Liza: A farm girl?
Uncle John?
Liza might well have spent her winters looking down on the tough streets
crowded with drunken rowdy dockworkers from her family’s fifth floor walk
up on West 15th Street, but she spent a good deal of her summers on a
family-owned farm in Shenandoah Valley – 40 acres filled with apple and cherry
trees, and a stream in which she and her close relations could swim in.
This was no poor
communist, despite the fact that Alexander and Hattie sometimes allowed
veterans from the Lincoln Brigade to stay with them – men , who had fought
against the Nazi’s in Spain, and whom had defended against abuse in America in
a letter published in the Daily Worker – a letter that would be used by McCarty
to end his career in City College.
Even as early as the late 1920s when the rest of the world was sliding into what would later be called “The Great Depression,” Alex and Hattie were well off, even having a live-in maid named Anna Koch when they resided in the Bronx..
Alex and Hattie were not only well enough off financially to send Liza to some
of the best schools in
Liza remembered picnicking with her parents, as they carried one of those large, classic straw baskets that have long since been replaced by ice chests.
The farm was near Wiccopee, which was a hamlet to the east of Fishkill in
Wiccopee was an Indian name and the name of the tribe that lived in that part of the valley.
Before being straightened, Route 52 curved around Fishkill Hook Road, which is lined with old homes, the Wiccopee store and continued past the village green dominated by the fine 1825 Methodist Episcopal Church and Liza’s family’s farm was along this road, on which many of the buildings are listed in various historic registered, including homes, stores, a shoemaker's shop and Mr. Hawks' wagon shop.
Liza’s Uncle John, who had married into her mother’s side of the family, was an artist, a painter, and had constructed a house on the property as well.
There was some tension on that side of the family, but not among the siblings. Hattie was not a good terms with her father, Siegfried Glass, who she blamed for killing her mother, Bertha Bergman.
“I never knew her,” Liza said. “My mother told me of her when I was a child. My mother, she said, speaking of my grandmother, had a goiter.”
Liza actually had to look up what a goiter was, which was a swelling in the
throat. She also learned that in some parts of
“She died, my mother told me, because her father (Siegfried) wouldn’t spend the money on an operation for her,” Liza said.
This happened early on so that Liza had no memory of Bertha. But the tale seemed to contradict her own experience with Siegfried, who had once offered to buy her a pony and a cart. He did give her a miniature sewing machine that Liza said actually worked on electricity.
Born in a portion of
Liza, who already appeared to have artistic leanings, seemed impressed by the fact that her Uncle John had brought Archelle Gorky, one of the more promising young artist of that era, and one of the first artists to be employed under President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. This later came to include such artists as Jackson Pollock, Diego Rivera and Mark Rothko.
What Liza failed to say is that “Uncle John” -- as she called him – was none other than Balcomb Greene, known more wildy as “John Wesley,” who along with his wife, Gerture, (Liza’s mother’s sister) were heaviliy involved in the effort to get abstract art accepted by the mainstream establishment.. Both were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization. Uncle John attended Syracuse University and later studied English Literature in Columbia University. He went on to teach englished at Darrmouth College and then in the early 1930s when to Paris where he studed art. Returning the the United States to become deeply involved the WPA programs and did several significant murals throughout New York City, only to return to school at New York University in the early 1940s for a degree in history. His first solo exibition was in Paris in 1937, following by others in New York City in the 1940s, and in the 1950s, he did shows at the Bertha Schaerfer Gallery in New York for several years, and since has had exhibits at the Whitney and other art museums across the nation.
Gertrude was also an artist, who married John shortly after his graduation from Syracuse Univerity in 1926 and travelled with him to Vienna, Austria and back to New York, and later she continued her study of scuplture, and later briefly shared a studio with her husband in Paris. She had a solo exhibition of her workd in New York in 1951, and another in 1955.
Both of them were very involved in liberal issues that affected artists, and picketed museums that refused to display abstract art.
In the mid-to-late 1940s, Liza would begin her own career as a fine arts painting, without a doubt influenced by these two people.
But her farm had farm had at least one prestigious neighbor directly associated with the Roosevelt administration: Henry Morganthau, Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury lived with his family in a large white house down the road.
“Once Eleanor Roosevelt came to see them and later, I found a five dollar bill in the grass just outside the iron gates,” Liza recalled.
Morganthaus’s chaurffer, who lived near the stream, was something of a snob.
“We swam there, but his children were not allowed to swim with us,” Liza said. “He was particular about their associatites.”
One day Morganthal’s wife and daughter came riding by on horses, pausing at the bridge to look down at Liza and her friends swimming.
“My dear,” the wife said to the daughter, “who can these people be?”
This was an idelic time for Liza and something that she would treasure in memory for the rest of her life, often conjuring up vivid memories few other kids from the city would have.
“Lilacs grew in our livingroom window,” she said. “Their perfume was heavy and rich. The room was all of wood and lit by kerosene lamps.”
She remember the Lincoln Brigade soldiers sitting in that room playing chess, while listening to records played with a catus needle.
“That landscape is in me now, my father had his roll-top decks correcting manuscripts, my mother slicing watermelons.”
The kitchen still had a hand pump that needed to be primed, then would gush with water that tasted of minerals.
She even recalled the ten that her parents had erected for her on the front lawn, where she slept during the summer.
“My tent was green and large, helding two beds, and from one wall pole I hung a round red painted miniature wooden life preserver framing a picture of a harboror Graus Auf Hamburg.”
She recalled her mother climbing the cherry trees in order to collect the fruit before the birds did.
She recalled the tiger lillies, and the “amazing gush of orange at the turning of the road.”
She remembered being frightened by lightning storms.
The water fell so thick that it lay visible on the grass before sinking into the hot earth,” she said.
She also remembered the childrn, and a boy she called “Crasy Charlie,” who used to torture the negibhor’s plow houses while she watched the from the safety of the barn, the air thick with the scent of manure. One friend, Josie told her that the air from horses turn into snakes if left in water. She also remembered how surprised Josie was at her rising bellie after her father came home one night drunk and forced her to have sex.
The family apparently didn’t only summer at the farm house because they were there on Thanksgiving in 1941 when one of the worst blizzards in local history struck.
“The snow fell four feet thick,” Liza recalled. “We were stranded in the house with a bad of flour and some turkey bones. I couldn’t go outside for fear of drowning in the white.”
Liza said the family sold the house long ago, and the new owners modernized it, installing electricity even, and antiques brought from local boutiques.
“I shall never go back there, nor do I want to, having the best part of it with me still, just as I can still see the moon as a gauzy lantern whose other side only the far stars know.”