Lies My Mother Never Told Me (11 page)

On Friday night, Frank and I went to check out The Lobby (“The Foyer” in
Some Came Running
), the long, loudly echoing bar and pool hall whose glass-fronted windows overlooked the square. After a while, Frank went back to the hotel and I stayed and drank and drank and drank. People came up all during the evening to shake hands, or to give me a piece of their mind. Some—the children and grandchildren of the characters my father had portrayed unfavorably in
Some Came Running
—wanted to pick a fight. I just gave them back their same flat, blank, midwestern stare—which I had seen my father use on more than a few occasions.

Twenty-five years later and the denizens of Robinson were still upset; my father sure must have hit a serious nerve, I thought.

The next morning, Frank MacShane and I drove the half hour to Marshall, to visit Lowney Handy's brothers, Earl and Andy Turner, and the house on the Colony grounds that my father had designed, and lived in, for most of the fifties.

Earl and Andy were strangely formal but generous with their time and their words about James Jones. They had a disconcerting parrot in a cage that kept screaming, “EARL! EARL!” as if the cage were on fire. They were, in fact, much kinder to us than I had any reason to expect. They still had the original manuscript of
From Here to Eternity
, but this didn't seem like the right moment to bring it up.

They seemed, like Tinks Howe, to understand very well why Jim had left. Lowney, they said, could be a very overbearing woman. The only thing they regretted was that Jim had not kept in touch.

My father's house in Marshall, which he built using his
From Here to Eternity
money, stood at the edge of the Colony grounds; the old wood cabins, now in ruins, still dotted the wooded landscape. Across the backyard, in the distance, was a brick fireplace—the only vestige of Lowney and Harry Handy's house, which had burned to the ground sometime in the sixties.

I noticed right away that my father's house had a similar feel to our home in Paris. He'd designed an enormous bathroom for himself, with a bare-chested mermaid on the shower glass, complete with a bidet, which, according to the present owner, was the first one in Crawford County. My father had also built a secret room behind a bookshelf. He'd always loved secret rooms and alcoves and large, extravagant bathrooms. It was strange to feel my father's presence so strongly in a house he'd walked away from with my mother in the summer of 1957, and never returned.

 

Frank MacShane's biography,
Into Eternity
, turned out to be a mediocre book. MacShane's research is for the most part competent, though he made some blatant mistakes. He found, and
researched, the wrong Jones family in the Robinson courthouse archives, and therefore, all the Jones ancestry is incorrect. Ultimately, he seemed at a loss in understanding what made a man like James Jones tick. He divides my father's life into before and after his move to Paris, as if, somehow, by marrying Gloria, “a born party girl,” and moving to Europe, my father had abandoned his old self and his midwestern ways and tried to climb above his station and become someone entirely different, someone erudite and suave. This view is nothing new—almost the entire Ivy League literary establishment took the same stance after the success of
From Here to Eternity
.

My father was absolutely and totally midwestern, and proud of it, and never for a second did he try to be anything else. What he had despised about the Midwest and wrote about in
Some Came Running
he had hated all along—the Puritanical hypocrisy, the greed and concern with upward mobility, and the social pretensions.

In Europe, my parents were free of all that, in a way that they were not in New York. He absolutely spent too much money living the high life. If Gloria wanted to spend the summer in Deauville or Biarritz, they did it. He was addicted to alcohol, yes. He worried constantly about money and what his next book would be. But he was deeply humble in the best ways a man can be humble—he felt he'd been lucky, and had been given a talent, and he worked harder and more constantly and consistently than anyone I've ever known, and he never took his good fortune for granted. He labored over his work, slowly, methodically; he wrote all of
The Thin Red Line
and
The Pistol
in France, as well as a good part of
Whistle
.

 

When I was in eighth grade at the École Active Bilingue in Paris, those of us who already spoke two languages were given the opportunity to study a third—Spanish, German, or Russian. I
picked Russian because it was the weirdest and most alien, and had an incomprehensible alphabet that I thought would be fun to use for secret messages.

