Lies My Mother Never Told Me (28 page)

Wearing my Black Belt, first time, December 2006—I passed my Tae-kwondo Black Belt test. The next day, with Mr. Luis Sevilla, holding my Black Belt certificate.
photograph by Lisa Harsh.

Willie blushed but said not a word. JoAnne, an elegant southern lady to the core, looked down at her plate and busied herself with her food. She held her countenance, and I was glad my mother had not been able to rile her. And if my mother had been expecting a laugh, she certainly didn't get one. Not from them, and not from Kevin or me.

It was no surprise, then, that the Joneses were not included on JoAnne's Christmas card list, or kept up-to-date on Pritchard-Morris family events. I'd hear from friends over the next several years that Willie was doing much better now that he was with JoAnne.

 

Willie's funeral service at the First United Methodist Church of Yazoo City was packed with mourners. JoAnne asked us to sit with the family, and I was deeply touched by this kindness. To keep twenty-one-month-old Eyrna quiet during the service, we gave her a bag of pistachio nuts in their shells. She busily set to breaking open the shells and munching loudly on the nuts. Willie's coffin, covered with flowers, lay not five feet away, and although some people glanced at us with mystified, perhaps even indignant expressions, I felt sure that Willie would have been delighted to have his old friend's granddaughter present, even if she was eating pistachios, for this scene was exactly the kind that amused him greatly.

Among those who spoke were Willie's fifth-grade English teacher, Josephine Ayres Haxton, and his close friends Bill Styron and David Halberstam, who talked of his brilliance, his extraordinary skills as an editor, his legacy as a writer, his kindness, his
generosity of spirit, and his jokester's sense of humor.

This reminded me of our first months in Bridgehampton, when Willie would disguise his voice and pretend to be the highway commissioner coming to tear down a wall, or the dogcatcher about to put our dog to sleep for biting a neighbor. My mother got taken by him every time, and I remembered her on the phone, begging a certain Mr. Steppenkowski the Dogcatcher not to kill her dog. By that fall, when we moved into our new house just down the street, these pranks of Willie's had become so commonplace that my father told the Soviet cultural attaché, who called to invite him to Moscow, to fuck off. The cultural attaché gasped, coughed, stammered, and the line went dead. The attaché tried again five minutes later, and they both pretended the earlier conversation had never taken place.

Several speakers described Willie's involvement in the civil rights movement during the sixties, when he put himself on the line to uphold his most profound desire for equality for southern African-Americans. It was Willie who'd brought to Hollywood the idea of a film based on the murder of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers, which became the critically acclaimed
Ghosts of Mississippi
. Willie had also been a mentor to struggling writers and had been instrumental in encouraging Donna Tartt and John Grisham with their first novels, when they'd been his students at Ole Miss.

In closing, the First United Methodist Choir sang “Abide with Me,” Willie's favorite hymn, a beautiful rendition that brought everyone to tears. In the ensuing silence peppered with sniffles, Eyrna yelled out, “More, please!” And people giggled into their handkerchiefs despite themselves.

A Delta blues trio played at the grave site in the steaming Yazoo cemetery, which Willie loved and wrote so passionately about in
North Toward Home, My Dog Skip
, and his last, posthumously published novel,
Taps
. The gravediggers, convicts in
striped pants, stood off in the distance, leaning on their shovels, smoking. Our friend Winston Groom said a few kind parting words. Winston, who'd grown up in Mobile, Alabama, had been a Washington reporter when he decided to write a novel about his Vietnam experiences. He moved out to Bridgehampton and wrote
Better Times Than These
, with Irwin Shaw, Willie Morris, and my father as his mentors and champions. Later, he wrote the novel
Forrest Gump
, which was made into the very successful film.

Finally, a group of schoolboys played taps on their bugles. Willie had once been among their number, playing the taps echo at the funerals of soldiers fallen in the Korean War. (This is what his novel
Taps
is about.) While Eyrna, in her bright yellow sundress, romped and skipped among the gravestones chasing butterflies, I thought of Willie trying to track down a regular army bugler to come play taps for my father's service at the Bridgehampton Community House. Buglers, he was told, were no longer enlisted men. A Senior/Sergeant Mastrolio, who'd played taps at the funerals of two presidents, volunteered to play for my dad.

