Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill with their son Shane O’Neill, Cape Cod, 1922
Maman~ Great Expectations
This story is about Maman and the years of interlude. This was a time of great expectations. These expectations were not only of her eventual if not immediate return, but they were also of our adapting to a life in Bermuda, a kind of paradise, and wanting to fit in at school, live at the stables, ride at every horse show and win, excel at the difficult British curriculum, learn to play piano, and play outdoor sports we'd never even dreamed of in New York City.
She would be gone for more than two years, and when she returned, Maman would say that my brother and I had been ruined by the freedom to roam the island as we pleased, also mostly shoeless, and that I would never be able to fit into any shoes again let alone pointe shoes. Wild animals she said we were. Later there would be more separation when I stayed in the pension in Buenos Aires and boarded at school, and when I went to England for university. For decades we would live on different continents, and the emotional distance could not have been further because of her husband.
Maman was in Portugal, in the Algarve, and my father spent the weeks in New York City, and flew back to Bermuda on the weekends. While we weren't absent from school, my brother and I had almost complete freedom. Every Sunday before he flew Eastern Airlines or Pan Am back to the city, there would be some sort of rules review. When my father had looked at his watch every minute before he extinguished his thin bitter Dutch cigar and reached the bottom of the glass, he had forgotten to say something. He would motion vaguely in the direction of Spithead Cottage and mention the usual admonition.
~And remember what else I always tell you~ Don’t bother Agnes Boulton.
I remembered this with tiny jolts of guilt the first time I sat in the sunlit nook in the kitchen with Ms. Boulton drinking a tall glass of heavenly lemonade. It had not been difficult to find the reclusive older woman who almost never went outside and who no one came to see. She had been in her garden under a big straw hat wearing gloves and tending to her flowers when she noticed me as I was always outside, often climbing the trees that bordered on her property or wandering about looking for lost tennis balls from the games played on the cracked concrete court. She seemed pleased to see me and invited me inside immediately, saying it was too hot to be outside on days like these, and asking me if I was going to the stables, as if she knew my day, as if I were familiar to her.
The walls of the small room were painted a wonderful yellow and there were large colorful posters of Spain of bullfights and fighters. There were large framed black and white photographs of Agnes Boulton with lots of toreadors celebrating, and then several of her with one of the toreadors, only now I believe those photographs were of Eugene O'Neill dressed as a toreador. I hoped against hope she would tell me about her life. She saw me gazing at the pictures, and I believe she said,
~ My husband, my lovers.
~That's taken in Spain, right?
~Spain, yes, I was in Spain then. We were there.
~ Did you have a lot of lovers? Do most women?
She smiled at me.
I didn't ask many more questions because her voice was sad, although she could have shed light on my enigmatic mother, and I wondered if she hid away from the world, and no one came to see her because in these visual souvenirs she had all the company she needed. Not until years later did I understand that Agnes Boulton had been married to Eugene O'Neill until he left her for Carlotta Monterey, and that her daughter Oona O'Neill had married Charlie Chaplin leading her father to disown her as Chaplin was decades older. At one time she had resided with her husband in the main house before he took up residence there with his new wife.
She will have written about her time on the Chaplin Estate in her memoir about her marriage to Eugene O'Neill, in Part of a Long Story. There is also the correspondence between Agnes Boulton and O'Neill which was published in 2000 in a book called A Wind is Rising, and William Davies King wrote a biography of Agnes Boulton called Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O' Neill and Agnes Boulton.
~ No, no I promise I won’t, I would say to my father every Sunday.
~I won’t bother her.
***
Maman
Fascinating, these memories of a child filtered through the woman she became.
Thank you Sarah! I'm glad you're enjoying these little stories!