Lies My Mother Never Told Me (15 page)

“The writer's back!” they shouted. “The writer came back!”

It took everything I had not to burst into tears.

 

Only a matter of weeks after Andrew had moved out of the apartment and resettled in Minneapolis, he sent his mother a FedEx package containing a binder that looked and read exactly like a business proposal. Linda called to tell me about it, utterly surprised. Since I needed to return her ring anyway, I went over to see her.

The binder had a title, which I unfortunately cannot remember, with photographs glued to each page. I barely glanced at the thing, I was so mortified. What Andrew was asking his mother to accept was a fait accompli. He had moved in with a woman ten years older (there was a smiling picture of her) who had two tween-aged children (pictured also) and a ranch house in a suburb of St. Paul. As soon as our divorce was final, he intended to marry this woman and raise her two children.

Andrew had been traveling to Minneapolis on business all through our relationship, but it had never occurred to me, until I saw the binder, that he'd probably set up the whole maneuver way in advance. The Minnesota woman may have been a backup plan all along; I'll never know for sure. Clearly, it had been important to him to gather whatever material spoils he could on his way out, and on that front, I'd been completely outplayed. I'd let him
take anything he wanted out of the hundreds of expensive gifts. He took half the dishes, glasses, and silverware; the furniture; the bed; the two television sets (they were both his, after all). He wanted all the wedding photos and videos. Those, I was ready to throw down the garbage chute anyway.

For a long time after my visit to Linda, I wondered why on earth Andrew wanted any of these things, since he was moving into an already well-appointed household. Did he plan to show the videotape and photos to his new wife and children? Would they use those six Positano dishes and the Christofle wineglasses on special occasions?

When I called Cecile to tell her Andrew had taken everything, including both TVs, she turned to Buddy, who was standing nearby and said, “Can you believe it? He took
both
TVs!” I heard Buddy shout, “Call our TV man right now, Cecile! Get the girl a brand-new TV and VCR!” They were the first new TV and VCR I ever owned.

I decided not to fight Andrew on anything, and vowed never to speak to him again.

 

A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
was published in the spring of 1990, to very good reviews. I was still living in Andrew's apartment, now devoid of furniture, except for my old futon bed, my mother's old love seat, my books on the wall-to-wall bookshelves Andrew had built, and my new TV and VCR. The morning after the book party, sitting alone on the love seat in the otherwise empty living room, surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and empty glasses, I tried to assess what had gone wrong with my life, but I didn't have a clue.

I realized the first thing I had to do was move, find my own place. But I'd never looked for an apartment before; Carol had found the one we shared after college. How did a person go about finding an apartment? I called a friend, whose dad was a builder
with connections, and in a day he found me a little ground-floor one bedroom in Yorkville that cost $750 a month, less than half the rent of Andrew's place.

 

Andrew called me in the spring to say we could get divorced over a weekend in the Dominican Republic, and would I like to fly down there with him for a romantic tryst for old times' sake, on top of a divorce? At first I thought I'd misheard him. No, I'd heard him correctly. I told him to fuck off and hung up. I sent him the weirdest postcard I could find, a picture of a Yemen camel market, and stated unequivocally that he could go to hell, and that I wanted him to stop calling me.

The Minnesota divorce papers weren't finalized until the following November. In them, he included as possessions not to be argued over, his new Nissan Pathfinder, in case I suddenly decided to get greedy.

I kept one photo of us scuba diving in deep blue water, taken on our honeymoon in Mexico. I cut Andrew out and in the gap glued a close match of tropical water from a travel magazine. There I am, at the bottom of the sea, floating toward the camera in full scuba gear, totally wide-eyed, and beside me is the ghostly blue outline of a human from, as if a
Star Trek
character had just been beamed away to some other, distant planet.

This is a story my mother liked to tell the gathered company on my birthday.

 

In late August 1970, on the way back from the States, on the ocean liner
France
, Gloria met an old friend, Kitty Hayden, the actor Sterling Hayden's wife. Kitty was traveling in first class with her two sons, Andrew and David, who were around Jamie's and my age. They were on their way to join Sterling in Paris, who was living on a barge under the Pont Neuf. Gloria wondered aloud how Kitty was going to manage living on a barge, with two sons under the age of twelve.

I promptly developed a crush on Andrew, the older boy, who returned my affections. Coincidentally,
Johnny Guitar
was playing in the ship's movie theater, and Andrew and I sat alone for hours in the first-class balcony, watching his father kiss Joan Crawford, attempting to imitate them. Six hours later, our mothers found us there and had a good laugh at our expense.

