Dearest Wilding

A Memoir, with Love Letters from Theodore Dreiser

Yvette Eastman, Thomas P. Riggio

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780812216462
• eBook ISBN:
  9781512821123
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A candid and intimate chapter in the life of a modern woman, Yvette Eastman's vivid narrative also contributes richly to the life story of Theodore Dreiser. Dearest Wilding: A Memoir records the journey that took Yvette Szekely from an upper-middle-class scholar's home in Budapest to the intellectual and artistic centers of urban America in the 1920s and 1930s.In 1929 sixteen-year-old Yvette Szekely met Dreiser, who was fifty-eight at the time, and within a year he became her lover. Dreiser remained central to her life—as lover, father figure, and mentor—until his death in 1945. Her portrait of Dreiser, who is by no means idealized, is of a complex man—often troubled, suspicious, and jealous, but also caring and supportive.The book is much more than an account of a sixteen-year relationship, however. It describes Eastman's attempt to understand her bond with Dreiser, forcing her back to her childhood, to memories of her distinguished but distant father who remained in Hungary, and to the early experiences that made the aging Dreiser so important to her life. In an afterword, the author thoughtfully reflects on the patterns of love and loss that form part of her past. Dearest Wilding is a valuable primary source in literary history and among the last documents from this era. One of the most important figures in the memoir is Max Eastman, whose early relationship with Yvette Szekely resulted in marriage years later.As perhaps the last reminiscence of Dreiser and his circle that will ever appear, Dearest Wilding: A Memoir promises rewarding reading.

First Memories

It is an October morning in 1928 on New York’s 91st Street, and I will soon be sixteen. In the sun-washed spacious living room of the sprawling apartment, where I live with my mother, Margaret, my younger sister, Suzanne, and our housekeeper-cook, Zsuzsi, I am sitting astride an arm of the sofa reading a letter to Suzanne and me from our father in Budapest:

I am thinking of you who, as little girls, were torn from the homeland to the vast America. You probably don’t find this to be so extraordinary, so especially sad as I do. Still, what we here in ancient Europe believe in, prefer, want, is to have the children with their father as well as their mother, or at least growing up near enough to him to benefit from his guidance and protection.

As I fold the letter, I do not find it “especially sad.” I had lived in Budapest with both my parents for only three years after their marriage—she at eighteen and he at twenty-five. After their divorce, I jumped to obey whenever my mother threatened, “If you don’t put your toys away right now and wash your hands I’ll send you back to your father!”

Father’s letter has an undertone of complaint, an accusation directed at my mother, but it brings back to me a corner apartment building that wrapped itself around a corner along a Danube embankment. My father, too impatient to wait for his small daughter’s short legs to mount, one at a time, the several steps to the elevator, tucked me upside down under his arm like a package and bolted up the stairs with my head dangling near his hip and my feet under his chin.

Some things I remember; others were told to me; and some I simply understood.

The polished brass plate on the entrance door to our apartment on the fourth floor read “Dr. Székely Artúr.” Except by friends and intimates, he was addressed as “Sir Doctor”—a doctor of law, economist, author, contributor to literary and liberal journals, the Secretary of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the director of Hungary’s Inter-Commerce Bureau. My father: the then twenty-eight-year-old intellectual and aesthete who had the books in his library custom bound in maize-yellow linen or leather, who savored his after-dinner cigar while leafing through his slim volumes of Baudelaire and Verlaine. He had wide-open hazel eyes and thin, straight-line lips, one corner of which often lifted in a characteristic half-smile, for which he was dubbed by his associates and colleagues “Dr. Supercilious Smile.” When he laughed his shoulders shook, and the sound I heard was like escaping steam. His kisses on arrivals and departures felt cold-damp on my child’s mouth, the kind I would wipe dry with the back of my hand, but his tenderness leaked out to me when he let me taste a little corner of a sugar cube he softened brown with his demitasse before popping it into my mouth. Although his lap did not invite small children, I think he felt more warmth and affection than he was able to show. I remember him more as a cordial father than as a playful daddy.

