THE PAST



Alice de Forest and Francis Minturn (Duke) Sedgwick on their wedding day, May 9, 1929

I

When they were young, in the 1930s, our parents divided the year between California and Long Island. They spent the summer months in Goleta, in the foothills west of Santa Barbara, at a place that had been a wedding present from our mother’s parents. They hadn’t wanted her to marry my father: she was nineteen and he was twenty-three when he proposed, and although he was very handsome and came of an old New England family, he had a history of nervous trouble. But she was determined, and eventually they gave in. The marriage took place in New York, at Grace Church, on May 9, 1929, and oh, how radiant they were as they stepped out of the church, the former Alice de Forest and her new husband, Francis Minturn Sedgwick, he in his cutaway and she in a satin dress with a veil of tulle and old lace, carrying her train and a big beribboned bouquet. They spent their honeymoon in California, at the place in Goleta, which even now, more than eighty years later, I remember as paradise.

The house stood—indeed may still stand—facing south in a vast sweep of landscape that descended from the Sierra Madre to the coast. In style it was Spanish: one storey, white stucco with a tiled roof, and built around a patio. Plumbago and trumpet-flower vines and scarlet bougainvillea covered the outer walls so you could hardly find the yellow front door, and the patio was filled with flowering shrubs that sent their fragrance floating in through the windows. Outside the living room there was a large covered terrace lined with ivy, and an open terrace above it where our parents sometimes slept on clear nights. That side of the house looked out over steep gardens and orchards of orange and lemon trees and beyond, across open countryside studded with stands of eucalyptus to the ocean and the Channel Islands. Behind the house there was a cavernous white barn that served as the garage, and built onto the back of it was our father’s studio, where they gave parties that we could hear from our beds in the house. From there the land rose to a tawny hilltop where our parents had built a tennis court and a pool, each in its green wire cage, as well as another cage enclosing a sandbox and swings. Farther on, almost out of sight, there was a rough riding ring with jumps and a little wooden cabin lined with blue ribbons our mother had won before she married. Now our parents always rode together. If we children were in the playground, we could see them go by in the distance and disappear toward the foothills that rolled, yellow and sage blue, all the way up to the mountains. The sky above was immense, full of buzzards wheeling high up, and once the morning fog burned off it was blue, always blue, because in that place it was always summer.

Bobby and I were born there, I in the summer of 1931 and he two years later; however, our mother was not to have another child in California until Edie came along, and meanwhile our sister Pamela and the next three—Minty and Jonathan and Kate—were all born in a different climate and another landscape altogether.

Until the war, we spent the rest of the year on Long Island, first at our mother’s family place in Cold Spring Harbor, where we stayed until Pamela was born, and eventually in a large white clapboard house of our own on a pond a couple of miles away. There we three older children lived with Sophie, our dour gray-haired German governess, on the third floor, in little irregular rooms under the eaves. The doors all opened onto a large playroom that contained a big wooden table for Bobby’s Lionel trains, some chests stuffed with toys and tools and games, and a golden-brown hobby horse with real hide and hair. All around, the walls were lined with low shelves full of books. I remember distinctly the different worlds evoked by the illustrations of Kate Greenaway and Arthur Rackham and Howard Pyle, but what I liked best was a set of St. Nicholas Magazine from the years 1910–1920 bound in large red leather volumes embossed in gold. I remember poring over the pictures—soldiers in jodhpurs and women in white uniforms standing beside ambulances, people in wooden boats hurtling across a frozen river, old ladies in long black dresses sitting on porches—trying to imagine what life might hold for me. There was a skylight over the playroom, but otherwise the house was dark, and in my memory the landscape outside was mostly dark as well. Blacks and browns and dull silver were the colors of the pond and the woods that rose from its margins, although in spring a queer pale green broke out on the trees, and the dogwoods bloomed.

