Granny D’s American Century

9 | Surviving by Our Wits

Surviving by Our Wits T here was a stream of people like us leaving Boston, New York, leaving all the big cities, leaving all those communities dedicated to the creative magnification of life, heading home to the dull cold of farms and tiny towns. Jim was lifeguard again and I was maid again on Nantucket—our fourth and final summer there. We walked together in the evenings, but now as man and wife. Jim was allowed to share my room upstairs. One evening as we walked together I decided I simply must have some potato chips. Jim bought me some from a small food vendor. I ate them, but then I lost them. Jim and I looked at each other. The ladies at Old Parliament confirmed it. They were certain I was pregnant . I was. They were delighted. I didn’t know how to feel about it. I was scared for us and for the child. There was some exchange of notes between my mother, Jim’s mother Aggie, and me regarding whether or not I should go through with it, considering the present economy and Jim’s situation. It was an awful thought. Jim wouldn’t hear of it, which was also the way I felt. The ladies of the Old Parliament used all their local muscle to try to get Jim a job teaching on the island. But the Depression had caused everyone to pull in their jazz hands, and a local boy with lesser credentials got the only available teaching post. At the end of the summer, we sailed on a ferry among huddled masses returning to what everyone rightly assumed would be hard times on the mainland; we left the privileged class behind, our shallow pockets filled with our summer wages. We showed up at my parents’ house in Laconia. My mother would not have us. I had made my bed and must sleep in it, is precisely what she said. My father seemed crushed by her words, but he did not countermand her. I knew it was the business with Lulu that had so poisoned her attitude toward me. And now, look, I was pregnant, and she would never be the mother of a rich star. 9 76 granny d’s american century We went to Lakeport, just north of Laconia, to the home of Jim’s parents, Aggie and Joe. My Jim didn’t need to ask them—he knew it was his house, his family, and he had a right to be there with his new wife. The house would be full, as there were three Haddock children still at home, and now a fourth had come back with a pregnant wife. “We’re going to live here for a while,” he told me on the porch as we arrived, hugging me and the baby in me. So we were now living in an unheated attic. Jim’s brother Lawrence, twenty-two, was below us, along with Aggie and Joe, and thirteenyear -old Bradley. A daughter, sixteen-year-old Natalie, would soon leave for teacher’s school and let us have her room. But for now it was cold, and the Depression was on. It was the fall of ’32 and then the winter of ’33. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just been elected president . We would all listen to his inauguration speech on a small radio in the Haddocks’ sitting room. Lawrence, my age, figured himself a Republican and didn’t like fdr at all. He also wasn’t happy that Jim and I were living there. He was the handsomer son—broad-shouldered, tall, even more athletic than very athletic Jim. Lawrence the football star had led the high school graduation march, voted king by the student body. During my performance as seer and prognosticator on that graduation day, I had publicly teased Lawrence—again at the suggestion of Alan Ayer—about how easily he blushed. So he was dead set against me and would remain so for years. Lawrence was now in his senior year at the University of New Hampshire, which wasn’t far away, so he was often in the house, especially on the weekends. Jim was the educated one, the Amherst intellectual, and he didn’t feel he lived in his brother’s shadow in any way. My Jim was impressed with fdr, and so was I. “I will wear whatever color shirt Mr. Roosevelt wants us to wear,” Jim said, joking about the frightening rise of authority...