Still Me Page 7

  I remember my father in the late fifties and early sixties as being both magnetic and unpredictable. Much of the time Ben and I basked in the glow of his interest and praise. He taught us to ski and played tennis with us patiently in the park. We used to lie down on gratings in the sidewalk and watch the subway trains roar by beneath us. I loved the trips back to Princeton in his red Volkswagen Beetle. It didn’t have a gas gauge, so my father would write down the mileage at each fill-up, and we would take turns guessing how far we could go before the next one. He always turned off the engine when he went downhill to save gas and would never take the New Jersey Turnpike because he could save eighty-five cents by taking Route 1. When we stayed with him we bought root beer to have after our naps and often had a glass of ginger ale in the evening, joining the grown-ups for “cocktails.”

  But then there would be unexpected moments of remoteness or rejection, when it seemed impossible to figure out how to get back in good standing. Later, as my independence grew and I headed toward a life in the public eye that neither of my parents could control, our relationship became increasingly complex. Once during my freshman year at Cornell, I drove over to his house in Connecticut for the weekend. He was very distant, and I had to spend most of the time talking with my stepmother. Then, at one point, I abruptly asked him, “Do you care? Do you care what happens to me?” And he said, “Frankly, Toph, less and less.” It was a pretty honest thing to say, it was certainly what I was experiencing, but that’s something you never forget.

  But I adored my father, and he did have a strong influence on me. I think, for example, that this is one of the reasons I am not religious. I went to the Presbyterian church in Princeton, mainly because I liked to sing in the choir. (I was bothered by the hymns, though: so many lyrics are about God the Father Almighty and the vengeance of his terrible swift sword. The image of a vengeful father who sits in judgment was disturbing to me. But the pleasure of flirting with sopranos and altos made going to church quite enjoyable.) Franklin avoided churches and had no use for religion. When he drove us home or to the train station on a Sunday, he would make disparaging comments about the people coming out of services. He used to call them sheep, and of course I would instantly agree.

  My father had a unique ability to give instruction in activities that he couldn’t actually do himself, and that included riding. I was allergic to horses as a kid and couldn’t get near one without wheezing. But I remember visits to a stable in Portland, Connecticut, and watching Alya and Brock take riding lessons. My father would stand at the ringside and quietly advise, “heels down,” “sit up straight,” “hands together,” “thumbs forward” as they passed by. He was not a rider himself, but he was born to teach.

  Yet he could be so much fun. Pa was six feet four, with chiseled features and broad shoulders to climb on. And because he was so athletic and young, he could play with us like an older brother. He could make life really magical. Even routine activities could be joyful experiences. We used to burn our trash out in the backyard, all five of his children gathered around tossing egg cartons and papers into the fire, feeling it was a privilege to be with him. When Franklin’s sun shone on you, the light was worth everything, and it wasn’t only because it was in contrast to the dark.

  He used to watch baseball with Mark after Brock and Alya were away at college. He was always against owning a television, but he finally dug up an old black-and-white one from someplace and put it in the attic, where it was usually freezing. This was his way of nearly not owning a television. He and Mark would go up there, wrap themselves in blankets, and watch baseball games together. And they would go fishing. That was their special activity. All the children had some unique relationship with him.

  I had my moments in the sun, too. Often he would compliment me for a paper I’d written in school. I was singled out for a short story I wrote when I was twelve, about a kid who wanted to commit suicide. Franklin praised that story and my writing to the skies. Sometimes he would read my papers out loud at the dinner table. Later he would come to see me perform. When I was sixteen he saw me as Beliaev in Turgenev’s A Month in the Country with the Harvard Repertory Company in Cambridge, and he was ecstatic about the performance. I was especially thrilled because the play was in his field of expertise, and I had expected him to be highly critical of the production. To my surprise, I was the man of the hour for an evening.

