Irrepressible (21 page)

IN APRIL 1948, Decca’s mother surprised the Treuhafts with a telegram announcing her sudden decision to visit. For years, Decca had been inviting her mother to California, but their reunion had started to seem unlikely—first there had been the war, then Unity’s needing constant care; there was little money, and California was so far away. They had
continued to correspond faithfully, both their personas on paper reliably airy, comic, forgiving, and controlled. But letters, no matter how intimate or revealing, are just the silhouette of a body. After nine years, how would her mother find her? Decca felt “at once immensely excited . . . and deeply apprehensive.” Here she was with three American children, a stay-at-home housewife with Communist books and laundry ankle deep. About all she could do was clean the house with the help of Bob and seven-year-old Dinky (who, family legend held, was something of a domestic prodigy). One day, her daughter returned home from school to find Decca sweeping the stairs from the bottom up.

“You’re supposed to start at the top and go down,” Dinky advised.

 

A PHOTO TAKEN at the airport shows Muv looking thin and fatigued. She was sixty-eight years old. Commercial nonstop flights from London to San Francisco had begun just the year before. The journey took twenty-three hours, still a piece of cake after what she’d come through in the past few years. In the picture, Decca looks healthy and pretty and, just months after Benjy’s birth, slightly plumper than usual. Decca didn’t pay much attention to fashion anymore, but she had obviously dressed with care. It is one thing to imagine one’s mother after many years apart, but quite another thing to actually see her. Consternation and apprehension melted into a joyful reunion made sweeter as Muv and her granddaughter became instant friends. In the car ride to Oakland, Dinky asked her just when she planned to scold Decca for having run away. The very idea, Decca said, “set us all to shrieking with laughter.”

From the freeways to the bridges through the gorgeous golden city to the Oakland suburbs, Muv was fascinated, curious, and uncritical. She was playful with the children and unjudging of the household chaos. She told Decca she thought the house “wonderful & very pretty” and Oakland’s Victorian homes amid Western gardens something “like a musical comedy stage set.” Decca was far more comfortable with Muv’s disengaged cool than she had ever been. It seemed her mother was “absolutely bent on friendship.”

There was some comforting family gossip. Decca found out what she could about Mrs. Romilly and about Giles, who had survived the war as a prisoner in Germany. He had suffered from deprivation and many losses, but seemed to be improving and had recently married. Nancy was a great source of entertainment; there was so much to say. She’d moved to Paris, and she was still in love with a French diplomat, whom she’d met in 1943. His name was Gaston Palewski. He had been the
chef de cabinet
of de Gaulle’s Free French government in exile during the war and commanded the Free French forces in East Africa. Nancy called him “the Colonel.” There was a character in her novel,
The Pursuit of Love
, very like him. The family thought Nancy’s novel was delicious, and they were pleased by its great success. Farve was delighted by the fictionalized version of himself. Everyone agreed there had to be a sequel. The fictional Farve was easier to discuss than the man in reality, though his health was a neutral subject. It was good to know that his eyes had improved. It had seemed for a while as if he’d go blind due to cataracts.

There were still terrible shortages at home—rationing, nationalization—so it was better not to dwell on that subject.
No politics
was the only rule for this visit. Fresh fruit was hard to find out of season, so the lemon trees in all the gardens were dazzling to Muv. She could now make terrific bread, which she demonstrated. Noting that Decca had no adequate breadboard, Muv promised to send her one. Nancy had started sending rice from France, and—teasing as always—she only sent it to people who had good chefs so it wouldn’t be wasted. Pam was getting a divorce—imagine! She’d been so good to Diana’s boys, taking them in for the duration of the Mosleys’ incarceration. There was a definite chill when Diana’s name was mentioned, and Decca made it clear she couldn’t forgive her sister. (“Wicked Aunt Diana who would melt us all down for soap if she could catch us,” is how she described her to Dinky.) Debo had a new title, the Marchioness of Hartington, and when her husband, Andrew, became Duke of Devonshire, she would be a duchess. With all of that, Debo faced her own heartbreak. Three miscarriages, one around the time of Decca’s and the others more recently. Unity was sometimes
impatient and rude to Debo, often unable to express herself adequately, but Unity always spoke of her favorite sister, Decca, with affection.

