A Ticket to the Circus (21 page)

So here was Carol, having yet another woman in Norman’s life shoved in her face. But at least it was finally out in the open. The one thing Norman kept saying he wanted to do was clean up his life and stop sneaking around, stop lying, stop living in guilt. He was tired of juggling a lot of women, sick of all the time-consuming deceit. He was in his fifties and felt he had wasted a lot of his prime years when he could have written more books. He wanted to get serious about his work, and he wanted to try monogamy, something he had never done. He wanted to see how deep a relationship could go when there were no others, no cheating, no deceit. He wanted to try it with me. Until they had moved back from Maine, he hadn’t told the family about me, and was still spending half the time in Stockbridge with Carol. But after she found out, there was no reason not to tell the kids, no reason not to spend more time in New York, so he began to gradually introduce them.

Betsy was the first one I met. She was sixteen. Norman sent me alone to the apartment she shared with her mother, Adele, his second wife, who thoughtfully (or whatever) was out. Betsy was exotic, with a head of fabulous curly dark hair like her father’s, and a sweet smile. She was sophisticated for her years and didn’t seem to mind that here
was another of her father’s girlfriends, this one not that much older than she was. She showed me some of her poetry, we talked about her boyfriend, and we’ve been great friends ever since.

Kate was the second child I met, thirteen at the time. I went to her apartment on Seventy-second street in Manhattan, again by myself, on a day when she’d had a small growth removed from her neck. Her hair had gotten caught up and tangled in the bandage, and I took it off and put a new one on for her. She looked like a perfect mix of her mother and father. She was well mannered and sweet, with a creamy British complexion, at that wonderful age in a girl’s life when everything is poised to bloom.

Her mother was Lady Jeanne Campbell, Norman’s third wife, the granddaughter of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. Jeanne’s brother Ian was the Scottish duke of Argyll and lived in a castle in Inverness. Kate showed me a picture of it on a postcard, with a small arrow pointing to a window, in the vast rows of windows, where she stayed when she went to visit. She had drawn a balloon above it that said, “My room.” Jeannie was striking, with erect posture and a smile that could be welcoming but at the same time brought to mind a cat with feathers caught between its teeth. She had the most incredible voice, a beautiful, aristocratic English accent. I am weak before good upper-class British accents, and hers was the best, not a hint of Scottish in it. I’ve been to Scotland only once, but I could hardly understand anything they said. (I’m sure they thought the same about my thick Southern American accent.)

Jeannie got married again after she and Norman divorced, and she had another daughter, a beautiful dark-haired girl named Cusi, who was eight when I met her. Cusi was wise beyond her years, and was balancing her mother’s checkbook when I arrived, which they said she did all the time. Jeannie rather enjoyed the fact that Norman had a young girlfriend, I think, and invited me to Thanksgiving dinner that year while he would be in Stockbridge. I said yes, and I so appreciated it. I still had few friends in town and was alone most of the time while Norman was away. But Jeannie also had a wicked streak, and told Norman that she had invited several attractive single men to Thanksgiving as well, so he should be careful, he might lose me. He said he wasn’t the least bit worried, pompous man that he was. I liked her enormously, but
we never got to be real friends. It just wasn’t in the game plan. But Kate is one of my best friends today, as is Cusi, as are all of the kids.

Betsy, me, Danielle, and Kate.

I went to Provincetown to meet Michael and Stephen on a cold November evening in 1975. I’d taken the bus from New York and Norman had driven from Stockbridge, where he had spent Thanksgiving. As the bus topped the hill on Route 6, I had a view of the curve of the town around the bay in the setting sun; I gasped and fell in love with Provincetown at first sight. I had never seen another town remotely like it. The salt air was clean and invigorating with a hint of fish, and the muted voice of the foghorn was comforting at night. It sounded like music when it mixed with the sound of waves washing the beach. No one ever sleeps better than they do their first night in Provincetown. In summer the population of the town swells to seventy thousand or more, but in winter only about three thousand diehards dig in for the long, dull evenings that start in the middle of the afternoon. The most poetic and eerie description of it I know is in
Tough Guys Don’t Dance
, which Norman wrote in 1983.

Provincetown was indeed spooky and bone-chilling in the winter wind. We would spend part of every summer there for the next thirty-three years (Norman had come originally with his first wife, Bea, in 1943), and we would live there year-round the last ten years of his life, but the first time I came was magic. Of course it was magic. We were newly in love and everything was magic. We rented a small attic apartment with yellow painted floors, blue walls, and a view of the bay. Across the road was Ciro’s, an Italian restaurant situated in the basement of an old house, which had warm lighting and low ceilings that just escaped being claustrophobic.

