Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Vivian
Jay Vivian Chambers was born on April 1, 1901—April Fool’s Day, as he liked to point out. He was named for his father, Jay Chambers, a graphic artist at the New York World. The boy’s middle name, chosen by his mother, Laha, dismayed her husband and also its bearer, called Vivian all through childhood. Jay, however, refused to utter the hated syllables and so inflicted on his son the nickname Beadle, evidently a comment on his demeanor, watchful, grave, and severe.
In 1903, after a second son, Richard, was born, Laha decided the young family should move from their apartment, near Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and resettle in the suburbs. She loathed New York City and missed the open spaces she had known in her own childhood, spent in Wisconsin.
Jay resisted the move. A city boy from Philadelphia, he enjoyed Brooklyn, its brownstones and tree-lined pavements. He liked too the easy access, by elevated subway, to his Manhattan office and the theaters and galleries he frequented. Also, he had recently lost his job at the World to a news camera, and although he soon found new employment—with a design studio on Union Square that did book covers and magazine illustrations—the venture was in its infancy and its prospects uncertain.
But Laha, insistent and strong-willed, prevailed over Jay, who was passive and retiring, and in 1904 the family moved to Lynbrook, a pretty coastal village on Long Island’s South Shore, twenty miles east of Manhattan, with a population of less than two thousand. The year the Chamberses moved there, Lynbrook got its first water mains and its first brick building, M. L. Levinson’s Hardware Store.
The family took up residence on Earle Avenue, an unpaved street lined with silver maples.4 The house, formerly a postal coach stop, was a sturdy clapboard structure, two stories plus a slope-ceilinged attic. It sat back from the street on a swatch of lawn. Though in need of repair, 228 Earle Avenue gave every appearance of being a suitable place for the young family to achieve stability and for Laha to regain the “paradise” of upper-middle-class respectability she had known in childhood.
Laha’s father, Charles Whittaker, a Scottish immigrant born in 1840, had immigrated to Milwaukee in 1845, with his parents and twelve siblings. In 1869, a language teacher and principal in Milwaukee’s public schools, he married Mary Blanchard, a fetching sixteen-year-old with wide-set eyes and a broad forehead. She came from Wauwatosa, a grouping of frame houses set among oak and maple groves, near the banks of the Menomonee River. The descendant of Huguenots, Mary spoke fluent French. Many years later she taught Vivian the language, using a convent primer.
Even as he advanced his pedagogical career, Charles pursued other interests. He was the founding publisher of Milwaukee’s first city magazine and registered several patents. But he suffered stinging reversals. In 1878, when Laha was seven, her father was forced to auction off the substantial house he had built only two years before near Milwaukee’s exclusive “Yankee Hill,” overlooking Lake Michigan. In 1880 Charles and Mary Whittaker departed Milwaukee, tracing the southern sweep of the Great Lake to Chicago. Laha, their only child, stayed behind at the Home School, a private academy in Racine. In Chicago Charles manufactured and sold brass castings—and again went bankrupt, losing everything just in time to foreclose on Laha’s long-held dream of attending an elite college in the East.
She went instead on the stage, touring the Midwest and Far West with stock companies. After six or seven hard years she gave it up and joined her parents, who had moved again, this time to New York. They were now operating a lunch counter on West Twenty-third Street, in Manhattan, and living above it in tiny, cramped rooms. Laha came to cook and waitress and help care for her father, afflicted with cancer of the tongue. Charles Whittaker died in 1899, at age fifty-nine. He left his widow and daughter a twelve-dollar-a-month Civil War pension, fifty dollars’ worth of kitchen utensils, and a couple of hundred books.
By then Laha had met Jay Chambers, a customer at the eatery. He was short, dark, plump, and boyish—and five years Laha’s junior. A recent graduate of Philadelphia’s Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, he had come up to New York to work as an illustrator at the World, a job he obtained through his father, James Chambers, a well-known journalist. After a two-year courtship Jay and Laha were married in January 1900 over the strenuous objections of the groom’s mother, Dora, who judged Laha unworthy of her only son. In her indignation Laha taught her sons that their father came from inferior stock, deficient in “breeding.” The truth was that Jay had reached below his station to rescue her, a penniless waitress nearing thirty with a history on the provincial stage.
These distinctions meant little to Jay. He cared only for art. A product of the 1890s, the mauve decade, he quietly deplored middle-class standards of respectability. While Laha strove to establish the family in Lynbrook, Jay stood to the side, mocking. He regarded the suburbs and their inhabitants with droll disdain. He once bet a friend he could walk to Lynbrook’s center, the “Five Corners,” clad only in his pajamas and not attract a single comment from his complacent neighbors. He won the bet. At home he raised the gaudy pennant of aestheticism. He wore a linen “samurai robe,” planted a large replica of the Venus de Milo on the living room floor, and mounted on its walls a permanent exhibition of his bookplates (prized by collectors) and whimsical Christmas cards (prized by his friends).
