PART II SECOND GENERATION   Chapter 6   A New Marriage: Dr. Donald Macomber and Harriet Seaver Macomber and three … no, four … no, five … no, six children in West Newton, Massachusetts    TThe army sent my father home from the front eight months after he had gone overseas when he again developed an almost fatal form of pneumonia, worn down by day-and-night operating at a field station in a tent just behind the front. Recuperating at home, he brought his new family to Journey's End for the summer.   ... Daddy's home at last! For the first time, the whole family was to be together: his blonde young daughter now four and a half, his chubby twin baby sons, a year old the previous March, my mother and himself. It was a perfect place to recuperate in. ......  Looking at the snapshots taken of my parents, it is evident that they are deeply in love! Bearded, smiling, he kneels on one overall-clad knee holding out a cabbage to her, his other hand clasping his felt hat over his heart! She smiles with humor and pleasure, holding out her hands to receive his gift. His expression in the picture taken with the cow Yum-Yum suggests the pleasure he is experiencing as a farmer. It is a brief, romantic prelude to what is to become the busy, demanding life of a doctor - and of a doctor's wife!   Katie writes of this post-war period in the lives of my parents,   In the fall I began my sophomore year. Harriet had a farm near Northampton - she had had the children there for the summer. Donald, my brother, returned, and he and Harriet came over to visit me at Smith.   Harriet's mother had given the young couple a house at 15 Temple Street in West Newton as a wedding present, and my mother had furnished it and moved in with Jeanne and the twins while my father was still overseas. It is to this house that they now returned with all three children from their idyllic honeymoon-cum-summer vacation at Journey's End.   The House at 15 Temple Street    Katie's account of the need for secrecy concerning the marriage makes it sound as though the initiative for this decision came from my mother's mother. It seems to me more likely that the initiative came from both families, and stories my mother has told me of her relationship with my paternal grandmother make my account even more plausible, in spite of Katie's belief. My mother once told me, for example, that my father's mother marched into the house at 15 Temple Street, walked right into the dining room, opened the silver drawer in the sideboard and calmly extracted all the flatware from it, announcing that it was Ethel's silver, not hers - and took it back to 23 Prince Street. It may even be that the letter written to my grandfather reproduced above represents my mother's awareness that her presence in her son's life was an unwelcome one. No word of any of this survives in the contemporary accounts, of course.   They were continuing to spend vacation time at the Farm in Ashfield. Over the summer, the three children have become more independent, as these images, probabhly taken by Harriet's former partner Ethel, seem to show. But things were beginning to change.   ..m Break for freedom? No, the bold twin gets a reminder. Or is it the timid one being comforted for being left behind? And am I hidden behind that maternal back?   The family of three was shortly to grow. My mother had become pregnant, and I was born a few days before Christmas, 1919. She describes her new life as follows:   He was a very busy doctor and I had to learn the diplomatic art of handling his home telephone calls, and keeping professional secrecy. It was still the day of plentiful servants. As our family grew from three to six, I gradually added one and then two maids to our menage, not realizing that perhaps I was adding an equal amount of trouble along with their help.   My father continues:   During the next few years I took over a gradually increasing share of the work at 321 Dartmouth Street, while carrying out research at the Harvard Medical School on the dietetic causes of sterility. In the meantime, Mary was born in December, 1919, and later Billy in 1921, and finally Peter in 1923.   So, without fanfare, my life is launched out into the world, lumped along with the births of my two younger brothers! Now it's up to me to struggle with the account - but I still cannot see myself clearly apart from the lives of my parents, and must struggle to separate my own memories from theirs. It's not an easy task. Throughout my childhood I would beg my mother for family stories, and she clearly loved to tell them. It formed a real bond between us, which I also loved. These stories have perhaps acquired too much significance for me in my adult life, especially the ones she told about the infancy of my siblings and myself. For me, these family myths have been confusing because they function mentally as real memories, when in fact they are not. They are my mother's. This is especially true of her stories of my infancy. I suppose my earliest memories are not unlike other people's - scenes taken out of a context one senses but does not remember, interspersed with stories one has heard from the adults who were there at the time. It's sometimes hard to distinguish among the scenes, to know which is a true memory and which an "acquired" one.   ......   