Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (6 page)

On the verge of adolescence, acutely self-conscious, she felt there was something wrong with her, and so it was necessary to create a Dorothy Rothschild she liked better. She started by changing her handwriting, a spiky scrawl that wandered uphill and down. There began to emerge glimpses of the beautiful rounded script that would be her adult hand. Similarly, her search for a better Dorothy Rothschild made her intent on erasing everything in her makeup that she considered ugly. Her method of elimination was to write over the original by reshaping herself in the form of a fictional character whom she admired. Since the psychic wounds she had suffered as a young child could never be rubbed out, she was stuck with both images, her psyche a palimpsest of two drafts, original Dorothy and final Dorothy, the new standing shakily atop the old.

When she was eleven, she first read Vanity Fair and felt inspired for life: In her sixties, she claimed that she still reread Thackeray’s novel “for comfort,” but the only example of comfort she could cite was thrilling to the line about George Osborne “lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.” Thackeray’s subtitle for
Vanity Fair was A Novel without a Hero
, but for Dorothy it was a novel with a heroine, the exact sort of person she wanted to be. She fell upon the character of Rebecca Sharp like a long-lost alter ego. Not that Becky can be called a completely healthy model; she was in every respect an outlaw, female insubordination personified, and even Thackeray disapproved of her. Antisocial as she was, Becky proved to be an extremely healthy blueprint for Dorothy. Courageous Becky, thumb glued to her nose, was able to confront and defy adversity head-on. Her fictional experiences seemed metaphors for Dorothy’s emotional experiences and, perhaps following Becky’s example, Dorothy might triumph too. In effect, her identification with Becky Sharp urged her beyond those early traumas.

“They say when your writing goes up hill, you have a hopeful disposition. Guess I have,” she wrote to her father in 1906, when she was yet unsure whether there was anything about which to feel hopeful. Unlike Becky, who seemed naturally built for landing on her feet, Dorothy had to struggle with crippling handicaps in developing ego strength. She was forced to learn mental toughness. Taking her own inventory at the age of thirty, she listed the three things she could count on having until she died: laughter, hope and—there was always a palimpsest memory—“a sock in the eye.”

Her twelfth summer was the most carefree of her later childhood.

In June 1905, Helen took her to the Wyandotte Hotel in the resort town of Bellport on the south shore of Long Island, where George Droste’s family had a year-round house. While not wishing to deny his daughters a summer at the shore, Henry Rothschild felt badly about the two-month separation and made them promise to alternate writing every day. They faithfully complied, Helen with fairly lengthy letters and Dorothy, more often than not, with postcards that fulfilled the letter of the agreement if not the substance. She went bathing in the cold surf, played a lot of croquet, and made excursions to East Quogue on the train and to Patchogue in the Drostes’ pony cart. Nearly every day there was sailing, and once a young man from Helen’s crowd who owned an automobile took Dorothy on a spin along the country roads.

Her chief anxiety was about the dogs. There was no danger of a chowhound like Rags starving himself in her absence, but she feared he might pine away and be gone when she returned. She sent him loving messages, read
St. Nicholas
magazine from cover to cover, and compiled lists of gifts she wanted for her birthday. At eight-thirty she went to bed, whispers of the dark ocean coming in through the open windows. Helen reported to their father: “The kid is fine and enjoying herself greatly—she looks well and eats a lot.” Some of Helen’s girlfriends were having “a horrid time” because “there are hardly any fellows here,” and Helen too found Bellport “pretty slow.” But Dorothy was having a splendid time.

Dear Papa,

We are all well and having a good time. When you send my things down, will you please send my pink and green beads. They are in my dressing-table in a “Home, sweet home” box. I hope the animals are well.

With love,
Dorothy

Dear Papa,

I received your poetic effusion about Nogi and the snowballs, and will try to see if I can do any better.

I am having a lot of fun,
Tho’ my neck and arms
are burned by the sun.

Doesn’t “tho’ ” look poetic?

Dorothy

Dear Rags,

Hope you are well and having a fine time.

Dorothy

Dear Nogi,

Ditto.

Dorothy

Dear Papa,

Bert and Tiny arrived last night. They brought me some Cailler’s chocolate, which was very nice of them, only I hate it. But they didn’t know I hated it, so it was very nice of them, after all.

I hope that Nogi and Rags are well. Please remember me to Harry, Mary and Annie.

With love,

Dorothy

Her father wrote to her:

Say, Miss Dorothy, will you kindly tell
If the “Push” at Bellport are all well
All well here—but a little sad
Your coming home will make all glad
Rags and Bunk have got the blues
As they seek in vain for your little (2) shoes

All day, too, nothing but rain
Enough to give everybody a pain
We are all saving for to pay
For beautiful things for your birthday
A Postscript—for I forgot
To send my love to the whole lot

Rags is fine, he is all right
His behavior is “out of sight”
And as he walks along the floor
He too wishes the summer o’er
Mary now is his only chum
But what he wants is Dora “the Bum”

You seem always able to please him
And unlike Helen do not tease him
I scolded him for calling you “Bum”
But he winked his eye
As he ate his pie
And he said—“I wish she were ‘hum’ ”

For her twelfth birthday Helen threw a party on the Wyandotte lawn and invited fifteen young ladies. By Dorothy’s exact account of the affair, they played croquet, then had their pictures taken. There is a faded photograph of the group posing under enormous trees. Dorothy, skinny, is dressed in white blouse and dark tie, her hair pulled back and tied at the base of her neck, and she looks solemn. After the cake and ice cream, they played Blindman’s Buff and Cops and Robbers for the rest of the afternoon. She was extremely pleased with the light blue beads Henry had sent, also with the books and the bead loom. She politely thanked Bert for his dollar and poem. “One came in handy, and the other was very good,” she wrote to her father.