  When I was about thirteen I started learning the guitar and soon joined a rock band, called, for some inexplicable reason, The Remnants. But we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as leftovers; we thought we were extremely cool. We used to play at dancing school and at parties—fifty bucks for the evening, split among four of us. It was great fun; our standards were songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Lovin’ Spoonful, even the Turtles. I began by learning folk songs like “Kumbayah,” “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and “This Land Is Your Land.” One night I gave a little concert for Franklin. I played all my songs, and once again he was full of praise. He could hardly carry a tune himself, but he always liked my voice.

  One summer when I was nine and we were visiting him at my grandmother’s house in the Poconos, Pa asked me to row across the lake all by myself to go to the general store and get tobacco for his pipe. All the other children were there. The honor of being chosen for this mission was tremendous. I had money in my pocket and would get to row our fairly big rowboat more than a mile across Pocono Lake. Another moment in the sun.

  But the next night there was a square dance. I spotted a girl in a yellow dress. She was my first crush; I took a big shine to her and tried to be near her the whole evening. But Franklin teased me in front of the others about my attraction to her. With my father you could go from one extreme to the other very rapidly.

  Preparing for my big mission across Pocono Lake.

  Meanwhile in Princeton my mother did her best to cope with my brother and me as we became more of a handful. If I did something that disappointed her, she would burst into tears and say, “Oh, you beastly, beastly boy! Oh, you beastly, beastly boy!”—at which point I would calmly and rather arrogantly explain to her that I was not a beastly boy, which would make her cry even harder. It was cruel, I know.

  But much of my time and energy went into trying to be as perfect as possible. I thought this would set me apart from all the half brothers and stepbrothers who became a part of my life when my mother and father both remarried. My school shoes were always placed neatly in the closet. I used to hang up all my clothes and always made my bed, trying to do everything right.

  On the other hand, I took secret risks to see how much I could get away with: one of my favorites at age twelve was taking the family Rambler out for a spin when my mother and stepfather were away.

  We spent part of each summer at the New Jersey shore, in an old house at Bay Head that had been in my stepfather’s family for four generations. One time—I think it was the summer I was thirteen—I sneaked over to a neighbors’ house on a dare and took a bottle of vodka from their liquor cabinet. My friends and I mixed it with 7UP and chugged away. I got absolutely clobbered and ended up passed out on the beach, right at the edge of the water. I woke up at about ten-thirty as the tide was coming in—I was being gently rolled from side to side by the waves. I staggered back to the house feeling absolutely awful, crept up the back steps, and almost made it to the second-floor bathroom before I heaved everywhere.

  I crawled into bed, but the next morning I was supposed to sail in a very important Blue Jay regatta for the championship of the season. Somehow I got up on time and made it downstairs by 8:30. My mother was at the stove cooking bacon, a terrible look on her face. Oh God, the smell of that bacon. I knew that this time I’d been caught. There was an excruciating silence as I tried to steady myself and make a piece of toast. Finally she said, “I’ve been thinking about how to punish you. First of all, you’re going to go next door to the Browns and apologize and pay them back. Then you go straight to the boat and race.
” Feeling the way I did, getting in that Blue Jay was the last thing I wanted to do. But I did it. I made it there and did it. I certainly didn’t win, but I almost appreciated my mother’s punishment as an exception to the rule.

  Later in life I gained real respect for my mother. She stopped letting people take advantage of her and began to come into her own. She always had an interest in writing and finally did something about it, eventually becoming associate editor of Town Topics, the local paper in Princeton. She bought her own house and at the age of sixty took up rowing despite a lifelong history of asthma. Today she is a serious competitor. In the winter she trains on an ergometer; in the spring and fall she can be found rowing the Head of the Charles, or out on the Schuylkill, often coming back with a trophy. She takes it as seriously as I took flying an airplane, sailing a boat, or competing on horses.

  But as I grew up I felt torn between my parents’ quite different and opposed worlds. My father’s house was filled with books and visiting intellectuals and stimulating conversation; my mother and stepfather’s comfortable house often seemed dull by comparison. I began to spend more time with other families who lived in the neighborhood.