Shortly after our return to Paris, Gloria went with a girlfriend to visit the Haydens on their barge under the Pont Neuf. Sterling Hayden, in leather sandals and dirty jeans, sporting a long white beard, brewed some hash tea. My mother and her friend drank it and got so stoned they lost their shoes and walked home barefoot along the quais, singing to the trees.

Jamie and I were invited to the barge to play with the boys the
following Sunday. Gloria sent us over, warning us not to drink the tea. At four o'clock that Sunday afternoon, Gloria received a phone call from the police. “
Votre fille est tombée sur son dos. On l'amène à l'hôpital
.” With her limited French, Gloria understood it as,
Votre fille est tombée dans l'eau
. Your daughter has fallen in the water. And the French word for hospital.

My parents took a taxi to the closest hospital, the Hôtel Dieu, just across the bridge on the Île de la Cité. They learned from the reception desk that indeed a child had fallen in the Seine and drowned. In a moment, a policeman would escort them to identify the corpse in the basement morgue. Gloria's legs gave way, and she fell in a faint on the tile floor. Once she'd recovered, she told Jim she couldn't do it, so he went downstairs alone. The drowned child was a little boy, perhaps eight years old. He was dark haired and his lips were blue. My father went back upstairs.

“It's not her,” he managed to say.

Phone calls were made, and they finally got Kitty Hayden on the phone at the Hôpital Necker, a children's hospital in the fifteenth arrondissement. Kitty explained that I had been running and fell through a plastic skylight on the roof of the barge and landed on my back, seven feet below. It turned out, after the X-rays, that I had fractured a lumbar vertebra. The doctors said I would have to lie flat in bed for four weeks.

It was a wonderful convalescence, even though my back hurt. In that four-week period, Gloria read me
Pride and Prejudice
and
Wuthering Heights
. I was an avid reader of comic books, but I resisted novels as long as I could. I can still hear my mother's expressive, slightly hoarse voice as she brought to life those nineteenth-century ladies and gentlemen, all for my amusement, her captive audience.

 

“If that dead child had been you,” Gloria would say at the end of her story in a matter-of-fact tone, “I would've killed myself.”

O
N
M
AY
1, 1991, I went with my mother to the opening of the Broadway musical
The Will Rogers Follies
. Her friend Peter Stone had written the book, and the lyrics were by two of her closest friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

I picked up Gloria at Cecile and Buddy's apartment, where she stayed, now that she'd given up her job at Doubleday, and consequently, her place in the Delmonico. In the taxi, she informed me that she'd sold my father's Beauford Delaney paintings.

“What?” I almost jumped out of the seat. “How could you do such a thing without telling us?”

“Why do I need to tell you anything? They're mine. I got thirty thousand for them.”

“In ten years they'll be worth more than thirty thousand each. That was a stupid thing to do.” She didn't say anything, but I knew I'd pay for those words.

Apparently a Frenchman who owned a gallery in SoHo came to the house to look at them. They were oil paintings from the sixties and early seventies, several portraits and abstracts in yellow tones. The art dealer offered her a check right then, and she felt the offer was too good to pass up. Over the years, she'd sold off almost everything of value my father had collected, and that was her right. Yet I'd always hoped to keep one or two of these
oil paintings, because when I was a little girl, Beauford Delaney had been a good friend of mine.

On lazy afternoons in Paris, when I was little, I'd hear the doorbell from my room downstairs, and after Judite let the guest in, I'd wander up to the living room to see if someone interesting had arrived. Sometimes Beauford, an African-American painter who was also living in Paris, would be sitting there on the couch, immobile, elegant, in an old, dark suit, his French beret on his knees.

“Beauford!” I'd shout, running to him and giving him a big hug and a kiss. He smelled to me of wet dust and turpentine, a little like the cabinet under the kitchen sink.

My father once told me that Beauford had tried to kill himself by jumping off an ocean liner, and he had been rescued by fishermen. Why? I wanted to know. Why did he do that? Because he was unhappy, my father explained. He added that it wasn't easy in America for black people, because there was so much racism. What is that? I wanted to know. It's when you don't like someone because of what they look like.

Ridiculous! I exclaimed, a new word for me, and my father cracked a small, mysterious smile.

At one time in the early sixties, Beauford had been so poor he didn't have money to buy supplies, and he made a canvas out of an old beige raincoat. My father had bought the painting, which hung for years in our living room. On the back, you could still see one of the pockets. This was the painting I loved the most.

When Beauford came over, I liked to play hostess. “Do you want something to drink, Beauford?”

“I'm just fine, baby girl.”

