Fiction Ruined My Family (3 page)

 

 

 

At Devon we met Elise. She became Julia's and my best friend. She was a summer person, not a townie like us. She went to Dalton with Robert Redford's children. The closest thing we had come to a celebrity was seeing Stan Musial, Stan the Man, St. Louis Cards baseball great from the '40s and '50s, in the parking lot of my grandmother's church after mass. Stan Musial / Robert Redford. Not much of a match. Elise's father was a lawyer. They had a pool. To Julia and me, Elise was our George Plimpton, our idea of New York; she knew everybody. We weren't going to meet anyone like her in St. Louis: she was urbane.

Eleanor and Kate were in Junior Yacht, Julia and I were in Sandpipers, the younger kids at Devon. One day the Sandpipers all headed out on sailboats by ourselves. Elise and I and one other girl, Tracy, kept capsizing and were terrified. The motorboat that was meant to monitor new sailors,
The Terror
, was nowhere to be seen. Elise and I decided to swim back to shore, even though this meant breaking the cardinal rule of sailing, Never abandon your vessel. Elise and I were kicked out of Devon for abandoning our sailboat. I couldn't go sailing anymore and I couldn't go on the camping trip and I was banned from the Thursday dances for the remainder of the summer. I ended up playing a lot of tennis by myself, hitting balls against the old backboard on Stony Hill Farm, and strangely developed an incredible serve.

Since Elise had nothing to do either since getting kicked out, Julia and I spent days and days at Elise's house, eating all their cold cuts and their fancy ice cream, never once calling our mom and never receiving a single call checking up on us. Mrs. Fleming would explode when we made messes and left wet swimsuits everywhere (we never had suits with us and were always borrowing them). “I will not have it! I will not have it in my house!” she'd yell, storming through rooms, Georgette Klinger cold cream on her face, in her white, feathered slippers, to find the three of us. Inevitably she couldn't take it anymore and would call our mother to say it was really time for us to go home.

At Elise's house we played a game called The Weinhausers, in which a poor townie family named the Weinhausers imposed themselves on this wealthy family. The Weinhausers stayed with you and ate all your food and watched your TV and would never leave. They complained a lot about the conditions, too, in their irritating, loud voices. “Your house is too cold!” “You're out of mayonnaise again!” Until finally the rich family would get fed up and attack the Weinhausers, evicting them from their home.

“Get outta my house, you lousy Weinhausers!” and Julia would throw me and Elise out the kitchen back door. We'd rap on the windows to come back in.

“Scram! All of you!” Julia would scream at the window, and we'd run off in case she'd called the police on us. Then we'd switch roles.

When we got bored with The Weinhausers we began talking about going to bars. Not necessarily because we wanted to drink or meet men, just because it seemed like the next logical thing to do. And not just any bar, we wanted desperately to go to Stephen Talkhouse. Stephen Talkhouse was a local bar; sometimes there was music but mostly just regulars having drinks and finding someone on the Island to have sex with who they hadn't already screwed fourteen times. Elise's older sister Sasha said we were too young to go to Stephen Talkhouse but she would take us next year, when we were nine and ten.

 

 

 

 

DAD'S NOVEL DIDN'T SELL. It was rejected by two publishers, and that was that. Dad later said, “I didn't even think of rewriting it. Rewriting was not playing the game like a gentleman.”

In January, Nonnie died. My father gathered us on the long couch in the barn's high-ceilinged living room.

“Nonnie died. In Florida. Neallie is with her,” my father said.

“Neallie died, too?” Eleanor asked.

“No, I mean Neallie is with Nonnie right now so she's not alone.”

“But Nonnie's dead, so that means Neallie is alone.” Katharine, future copy editor, said.

“Neallie is fine. And Mama's going to be fine, she's just very sad. We'll let her be alone for a while so she can call Aunt Ruth and Aunt Carol.”