My mother's face used to light up when she told me about my earliest infancy. She says I had a "fountain" of black hair - as evident in the images above. I do have a sort of recollection of the utter bliss of nursing - and the size of my mother's breasts as they filled my field of vision. I was told that I was born on December 21st, 1919, at the Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain, but naturally I don't remember being there. I have heard from my mother that another Mary Macomber was born at that same hospital on or around the same day as I was, and I've sometimes had fantasies, when I was feeling bereft, that the nurses had changed us around - but I actually do know better, as I look quite a bit like my mother. The other Mary has come into my speculating occasionally, however, and I've sometimes wished I could have known her. It is, after all, pretty unusual to have a namesake born on (or about) the same day in the same hospital. One wishes the significance of such an unlikely event could be made plain. But, like so many of these early "memories," this is hearsay. I know a couple of people who actually remember their own births, but I don't.   What I have gotten back about that first year of my life is fairly dramatic. Like her own mother's, my mother's milk "ran out" when I was about three months of age, and, like herself and both of her little baby brothers, nothing was found to feed me which I could tolerate. Like them as well, my weight dwindled away to starvation level before a suitable formula could be found. By the time they discovered "Klim," a powdered milk from which the lactose had been removed, I was pretty close to kwashiorkor, sticklike limbs, big eyes, swollen belly and all. My mother has told me that they called me their "starving Armenian," referring to the dreadful atrocities and wholesale slaughter of the Armenians inflicted by the invading Turks at the time, amounting to virtual genocide.   I did, however, get back a highly subjective and vividly dramatic experience of what it might have been like to be that frightened, angry baby, suffering from what Freudian analyst Melanie Klein called "infant paranoia." This occurred during an allegedly supervised LSD "trip" I took in London in 1968 with an American psychologist:   The first intimation of something strange happening was when I looked at my hands and noticed that they had become shriveled claws, the claws of an old witch. I realized to my amazement that I had become an old witch, complete with demonic laugh and evil spell, the entire Halloween image! This horrible old crone I had suddenly become had a disgusting habit: she loved to eat babies! Their little heads to her were lollypops, sweet, crunchy, delicious! As she ate, the saliva dripping from her pointed chin, she would laugh her evil cackle of pure joy! I was appalled. She ate even their excreta, and all sorts of filth, loving it!   Then without warning, this image turned itself around and I was the poor baby being fed this same filth by this horrible old hag. How could she? And where had my lovely, milky brown cow Mummy gone? What had happened to my world? I was at once the old shit-eating, baby-eating hag and the baby whose whole universe was food, whose universe had now turned to shit, brown torrents of it running downstream carrying along carcasses of dead rats, tree limbs - a flood-saturated world of pure death.   The full extent of this paranoid vision of my infancy based on the shared consciousness between my mother and my baby self most assuredly had not been available to me until this "bad trip," and of course I have no way of knowing how authentic this re-creation might be. It is, however, characteristic of my memories of these early years in being intensely vivid,   A kind of "love and death" atmosphere must have exuded from my mother's aura, I think. I can remember sitting on the stairs in my nightgown when I was supposed to be in bed listening to my mother play the piano - especially a lovely song of Cécile Chaminade's and Schumann's "Traümerei," both of which she loved - and feeling an acute belly pain of sadness and sweetness combined, and a kind of longing for the sweetness of contact with her body and pain of the deprivation.    It is this mingled "love and death" feeling that for me is the epitome of what women's fate in life was at that time, as transmitted to me by my mother's own feelings - the pain of that strength of natural sweetness and vigor, perhaps, trapped in a life of obedience, guidance and drudgery in the service of domesticity. It becomes complicated by the fact of motherhood, because the fetus spends its nine months surrounded, embued by that pain-infused sweetness, that unfulfilled longing that is her daily experience. She may not even see it in herself. Doesn't matter. It's what her soul swims in, and it is part of the common consciousness, the inwardness that she and the child within share.   Writers like Poe capture that love-and-death vector so vividly, it becomes easy, almost inevitable, that the girl child (me) become addicted to its evocation - and in adolescence it becomes transmuted into the sweet pain of hopeless crushes on older males and females! It's easy to detect in another female who knows the experience like a Tchaikovsky or a Rachmaninov lament in her belly! Very Slavic. It is so romantic as to be almost irresistible, after an entire childhood addicted to the sweetness of hidden pain and longing.   I remember acutely how passing through settled neighborhoods at twilight, especially in December close to my solstice birthday, caused a great surge of such painful feelings of longing! Love and death equally romanticized. George Eliot suffered from "it" in such intensity whenever they were in London that she wrote about the yellow wallpaper in her bedroom, where she spent her time ill and depressed, only well when they were in Italy (I did a paper on her when I was in graduate school in Texas). William and Henry James' sister - Alice, I think - spent her entire life in bed! Lydia Languish and chlorosis, decline. Mary Baker Eddy finally went to faith healers and one in particular, a hypnotist, as I remember, to overcome this spell - and went on to found Christian Science, based on her own healing process. Her autobiography is fascinating!   