Painting by Duke Sedgwick of the house in Goleta, 1930s

Painting by Duke Sedgwick of the view from the house, 1930s

The house stood on a wide sloping lawn between the pond and the road, which was out of sight behind a high gray cinder-block wall. Our parents built that wall to keep out the noise of passing cars, and even as a small child I was ashamed of it. I read English children’s books and I knew that walls were supposed to be made of brick or stone, and houses too, for that matter. The other thing I was ashamed of was our car, not the cars our parents drove but the one in which we were taken to the school bus. It was a pinkish-beige delivery van like the Dugan bread truck, fitted with pearl-gray vinyl seats. The other children came in station wagons with wooden sides, except for the Coes, who were driven all the way to school in a limousine.

The main thing I remember about that house in Cold Spring Harbor is all the rules. In our family the basic methods of child-rearing were disciplinary: rules, admonitions, criticism, shaming, and spanking were the degrees, and the rules concerned not only our behavior but also our manners and speech. Do as you are told. Don’t talk back. Ask “May I?,” not “Can I?” Don’t brag, don’t show off, don’t draw attention to yourself. Curtsy when you are introduced to a grown-up, look them in the eye and say, “How do you do,” never say “Hello.” Never address adults by their first names unless, of course, you are speaking to a servant.

The rules for table manners were endless: rest your left hand on the table, just the hand, not the forearm, never the elbow; hold the soup spoon parallel to your lips and dip it away from you; do not switch your knife and fork after cutting your meat. We learned to eat what was on our plates, because if we didn’t the plates would reappear at every meal until we did. Bobby and I dropped unwanted food behind the radiator, but Pamela put so many peas up her nose she had to be taken to the doctor.

There were rules for other eventualities as well. I learned that in public I should never let myself be seen entering or leaving a bathroom, and that I should always run the water so nothing I did could be heard. I also learned that it was wrong to begin a letter or even a paragraph with the pronoun “I,” and that I should always sign my name in my regular handwriting. No fancy signatures. Mainly, we learned to do as we were told and not to ask questions, particularly not where we were going or what was going to happen. “Wait and see” was the invariable response, even years later on the ranch, when we wanted to know where we were going to ride or whether we were going to town.

Then there were rules about language: we say “house,” “letter-paper,” and “trousers,” never “home,” “stationery,” or “pants.” All the children we knew called their mothers “Mummy”; no one said “Mommy” or “Mom.” They called their fathers “Daddy” or sometimes “Pop,” but we called ours “Fuzzy,” which was understood to be special, meaning something about him. Along with usage, we were taught pronunciation: not to talk through our noses, never to pronounce final Rs, and to say some words in a particular way. So when we moved to California for good, the other children in school would amuse themselves by asking me to say words like “orange,” “garage,” and particularly “squirrel,” which they pronounced “awrnge,” “grodge,” and “squirl.” And when I got to college a girl asked in front of a lot of people where I got my accent. I said I got it from my parents. She said her parents had a Yiddish accent, she had had to make up her own, and what did I think of that?

The house in Cold Spring Harbor had many levels, and so did the household. At the top was our father, who was the most inaccessible, in part because his interests didn’t include us and in part because he was gone all day. He would be driven to the station like everybody else’s father, wearing a dark suit and a coat and hat, but unlike them he didn’t go to an office. He went to his studio because he was an artist. Our mother was at home, but unless we got into trouble we mainly saw her at meals, except for supper, which we had at five-thirty. We could hear her during the day practicing the piano or talking on the telephone. After her mastoid operation went wrong, however, she began taking me with her when she went out to do errands or to see Dr. Wallig in Sea Cliff for electric treatments on her face. One side was smooth and drooping, so she only had half a smile, and from time to time her eyes rolled, especially the one on the droopy side. But nothing was ever said, and I am shocked now to realize how matter-of-factly we children accepted the change. The thing is, our mother’s self-control was such that there was absolutely no difference in her behavior. She was in her late twenties then, and she had been quite beautiful, a bit like Edie but more ladylike, and our father was so very handsome, so proud of his thick hair and fine physique.

