Rough Magic Read online

  2

  The Charles River, curving in on itself as it flows eastwards to Boston and the Atlantic beyond, winds around Wellesley’s borders, but the town has many other bodies of water as well: Morse’s Pond, Longfellow Pond, Lake Waban, and brooks like Fuller and Rosemary. Still, it is trees, in particular elms and maples, that define Wellesley’s character. They are, in fact, everywhere, lining the narrow two-lane streets, shading front and back yards, composing the forest that establishes the town’s northern border. In the summer, Wellesley is awash with green; in autumn, oranges, yellows, reds. The leaves were well into their changing by October 1942, the month the Plaths and the Schobers moved to Wellesley. On the surface, the town, dominated as it was by these trees, projected a picture of charm and hominess. What there was of the town, that is: with only fourteen thousand residents, Wellesley was relatively small. Enclaves of houses, most built in the last four decades, were connected by lanes that bore such archetypal New England names as Brook Street, Green Street, and Elmwood Road. Downtown consisted of several plate-glass-window-fronted stores that lined the main street; a number of churches, among them the Unitarian; a combination town hall-library housed in a huge granite-and-red-sandstone building designed in the French chateau style; and customary small-town establishments like a post office, a police station, and a firehouse. Perhaps the town’s most elegant section was the Wellesley College campus, the wooded grounds dominated not by the stately buildings which created an unmistakable Ivy League aura but by the long sloping hill that overlooked Lake Waban. The town’s newest civic structure, completed in 1938, was the Gamaliel Bradford High School, a contemporary red-brick building that boasted a gymnasium, an auditorium, a cafeteria, corridor upon corridor of classrooms, plus metal and wood shops. Connecting Wellesley with Boston were the Worcester Turnpike, the Boston and Albany Railroad, and a modern trolley system—all needed, since many of the town’s inhabitants—like Aurelia—worked in Boston.

  In many ways, the staid, peaceful facade created by the town was misleading. The Great Depression had ravaged Wellesley throughout the thirties. The town’s upper-crust white-collar workers, left unemployed by the failure of countless financial institutions, signed on as menial laborers while their wives took in sewing and knitting. Then, in 1938, the worst hurricane in recent memory had struck. And just as the final stages of the town’s long-term rebuilding program neared an end, the harshest blow of all—World War II. A local historian describes Wellesley in late 1942:

  Gas rationing so tight you could scarcely motor beyond the town’s borders. Shortages of rubber so you couldn’t patch your tires to go anywhere safely, even if you had the gasoline by virtue of a B or C ration book. Town canning kitchens, local knitting circles, endless work on surgical dressing. A town with no young men. Lists of casualties that were the center of daily conversation. The thrill of managing to wangle a rare stick of butter or occasional bit of sugar. Daily life without them, without meat. Horsemeat, soybeans, oleo you had to mix with food coloring to make it acceptable at table. Anxious nights glued to the H. V. Kaltenborn broadcasts of war news. Living rooms with maps spread out so people could trace the action and guess at the locations of their sons’ units. A sober dedication to service; long hours of volunteer work, and raising money for refugees. Collecting every bit of metal for the scrap iron collection, including old car bodies that youngsters retrieved from the woods on their carts. Rolling balls of tin foil salvaged from cigarette packages. Victory gardens and war stamps books, filled in by bringing coins to school. A citizens’ auxiliary police force, and air raid wardens. Drills. Headlights half blacked out with paint and shades on street lights. Fears, after reports of submarine sightings along the New England coast.

  Around the time the Plaths and the Schobers relocated, Frank Senior secured a new job. Because his vision had become impaired by a degenerative eye disease, and because he remembered fondly the years he had supported himself in Europe as a waiter, he applied to become Brookline Country Club’s maitre d’hotel, a position with numerous advantages—a good salary and perks—but one significant drawback—a requirement that the maitre d’ reside at the club during the week and visit home only on weekends. In Winthrop, with Grammy in charge days, Aurelia home nights, and Grampy—the children’s name for Frank—present whenever he was not working, Sylvia and Warren had enjoyed a more traditionally European upbringing, as multiple generations harmoniously lived under the same roof. Once they moved to Wellesley and Frank began his Brookline job, the Plath-Schober household turned into a matriarchy—not an altogether positive development, in Aurelia Plath’s eyes.

