Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 latenineteenth 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