We did see her if we got into trouble. Sophie was strict, and she could deal with manners and habits and ordinary misbehavior, but any real naughtiness was reported to our mother, who would lecture us and mete out minor punishments. In the case of egregious misdeeds and faults of character, however, she would shake her head and say that she had no choice but to tell our father when he came home. That meant hours of terror and abject behavior, because he never sent for us right away but waited until after our supper, after he had exercised and bathed and dressed for dinner, before spanking us. Three or four sharp smacks of a hairbrush on our bare bottoms, then he would comfort us and say it hurt him more than it did us. I say “us,” but it was usually me, because Bobby was diffident and kept to himself and Pamela was a very cautious and obedient child. I, on the other hand, was overeager and heedless, and to make matters worse, the instant I found myself in trouble I would try to lie my way out of it. It was not until late adolescence that I understood that the truth as I knew it to be was the only thing in the world I could count on.

Next in the hierarchy, but well below our parents, came Sophie, with whom we lived and had our meals. There was also a series of nurses called Nana for the younger children, but they stayed upstairs in the nursery, especially if there was a new baby. Then came the Scottish butler, William Kennedy, and his French wife, who was the cook. Her real name was Jeanne, but she was called Nancy because a previous employer had had another Jean on the staff. We didn’t really know Nancy then, because we weren’t allowed in the kitchen, but William served in the dining room and drove us to the school bus, so we knew him well. We also knew the Swedish housemaid, a frail and gentle old woman named Karen, who wore a pale green uniform with a white apron and had Thursdays off. We children were at the bottom, no question, and the reason I think Karen was on the same level is that she confided in me: she told me once that she earned sixty dollars a month. Nobody else told me much of anything except what I should and shouldn’t do.

There was one person who did talk to me, and that was our grandmother de Forest. We had known her always because when Bobby and I were small our family lived at Nethermuir, the de Forest family place, in an old farmhouse that stood across the lawn but out of sight from the big white house where our grandparents lived. I still have vivid memories of that time, two in particular: I remember being lifted out of my crib by my nanny and carried to the window to see a rainbow, and I remember I had an obsessive mistrust of adults; I thought I had to keep my eyes open all the time I was around them. But the place was beautiful. Both houses overlooked an inlet from Long Island Sound called Cold Spring Harbor, and while the farmhouse was modest, Nethermuir itself was three storeys high, with two lower wings, and terraces and gardens all around. After Grandpa died, which happened when I was seven, Grandma had to sell the place, and she had the big house torn down. She left everything else—the walled garden, the farmhouse, the brown shingled boathouse and its dock, and the huge barn where I was taken to visit a very old man named Lynch who had been the coachman in the days before automobiles. The place had belonged to de Forests for generations, and Grandma didn’t want anyone else to live in their house. My mother never forgave her. She grieved for her childhood home, but my father said he couldn’t understand how an intelligent man like Grandpa had lost so much of his fortune in the stock market.

After the house was demolished, all the land that bordered on Cold Spring Harbor was sold, and my grandmother moved up the hill and across the road to a formal brick house that was built for Mummy’s older sister Molly Duer, who went to live in Virginia instead. I came to know that house well, just as I came to know my grandmother, because I was sent to stay with her whenever I was sick, or whenever our parents went away, to protect the other children from contagion of one kind or another, germs or mischief. That was the way our parents looked at it. The way I looked at it, I got to have the experience of being a beloved only child.

