Crossroads (17 page)

“You want to talk to your daughter, Mr. Mills?”

“Yes, I do. Who are you?”

“My name is Sean Bryant and I'm living here for the time being.”

“Oh,” my father said. That was the sum total of his reaction to my living with Sean.

My father was building a housing complex near Hartford, so a few weeks later my parents stopped in New York when my father had a meeting in Hartford. They stayed in town two nights and Sean joined us for dinner on the second night. The dinner he ate with us had the relaxed atmosphere of a job interview. To begin with there was a shooting on Canal Street and police cars streamed up West Broadway as we strolled toward the restaurant Sean had selected. My father, who in the past year had grown rather heavy, chased along West Broadway after the police. “Do you believe that?” he said to us after the police cars disappeared around the bend. “A shooting.”

“Dad, this really is a nice part of town. See, look at the galleries. It was just a fluke.”

But he was obsessed with the shooting. How far away had it been? Was the killer still at large? Had anyone been robbed? Fatally injured?

“Oo,” Mom said. “Look at the pretty shops. I just love those antique blouses.”

“SoHo is filled with antique clothing stores, Mrs. Mills,” Sean offered. “After dinner we can shop, if you like.” My mother smiled a somewhat retarded smile at Sean. She didn't really want to window shop. It was her tactic to talk about some banal detail of daily life to get my father's mind away from his favorite subject—man's impending doom.

“We should've eaten near the hotel,” Dad went on. “Plenty of good restaurants right around there. I've eaten in some terrific restaurants in this city. Years ago, but I bet they're still wonderful. The Four Seasons, Le Pavilion.”

“I remember when I came to New York in 1935,” Mom interrupted. “Or was it 1934? That was when I had a date with that darling doctor who worked at . . . what's the hospital near the Bowery?”

“Lots of good hospitals in this city,” Dad went on. “If you're going to get sick, I say this is the city to do it in.”

“Bowery Savings?” Mom looked questioningly. “Is that a hospital?” We told her it was a bank. “Oh, I don't remember, but he was a resident somewhere.”

“Did you say you were here on business, Mr. Mills?” Sean tried to land on a subject that would interest my father enough to take his mind off the police chase.

“Well, we're just signing contracts right now on some new housing complexes we're doing the engineering for.” He stuck his head around the corner to make sure the killer wasn't coming. “I hear your crime rate is way up in this city.” He used “your” as if we were somehow responsible. Maybe he thought it had something to do with Sean's beard; he'd been unable to hide his disapproval of it when they met.

“We have our problems here,” Sean said. “How's Chicago? Do you do much building there?”

Their voices drifted off and I walked with my mother. She
and I are built alike. We're both tall and slim, though I have my father's dark eyes and auburn hair. When we walk together, we always drift into stride. She was still back in 1935 or 1934.

My father and Sean had reached the little French restaurant, where you had to bring your own wine. “I'm going for wine,” Sean said.

“How do we get a cab out of here later?” my father asked. “Maybe we should call one now.”

“It's not difficult to get a cab, Mr. Mills,” Sean said, not sounding terribly reassuring.

While we waited at the table for Sean to come back, my parents assessed him. “Seems like a nice boy,” my father said.

“He's thirty-four, Dad.”

“Fought in Vietnam, huh?”

“No, he was a radio announcer.”

“Very cute,” Mom said. “Reminds me of that actor . . . what's his name? Sam Watertower. Is he Jewish?” My mother kept a long list of famous Jews: Fagin, Marx, Christopher Columbus (why else did he leave Spain in 1492?), Lenin, Hitler, Paul Newman, Lauren Bacall, Spinoza, Christ, Clifford Irving, Leonardo da Vinci, Kafka, Gershwin, St. Paul, Disraeli, Dinah Shore, Sandy Koufax, Freud, Sammy Davis, Harry Houdini, and Levi Strauss, the tailor.

“I don't think he's Jewish, Mom.” I thought for a moment, then felt the need to add “Mark wasn't either.”

Sean returned with two bottles of wine and a bottle of champagne. “Thought we'd celebrate your father's business deal.”