  Appreciably smaller than 92 Johnson Avenue, 26 Elmwood Road contained, downstairs, one bedroom, one bath, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a screened-in sitting room that connected the house to a single-car garage. Upstairs consisted of two bedrooms and a second bath. The Schobers took the first-floor bedroom, and Warren required a bedroom of his own (he and Sylvia were too old to share a room), so Sylvia was relegated to the third bedroom, which she had to share with her mother. For a young girl approaching her teenage years, these living arrangements could have been better. Yet Sylvia faced far greater strains. The move to Wellesley itself represented a source of anxiety. She had to worry about making friends, adjusting to a different school, and learning her way around unfamiliar places. But this seemed nothing compared with the pain she still felt over the death of her father. The tragic loss of a parent can crack the foundations of any child’s personality. To Sylvia, her father’s death proved even more troubling because he could have prevented it merely by getting medical help. In a real way, Otto had willed himself to die, had committed, as Sylvia would later confide to friends, a kind of suicide. Therefore, when Sylvia thought about her father’s death, she became more confused, not less. How could her father, an international expert in the field of biology, so misdiagnose his own case?

  To ground her daughter in this time of uncertainty, Aurelia decided to enroll Sylvia at Wellesley’s Marshall Perrin Elementary School not in the sixth grade, which she had started in Winthrop, but in the fifth. Holding Sylvia back a year, which would allow her to study familiar subjects, might help her navigate this period of transition in her life. It would also narrow the two-year age gap between Sylvia and her fellow students, a result of Sylvia’s having started the first grade at age four. Aurelia now feared that if the gap persisted Sylvia might grow up physically, emotionally, and socially out of step with her peers. The move to Wellesley provided the perfect chance to carve one year off that difference. So, in Wellesley, Sylvia, thanks to a lightened academic workload, had time to pursue such extracurricular activities as piano, Girl Scouts, and reading, and to establish neighborhood friendships. One of note was with Betsy Powley, a cute ten-year-old who lived nearby on Parker Road.

  Aurelia also made several friends in Wellesley. One woman to whom she would become especially close was Mildred Norton, the wife of a colleague of Otto’s. Since the friendship brought their families together, the Norton boys—Dick, Perry, and David—were soon visiting with the Plath children either at 26 Elmwood Road or at the Nortons’ home in Wellesley Fells, a Wellesley subdivision. The families saw each other regularly at the Unitarian church, after Aurelia, who had been raised Catholic but wanted a more open religion, converted to Unitarianism. Before long, the Plaths and the Nortons had become so intimate that Sylvia and Warren referred to Mildred Norton as Aunt Mildred, just as the Norton boys called Aurelia Aunt.

  In February 1943, Aurelia suffered an acute gastric hemorrhage, for which she was hospitalized for three weeks; she then convalesced a fourth week at Dorothy’s home before resuming a regular routine. Sylvia and Warren endured the crisis well; their grades never slipped. But, by June, both children longed for a vacation. This summer, their first inland, would be considerably different. To amuse herself without the help of the ocean, Sylvia drew pictures, read books, wrote—and sunbathed, an obsession she had her whole life. And because trees dom
inate Wellesley’s landscape just as water does Winthrop’s, Sylvia took to climbing a backyard apple tree in whose branches, thick with the scent of blossoms or, later in the season, apples themselves, she would sit for hours as she read and wrote. Sylvia’s playtime with Betsy also involved foliage. “I’ll never forget what she and I did that first summer we were friends,” remembers Powley. “Behind my house, the land sloped off down into a valley. It was all thick woods, and there was a little brook on either side of the valley. The woods were full of ferns. What we did was, we went down and built a hut in the woods. We’d frame it up with little saplings; then we would weave ferns into the sapling to build an igloolike fern hut. In the rear part of the hut we had a secret room where we could hide. The hut was gorgeous, as huts go. We played in it a lot that summer—two girls happy and innocent, seemingly without a care in the world.”