My grandmother told me all kinds of stories about my ancestors, going back before the Revolution, and she loved to talk about her school. She had grown up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where her father, Charles Phelps Noyes, was in business, and instead of having her taught at home like other girls, her parents had sent her away to the Cambridge School for Girls. Her mother’s brother Arthur Gilman, who founded the Women’s Annex at Harvard, started that school with his wife to provide an education for their daughters, and Grandma spent three happy years there. I believe it is where she met her lifelong closest friend, May Tiffany. May-May, as she was always called, was the daughter of the decorative artist and designer Louis Comfort Tiffany, and she invited Grandma to stay at their country place in Laurel Hollow. Nethermuir was just up the road, and one evening Henry de Forest was asked to dinner. So that’s how she met Grandpa. He was nearly forty and already a prominent lawyer and philanthropist in New York, and she was twenty. Years later, I asked if anyone had told her anything before she was married. She said no, she had no idea, but she said on their wedding night Grandpa explained, and she smiled at the memory. She always sounded surprised and honored that he had chosen her, and sometimes she laughed about the difference between their fortunes. I already knew that one was not supposed to talk about money or status, but in her dignified way my grandmother managed to convey quite a lot. At home, instead, not much was conveyed. There I had to learn by observing and guessing, and a lot of the time I guessed wrong.

From our rooms on the top floor we older children could not hear what happened in the rest of the house, unless there was a new baby. Then we could hear harsh squalling, hour after hour. Our mother said that was how babies got their exercise. Sometimes we could hear guests arriving, or the roar of a dinner party, but nothing more because we went to bed early. We kissed our parents good night downstairs (we kissed them; they did not kiss us), and Sophie saw us up to bed. Before getting in, we had to kneel and ask God to bless our father and mother and one another and to take our souls if we died in the night. I don’t know whose idea that was, because we were not baptized until there got to be three or four of us. Then one spring day our great-uncle the Reverend Theodore Sedgwick, an old gentleman with a beaky nose, came from Connecticut, put on a robe with a billowing white garment over it, and christened us all in a batch on the terrace.

We had been going to church for a while by then, but it was a case of “Do as I say, not as I do,” because our parents never went, and once when I told Fuzzy that I was going to be the angel Gabriel in the pageant he laughed out loud. The plain white clapboard church, which the de Forest family had attended forever, stood diagonally across the pond from our house, and we walked there by ourselves. Sophie didn’t come because she was Catholic, but sometimes the dogs would follow us and pelt down the aisle, misbehaving until somebody put them out and made sure they stayed.

For as long as I can remember, our parents always had dogs. The ones I remember particularly from Cold Spring Harbor days are Woof, a lolloping creature that was half greyhound and half Great Dane, and Quichee, my father’s English bull terrier. Quichee was squat and white, with a muzzle like an alligator, and because he was always getting into fights, he usually had nasty puncture wounds that the vet painted blue. I was terrified of him and those holes in his skin. One time on the train to California he was recovering from a fight, and I was shut up in a compartment alone with him and told to wait there because my mother wanted to talk to me. After a while she came and brought a book with a pale green cloth cover that had birds and flowers incised on it in gold. Quichee was sitting there by the window and she sat down next to him and told me in a very roundabout way how babies were made, which she said was all very wonderful; then she stood up, confided that she was going to have a baby in December (I guess it was Jonathan, because I must have been seven or eight), and went out again, leaving me with the book and the dog. I was flattered and excited, and when Sophie came I burst out with what I had learned. It turned out I was not supposed to talk about any of it, including the baby.

Except for Quichee that once, the dogs did not ride with us in the railway car when we went to California. I don’t know how they traveled, but one time they got loose in Grand Central and raced around the tracks. Our mother had all the trains stopped until they could be caught. Perhaps the stationmaster would have done this for anyone, but we always assumed it was because Grandpa had been president of the Southern Pacific for a time and had his own private car, called the Airslie. Our family did not have a railway car, of course, but eventually there were so many of us that we had one to ourselves.