“Torn from the homeland.” What was left of it for me after seven years were flash cards of recall: a country at war; nannies wheeling prams along the Corso at noon past luxury hotels and restaurants that spilled Johann Strauss’s music onto the sidewalk tables; vendors hawking their wares on the promenade, holding their bright bouquets of balloons and pinwheels; how wrinkly uncomfortable it was whenever the cuffs of my short white socks slid back into my shoes. And, yes, I remember the nanny unbuttoning the three-button dropseat of my underwear and making long s-s-s-s sounds to encourage the sprinkling as I squatted in the park above the dandelions. Early December brought chocolate brooms and switches tied with red ribbon for Saint Nicholas Day on the sixth, followed by the white and silver of Christmas Eve: two little girls standing behind tall, closed double doors until the doors were opened to the sight of a ceiling-high Christmas tree, whose lighted candles made a quiet quivering glow that prompted their voices to lower to a whisper. Then, walking toward the tree, as in a procession, our child-soprano voices sang “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.” Someone put a match to the sparklers we held, and they burst into a shower of stars.

As dawn’s blue-white daylight crept into our room, my sister lay sleeping in her crib. I slid out of my bed, tiptoed into my parents’ bedroom, and crawled into my mother’s bed. I laid my head on her bosom and felt the rise and fall of her breathing, the warm skin smelling like flowers, the softness on both sides where the breasts divide. I was four, and I was afraid that she might disappear. My hunger for her love was such that I needed to hear the sound of her voice to feel safe. When in anger she yelled at a servant, the loudness frightened me and made me anxious, as did her out loud crying that muffled my father’s murmurs whenever they fought.

One day, lending truth to my fears, my mother did disappear for a time from the bounds of my small world, taking my sister with her. I was desolate. The divorce court gave me into the custody of my father. His cool-headed, orderly mind could not continue to live with a mercurial temperament that raced capriciously between seductive behavior and volatile histrionics. For my mother’s part, she felt put down by his imperious, deprecatory attitude, his abrupt, impatient manner. There were distractions to dry her tears when he left. She had a way of being where the action was, more especially if the situation held people of fame and importance or a cause she could support. She became active in the “cause” of Count Mihály Károlyi’s Party for Independence. When the monarchy collapsed in 1918 and Hungary was declared a republic with Károlyi its president, my mother, his staunch supporter and friend, was appointed Secretary of Welfare. With my sister she had taken up residence in the Ritz Hotel, then the Budapest headquarters for the postwar ministrations of the American Red Cross. Besides her political activities, she was also a Red Cross volunteer and, while serving as such, fell in love with an American army colonel who was planning to return to his wife and children in Chicago.

Eighteen-year-old Margaret and twenty-five-year-old Artúr Székely in Budapest just after their marriage in 1913.

Suzanne (left) and Yvette Szekely with their governess in Budapest.

“The children may not be taken out of the country without the father’s consent,” ruled the court that granted my parents’ divorce. “Visiting rights: one half-day each week.” When, after one of these “visits” of a March afternoon, I was called for to be taken back to the home of my stern paternal grandmother with the black velvet band circling her throat, my father was informed that some hours earlier my mother had checked out and boarded the train to Paris with both his children. Later he learned that she had booked passage aboard a ship bound for New York. Her destination: Chicago.

August 1921: My sister and I are in the back seat of a long red convertible that is driving along Brooklyn streets with its top down. My mother sits in front next to the young man at the wheel. The hot summer breeze combs back her hair as the car slows around a noonday traffic circle. A hurdy-gurdy rolls out the tune of “Margie.” In a restaurant at a table with a white tablecloth, the nice looking young man with the crewcut and reddish-blond moustache turns to us and says, “I think it’s time now for you to call me ‘Daddy.’”

Three days later and five months after arriving in “vast America,” Roy Phelps Monahan, age thirty; occupation: attorney; country of birth: United States of America, became our stepfather in a marriage solemnized by the city clerk of King’s County, Borough of Brooklyn. Mother and children are now American citizens.