  Fortunately for me, I always loved school. I learned to read very quickly, and from the age of five I remember wanting to be bigger and older and more advanced. I used to beg Miss Griffith, the first-grade teacher, for homework to do because big kids had homework. I wanted to come home and say that I had to do my homework and go upstairs and have busy things to attend to. Ben was a lot brighter than me, and I guess I was trying to stay ahead of him. I had a strong compulsion to meet all my responsibilities, both real and imagined.

  My mother’s relationship with Tris Johnson had begun late in 1958. He had grown up in Princeton and worked for Laidlaw & Company, a local investment firm. (My father once explained to me that it was acceptable to be paid wages for a day’s work but to profit from the stock market was morally wrong.) Tris had four children of his own and was divorced. Those children—Tristam Jr. (known as Johnny), Tommy, Beth, and Kate—lived in Utah with their mother, Bunny Miller. Tris started to visit my mother from time to time. He had a part interest in the family house in Bay Head and had spent summers there himself as a kid. We all began to go there after my mother and Tris were married in June 1959.

  Tris and Barbara’s wedding in June 1959.

  Tris was generous and relaxed, a kind man who always wanted the best for us. He thought it would be better for Ben and me to go to the private school of his childhood—Princeton Country Day, down near Carnegie Lake behind the playing fields of the university. In the fall of 1961 I started in first form, the equivalent of fourth grade. I loved it. On Monday nights we went to father-son carpentry workshops, where we’d build little birdhouses together. Tris came to watch my soccer and hockey games. I developed a great affection for him. Yet this was complicated by the fact that what I wanted most was my father’s approval.

  Through Tris came a lot of fun things for a kid—peewee hockey, summers at Bay Head, a little duck boat to learn to sail. Franklin would have coached us, drawn diagrams about wind direction and sail trim, would have shown us how to coil ropes properly. Tris let us go out on our own, crash into docks, flip the boat over, run aground, and gradually get the hang of it. By the time I was twelve I had graduated to Blue Jays and was on the match-racing team for the Bay Head Yacht Club. My desire to win turned me into something of a tyrant, however; I could never restrain myself from screaming at my crew out on the racecourse. After one particularly successful season, I was awarded the coveted Seamanship/Sportsmanship Award, which is given to the outstanding junior skipper of the year. Obviously the officers of the club didn’t know what really went on in my boat. But the other kids did. I went up to accept the prize at the Labor Day Ceremonies and received only a polite smattering of applause. I remember turning beet red and breaking into a sweat as I suddenly realized I didn’t deserve this recognition. I never raced a sailboat again.

  At school I was one of the few kids who were successful in both academics and sports. Often you’re in one camp or the other, but I was on the honor roll and I could play soccer, baseball, tennis, and hockey. The sports made me popular with the “cool” kids, whose respect I really sought, but I also wanted to be academically on top so my father wouldn’t be disappointed in me.

  So I put a lot of pressure on myself. My mother would say later that I was always straining to be older than I was. It was as if I were trying to race through my childhood, to get it over with. I remember this desire from as far back as the age of six, wanting to read more difficult books, not only because the older kids did but because my father was always surrounded by books, always studying, always writing. Later on the scholar’s image became problematic because I wasn’t very good in math. But for many years I excelled academically, and that gave me a certain standing with my father, which I needed.

  Ben started PCD a year after I did, and we entered one of the best periods of our relationship. We both played baseball for the Hulit’s Shoe Store Yankees; we skied together on a little hill with a rope tow just outside of town; we rigged up an intercom between our two bedrooms and checked in with each other day and night. One summer we went to a day camp, where we both loved archery and building mud forts down by the stream.

