Art of a Jewish Woman (21 page)

When it came to actually designing the home, Felice said, “Mies van der Rohe was also an influence because of his clean, uncluttered esthetic. The houses I loved were extremely simple and great. Nothing ornate, baroque, or fancy. Our house was to be strong, straight, and simple. The direct approach is lasting; it doesn’t bore or fatigue you. You don’t outgrow it, because it is timeless. French styles would have been too elegant and thin, baroque absurd. The English Tudor that was so popular in St. Louis belongs in a closed space, not on an open field like ours.”

Elkington asked Felice to describe on paper the interior space she wanted. She described her American dream, her vision of the new world family life she was creating, in seven typewritten pages, from which excerpts follow:

We are four in our family. Our boys are nine and six years of age. We use our living room for reading together, for music and family gathering—never as a play area—and for entertaining. Most of our entertaining is conversational, in the living room. We do like to dance but we will use a recreational room for this. While we do not live in a formal fashion, the living room will be used more formally than the rest of our house. I want the furniture to be in a conversational grouping in the center of the living room surrounded by space.

We need a dining area to seat 12-14, permanently set for eight. We like to eat with candle lights (that is I do) while my husband finds dim romantic light a nuisance. Therefore we shall need flexible illumination to meet both of our needs.

My husband uses his Dictaphone in his study so much that I cannot write there during his presence, so I will need a separate writing space adjoining the master bedroom. His study should have a built-in desk facing the garden with well made drawers and a work space wide enough to seat at least one or two other persons, for my husband often has co-workers with him on certain projects. Right now they use the dining table, and it would be a disgrace to continue this in our new, perfectly functional home. His desk should have locks on the drawers so that his sons would be forced to stop pilfering their father’s sacred belongings. When my husband gets tired and stretches out on the couch in his study to rest, it should be sufficiently sound-proof so that the piano or records or children’s noises don’t disturb him.

In the master bedroom we shall have adjoining Hollywood beds with heads that can be raised. We will have one headboard. We both like to read in bed but one of us often precedes the other into sleep so we will need lighting (always a source of controversy) that permits one to turn off a light before the other. We will need a master bathroom with a built-in dressing table, mirror, space for a chair, and built-in drawers for all of a woman’s paraphernalia—the woman’s indispensable beautifying machine.

The recreational room will be the breakfast room and the boys’ playroom. They will use it from now until their marriage day. They have a great deal of building equipment—blocks, their erector set. It is a great pity we can’t use their equipment building the new house. We will also need storage cabinets for their games and space for their electric train. I need room for Americanized entertaining—dancing, ping pong, etc. The boys will need a rustic fireplace in this room for the future for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows when they entertain. We do not have a television set but we would like to make provisions in the recreation room for a cabinet for one if the programs ever gets better.

The desks in the boys’ rooms must have a place for them to rest their feet or the edge of the desk will soon looked off chewed by their shoes…

The kitchen is a real headache for me. I only visit the kitchen on Thursdays when the maid is off, and know very little about it. But we must plan on a functional one.

Felice adored functionalism in design. It harked back to Yale President Angell’s functionalist psychological theory that all mental operations have a specific purpose. So too should every element in a home. Consistently, she hated design that featured ornamentation. In her canon everything had to be simple and utilitarian. Over the course of two years, she and Robert Elkington planned and executed the home—both of their dream homes. One floor, and not terribly large at about 3,500 square feet, it angled like an
L
on the hilltop. One wing was for the bedrooms and the other for the kitchen and playroom. In the center, a wall of Missouri limestone rose fifteen feet. On one side of the stone wall was the living room, with a high, canted ceiling and a very large fireplace built into the stone; on the other side were Edward’s study and the library. The bedrooms were beyond.

