Edie (16 page)

NITA COLGATE
 After Minty came out of Silver HI’ll that first time, he would have supper with us and afterwards he would go to the AA meetings next door at the Brick Church. I had the feeling—having been definitely branded with family problems myself—that we’d gone through the same wars, even though I hadn’t had to live through them the way he had. He wrote me letters later on when I was in Bloomingdale hospital. They were strange, with drawings of sexy naked women . . . three-or four-page letters on small notepaper . . . pen-and-ink sketches like the illustrations you see on the cover of a detective-story magazine. Lurid. I remember them as having the deliberate sexiness of a prostitute—a stripped prostitute. That’s the image that comes to mind.

DIANA DAVIS
 When Minty got out of Silver Hill, He wanted to see me. I was shocked when I saw him because he was so blown up—alcohol or drugs, I guess. Somehow he wanted to tell me that everything was fine, and to find out about me. He kept saying, “I’m much, much better.” We went to his grandmother’s apartment for dinner. A number of the family were there. I don’t know whether I was there because Minty liked me or because they’d all decided for him, “Oh, she’s a nice girl.” I couldn’t judge our friendship any more. He saw me to the elevator. I remember saying, “I’m glad you’re better.” I kept thinking it was like when people ask you, “How are you?” and you say, “Oh, I’m fabulous,” and inside you’re just a total mess.

LOCY SILVAY
 He seemed disturbed and would talk about his family incessantly. He told me that he had tried to commit suicide twice: once by taking pills and another time he nearly jumped out a window. We would stay up all night talking—we even discussed getting married, but he never made a pass at me. I was surprised by that because I’d had affairs before.

I only knew him as “Francis.” He told me he hated that other name . . . “Minty” . . . the name his family called him.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 I’m sad I didn’t help Minty, because he came to me and said, “Help me.” I was too cold. I had come out of the Army in 1962, when I was twenty-two, and went back to Harvard. He came begging for help. His thing was that he never was sure people loved him. He couldn’t understand people’s love. He was a sensitive, musical person who could pick up (he wings of a bird and play them on a flute. Girls loved him, they really did, but he couldn’t
feel
they loved him. When Minty was younger and would bring a girl friend to the ranch, my father would turn on his sexual side and just usurp all the energy that my brother was putting out on that level and blow him out.

Minty thought too much about loving. I just gave up on loving people, they were too weird. Letting them into me was just ugh . . . they were nuts. So I always stayed open to animals. I could talk to them. They do what I ask. They come to me in the wild. A little fawn came right up to me, man. Blew me out. I wasn’t ready for it.

Minty and I went to dinner one night in a tiny little restaurant off Brattle Street in Cambridge. We talked until four in the morning. He asked me how I satisfied girls. My way was just simply I loved girls, I didn’t care whether they loved me. I loved it when they did love me, but that wasn’t what I was after. Minty was sure they never loved him . . . never, never, never, never.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 The year Babbo died, Edie was thirteen. She had just started boarding school at the Katharine Branson School near San Francisco. Pamela’s husband saw her on a summer vacation and said he just couldn’t imagine a more pure vision of absolute beauty possible than Edie walking across a tennis court. She was totally innocent. A young, budding woman with a very childlike consciousness to go with it, which is extremely tantalizing for older men. And I suppose that was difficult for me, too, because she was the apple of everyone’s eye when I was coming of age and trying to get some eye on me.

Being away from the ranch turned out to be a terrible wrench for Edie. When she went to the Katharine Branson School, she told me she had nightmares about Mummy. Crying. Just crying about Mummy a lot, I don’t know why. I think she hated school desperately. Maybe she felt she was being punished by being sent away. I don’t know.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 Suddenly Edie was taken out of school. I heard all sorts of rumors when she was brought home—that she had mononucleosis, even that my mother thought she was getting leukemia, That would have been absurd, because my mother must have known what the real trouble was. Edie had anorexia.

In our family there were two styles of eating. One was to eat special foods, which my mother did because of all her allergies. Edie ate special
foods at all hours of the day and night; even her white rat, named Hunca Munca, had to have special food. The rat’s diet nearly caused William and Nancy, the couple who had been with us since Long Island, to leave. The other style was to eat enormously—which my father did. In a way, my father was a model for Edie because he would eat such quantities; then he would burn it off with his exercises and swimming and riding. But Edie vomited it up. She would sit down to a very special meal which she herself would carefully choose and eat helping after helping of, course after course, excusing herself during the meal to go and be sick, to throw up what she had eaten so she could eat more. But nothing reached her stomach, or very little did.

SUKY SEDGWICK
 I used to assist on those feasts. She used to call it “pigging.” “I’ve got to go pig now.” Eating and stuffing and stuffing and eating and then throwing up.

GILLIAN WALKER
 Edie told me what it was like on the ranch alone with her parents, because by then all the children, even Suky, were off at school. She spoke of lying in her room alone with the shades drawn. She loved telling me how her father would come after her and lock her up and force her to stay in bed—a helpless, isolated prisoner, a drugged princess. She dramatized these incidents in a way that made me think she’d been reading nineteenth-century Gothic novels. But since she rarely read, I think these things were really going on.

JONATHAN SEDGWICK
 Edie found my father making love with some lady in the blue room . . . just humping away, and it blew her mind. He jumped up and swore at her. She went running to her room. He came charging in and slapped her a few times. He was irrational because he’d been caught in his act. “You don’t know anything. You’re insane,” he told her. Then he made the doctor come right over and give her a lot of tranquilizers. Nobody’d believe Edie because “Edie is sick.” Mummy wouldn’t believe her—she just had a blockage against things like that. Nobody’d believe her, so she was really a prisoner. Edie wanted to tell people what was happening, but she couldn’t do anything. She was too fucked up in her head to be able to do anything. She lost all her feelings because everything around her was an act now. She knew what had really happened, and my father just denied the whole thing. And that
really
hurt her.