“Oh, who's going to drink all that stuff?” Dad said. “One bottle's all we need. Don't waste your money.”

It was downhill from there. Dad's soup was cold and Mom's drinking water was hot. Dad said the floor of the restaurant was sinking. The fish, they were certain, was frozen, not fresh,
as the waiter had assured them, and neither could believe the prices. Dad sent back every course but dessert, and Mom just picked at her breast of chicken with three kinds of mustard, saying it was “all right. Just a little tasteless, that's all.”

“Don't order the trout,” Dad said. “Too many bones. Get stuck in your throat and kill you.”

“Dad, they won't kill you.”

“You'd be surprised. You'd be surprised, the stories of people gagging to death in restaurants because of fish bones. I know a doctor who performed a tracheotomy on the dining room table with a kitchen knife on his own little boy. You'd be amazed.”

Sean was a little confused. I could see that. He had wanted to make a nice impression but he did not know what to discuss. Mortal accidents, old loves, the destruction of the world, were the only suitable subjects he could come up with.

“So what do you think of the economy these days, Mr. Mills?”

“The economy? I want to enjoy my dinner, son.”

“Debbie tells us you're an actor. That must be exciting,” Mom said.

I reached into a pouch of my purse to powder my nose and started to pull out my blue diaphragm case. It felt like my compact, and I wasn't looking down. Fortunately, Sean noticed what I was doing; he reached across and pushed my hand back into my purse, under the pretext of holding it. He smiled at me. “Actually I work as an assistant director, right now. I was working in front of the camera but what I really want to do is direct. Of course, everyone wants to direct. Hollywood is filled with people who just want to be directors . . .”

My heart pounded. What if, my God, what if I'd taken out my diaphragm and powdered my nose? Maybe they wouldn't have noticed. Maybe they would have gone right on talking
about doom and destruction. But this is terrible, I thought. I am sitting in a French restaurant with my parents, my lover, and my diaphragm case. My mother said it would kill him. I pictured my father, seeing me powder my nose with my diaphragm, then choking on his veal scalloppini. I examined the knives and wondered if I'd be able to perform the tracheotomy.

“It's just horrible,” Dad cut in. “I read the other day that sixteen people have killed themselves because of the Russian roulette scene in that film
The Deer Hunter
.”

“That's who you remind me of,” Mom said. “What's his name.”

“Can you imagine?”

“Please, Howard, don't get all upset. You'll spoil your dinner. He hates violence. He gets embarrassed at sex. I think the last film we went to together was
The Sound of Music
.” My father stared sadly at the tablecloth. “You can't go anywhere with him.”

My parents had never had what you'd call the ideal marriage. Actually I believed everything was all right until November 1963, when my mother sobbed as President Kennedy was buried. As the nation mourned, she declared it was the end of America and she wanted to see the country before we went completely to pot. My father wouldn't go with her and he refused to let her go alone. So, instead, she packed a small suitcase for herself and moved from their bedroom into the guest room. She laid out all of her make-up on the dressing table to let everyone know how long she planned to stay. By day our father acted as if everything were normal, but at night, when he thought we were asleep, my father, Howard Mills, such a pragmatic and exacting civil engineer, tiptoed down the hall and pleaded with my mother to come back to bed.

Zap, Renee, and I were amazed at how tenacious she was. How she could open the door to the guest room just a crack, enough to tell him how utterly absurd he was, how utterly
bored she was with him, complaints over the details of daily living when the world around them was falling apart. She resisted his pleas and entreaties until at last she broke his spirit and made him give her what she wanted. Marge Mills would have made a terrific horse trainer.

In fact, she had a scheme. One day after sleeping by herself for almost a year, she told him she'd come back to bed if he'd give her a thousand dollars with which to take a trip across the country. He gave her the money and she bought a two-hundred-dollar Greyhound “America the Beautiful” bus pass, the kind that lets you get on and off wherever you want. The rest of the money she put into traveler's checks. She got as far as San Francisco. In San Francisco, she balked and, in a moment of weakness, called home. My father hopped the next plane and brought her home, thus ending the closest thing to adventure she'd ever know.

