Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (4 page)

It is hard to imagine more potent symbols of gilded age excess than the Nob Hill Bugbee mansions. That excess would soon demand a human cost. As if following the Gothic logic of a Hawthorne parable, a Poe vignette, or—indeed—a Shirley Jackson novel, each of the houses soon became a setting not only for ostentatious food and furnishings but also for a weird, melancholy family story.

Jackson never saw any of her great-great-grandfather’s creations, except in pictures: all the Nob Hill mansions were destroyed in the fire that resulted from the great earthquake of April 1906. But she may have been aware of the eerie tales that surrounded them. In 1958, as she embarked upon the research for
The Haunting of Hill House
, Jackson wrote to her parents for help. Her new book, she explained, was to be about a haunted house, but she couldn’t find anything suitable in Vermont: “All the old New England houses are the kind of square, classical type which wouldn’t be haunted in a million years.” Did her mother have any books of old California houses, perhaps with pictures of the Bugbee houses? Geraldine wrote back promptly, enclosing newspaper clippings she identified as “possible architectural orgies of my great-grandfather,”
including the Crocker house. “Glad [it] didn’t survive the earthquake,” she commented later.

Geraldine’s dismissiveness was probably a reaction to the house’s offenses against good taste: though the ornamentation was admired when the house was built, it would quickly have seemed outrageous, particularly during the most desperate years of the Depression. But she may also have heard about what happened to the families who lived in those houses. A local paper reported in 1891 that a “shadow of misfortune seem[ed] to rest” upon the Nob Hill mansions. Each one was virtually deserted, occupied only by a skeleton crew of servants. Colton had died suddenly in October 1878, forty-seven years old and in debt—as builders of megalomaniacal castles are apt to be. His daughter, widowed twice within a few years, eventually sold the house to railroad magnate Collis Huntington, one of Colton’s former business partners. The Stanfords abandoned their home after the death of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., in 1884 at age fifteen. They moved to Menlo Park, where they established the university bearing his name, but they kept his room in the Nob Hill mansion as a macabre shrine, complete with his boyhood possessions and his picture hanging before a window, the curtains left perpetually open so that passersby could look in. After Crocker’s death in 1888, the ownership of his house was disputed by his two sons, each of whom believed it to be his rightful inheritance. Their feud with the Yung estate continued until 1904, when the lot, its spite fence still standing, was finally sold.

At the same time, the Bugbee family was struck by an epidemic dramatic enough to be remarked upon by the local media. On September 1, 1877, Samuel Bugbee died suddenly while crossing from Oakland to San Francisco on the ferry. Several years later, his son Charles dropped dead on the street. Sumner Bugbee, too, died unexpectedly during a long-distance train journey from New York, where he had been living, back to California; he was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. And John Stephenson Bugbee suffered a fatal stroke in the midst of a speech while presiding over the 1896 Alaska Republican Convention. The family propensity to meet a sudden end would resurface with his great-granddaughter.

In a lecture she often gave about writing
The Haunting of Hill House
, Jackson claimed that in searching for a model for that novel’s haunted mansion, she had come upon a photograph of a California house with “an air of disease and decay.” It turned out, she said, that her great-grandfather had built it. “It had stood empty and deserted for some years before it finally caught fire, and it was generally believed that that was because the people of the town got together one night and burned it down.” She had her generations mixed up: John Stephenson, her great-grandfather, was the only nonarchitect in the family. But the career of another Bugbee descendant offers a possibility. After Samuel’s death, a year after the Crocker house was completed, Charles Bugbee continued to run a successful practice, designing homes all over the Bay Area. Though they were built on a more modest scale than the millionaires’ palaces, these houses were impressive architectural creations in the neo-Victorian style that came to be typical of the Bay Area, laden with ornamentation and studded with gables and bay windows shooting out at unlikely angles—“big old california gingerbread houses,” Jackson would later call them.