We gathered later that evening at JoAnne and Willie's house, which they'd just recently remodeled to suit both their working needs. There was nothing familiar about the house, nor the crowd, and Kevin and I knew no one, except for JoAnne, David, Bill Styron, and Winston Groom. I wandered over to Bill, who was standing with a glass of white wine in the backyard. The air was hot and close, like a bathroom when you've left the shower running too long. I waited until he was alone and then launched into some questions about the Holocaust research I was doing for a new novel. He talked about the flak he'd taken for writing
Sophie's Choice,
a novel about Auschwitz, when he was not Jewish, and having a character, Sophie, a prisoner at Auschwitz, who also was not Jewish. He told me to disregard everyone and just write what I wanted to write. He felt the Holocaust was a human
experience, not a Jewish experience, and that no one had a right to censor any writer's exploration of the subject. Some people I didn't know wandered over, and soon I excused myself and drifted back into the unfamiliar house.

I searched the bookcases but did not find a single copy of my father's books anywhere, nor a photograph, nor any other memento from our shared past. It was as if by moving into his new life, Willie had locked us all away in the attic. I stood alone in the living room and saw his glasses and a few note cards he'd been writing, along with the week's TV guide, lying on the ottoman before his favorite leather armchair, as if he'd just gotten up for a moment, perhaps to get something to drink. I wanted to call out to him—but if his ghost had come traipsing through the doorway, would I have known this man, or would he be someone else entirely?

I climbed the stairs to his study to see if I could find the Willie I knew there, as if he'd perhaps sneaked away from the party. Nothing was familiar in his study either. I felt as though I were visiting the shrine of a beloved stranger, just as I had when I'd stood in Hemingway's study in Key West.

 

When I'd spent that dreadful semester in Paris during my junior year of college, I accompanied a friend to a party at the apartment of one of Tolstoy's great-great-grandsons. The Tolstoy apartment, which was the boy's parents', was in the elegant, staid, uninspiring sixteenth arrondissement. The young man, whose first name I cannot remember, was tall and stately and looked so much like young Lev Tolstoy that I couldn't help but stare at him. Knowing absolutely no one but my friend, I wandered down the apartment's long hallway and found an entire wall adorned with ancient Tolstoy family photographs. This was so stunning to me that I took a step closer, so that my nose was almost touching one of the frames. Here was my beloved Lev, ancient and white-
bearded in his ubiquitous peasant garb, surrounded on all sides by his offspring, and beside him, his wife, Sofia, blunt-faced and wearing a long-suffering expression. As I was standing there, the great-great-grandson glided down the hall and passed me without a backward glance.

“What an amazing display of photographs!” I cried out after him in French, stopping him in his tracks. “I
love
Lev Tolstoy. His writing changed my life! And it's really amazing how much you look like him!”

The aristocratic young man gazed at me with a cold and condescending expression. “I've never read his books,” he said.

“Oh but you must!” I said. “That's an incredible legacy to have. You should be very proud!”

“I couldn't care less,” he said, “I'm not at all interested in books.” And he bowed slightly, and walked away. Jesus, I thought. If a writer's own family doesn't even realize the importance of his work, who will stand up for him? Who will pick up his banner and carry it forward after he falls?

I
will, I thought.
I
'll fight for you, Lev Tolstoy, even if your pansy-assed great-great-grandson won't. And I had the strange sensation that Lev Tolstoy was closer to my blood and to my heart than to his own offspring.

 

My eyes drifted over the contents of Willie's study—books I did not know and photos of strangers. Never mind, I thought, Willie wrote it all down in his memoirs, and even if the details are romanticized, even if the dates are wrong, the books will endure. And we will always have Bill Styron's books, and Truman Capote's, and Faulkner's, and Tolstoy's books, and my father's books, and those, no matter what else, will always be worth fighting for.