For six weeks we live in four rooms with newly bought furniture on a tree-lined street. Mr. Monahan brings home presents—a teddybear with electric eyes that can be turned on and off, a toy safe with a combination lock like real ones—and is rewarded with my calling him “Daddy,” which my sister refused to do. His visiting father goes to early morning Mass every day in the Catholic church nearby, where we children attend the parish school.

At the end of the six weeks there are loud, angry voices, and late one afternoon Mother is standing in her nightgown bracing herself against the dining room wall. “Don’t you touch me!” her voice rings out. Nearby stands Mr. Monahan.

“Hurry! Go find a policeman!” she calls to me. I run out and through streets where I had never before walked alone. At a busy intersection I find a policeman directing traffic. I take his hand and beg: “Please, please come. My mother . . . my mother.”

Back at the house Mr. Monahan meets us in the hall. He and the policeman exchange words, and the policeman leaves. Then Mr. Monahan leaves, to return only once to collect his clothes and ties, which my mother has cut into strips with scissors. Movers come and take back the furniture bought on the installment plan but leave us two mattresses. While we sleep on them, the gas our mother has turned on seeps through the door cracks, bringing neighbors in. Seeing our mother lying there with eyes closed, not responding, they urge me to run to the church and bring the priest. When I come back with him, he tells me to kneel and pray, and, squeezing my eyes tight for emphasis, I recite all the prayers I learned in school. When I get to “and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus,” I visualize an apple or orange. My mother’s head turns from side to side, her chest rises, and I hear the sound “mmmm.” Life has come back.

It is four o’clock of a 1922 Saturday afternoon in the lobby of the Hotel Laclede on 15th Street off Union Square. Sitting around reading their newspapers, puffing cigars, playing cards, or dozing-snoring with mouths parted are some of the residents—mostly idle, unattached older men living on pensions or disability allowances. We live there too, and they like seeing us children around most evenings and on the weekends when we aren’t in Saint Ann’s School on 11th Street or in after-school care in Grace Church across the street, waiting for our working mother to pick us up at six o’clock. They save and give us the “funnies” from their newspapers: “Maggie and Jiggs,” “Little Orphan Annie,” “Mutt and Jeff.” Among them are the retired, almost-blind naval officer Captain McAllister and his wife, Jamie, and Mr. and Mrs. Bidwell. Because Mrs. Bidwell is an actress and is seldom around, it is to Mr. Bidwell that our mother turns for the favor of “keeping an eye on the children” when she has to be out.

On one of these weekend afternoons, when we are alone playing in the lobby, Mr. Bidwell approaches. “We are going to have a birthday party for one of my children who live with their grandmother. It will be this afternoon upstairs in our rooms. You must come up for cake and ice cream and games.”

When later we tapped on his door and he let us in, there was no one else in the darkish suite, with its glass doors separating a bedroom from the living room. “The other children have not yet arrived,” said Mr. Bidwell, “but come and sit on the edge of the bed and I’ll tell you stories until the party starts.” He was in his pajamas and got into the bed. In a little while he said to my six-year-old sister, “Go down to the desk clerk and ask him for the right time.” As soon as she left, Mr. Bidwell took one of my hands and placed it on top of the bed blanket over a hard bulge and then pulled me under the covers, removed my pants, and started kissing me. I froze with panic, fear, revulsion. I lost my voice.

When he heard my sister knock—back with the “right time”—he quickly pushed me out of the bed and said, “This is a secret game. You must never tell about it or something terrible will happen to you.” Afraid to tell my mother, I only begged her not to ask Mr. Bidwell to look after us when she went out. I couldn’t answer when she asked, “Why?”

The day our mother fainted on the street in front of the hotel and was taken to Saint Vincent’s Hospital, Jamie McAllister contacted Mrs. Klauber, an old acquaintance of our mother’s mother, with whom we had stayed for some days on arrival in America before going to Chicago. She had been a pupil of Franz Liszt and gave piano lessons in one of the row of ocher-colored frame houses with wood-railed porches in the Bronx, where she lived with her husband and two grown sons, both of whom were musicians in a band.

