A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Read Free Page A

disgusted at the time she took in it behind a door she always primly locked.
    I was then enrolled at Bovee and she in Miss Chapin's, a few blocks south. Maggie, our nurse, would pick me up at noon and walk me down to Miss Chapin's to get Priscilla. My poor sister, at twelve, was undergoing the severe mental stress of a constant bad conscience over trivial matters. This was all part of her condition.
    Such things were never discussed in those days. People were too apt to jump to conclusions that far exceeded the actual condition. When the doctors treating my father sought to trace the origin of his disease in his family, I kept my sharp little ears open and picked up the legend that, as a Newport debutante, grandmother Auchincloss had tried to drown herself (a tale barely creditable and utterly hushed up) and that a crazy niece of hers had actually murdered a woman friend.
    Although I concealed my finds from the outside world, I was enchanted by such accounts, which made a dull family exciting. Despite the stern parental warnings, I told all my little friends that the doctors were probably going to put my sister in a straightjacket. My poor bewildered parents couldn't imagine where these rumors were coming from.
    My unhappy sister would awake me at night with complaints like: "We were playing tag in the yard at recess today, and I touched a girl on the shoulder and cried 'You're it!' But did I actually touch her? Might I have cheated?"
    You can imagine how much consolation she got from a kid brother angry at being awakened. Besides, I was already convinced that she got too much sympathy from our parents, whose growing alarm over her condition was, of course, not understandable to me. A crisis arose one Christmas when she refused to open a single present marked "For Priscilla," insisting that it might be for Mother, whose namesake she was.

    My sister had a series of female paid companions who were disguised professionals trained to cheer her up and help her to find life interesting. They became, of course, a feature of family life not wholly welcome. I recall one who tried to stimulate conversation at breakfast by asking my father, a devoted Wagnerian, if he did not find the music of
Tristan
vulgar and sensuous. Another one, a rather pretty Miss Jack, was engaged to a man called Bill, and I used to infuriate her by singing excerpts from the song "My Bill," which Helen Morgan had then made famous in
Show Boat:
"He's just my Bill, an ordinary man; you'd meet him on the street and never notice him." Finally she actually gave notice, and Mother thought it was so silly she never scolded me.
    The companion who was with us longest, a Miss Warfield, was an amiable, well-meaning, but thickly sentimental woman who was rumored in later years to have been some kin to the duchess of Windsor whom she certainly did not resemble. It was her enthusiastic theory that Priscilla be introduced to "Mother Nature" by spending a night outside in the woods in Maine. Great preparations were made under Miss Warfield's detailed instructions. Sheets, blankets, pillows, pots and pans, breakfast foods, insect deterrents, medicines, flashlights, and Lord knows what else were hauled by our reluctant chauffeur into the woods adjoining our property, and something like a camp was set up.
    In the morning after a sleepless night the chauffeur and Maggie brought the adventurers back to the house, where they gratefully spent the day in bed.

    Expert and expensive psychiatric treatment in those days was centered in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Priscilla was placed in the care of a famous and fashionable doctor there.
His treatment would, I am sure, be considered odd today. He opined that Priscilla's trouble originated in a family with three boys and she must be reintegrated in one with two girls and a doctor. Guess which doctor and guess his fee! Twenty thousand dollars a year, in the 1930s! But Mother believed in doctors and even in their fees. The money was paid