Lies My Mother Never Told Me (2 page)

An extremely expensive psychiatrist gave Jamie a battery of tests and reported that the only thing wrong was that he wanted to be American, and suggested Jamie be enrolled in an American school. He went to Pershing Hall School in Auteuil for the next eight years and never had a problem again. According to our dad, the only problem was that the “god damn school is going to cost me more than a fucking yacht.”

Recently, my brother told me a story I'd never heard before. Just around the time my parents were adopting Jamie, his biological father, a wealthy playboy who lived in Monte Carlo, wrote a letter to our father, offering to subsidize the boy's education, right
up through college. Our dad wrote him back and thanked him, but turned down the offer. “Jamie,” he wrote, “will have to take his chances with us.”

 

My mother adored dancing, and my fondest memories of her are of us kicking up our heels in our long, cream-colored, sunny Paris living room. My father had purchased a state-of-the-art stereo system, and sometimes in the afternoon, she'd decide to put on music, and it would fill the house, echoing off the walls and making the tall French windows rattle.

While Jamie sat on the couch, observing with a bemused expression, my mother and I and whoever else was over would dance to the Beatles, the Barry Sisters from Israel, Simon & Garfunkel, The Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte. She taught me to walk up and down the stairs with a book on my head, which forced me to find my center of gravity and to move my hips while holding my torso still; the rest was easy—she taught me the twist, the waltz, the fox-trot, the two-step, and the Charleston. She even got her Israeli friend to teach us the hora.

“Come over here and dance, you pain in the ass!” she'd call to Jamie, but he would not budge from the couch.

When the Styrons or the Shaws were visiting, my mother would play The Writer Fucker Club anthem, “Take Him,” by Rodgers and Hart, sung by some famous Broadway star. The wives would put on a little show, linking arms and kicking their legs out like chorus girls.

Everyone would howl with laughter, but I didn't get the joke and found myself cringing on the couch, next to Jamie.

Once, my mother played a classical record, and I recognized the tune from a little song we'd been taught in Chant, our singing class at school. I flew around the room, jumping and pirouetting, singing, “Up in the treetops / A birdie sang to me / It's springtime / It's springtime / And all the birds are singing!”

Jamie threw himself back into the couch and covered his ears, muttering,
“Au secours!”
Help!

“Bravo!” cried my mother. “You're singing to Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.”

She had also made my father go up and down the stairs with a book on his head, and as a result, he'd become an excellent dancer. Watching the two of them moving in fluid rhythm, as one being, was a beautiful thing to behold.

 

For Jamie's first Christmas, our mother bought a large, fresh pine wreath, and piles and piles of candy and chocolate, which we spent hours tying to the wreath with gold and red ribbon. Then we hung the wreath on the outside door of the apartment with a little pair of scissors, an invitation for people to take what they liked. Merry Christmas! But some
voyoux
, young neighborhood thugs, pulled all the candies off, then rang the doorbell and fled, laughing and jeering. We opened the door and found the wreath all broken, branches lying on the floor in a carpet of pine needles, as if it had been attacked by dogs.

“Come back here, you little shits!” our mother yelled as she shook her fist at their fleeing backs. She kicked the door and started to cry. I was stunned into immobility. I had never seen her cry.

The day before Christmas, the doorbell rang, and it was two deliverymen from Au Nain Bleu, the fanciest toy store in Paris. They rolled a huge canvas container into the living room and un
packed a mountain of colorfully wrapped gifts. Jamie stood back and stared at this pile in complete shock.

“Is…is all that from
le père Noël?
” he stammered.

“There is no
père Noël
,” our mother told him, tipping the two deliverymen. “
I
'm the
père Noël
around here!”

