A Ticket to the Circus (42 page)

L
ife was busy in the early and mid-eighties. Besides painting and showing, I was still taking a few acting classes and trying to get work as an actress, although I slowly realized that I would never have a big career. The biggest part I got was on the daytime drama
All My Children
playing an aging ex-model named Britt Hemingway, who had sunk to dealing drugs since she was so old she couldn’t model anymore (I was thirty-four). The part lasted six months. In the story line, my character got Mark, one of the good guys, hooked on cocaine, but he finally saw the light and went to rehab and back to his wife, and Britt faded away, as those kinds of girls on soap operas usually do. It was great fun, and I got fan mail, some from guys in prison, who were big fans of the dope dealer. I even got a few letters asking if I could get someone cocaine. I replied that I could send them a packet of Epsom salts. That was what we used on the show.

I was also working a lot at the Actors Studio at this time. I had been admitted to the Playwrights/Directors Unit through submitting a screenplay—co-written with my old teacher B. C. Hall in Arkansas, called
Little Miss Little Rock
—to Arthur Penn and Elia Kazan, the two legends who ran the unit. The screenplay had the same title as the novel Norman had read, the one I’d never finished, but B.C. and I took the story in a totally different direction. The screenplay actually got so far as to have someone take an option on it, and we nearly got financing a couple of times, but it always fell through, as most movie projects do.

After I became a member of the unit, I also wrote a couple of plays that were produced at the studio. The first was a two-character one-act called
Go-See
that I wrote for Sally Kirkland but wound up doing myself with Rip Torn (who had long ago made peace with Norman), and the second was a short play called
Double Feature
with Rita Gam and Patrick Sullivan. The Actors Studio made me more confident about my writing abilities, and Norman and I had great fun doing things together there. I directed one of his short plays called
The Notebook
, and he directed me in
Strawhead
and another play or two. If one of us put up
something for a session, during the critique afterward we would have great mock fights. Once, when I had criticized something he had done, he pretended to cough up a loogie (an old Brooklyn term for a wad of phlegm) into his hand and launch it at my head. I ducked, and half the audience thought he really had done it and went, “EYEEEEW.”

We took various of the kids there, too. They used to say that while other kids went to church, they went to the Actors Studio. John was in plays from the time he was seven or eight; Matt ran lights, did the technical work for plays, and also acted; and Stephen and Kate acted. It was a cozy, safe atmosphere in which to practice the craft, and I realized after a while that, as with modeling, I didn’t particularly want a big career. I didn’t want to go to Hollywood and work on a TV sitcom or be in a play eight times a week on Broadway. I just wanted to live with Norman and take care of the family, go to Provincetown in the summers, write and paint and do a little work at the Actors Studio once in a while for fun.

We still had an active social life, and “Norman and Norris” became almost one word in the social columns. While we did fight a lot, almost as a sport, Norman was always there, supporting me, encouraging me in whatever I was doing, and I was there for him.

The kids were all going to good schools and making interesting careers for themselves. They each had the dreaded twenty-fifth birthday to pass, because that was the age Dad had been when
The Naked and the Dead
was published, and it hung over all their heads. Rational or not, they felt that they, too, were expected to be famous young, but Norman just wanted them to be happy, and in fact he always said that becoming famous so young was the worst thing that could have happened to him. He wasn’t ready, and he didn’t know how to handle fame. It was why he’d gotten into so much trouble in his early years. With the exception of Sue, who became a psychoanalyst, all of the kids found careers in the arts one way or another. I used to laugh and say that if one of them had come to us and said they wanted to become a dentist, we would have looked at them in horror and said, “What are you thinking?” Now I wish we had a few doctors and dentists in the family.

   
IN 1984 WE
bought a big brick house on the beach in Provincetown that would be our home for the next twenty-three years. I loved that
house. It was big enough for all of us—five bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms, with Norman and me splitting the attic floor for our offices. Granted, he had three-quarters of the space and I had one, but my side was cozy. By now Norman was just that little bit older and couldn’t be as active, so every year, we were spending three months or more in Provincetown, and we went up during the year for long weekends or on holidays. Norman loved working there. It was an escape sometimes from New York’s energy, and often he would go by himself for weeks if he needed to get a big chunk of work done.

