Bit by bit, in emails, Lyndie shares fragments of the “every-which-way jumble of recollection” that suddenly floods in unbidden, “in full Technicolor,” after I have asked about something else.
“Do you know I can draw or describe every detail of the rental house on 26th St. we lived in till 1945? The upstairs bath had green walls, black and white hexagonal tiles, and a big claw-footed tub, also green. The back porch had an icebox supplied with a big block of ice each week by a man with huge tongs over his shoulder. Easily recall those tongs, 80 years later.
“Another man dumped coal down a chute into our basement. The Jewel Tea man and the Fuller Brush man came by a lot. And a man who had a little wheeled cart for sharpening scissors and knives. The milkman delivered milk 3 times a week. The cream on top was for coffee and tea. We had to wash the bottles for return.”
The bay window had a view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge. The kitchen had a skylight. None of this is especially noteworthy, except for the memories sparked by that skylight.
It was 1943 – wartime. Her stepfather, who was ineligible for military service and was on Civil Defense duty, would sometimes rush off at night.
“It was dark, with mattresses up against the windows, black-outs, sirens screaming. Sometimes my baby brother howled. My mother was terrified the Japanese (we were forbidden to say “Japs”) would spot the pilot light on our cookstove, under the skylight in the kitchen, and drop a bomb right through, so she blew the pilot light out. Before long the house smelled of the flavoring they put in methane (which is odorless) to warn of explosions. I was afraid the house would blow up before the Japanese [bomb] even arrived.”
Later, when her mother told her stories about the Holocaust, she began to have nightmares, remembering the smell of the methane during the bomb scares. “I got it all mixed up in my mind with the poor Jews. Later, when I realized that we were Jewish on my mother’s side, the nightmares got more complicated.”
At the time (she doesn’t mention it, but the newspapers did), San Franciscans of Japanese ancestry were being evicted from their homes and sent to internment camps in the desert. She doesn’t remember focusing on that as a child, but rather on the death of FDR. “I agonized over the mechanics of aneurysm: Did FDR’s brain bleed through his ears? His mouth? His eyes? I lay in bed wondering and wondering…….”
Even in peacetime, it would have been an unusual childhood. With a dancer for a mother and a journalist for both fathers, adoptive and biological, she grew up in an artsy, book-filled, “bohemian” household. The visitors were artists, writers, and dancers. Nudity was casual and unremarked.
“We had wonderful art books with naked folks of both sexes whom we accepted easily and unconsciously. We were sometimes taken to art studios where nude subjects were being drawn by students. So I thought nothing, in 2nd grade free art period, of practicing nude drawing in expectation I would someday rival Michaelangelo–who was the first artist I learned to idolize. I was pretty explicit if not skilled in my drawings, having never been shamed for such awareness.”
When her second-grade teacher saw her “work,” Lyndie was hauled by the scruff of her neck to the principal’s office. Her mother was called, and her “perverted” efforts were reported.
“She instantly came to my rescue,” Lyndie wrote, “saying indignantly ‘Lyndie is practicing to become an artist!! She has done NOTHING wrong!’ Meanwhile the 8th grade boys started following me around, offering me 50 cents for a drawing.
“I was furiously indignant. ‘My art is above price!’ (Where did I learn to say that at age 8?)”
She and her brother were regularly taken to art films and to live performances of ballet and theater, featuring world-class performers. They spent Saturday mornings listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio, reading librettos so they could follow the plots of operas being sung in unfamiliar languages. Her brother preferred Wagner. She loved Verdi and Puccini.
At play, they relished acting out the bloody scenes: Hamlet stabbing Polonius, Lady Macbeth shouting “Out, damned spot!” after the murder of the king. She remembers pouring “poison” into her brother’s ear while he sat on a bench in Golden Gate Park playing Hamlet’s father, and herself as Ophelia, pretending to drown in the claw-footed bathtub.
An actor friend once showed them the stage “knife” with the blade that slips back into the handle during a stabbing scene. “What a relief to know that nobody actually had to be stabbed,” Lyndie said. But she was troubled by the line about the pound of flesh in Merchant of Venice. “Hard to imagine that,” she added
What recurs most often throughout her recollections are the books: Several times she mentioned her mother’s copy of the Bhagavad Gita, which expanded her thoughts about God. There was a big blue Lives of the Composers, with its picture “that haunts me to this day” of the deaf Beethoven at his piano, trying to hear what was in his head. The dictionary and thesaurus were kept close to the dining room table, where “we were corrected more severely on issues of grammar and usage than for having elbows on the table or chewing with our mouths open (but that, too).”
There was no shortage of the classics around the house. One recent evening at home in Laramie, she picked a volume at random out of her bookshelf and retrieved her stepfather’s 1930 copy of Night and Day by Virginia Woolf. Inside, the frontspiece bears his characteristic signature: Robt. O’Brien, London 1932.
“A lot of his books were picked up in that year, during the course of the traditional European Grand Tour,” she wrote, “which was his parents’ reward for his having successfully survived Yale with a degree in English Lit. Each bore the name of the city (London, Vienna, Venice, etc.) where he was at the time. He was a heedless, spoiled only son, who wrecked expensive, fast cars as quickly as his indulgent father replaced them. But his books are an enduring treasure.”
In 1956, six years after her mother revealed the identity of the “family friend,” her true father John Wallace took her along on a cross-country trip with his wife of the moment – perhaps the fifth of eight – giving her “my first glimpses of the world beyond the San Francisco Bay area.”
It was a business trip for her father, a fifth-generation newspaper editor, who had ironically set about trying to clean up “yellow journalism” while working for the son of the man who introduced it: newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst.
“My father spent many years (and made a small fortune) working for Randolph Hearst (the son) while trying to clean up sensational journalism, railing against “Randy”, his boss, in his frustration,” Lyndie told me. “He went all over the country to the 22 struggling Hearst papers during the 50s and early 60’s, firing, hiring, re-designing lay-outs, to stimulate circulation.”
Speeding across the country in 1956 on one of these trips, with his daughter in tow, Wallace grew cross with Lyndie for failing to appreciate the Erie Canal sufficiently. She had her first look at Niagara Falls and an unforgettable first pastrami sandwich in Albany NY.
In Chicago, riding the El, she filled her notebook with sketches of the slums. Later, in Social Studies class, “I made a spectacle of myself, holding forth on the horrors of urban poverty–in a prosperous suburb where most of my classmates had no clue what I was ranting about.,” she recalled. “My teacher must have feared I was a budding Socialist. Well, at 16, I almost was.”