Mom cried for at least a whole day and a half, which was really terrifying for us girls. A couple days later we all went to St. Louis for the funeral at Annunziata. Mom was a disaster. At Nonnie's funeral Mom tried to get in the casket with Nonnie. We stayed at Nonnie's house for a week and then we all went back to Stony Hill Farm except my mother, who stayed behind to settle Nonnie's estate.

Nonnie's will apparently had a little twist: My mother would get Nonnie's house only if she moved all of us back to St. Louis and lived in it. She would not be allowed to sell it.

My grandmother loved puzzles, really any kind accompanied by a big bowl of salty potato chips would do, especially brainteasers and card games. She liked any kind of action. When my sisters and I would get out the Monopoly board, my grandmother would get her German on and get out her long ironing board and iron the money before the game could officially begin. My mother inherited her mother's love of puzzles in the form of crosswords, and Nonnie's turned out to be the Sunday
New York Times
of wills. Mom was furious that some of her inheritance was contingent upon moving back to St. Louis, but it probably also felt like rejoining the workforce. As a retired child equestrian she hadn't competed in years, but she honed her brain-twisting skills daily, at the kitchen table, with a pencil and an iced coffee.

Over the next six months Mom was going back and forth to St. Louis, eventually managing to get around a very tight legal document to sell Nonnie's house and get the rest of her inheritance as well. We were back in shoes and hollandaise sauce, but how this all went down we didn't know. Mom was an awfully swell-looking lady: doors didn't so much open for her as they did fall off the hinges. She returned to Long Island in Nonnie's fur coat, Nonnie's big blue Oldsmobile Regency. She was happy to have been able to crack at least the house clause of the Germanic will but she was also profoundly changed. Maybe it was guilt that she left her mother and then she died while we were away or a feeling that we had left her mother for a book that didn't even sell. But something besides my grandmother's life had ended for my mom, some playfulness, a lightness.

Mom and Dad were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with bohemian rural life; in those days no one lived out in the Hamptons during the winter if their ancestors weren't born there. No one from St. Louis came to visit Long Island in February, Elise's family stopped coming after Thanksgiving, everyone stopped coming out to Long Island after Thanksgiving.

The barn was drafty, the nearest hospital was Southampton, which was a half-hour's drive on Route 27, and I almost died of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The way Mom told the story was that I was delirious and dying on the couch while Dad was reading the
New York Times.
He came across an article about Rocky Mountain spotted fever and my symptoms matched up, so Mom found a clinic nearby that she could take me to and ran me down there and the doctor said I had the highest fever they'd ever recorded and reassured my mother that if she had waited another two hours to bring me in I would have died. From this near-death experience I gleaned that reading the
New York Times
will save your life. Doctors, well, who knows how effective they are, but newspapers, newspapers can save your goddamn life. “Thank God your father was reading the
Times
this morning. You might have died.”

My parents may have finally realized it was time to get out of the East End, though, when, the second year there, I was moved up to fourth grade halfway through third grade due to apparent intelligence. If the schools were so bad as to be skipping me ahead grades, we needed to get out of town and quick.

 

 

 

One year in New York turned into the Thomas Wolfe quote. We had now been in New York for two years with no plans to go home again to St. Louis anytime soon.

We did not crawl back to St. Louis penniless, on our hands and knees, as Nonnie had predicted. We did not see Nonnie “very soon,” as she had said that day at the car. We did not return to St. Louis and live in her house when she died, as was her will. Mom was thinking about a job for Dad. We were moving to Westchester.

B
RONXVILLE, NEW YORK, is a squalid little square mile in lower Westchester, twenty-eight minutes to midtown on the Metro-North, with a seedy downtown of Tudor flower shops and stores where pink corduroys for fathers can be purchased. Up near our house was a wasteland of country clubs and manses where lowlifes like the Kennedys once lived. As my dad put it, “People had some dough.” But we were in our own little financial microclimate in the bullish Bronxville. We survived on the interest of the writer-proof trust fund that Nonnie had set up. (A mis-trust fund?) The interest we got every four months wasn't enough for a family of six people without eating disorders to live on. But this didn't seem to faze Mom and Dad. They bought a five-bedroom house, a shell our mother called it, in one of the most expensive towns in Westchester. Nothing was in tip-top condition—if rats bother you it might not suit your tastes—but everybody had her own room and it was in a new town where Dad hadn't told anyone to fuck off yet. Bronxville was chosen for its good public school, and my parents figured they could ignore the anti-Carter bumper stickers in exchange for this. The plan was that Dad was going to get a job, a real job, and he did.