  This was also about the time we had some goldfish. But Ben and I decided it was wrong to keep them in captivity, and we should set them free. So we carried these goldfish in their bowl a couple of miles down to Carnegie Lake. We stood on the bridge on Washington Street and had a little ceremony. We told the fish, “Go. Be free. Swim. Live. Enjoy your life. Good-bye.” Then we turned the bowl upside down, sending the fish to an instant death. Their little bodies floated on the water. We were so confused.

  We rode our bikes to school every day through the town. That was both exciting and dangerous; we rode without helmets right out on Route 206. I nearly got killed by a truck riding home from school one day. I had to fall over onto the side of the road to avoid being hit. I came home with my arms and legs all banged up and scraped from landing hard on the pavement. Still, we were allowed to ride to school by ourselves. My friends and I used to race each other through the university campus down to Princeton Country Day. I savored the independence, the fact that we were given so much freedom.

  I loved peewee hockey on Saturday mornings, and then going over to Deebs Young’s house to skate on his pond. I remember one day in February 1964—I would’ve been in seventh grade—going to his house to have breakfast and skate, and seeing on the front page of the paper four really weird-looking guys with strange haircuts coming down the steps of an airplane. The Beatles were arriving for The Ed Sullivan Show. We thought, What freaks! We all had crew cuts in those days. We went to a barber named Bob Chaty down in Palmer Square, and if Ben and I didn’t get our hair cut short enough, my mother would send us back. But I always had my hair cut exactly the way I was told to.

  My mission was never to give anybody cause for complaint. When I was in fourth grade at PCD, our reading teacher, Wesley McCaughn, taught us to love stories. He would record them in a sonorous, Walt Disneyish voice, then play the tapes in class. We would sit there enthralled by the way he told a story. Later that love of storytelling informed my love of acting. On one of my report cards he wrote, “Would they were all cut from the same cloth.” I cherished his words, because they validated all my efforts to excel.

  Then one day in the spring of 1962, when I was nine, somebody came over to PCD from the Princeton Savoyards, an amateur group that put on Gilbert and Sullivan operettas once or twice a year. She asked if any of us could sing and would like to try out for a production of The Yeomen of the Guard. I shot up my hand and went for the tryout. I was cast with grown-ups over at McCarter Theater, the big thousand-seat theater that had been built in the twenties to house productions of the Princeton Triangle Club. I was given the small part of a townsperson. It was my first time onstage, and it was intoxicating.

 
It was one thing to be a good student-athlete, but acting was even better. I even got to miss school for rehearsals. McCarter had a state-sponsored program of student matinees, usually at 10:30 in the morning or 2:30 in the afternoon. I would get to pack up my books and walk out of the classroom for a performance. I was special.

  Then I started to act at PCD. When I was eleven or twelve, we put on a production of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution, and, of course, all the parts were played by boys. I was cast as Janet Mackenzie, the sixty-five-year-old housekeeper in the mansion where the murders take place. I was outfitted with a gray wig and a dowdy Scottish tweed housekeeper’s suit. At one point in the play, Janet Mackenzie fiercely defends her actions, insisting that she’s not guilty. On opening night, as I was finishing a heated exchange from the witness box, I got applause from the audience. Right in the middle of the first act. It went straight to my head, and I thought, This is wonderful.

  I found every excuse I could to get down to the theater. Even before they started casting me in plays, I went down and wired dressing-room speakers for sound and worked on the light board. It was an old-fashioned one—sometimes you had to reach out with your foot to get one handle and stretch out an arm to get another one, and I was tall enough to do it. I would ride the curtain, too, and I loved that. Groups like the Joffrey or the Pennsylvania Ballet would come through, and I often had my eye on some ballerina. The quickest way to make an impression was to ride the curtain. I pulled the curtain down, then, in order to get it started the other way, I rode the rope that pulled it up as soon as the curtain hit the floor. I’d sail fifteen, twenty feet into the air, and then my body weight would start it down again. The girls in the corps de ballet often looked over to watch my acrobatics. After that it was easy to start a conversation.