L'America (21 page)

During these early years, Preveena fell in love with Jackson, and throughout their love affair he continued to talk to Claire. He told her about how good it felt to feel love, about what it was like to be alive, about how Beth accepted Preveena. And Beth did. Preveena taught Beth bits of Hindi, told her long convoluted stories about monkeys in banyan trees and bathers in the polluted Ganges. She described the funeral pyres and how babies and bodies floated by in the river, and she told her how the Ganges, long ago, came down from the heavens in a torrent on the back of Shiva's wild hair. And, of course, there were maharanis and maharajas riding bejeweled elephants on their way to shoot tigers. Preveena, in her sari with all her stories and her beautiful eyes, also had a talent for fly-fishing, which she shared with Beth. They haunted the raging spring streams together, a picturesque and unlikely pair.

Jackson was weaving the dream, but he was not in charge. He didn't have that sort of ego or desire for power. Besides, he'd have been no good at it. He wasn't interested in leadership as a role. In fact, his penchant for bartering had to be kept in check—a job that fell first to Beth, then to Preveena, then to Sissy Three.

People fell in love and then fell out of love and there was conflict over that. Some left as a result, since even two thousand acres isn't always enough to escape a love gone bad. Others endured. Shortly after Rada was born, the love between Jackson and Preveena went bad. The new mother became more and more jealous of Claire, of Jackson's conversations with her, of his inability to let her go. He spoke more to Claire about Rada (a very dark-skinned girl with his blond hair and her mother's big eyes—a most alluring contrast in lightness and dark) than he did to Preveena.

But Preveena stayed. She taught everyone to appreciate elaborate Indian feasts. Beth loved her nine-curry meals eaten with your fingers—right hands only, please (the left was traditionally used for the toilet). Preveena conjured up pilaus and kormas and raitas and mango chutneys, spending days in the kitchen combining spices, toasting cardamom and coriander and mustard seed, crushing the spices into a dust with a pestle, teaching Beth the chemistry, answering the girl's endless questions.

Meanwhile, Jackson continued to speak to Claire about the dissolution of love, about his role, her role, wondering for the first time if time would have dissolved their love, pondering that notion with her, but only for a moment before banishing the idea because his world was built upon the endurance of their love.

As strong as Jackson may have been and seemed, his grief endured along with his love. Alone sometimes he would cry. Beth always knew what the long absences behind his office door meant. As a child she would sit outside the door and wait. She didn't care how long it took for him to emerge. It was her small attempt to defy her mother and claim her father for her own. She would sit there, legs crossed Indian-style (as they used to say), back straight, and stare hard at the door, so hard sometimes she imagined she could penetrate the door with her eyes and see her father sitting at his desk, head resting in hands, sobbing and trying to speak to someone who was not there. The inescapable ache paralyzed her father. When he finally did come out, she would curl up beside him and brush his hair with her fingers, feeling the great weight of his sorrow, feeling scared by it. She hated her mother for dying, for stealing her father as well.

"Don't hate Claire," he would say. He knew his girl. He wanted to speak to Claire so that Beth could hear her mother answer. He wanted Beth to know that her voice was beside them, her wisdom with them, that she loved her girl. He wanted his daughter to be caught up in Claire's arms, smothered with Claire's kisses. "See your daughter, darling," he said. It seemed to Beth he really was speaking to someone, but Beth couldn't see that person. "See what a fine job we're doing here with her," he continued.

"But I don't even know this woman," Beth said. "And she definitely does not know me."

"Don't say that," he snapped. "She does know you. She knows exactly who you are. You have been the same since the moment you were born. She knows your fierce will. She knows your warmth and love. She knew exactly who you would become." He looked into the terrified eyes of his Beth.

