Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [5]
The dog’s owner, Eleanor Ward, came by to see if it had taken shelter in our barn. Mom and Dad invited her in for a drink. I loved the way they got someone a drink as the response to any dilemma. So cinematic. Like a social doctor. I couldn’t wait to say to someone who came to me with a serious problem, “My God, Jan, that’s awful. Can I get you a drink?” or even better, “You look like you could use a drink.”
Eleanor and Kate were sent out to look for the missing corgi. Through the rain and winds they searched the fields and the farm’s dirt roads. When they returned, the little lost dog was inside playing with my sister Julia while Eleanor and Mom and Dad sang songs from Candide blaring on the stereo. Mom and Dad were good together, they looked great together, he was six-one with dark brown hair, she was five feet and blond, they were singy and dancy and funny, and it seemed to me during this storm that love was fun and costumed and gusty and uncertain.
Then, with a very limited amount of money that would have to last us an entire year in New York and with borrowing from Nonnie being an absolute impossibility, my mother joined the Devon Yacht Club shortly after we arrived. The Devon Yacht Club was the ramshackle alternative to the real country club in East Hampton, the Maidstone Club. Devon was on the sound, Maidstone was on the ocean. The Maidstone was a Tudor manse built in 1891. Devon was a cluster of crumbly old gray-and-white clapboard buildings that needed a paint job so badly that from out on the sound it looked like a coconut cake. The main building had dances every Thursday night. (For which Mom bought four . . . what can only be called gas station attendant jumpsuits—colorful oufits with stripes down the side that had little Pennzoil and Sunoco patches on the arms—for all of us to wear if we needed to pull a sophisticated gas station look together. Everyone got a different color. My gas station jumpsuit was white and blue.)
This was a signature move of my mother’s, buying four of the same item in four different colors. With four of us being so close in age—my mother had four kids in five years, or two sets of Irish twins with a one-year break—this retail practice seemed reasonable to her. Eleanor was the oldest, then Katharine, then a year off, then Julia and then me.
My dad wasn’t a country club kind of guy, but rumor had it that George Plimpton, who lived next door to Devon, had a Fourth of July rivalry with the club’s fireworks display every year, which must have sounded fun and New Yorky to the St. Louisan in my dad, and isn’t this why we came to New York? I mean, you can write a book in St. Louis. You cannot, on the other hand, have a gin and tonic with George Plimpton at Busch’s Grove in Ladue. And he probably figured the club would get everybody out of the house during the day so Mom could type up his finished pages and he could write. My father was the most distracted writer working in America. If my sister Katharine and I put together a game of catch in the backyard with some old ratty mitts we’d found, he’d come out within minutes looking for a piece of the action.
“Give me that ball, Jean-Joe. Do either of you girls know who Dizzy Dean was?” and the game was brought to a standstill with a lively portrait of a Cardinals pitcher in the ’30s. I threw the ball as hard as I could. I did not, nor did any of us girls, push the ball off our shoulders like a shot put or “throw like a girl.” My father taught us curveballs from sliders, fastballs and screwballs. Later, during his boxing phase, we would learn jabs from hooks, how to throw a punch, turning your fist ever so slightly at the end of the extension, and basic footwork.
My father caught my wild throw. “Jean-Joe, your tactics are a hundred percent Dizzy Dean. ‘The Diz,’ they called him. He and his brother Daffy were part of a team during the Depression called the Gashouse Gang.” He threw the baseball to Katharine. “They were the