The trip took five days, but it was always broken in Chicago, where we would get off and have breakfast at the Blackstone Hotel while the car was switched to a different train for the journey west. I have no recollection of leaving Chicago, but I can still see in my mind an endless flat landscape dotted with wooden farm buildings and spindly windmills made of metal, and the continuous loop-loop-loop of telephone wires that stopped when we passed through a town and started up again right away as we left. The train would hoot and rattle through stations and past platforms, and it must have stopped at some of them, but the only place I remember clearly was in the middle of the desert. I don’t think there was any station there at all. It was just a sandy place where Indians crowded below our windows, holding up rugs and baskets and jewelry, and I remember one time Sophie bought a turquoise ring. After that the landscape would be dry and jagged for a day or two until we came to California; then there was the unspeakable joy of arriving in Santa Barbara.

I know our parents were happy there too, at least in the early years, because I remember them singing all the time and calling each other “darling.” They rode and they swam and they played tennis with their friends, who were in and out all the time, talking and laughing. The sun always shone, the air was always fragrant, and the vegetation seemed to be forever in flower, alive with butterflies and hummingbirds and large noisy bees. Even the food was delicious. We often had lunch out-of-doors, on the terrace or up by the pool, and quite often guests would come for a game of tennis and stay on. After lunch, if there were no guests, our mother would sometimes go calling in Santa Barbara, visiting soft-spoken older people who lived in large quiet houses, and sometimes she took me with her. I remember on the way to Montecito one day we passed a big park where groups of ragged men were sitting and lying about under the trees. I asked Mummy who they were and she said they were called “hobos” and that a lady was being very kind, letting them live in such a beautiful place. After that when a freight train passed I could sometimes see hobos hanging out the open doors, but I don’t recall asking any more questions. Nor did I think anything of it when dark-skinned men from Mexico were brought all packed together in the open backs of trucks to pick the fruit in our orchards.

The first I ever heard of politics was in Long Island in 1940, when Roosevelt was running for reelection again and Wendell Wilkie ran against him. Grandma wore a pin with Wilkie’s name on it, but I don’t remember anyone mentioning the subject at home. I did hear it discussed at school, where almost everybody was wearing buttons like Grandma’s and making fun of FDR and Mrs. Roosevelt and their dog Fala. (Grandma actually voted for FDR once, but she said that was only because Grandpa told her any child of Sarah and Jimmy’s would make a good governor.) Roosevelt won, and at school I began hearing about war. I had known about the Germans invading France, because that’s why Grandma had gone there on a boat, to a place called Pau, and brought her elderly aunt Serena Davenport home to live with her. I was impressed by my great-great-aunt: she was the widow of an admiral who fought in the Spanish-American War, and she wore stiff black dresses down to her feet just like all the old ladies in St. Nicholas Magazine. I had also heard that England was at war with Germany, although at home nobody talked about it. Life went on, and the following year, on December 6, my mother had another baby, a girl they named Katherine and wound up calling Kate, although people at the hospital thought she should be called Pearl because the next day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Then America declared war, and at school we began making patriotic drawings and singing military songs.

Sedgwick family, six children, in Cold Spring Harbor, spring 1942

At home our parents talked about their friends enlisting and going off to war. Uncle Minturn, Fuzzy’s handsome older brother, came to say goodbye because he was joining the air force and going to London. I am not sure how I learned that Fuzzy himself couldn’t get into the service, or that he was embarrassed when people looked at him, knowing they saw a healthy young man in civilian clothes. They couldn’t know that he had very bad asthma or that he had six children, which was one more reason, so they said. But now I realize there might have been something else: he had had a couple of nervous breakdowns, and that must have been in his records. His psychiatrist sent a letter of recommendation, but he was rejected anyway. I learned that some thirty years later, which is when I also learned that the same psychiatrist had warned my mother and father before they were married that they should not have children.

One dark morning that same winter, we older ones were sitting at the round table in the corner of the dining room having breakfast when Nancy suddenly came in all excited and told us Mummy and Fuzzy had bought a big ranch in California, with pigs and chickens and lots of cows, and we were all going out there to live. Sophie already knew, but no one had said anything to us. Nor did anybody tell us our grandfather Sedgwick, our beloved Babbo, was going to live there with us.