 

At Easter we boiled eggs and our mother's friend Addie Herder helped us paint them. She was an extraordinary collagist, and was also now Jamie's godmother. We made Addie paint the faces of everyone we knew on the eggs, complete with cotton hair, so that every time we walked by, it looked like a party was in full swing on the large silver platter. My mother bought big chocolate rabbits with bows, which she placed on the platter among the eggs. Jamie picked the one he wanted, which had a blue bow, and eyed it with the same pained devotion our German shepherd, Sir Dog, had for his steak bones. Knowing this was the rabbit Jamie wanted, I decided it was also the rabbit
I
wanted, and an enormous fight erupted. Of course, my mother took Jamie's side and I had to pick another rabbit with a different-colored bow.

I was convinced that planet Earth had never seen a more stubborn boy than Jamie. When I insisted, quite reasonably I thought, that Jamie's G.I. Joe should reciprocate my Barbie's affection and they should get married (of course Barbie really wanted G.I. Joe's Jeep—boy, what a great Jeep that was!), Jamie would get that glassy look in his eyes and refuse. “No,” was all he would say. There was no point in taking this up with our mother, because she would only say, “Oh, for God's sake, stop acting like Lucy from
Peanuts
, you mean little girl, and leave him alone!”

With him, I could scream, yell, threaten, stomp my feet; nothing worked.

It still doesn't.

 

As a child, I suffered from insomnia, especially on Sunday nights when Judite was off. Jamie could fall asleep anywhere, and now that he no longer suffered from nightmares, he slept like a stone, undisturbed by noise or commotion. I hated that he could do this.

Sundays started around eleven, when our parents awakened. We'd have a family outing, lunch at the Lido Club, or the Brasserie Lipp, or our dad's favorite Vietnamese restaurant, then we'd go see an American movie with French subtitles. By 5:00
P.M.
we'd be back home so that our mom could prepare the one dish she knew how to make—spaghetti Bolognese—for the fifty or so people who'd be stopping by in a couple of hours. My mom would have several scotch-and-sodas on the rocks, getting ready for the evening.

A seed of anxiety would sprout in my stomach while we were in the kitchen chopping garlic and onions for the sauce. By eight, which was our bedtime, this feeling would have bloomed into a huge, many-tendrilled, man-eating plant.

I clung to my mother as she put me to bed, and I loved the tingling, sweet and cool smell of scotch on her breath and the smoke of Marlboros on her clothes as she held me against her large, soft breasts.

“Okay, enough.” She'd push me off. “Go to sleep.”

At first, I cried and beat my fists against the mattress and shouted for Judite. “I want my Didi!”

My mother said, “Your Didi gets paid to watch you. She needs a day off, like anybody else. Now go to sleep.”

This is how I learned to stay quiet, and wait in bed, staring at the dark corners of the ceiling for a long time, listening to the laughter and shouting and music coming from the living room, up a flight of shallow stairs. Right next door, Jamie was snoring away, sound asleep.

Then, after an appropriate amount of time, I would climb the stairs, dragging my leopard print blanket behind me, and my parents would let me stretch out on the couch and observe the raucous goings-on. One night, a tall and elegant lady whom I didn't know—clearly a newcomer—approached my father and said, “You shouldn't let your little girl see and hear all this. You should send her back to bed.” Everyone tensed.

“If you don't like it, you can goddamn well get the hell out of my house,” he said, and stormed off to another corner of the room.

When I finally fell asleep, my father would carry me back down to my bed. Sometimes their high-stakes poker game went on so late, they'd still be playing the next morning when Jamie and I left for school, the living room filled with a gray fog of smoke, ashtrays overflowing on every surface.

 

My father swore like the common foot soldier he'd been and didn't care who heard him. By the age of six, Jamie and I knew every gruesome and colorful swearword in the American lexicon.

About Mme. Cohen, the headmistress at my French school, our dad would say, “That mean old cunt couldn't tell her own ass from her elbow.”

Or upon returning from a fancy party, “There were more famous people in that room than I could shake my dick at.” (I promptly repeated this to my best friend, Lee Esterling, the next morning at the École Bilingue.)

I also told Lee's mom about my dad's nose: “My daddy says he has a nose like a douche bag.” I had no idea what a douche bag was, but I was proud of my enriched vocabulary, and I couldn't understand why the comment received such a cold response from Mrs. Esterling.

