Read Online Edie by Jean Stein - Free Book Online Page B

East when she read it for the first time—I think she had the chicken pox, which she had caught from us, and she was stuck at my grandmother’s on Long Island. I found the letter she wrote him about it in a desk drawer in the study, and even though I was only thirteen at the time, I had the feeling that my father had shut my mother out.
    It was an unhappy time. My mother’s looks had changed. She’d had a mastoid operation in her late twenties, and in the course of it the doctor cut a nerve. At first the right half of her face was paralyzed. It sagged and her smile was very lopsided. Her eye rolled uncontrolably and she had muscle spasms. I remember trying to imitate it, to the horror of my governess. I didn’t think it was ugly, but it was pronounced, and it must have driven her in on herself terrifically. I never once heard her complain or saw her give in to it.

    Francis and Alice Sedgwick at Corral de Quati
     
    The symptoms abated eventually, but my mother wasn’t beautiful any more. She always looked nice, but she was heavy from so many pregnancies, and she wore her hair in a tight little permanent.
    Then there was a feeling at this stage of being pinched for money, of cutting corners. We children were dressed in hand-me-downs from our Eastern cousins, and we got very little for Christmas or birthdays.
    The only reason my parents had been able to buy Corral de Quad was because my grandfather had died. They couldn’t have bought it before; now they invested so much of my mother’s inheritance in land that they were land poor. Before my grandfather died, he had lost fifty or sixty million dollars in the Wall Street crash. He willed half of his remaining money—several million dollars—to my grandmother, the other half to be divided equally between my mother and her older sister, Molly. My grandmother changed the wI’ll so that she, my mother, and Aunt Molly got equal amounts. But my father always complained to Uncle Minturn that his father-in-law had died penniless, which is ridiculous but shows how disappointed my father was that there were no longer private railroad cars or rented castles in England.
    Owning a three-thousand-acre ranch was very important to my father. Because Babbo was a historian and never made much money, his family had always lived in borrowed houses, rented houses, little houses on big places. They had always been one step behind—always the poor relations. And my father wanted to live in the
big
house. He tried to buy the Old House in Stockbridge but the Sedgwick family wouldn’t sell it to him because they wanted to make a trust and have the house belong to the entire family. My father wanted the big house to himself.
    After my grandfather de Forest’s death, particularly after we moved to Corral de Quad, my father began to behave differently: he was only boisterous with guests. Around the family he was icy and remote. My mother became cautious and reserved. At the same time, they began opening up to different types of friends—ranchers from around the Santa Ynez Valley, artists from Santa Barbara, people here and there that they took a fancy to. They began adopting young couples. Often my father would have an affair with the wife. So by the time my youngest sisters, Edie and Suky, were born, my father was definitely fooling around.

7
     
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  My mother had a difficult time with the births of her last children, but she kept getting pregnant anyway. I know my parents expected to have another boy. My mother turned out to be allergic to anesthetics, and when Edie was born she nearly died. It was very close. It affected everyone. Babbo used to say that he had told the Lord in words of one syllable what he thought of his “baby system.” My father was afraid when my mother was having those last babies that she was going to die, but on the other hand he had begun to like the idea of producing a spectacular number of children. As for my mother, I have no idea why she went