On the first day, a very old lady in a ratty sable coat and a tall, square fur hat walked in and introduced herself as Marina Zhuk-hovskaya. She told us her family had fled her beloved country when she was in her late teens, after those dirty Bolsheviks took over and destroyed everything. She spoke French with a heavy Russian accent and became teary-eyed as she described the snowy streets of Saint Petersburg and the winter droshky rides she'd enjoyed with her brother Petya, a real horseman, who'd been a lieutenant, killed fighting for the White Army during the Civil War. She recited Russian poems by heart in a fluid, deep voice and taught us how to speak and read from a funny children's book with colorful drawings. The first word I ever learned in Russian was
arbooz
—watermelon.

She took us out to a Russian Orthodox church service and then to lunch at a Russian restaurant on the right bank of the Seine. She ordered shots of vodka, and all six or seven of us twelve- and thirteen-year-olds had our first drink. We sipped carefully, as she instructed, toasting Russia and all things Russian—except those dirty Bolsheviks who had destroyed her glorious land.

When we moved back to the States in 1974, the high schools I attended didn't have Russian language courses, but Russian was the first class I signed up for at Wesleyan. I went to these classes religiously, even though they were at 9:00
A.M.
, and I was often more than slightly hungover. I studied Russian language and literature for more than ten years—in school, then college, then graduate school, and as a postgraduate at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, and in Moscow for seven months, on two different occasions, at the Pushkin Institute.

During my summer of study in 1984, the American students at the Pushkin Institute threw a Fourth of July party for our in
structors and monitors. Our own KGB Man, assigned to watch us and keep us out of trouble, brought a sleek, black air pistol to the party and set up some empty soda cans on a post about fifty yards off. He invited the American boys to try to shoot the cans, and they all dutifully lined up. None of them managed to make even one hit. I approached and asked if I could try. Our KGB Man was a self-proclaimed “old-fashioned Russian,” which meant women should know their place and stay in it. He snickered politely as he handed me the pistol. He tried to show me how to hold it, and I just as politely declined his help. I aimed calmly, breathed deeply, as my father had taught me a long time ago, and fired. In three shots, I knocked over two of the cans.

“Daughter of a soldier,” he said in Russian, with a smile. I nodded. He said he was the son of a soldier, and his father had fought in the Great Fatherland War.

“Mine as well,” I responded.

“But our war was much worse than your war,” he said. All Russians said this, and it was undoubtedly true. They lost 15,000,000 people (a low estimate), many of them civilians, while we Americans lost 405,000, almost all soldiers.

I stood there, remembering how my father could never sleep for more than a few hours at a clip and kept a loaded pistol in the bedside cabinet. He had nightmares and shouted in his sleep. You couldn't sneak up on him, because he always jolted awake. Once I managed to tiptoe right up to the bed—it took me close to half an hour. But then his body suddenly tensed, he gasped, and he stared up at me with a look of fright and rage that I didn't like at all. “Don't ever do that again,” he said. “It's dangerous. I might hurt you.”

I never did it again.

“True,” I now said to our KGB Man. “But all veterans suffer equally when they go home.” He nodded solemnly and patted my arm. We never found out if he
really
was KGB.

Later, I had a boyfriend from Texas who yelled out in the
midst of one of our arguments, “I can't fight with you, you fight like a man! You know, that's your problem, your father raised you like a son instead of a daughter.” It struck me as peculiar that anyone would differentiate.

“My father,” I responded proudly, “raised me as a soldier's kid. He just taught me to fight back.”

In 1967, when my brother and I were six years old, my family spent the Easter holiday in a villa outside Florence, Italy. My father bought cap pistols for Jamie, his friend Jamie Bruce, and me. They were shiny black revolvers that you loaded like a real gun, and they sounded and smelled like firecrackers when fired. Seeing how much fun we were having, my father bought himself a pistol too and pronounced himself Sergeant Jones, leader of our platoon. He organized war games against the local Italian kids, taught us to salute American-style, positioning our hands at exactly the right angle so we wouldn't look like European soldiers; to fire searching fire and covering fire; and to belly crawl through tall grass. The feeling of excitement while we waited for the Italian kids' attack, the smell of the dust and dry weeds, has stayed with me to this day.

