Free Edie by Jean Stein

on having children when it was so dangerous for her.
    Edie was born at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara, April 20, 1943, the first child after my parents moved permanently to California. She was the seventh of the eight of us, and named for our father’s favorite aunt, Edith Minturn Stokes.
    Edie was very little when Jane Wilson became her nurse. She was a strong, kind, straightforward person—she was strict, but you knew where you stood with her; nothing was devious. She loved those children in her way, and she interceded for them and invested quite a lot in them, I think.

    The Sedgwick family at home, Corral de Quati
(clockwise):
Suky with Francis, Edie, Alice, Jonathan, Kate, and Minty
     
    JANE WILSON  Edie was six months old when I took over. I had Kate and Edie and then Suky. I started to toilet-train Edie right away. She did everything in her diapers, and I wouldn’t have that. She had to sit until she did it. That’s the one thing I was always fussy about with all my children. Suky was only two weeks old when she came home, and I started
her
on the potty. You hold them up, the little potty on your lap, and then patiently wait. It doesn’t take them long to know what they’re there for. I never spanked Edie or any of them. Jonathan used to claim he had nightmares. He was about seven. I told him, “Is this what you want?” and I showed him a hairbrush. He never had another nightmare.
    I’d take Edie over to the main house from the cottage we lived in to say good morning to her parents. She’d refuse. Edie knew she’d have to sit until she’d said good morning, but she was determined not to give in and she would just stare at you. She never cried, that was the last thing she’d ever do.
    Edie had a wI’ll of her own. It was born in her. The parents spoilt her. Anything Edie wanted to do was fine with her parents, but not with me. She had to mind and she had to eat everything on her plate, and I wouldn’t allow her to push Suky around.
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  I was almost twelve when Edie was born, and most of the time when she was growing up I was away at school. So were Bobby and Pamela. Even when we were home we didn’t see much of the younger children in those early years.
    Right after the war, “the three little girls,” as Kate, Edie, and Suky were always called, lived like poor kids, dressed in hand-me-down pale green overalls and jackets and scuffed brown shoes. They looked like little Maoists playing in the sandpit.
    JONATHAN SEDGWICK  Birthdays were really strange. The joy was out of the presents that you might get and the ice cream and the cake, because you’d get a pinch from my father, which really hurt, to grow an inch. After the pinch you got a swat for each year since your birth. I never liked that. Seemed weird. You’d have to spend most of the day trying not to get caught.
    SAUCIE SEDGWICK  When Edie was five, a new nurse came along called Addie. She was different from the earlier NURSES in that she was utterly loving and gentle. She was a pudding of a person, whitewhiskers, buck teeth, a small skull, and a big, fat face. There was just not one mean thing about that woman—she was something out of a fairy tale, but she was incapable of maintaining any kind of authority. Edie was unbelievably cruel to her and kicked her, but she loved her very much.
    Some of the games Edie and Suky played seemed a little sadistic at times. Edie turned Suky into a horse, herself into a wolf, and she chased Suky, whimpering and whinnying, out into the fields. That game terrified Suky and gave her nightmares. She even began to see wolves in the scrapbasket. Edie also made a whole series of animal heads to go on a broomstick, and she’d ride around on them. But the heads had to be perfect.
    JONATHAN SEDGWICK  When it came to real horses, Edie would always get the best-looking one. She could get anything she wanted. Spoiled. Even if I had the best-looking horse, it became
her
horse because she