Photograph: Spithead House, Harbour Road, Warwick, Bermuda
Bad Luck in Bermuda
Maman ~ Bad Luck in Bermuda
It would be about 5:30 am and the sun would be coming up. I would hear Maman singing gaily below the windows on the widow's walk the Petula Clark song Downtown or any popular song from Broadway a Capella to the band, before asking
~ Well, you guys, what key am I singing in? What's my key?
Then...a lot of laughter.
It was quite common during that first summer at the house in Bermuda, for me to wake up at dawn to the sounds of the band on the dock just packing up. There were dinners and parties on the dock almost every night, and there was a regatta for 200 sunfish owners and spectators, as well as a gymkhana paper chase on horseback for all ages, with cash and silly prizes for the winning teams. An actual hot dog stand had been flown in from the streets of New York City for the events, and the bands that came to play were epic meaning on the Billboard charts. My favorite memories of that dock are sitting with my father and his friends, listening in particular to the soft-spoken playwright Terrence Rattigan. They are not only recollections of the regattas and paper chases, and not only of Maman in her Emilio Pucci dresses still up with the band drinking and smoking and talking with her hands at 6 am, and her laughter wafting in with the warm wind.
No one in New York City could understand at the time why Maman at the age of 40, twice divorced and with children in tow, would pick up lock stock and barrel suddenly, and decide to decamp entirely to Argentina. After her Haitian divorce from my Father was finalized in 48 hours, accomplished by a weekend sojourn to Port- Au-Prince, and followed by long evenings of Maman's tales of living in Haiti as a child at the American Embassy, they were married one Saturday afternoon at Saint Thomas Church on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue. She did not want to stay in New York City because it reminded her of my father, Maman said, and in Argentina her older half- sister Margot Garrett had married and been blissfully happy until she died at the age of 28 in a plane crash flying back to Buenos Aires with her husband Mariano Zuberbuhler from Santiago del Estero in a small plane as people do there. My Grandmother flew down to Buenos Aires to buy back her daughter's estate and bring back her remains. Maman was 17 at the time, and as Margot and Mariano had visited and taken her out from boarding school in Switzerland frequently, she said Margot was more like a mother to her, and she felt the deep loss.
Maman had dreamed of an Argentina that would replicate her idea of the twenties, and a European city~ after all Buenos Aires is called the Paris of South America she kept repeating!
She paid no attention to the reality of the politics or the place in time or the conditions of the country. There was never a problem Maman could not solve with getting on a plane or buying a new place, be that a ranch, house, apartment, whatever, and making it over. Whenever things were going badly for her, she would begin to hate the house or the apartment wherever she was and dream of going somewhere else. She would also blame the real estate or physical location, street, town, city, province, country, the language, the provenance of the population, the fashions, customs, and culture wherever she was when visited by this restless unhappiness.
She was happy when she was in love, and she fell out of love quickly with places and with people.
Following the death of my Grandmother Alice, we left the apartment at 799 Park Avenue where she had lived across the street from us at 800 Park Avenue, and where Maman visited her daily, and took us for tea once a week. That year my parents bought a townhouse on 71st Street between Park and Lexington, and a house in Bermuda. The huge 19th century pink house made of limestone had the typical Bermudian white roof to catch rainfall and sat jutting out into the harbor with a smaller house and a cottage on the grounds. This geography was the inspiration for the name its builder Hezekiah Frith gave the place, and he carried out a successful smuggling and piracy enterprise from the dock of Spithead House sheltered by the island's inner harbor. This privateer was one of Bermuda's richest men in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Later the house would pass through the hands of Noel Coward,Eugene O'Neill and Charlie Chaplin. Before my father bought it in the late 1960s the house would belong ultimately to Oona O'Neill and was known as The Chaplin Estate.
Maman loved the long widow's walk with its windows that stretched along the entire second floor in between the two main wings of the house and looked out across the Hamilton Harbor. She told me the upstairs was haunted by the ghost of the pirate's mistress, a young French woman carried off from the ship L' Auguste, and that she wandered lonely and confused about the house, The ghost of Hezekiah Frith could be seen waiting anxiously on the dock on stormy evenings at dusk, waiting for fair weather to put out to sea. At the end of the first summer Maman put herself into a taxi along with my baby sister the nanny and as much luggage as would fit, and left the island, her husband, and her children to pursue a man she had fallen in love with on a crossing of the QEII from New York to Southampton. She and my father quarreled constantly that summer. She had become increasingly unhappy and took to sitting in her room drinking and smoking in the days before she left, entirely insistent on talking to me, and on my constant company. I followed her about with the little ashtray she had swiped from The Ritz in Paris as she lit one cigarette after another and let the ash fall where it would, and I watered down the drinks she instructed me to make.
~ You know Mignon, Ma Puce, as she liked to call me, she would say, it's this house you know. That’s what it is.
She had a flair for dramatic inflection, and I was spellbound at anything she said no matter what.
~It brought bad luck to the O'Neills~ it will bring bad luck to us too.
I would just have to ask about this.
~What about Charlie Chaplin? What about him, was it bad luck for him too? And what about the O’Neills , what bad luck? What happened?
~I will tell you when you're older, not now Mignon. You're too young. Why must you know everything? C’est de trop!
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Well, I mean, wouldn't you move to Argentina to escape such misfortunes, I ask you?
Echoes of F. Scott Fitzgerald here, except you look from the inside. Fascinating woman, your mother. Though life with her certainly sounds precarious!
Precarious , yes- a good word for her life.