Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (5 page)

When Dorothy was six, she idealized her mother. Twenty-five years later, carrying the same pictures in her head but no longer able to disguise her angry feelings, she decided the dead “do not welcome me” and furiously denounced them as “pompous.”

Dorothy and her sister attended Blessed Sacrament Academy, a private parochial school run by the Sisters of Charity. Academically, it was one of the city’s finest schools and had the added advantage of being located close by in a double brownstone on West Seventy-ninth Street. She walked there with one of the housemaids. She never forgot the laundry smell of the nuns’ robes, the desks covered with oilcloth, Sister Dionysius’s cold-eyed glances, the haughtiness of her classmates.

Helen had no trouble fitting in, but she was that sort of person. Dorothy had no intention of belonging. She referred to the Immaculate Conception, which struck her as sounding a little fishy, as “spontaneous combustion” and felt enormously pleased at having thought up the joke. She made a special effort to criticize everyone and sought reasons to find them ridiculous. “They weren’t exactly your starched crinoline set, you know. Dowdyest little bunch you ever saw.”

There was another girl who hated Blessed Sacrament. Mercedes de Acosta, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish-Cuban family, had a married sister who was suing her husband for divorce. The newspapers were full of sensational stories about the suit, which prompted the children at school to gossip maliciously that Rita was trying to sell her son to her husband for a million dollars. Mercedes, squaring off against her persecutors, traded taunt for taunt, in which endeavor Dorothy was only too eager to aid and abet. Before long, the nuns had cast them as the school troublemakers, parts the two scrappy little girls played with relish. Eighty years later, a student who had been three grades ahead of them at Blessed Sacrament could still remember the pair behaving so badly that their teacher suffered “a breakdown.” Dorothy was reputed to be just as devilish out of school. She even invented a secret language that drove her parents very nearly out of their minds.

All day long the nuns talked about Jesus. When she arrived home from school Dorothy found Eleanor bustling right out to interrogate her.

“Did you love Jesus today?” she asked Dorothy.

Despite her piety, there must have been times when Eleanor felt like strangling the miserable brat. Instead, she admonished lucky little Dorothy to count her blessings: Didn’t she have everything a child might want? Eleanor naturally was talking about herself, the lonely woman reincarnated into a prosperous man’s wife and the mistress of a dream house. Even though marriage had brought unexpected miseries, precisely because it had brought them, she had to work hard to deny them and prescribed gratitude as a worthy attitude. Dorothy laughed when Eleanor turned her back, and sometimes before she had.

Dorothy did not feel lucky. Eleanor made her say prayers and lectured her about regular bowel movements. The nuns were mean, her friends few, her brothers too grown up to play with her. One day she glimpsed Harry, or else it was Bert, swaggering down the street with a friend, who pointed at her and asked, “That your sister?”

“No,” her brother said.

She remembered this snub with great bitterness for the rest of her life.

After her birthday in August, there was Christmas to look forward to: working herself into a frenzy of anticipation, crossing out the days on her calendar, then finally Christmas dawn and crawling downstairs groggy with sleeplessness. But to find what? That Santa Claus and Jesus and Eleanor had remembered her with a pair of galoshes she needed anyway, a board game called Dissected Wildflowers, a copy of
Sylvia’s Summer
in the Holy Land, and “a fountain pen that ceased to function after the third using.”

The struggle with Eleanor had evolved into trench warfare. Dorothy found further reasons to resent her and to wish the woman dead. Her weapons were the time-honored methods of sulfurous stares, extended silences, and responses that were at best grudging. These tactics drove Eleanor into a tizzy, but they provided a kind of stability to Dorothy’s life. After three years of hostilities, there came an unexpected cease-fire. She was trying to dream up more imaginative tortures when one morning in April 1903, she woke to learn that Eleanor had just fallen dead of an acute cerebral hemorrhage.

Now Dorothy had two murders on her conscience. The sudden deaths of Eliza and Eleanor became the twin traumas of her early life, her ticket to self-pity, a passe-partout to self-hatred and an unalterable conviction that she deserved punishment—the source of the negativity with which she grappled so unhappily—and so happily—thereafter. Reaffirmed was her perception of the world as a horrible place where people keeled over and died without warning. Nature had no right to be so mean. Therefore, she decided,

There’s little in taking or giving,
There’s little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.

Eleanor willed various amounts to her own family and gave fifty dollars apiece to Harry. Bert, and Helen. As a final gesture to lucky little Dorothy, she left “such articles of jewelry as have been given me by my husband since my marriage to my step-daughter Dorothy Rothschild,” in the value of three hundred dollars.

After Eleanor’s untimely death, the house was empty of mothers. Next came the dogs.

Chapter 2

PALIMPSEST

1903-1914

The Rothschilds were determined to enjoy good times. Henry, fifty-two, abandoned his lifework in the garment industry, which was changing irrevocably bit by bit. The sweatshop system slowly was expiring under the spotlight of exposes and public indignation. Increasing boldness by the cloakmakers’ union threatened to send wages soaring. Henry heartily denounced these omens as violations of God’s plan. When Meyer Jonasson & Company faltered, he briefly entered partnership with another cloakmaking giant, then threw up his hands altogether and switched to the comparatively sedate cigar business.