The exterior walls on the driveway side were of sheets of redwood siding imported from California; the walls on the other side facing the fields were floor-to-ceiling, insulated-glass doors, framed with vertical grain fir, which all swung open in warm weather so that the outdoors and indoors merged. The interior paneling and cabinetry was all light birch. Except for the gently pitched, high living room ceiling, the rest of the house was one-story with a flat roof that extended into a four-foot overhang that provided shade and a covered walkway all around the house. Across a breezeway from the playroom was the maid’s or guest room, and down a few stairs, cut into the slope of the hill was the swimming pool and its terrace.

One of the reasons the house took so long to create was Felice’s insistence on supervising the selection of all the wood and stone. Feeling that every detail and piece of material was important, she directed the placement of each of the large limestone rocks, often asking the workmen to reset or exchange one stone for another. It caused work stoppages and drove the contractor to near mutiny.

The finished project was a grand success. Emblematic of clean-lined modernity, it was featured in architectural magazines and established the career of Robert Elkington. Less public were the contradictions in the form-follows-function idea of modernism. For example, the graceful, molded Knoll living room armchairs created the illusion of being functional, but they were so uncomfortable that they were dysfunctional. The beige Berber living room carpet looked beautiful but was a source of endless battles between me and my mother because I liked to stretch out on it—the only carpeted floor in the house—with the comic and sports sections of the newspaper. When she found me spread out on the rug, she lectured me and forbade it for fear the newsprint would rub off onto the rug. Her perfectionism could not tolerate the possibility that the carpet’s light tone might get slightly discolored. The beautiful exterior redwood paneling with the grain matching section to section was ill suited to the harsh Missouri climate, which plunged to zero degrees in the winter and soared to humid triple digits in summer. It required constant upkeep to prevent it from deteriorating. Form led the way to the disadvantage of function.

These were private troubles, though. The success of the home’s design also inaugurated Felice’s public life. People loved to visit the house, which was in itself a focus of attention. Generally speaking, three types of guests came regularly, all sharing Felice’s interests and conversational verve: psychoanalysts; people in the arts; and a coterie of leftists and socialists. In particular, I recall the architect Elkington, who visited most Monday mornings for coffee for the rest of his life. He would admire the lines of “his house, his creation” as Felice said, study her furnishings appraisingly (several of the designs are now represented by pieces in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection), and talk with her about his new projects before going to his studio drafting table. Other regulars were Peter and Dora Janson from the Art History department at Washington University, the authors of
The History of Art,
the standard text for generations of college students. Painters from the community and Washington University art faculty such as Bill Fett and Fred Becker—early abstract expressionists experimenting with breaking from the geometric shapes and forms of constructivism into something freer—came to Litzsinger Road.

There were the notable psychoanalysts Alex Kaplan, who advocated for scientifically validating psychoanalytic discoveries and later became president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and James Anthony, who became president of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry. Anthony enlisted Felice in his project to publish the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s heretofore unpublished 1917 slightly fictionalized account of his own youth,
Recherche
(Research). Felice was to translate it from its original French to English, and James Anthony would write the preface.

Piaget was a pioneer modern psychologist who used careful study, observation, and experiments to document children’s cognitive development from primitive reflexes in infancy to abstract thinking in adolescence. Felice mastered his writings, but when her translation and introduction to the autobiography were finished, it turned out that Anthony did not have clear permission to publish the work, and Felice was disappointed and felt misled. A rift developed between the two. According to Felice, the source of the trouble was that in his autobiography Piaget referred to a nervous breakdown in his youth, and his estate did not want this made public, whereas the publisher, Basic Books, insisted that without a full accounting there could be no book. It has never been published.

A regular visitor for three decades was Marvin Bank, a socialist and graduate student in chemistry at Washington University. Felice and Marvin decried how American capitalism left so many people behind, marginally subsisting or impoverished. They did not believe that the whims of the marketplace should determine the fate of people’s lives; more rational planning was required. The pro-communist
National Guardian
arrived at the house weekly, and its accusations against Washington, D.C. politics and policies, its assertion of facts and data, became the focus of many discussions on Litzsinger Road.

