Fiction Ruined My Family (2 page)

“I'll see you girls very soon.”

“Bye, Nonnie,” we said brightly, and waved, her words leading us to believe we were heading off on some kind of scavenger hunt, a yearlong one that would wind up with us watching a rousing game of bridge in her living room with her best pal, Monsignor Hartnett, and her do-gooding friends from Annunziata Church, smoking Carltons and having a Tom Collins or two.

“Good-bye, Mother,” my mother sighed. Although she was psychologically duct-taped to her mother, I never saw them physically touch. (I, on the other hand, was fine with symbolic behavior. By this age, seven, I had only recently stopped sucking on my mother's neck at night while we all watched television.)

“Verena,” my father said, a verbal tip of the hat, and hit the gas as if we had the kind of car that could perform in a peel-out.

 

 

 

Our green, wood-paneled Ford Torino wagon reached the East End of Long Island in early summer. The local white corn, tomatoes, and gin and tonics would soon be coming up. A friend of my father's from St. Louis, a preposterously tan writer named Berton Roueché, had arranged a house for us. It was a small, two-story converted horse barn on Stony Hill Farm in Amagansett. The farm was surrounded by potato fields. There was a handwritten wooden sign nailed to a tree at the entrance that read STONY HILL FARM. A woman named Penny Potter owned the place. (My dad would later tell Penny Potter to go fuck herself, when she didn't invite my parents to cocktails until three months after we had arrived from St. Louis. In my father's opinion, “Go fuck yourself” was the only civilized response to bad manners.)

Penny had been married to a writer named Jeffrey Potter. Writer Peter Matthiessen and his wife had lived in what was now our house. The hill house was the storied spot where Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe spent the summer of 1957, arriving by helicopter on the front field. When people came from St. Louis to visit, my dad gave them the dead-artistsand-writers tour, driving them to the Green River Cemetery, where A. J. Liebling and Jackson Pollock and Stuart Davis were buried, highlighting the curve on Fireplace Road where Pollock cracked up.

My mother wasn't thrilled about leaving her mother for a year, but she was up for a place with more scope and more glamour. Both my parents wanted a bigger game, and New York was it. And Dad was about to be it. He had been selling pieces to
Harper's
,
The Atlantic Monthly
, and the
New York Times Magazine
, and the great literary novel was the next obvious step. She believed in him.

Besides the Rouechés, the other friends my parents spent time with were more writers, like Mike Mooney, Willie Morris, Martin Quigley and Eloise Spaeth, an industrialist's widow and art collector whom my parents also knew from St. Louis. Mrs. Spaeth and her late husband had been huge figures in the New York art world in the '50s and '60s, involved in promoting artists like Picasso, Calder, and Willem de Kooning. Mrs. Spaeth was a big deal at the Whitney, and she lived in a modern house that had art and sculpture everywhere, like the Picasso birdbath out by the pool. She was respected for her impeccable taste and vision, and I thought it must mean Dad was really up-and-coming if she was friends with him.

Everyone was “interesting”: “Hell of an interesting gal, very bright, has a piece in
The New Yorker
, is researching something terrific, was friendly with so-and-so, working on a collection of stories.” It seemed there was no shortage of little stories about the writers and artists who lived around us. “Quigs [my father's friend Martin Quigley] said he used to ride the train with Pollock. ‘Jack and I used to drink together in the bar car of the Montauk Cannonball.'” They called it that because it was the slowest train of all time. Big, black, slow.

“Saul Steinberg, who lives down the road from Quigs, calls Martin's wood-burning stove ‘the black cat,'” my father would tell his old friend Hereford on the phone.

My parents had a cocktail party one night, and my dad pulled me aside and said, “Now, Jean, there's a woman coming over tonight and I want you to pay attention to her, to what she's like, because you'll read
Tender Is the Night
someday and the couple in it, the Divers, were based on her parents, Sara and Gerald Murphy. She's the living continuation of the American social novel.” This was just a normal direction from my father, like “Don't slouch at the dinner table
.”
I want you to pay attention to this woman tonight because she is the living continuation of THE American social novel. Okay, Dad. “Dorothy Parker was her nanny. Played on the beach in Antibes with Picasso.” All right, all right. I heard ya.