After Unity’s suicide attempt, the doctors had thought it too dangerous to remove the bullet from her head. Brain damage had made her “strange and childish.” Muv cared for her devotedly, but Farve still found her presence hard to tolerate. Other visitors had noted Unity’s weight gain and that she often seemed depressed. Unity hadn’t been allowed into town during the war, because American forces had been stationed there, but now on good days, she rode her bicycle all over, singing at the top of her voice. A few things gave her real pleasure. She liked to eat and resisted the healthy diet her mother enforced. Church soothed her to some extent. She loved the hymns and liked to visit the parson. She had also found a part-time job, pouring tea at the hospital near High Wycombe, where she and Muv lived when they weren’t at Inch Kenneth.

Muv had seen Unity grow more confused in social encounters. She knew her daughter was unbearably lonely. On one visit to see Nancy, Unity had confided in Derek Hill, a painter and friend of her elder sister, that she had joined the Congregationalist Church because after the service, you shook hands and that was “wonderful,” since so few people would touch her anymore. They had a few friends who reliably cared for Unity while Muv visited America.

Decca and Muv’s reunion featured a new directness and honesty. It had rarely been the form among adult Mitfords to share introspection. Decca was happy by then living with Bob and her children in California, but that other life—the one with Esmond—was not so deeply buried. Decca may have tiptoed around some subjects, but she was more than ready to talk about her first husband. It must have been a relief just to say his name aloud. They discussed Esmond’s death early on in the war and Tom’s death at its very end. So many of the young men who used to come to their house had been lost or injured, but a few had established themselves.

Muv and Decca discussed Evelyn Waugh’s career. He had been in their house often when Nancy and Diana were home. Hadn’t Evelyn used Decca’s
own definition of
sheepish
in
Vile Bodies
, to mean not shy but as beautiful as Decca’s pet lamb Miranda? He had dedicated his new novel,
The Loved One
, to Nancy (just as years before, he had dedicated
Vile Bodies
to Diana). Mother and daughter noted that in the first few pages of
The Loved One
, there is a reference to a chap who before the war had defied convention by staying in America and opening “a restaurant with an Italian partner.” That same character returned to fight in the war and died as the Nazis invade Norway. Esmond had died over the North Sea, and Giles had been captured in Norway, and Waugh knew them both. Waugh’s genius was for the rolling, light, barely there soufflé spiced with malice. It’s just possible that Decca read in the character, who set the standard for eccentric independence, a sort of tribute to her husband. Sydney thought it possible. Writers do so often make fiction out of true stories—they mix and match. Nancy’s work was proof of that.

What must Bob have thought? Before her mother’s arrival, Decca had worried that Muv’s anti-Semitism would become an issue. It wasn’t. She was courteous and cordial to her daughter’s new husband. For his part, Bob couldn’t get over the “non-Jewish-motherishness” of his mother-in-law. When he mentioned that the Nixon-Mundt bill then under consideration in Congress would threaten Communist Party members with long stays in concentration camps, she replied, “What a pity. But of course I’m quite accustomed to my children going to prison.” Aranka faced with the prospect had said, “How can you do this to me?”

From the pages of
The Loved One
, Muv had gleaned that a funeral parlor was the American oddity no tourist should miss. She and Decca made plans to visit one together, an excursion that would have a powerful influence on Decca’s later career. Muv also wished to tour a supermarket. Decca had a refrigerator now, large enough for a small cow. California’s hamburgers were like steaks, and its steaks like heifers. Every tomato was as big as the prize-winners in the church fete. To Muv, shopping in the brightly lit and colorful supermarket was like entering some American folk-tale. Twenty years later, Decca would have a walk-on role as a supermarket
shopper in the Herbert Ross movie
Play It Again, Sam
with Woody Allen. In her character’s curiosity and wonder at the overbright, overlarge shelves of merchandise, a viewer can imagine Sydney’s delight, even the inchoate stir-rings of a letter to the
Times
, which Sydney would send upon her return—heartily recommending that this self-service style be encouraged throughout England.