Only one word was whispered in our house, as if it were
the worst insult in the entire world you could call somebody—
alcoholic
.

My father, in a low, measured tone, admitted to me once, when I was perhaps six or seven, that my grandfather Ray Jones had been an
alcoholic.

Alcoholic
was a word my parents reserved for the most appalling and shameful cases—drunks who made public scenes or tried to kill themselves or ended up in the street or in an institution. If you could hold your liquor, you were not an alcoholic. If you could get up in the morning and go to work, you were definitely not an alcoholic. No matter how much my dad drank the night before or what time he'd gone to bed, he got up at six every morning, made himself a pot of coffee, and climbed the two flights of stairs to his office. Every day but Sunday, he wrote for six to eight hours straight.

Most people were astounded by the amount of alcohol my father was able to consume and yet still retain his composure. He appeared to judge people he just met by their capacity to imbibe. The more they were able to drink without falling over or making a fool of themselves, the better he liked them. One Sunday night someone brought Jerzy Kosinksi, the author of
The Painted Bird
. My father distrusted him and his wife, Katherina Von Fraunhofer (known as Kiki), practically on sight. He told us later he thought they were “phonies”—and interestingly neither one of them drank; Jerzy never touched a drop of alcohol. Jerzy and Kiki became regulars for a while at my parents' Sunday-night parties, and my father tolerated their presence but never considered them friends. Years later, when Jerzy was accused of inventing his own biography, of plagiarizing his work, and of not having spent World War II as a Jewish orphan wandering alone around Poland, I realized that my father's built-in bullshit detector had been functioning perfectly, despite his inebriated state.

 

One afternoon, perhaps a Saturday, I found my father sitting alone at the head of the long dining room table, looking worried. I asked him what was wrong. I must have been in second or third grade.

“We're going broke,” he muttered. “We can't go on living like this. We're going to end up in the fucking street.”

I put my hand on his large, tight shoulder and patted him there. “It'll be okay when you finish your next book,” I gently offered.

“I can't write 'em fast enough,” he replied. “It's these goddamn French taxes.”

I thought for a moment and then said, “Why don't you go work for IBM, like my friend Lee Esterling's dad? Mr. Esterling gets a paycheck every two weeks. That way you could get paid every two weeks and you wouldn't have to write so much.”

My dad threw his head back and guffawed. He leaned back so far that the Louis Treize chair he was sitting on groaned and threatened to crack in two. “Ah, shit,” he said, wiping his eyes, “that's the funniest thing I ever heard in my life.” For the next month or so, he told everyone this story, and they all thought it was hilarious.

I couldn't understand what was so funny. I was only trying to give him sound advice.

 

My greatest childhood terror, besides insomnia, was the last hour of school each day, when my anxiety built to the point that I felt I might pee in my pants. When the final bell rang and we thundered down the stairway like a herd of antelope, I searched the faces of the parents and nannies crowding the echoing, vaulted outdoor hall that in the old days held the horse-drawn carriages, hoping to see my mother or Judite. If I did not find one of them immediately, that meant my mother had told Judite she would pick me up today but had then forgotten to come and get me.

Now I had to wait, and wait, and wait some more as the last private taxis took my classmates home, and the janitors in their blue jumpsuits came out with their pails and mops, and the headmistress, Mme. Cohen, and the assistant headmistress, Mme. de la Marselle, clacked down the stairs in their sharp suits and heels, briefcases in hand.

“Mais qu'est-ce que tu fais là, toi?”
What are you still doing here, you?

By then I had to pee so badly I had to ask them for permission to go to the toilet, even though we were not allowed back upstairs. Mme. de la Marselle, huffing and sighing, took me up and went back to her office to call my house, but of course no one was home, because Judite was out running errands. Even though I was crying hysterically by now, it never occurred to me, not once, to call my father on his private line in his office upstairs. In my estimation, this was not an emergency big enough to disturb his work.