It amused Jay to adorn the house, but he steadfastly refused to fix it, despite its poor condition. The yellow exterior coat had been bleached of color by the salty ocean winds. The shutters, a sickly green, nagged at their rotted hinges. The interior was even worse. One day a portion of the dining room ceiling dropped. Laha covered the hole with cheesecloth. Vivian and Richard watched transfixed as mice nested in its bulges, their scampering feet leaving “twinkling” impressions. Another project was the wallpaper, aged and blistered. Jay would not replace it. Laha wrapped up her few valuables and took them to Manhattan pawnbrokers, returning with enough cash to hire a team of workmen. When the job was finished, Jay said nothing. Laha’s sobs “were dreadful to hear.”
But she was not deterred. With or without Jay’s encouragement, she was determined to carry her mission forward, to conquer Lynbrook in the name of her sons, anchoring them in the community. She was elected president of the local mothers’ club and was on the committee that founded and staffed the village’s first library. She also secured entrance into the “exclusive” Friday club, limited to thirty-five women, most of them “wives of leading figures,” with newcomers drawn from a waiting list. Laha’s dramatic “monologues” and “readings” were a staple of the club’s afternoon entertainments.
Yet the Chamberses never quite blended in. Neighbors found them “clever” and “brilliant” but faintly disreputable. The house, cluttered with Jay’s artwork and the mismatching “antiques” Laha rummaged up, had the appearance of a seedy museum. And its curators were themselves odd: the plump, aloof artist who rode the commuter train in virtual silence; the actressy wife with her stagey voice and florid gestures, her talk of important “friends” in the theater. Locally, they were referred to as “the French Family.”
Vivian early realized his family was “peculiar.” More painful still, he watched his parents’ marriage crumble. Laha craved affection from all those around her. Jay would not—or could not—give it. The couple enacted rituals of devotion, but the children were not fooled. Each evening Laha ceremonially positioned Vivian and Richard in the front hallway so they could plant a kiss on their father’s cheek when he returned from work. Jay, stooping to receive his welcome, wore a farcical smile. At the dinner table, lavishly spread with “high sauces and cheeses, lobsters, oysters and hot curries,” Jay ate in greedy silence, speaking only to reprove his sons when an elbow sneaked indecorously onto the table. Supper concluded, Jay slipped upstairs to his room, donned his robe, and busied himself with his many hobbies—his bookplates, his elaborate puppet theater, the tiny matchbox houses he built, precise in every detail, and his vast collection of “penny toys.” His sons, forbidden to touch their father’s baubles, grew to loathe them. “An artist must be pampered or he would not be an artist,” says a character in one of Vivian Chambers’s first short stories, written when he was seventeen.
With Jay in retreat, mother and sons gathered in the parlor. Cradling Richard in her arms, Laha rocked in a Windsor chair and sang lullabies. Vivian, creeping amid the shadows cast by the oil lamps, shrank from the desperate melancholia in his mother’s voice, meant, it seemed, for some unseen audience.
Soon Jay was delaying his nightly return from the city. Laha and the boys waited at the table, weakly reassuring one another he would be on the next train, while the sumptuous sauces congealed. Late at night Vivian sat up in his cot listening for his father’s return—the sound of the front door opening and then the tread of feet mounting the stairs. Hours passed in which he heard only Richard’s breathing in the cot beside him and the lisp of “the surf pouring without pause on the beaches.” The Atlantic felt especially near on winter nights “when the cold air brought it in clearly. I was frightened, for it seemed about to pound away the land. It was the sound of inhuman force—the first I knew.” When at last the knob turned downstairs, often past midnight, the boy surrendered himself to sleep, except on those nights when his parents’ voices erupted in fierce quarrels. In the morning, with Jay again out of the house, Laha assailed him in monologues, while she paced the living room floor. Vivian and Richard listened raptly, though ordered to stay in the kitchen, the warmest room in the house, heated by a “big, black, nickel-trimmed coal range.” Once, when Laha emerged, Vivian noticed “black and red marks on her throat.”
Then one evening, probably in 1908, Jay did not return. He had moved back to Brooklyn and its bachelor pleasures. He remained in hiding for at least a year. His sons did not see him. Laha “never attacked my father to us children but she was able to convey to us that we shouldn’t like him.”
It was many years before Vivian realized the origins of her frustration and rage. Jay Chambers was bisexual. But even as a child Vivian had grasped that his father’s life was divided into “separate compartments.” So would the son’s be, with far greater complexity.