Felice believed that you have to be “a soldier in life, not a soldier with a gun, but a soldier for life.” She came to this when she was a student in Wilno because in Poland she’d seen so much poverty and disparity. She felt that you have to change things so that there won’t be poor people. “It is a political decision,” she said. Echoing her Fabianism from her university days, she believed poverty exists because of corrupt government and corrupt religion.

Edward began to understand what she meant about socialism. He didn’t think or feel that way before they met, but he told her after a time that he was beginning to share her ideas. It was a new feeling for him. Edward was not a social activist or especially curious politically. He was a bystander to my mother’s political interests. Medicine occupied him seven days a week. He left the new house at 6:30 a.m. on the rural road, reached the freeway fifteen minutes later, and exited at the medical center at about 7:15 a.m., before the traffic became heavy. In the evening he returned home around 7:30. Saturdays he left later and returned home mid-afternoon, and Sundays he came home in time for a late lunch. Sometimes he picked up his black bag and went out on a house call in the middle of the night.

The biggest threat to the stable life Felice and Edward established was McCarthyism in the early 1950s. Senator Joe McCarthy championed the notion that all of America’s problems were caused by communists who, in his paranoid mind, had infiltrated all government institutions, universities, the entertainment industry, and libraries. It was not too far a cry from fascists blaming the Jews for all of Europe’s problems in the 1930s, for in fact many Jews were active in these industries, and McCarthy targeted them. His crusade was like a wildfire across America torching those who were in its path. It frightened Felice and Edward and all their friends.

Most problematic for the family were the political meetings Felice attended, her leftist friends who came to the house, and the anti-McCarthy demonstrations she joined. These would certainly come to the FBI’s attention and potentially link to Edward, jeopardizing his career.

My mother and father debated with each other behind closed doors. They never raised their voices insofar as I was aware, but I felt the tension. I joined them to watch Joe McCarthy on our new television floridly denouncing scores of people my parents admired, and I couldn’t imagine how people could listen to, let alone act on the behest of, such a despicable man. I clearly didn’t understand the dynamics of demagoguery and the power it exerted. My parents must have reached a détente, for Felice stopped participating in public demonstrations after her picture appeared in the
St. Louis Post Dispatch
holding a placard denouncing McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, parading her opinion as she had done in the early 1930s when she was arrested and her father struck her.

She had seen her father lose his occupation to fascism that was beyond his control. In this era, here in America, Felice and Edward had some control. She desisted and Edward’s career continued to advance. In fact Washington University was an unusually staunch supporter of its faculty, not requiring them to sign the loyalty oath McCarthy was demanding, even hiring faculty members from other universities elsewhere who had been dismissed for refusing to sign loyalty oaths.

Felice didn’t cancel her subscription to the
National Guardian
but arranged for it to arrive in a plain wrapper so mailmen and snoopy neighbors who might peer into our rural mailbox wouldn’t see what it was. Her political friends continued to come to the house. But Marvin Bank, who had served in the U.S. Air Force in Britain fighting against fascism, and his best friend Bill Fett, grew so disenchanted with the national political climate that they left the country and moved to Mexico.

Most of my mother’s daytime visitors were men. I was in fifth grade when we moved into the new house, and Felice’s new life started taking shape. That year and into the beginning of high school, if I happened to be around when my mother had visitors, I’d set myself up with books, homework, magazines, games, or newspapers in my father’s study just around the corner from the living room and catch as much as I could of the conversation. If the laughter grew loud or sustained or the talk emphatic, I would cruise by the living room trying to see and hear what was going on. I would spy on tall, dark, handsome Marvin Bank scowling over a political contretemps. There was the roly-poly art historian Peter Janson dropping cigarette ashes on his vest. He had self-exiled himself from Germany in the 1930s to protest the Nazi ban on modern art that they labeled “degenerate.” He would be talking up the latest edition of
The History of Art
.