I'm sure male rejection and discount has a lot to do with the perpetuation of this female experience, but it was directly transmitted by mothers to their girl children. It was solemnly categorized by the medical progression as "hysteria." I heard a piece on NPR a couple of years ago about the popularity of mechanical devices in doctors' offices for inducing orgasm via clitoral stimulation as a very effective cure (if renewed regularly!) for this "hysteria"! All part of the same picture, I believe.   I have wondered if this earliest experience of intrauterine depression might have been part of why neither Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton seemed in the end able to throw off the negative influences of their nay-saying mothers. Morris Netherton, an MD in California who practices Past Lives therapy, writes about the "shared consciousness" experience that acts like a command for the growing baby inside - sometimes very explicitly. This whole subject has fascinated me for years.   My early infant depression and ambivalent rage seem to have left a mnemonic residue of uncertainty on my part as to what actually happened in my early years, and what I have imagined. Thus, I have a memory of sitting in my high chair on a screened-in porch being fed by my mother - but this memory is "contaminated" by a Jessie Wilcox Smith illustration of just such a scene! In fact, there may even have been a copy of the picture framed on my nursery wall. And it blends in with another memory, this one given to me by my mother later on, of a scene in which I am sitting in the lap of her close friend (and erstwhile lover), my "aunt" Ethel Freeman, who is still unmarried. I am touching the bright blue buttons on her white blouse, calling each one "bucky." I do have an independent visual memory of such blue buttons, which are a bit like small stones and of a vivid blue color like the intense sky blue of "donkey beads," which I love to wear! I am told that our family name for her became "Bucky" by association with these beads.   Other pseudo-memories which have perhaps acquired too much significance for me in my adult life my mother gave me proudly, as though their place in my mind would be necessary guidelines for a time when I would be raising children myself, following the instructions of a doctor who, like his pediatric colleagues, believed religiously in the two principles of child-rearing: careful diet and scientific regulation of all aspects of the child's daily routine! They reflect the era of "scientific" child-rearing in which I grew up - and became a kind of quasi-religious backdrop to that time for all six of us! My mother took pride in the fact that she had toilet-trained me for defecation by the age of three months by following the procedures outlined in her baby book. Knowing the child's daily habits for moving his bowels, one had ready a soap stick whittled from a bar of Ivory soap which one then inserted into the baby's rectum, holding it there until the baby began to grunt, signaling the urge to defecate, at which time one sat him (or her) on a small potty set on a table, with his little back braced against one's belly and chest until the desired bowel movement was accomplished.   I certainly can't prove that the constipation I suffered from for many years before working with a couple of Reichian therapists &endash; which involved breathing deeply and expressing feelings physically by yelling, pounding the bed and assuming postures that involved prolonged bodily tensions, set me free. Nor can I prove that my oldest son Bill's diverticulitis might have anything to do with the fact that my mother's influence induced me to subject him to the same bowel training at an equally early age! But I do speculate on a possible connection, especially since my other four, who were raised under the influence of Dr. Benjamin Spock, have no such difficulties.   This same baby book, which I now own (perhaps a little like the abused child who saves the implement by which he was abused and then uses it on his own child!), was written by the Chief of Staff at the Children's Hospital in Boston during the twenties, Dr. Richard Smith! It gives careful instructions for all the scientific procedures necessary for a mother to follow in order to rear a successful child. These include stiff Bristol board cuffs to prevent thumb-sucking, "thigh-spreaders" to prevent masturbation, a strict caveat against feeding a baby irregularly, a strict four-hour schedule being advocated, and an equally strict caveat against picking up a crying baby, because of the danger of reinforcing his crying by rewarding it. There was, of course, very little mention of breast-feeding, but a lot about boiling baby bottles carefully, many warnings about "germs" and the danger to the baby's life by exposure to them. Already the practice of breast-feeding had become equated with working class or immigrant cultural patterns, and was being abandoned by many middle class women, usually with the approval of their doctors!   These were also the days during the early nineteen-twenties of the experiments of John Watson, the Pavlovian behaviorist, and his classical study of "little Albert and the rabbit" in which Watson first conditioned Albert to fear the rabbit by associating his appearance with a loud, frightening noise, and then de-conditioned him by reintroducing the same rabbit at a very gradually decreasing distance, and with fascinating toys as pleasing associations instead of the loud, disturbing sound! By this rubric, young children were to be regarded primarily as bundles of reflexes, of "S-O-Rs" (stimulus-object-response), the "O" being the child. One was to exercise one's rational will to avoid (lower-class female) behavior patterns such as the urge to keep one's new baby with one in bed (because of the danger of "overlying" him as - allegedly - so often happened in working class families), or the urge to pick him up and feed him at the breast to soothe him when he cried, a practice which was alleged to turn perfectly docile babies into spoiled monsters!   