I knew he'd have a drink with my father in a few minutes. While we waited for him to come down from his office, Beauford asked me how school was going. We talked about this and that, but he was most interested in the art projects I was doing. Once,
I did a portrait of him in watercolor on a large, good piece of art paper from the art supply store and wrote at the bottom: “For Beauford Love Kaylie.” I had to ask my parents how to spell his name, which sounded to me like
Booford.
He smiled delightedly when I presented it to him. I was reciprocating, for he'd given me two beautiful abstract watercolors, one for my third birthday and one for Christmas the following year. I still have those.

Sitting in the cab on the way to the theater, I felt as if my mother had kicked me in the stomach. We arrived in a black cloud of unaired resentments, and I made my way to the bar and ordered a glass of white wine. Still reeling, I drank it down as fast as I could and ordered another, which I intended to drink and another after that, before the curtain went up.

The Will Rogers Follies
might have been divine, but I was in no shape to appreciate it. Airy and light, each number seemed to feature feathers and sparkles aplenty as I continued my downward slide into self-hatred and despair, with no idea what was wrong or how to go about fixing it.

At the after-party I drank as much as I could as fast as I could, and eventually found myself standing at the edge of a dark and empty dance floor with a disco ball spinning around, among a small group of people talking to the actor Timothy Hutton. He was tall, thin, and wore a serene and contemplative air. He listened intently but didn't say a word.

My mother appeared at my side out of nowhere and in a loud voice said to Timothy Hutton, “You want to fuck my daughter? You can have her for free.” She looked up at him with that wild, gleaming defiance in her eyes. I realized then that she was seriously lit, even more than I was. Perhaps she'd meant this as a joke.

“She's joking,” I managed to say. “She doesn't mean it.”

“I'm not joking, she'll fuck you for nothing,” said my mother, staring up at him belligerently. He gazed down at her in penetrating silence, expressionless. Perhaps as a famous person, he was
used to being confronted, assaulted, or adulated by strangers. Suddenly she turned and lurched off with the strange, stiff-backed gait of someone with a distended stomach. What was happening to her? What was happening to me?

“I'm sorry,” I said to Timothy Hutton. “I'm so sorry. She's drunk.”

He looked at me with a small smile and still didn't say a word. I drifted away, feeling physically sick and weak in the knees, as if I'd been assaulted and had my clothes torn off in public.

Everyone was anxiously awaiting the
New York Times
and the all-important theater review. I wanted to leave, go home to the small one-bedroom apartment I'd found the May after Andrew left, which was almost exactly a year ago. How was it, I now considered, that absolutely nothing had changed, progressed, in a year?

I approached the table where my mother was sitting alone to tell her I was leaving. It was a strange, eerie sight, Gloria, maven of entertainment and hilarity, sitting alone at a gloomy little round table covered with a stained white cloth. Had she frightened everyone away? It was entirely possible. I saw now that she was holding the
Times
review.

“They're screwed,” my mother said, and chuckled humorlessly. “Poor Betty.” I picked up the paper. Frank Rich's review was less than kind.

“I'm leaving now, Mom,” I said, my whole body feeling like a tree trunk. Even my voice sounded stiff to my own ear. “You can catch a ride with someone else.”

“Just a minute.” She pushed herself to her feet, grabbed her jacket and purse from a nearby chair. What would happen, I thought vaguely, if I just kept walking and left her to fend for herself? She'd probably never forgive me, never speak to me again. The thought scared me so much I couldn't even seriously contemplate it.

As we moved toward the exit, she passed a tall, bald man in glasses, standing by himself at the edge of the empty dance floor.

“Ha-ha, you dumb son of a bitch,” she said to him in that horrible, teasing voice I remembered so well from my childhood. “You're gonna lose your shirt.” She followed this with her How-Do-You-Like-That? look, her lips pressed tight and twisted in a ghoulish distortion of a smile, her chin jutting forward, as if expecting a punch. And then she lurched off toward the exit. Stupefied, I followed her out.

As we waited for the elevator, swaying in our evening clothes as though it were Gala Night on a fancy ocean liner out in the middle of the Atlantic, she said, “That was the producer. I never liked him, the arrogant bastard.”

The Will Rogers Follies
ran for more than two years, despite Frank Rich's bad review. The producer, whoever he was, didn't end up losing his shirt, and I am glad for him. I hope to God he isn't Italian and doesn't hold grudges the way my mother did.

After I dropped Gloria at Cecile and Buddy's, I came to a horrifying realization: I hated my mother. And if I didn't watch out, I was going to end up exactly like her—alone, drunk, lashing out at the world. But I would be worse because I'd never had her health: I was much more like my father, who while physically strong, had a much weaker constitution.

Okay, I thought. Time to seriously cut back. I'll drink, say, once a month.

I held on to my need to drink, my right to drink, to the bitter end.