Charles’s nephew Maxwell Greene Bugbee, John Stephenson’s son and Shirley’s grandfather, joined his uncle Charles’s practice in 1890. Three years later, he married Evangeline Field, one of seven children of Chauncy Field, a lawyer, and his wife, Julia. Evangeline, whom everyone called Mimi, was born in 1870 in Yolo County, west of Sacramento. At her wedding, on March 15, 1893, Mimi carried a bouquet of white lilies of the valley and a prayer book that Maxwell had given her with a ribbon marking the wedding service. She would pass the latter on to her granddaughter for good luck, telling her never to move the ribbon; Shirley didn’t. The couple spent the early years of their marriage in Alameda, across the bay and south of Oakland, where they raised two children: Clifford Field Bugbee, born in 1894, and Geraldine Maxwell Bugbee, Shirley’s mother, born the following year.

The house exuding “disease and decay” that Jackson mentioned in her lecture could have been one of Maxwell Bugbee’s designs. The Gray House, as it is known, still stands in Ross, California, a small, elegant town fewer than twenty miles north of San Francisco. In the late
nineteenth century, the bucolic Ross Valley was a popular vacation destination for wealthy San Franciscans. Among the town’s earliest settlers were William and Elizabeth Barber, who commissioned Maxwell Bugbee to build an additional house on their property to rent to vacationers. Completed in 1892, it featured shingled sides and a deep veranda. But within a few years, the same shadow of misfortune came to rest upon the Barbers. Their original home burned down. After Bugbee built them a new house in a similar style on the same plot of land, troubles continued to plague them. Their daughter Alice was widowed after less than three years of marriage and never remarried. Her sister, Mary, was institutionalized at Stanford Hospital and eventually committed suicide.

While the details are largely unknown, the outline of Maxwell and Mimi’s marriage hints at yet another strange and sad family story. On the surface, the two seemed to be happy together. Maxwell was an officer in the Masons, and his wife served as secretary of the Alameda Whist Club. In 1902, he was admitted to the California Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. A few years later, the Bugbees took a grand tour that included stops in France, Switzerland, and Italy. A newspaper profile described Maxwell as “a cultivated, refined gentleman, an artist in his tastes, of congenial manners, entirely unassuming, and conservative in his views . . . respected professionally and esteemed socially.”

His social refinement notwithstanding, Maxwell was a poor husband. Mimi, for her part, became a devotee of Christian Science, the cultist offshoot of Christianity founded in Boston in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy, who promoted the idea that the material world is an illusion. Jackson’s younger daughter, Sarah Hyman, describes it succinctly: “You think things and make them real.” During the first few decades of its existence, Christian Science was the fastest growing religious movement in America, increasing from just under 9,000 members in 1890 to more than 60,000 in 1906; the church’s first San Francisco branch was established in 1895, the year of Geraldine’s birth. At its height, in the 1930s, the movement claimed more than 260,000 members—about one in every 500 Americans.

The rise of Christian Science coincided with a general surge of interest in spiritualism and occult phenomena; Eddy herself was known to
conduct séances. The Ouija board, popularized in its modern form by Baltimore inventor William Fuld, could be found in virtually every parlor across the country by the late 1910s. Even President Woodrow Wilson was a devotee: when asked in 1914 whether he would be reelected, Wilson replied, “The Ouija board says yes.” Numerous people claimed to take dictation from spirits, including one woman who said she had recorded a new novel by Mark Twain, then dead for seven years. Back in the Bay Area, Contra Costa County was the site of an outbreak of “ouijamania,” in which a teenager allegedly forced her mother and sister to sit by the Ouija board day and night, believing that they were in contact with a relative who had been hit by a car several weeks earlier. Mimi, too, experimented with a Ouija board; Shirley’s brother recalled her and his mother using it with him and Shirley when they were children.

Christian Scientists are famous for their belief that illness can be cured through thought alone. “Sickness is a dream from which the patient needs to be awakened,” Eddy proclaimed. Perhaps Mimi suffered from a chronic illness or handicap that she believed Christian Science could cure. Or she may have been drawn by its message of personal empowerment, its exhortations that belief alone could suffice to improve one’s lot in life. But it could not cure her marriage. In the early 1920s, she and her husband separated, and Mimi moved in with her daughter and son-in-law. Around the same time, Maxwell began designing a new house for his daughter’s family, complete with an extra bedroom for his own wife. He died in 1927, shortly after it was finished. His granddaughter, then ten years old, would barely remember him.