Norman’s mother always came for part of the summer, as did his sister, Barbara, and her family. Fanny was aging dramatically. Her mind had started to wander, and she began to imagine things. The first clue I had was when she asked me one day to go with her to the cleaners; they had lost her sheets, she said, and wouldn’t give them back. I went in with her, and the man, obviously exasperated, said, “Oh, Mrs. Mailer, we don’t have your sheets! Please!” He told me she had never sent them to him, and she was just as adamant that she had and he was lying about it. There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t force him to produce sheets he didn’t have, but I didn’t like to think she was, God forbid, losing her mind. After that we began to notice more and more things of that sort. Once she climbed up on the bed to kill a spider with a broom, fell off, couldn’t get up, and lay on the floor all day until I came over to visit late in the afternoon.

After that, we got a girl named Rose to stay with her because we were also concerned about her turning on the stove and then not lighting the gas with a match, or wandering away and leaving food to burn. She immediately started reporting that Rose was stealing her long dresses, or her high heels or her teacups. We apologized to Rose and ignored it like we ignored the sheets, as the long dresses were still hanging in the closet along with the shoes, and the teacups were in the cupboard, but in the end it turned out that Rose had indeed cleaned her out of all her good jewelry and any loose cash lying around. We discovered this after Rose tried to write a hot check on Fanny’s bank account and then disappeared. Just because someone is hallucinating doesn’t mean they are always wrong.

Fanny was living in some other land in her head much of the time now, and we found a great nurse named Eva to take care of her. Fanny
still had lucid moments, and was still feisty. Once, she was uncharacteristically feeling sorry for herself, saying that it would be best if she just went ahead and died, and Eva, kidding (at least I think she was kidding), said, “Would you like me to help you along?” “Go to hell!” Fanny said to her, maybe not so ready to move on after all. After we brought her to Provincetown in the summer of 1985, she took to her bed and couldn’t really eat or drink much. Eva, Sue, Betsy, Danielle, Kate, Maggie, Barbara, and I sat beside her bed and talked to one another a lot that summer while we peeled the outer husks off silver dollar plants we found growing in the yard, and made beautiful bouquets of them. It seemed to be just a matter of time until Fanny went. The doctor said there was nothing to do except keep her comfortable.

For his part, Norman was in denial about the situation, and would stick his head into her room every morning with a cheery “Good morning, Mom!” wave and then go about his day, as though oblivious to what was going on. He hated being around sick people, hated being sick himself, and was convinced the mind could overcome the body by an act of will if it was just strong enough. A couple of years previously, when his mother had been in better shape but clearly unable to get around well, he’d decided that if she went hiking in Maine it would do her so much good that she would be able to walk better afterward. Nothing could dissuade him—not her, not us. So we all set out on what was, for most people, an easy stroll on a relatively smooth path, but not if one is ninety-some-odd with a bad heart. She soon tired, and Peter and Michael wound up carrying her to our moored boat. The boat ride back was frightening for her as well, and the whole experience was traumatic. I felt so bad for Norman, as we all meanly said to him, “I told you so.” He was like a disappointed little boy who just knew he could fix his mother and make her like she used to be, if only she would do as he said, but it didn’t happen.

Occasionally, Fanny would come back through the fog and say to me, “I am so sorry I have to put you through this.” Once, she said, “I’m so glad Norman has you.” It made me cry, and I knew she really did love me. We had been friends for ten years, not such a long time in her long life, but we had been real friends. She didn’t have many others outside the family.