The family now lived in a large brownstone around the corner from Blessed Sacrament, everyone being haphazardly cared for by two housemaids, Annie and Mary. Dorothy’s most passionate interest in life at this period was collecting pictures of Maude Adams. Once she sent the actress a letter that began “Dearest Peter,” and received one of the much-coveted silver thimbles inscribed
A kiss from Peter Pan
. Then came a minor but memorable change: The Rothschilds acquired an assortment of what would become the most aggressively spoiled dogs in New York. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of these mixed French bulldogs and Boston terriers named Rags, Nogi, and Bunk, who would be reincarnated in countless hounds throughout Dorothy’s life. From the first, the family regarded this trio of equivocal breeds as humans disguised as animals, endowing them with a full complement of neuroses and then grumbling accordingly.

By this time, Dorothy’s brothers and sister were almost adults. Harry and Bert worked in wholesale garment houses. Bert was engaged to a long-legged colt of a girl named Mate (nicknamed “Tiny” because of her height). As a wedding gift, Henry offered them the choice of five hundred dollars in cash or a flat; Bert and Tiny chose the apartment. Helen, too, was busily preparing to move forward into the great world. Henry’s expectations for his daughters were at once conventional and reflective of his personal conception of women. Despite the tradition of female professionalism in the family, if his marrying two educated women can be called a tradition, he was certainly no believer in vocations for women. He preferred to marry superior women, which for him meant primarily Christian and only secondarily a woman with sufficient intelligence to earn a living as a teacher. (The family success story in this respect was Martin Rothschild, who had wed Elizabeth Barrett of the Great Bear Springs Water family.) For all Henry’s acceptance of Eliza and Eleanor as working women, he saw himself as a kind of knight who had rescued them from the misfortunes of spinsterhood. For his daughters, he invested in first-class Catholic educations, which, he hoped, would ensure a predictable outcome: marriage into wealthy Christian families.

A sensible young woman like Helen needed no parental instructions. She zipped around on a merry-go-round of dances, picnics, and golfing parties, happily pursuing young men of suitable families, preferrably those better off than the Rothschilds. To follow any other course would have been considered self-destructive. Especially high on her list of prospects was the scion of a well-known New York baking company, whom she had met at a skating party. George Droste, Jr., did not happen to be Jewish (although he was German), but then convent-educated Helen did not really think of herself as Jewish either.

Dorothy, a bedazzled spectator, found these rites of passage spellbinding. Describing her sister a long while later, she said, “She was a real beauty, my sister; sweet, lovely, but silly.” What she meant by silly she didn’t bother to explain, but certainly this was not her opinion as a girl. On the contrary, she adored, admired, and envied Helen, whose undisputed good looks and popularity seemed to embody ideal womanhood, a model that Dorothy aspired to copy but secretly feared a useless endeavor.

If Helen Rothschild was exceptionally glamorous, it was, alas, all too obvious to Dorothy that her own pubescent plainness was going to remain a permanent condition. In a photograph taken at age twelve, she appears to be nine or ten. She was short for her age and thin. She achieved a final growth of four feet eleven inches and remained underweight into her twenties. To make matters worse, she had hollows under her eyes, stringy hair, poor eyesight, and the kind of listless appetite that elicited constant admonitions to eat up. Since she had a heart murmur, the Rothschilds took care to cosset her in a manner befitting a child of delicate constitution.

As early as 1905, she seems to have found a place of her own in the family: She was the artistic member. Later she liked to define herself negatively as “one of those awful children who wrote verses,” but she neglected to mention that her efforts were encouraged and rewarded with enthusiastic praise. “Wonderful to say the least,” Helen called the verses. Nor was the writing of poetry viewed as a charming, not very noteworthy accomplishment appropriate for a sickly female child—not at all. Henry himself loved to compose verses that he referred to as his “pomes.” His favorite theme was the antics of the dogs, and even though the verses sound childish, they also are charming. His lovingly amused descriptions suggest a sort of Thurberian view of the species:

This morning Rags near’ got
a “licking”
’Cause, he “kicked” at meat
& wanted “chicking”
But Mary pleased him
with chicken hash
And begged me to do nothing
rash
So once more His Lordship
is all right
And got the better of the
fight
He looks at me as much
to say
When Dora gets back I’ll
have my way

Not the least self-conscious, he struck off this doggerel at his office desk on the backs of sheets of Royal Company stationery and, no doubt, felt pleased with his handiwork.

The paternal portrait reflected in his verses is so greatly at variance with Dorothy’s descriptions that they might be two different men. Both in his verse and in the letters exchanged between him and his daughters, he exudes warmth, humor, and generosity, and his affection for Dorothy cuts like a warm stream across the middle of her childhood. His idea of child-rearing owed little to his second wife, little perhaps to his first either. He was far from being a disciplinarian. In his household, children were indulged—in return he expected them to “get ahead.” Feelings, negative as well as positive, could be spoken of openly. Eccentricities, too, appear to have been tolerated, even appreciated if they were amusing. Expression of needs was encouraged. He told them that if they ever needed money, “do not fail to ask for it,” and they did not fail. He was lavish with the word love, fond of playful teasing, an admirer of peppery behavior, and tolerant of scenes, because he himself was given to emotional extravagance. His was, above all, a house of much laughter.

In contrast, there is Dorothy’s version of reality. Her lugubrious account of a deprived childhood has a plot that plods along like a gothic novel—innocent heroine victimized by heartless father, malevolent stepmother, and a Greek chorus of batty nuns—and is largely false. This romance was doubtless a therapeutic invention that enabled her to settle old scores. Underneath lay concealed another fiction, never articulated but internalized so completely that it became an implant in her deepest self—an unloved orphan, which was how she experienced herself, must be clever and amusing in order to ensure survival in the world. Therefore, behaviors ordinarily frowned upon might very well be excused, or considered virtuous, if a person happened to be an orphan. The poor orphan from whom she learned these rules of the game was William Thackeray’s antiheroine Becky Sharp.