When I came back—I guess I was a senior at Groton—Edie was really strange. She was like a little baby, saying, “Look at the neat horse
I’m drawing. See, Jonathan? Isn’t it neat?” Her life had gone, except for the horses. So my father shipped her off to another school.

LAINE DICKERMAN
 Edie came to St. Timothy’s in 1958. As you know, St. Tim’s, as everyone calls it, is a small, exclusive school of about 125 girls on a totally secluded Maryland estate surrounded by woods and hills. It’s always been proud of its tradition of turning out well-balanced “Christian gentlewomen.” At the end of each year the school gives out two prizes, one for “the best scholar,” the other for “the best person.”

When Edie first came, she seemed like a real leader type. She was the only one of our class to make the Brownie basketball team. She practically lived in the team uniform—a brown tunic with a red Brownie shaped like a plump troll on it. She was
so
high on making the team. The night before the big game at Thanksgiving there is a secret candlelight ceremony in which the newest Brownie, Edie, walked around within the circle of Brownies all chanting:

I
thought I heard my Grandmother say
St. Timothy’s School is coming this way
With a Vivo and a Vivo
And a ribtail, ribtail
Hanging on a cat tail
Vum, vum, vum.

Edie must have been incredibly pleased with herself; it lasted her most of the fall, her happiest time. The rest of the class admired her. She was our first class president. She dazzled us with her charm, and we all wanted to be her best friend. That Thanksgiving was the peak of her desirability.

But then it became apparent that Edie’s friendships were full of courtships and rivalries and jealousies. She would choose only one best friend at a time, do everything with her, and make the rest of us jealous. Then she’d suddenly be attracted to someone else, drop the old friend, and hurt her with scorn and indifference. She had crushes on seniors in high positions and was quite bold about approaching them, flirting with them and trying to impress them. She was so bold that I often felt embarrassed for her. But she got the seniors’ attention; they noticed her and treated her like a cute mascot. One of them gave her a ring at exam time for good luck.

Then Edie began to get in trouble. She’d wear the blue skirt when she was supposed to wear the gray one, or sneakers instead of saddle shoes, and then she would refuse to change. She’d explode at people in crazy arguments. I remember her yelling, her face dark, and flinging herself around on the bed. Once I saw her hit a girl who had criticized her. Her temper provoked teachers. She became by turns sloppy and lazy and disobedient, or brilliant and enthusiastic, depending on her moods. The sick times of winter affected her, so that she seemed bitter, not dazzling any more; Thanksgiving was long gone. All the people who’d thought she was so cute and bright were really sick of her. Housemothers who had once been charmed now gave her “tidy crosses”—which were demerits. She seemed to hate herself. Suddenly her eyes would look wild and scary, and she’d cry out, “I can’t do it—I’ve failed.”

The Brownie basketball team, St. Timothy’s, 1958.
Edie is in the front row, left.

Sometimes she could be magical. I remember one time toward the end of the winter term Edie and I stayed up late into the night. We sat on the floor in the hall outside our rooms with the moonlight coming through the French doors onto the Oriental carpet. We talked about the seniors, our families, ourselves . . . private, secret feelings in the moonlight. I felt very close and easy with her, without any of the currents of rivalry and jealousy and wild emotion that had made me afraid to be intimate with her. She had on a white slip that night as a nightgown, a strap sliding off one of her shoulders. She seemed fragile, vulnerable, and serious. She invited me to come to the ranch that summer. She made it sound like the perfect life and her family like gods. I imagined all those dark, handsome Sedgwicks. It sounded wild and romantic, not like boring East Coast tennis parties. We imagined adventures we’d have riding all day in the mountains getting sunburned, and then at night we’d wear long white dresses and bare feet and sit at the long family dinner table in candlelight with all those handsome brothers. She made me fall in love with it. I never went. . . I don’t remember why . . . the plan just didn’t materialize.

That spring at St. Timothy’s was so green and rich . . . the dogwoods and magnolias . . . lying in the grass on Sunday afternoons, walking to study hall after supper in the pale light. But Edie seemed subdued. Perhaps her sicknesses in the winter had affected her. People didn’t care any more whether she liked them or not . . . her power was gone. In a way, that might have been the time when she was most real, when she was just like the rest of us. I thought of her stI’ll as my friend, but not as the prize possession she had been in the fall. Somewhere underneath there was an incredible dark fear, a strangeness that made her bite her nails, pick her face, blow up at her friends, and hate herself. Her feelings were too exposed. I never knew what made
her so miserable, but I felt uncomfortable with her. I couldn’t absorb it. It was her problem, not mine.

I was both sorry and surprised when Edie didn’t come back to St. Tim’s the following fall because I thought she’d like being an old girl. But then when I thought about it, I wasn’t at all surprised.

SAUCIE SEDGWICK
 I saw Edie on the ranch the summer of 1960, the year after she left St. Timothy’s. She was seventeen years old and had a kind of Shirley Temple look; she wore doll-like clothes and had a breathless, childish voice. She used the word “cunning” a lot. Or “sweet.” Edie had a little baby way when she was with my mother . . . a special baby talk, “Mum-mum.” I noticed that she had established her authority on the ranch. She got rid of the furniture in her room and designed a whole suite and had it put in—heart-shaped bedsteads, hideous beyond description—and this was one of the first indications of her relationship with my parents because the rest of us were never allowed to have anything. I was scandalized to find out what Edie was getting away with. She did exactly as she damn pleased. It was always considered absolutely out of the question to sleep late, or walk around the house in nightclothes, but Edie flouted all these things. She had brought my parents to their knees.