Chanel Bonfire (13 page)

It hadn’t been much of a celebration, as Mother had hated the show and spent most of it in the theater bar, sulking. She had complained sourly all through dinner. But Robbie and I were happy to be back under the dazzling lights and marquees of Broadway. The city was so alive and filled with people, not like Ridgefield, where it was dark at night and all you could hear were the insects rubbing their legs together.

After almost a year in Ridgefield, Pop was our only connection to our old, fun life. He was also the only person, maybe because of his money at least, who still had any influence on Mother, and the only father figure we had.

The phone rang and rang. Someone picked up after about the tenth ring.

“Pop?” I could tell by the wheezy breathing that it was him. I also heard the familiar sound of ice cubes in a glass.

“Yes, dearie.”

“I was wondering if you could speak to Mother. She’s been locked up in her room for days. And I think maybe she’s been drinking a lot.”

“Well, dearie, I’ll try and talk to her, but you know your mother. . . .”

His voice trailed off. I wanted to say,
Well, I may know her, but I sure don’t understand her.
But I didn’t.

“Thanks,” I said.

I don’t know if Pop made the call, but she emerged from the miasma of her room in the spring and was somehow fine again. It was if she had woken from a long winter’s nap and not a nervous breakdown, which was certainly one way of looking at it.

Robbie and I took advantage of her exit from lulu land and convinced her that this country-mouse life was making us all despondent. What we needed was new surroundings. We could move to Boston, which wasn’t New York, and no one knew us there. Wouldn’t that be fun? It would be like it used to be in London. She could make new friends, start going out again. It would be like old times.

And it worked, for a while.

BOSTON, 1977

chapter eight

PLAY DEAD

In Boston, just as she had in London, Mother zeroed in on the most happening and poshest neighborhood she could find. In the late seventies, that was Cambridge and, for us, a mansion for rent that stood behind a long, serpentine stone wall on Fresh Pond Parkway. It was a pile, with four bedrooms that all had interconnecting dressing rooms and loos, a sunken living room added in the twenties, a solarium, and an outdoor porch that hugged the entire back of the house, which looked out on a glorious lawn peppered with dogwood trees, their petals trembling and floating in the wind. While it was way out of our price range, Mother embraced living beyond our means, as usual. Locally famous as “the house behind the wavy wall,” it and Pop’s introductions got Mother almost instant invitations from Cabots and Lodges and many of the bright young things of the Boston literary and arts scene. Soon she was lunching at the Ritz at
least once a week and had her own table at Harvest, a chic nouvelle-cuisine spot in Cambridge.

The house gave Robbie and me easy access to Harvard Square and a summer full of bright lights and fun distractions like we’d had in London and could only dream about during the long, dull nights and days in Ridgefield. We practically skipped along the streets of Cambridge, flipping through LPs at the Harvard Coop and shopping for long, flowered skirts, cowboy boots, and jumpsuits in Urban Outfitters. We went to movies at the Harvard Square Theatre or more often at the Brattle, a revival house featuring sophisticated and racy double bills like
The Boys in the Band
and
The Women
.

On weekends while Mother was partying with society trust-fund babies, Robbie and I would drive to the beach in Provincetown and eat boiled lobsters and corn on the cob out of foil-lined bags on the rocks. At sunset, we’d change in the Subaru and go out dancing in the gay bars in P-Town. Robbie was an expert at charming the bouncer at the door, and we always got in. No one ever bothered us, perhaps thinking we were together, and we’d dance our asses off until last call. Then, soaked in our own sweat, we’d stumble out into the street, to see Edward Gorey riding by on his bicycle like Ichabod Crane on wheels, and hunt for our car. I’d drive home and we’d listen to the radio. Robbie would put her bare feet up on the dashboard, and her hand with a cigarette would dangle out the window. If we passed someone on the road, she’d defiantly, and just for the fun of it, give them the finger, and we’d end up in a drag race with the offended
driver of the other car—screaming with laughter and singing at the top of our lungs to the Police’s “Roxanne” as we raced along the empty beach roads.

While we were gone on one of these Cape Cod expeditions, Mother met the next man of her dreams, Frank Collins, at the bar at Harvest.

Frank lived somewhere in Vermont with his wife and family and would visit Mother when he came to Boston on business. He was tall, thin, and blond and wore horn-rimmed glasses. It didn’t seem to bother her that he was married, but it bothered me because I knew there was no chance he would marry her and take care of her so we wouldn’t have to keep calling Pop to lend us money all the time.

I only had one conversation with Frank. During one of his lunchtime visits, he described tearing the wings off flies when he was a small child—apparently this was what he did for fun. As he told me this story, he smiled and looked really happy and my mother stared adoringly at him, as she did whenever he said anything.

The only other thing I knew about him was a story my mother had told me about his hitting a little girl accidentally with his car many years ago. The girl had darted out into the road, not giving him time to react or stop the car, and she was killed instantly. According to my mother, he felt terrible and would never recover from the horror of it. I wasn’t sure I believed it was really an accident after hearing him talk about what he did to the flies.

He reminded me of a character in a John Cheever story,
someone who seems normal and nice, but underneath the calm façade there’s all this darkness boiling that he barely contains with his flashing smile and perfectly polished shoes. Frank came and went suddenly, as if he had his own trapdoor in the floor. But Mother seemed happy when she was with him, and despite some bitchy moments, she wasn’t on the warpath the whole time they saw each other.

Mother and Frank went off on little trips to Maine and Nantucket. She talked about how he was planning to leave his wife. I wanted to tell her not to hold her breath. I had done a little research on this in
Cosmo
and had discovered that a small percentage of men left their wives for other women. I decided to keep the information to myself, but at the same time I worried about Mother getting her hopes up. And I was worried, too, about who would be left holding the bag when things didn’t work out.