The next summer, she and Helen were back at Bellport, at the white hotel with its tall gateway that spelled out WYANDOTTE in wrought-iron filigree. This time, though, the days seemed endless and sultry—“It’s terribly hot here,” she complained. The boats still bobbed like toys at the end of the Wyandotte dock, the plumy oaks still arched a dark canopy over Rector Avenue, the corn fritters and chicken sandwiches still tasted better than at home, but she mentioned no playmates, no parties.

Her sister was madly in love and sometime during the summer became engaged to George Droste. He was twenty-three years old, conspicuously good-looking, and determined to enjoy life. (Their daughter Lel, putting the matter kindly, would describe him as a professional playboy, who never worked at much of anything but once broke his leg doing a legendary high kick at a party.)

Helen owned a camera. In her photo album unfold page after page of laughing young women in long white dresses and slim, elegant youths in knickerbockers and straw boaters tilted gaily on their heads. After eighty years, the browning snapshots do not dull the brightness of those summer vistas, the weedy meadows and the sand bleached white against the black water. Dorothy, who naturally was excluded from the romantic outings and from the polkas at the Saturday night dances, had other activities to keep her occupied. Entering a dress-up contest for the best advertisement lookalike, she won a vase that she described to her father as “awfully pretty,” but because her tone suggests that it was hideous, she saw no point mentioning the costume that had merited it. From the first, her letters sounded a bit homesick and more than a bit wistful.

Dear Papa,

This morning I received
your “pome.”
How did you do it
all alone?
When you come down
on Sunday, Pa,
No, nothing rhymes
except cigar.
Well, I must tell
you, anyway
Bring down St. Nich’las’
next Sunday.
This “pome” looks “kinder
good to me.”
With love to Rags
from Dorothy.

In practically every one of the three dozen letters and cards to him, she wondered “how is Rags?” and assured her father that she felt “well” and was enjoying “a good time,” but there was nothing to suggest she was. The exuberance of the previous year was missing. Left to her own devices, she moped around and spent many solitary afternoons on the Wyandotte’s cool verandah, reading and thinking. Her father expected her to have “a good time.” Clearly she had no wish to disappoint him. But just as clearly, 1906 was Helen’s big summer.

By the fall of 1907, the Rothschilds were scattered. Helen was married, and Bert and Tiny were occupied with their baby son. Dorothy, now fourteen, was eager for adventures of her own. In September, she enrolled in a boarding school, Miss Dana’s, thirty miles away in Morristown, New Jersey. One of George Droste’s younger sisters was a student at Miss Dana’s.

The overwhelming majority of Dana students were Episcopalians and Presbyterians, a few were Roman Catholics, but none were Jews. Henry solved the problem of admissions with a decisive lie. Dorothy’s records indicate that her parents attended the Episcopal church.

In a blitzkrieg preparation, Mary and Annie were set to rounding up the required articles, including a golf cape and a hot-water bottle, and laboriously marking each item with Dorothy’s full name. Despite an admirable curriculum, the school did nothing to contradict Dorothy’s secret belief that she was an outsider. The typical Dana girl, Dorothy was to write, “was congenitally equipped with a restfully uninquiring mind,” and in years to come she claimed to be able to spot a Dana graduate a block away by her “general air, no matter how glorious the weather, of being dressed in expectation of heavy rains.” Dorothy took courses in algebra, Greek and American history, French, Latin, physiology, and advanced English. Her best marks were in Bible study and piano, her worst in gym. The fact that she received A’s in deportment provides the only clue to the Teutonic principles of discipline practiced at the school.

At the end of the following March, she stopped attending classes. Whether this was due to illness or to some other cause, the records give no clue. She failed to return to Miss Dana’s in the fall of 1908, nor did she matriculate in any other school. At age fourteen her education ended, abruptly and inexplicably. As an adult, upon request only, she would list her educational credits as Blessed Sacrament and Miss Dana’s, careful not to specify that she had graduated from neither. In the company of close friends she was quick to bury the subject with a joke and say that she had “carried the daisy chain in the college of hard knocks.” It was her best camouflaged deprivation. The sole time she publicly alluded to the fact that she never finished high school was when she remarked to a newspaper reporter while a visiting professor at California State College, “Because of circumstances, I didn’t finish high school. But, by God, I read.”

Dorothy and her father migrated from the luxurious Red House on Riverside Drive to Amsterdam Avenue and then to a somewhat less distinguished building on West Eightieth Street. Of all the Rothschild children, she alone remained with Henry and provided the companionship he required. To Dorothy at fourteen, this cloistral arrangement must have seemed natural, but by the age of twenty it had grown exceptionally deadening. There was not a sign of the personal autonomy that became her trademark. She found herself in the unenviable position of a caretaker who is totally dependent on her charge.

In the summers, she and Henry visited Helen at Bellport, but more often they spent endless, boring weeks at resort hotels in Connecticut, which Henry seemed to enjoy. Retired by 1910, he fussed over his investments, some of which would prove to be unwise. He suffered from heart disease and secondarily from chronic worry about Dorothy’s oldest brother. Harry, unlike Bert, was not much interested in “getting ahead” and didn’t give two cents about keeping jobs. Whenever Henry got him one, he would manage to get fired. Irresponsible about spending money, lacking self-control, he was the object of Henry’s scorn, the target of his cajoling and bullying, an errant boy-man whom he felt compelled to rescue time after time. No sooner had Bert and Tiny married than Harry told his father to go jump in the lake and finally left home—he was twenty-five—and went to live with them. Subsequently he vanished altogether and was remembered in family legend as “the black sheep” who most likely had gone to the bad.