In addition to socializing with the local literati, my parents also hosted a number of friends from St. Louis that summer—ironic since the reason we'd come here in the first place was to escape the old routines. One of the first people to visit was my father's old friend Eileen Ellsworth, a divorcée with a six-year-old son, who came, too. Physically, Eileen was the exact opposite of my mother. Tall, brunette, olive-complected, leathery-looking. Like my mother, Eileen was a depressive. I never imagine tall people as prone to depression but she was that, a tall depressive. She was quick and theoretically funny. Her voice was deep and theatrical and I hated her. There wasn't a story my father could tell too many times as far as Eileen was concerned. “Oh, that is wonderful, Steve,” she'd say, drying her eyes and fluffing her mane.

Even at seven I understood that my mother was fighting this woman for my father, one beguiling depressive battling it out with another for the affection of a novelist. Classic stuff, been going on since the beginning of time. I had no idea why a woman who threatened my mother so completely, a woman I was sure was his mistress, had come to the East End of Long Island to stay with us. But, as always, manners were important; you wouldn't want to offend your husband's lover by insinuating she wasn't welcome in your home.

At cocktail hour the night Eileen Ellsworth arrived, my mother was in a T-shirt and dungarees, as she called them, sitting with my father in the living room. Eileen came down the stairs in a silky blouse and slacks. My mother said something about getting cleaned up and a few minutes later came down the stairs in a sexy shirt and a denim skirt, little heels. Eileen then said something about realizing it was too humid for a silk shirt and a few minutes later came down once again, trying to be nonchalant, in a dress and heels and lipstick. My father simply complimented every entrance with equal weight. “Eileen, you're absolutely right. Let's celebrate your arrival and get dressed up. Doris,
che bella
!” My mother laughed and went back up and descended the stairs again and she might as well have been carrying a gun the fight was so over. She busted out her Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress, heels, coral lipstick, a little blue eye shadow. She had a sexy gap between her two front teeth, and she stuck out in all the right places, which seems even more impressive at five feet tall. Eileen Ellsworth and her son, Davey, went back to St. Louis a few days later. I never saw her again.

It seemed like when you made a break from the past, people wanted to be a part of it, often people from your past. After Eileen came Aunt Carol and Uncle Tom, just as we were preparing for Hurricane Belle, our first hurricane, possibly our last if we moved back to St. Louis when the year was up like we were supposed to. Our electricity was already gone. We got one TV channel out of Rhode Island and when that went out we listened to the radio for reports. Our phone went dead sometime during the morning bluster. We filled the bathtubs with water. We lit the tall green candles on the long wood dining table. A hurricane was no impediment to Mom and Dad's socializing. They got dressed up for Hurricane Belle. My mother put on a multicolored silk, floor-length muumuu—splashy orange, purple and pink, her hair in a short, late '70s salt-and-pepper perm, lots of jewelry. Dad put on an old top hat and tails of his father, Dagwood's.

My uncle Tom (not our real uncle, but our father's best friend) was dating my aunt Carol (my mother's half sister). These two couldn't have been a more unlikely couple. Tom was boozy, prone to break out in song at any moment or suddenly sit down and write a musical. He and my father had written a really funny election musical called
GUV!
and also a Watergate Christmas carol, and they did, in fact, with a few drinks under their belt, head out with a large group of drunken St. Louis Democrats in 1972, and sing it door-to-door. But one carol no one ever expected Tom to take to the streets with was Aunt Carol. Uncle Tom had been drunk for days.

It wasn't just the alcoholics the storm was rattling; the animals were out of sorts as well. Our dog, Jubjub, ate my dad's nine-foot surf-casting rod, and one of the corgis belonging to the neighbor living in the icehouse next door ran off into the storm.

The dog's owner, Eleanor Ward, came by to see if it had taken shelter in our barn. Mom and Dad invited her in for a drink. I loved the way they got someone a drink as the response to any dilemma. So cinematic. Like a social doctor. I couldn't wait to say to someone who came to me with a serious problem, “My God, Jan, that's awful. Can I get you a drink?” or even better, “You look like you could use a drink.”