 

Sometime in June, perhaps six weeks later, on a Saturday night I was on my fifth or sixth margarita sitting at the crowded bar in a Mexican restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue with Sally—an old friend from the Columbia writing program who drank the way I used to and was therefore safe to drink with—when she told me
that she'd heard Dennis was back in New York and living somewhere nearby. I hadn't seen him in three years and three months, since I'd left him in the New Orleans airport. In a moment of total emotional mushiness, I went to the pay phone in the back and dialed information. His number was listed. I remembered the digits, and dialed—no small feat given the number of margaritas I'd consumed. It was 1:00
A.M
., and I got his answering machine—no surprise. I left a message telling him where I was and hung up. Twenty minutes later, he walked into the bar. I saw him moving purposefully through the crowd toward us, and my heart started beating faster. Sidling in between Sally and me sitting on barstools, he ordered a club soda and lime. Something about him was different, his eyes were bright and clear, and there was a sharpness to his features that had never been there before.

“You're not drinking?” I asked tentatively.

Dennis told me that he hadn't had a drink in close to a year. He looked me right in the eyes and said, “I'm an alcoholic.”

I was absolutely stunned. “You? An
alcoholic
? You really think so?” But then, I thought, I was a lightweight compared with Dennis. When we'd driven down to New Orleans for a short vacation in 1986, he'd had a cooler full of beer behind the driver's seat and drank the whole way down.
I
never drank in the car. Never.

Sally soon went home, and Dennis and I left the bar and walked around for a while so I could sober up. We went back to his apartment and talked for hours, and as gray light began to bring the room into focus, I broke down and wept over my ridiculous marriage and the state of my life. He made me strong coffee and began talking in general terms about alcoholism and its dynamics. He said, and I'll never forget this as long as I live, “Alcoholics are like cockroaches. You find one, you know there's a nest nearby.”

He went to a bookshelf and returned with two books, which
he placed on the coffee table in front of me. One was by Alice Miller,
Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self
; the other by Janet Woititz,
Adult Children of Alcoholics.

“Dennis,” I said, dead serious all at once. “You know my mother pretty well. Do you think she's an alcoholic?”

For a second I thought he was going to laugh, but he didn't. He made a huffing sound and gazed back at me intently. “Your mother is definitely an alcoholic,” he said in a quiet, neutral voice.

I tried to process this. If I agreed with him, then what did that say about my father? What did that say about my family? All of us? About the way we lived our lives? I felt like Rosemary in
Rosemary's Baby
when she puts the anagram together with the Scrabble pieces and realizes she is surrounded by liars.

It was almost too much to absorb, and I pushed the thought away, deciding that Dennis was exaggerating—he'd become one of those recovered lunatics who in their self-righteous zeal saw an alcoholic in every drinker they knew.

Then he kissed me, and the familiarity of his lips, the smell of his skin and hair, made me feel as if I'd finally reached the safety of a cool and shady oasis after a long, arduous journey.

 

Despite my mother's insensitivity about my father's paintings, she did see that I was unraveling and felt compelled to help in whatever way she could. Through a friend of hers, we'd found a psychiatrist, and since I didn't have health insurance, my mother was helping me pay for the sessions.

Dr. Ellen was tall and thin and wore her thick, dark hair down around her face, and her short-skirted suits were pastel and form-fitting. She liked to eat those natural chips made from root vegetables, which she shared during our sessions. For some rea
son that gesture made me feel relaxed and at home. On her desk was the only personal object in an otherwise sterile, beige-toned room: a smiling picture of herself and her husband in scuba diving gear.

I told Dr. Ellen the absolutely stunning news that Dennis thought he was an alcoholic. But even more startling, I'd asked him if he thought my mother was an alcoholic, and he'd said yes.

“What do you think about that?” Dr. Ellen wanted to know.

And here it finally is, I thought vaguely. I couldn't cross this important boundary lightly. If I admitted to Dr. Ellen or to myself or to anyone else that my mother was an alcoholic, that would be a betrayal of everything I'd ever believed or been taught by my parents about life. That would be tantamount to abandoning the Jones fortress forever. I wasn't prepared to do that.

“An
alcoholic
…,” I repeated under my breath, practically speechless with shock. Could this be? It wasn't possible. But, yes…all evidence pointed in that direction. “I don't know,” I said helplessly.

Then Dr. Ellen asked, quite matter-of-factly, “How much do you drink?”

“How much do I drink? Oh, every three weeks or so I might have a couple of glasses of wine.” For the most part, this was true. I had cut back substantially. Now, even though I might drink only every three weeks, I could suffer a complete blackout on two or three glasses of wine. Once I started I had no control over the outcome. But, you couldn't say two or three glasses of wine every three or so weeks was a lot. It's not that much at all. Naturally, I did not share these thoughts with Dr. Ellen.