INTRODUCTION
After my first book, Take My Ex‑Husband, Please‑‑But Not Too far, was published by
Little, Brown and Company in 1991, I began to think about a sequel. Readers said they enjoyed my memoir but some
added that they were left with questions.
They deduced that a lot had been left unsaid, and they wanted to know
more about the Malley family.
My
diaries and letters were a source of ample material for such a sequel. In my opinion, letters have every bit as much
sentimental and historical value as photographs or home movies. When we take pictures of our family, we
don't look at them and then throw them away.
We know they're a record of the way our kids and parents and uncles and
aunts looked and acted at various ages.
Letters are more perishable. The
chances are that even the most provocative or humorous or touchingly forlorn message will be enjoyed or
wept over and then discarded. The record
is destroyed and soon forgotten. But if
you keep copies of your letters, both sent and received, you gradually
accumulate an album that depicts your family in writing instead of photographs.
Moreover, casting a letter into a mailbox is like casting bread upon the
water. With a little luck, your
correspondent will keep flowing the exchange of ideas and adventures.
My
mother, children's poet Ernestine Cobern Beyer, was my first long‑term
correspondent. Later, daughters Kathie
and Vonnie became faithful letter‑writers, adding their youthful self‑ portraits to our family history. Their brothers, Ted and Tim, also contributed
letters from time to time—Ted’s, laconic and reserved, Tim’s, open and
extroverted.
Vonnie was not a scholar like Kathie; she
was twenty before she became an avid reader.
She had always had a flair, however, for dashing off breezy letters,
original in content and spelling. As she
matured, so did her writing skills, blossoming into a style uniquely her
own.
This manuscript might never have made it
off the floor of my study if Kathie, a professor of psychology at Boston
University, hadn't gone on sabbatical.
"How are those chapters coming, Mom?" she asked me one
day. "I'll be ready to start
looking at them in two weeks."
This was the impetus I needed to glue my
nose to my computer (in my day it was a
grindstone) and begin assembling chapters for this new memoir.
Captured
Music
Breaking
upon the shore, the bright waves leap
And
play until the ebb-tide backward wells,
Leaving
the lonely sand in silence, deep,
Save
for the captured music of the shells.
Thus
long ago, my children came to me,
And
stayed until life bade them to depart,
Yet
still upon the sands of memory
Their
vanished laughter lingers in my heart.
Ernestine Cobern Beyer
This isn’t what our house looked like when we moved in, after buying it
for $12,500 in 1944. It isn’t even exactly what it looked like when we moved
out, twenty-two years later. There was a time when I was sure I’d still be
living there today. But it’s funny; life has a way of changing expectations.
Welcome to Tears and Laughter at 90, where I peer back into decades of
journal entries and letters and share bits from my book (Take My Ex-Husband,
Please--But Not Too Far), plus a comedy co-authored by my daughter Kathie (The
Tempestuous Triangle), plus my mother Ernestine's captivating
poems (20 published in Poetry with a Purpose, Good Apple,
Inc., 1987, an activity book available on Amazon), and excerpts
from the Log of the Happy Days.
The house on Sandy Cove was razed in 2002. When I heard the news I
felt as if an essential part of me was gone, too. Our home for over two decades
was replaced by a million-dollar edifice that dwarfed its neighbors . . .
even McKenna’s Mansion. Embellished with spires and turrets and pediments, it
loomed over the adjoining homes that blended unaffectedly into their beach
grass and scrub pine surroundings. In 2007, the alien sold for close
to five million dollars. Kathie’s reaction: “I don't care if it sold
for ten million dollars. To me, it will always detract from the beauty and
charm of the Sandy Cove I remember.”
In the spring of 1944, my husband and I were looking for a house
in Cohasset, Massachusetts. Our home in Waban was an attractive colonial we had
purchased for $6500 two years earlier, after Ed got a sizable raise to $65 a
week, but it lacked one thing he was determined to have: an ocean.
The realtor was about to pass a long driveway lined with venerable elm
trees, when she slowed down and said, "There's a nice old house back
there, but it's rented for the summer. You might want to take a look at the outside.”
We
followed the realtor, our toddlers, Kathie and baby brother Teddy, in
tow. We saw a rambling three-story shingled house with gables and
ells, a large screened porch, and a shed covered with vines (watercolor by
Mom's friend Ruth Yount). Beyond the front porch, beach grass edged a
meandering path leading to Sandy Cove. In the middle of the cove there
were two out-croppings of rocks, one much larger than the other. The rocks, our
guide told us, had been called "Big‑Big" and "Little‑Big"
for as long as anyone could remember.
We walked down to the beach, saw Minot’s Light flashing its “I love
you” welcome, saw Ed’s ocean stretching to the horizon, and were
hopelessly seduced. How felicitous it seemed that this dwelling on Atlantic
Avenue, echoing the lighthouse’s signal, was number 143.
In
the fall, after we moved in, four-year-old Kathie solved the mystery of the
tides. “Look, Mummy, the rocks have gone out again!”
Our house was referred to as "the old
Adams house" for most of the twenty-two years we lived in it. The key
to a third floor bedroom was labeled "Uncle Charlie's room." Charlie,
we deduced from local yore, was Charles Francis Adams, a descendant of John
Quincy Adams and a frequent visitor to his relatives’ South Shore retreat. My
mother, children’s poet Ernestine Cobern Beyer, lived with us in the summer and
loved the view from Charlie's window as much as he must have. A trio she
observed on the beach was the inspiration for "Sunbonnet Babies.”
One wears a bonnet of organdy rose
That hides her adorable bangs,
And one wears a bonnet that shadows her nose,
And one wears a bonnet that hangs.
The first wears a pinafore (not very white!)
The second, a dress that is tidy.
But the belle of the beach is the third little mite
With the slightly inadequate didy!
(Ladies Home Journal, April
1949)
VAUGHAN AND VONNIE
|
Opposite Mom’s bedroom lived Vaughan, my childhood caretaker, confidante,
and faithful champion since I was eight years old. I thought of her
as my second mother and had long ago promised her “a place by the chimney
corner.” Although she was recovering from a double mastectomy, Vaughan couldn’t
be deterred from pitching in when my current helper had a day off or went on
vacation.
She
and Ernestine were devoted friends, although sweet dispositions could sour just
the tiniest bit when one or the other won at Canasta unfairly often. When the
weather turned cold-hearted, the two migrated to Florida and went their
separate ways, Vaughan to a job in Miami, near her son, Mother to Orlando.
The
second floor had four bedrooms, a plus when our family expanded. The one to the
left of the stairway was assigned to Vonnie (Stephanie Vaughan), who arrived
two years after Teddy. Next came the bathroom, whose claw-footed bathtub we
eventually replaced with a modern one, installed under a small, high window
that overlooked the driveway. Many was the time I hopped into that tub to make
sure the children had caught their bus or Kathie’s on-the-loose horse, Heidi,
before she found her way onto the pristine lawn of our neighbor, Mr. McKenna.
The bedroom across from Vonnie’s overlooked Sandy Cove and belonged to
Kathie. The third bedroom also had a view of Sandy Cove and was outfitted with
bunk beds for Teddy and Timmy, the fourth child in the family, blessing us in
1946, the year I turned twenty-five. When the brothers reached a destructive
age, boy-proof linoleum was installed. In a matter of months, a chemistry
experiment involving acid marred the flooring, which didn’t come with a
warranty.
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