Eleanor and Kate were sent out to look for the missing corgi. Through the rain and winds they searched the fields and the farm's dirt roads. When they returned, the little lost dog was inside playing with my sister Julia while Eleanor and Mom and Dad sang songs from
Candide
blaring on the stereo. Mom and Dad were good together, they looked great together, he was six-one with dark brown hair, she was five feet and blond, they were singy and dancy and funny, and it seemed to me during this storm that love was fun and costumed and gusty and uncertain.

Then, with a very limited amount of money that would have to last us an entire year in New York and with borrowing from Nonnie being an absolute impossibility, my mother joined the Devon Yacht Club shortly after we arrived. The Devon Yacht Club was the ramshackle alternative to the real country club in East Hampton, the Maidstone Club. Devon was on the sound, Maidstone was on the ocean. The Maidstone was a Tudor manse built in 1891. Devon was a cluster of crumbly old gray-and-white clapboard buildings that needed a paint job so badly that from out on the sound it looked like a coconut cake. The main building had dances every Thursday night. (For which Mom bought four . . . what can only be called gas station attendant jumpsuits—colorful oufits with stripes down the side that had little Pennzoil and Sunoco patches on the arms—for all of us to wear if we needed to pull a sophisticated gas station look together. Everyone got a different color. My gas station jumpsuit was white and blue.)

This was a signature move of my mother's, buying four of the same item in four different colors. With four of us being so close in age—my mother had four kids in five years, or two sets of Irish twins with a one-year break—this retail practice seemed reasonable to her. Eleanor was the oldest, then Katharine, then a year off, then Julia and then me.

My dad wasn't a country club kind of guy, but rumor had it that George Plimpton, who lived next door to Devon, had a Fourth of July rivalry with the club's fireworks display every year, which must have sounded fun and New Yorky to the St. Louisan in my dad, and isn't this why we came to New York? I mean, you can write a book in St. Louis. You cannot, on the other hand, have a gin and tonic with George Plimpton at Busch's Grove in Ladue. And he probably figured the club would get everybody out of the house during the day so Mom could type up his finished pages and he could write. My father was the most distracted writer working in America. If my sister Katharine and I put together a game of catch in the backyard with some old ratty mitts we'd found, he'd come out within minutes looking for a piece of the action.

“Give me that ball, Jean-Joe. Do either of you girls know who Dizzy Dean was?” and the game was brought to a standstill with a lively portrait of a Cardinals pitcher in the '30s. I threw the ball as hard as I could. I did not, nor did any of us girls, push the ball off our shoulders like a shot put or “throw like a girl.” My father taught us curveballs from sliders, fastballs and screwballs. Later, during his boxing phase, we would learn jabs from hooks, how to throw a punch, turning your fist ever so slightly at the end of the extension, and basic footwork.

My father caught my wild throw. “Jean-Joe, your tactics are a hundred percent Dizzy Dean. ‘The Diz,' they called him. He and his brother Daffy were part of a team during the Depression called the Gashouse Gang.” He threw the baseball to Katharine. “They were the dirtiest, most low-down bunch of players—just terrific. Now, he first played for the Cards but later for the Browns, God, it must have been 1947—”

I don't ever remember him passing up going to the beach with all of us, even though he probably should have been doing some work. That summer my father cleared the beach twice in one week with shark spottings that turned out to be schools of fish. He ran up and down the beach, waving his arms, a maniac in yellow-and-green Lilly Pulitzer trunks, cupping his hands to his mouth to amplify the danger. “Shark! Out of the water! I mean now, God damn it!” he said as if the entire beach were made up of insolent daughters. It was the summer after
Jaws
came out. He hadn't seen
Jaws
, of course, but everyone else had, and that was the problem. It got to the point where if he came down to the kitchen asking who wanted to go ride the waves at the beach, he was teased and made to promise not to save anyone that day.

Days later you'd hear him on the phone to St. Louis talking about how he couldn't get any work done.

“Jesus, Hereford, you wanna know how the novel's coming? People wanting to play tennis in the middle of the afternoon and throw a ball around every five minutes and there hasn't been one goddamn night that we haven't been to somebody's house for cocktails.”