Mr. Reynolds. I think this story dates from just before my arrival on the planet in 1945. It occurred in Cedarhurst, where the Hatch family home was located. Mr. Reynolds came out to meet my dad; they had corresponded and had phone meetings but had not met in the flesh. It was a Monday, and the train arrived. It disgorged many, many African-American women, the maids of the gentry coming back to work after the weekend. Finally, a lone white man stepped onto the platform. My dad went over to him, looked around at the crowd, and smiled. âDr. Livingston, I presume?â The man answered, without an answering smile, âWhy, no, sir, I am Paul Revere Reynolds.â It was a relationship that was doomed to failure.
Off to Haiti
By 1948 my dad was out of money â again. The Roller and the floatplane were sold, and Maizie the maid, and Melba the cook (who drank) were laid off. How he got this brainstorm, Iâll never know, but my dad decided the thing to do was to dwell in Haiti, where you could live comfortably for about five dollars per week. He would research a new novel, and weâd return to the States in triumph.
Some of this plan worked out. My dad did do his research (boy, did he), and did write his worst novel, The Golden Woman, and started another, Beautiful Bequest. Eventually we did return to Westerly, only to leave again for the Virgin Islands. (Same rationale).
One Haitian morning, before the day got too hot and sticky, I went climbing up a stream with my mom and dad. She was wearing a light buckskin jacket with fringe, her favorite. I was splashing along some distance behind my parents. Suddenly I became aware of a voice talking to me. Iâve forgotten exactly what it said, but my response was shock and delight. âThis must be thinking,â I said to myself. âThatâs what thinking is. Itâs a voice inside your head!â
I donât know if I told my mom or what her reaction was if I did. But shortly before she died in 2007, I asked her if she remembered the stream and the jacket, and she did.
This was my first conscious, self-aware, verbal thought. It was a BIG DEAL to me then, and itâs a big deal to me today. I can still see the rocks, the vivid green of the trees, and the blue of the sky. I can feel the water, and I still hear that inner voice almost all the time.
That I should have had such consciousness at the age of three ⊠I have no idea how rare that might be. I still donât know, but I imagine itâs not exactly common. I do know that by that age I was speaking in full-length, grammatically correct sentences. In three languages, it turned out.
My second Haitian memory was of a visit to a French heavy cruiser, or frigate, in Port au Prince for a duty call. The natives were in a state of unrest, and Dumarsais EstimĂ©âs presidency was none too solid, so the reassuring hand of France arrived to calm the waters.
The anchorage was very rollie, and Jon Do got frightened. My mother said sheâd stay ashore with him, and my dad and I embarked on the run out to the cruiser. I remember being handed down into the heaving launch. I loved it. Then off we went, plunging through the chop. Wet, but fun!
We arrived at the landing stage of the French frigate. The crew timed the rise of the wave just right, and my dad and I were deposited with care. I was carried up the ladder. My dad, an agile sailor, frisked his own way up.
My dad loved recounting what happened next.
We were met at the head of the landing ladder by a lieutenant who ushered us aft to the captain. My dad spoke pidgin French. I was introduced to the captain, who was thunder-struck when I said, in French, âBonjour Mâsieu le capitaine, je suis enchantĂ© de vous faire la connaissance.â (Good day, Captain, Sir. Iâm delighted to make your acquaintance). You see, Iâd been soaking up Creole and French while learning English at the same time. I donât think my parents quite knew this. The captain gravely shook my hand, concealing what must have been gales of laughter.
After a tour of the vessel we went to the Officersâ Wardroom where I was served lemonade in a tall glass. The tables were covered in green baize, like little square pool tablesâthe tables were a bit crowded together, but it seemed pretty nice to me just the same. The officers were all charming.
The trip back to the quay was downwind, smoother, and a little less fun than the outbound trip. But it was quite a day for a little guy like me. Later, I lost the Creole altogether, and the French with it, but the French came back readily in school, and my ability to speak the language fairly fluently has created wonderful opportunities for me throughout my adult life.