And they didn’t work out. Just like it said in
Cosmo
.

After stringing her along for six months and wining and dining her all over the Eastern Seaboard, Frank decided to stay with his wife. This tragedy, coupled with the alienation of some of her new crowd and another run on her finances, sent Mother into a period of black despair and us all into a slightly less grand house on top of a hill in Belmont, a leafy suburb of Boston. After the move, and Frank’s betrayal, Mother was heartbroken and, like a Victorian lady in mourning, took to her bed. Only Mother’s version of appropriate mourning attire was her blue Pucci nightgown. And instead of weeping and making bracelets from her departed
beloved’s hair, she chain-smoked and plotted a murder/suicide that would make the six o’clock news.

It was Thanksgiving, months later, when she came downstairs fully dressed for the first time. She had changed out of the nightgown into a tailored, brown Jaeger skirt and a pale pink silk blouse. One of her three pearl necklaces adorned her throat, and an Hermès scarf that perfectly matched her blouse was expertly placed over her shoulders, the knot settled on her chest. She had put her frosted blond hair back in a chignon and had even put on some makeup.

Mother set the table with her Limoges china and the Tiffany flatware that we hadn’t seen since we’d left Park Avenue. She cooked a turkey with all the trimmings. Looking at her elegant appearance and the lovely table setting, I had to admit that when she wanted to, she could still pull it together. The trickier question was how long she could keep it up.

Robin and I sat at the table watching Mother carefully carve the turkey—our mouths hanging open ever so slightly as if we were witnessing a miracle. She placed the turkey slices on our plates and spooned mashed potatoes and green beans next to them. Then she heaped on the stuffing and, doing her best Donna Reed, said, “Help yourselves to the cranberry sauce.” She pushed a stray strand of hair behind her ear with the back of her hand, just like a contented housewife.

“Thank you, Mother,” I said, smiling. “Everything looks delicious.” I looked at Robbie, cuing her to compliment
Mother’s cooking, but she just stared back at me and said nothing.

In silence, we began pushing mashed potatoes onto our forks and spearing green beans. The clock ticked. The carving knife clicked against the serving fork.

I thought of how other people celebrated the holidays: laughing and joking with grandparents, cousins, and old friends. But not us, because we didn’t have any. The house in Belmont was our tenth home in twelve years, and my mother had no more friends left, old or new, having driven them all away. Robbie and I had decided that this was her superpower, and we were too afraid to invite our friends over in case she turned it on them. So it was just the three of us, the turkey, and our cat Gus, a stowaway from Ridgefield, and I wasn’t even sure how long he planned to stick around.

I was staring into my mashed potatoes, feeling sorry for myself, when Mother decided to ratchet things up a little by polishing off a bottle of Almaden Chablis in about five minutes flat. This was a trick she had perfected years before with a cold, crisp Pouilly-Fuissé, and although her finances had forced her to move on to the cheaper labels, the result was the same. Her empty glass tipped over onto the table and she moved back onto the warpath for the first time since we’d moved to Boston and she’d met Frank.

She fixed her woozy gaze upon us. Her eyes filled with a creepy intensity that made me feel as if she could see inside me to the knotted heap of fear that had replaced my stomach.

“Do you know something, Wendy and Robin?” Her voice was quiet with a touch of acidity from the cheap wine.

Here we go,
I thought. The jungle drums were beating in the distance, the natives were coming to get us.

“I have sacrificed my whole life to raise the two of you.”

My sister and I sat at the table frozen, our forks poised in midair. I was too afraid to look at her so I stared down at my dinner plate. I noticed that my gravy was running into my green beans. I hated that.

“My
whole
life.” The drums were growing louder.

“No one else gives a
shit
about you.” The natives were almost upon us.

“You’re just selfish little
brats
!” She stood up and threw her napkin onto her plate of uneaten food. Stumbling back against her chair, in high dudgeon now, she raised her hand to her breast.

“You will
never
know how much I have given up because of the two of you!” she snarled.

My sister and I did not move, did not breathe. At least when she had raided our rooms at three in the morning, we had the covers to hide under. An icy tingling started to creep up the back of my neck and onto my scalp—an all too familiar feeling that never seemed to improve with time.

“‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’”

I can’t remember exactly when, but somewhere between our evacuation from London, the Kansas City Death Watch, and the suburban nightmare of Ridgefield, she’d begun to
quote Shakespeare or the Bible when things were about to get really hairy.

But before we could move, the
Mommie Dearest
routine was cut short by the wine or an act of God and she passed out and keeled over onto the carpet.

Robin and I looked at each other. Was she really out or was this just another lunatic, attention-getting ploy? It was Thanksgiving, for God’s sake, and the food was getting cold.

“Maybe she’s dead,” Robin said. “Or faking it.”

I looked under the table. Mother’s chest was moving. “She’s out cold.”

Mother had often played dead through the years, though when we were seven and eight it was more a game than a tactic. She would ghoulishly limp to her bed and flop down on the mattress, and my sister and I would scream and jump on her, poking her and pleading with her to wake up. The game would always go on a little too long, my mother being very good at it, and we would start to really believe that she was dead. We’d lift her heavy arms and legs and drop them onto the bed wondering why she wouldn’t move. Finally, after our fear overcame us, we’d start to cry, and it was only then that she would open her eyes, coming back to life at the sound of our tears. It was a kind of twisted version of the fairy-tale prince’s kiss. It was her way of gently reminding us that she was all we had. If she were to die, we would have no one.