II

So it was that we found ourselves in the Santa Ynez Valley, over the mountains from Santa Barbara, on a ranch called Corral de Quati. The strange thing, given that everything was so very different from anything I had ever known, is that I have no recollection of arriving; we were simply there, on three thousand acres of tawny yellow tableland dotted with live oaks and brown-and-white Hereford cattle. The ranch was easy to find. You came off the road from Los Olivos and up a little rise, and the buildings were all right there, laid out around a large oval pasture: barns, corrals, and sheds on one side, the main house opposite, cottages for the men at either end. The house was low and L-shaped, with yellow walls and brown shutters and trim and a small flowerless garden with a picket fence. Outside the gate stood a clump of pepper trees and a wooden frame with a large bronze bell that was rung half an hour before meals to call us from the barns or wherever we were, and again when the meal was ready.

Duke and Alice Sedgwick on their new gray mares at Corral de Quati, 1942

The house was dead simple. It was built all on one level, and composed of enclaves. Our parents had their quarters in one corner, off the living room; William and Nancy had theirs in the opposite corner, off the kitchen; Minty and Jonathan and Kate lived with Sophie in the middle of the wing that faced the garden; and our grandfather Babbo lived at the end, where he had a large room next to the spare room. Beyond that was the bathroom, which he had to share with us older children, who lived outside because there were not enough bedrooms to go round. The three of us each had a little bunkhouse of our own, so placed that we could not see or hear one another, or in other words get into mischief. Bobby’s was by the back door to the bathroom, mine was over next to the road, and Pamela’s was way around outside the kitchen, probably so William and Nancy could hear her if she cried in the night. She was only six, and I seem to remember that she was unhappy, but I absolutely loved my bunkhouse. It measured some eight by ten feet and contained a bed, a bedside table, a dresser, a wooden chair, and a row of hooks to hang my clothes on. It had electricity—a light bulb hung from the ceiling— but no windows; instead, there were screens all round, so anybody could see in. At night, though, I could hear a whole landscape of sounds: coyotes and owls, all sorts of cries and rustlings, and in summer the raucous buzz of the katydids. Nobody could possibly have heard me if I’d called out.

That suited me just fine, and it showed how differently we were going to live now. So did our clothes: we children wore unironed workshirts and overalls or jeans, and brown lace-up shoes that were good for our feet, which our riding boots supposedly were not. On the whole we were pretty disheveled and not particularly clean, and it was clear we belonged to a different class from our parents, who always looked perfect. Fuzzy dressed like a cowboy, hat and all. In summer he wore clean pressed jeans with a wide belt and tight little blue T-shirts that showed off his muscular physique, and when it got cold, he changed to gabardine trousers and soft yellow chamois shirts. And always before getting on his horse, he would buckle on his big leather chaps. In contrast, our mother wore English riding clothes that she had made for her in New York: jodhpurs and low strapped boots and tweed coats or gabardine, according to the season. Although my father looked impressive on a horse, she was the one the cowboys admired. She was a really good rider.

Our clothes were not the only thing that was different: while Sophie kept an eye on the others, Bobby and I were completely unsupervised now except in the immediate presence of our parents. On the other hand, we were spending more time with them than we ever had; not only did we ride together for several hours every day, we had all our meals together, and after supper we gathered in the living room to listen while Fuzzy read aloud. I particularly remember Macaulay’s History of England because it went on for so long, and the stories of Damon Runyon, which made Fuzzy laugh so hard he had to put the book down. Another difference was that the atmosphere was jollier, largely because it turned out that Fuzzy could be a lot of fun, even if it was usually at somebody’s expense. Still, in my eyes the biggest difference was that Bobby and I could get away, and the minute we did, we could experience everything for ourselves.


Copyright © 2022 by Alice Sedgwick Wohl