Iâve never written French well, but even today, a decade will go by, Iâll wind up somewhere francophone, and some sort of rusted synaptic gate squeaks a bit, thenâI once again speak French. After a week or so, probably more now that I am so much older, I regain fluency. It worked in Tahiti, to some extent, in 2017. If Americans were taught second languages in a serious way, starting in kindergarten, I believe there would be a number of positive consequences. Weâd be more open, less arrogant, and much less provincial. Weâd be able to see things from a different point of view than our own. And perhapsâjust perhapsâour immigration policies would become less xenophobic and more responsive to the needs of others.
One night a group of black men sat on our front stoop, talking, drinking rum, then tuning up three drums made from carved and tapered hollow logs topped with goatskin (complete with hair around the edges)âtwo small drums and a âpapaâ drum, which had to be given a drink of rum before he could really sound. The drummer poured this libation on the ground just under the bottom of the drum, then drank some himself. The drums were painted a light green with red symbols. The goat hair was a light reddish-brown. Four stout pegs driven into the drum at sharp downward angles tensioned the goatskin head.
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Photo: Papa Drum 1948
EstimĂ©âs residency strongly favored blacks over mulattos, who had formed the elite of Haitiâs society. The mulatto people, who were better educated and had much higher expectations, did not take kindly to this noiriste policy and were in a state of perpetual turmoil. My father, I believe, sided with the noiristes, the darker-skinned people. All his life he believed in fairness to all people and in opportunity for all. In Haiti, where he mostly wore a sarong, he became friendly with the local populace, so much so that he was initiated into one of the voodoo sects. My mother watched in horror as machetes whirled around him, centimeters from his body, face, and ears. My father did not flinch and survived this rite of passage. Later, when we left Haiti, the three drums were shipped to Westerly and somehow stayed with us when we moved to Connecticut. They were stored with one of my dadâs polo mallets, a prop from one of the airplanes, and many, many boxes of correspondence and manuscripts.
The native kids warned me about âjumbyâ holes. Bad things lived in them, and they could be anywhere, under houses, under rocks, under our own front porch. I didnât know what âjumbiesâ wereâbut now I know they were zombies! I donât know how much the other kids were just into scaring me and how much they believed it themselves, but it sure worked. I remained nervous about dark places for many years, well into my adolescence. May as well attribute it to warnings about the jumbies.
We had a Haitian butler, Poli, who was very dark, very nice, and wore a white jacket with lots of buttons. Our having a butler wasnât as grand as it seemsâevery foreigner living in Haiti had servants. In a land of dire poverty, it was a way of helping. Broke as we were, we were wealthy compared to the Haitians.
We sometimes made our own ice cream as a special treat. Ice and salt were packed into a tub, and a mixture of cream and sugar was poured into a brass hopper in the center of the tub. A slotted plank called a dasher was inserted, and everybody took turns cranking it. And cranking. And cranking. My turn was pretty shortâno muscles and less patienceâbut I remember squatting there on the porch, turning the crank. The rock salt and ice were replenished as they melted away and leaked from the tub. After forever, as evening faded into night, the dasher stiffened until it would no longer turn. The whole thing was carefully disassembled, and the thick white treasure was revealed. Fruit was added, and we dug in. We all shared it, including the servants. Ice cream in the tropics! A miracle! Bon appetit!
After about half a year in Haiti, we returned to Westerly. Our stay was brief, and in late 1948 we traveled to Christiansted on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. On the way, we stayed overnight in Puerto Rico. The next morning, after a brief downpour, I saw a complete double rainbow. Wow! We ended up staying some days thereâinterisland flights were much scarcer than they are now, and my brother got sick, puking up some sort of bright red stuff with white things in it. Yecchh. He did recover, and from there we flew to St. Thomas.