  Seemingly, for early in the summer Aurelia’s ulcer had hemorrhaged again. In July, while Aurelia recovered, Sylvia attended Girl Scout camp in New Hampshire. Occasionally, she showed in her postcards home the dread she felt over her mother’s health: she included deceptively short passages that asked how she felt or expressed her concern because she did not write regularly. After camp, Sylvia returned to Wellesley for August—and more sunning, writing, and playing in the fern hut with Betsy. In September, she entered sixth grade, and in this year her achievements remained high. That spring semester alone, she read so many books that on May 3 she earned an honor certificate from the state Division of Public Libraries’ Department of Education. One month later, the school awarded her a similar certificate.

  Sylvia did not devote all of her time to academic pursuits. Like any eleven-year-old, she livened many of her nights by listening to the radio, especially “The Jack Benny Show” and “The Lone Ranger.” One highlight of the late winter of 1944 occurred when Aunt Dorothy treated Sylvia and Warren to Lassie Come Home, starring Roddy McDowall and Elizabeth Taylor. But mostly Sylvia drew, wrote, and read. True to form, when the spring semester ended on June 16 (she received her string of A’s and B’s), Sylvia celebrated the arrival of summer by reading—in two days—Gone with the Wind, a book she had now read three times.

  That summer, following a month of Girl Scout camp, Sylvia passed August relaxing in Wellesley. In early September, she started the seventh grade at Alice L. Phillips Junior High. Now, approaching adolescence, Sylvia became concerned about her popularity. After adjusting to Phillips in the fall, she made a concerted effort to develop her social life in the spring. Although she did quit Girl Scouts, she served as vice-president for her guidance (homeroom) class, for that same class managed Defense Stamps (stamps sold to support the American effort in the war), and joined the girls’ basketball team. In addition, she attended various social functions, often escorted by boys. Outside school, she found time to draw, study music, read, and write. In 1944, she wrote the story “The Thrilling Journey of a Penny” and mapped out a novel to be narrated by a girl named Nancy; in the fall, she finished several poems, among them “In the Corner of My Garden” and “A Wish upon a Star.” By spring, Sylvia was writing poetry at an astonishing rate and a surprising level of sophistication. She had also become adamant about saving her poems, copying them into one of three books—a scrapbook, a diary, or a document she called Life Poem Book. She continued to publish, now in the junior-high newspaper, The Phillipian, which printed not only her poems but her drawings.

  On January 20, 1945, Aurelia took Sylvia and Warren into Boston to see the Colonial Theatre’s production of The Tempest, the children’s first play. After reading both Lamb’s version and Shakespeare’s original, Sylvia and Warren eagerly awaited the show, which did not disappoint them. “They were completely transported to the magic land of Pros-pero,” Aurelia wrote in a note to herself at the time, “and Sylvia, in particular, will remember the enchantment that was continued on the train ride home. Everything conspired together to make this a celestial occasion—even the snowstorm that had been predicted to strike blizzard-force this day withheld itself. The sun shone instead on the piles of snow already heaped everywhere; the children were well, and their spirits ready and eager for transport, ready to receive ‘such stuff as dreams are made of.’ “ Sylvia would also remember, specifically, certain speeches, characters, and lines from the play for years to come. That night, as she sat spellbound in the audience, she saw onstage for the first time the airy spirit Ariel, released from more than a decade of captivity in a tree by his liberator, Prospero. She marveled at the supernatural workings of Prospero, who, finally seeing the error of his ways, decides to give up “this rough magic.” And she heard a poem whose subject rang chillingly true for her. About the death of a father, “Ariel’s Song” reads:

  Full Fathom Five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

  3

  In the spring of 1945, while sitting for a portrait on April 12, President Franklin D. Roosevelt collapsed and died. Hearing the news on the radio, Sylvia wrote in her diary, at the top of that day’s page, “Roosevelt Dies.” Then, only days after Harry Truman assumed the presidency, a series of startling Allied victories forced Germany and Italy to surrender on May 7. As Sylvia listened to the car horns and firecrackers, it sounded as if all of Wellesley would erupt in celebration. Now, there was only the war in the South Pacific. Still, to Sylvia, the arrival of June meant not just the end of another academic year but the prospect that her Uncle Frank might come home. For her scholastic achievement— her final report card contained seven A’s and a B in music—Sylvia received an honor certificate for reading; commendation cards for “her unusual creative work in English,” for “her outstanding quality of oral and written work, for her careful application to daily work, and for her helpfulness in class discussion,” and for her “excellence in taking care of war stamps sales"; and the seventh grade’s Wellesley Award.

  On July 1, the Powleys drove Sylvia and Betsy to Camp Helen Storrow in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. At Storrow, where she was overseen by, as she called them, the “Ash” Trio—Dash, the camp leader; Flash, her assistant; and Splash, the person in charge of water sports—Sylvia pursued such time-honored camp activities as hiking, picnicking, and swimming. Judging from her letters home, the activity she enjoyed most was eating. At one lunch alone, she consumed six plates of chicken-and-vegetable casserole, five cups of punch, and a scoop of ice cream. If the family was running low on ration points when she came home, she wrote to her mother after describing a meal, they could slaughter her and eat her for pork.

  Once she returned to Wellesley on July 15, Sylvia entertained herself for a week, practicing the piano. Her favorite pieces included Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Paderewsky’s “Minute,” Deeme’s “Tar-entelle,” and Bohrom’s “The Murmuring Brook.” On the 23rd, the Plaths traveled to Oxford, Maine—by train to Portland, by bus from there—to visit Sylvias friend Margot Loungway’s family at their summer home. They stayed until August 8, during which time the children worked on the farm and Sylvia wrote poems about shooting stars and northern lights. On a layover in Portland on the train ride home, Aurelia picked up a newspaper in which Sylvia read the initial reports about the bombing of Hiroshima. One cold statistic—60 percent of the city lay in ruins—struck her hardest. Two days later, Sylvia read accounts of the chaotic state of affairs the bombing had produced in Japan. The descriptions of the destniction of Hiroshima and (subsequently) Nagasaki sounded as horrific as new tales coming from Europe—reports about German concentration camps and the execution of Jews. By the 14th, peace in the Pacific appeared near. Throughout the day, which Sylvia passed by reading Separate Star, radio reports depicted Japan hovering on the verge of surrender. At seven o’clock, during supper, came official word from Washing
ton: Hirohito had forwarded to Truman a note that read, “We surrender unconditionally.”

  In this time of optimism, Sylvia entered the eighth grade at Phillips on September 6, 1945. Six days later, her homeroom elected her its president. For Sylvia’s birthday, Ruth Freeman arrived for a spend-the-night party. In the spring term, Sylvia maintained a heavy reading schedule of novels like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Pride and Prejudice. Also in the spring term, Sylvia—now thirteen and a full-fledged teenager—developed a keen interest in boys. In February 1946, she and Perry Norton attended a Unitarian church dance and a Girl Scouts’ Valentines Day party at which they played spin-the-bottle, much to Perry’s disgust. Then, in April, Dick Mills, a friend, took Sylvia to a small dance party at Donnie Russell’s. In the Russells’ basement playroom, four teenage couples ate cookies, drank Coca-Colas, and danced to music playing on the phonograph. For Sylvia, the evening’s climax occurred at the moment she settled down on the sofa next to Dick Cunningham—another friend—and he slipped his arm around her shoulder, a move that prompted Dick Mills to rush over and ask for a dance. The next day, visiting Ruth in Winthrop, Sylvia met an old friend, Wayne Sterling, who made such an impression on her that she dreamed about him for nights.