One day near the end of the summer, she began to ask to go home. We kept saying, “It’s just a few more weeks, Grandma. We’ll all go back to Brooklyn soon. Just hang in.” But she insisted and insisted, every day. I had gone into the city for a few days to attend an acting workshop with Ellen Burstyn, and since I had to go back to Ptown anyhow, we decided it would be convenient if Michael and Stephen brought her home, along with Eva, and then I would go back with them and get the rest of the family packed up to come back. I was waiting at her apartment when they arrived, and we got her into bed. I sat beside her for a long time, talking, and her head was relatively clear. She told me she was going to die. She used to say that frequently, and I would joke her out of it and say, “Oh, no, you’ll just get on the wrong bus and wind up in Schenectady,” but I knew she was serious, and this time I said, “Yes, darling, I think you are. Does that frighten you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’m frightened.” I took her hand.

“I don’t think you should be scared. You’ve lived a good life, and I believe that God loves us and that we go on to another life, in a different place from this one. I think your sisters and parents will be waiting for you when you get there, I think we’ll know each other, and life will be at least as interesting as it is here, except we won’t be sick or old. I think we even get a chance to come back down here and have another life. Maybe a lot of them.” She was silent for a minute.

“Do you really believe that?”

“I do,” I said, echoing the sentiments James Jones had told Norman all those years ago. “It’s the only thing that makes sense to me. It is so miraculous for a baby to be born at all, isn’t it? Those two little cells coming together and growing into a whole person. What is more miraculous about it happening more than once? What about a child who is killed in a car wreck when he is two years old? Is that all the life he gets? Or babies who are born dead? Do they never get another chance? I don’t think God works that way. I like to think this energy we have that makes us who we are leaves these worn-out bodies and goes somewhere else, like a driver getting out of an old car into a new one, and while we are still us—we’re the same drivers—we are so much more.” I kept talking to her, and gradually she relaxed.

“I’d like to believe that,” she said, finally. I held her hand, and she
drifted off to sleep. Then Michael, Stephen, and I got into the car and drove back to Provincetown. Labor Day weekend was coming up and we had to get the house packed up and the kids back to school. After the six-hour trip, as we walked into the house in Provincetown, the phone was ringing. It was Eva. Fanny had died peacefully just a few minutes before.

Myrtle stayed behind with John and Maggie and Matt, and Carol came to keep them company while the older kids and Norman and I went back to New York the following day. The funeral was at Campbell’s, the ritzy Upper East Side funeral home, which Fanny would have liked. Several of Norman’s exes were there. One of his old girlfriends, Shari, a former stewardess, came wearing a white suit and a huge black and white hat with big white sunglasses, and sat in the front row, just in case someone might miss her. The curse of the old girlfriends followed me everywhere, although I should have gotten used to it.

The burial was in Long Branch, New Jersey, where Norman had been born and all his family was buried. We caravanned out to the grave site in the late summer heat. It was a holiday weekend and the traffic was horrendous. After the rabbi said all the things he was supposed to, they began to lower the coffin into the grave. Except the coffin was way too big for the hole. Of course we had picked out a tank of a coffin, with comfy innerspring mattress and all the chrome doodads, while the Jewish tradition was to bury in a modest plain wooden box that took up much less space. We looked around for the grave diggers, but they had gone off on lunch break. Someone from the cemetery jumped into the car and frantically went searching every McDonald’s and Wendy’s in the vicinity while we all stood in the sun, waiting for them to come back. After an eternity, they arrived, two men in dirty T-shirts, one fat with his exposed belly hanging over his pants, and one skinny, his pants in danger of falling off his hip bones at any moment. We lined up and watched them work. They dug, then tried to fit the coffin, took it out, and dug some more. At one point, the fat one jumped into the hole and started bouncing up and down on the coffin, trying to pound it in, but we all started yelling at him to stop, so they had to keep digging. I can only imagine what Fanny was saying. “Young man, you stop that! Have a little respect! I’m the mother of a famous man! You can just dig a proper hole, and stop all this foolishness!”

Finally, it was over, and Michael, Stephen, Norman, and I set out to make the long trip back to Provincetown one more time. A bad storm blew up after sunset, and the rain pelted down so hard we could hardly see the road and had to pull over several times. We said the storm was Fanny, railing against the fat man who’d jumped on her coffin, and who’s to say it wasn’t?