In May, after a month’s stay with Decca’s family, Muv stopped in New York, where she had dinner with Aranka, an encounter Decca only wished to attend as a fly on the wall. It had seemed so unlikely that those two worlds would ever collide, but now they had and with agreeable results. Aranka admired Sydney as she had Nancy, whom she looked forward to meeting again in Paris.

Soon after Muv arrived home, she and Unity set off for Inch Kenneth. There they resumed old customs. Muv saw to the farm; Unity went fishing. They spent hours sewing and updating their scrapbooks. There were plenty of new newspaper articles to include. Sydney recounted her visit to Decca in detail. One of the things she’d found odd was that in America, people thought it was more important to spend money on a car than on household help.

 

UNITY WAS HAPPIEST talking about her youth before the war and about her affection for Decca. It was impossible to say when the sisters might meet again. In the United States, there was trouble on the horizon for people of Decca’s political beliefs. The party organization was not yet outlawed, but the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required all union officers to sign loyalty oaths and swear they were not Communists or Communist sympathizers. Nationally, there was a coordinated effort to cleanse the country of its residual Communist menace. The film industry came under much public chastisement for harboring intellectuals of a presumed pink persuasion. In October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities sentenced ten screenwriters (in what came to be known as the Hollywood Ten court case) to jail sentences for refusing to adequately answer the question “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?”

Around the same time, eleven leaders of the Communist Party USA were arrested under the Smith Act of 1940 and charged as conspirators. The Smith Act allowed government agents the flexibility to round up dissenters who assembled to protest, or who published antigovernment matter or whom the agents perceived to be in any way advocating or teaching the “desirability, of overthrowing the government” (this extended to the theoretical support of a socialist system of government). The penalties were ten years in prison and a ten-thousand-dollar fine. The U.S. Justice Department intended to crush the U.S. Communist Party by rounding up its leaders and subjecting them to long and expensive trials. In the Smith Act trial, the government’s case revealed little evidence of any actual violence or talk of violence, and the case turned on the group’s leadership and organizational influence. These were the men who in 1945 had expelled Earl Browder and dissolved the Communist Political Association to reconstitute it as the Communist Party USA. That series of events was at the heart of the government’s charge of a revolutionary conspiracy. One of the senior partners in Bob’s firm, Richard Gladstein, was a lawyer for the Smith Act defendants and was himself sentenced to six months for contempt of court. Decca organized a rally to support him.

 

MUV KNEW FROM deep experience how quick and wide the pendulum of politics could swing. She suggested that in a different political season, Decca might come to Inch Kenneth with her children and new husband. (After all, she owned part of the island.) Unity thought she and Decca would probably never meet again. But in any case, her love for Decca “was quite unchanged.” When they had said good-bye in California, Decca asked Muv to give her Boud her love. (In the language Unity and Decca invented when they were children,
Boud
meant “pal.”)

Not long after Muv and Unity had returned to Inch Kenneth, Unity fell ill with a fever. Because of their isolation and the bad weather, it took a few days before their physician could treat her. He arranged to move her by special chartered boat to West Highland Cottage Hospital in Oban, where she died on May 28, 1948, ten years to the day after Decca’s daughter Julia
died. She was thirty-three years old. The cause of death as it appears on Unity’s death certificate is “Purulent Meningitis, Cerebral Abscess, Old gun-shot wound” to the head.

A decade after her sister’s death, Decca recognized that understanding her sister’s actions might not be possible: “It is perhaps futile to try to interpret the actions of another—one may be so completely wrong.” And if this observation seems to dismiss the efforts of most early-twentieth-century art and social science, it also rings true in the wake of grief. Decca nevertheless goes on, as people do, to try to explain: “But it always seemed to me that this last really conscious act of [Unity’s] life, the attempt at self-destruction, was a sort of recognition of the extraordinary contradictions in which she found herself, that the declaration of war merely served as the occasion for her action, which would in any case have been inevitable sooner or later.”