I asked them the other evening to name the three most important human beings in history. They protested that the question made no sense to them.
I insisted that they put their heads together anyway, and give me some sort of answer, which they did. They were very sulky about the exercise. It was painful to them.
They finally came up with an answer. Melody does most of the talking for them, and this is what she said in all seriousness: “You, and Jesus Christ, and Santa Claus.”
Hi ho.
When I do not ask them questions, they are as happy as clams.
They hope to become slaves of Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa some day. That is O.K. with me.
Chapter 2
AND I really will try to stop writing “Hi ho”
all the time.
Hi ho.
I was born right here in New York City. I was not then a Daffodil. I was christened Wilbur Rockefeller Swain.
I was not alone, moreover. I had a dizygotic twin, a female. She was named Eliza Mellon Swain.
We were christened in a hospital rather than in a church, and we were not surrounded by relatives and our parents’ friends. The thing was: Eliza and I were so ugly that our parents were ashamed.
We were monsters, and we were not expected to live very long. We had six fingers on each little hand, and six toes on each little footsie. We had supernumerary nipples as well – two of them apiece.
We were not mongolian idiots, although we had the coarse black hair typical of mongoloids. We were something new. We were neanderthaloids. We had the features of adult, fossil human beings even in infancy – massive brow-ridges, sloping foreheads, and steamshovel jaws.
We were supposed to have no intelligence, and to die before we were fourteen.
But I am still alive and kicking, thank you. And Eliza would be, too, I’m certain, if she had not been killed at the age of fifty – in an avalanche on the outskirts of the Chinese colony on the planet Mars.
Hi ho.
Our parents were two silly and pretty and very young people named Caleb Mellon Swain and Letitia Vanderbilt Swain, n?e Rockefeller. They were fabulously well-to-do, and descended from Americans who had all but wrecked the planet with a form of Idiot’s Delight – obsessively turning money into power, and then power back into money again, and then money back into power again.
But Caleb and Letitia were harmless themselves. Father was very good at backgammon and so-so at color photography, they say. Mother was active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Neither worked. Neither was a college graduate, though both had tried.
They wrote and spoke nicely. They adored each other. They were humble about having done so poorly in schools. They were kind.
And I cannot fault them for being shattered by having given birth to monsters. Anyone would have been shattered by giving birth to Eliza and me.
And Caleb and Letitia were at least as good at parenting as I was, when my turn rolled around. I was wholly indifferent to my own children, although they were normal in every way.
Perhaps I would have been more entertained by my children if they had been monsters like Eliza and me.
Hi ho.
Young Caleb and Letitia were advised not to break their hearts and risk their furniture by attempting to raise Eliza and me in Turtle Bay. We were no more true relatives of theirs, their advisors said, than baby crocodiles.
Caleb’s and Letitia’s response was humane. It was also expensive and Gothic in the extreme. Our parents did not hide us in a private hospital for cases such as ours. They entombed us instead in a spooky old mansion which they had inherited – in the midst of two hundred acres of apple trees on a mountaintop, near the hamlet of Galen, Vermont.
No one had lived there for thirty years.
Carpenters and electricians and plumbers were brought in to turn it into a sort of paradise for Eliza and me. Thick rubber padding was put under all the wall-to-wall carpets, so we would not hurt ourselves in case we fell. Our diningroom was lined with tile, and there were drains in the floor, so we and the room could be hosed off after every meal.
More important, perhaps, were two chain-link fences which went up. They were topped with barbed wire. The first enclosed the orchard. The second separated the mansion from the prying eyes of the workmen who had to be let in through the first from time to time in order to look after the apple trees.
Hi ho.
A staff was recruited from the neighborhood. There was a cook. There were two cleaning women and a cleaning man. There were two practical nurses who fed us and dressed us and undressed us and bathed us. The one I remember best is Withers Witherspoon, a combination guard, chauffeur and handyman.
His mother was a Withers. His father was a Witherspoon.
Yes, and these were simple country people, who, with the exception of Withers Witherspoon, who had been a soldier, had never been outside Vermont They had rarely ventured more than ten miles from Galen, for that matter – and they were necessarily all related to one another, as inbred as Eskimos.
They were of course distantly related to Eliza and me, too, since our Vermont ancestors had once been content to dogpaddle endlessly, so to speak, in the same tiny genetic pool.
But, in the American scheme of things at that time, they were related to our family as carp were related to eagles, say – for our family had evolved into worldtravelers and multimillionaires.
Hi ho.
Yes, and it was easy for our parents to buy the fealty of these living fossils from the family past. They were given modest salaries which seemed enormous to them, since the money-making lobes of their brains were so primitive.
They were given pleasant apartments in the mansion, and color television sets. They were encouraged to eat like emperors, charging whatever they liked to our parents. They had very little work to do.
Better still, they did not have to think much for themselves. They were placed under the command of a young general practitioner who lived in the hamlet, Dr. Stewart Rawlings Mott, who would look in on us every day.
Dr. Mott was a Texan, incidentally, a melancholy and private young man. To this day, I do not know what induced him to move so far from his people and his birthplace – to practice medicine in an Eskimo settlement in Vermont.
As a curious footnote in history, and a probably meaningless one: The grandson of Dr. Mott would become the King of Michigan during my second term as President of the United States.
I must hiccup again: Hi ho.
I swear: If I live to complete this autobiography, I will go through it again, and cross out all the “Hi ho’s.”
Hi ho.
Yes, and there was an automatic sprinkler system in the mansion – and burglar alarms on the windows and doors and skylights.
When we grew older and uglier, and capable of breaking arms or tearing heads off, a great gong was installed in the kitchen. This was connected to cherry red push-buttons in every room and at regular intervals down every corridor. The buttons glowed in the dark.
A button was to be pushed only if Eliza or I began to toy with murder.
Hi ho.
Chapter 3
FATHER went to Galen with a lawyer and a
physician and an architect – to oversee the refurbishing of the mansion for Eliza and me, and the hiring of the servants and Dr. Mott Mother remained here in Manhattan, in their townhouse in Turtle Bay.
Turtles in great profusion, incidentally, have returned to Turtle Bay.
Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa’s slaves like to catch them for soup.
Hi ho.
It was one of the few occasions, except for Father’s death, when Mother and Father were separated for more than a day or two. And Father wrote a graceful letter to Mother from Vermont, which I found in Mother’s bedside table after Mother died.
It may have been the whole of their correspondence by mail.
“My dearest Tish – ” he wrote, “Our children will be very happy here. We can be proud. Our architect can be proud. The workmen can be proud.
“However short our children’s lives may be, we will have given them the gifts of dignity and happiness. We have created a delightful asteroid for them, a little world with only one mansion on it, and otherwise covered with apple trees.”
Then he returned to an asteroid of his own – in Turtle Bay. He and Mother, thereafter, again on the advice of physicians, would visit us once a year, and always on our birthday.
Their brownstone still stands, and it is still snug and weathertight. It is there that our nearest neighbor, Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, now quarters her slaves.