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

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    In an unpublished story in Jackson’s archive, its title given as both “Beverley” and “Letter to Mother,” the narrator, who sounds something like Geraldine (she is very proud of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.
    “She was a lady, Geraldine was,” Laurence Hyman remembers. And she tried valiantly to shape her daughter in her image. In one of the earliest photographs of Shirley, the little girl wears an immaculateruffled white party dress, white shoes and socks, and a giant starched bow nearly the size of her head. But it must have been clear early on that Shirley would not conform to Geraldine’s ambitions for her. “I don’t think Geraldine was