‘Happens Every Day’ a memoir of heartbreak

Isabel Gillies had a wonderful life — a handsome, intelligent, loving husband; two glorious toddlers; a beautiful house; the time and place to express all her ebullience and affection and optimism. Suddenly, that life was over. Her husband, Josiah, announced that he was leaving her and their two young sons.

When Josiah took a teaching job at a Midwestern college, Isabel and their sons moved with him from New York City to Ohio, where Isabel taught acting, threw herself into the college community, and delighted in the less-scheduled lives of toddlers raised away from the city. But within a few months, the marriage was over. The life Isabel had made crumbled. “Happens every day,” said a friend.

Chapter one
One late August afternoon in our new house in Oberlin, Ohio, my husband, Josiah, took it upon himself to wallpaper the bathroom with pictures of our family. Over the years, we had collected an enormous number of framed pictures. Some were generations old and really should be called photographs; like the one of Josiah's grandfather, a Daniel Day-Lewis-like, strong-looking man, sitting in profile on a porch, casually surrounded by all his family, including my father-in-law, Sherman, at age ten. I always thought that picture would have been a good album cover for a southern rock band like Lynyrd Skynyrd. There was one of my great-grandmothers looking beautiful, rich, and Bostonian on her wedding day in 1913. There was a picture of my mother sitting on stairs at Sarah Lawrence College in Jackie O sunglasses and pigtails. Numerous black-and-white pictures of various family dogs.

My grandparents on my mother's side always had somewhere between two and six black labs around at any given time. There were also two St. Bernards, one named McKinley and the one before that, Matterhorn. They lived in Croton, New York, on the Hudson River, on Quaker Ridge Road and belonged to that John Cheever group of eccentric intellectuals that had a little extra money, mostly from prior generations, and a lot of time on their hands.

My grandparents and John Cheever used to write letters to each other in the voices of their Labradors. Seriously. My grandfather had the mother, Sadie ("one of the great Labradors," he would say in his Brahmin accent), and Mr. Cheever had the daughter, Cassiopeia. Dogs are important in my family. But in addition to dogs my grandparents also had a raccoon, Conney, who would sit on one's shoulder during drinks and beg for scotch-coated ice cubes; a toucan; a sheep named Elizabeth; and, for a short time, two lion cubs. It sounds like they were vets or they lived on a farm, or they were nuts, but really they just loved animals and birds. The house that my mother grew up in was big and white with lots of lawn. They had a mimeograph in the living room that my grandmother Mimi knew how to operate and, as a family, they created The Quaker Ridge Bugle, which was later printed as a little local paper.

My grandmother was an artist. She mainly painted and drew birds. My brother Andrew and I now have them on our walls. I remember her as very beautiful but thin. She wore long braids and black socks with sandals. She and my grandfather, who was a photographer among other things, lived in Guatemala later in their life, so I remember her shrouded in lots of brightly colored striped ponchos. In her day, though, she looked like a fey Katharine Hepburn. Like my grandfather, she was from a nice old American family. She was an odd bird. She was an intellectual, a good writer of letters, and also was probably one of the first anorexics. She rebelled against her aristocratic, proper upbringing as much as she could by becoming an artist and leading a somewhat alternative life filled with books and chaos. She spent many hours in her studio alone, away from her children, whom she didn't really know what to do with. My mother, the eldest, ended up running the show a bit, which is probably why she is such an organizational dynamo now. "It sounds a little looney, and it was," my mother says.

Among the pictures Josiah hung on the bathroom wall was one of my father shaking hands at an Upper West Side street fair when he ran for New York City Council in 1977. He didn't win the election, but my memory of that is not as strong as my memory of his photograph plastered on the front of the Eighty-sixth Street crosstown bus that I took to school. I'll never forget the image of my father bounding toward me, his hand strongly gesturing forward, as I got out my bus pass. ARCH GILLIES CITY COUNCIL AT LARGE. I thought he should have won. As far as I am concerned my father really should have been the president of the United States. He can see the big picture and he is fair.

His grandparents were Scottish immigrants. His parents were of modest means but made a sturdy, dependable, nice life for their only son in Port Washington, Long Island. My grandfather was in the navy, and by hook or by crook, having never gone to college, he made his way up the ranks to rear admiral. When he found himself surrounded by other high-ranking officers he learned that they had all gone to something called boarding school. So he came home on leave one day and told my grandmother that they would only have one child, my father, and he would go to school at a place called Choate, a school in Connecticut where a colleague had gone. So my father, who thought he would do what all his other friends did, work at La Guardia Airport, was sent to Choate, which led him on a very successful path. His life took a different turn. He went on to Princeton, where he was on the student council and president of all the eating clubs. He helped change their policies so that all students were eligible to join the eating clubs. He has run things ever since. My parents met on Rockefeller's 1968 presidential campaign. He was the finance director and my mother was the office manager. At the end of the long days they would have a drink in the office together. "I had the scotch and she had the rocks," he would say as he gave my mother a wink.

Also among the sea of photographs was a snapshot of Josiah and his brother, ages four and five, leaning against their father, who was driving somewhere in the South — not a seat belt on anyone. There was another of Josiah's mother, Julia, holding hands with her husband, John, Josiah's stepfather, whose other hand was linked in a chain with four children. One of the children was an eight-year-old Josiah. They were walking across a lawn in Palm Beach in crisp white shorts and brightly colored Izods. Everybody matched.

There were old framed Christmas cards from both of our families — lots of gangly, long-haired boy and girl teenagers standing in front of various mountains in Georgia and on rocky beaches in Dark Harbor, Maine. Both of us have parents who had been married more than once, so we both have an array of step and half and real siblings that we love very much. The titles that came before the word brother or sister never mattered much.

There was a black-and-white picture of my girlfriends from high school at a Grateful Dead show in Providence, Rhode Island. The slightly curved picture in the frame gave away the fact that I had developed it myself in a photography class at RISD. And there was one of Josiah in a crew shell at his boarding school looking focused. Josiah often made fun of the fact that he was positioned in the middle of the boat to serve as weight, the "meat," rather than being placed in the front as the coxswain, the "brains" of the boat, who navigates the race. Out of the eight rowers, though, Josiah was the one who stood out. When someone in the picture looks like Adonis, it's hard not to notice.

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