I got up early the next morning and wandered unescorted down to the beach. Suddenly, three tracked vehicles, each with three or four laughing people aboard, came roaring across the beach and straight into the water and kept on going. I had no idea what Iâd seen, but when I reported it, I was told they were army ducksâpart boat, part truckâand they could operate anywhere. Wow ⊠I wanted one.
From there it was on to Christiansted on St. Croix, where we made our new home. âNewâ is a misnomer. It was a ramshackle old barely painted house with a wide wrap-around veranda and a series of rooms leading back to a semi-detached stone kitchen. A staircase led to the second floor, which also had a wrap-around balcony. Think atrium in todayâs world, but it wasnât roofed over. There was also a large, open courtyard with an enormous mango tree growing in the middle of it and a couple of coconut palms as well; I remember a native boy scampering up and cutting down the coconuts. By this point, money was really, really tight, and I remember being told later that we had gotten the house dirt cheap.
Money was so scarce that my dad used to hike up into the hills looking for birds to shoot. He also spear-fished from a craft called the SS Macallan, so named because it was made from a door with several rows of flat Macallan whiskey bottles held in place by chicken wire stapled to the frame to act as floats. My dad had it balanced so that if he leaned forward, it would glide into the crystal-clear depths, and when he tilted back, up she rose. He thought this was both convenient and a barracuda deterrent. He was never attacked, so perhaps he was right. Since my dad was a heavy drinker, he contributed a number of the bottles himself, and replacements were easy to find. These diving sessions were fun for him but mainly brought home food.
We did somehow acquire a donkey cart, painted yellow with bright green and red decorative silhouettes of palm trees, stars, and the like. With the cart came a cantankerous donkey named Donkey Oatey. My mother also had made a saddle out of canvas, and that was my introduction to riding lessons.
The donkey turned out to be important. My dad, always prone to fits of whimsy, immediately saw in it the possibility for fun, and promptly founded the St. Croix Jonkey Club, a parody of the New York Jockey Club. The Jonkey Club arranged for a series of races to be held on Washingtonâs birthday, February 22, 1949. It was the New York Jockey Club played for laughs. The âsteedsâ were, to say the least, sluggish. There was a six-furlong riding race, a cart race, and an obstacle race (six-inch fences, not six feet). Tin cups and ribbons were awardedâand my father founded a special trophy event, the Ambletonian Classic, a play on the Hambletonian Classic harness race. British journalist Evelyn Waughâs brother Alec attended and wrote of the event in one of his travel books. The Jonkey Club races were later written up in the National Geographic magazine, Life magazine, and other places.
The Jonkey Club races grew over the years, incorporating donkeys and riders from all three islands (St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas), adding a gala dance and more frivolity. They lasted at least twenty-eight years, giving people something to cheer about, look forward to, and laugh atâall while providing funds for organizations like the library and the chamber of commerce.
There were a few special treats during our time on St. Croix, such as a ride in a cabin cruiser over to St. John to a totally deserted beach with my dad and his friends, the Heinz family. I fell profoundly in love with their little gold-haired daughter, Star. I wasnât dumb enough to let on, but at four-plus years old, I must have amused the adults no end. I do remember eating bacon and peanut butter sandwiches in the boatâs tiny galley. Yum.
Another trip took us to Sandy Point. It was a long ride, bouncing along in a borrowed Buick convertible. Sandy Point was beautiful, wild, and totally deserted, with branches of purple-colored fan and other corals washed up on the coarse sandy strand. Now itâs a national wildlife refuge, and not hard to reach, but in 1949-50, it was quite the expedition. I recall my dad being warned of rip currents and barracuda. But the outing was unmarred by anything.