His brief stint in the world of the Manhattan-bound 8:02 was as a speechwriter for William Paley, founder and chairman of CBS, for six months. My dad had an office at the CBS Black Rock building and worked regular hours. He got a little yellow Puch moped that he rode to the train station in his Brooks Brothers suits in the morning and left at the station to ride home at night, until one day some kids stole it and set it on fire.

When he was working for Paley he was boxing a night or two a week at Gleason's Gym near Madison Square Garden. He took lessons from this old trainer named Sammy Morgan who had trained a lot of good boxers, like welterweight Stanley “Baby” Sims in the '40s, and a Capuchin priest, and Miles Davis, who apparently was also a good boxer. My dad would bring Sammy back to Bronxville, surprising my mom with this old trainer with his gigantic beat-up boxer's nose and his smelly dogs. After dinner Dad would interview Sammy for a piece on boxing he was going to send to
The New Yorker.
My mother was happy during the yellow-moped year. Or the yellow-moped six months. It was the first time since my dad was a reporter at the
St. Louis Review
that he was out of the house.

We got a new dog, a Kerry blue terrier we named Guinness. This dog was supposed to be our new civilized dog, unlike Jubjub, our last dog in Amagansett and all the other criminally insane dogs we had owned who “had to go.” Dogs would disappear one day and you'd ask, “Where's Jubjub?” and my mom would just say, “Oh, he had to go,” as if he had a dentist appointment in midtown.

But Guinness was unrepentantly vicious. He scratched, bit, jumped on people, leaving trails of raised white flesh down your thighs. He murdered our bird, Oiseau. Neighborhood kids left our house looking like they'd been jumped—crying, with rips in their clothing, scratches on their legs and arms. When we had Mrs. Spaeth over to our new house for the first time, we were sitting in the living room having cocktails, trying to look presentable to the elderly art patron, when Guinness came into the room, his teeth gripping a used maxi pad he had dug out of the bathroom garbage. He sat on the white carpet next to Mrs. Spaeth gnawing on his bloody chew toy, until my dad managed to get it out of his mouth and hand it to my mother as Eloise talked about the Calder exhibit at the 1952 Venice Biennale.

In Bronxille we became devout twice-a-year Catholics, Christmas and Easter. My mother and father were tanked at every midnight mass and we were always late and my mother toddled into St. Joseph's Church in town in Nonnie's mink coat and demanded to sit in the front pew as if we were at a Broadway show. I don't think I once connected with a sermon. Who were those creepy bachelors who collected the baskets during mass? Did they have to look so sad while they took your money? I did love the “Peace be with you” part of mass, reaching out and shaking hands with people you didn't know, touching strangers and wishing them well. Shaking hands with that trembly old lady with the furry chin like a kiwi whose hands felt like little earthquakes. That was nice. Mom and Dad were too disorganized for more regular worship. There was never any talk of God or faith—odd, considering they had both gone to Catholic schools through college. As she smoked and read the paper in bed, Mom bragged about being certified to teach catechism, but when I came home one day and said, “I don't think I believe God is real,” she just said, “All right, sweet pea. Let's see what Half Pint is up to, shall we?” and we snuck a
Little House on the Prairie
rerun before Dad came home. It seemed as if everything they once valued, everything important, we had given up. St. Louis, our hometown, gone. The Catholic Church, an awful lot of effort. Family, no extended family around at all. On Long Island we had been untethered, but we'd had a deadline, for the book, of one year, and then we were going back to all the things we had known. Now there was no going back to who we had been. We were all trying out new ideas of who or what we were going to be in Westchester.

I was the baby.