 

They continued to come. Mash arrived in the mid-1970s from New York City and before that Russia. He built teepees and yurts and small cabins in the woods so that privacy could be offered and respected. He instructed others on how to help and some people who wouldn't have thought of themselves as talented carpenters learned otherwise. In 1984, Hunter, the failed investment banker, came from New York City (a lot of people came from New York City). Somehow this one, with all his supply of champagne and his penny loafers (tucked with pennies), had been involved with Ivan Boesky and fallen for him quite some time before Boesky would fall. Hunter, adorable, dirty blond hair, relentlessly positive, knowledgeable about many things, great questioner, he would become Beth's husband—Valeria's father. But of course no one knew that yet.

Sissy Three came with her mass of reddish curly hair and her bright energy and her bossy nature, bossing everyone with her big plans as if she had lived at Claire since its inception and knew what was best for the place. She wrote a constitution. (To this day it remains buried in a drawer in a basement somewhere at Claire.) In fact, she became obsessed with the real Claire, poring over pictures of the woman—some even say she was trying to compete with Claire, trying to trump her zest for life with even more. Sissy Three spoke as if she knew Claire and soon this interest brought Jackson and Sissy Three together, though Jackson had no idea of the depths of inquiry and research Sissy Three had engaged in: weekends in New York with Claire's mother, flipping through old photo albums and Claire's notebooks from college, reading her letters from home. "She was smart," the grandmother said to Sissy Three, enjoying her attention and her interest. "Far smarter than I could ever have been. She had grand notions, but she was too smart to have wasted her time at the farm. She'd have written books. She'd have been at the forefront of this women's movement like—like what's her name?" She tapped her forehead with the heel of her hand as if she could knock out the name.

"Betty Friedan?" Sissy offered.

"She knew Betty Friedan—Claire knew her. Indeed Betty's even been to Claire." Then noticing Sissy's hands, she changed the subject: "You have the most exquisite hands." She lifted them up to admire. Sissy Three's distinguishing feature, oddly enough, was her hands, very long and slender. In Paris she had been a hand model. A Japanese chemist she had briefly dated in Paris brought her to Claire on a bright spring day. The chemist was involved with the hydrogen economy project. Sissy Three never left.

And always the grandmother came, arriving in her black Lincoln with a scarf around her white hair and a shawl upon her shoulders. She would sit on the deck overlooking the fields and forest and the distant farms. She would tell Beth about a better life in New York City, trying to convince her granddaughter to follow Claire's own path. She wanted Beth to attend a private school where she would learn Latin instead of Hindi, to come to New York and learn to appreciate French cuisine instead of Indian. (By 1979 the grandmother had won this battle.) And she would sit with Jackson, pretending to sip her champagne (she was not a drinker), and tell him he was a dreamer; she would all but tell him his dream was sure to fail as these experiments in alternative living always do. "Too much sex, too much ego, too many people with too many destinies."

"Now, Grammy," Jackson would say, offering her the "piping hot" tea that she had requested simply because she liked to ask him to do things for her. Jackson kept Claire alive for her, and though she would never admit it, she was drawn to the community, she came and she came and she came, sitting on that deck somewhere deeply enjoying the place and the views, and telling Jackson why it would never work. Irascible, she may have been, but she was not immune to the power of her daughter's myth. She sat there above the spot that Claire had declared as the site for the house, where Claire had danced a sweet striptease in an April mist. Rising on her forearms to look at Jackson, naked both of them in the grass, Claire had said, "The world can't possibly be coming to end if we can feel as good as this."

 

By the time Cesare arrived at Claire in November of 1985, brought out for Thanksgiving from New York City by Beth, there were over one hundred people living and working at the farm. Claire was not what Cesare had imagined. He had imagined a chaotic place with people living on top of each other and somehow all getting along in spite of themselves. He had imagined everyone eating and cooking and sleeping together, lots of odd people from all over the world walking around dreamily dreaming up ideas, kids running around wild and unkempt, and everyone with jobs that somehow got done, Jackson presiding over it all with a soft hand that his daughter (and various women) tried to make more firm. That was not Claire. What he found was an ordered place with privacy, routine, discipline even. Odd yes, different yes, but more like a village, a town of sorts, than Cesare's idea of what a commune might be. Although in one detail, Cesare's imaginings were realized: the kitchen in the main house was open, it seemed, to anyone at anytime. People both familiar and strange to Cesare helped themselves to the food in the refrigerator and the cupboards all day long. ("A revolving door," Grammy would say. "Feeding all those people will be the ruin of Claire.")