“
YOU COULD MAKE A
story out of . . . Pop’s life,” Shirley’s mother once told her. Leslie Hardie Jackson’s family history, a classic American up-by-the-bootstraps saga, would seem more at home in a novel by Sinclair Lewis. A wealthy English family suddenly loses all its money under mysterious circumstances, perhaps in a business deal gone wrong. The father disappears, leaving a teenage son to look after his mother and two sisters. They change their name, burying all traces of their past, and travel across an ocean and a continent to San Francisco, bringing among
their few possessions an heirloom wedding gown that had been Leslie’s grandmother’s. For a decade, the son supports his family by working a series of odd jobs, serving as a clerk, a salesman, and finally a printer’s apprentice. At age twenty-four, he marries the daughter of one of the city’s most established families, his bride—“one of the prettiest girls in the neighborhood, tall, brunette type, with quantities of brown hair and a clear lovely complexion”—elegant in his grandmother’s dress. Their marriage took place on March 15, 1916, the date chosen to coincide with Maxwell and Mimi’s anniversary.

Leslie and Geraldine must have seemed an unlikely couple. Her family, San Francisco elite, could trace its heritage to before the American Revolution; now she was marrying an immigrant with an unknowable past. But their goals were strikingly consonant, first among them a desire for material wealth. By the time of the marriage, Leslie was already working at the rapidly growing Traung Label and Lithograph Company, where he would ultimately rise to chairman of the board. Established by identical twins Louis and Charlie Traung in 1911, the company, headquartered on Battery Street, boasted the first four-color press in San Francisco, turning out posters, packaging labels for fruit crates, and seed packs featuring beautiful botanical illustrations. In the later years of Leslie’s career, a perk of the job was regular trips to Honolulu to visit the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, a major client.

In an unpublished story in Jackson’s archive, its title given as both “Beverley” and “Letter to Mother,” the narrator, who sounds something like Geraldine (she is very proud of “my friends and my town and my clothes and my car and my country club and jewelry of all the nicest sort, and indisputably mine”), explains that she chose to marry her husband because he was the most “solid” man she knew: “i thought for a long time before i married [him], because there were plenty of other things i could have done, and men i could have married who were not so safe and solid.” Throughout their lives, Leslie proved able to provide Geraldine with all the things she desired: china, jewelry, fresh flowers, furs. He also—somewhat sooner than planned—gave her a daughter. Shirley Hardie Jackson was born on December 14, 1916, almost nine months to the day after her parents’ wedding.

If Shirley inherited from her maternal grandfather and his ancestors her fascination with houses, and from her mother and grandmother an interest in the spiritual world, the Jackson side also offered her something significant: a gift for visual art. In addition to his professional work in the printing industry, Leslie Jackson was a talented amateur painter with a particular fondness for ships and seascapes. The house Maxwell Bugbee designed for the family included an attic studio for him. Throughout her life, Shirley would entertain herself, her family, and her friends by drawing clever cartoons satirizing her life and her companions; at one point she even considered becoming a professional cartoonist. Economically sketched, with a few lines sufficing to suggest a person or animal (her cats were favorite subjects), Jackson’s minimalistic drawings and watercolors are stylistically far removed from the bold graphics of the Traung Company’s produce labels. But they serve as a reminder that she grew up in a home where art was valued—for commercial as well as aesthetic purposes.

It was not, however, a warm home. Even if Geraldine had been pleased to have motherhood thrust upon her in her first year of marriage (and by all accounts she was not), Shirley was hardly the child she had imagined. “The pregnancy was very inconvenient,” Joanne Hyman, Jackson’s elder daughter, says. Geraldine had been groomed to be a socialite: she and Leslie were formal in both their dress and their manners. In one of the few surviving photographs of Leslie, he sits behind his desk at work, looking every bit the proper businessman in a heavy wool three-piece suit, his tie beautifully knotted and a silk handkerchief in his pocket. His handwriting, too, was uncommonly elegant: he invariably composed letters with a fountain pen, adding generous swirls on the capital Is and Es. Geraldine appeared regularly in the society pages; in one photograph, she is captured at a theatrical premiere wearing a floor-length gown. “Seeing her . . . with her sleek little feathered pillboxes and her leopard coat[,] you’d never dream that she could be vulnerable to anyone,” one of Shirley’s friends once commented.