“Can you take the children for awhile?” Jamie asked.

Mrs. Klauber agreed to take my sister but did not want both children. The McAllisters decided to let me stay in the hotel with them during this emergency, but when some days later I got sick with acute bronchitis and robbed them of their sleep with my all-night coughing, Captain McAllister said, “You had better go to the hospital where your mother is.” Like a blind Charlie Chaplin with waif, we, holding hands, trudged off to the hospital, where I was admitted to the children’s ward. My mother, on a different floor, was lying in a straitjacket.

When I was well again and ready to leave but had no place to go and nothing to do in a ward with sick children, Mrs. Klauber persuaded a friend of hers from Brooklyn who was a widow to take me. In that household of middle-aged strangers and daily trips to the cemetery I wilted and was returned to the Klaubers, where my sister had become a household pet. My sister was a pretty child with dark auburn hair and big brown eyes, and the Klaubers dressed her in a sailor suit and stood her on the oak dining table, where their son Eddie, the saxophone player, taught her to dance the Charleston.

After we had consumed many bowls of sugared sour cream and quartered oranges at a corner of the kitchen table; marveled at the movie marquees with their blinking bulbs and offerings of Charlie Chaplin, Our Gang, and vaudeville; and been exposed to Christian Science, my mother was finally discharged from the hospital and again materialized for me. Besides my sister, she was the only one so far in my life who was important to me—the only one I wanted, needed, depended on. Although she did not bend down to my height and visit in my world, she was seductive. Her fortunes improved after she got out of Saint Vincent’s. After she designed and made a nightgown for Jamie McAllister as a Christmas gift, Jamie suggested that she present herself as a recently arrived Paris designer of ladies’ underwear. Dropping the “z” and the “1” from Szekely, she became “Madam Sekey” and succeeded in building a reputation in that specialty with earnings that were commensurate with her success.

We moved to a real apartment—two rooms and kitchen on the ground floor of a corner building on 103rd Street and Central Park West. I attended the neighborhood public school and the Presbyterian Sunday School and played games in the street with the other kids on the block—“Red rover, red rover” and “double dutch” jump rope: “Flat to let inquire within, when I move out let Ethel move in.” When Ethel moved in, one of us held on to the wheelchair into which her brain-damaged brother, Lars, was strapped. While Ethel skipped until she “missed,” we tenderly wiped the ever-drooling saliva from Lars’s chin. The day after twelve-year-old Ernest Grant, his blond hair slicked and darkened brown with water, knocked on our door and offered me the present of a book, the chalked big letters on the red brick wall across the street announced ERNIE LOVES YVETTE. This made me a little famous among the eleven and twelve year olds, and although my mother found the message shameful, I felt for the first time a satisfaction of acceptance and belonging among a group of children my age.

When we moved around the corner to an apartment on Central Park West, where my mother had her own bedroom and we children had ours, she bought an ivory-white set of children’s furniture—twin beds with storybook characters painted on their headboards—a four-poster bed for herself, and Windsor chairs and an upright piano for the dining-sitting room. A woman to clean and cook dinner came every day and a piano teacher once a week. My mother’s friend, a Dr. Ward, frequently stayed overnight.

The influence of the Catholic school on my need to conform and be accepted meant that my openness to prayer as a means to obtain rewards or to stave off disasters had been firmly in place for some time. Every night I would kneel by my bedside and, after saying the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary and requesting blessings on my mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Introduction
• Editorial Note
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• 1 First Memories
• 2 Enter TD: 1929–30
• 3 “Hello, Sox”: 1930
• 4 “Dearest Wilding”: 1930–31
• 5 New Horizons
• 6 Home as Found: 1932–33
• 7 New Deals: 1933–38
• 8 Final Years: 1939–45
• Afterword
• The Letters, 1929–45
• Index