The summer my mother took off for San Francisco was the summer when it all fell apart for me, or when it all began for me, depending on which way you look at it. It was the summer I caught my brother and Jennie in the drafting room. It was the summer Renee left her underpanties on a neighbor's rosebush and the summer I watched my father languish for love. If my mother wanted adventure and never found it, my father wanted love and never got it. My father, I feel certain, in the depths of his ill-tempered soul, is a passionate man. I've always believed that behind the explosions, the rage, the need to send food back in restaurants, to chase after shootings, lurks a man trying to keep the lid on things. I am afraid I take after him.

When we left the restaurant, my father said, “Can we drop you off somewhere, son?”

Sean didn't know what to say, but I cut in. “Why don't we all go back to my place and have a drink?” My father didn't want to because he had meetings all the next day, but Mom convinced him there were cabs on Columbus Avenue. The
subject of where Sean lived or should be dropped was discreetly forgotten. Once we were uptown, Sean and Dad went to mix drinks. Mom and I sat on the sofa in the living room, waiting for them. “So,” Mom began, patting my hand, “we've hardly had a chance to talk. Sean's very nice. Your brother likes him. But I guess you're still up in the air about Mark.”

“Oh, I'm not up in the air. I mean, I saw him twice recently, but I don't want to get back together.”

Her eyes lit up when I said I'd seen him twice. “Well, you'll see. You know, a marriage, that's not something you should give up lightly.”

I was getting annoyed. “Who gave it up lightly? I didn't leave. I wasn't unfaithful. I was here waiting for him to come home at night. You make it sound as if I'm the one who walked away.”

“You don't have to get all upset about it. I just made a simple statement. I can make a simple statement, can't I? I'm upset, too, you know, that you broke up. We've hardly discussed it, but I felt just terrible.”

I felt a little as if I were being sabotaged. “What am I supposed to do? Go take him back from the woman he lives with?”

My mother stood up. “I wonder what's taking them so long?” She started walking away. “Should we go and see?”

What was taking so long was that my father had cut his finger trying to get the electric can opener to open a can of tomato juice. “What's taking so long?” I asked cheerfully.

“I cut myself on this goddamn can opener. I don't know why you don't buy the kind we have.”

I looked at my father's finger and at the opener. “You probably used it wrong.”

“Used it wrong? I haven't been around for three quarters of a century without knowing how to open a can. Tell her, Marge. Believe me, I know how to open a can.”

“I'll finish the drinks,” Mom said.

“Naw, forget the drinks. It's too late. Let's go.” We wrapped my father's finger in a bandage and went for their coats. My father sat for a moment in his overcoat with his thumb held up in the air. Then they got up to leave. “Can we drop you somewhere, son?” Dad said again. Sean declined. “Oh,” my father said, thus coming to grips with the fact that Sean really did stay with me.

After they left, Sean more or less collapsed on the sofa. “You were terrific,” I told him.

“My God, that's amazing. Are they always like that?”

“Oh, not always.” My parents were often like that when they were upset about something. Right now they were upset that Sean was not the man I married.

 

The month of October was idyllic, only I didn't know it at the time. Sean stayed with me and the two of us set up house. We knew it was temporary, so we moved into domesticity with comfort and ease. What was wonderful about October was that Sean wanted to see Manhattan the way a tourist sees Manhattan. He wanted to go to every museum, every gallery. He wanted to buy chestnuts in the park and stop at F.A.O. Usually we went out alone, just the two of us. He'd pick me up at the office in the evenings with the
Times
and the
Voice
under his arm and pretend he'd been looking for an apartment. I knew he was looking for films he wanted to see. His work schedule was erratic that month, so he had plenty of time to find things for us to do.

One morning Sean went with me up to that section of the Bronx known as Fort Apache. The Arthur Hansom film he was working on, called
Minor Setbacks
, took place in Bedford-Stuy. It was the story of two Italian boys who grow up in the slums. One leaves, goes into advertising, and marries a wealthy but dumb girl from Manhattan. The other stays behind and marries the former girlfriend—a bright, sensitive woman—of his friend.