Early one misty morning Dad and I headed down to the harbor to watch a ship set sail. The vessel was a three-masted schooner used to haul freight from island to island throughout the West Indies, one of the very last of her kind. The captain had been drinking the night before and had wagered that his crack crew could get her under sail and out of harbor in fifteen minutes flat. Unfortunately, his crack crew was as hung over as the skipper, and they didnât make it quite that quickly. But as I watched, first one, then another, and then quite suddenly a cloud of canvas blossomed; she heeled slightly to the gentle breeze and ghosted out of the harbor. The skipper lost his bet (though not by much), and I gained a magical memory. No wonder Iâve been a sailor ever since I turned thirteen.
In Christiansted I played with the native kids and tagged along when they went diving for âcribbisheesâ (creveches, in French, crawfish to you and me). I was particularly fond of Herman, our maid Violaâs eleven-year-old son, but I got him into a great deal of trouble and learned a life-lesson at the same time. Our house came furnished, including a grandfather clock and a Seth Thomas mantel clock. Neither one was operational, and my dad spent endless hours working on themâand finally got them both keeping perfect time, bonging away the halves and the hours in close to perfect sync. I was fascinated with both clocks, but with the grandfather clock in particular. I loved to watch its stately pendulum swing back-and-forth, and I loved to watch the weights move down when it struck the hours.
One day when my parents were out, Herman and I were left alone in the house. I wanted to wind the clock, just as Iâd seen my father do. I knew where the key was kept, but couldnât reach it. Herman was tall enough, and I persuaded him to fetch it down for me. I put the key into its slot, gave it a good hard turn, andâclunkâthe clock stopped dead.
When my parents came home and my dad discovered the problem, he was furious, one of the few times Iâd ever seen him so angry. He asked what had happened, and I blamed the whole thing on Herman. My dad stalked out. Not much later, he steamed back in and told me to follow him. We went all the way to the back of the house, to the small, whitewashed stone chamber that served as Donkey Oateyâs stable. There my dad told me to take my shorts down and turn around. He removed the belt from his sarong and gave me two half-hearted licks. Then he told me in a voice like thunder â he was a bass â NEVER to lie and never to blame someone else for something I had done, especially servants, because they couldnât defend themselves.
I got the message. But in later years I had the devil of a time understanding why if lying was wrong, social lies were okay.
When I was about ten my mother tried to explain it to me, saying âwhite liesâ were acceptable, even good. I told her, âYou canât have it both ways. Isnât telling the truth more important than being nice?â
She grew angry with me, but could not answer the question. This kind of moral rigidity became a major factor in my youth and adolescence. I had no tolerance for ambiguity or ambivalence. On the other hand, I also learned at age five that blaming others for oneâs errors was simply not acceptable (except, of course, at the bridge table where itâs an art form). And though Iâve slipped up often enough, that rule has been a guiding principle in my life.
I really did like Herman and Viola. I donât know if it was before or after the clock episode, but at Christmas my parents gave me a special giftâa flashlight they had made themselves from a toilet paper roll, white adhesive tape, and wire. I couldnât wait to try it out! So a couple of days later, I woke up in the wee small hours, pulled on my shorts, grabbed the flashlight, and headed toward Violaâs tiny shack, which was maybe three hundred yards down the street. I was a little frightened but pressed on. There was the faintest band of color in the sky, what my parents later told me was the false dawn, and the stars shone bright. I knocked on the door, and Viola opened it. She took one look and said, âGet in here, boy, and get to bed.â So I did, piling into the same bed with Herman and at least two other kids. In the morning, just a few hours later, Viola fed me breakfast along with her brood, and marched me back up the street.
My parents, for some reason, werenât terribly upset, though they made it clear I was NOT to go out on my own, especially at night. I learned decades later that a policeman had seen me, and kept his distance until I got to Violaâs house and was let in. Then he hot-footed it back to my parents, woke them up, and told them where I was and that all was well. Wisely, they stayed put and let things play out. What an adventure for a little boy! And how kind everybody was to me. The memory of this daring adventure is warm today, and it was the first of many, many adventures.