Perhaps my father's behavior seems strange, considering that he was an extreme pacifist, a man who abhorred killing and who sheltered draft evaders during the Vietnam War. “The War”—his war—loomed darkly over our lives, always present. In 1973, he took us to Normandy, Omaha Beach and Utah Beach. It was winter, the week between Christmas and New Year, and we walked through the perfectly tended American cemetery with its crosses and Stars of David in even rows, stretching to the horizon. He wept over the graves of unknown soldiers, unashamed of his tears.

 

One afternoon in the winter of 1985, my mother called and said, “Come over right now. There's someone here you have to meet.”
She was, at the time, still living in the Delmonico during the week, working as an acquisitions editor at Doubleday.

She opened the door with a slightly frightened look in her eyes. Though I never understood her, I had learned to recognize her expressions. I walked in and found a scruffy man in a wheelchair looking up at me with a warm smile. It was Ron Kovic, author of
Born on the Fourth of July.
He had joined the U.S. Marine Corps and been deployed to Vietnam in 1965. During his second tour of duty, he had been shot in the spine and was now paralyzed from the chest down. As a college student, I had seen the movie
Coming Home
three times, and it is still one of the best antiwar films I've ever seen. The character played by Jon Voight is based on Ron Kovic, and Ron had in fact chained himself to several government fences in his protests against the war. He'd been beaten with billy clubs by riot police, teargassed, and thrown bodily out of his wheelchair, but he never quit, never backed down.

He'd shown up at my mother's door at the Delmonico, just wanting to meet the widow of James Jones and say hello. Though my mother was discomfited by his visit, she was also honored. I had never met anyone in a wheelchair and felt uncomfortable looking down at him. I promptly sat on the couch so we would be eye to eye.

His thoughtful, dark eyes told me he had seen a great deal and understood suffering on the most fundamental level, but they were also filled with a calm wisdom, as though nothing would shock him. And I could sense some fearless beast of rage below their surface, mastered now and under control, but always there. I found him hugely brave.

He took my hand and held it a long time, and told me what a great writer he thought my father was, and that he and many other Vietnam veterans consider James Jones's war trilogy to be the master work that any human being had to read if he or she wanted to learn the truth about war and warfare.

At some point, my mother jumped up, having decided to take us to Elaine's for dinner, always a good, fun place to go where she was bound to know half the customers. Elaine's was on Second Avenue and Eighty-ninth Street, a matter of ten minutes by taxi. Outside, on Park Avenue, it was very cold and damp, and cabs wouldn't stop for us. They probably thought Ron's wheelchair would be too much trouble. I felt like beating them up, the bastards.

“No problem,” said Ron, “we'll walk.” He navigated the streets and curbs and surly passersby and speeding traffic with good humor and a fierce resolve. At one point, he popped a wheelie, throwing himself back in his chair. My mother screamed, made a small and rapid sign of the cross, and murmured, eyes toward heaven, “Hail Mary, full of grace…” This made Ron laugh.

I had never realized how narrow the space was between the front tables and the bar at Elaine's. A lot of chairs and tables had to be moved around to accommodate Ron's wheelchair, and there was quite a bit of fussing from the maître d' before we were settled in. People kept bumping into the wheelchair. I felt so overwrought I proceeded to get totally blasted, and the rest of the night is a blur.

Two weeks later, my friend Dennis from the Columbia MFA program threw a huge party, and I invited Ron. Dennis lived on the ground floor of a building, and you had to go down about ten steps to get to the lobby. Three young men carried Ron's wheelchair down the stairs. Ron and I danced a lot, Ron popping wheelies and spinning around, and me spinning around him. Then he was tired and wanted to go home.

Someone called a cab company and told the operator we had a Vietnam veteran in a wheelchair and wanted a cab for him as soon as possible. Less than five minutes later a speeding yellow taxi pulled up with a dramatic screech of brakes. The driver,
an African-American in his early forties, jumped out and came around to our waiting group.