Other no-no's included allowing him to wear diapers until he was ready to potty-train himself, the use of a pacifier to keep him from crying, and, later on, the giving of candy for the same purpose! The myriad dangers of "spoiling" a child were drummed into the new mother's ears, all tied in, I believe, with the new emphases on science and hygiene, and and tied in with (unacknowledged) prejudice against working class women and their alleged carelessness for the lives of their babies, such carelessness being exhibited in the resort to these "unscientific," "unhealthy" patterns.   My mother's own natural parenting skills had been honed to an even keener edge by her marriage to a doctor who, like his pediatric colleagues, believed religiously in the two principles of child-rearing: careful diet and scientific regulation of all aspects of the child's daily routine! In her later reminiscences, she was to write:   Our children have done us the unspoken compliment of bringing up their families on much the same principles that they grew under themselves. They all have the habit of good manners, they do not feel that the world is their oyster, but that one gets out of it about what one puts in. They earn their fun and their parents' love and approval by good behavior. And there are no eating problems! The rules are simple: small helpings but an unlimited number, clean your plate or leave the table (without dessert, and without comment), no arguments, no recriminations, no coaxing. No between-meal snacks, if the main meal was unfinished, no concentrated sweets or cake, (except the birthday sponge cake) no water insisted upon; rather satisfy their thirst with milk or orange juice at any time of day. We have never known this approach to fail, but are pained by the constant sight of whimsical, "picky" eaters among children brought up on the "What-do-you-want" system, an outgrowth of demand feeding.   But this ideal regimen for child-rearing also had its seamy side. A year or so before she died, my mother told me how she had been advised to "cure" my sister Jeanne of the temper tantrums she had begun exhibiting after losing both her darling mother and the indulgent care of her adoring aunt and grandparents! She said that, feeling at a loss as to how to handle the rages, she consulted with her pediatrician (and quite likely her new husband as well!), and was told, "The next time that happens, run a cold bath and drop her into it fully clothed. They will stop!" They did. Jeanne developed polio when she was somewhere around that age, and was left with weak musculature on the right side of her face, so that her smile was crooked, although not disfiguring. I've wondered if there might have been some inner connection between the two events, especially knowing my father's impatient callousness with the emotions of young children!   She also described to me the winning of a battle with me at the age of a year, give or take a couple of months. This story opens with a scene in which I am in my playpen, and clearly growing bored with my toys, which I began throwing out onto the floor. Asking me if I wanted one of them back, I wept copiously, stretching out my hands for it. She picked it up and held it just out of reach, saying, "Say please." I continued to scream for the toy, doubtless with the intent of taking it and throwing it onto the floor again, being bored with my confinement in the playpen! She continued to hold it just out of reach, saying over and over, "Say please." She tells me that this Mexican standoff went on for the better part of an hour, at which time I gave in, said my hiccuping "P'ease" and received the toy as reward. I can only speculate about what I did with it, but I doubt that I threw it out again, probably being too exhausted to do much of anything except sit.     Several of the tiny pictures taken during this period show my sister Jeanne and me hugging each other. She was four years older than I was, and we were good friends. In the one above I am clutching a doll. This was a very fancy doll with real hair and handmade clothing brought to me by Bucky from a trip to Europe and played with only in her presence, then removed again when Bucky went back home. Her name, for this reason, was Visitor. Her specialness was finally rather marred when Bucky left me alone with her during a trip to her family's house. Evidently I got hold of a pair of scissors, and when she rejoined me, I was busily cutting off the doll's curls! When Bucky asked me, somewhat horrified, what I was doing, my reply was, "I'm cutting off the knobs."   I expect she forgave me. At any rate, I have no memory of reprisals, although I'm not sure I got to play with her again - certainly not alone! I have a tiny picture of myself* striding vigorously across the field at Journey's End with a doll tucked under my arm (it is clearly not Visitor, being bald and unclothed) - and another of me with my doll gazing across Cape St. I love the implied independence in those tiny pics!   ... * Actually, I have no proof that this was indeed myself in these snapshots. She could have been Frances Casey, whose family had lived at the farm during several very severe winters during the period between 1909 and 1917, and whom my mother took on as a ward. The Casey family was one of my other's "clients" as a social worker in Boston. They were an Irish family with many children. Mr. Casey was an alcoholic and the mother burdened by the care she couldn't give her children. I also have a pastel (below) by Bucky of Frances sitting near the great hearth in the living room, so I know she was there during the summer as well. It is still there, lovingly rebuilt by my son Tom after too many of the old bricks had begun to crumble. Move to Chapter 7    Write me at   maryskole@aol.com