In the middle of the first night, a nor’easter blew in with fierce howls. The electricity went off, as it tends to do often there, and the only light in town was from the glow of snowflakes as they whipped about in the air. Norman and I bundled up and took a walk from our apartment, which was almost in the middle of town, to the far end, about a mile and a half away, to the spot where the Pilgrims first landed and signed the Mayflower compact. In the dark, walking with our heads bent against the wind, we could almost believe that it was three hundred years earlier, no electric lights, no illumination except the occasional flicker of a candle in a window and the luminescence of the snow in the cold, salty air. Then we reached the big motel at the tip of land’s end,
hunkered down in the dark like a great sleeping beast. That brought us back to reality. Norman used to say, in his guided tour spiel that he loved to give our guests who had never been there before, that the motel had been erected to commemorate the spot where the Pilgrims had landed, before they’d had to hotfoot it over to Plymouth because they’d killed a couple of Indians and stolen their winter cache of corn.

We took Michael and Stephen to Ciro’s for dinner, and I remember what I was wearing, a black suit with a straight skirt, a necktie, and white shirt, and a big black hat with a wide sweeping brim. It was an outfit out of a Raymond Chandler novel, my hair swept down in a Lauren Bacall wave. I always loved hats and wore them whenever I could. Hats add drama to any situation, not that this one needed any added drama. The good-looking blond boys were nine and eleven. Michael, the older one, had startling blue eyes like his father, and Stephen’s were green with a glint of the imp. I ordered fried zucchini, which was at least close to my beloved fried squash (I so missed Arkansas cooking), and veal parmigiana, heavy on the garlic. While I tried not to slurp the spaghetti and get it on my shirt, Michael and Stephen, chesty little studlets that they were, entertained me with stories of playing baseball and football.

After the dinner, they went home and told their mother, Beverly, Norman’s fourth wife, that Dad had this neat new friend, a tall redhead, and I’m sure she groaned. Although they hadn’t lived together for six years, he was still legally married to her, and would be for another five years until he could get the marital situation straightened out, which is too complicated to put into a sentence here. I’ll do a whole chapter about it later. Beverly and I were actually pretty friendly in the beginning, until I got pregnant. (In her bed, no less. How rude is that? At her request, we were staying with the kids in Norman’s and her house in Provincetown in the summer of 1977 while she did a play in Connecticut. One night we even piled all the kids into the car and drove up to see her, and she was really good in the role.) But then when I got pregnant and Norman pressed her for a divorce, it got ugly. However, that’s down the road. It’s hard not to get ahead of myself.

To continue with my meeting of the kids, Susan was Norman’s oldest
child, a girl only six months my junior. Her mother, Beatrice, Norman’s first wife, married a Mexican man when Susie was two, and moved to Mexico City. Sue grew up there and Spanish was her first language. I’ve never met Beatrice but have immense respect for her because after she moved to Mexico, she learned Spanish, went to medical school, and became a doctor, a psychiatrist. Susan is a psychoanalyst and now lives in Chile. She is another one of my close friends, and the great thing about our relationship is that we feel free to totally be honest and say anything to each other without worrying about hurting the other one’s feelings. That goes back to our first meeting, which was in New York at her aunt Barbara’s, also that same November. We went out alone for lunch to get to know each other, and over soup and hot homemade bread, she said, “I feel like you’ve taken my place with my father.”

Michael and Stephen with Dad.

I was a little stunned by the directness of this, and said, “Well, Sue, what exactly
is
your place with your father?” I tried to make a joke of it, but I thought I knew what she was talking about. As the oldest, she’d
had four stepmothers, not to mention several serious girlfriends to contend with, but no one had been as young as I was. Now he had someone her exact age, someone who was there with him all the time while she lived thousands of miles away and saw him once or twice a year. That was the hardest thing for her, not being around him all those years. The other kids at least saw him on a regular basis, but she was too far away. He was not good on the phone, either, so there weren’t many phone calls. I still don’t see her often enough. She married a man from Chile, Marco Colodro, who is much like her father—older, powerful, handsome, divorced with three children, and they have three of their own. (Sue is the analyst to the family. We always go to her for advice. Everyone else is in the arts somehow, so of course we all need an analyst.) That first day, we talked it out over our bowls of soup, and then went to Bloomingdale’s. There has never been any problem that couldn’t be fixed by two women bonding over shopping.