At Claire, there were dirt streets (made by Mash), which contrasted with the interiors of the yurts and huts, all impeccably decorated with gleaming white walls, antique beds, and breezy curtains, courtesy of a designer named Short (and, indeed, he was short, with lots of hair and long fingernails). Short's contribution to the community was his eye for antiques, and their ability to appreciate.

The community had a store for supplies and a store that sold goods to tourists; there were business offices, the school, and, of course, the house sprawling on top of the hill, made of glass and cedar—also decorated by Short. Cesare had never seen such a house, which seemed of no particular design but was spectacular nonetheless for the advantage the windows took of all the views and the way the wood united the disparate parts. A deck trimmed the entire house and each of the five bedrooms, as well as the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen had sliding doors that opened onto it. The house had never been enlarged. It was built all at once with the knowledge that the views would not change. It followed a vague plan drawn up by Claire as she rode beside her husband on their trip back to New York City so many years ago. "Glass," she had said. "Lots of glass. So it looks like water and so that nothing is hidden from us."

At Thanksgiving dinner Cesare was surprised to find fifteen or twenty people instead of all one hundred as he'd imagined. Even this was a large group, he was told, but it was made up of family and friends. The other people of Claire had either gone away for the holiday or were having it with their own families. Rarely over the course of the year that Cesare was in America and visiting Claire was he aware of all one hundred people. Just as in a town, the population isn't constantly at your table.

Jackson, Preveena, Sissy Three, and Rada struck him as an odd family: not freaky, but unfamiliar. Jackson, for example, did not have the two wives—Preveena and Sissy Three—that Grammy had warned him about. ("Two wives," she would say. "Three if you count Claire. And I mean the farm, not my daughter.") Preveena, who was more like a sister, carrying on playfully with both Sissy Three and Jackson, was involved with Mash, the Russian carpenter whose thick accent Cesare had a hard time understanding. In Italy families were so straightforward; Beth's family was unusual but also refreshing, and Cesare admired the attempt here to make a happiness, to create a situation (unconventional as it may have been) that worked as well, perhaps better, than traditional families, in which unhappiness was so often swept beneath routine. They were trying, simple as that.

Though Cesare wouldn't have acknowledged his quest as directly as this, he wanted to see Claire, to see America and Beth's world, so that he could understand her completely, know her thoroughly, know if their love could withstand their respective histories. For him it was safer to think of his experience in terms of America: since he was a boy he'd been dreaming of America, reading about America, in love with America, and now that he was here, he wanted to sink into it, become it, know everything he could and experience everything he could. In theory, he liked adventure. In theory, he was willing to lose himself and try on anything and everything to see how it fit, to see if he looked better, felt better, in some other guise. This was the essence of him, the thing about him that Beth loved most, that Beth tried to excavate and encourage.

Leaving New York City on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with all the other undergraduates returning to their former lives, he felt American, like a college student going home. He loved the idea of college, of all these boys and girls independent of their families at such a young age, able to do and choose as they please; they learned the concept of choice simply by the range of topics they could pick from to study, and in doing so, they learned who they would and could become. In Italy, university was very different. You lived and studied at home (it was customary to live at home until you married), visiting school primarily to take exams. You had no real relationship with your professors and the university you selected was based on the job you would have once you finished, which was already decided by family legacy. He was at the Bocconi because its focus was economics. You would not go to the Bocconi if you needed to study law or medicine or language, say. A liberal arts education was had during high school. His summer trips to London had given him a small taste for independence, but those excursions were tightly structured, well organized, and taken with a large group of Italians. Here in America he was like a chameleon. He could adopt the life of the American student, try it on for size.