My perpetual curiosity often got me in trouble, sometimes seriously. One night after dinner my mom and dad were in the living room. They had something brand new and a real treat: a jar of instant coffee. I wanted to look closely at the magic moment when water turned the powder into wonderful-smelling coffee. I leaned close â just as the houseboy poured boiling water down my back. I screamed, but it didnât actually hurt that much until later â third-degree burns, the most serious kind, which burns the nerve endings so you donât feel much right when it happens.
We had no car, but somehow one was summoned. I was hauled off to the local clinic, where dressings were applied, then was taken by ambulance across the island to hospital in the town of Frederiksted. There, various kinds of goopy, sweet-smelling salve were applied (nowadays grease is the last thing weâd use on such burns), and thick bandages wrapped my torso. They needed changing every few days. A day or two later I was considered out of immediate danger, but the risk of infection was very realâespecially in the tropical climate. The houseboy felt terrible, but since it wasnât his fault, he remained in our employ.
The healing process took a couple of months. As the burns healed, the nerves regenerated, though I had some permanent muscle loss and needed to sleep on very firm mattresses or with a backboard throughout my adolescence. I still bear the scars. The worst part was the itching. It was beyond bearing, and my mother would gently rub my back for hours trying to relieve it. To this day even a light stroke on my back is soothing and relaxing. I probably carry a lot of lifeâs tensions there.
My third-degree burns werenât the only problem we had in Christiansted. We were broke, and my mother got seriously ill with hepatitis; I donât know if they distinguished the various types of hepatitis in those days (I doubt it), but it was one of them. By seriously ill, I mean we nearly lost her. At one point her heart stopped, but adrenalin brought her back.
What follows is not something I remember, except for one small part of it, and it is something my parents didnât tell me until I was in my teens. They were concerned, they said, that I would be traumatized, which was why theyâd waited so long to tell me. Which shows how little they understood me.
While my mother was still able to come downstairs for a little time each day, she and my father started hearing footsteps running around upstairs. My dad would go up and check, making sure his two high-energy sons werenât out of bedâand we werenât, we were sleeping away just fine.
The footsteps continued for some weeks, and my motherâs condition deteriorated. One evening they heard someone coming down the stairs. My parents lookedâbut no one was there.
They tried to dismiss these noises as critters in the gutters or the working of old plank floors in the weather. But, my mom said later, they knew a childâs footsteps when they heard them.
At about this point my mother was bedridden for the duration. My father, not a churchly man, was in despair and went to talk to the parish priest down the street. âFather,â he said, âwe could use a little help around our house.â
âIf you are talking about exorcism, I will have nothing to do with it or with you.â
âExorcism!â My dad was aghast. âWhatever for? I was talking about prayer.â
âIâm sorry,â the priest replied, âI cannot help you.â
This part I do rememberâor at least the occasion. It was a Sunday afternoon. My dad and I were alone together in the living room. I was in a chair, and he was on the sofa reading a newspaper. I can see the green bottle of beer that stood on the coffee table and the large tin can into which he threw cigarette butts.
Suddenly, the childâs running footsteps were heard, starting back in the stone kitchens at the far end of the house. They ran forward, through the dining room and living room, right past my dad and me, across the verandah, down the steps to the street, and fell silent. Then I turned to my dad and said, âDaddy, who was that little girl who just ran through here?â My father had heard the steps but had seen nothing.
The footsteps were never heard again. In fact, after this my mother started to recover, as did my brother, who had contracted a mild case of the same disease. Not too long after, my dad received a royalty check, and things began to look up. He had a good start on his novel âThe Beautiful Bequestâbut my motherâs condition would not let us stay in the islands. It was time to leave.
Before we left St. Croix, we did learn the history of our house. The builder had been a skipper in the rum trade. After one voyage he got home roaring drunk and killed his wife and daughter. Then he killed himself. So thatâs why the house, big as it was, was such a cheap rental. It was haunted. I make no judgment here. I donât believe in ghosts. But, if all my parents told me in dead seriousness is true, maybe I should.
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