This is a story my mother especially liked to tell French people who visited our home in Sagaponack.

 

Our Paris phone number must have been one digit off from the Palais de Justice's main line. The Palais de Justice was the block of buildings on the île de la Cité that included the infamous and ancient Conciergerie prison, police headquarters, and all the judicial branches of government, including the courts. During the fourteen years we lived in our apartment, we got at least two calls a day for the Palais de Justice. This was, of course, before the invention of answering machines, voice mail, or caller ID. In France, to this day, it is practically impossible to get the phone company to fix a problem, and equally hard to get your number changed. This was one of the many aspects of French life that drove my father insane.

My parents' French friend Monique taught them how to say in French, “You've dialed the wrong number. This is not the Palais de Justice.”
Vous vous trompez de numéro, ce n'est pas le Palais de Justice
.

With Gloria's accent, however, it came off sounding something like,
“No, voo voo trompay la numerow, say nay paw la Palay duh Joostees!”

The French callers, fearing that some foreigner had been hired to man the lines, would start yelling and insist on being trans
ferred to the appropriate department, while Gloria kept repeating,
“No, no, no, say nay paw la Palay duh Joostees!”
After several attempts at making herself understood, she would say, “Oh, go fuck yourself!” and slam down the receiver with a colossal bang. Good thing those old black rotary phones were as sturdy as Sherman tanks.

A moment later, the poor caller would be trying again.

At this point, my father would say, “Here, give me that phone,” and he would launch into his slower, more carefully enunciated, but hardly more comprehensible, version of the same words Monique had taught him, with little embellishments of his own:
“Jeuh m'excuse, mosoor, voo voo trompay leuh numero, ici nay paw leuh Palay de Joostees.”

When I was five or six, I told him that
je m'excuse
had a different meaning than
je suis désolé. Je m'excuse
meant the speaker was somehow responsible for the problem, while
je suis désolé
meant it was almost certainly someone else's fault. In any case, the caller would inevitably start shouting, as if that would help, and my father would then tell the person to fuck off, and slam down the phone.

When our Portuguese nanny Judite, or her mother Sylvina, answered such calls, the accent would be quite different, but hardly clearer.
“Nao, boo boo trompe, mossio, ici nao s'est la Palais da Justisa.”

 

Shirley MacLaine, the actress who'd played Ginnie Morehead in the film of
Some Came Running
, had apparently taken a shine to my father, and for several years, during her visits to Paris, she would call the apartment in an attempt to get together with him.

I remember once, I was standing near my mother when the phone rang.

“Hello?” Her face went from expectant to furious in two seconds flat. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and whispered, “It's that shitty Shirley MacLaine again!”

Suddenly, she said sweetly into the phone, her voice going up several octaves in an excellent imitation of Judite's and Sylvina's Portuguese accent,
“Nao, nao, madami, mossio nao pas icizi!
” No, no, madam, monsieur is not here! And she slammed the receiver back into its cradle, wiping her hands of it, a job well done.

I
N LATE
O
CTOBER OF
1999, on a day when the temperature shot up to the mideighties, I drove the extra half hour from Southampton College to Sagaponack to visit my mother and spend a few hours with her. Her eyes were clear and her face relaxed, devoid of the old belligerent, rageful tightness. She looked like a completely different person.

“I'd like to go to the beach,” she said. “Do you have time? We could have a picnic.”

Stunned, I went to see if I had a bathing suit somewhere in my room. I found one, and my mother packed a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and fresh local tomatoes, sliced and drenched in salt and olive oil, in a plastic Ziploc bag. We had the last peaches of the season, some dark bread, and a good French cheese. She brought Diet Coke, her new drink of choice.

I realized that I hadn't been to the beach with my mother since the summer of 1975, when we'd first moved here.

Now, on this gift of a hot summer day in October, we spread out our towels on the warm sand and sat. Her one-piece flowery bathing suit was so old the elastics had given out and hung limply around her skinny thighs. Her dark blue eyes seemed innocent and amazed. Perhaps it was the sharpness of the world, the edges that were no longer blurred, that surprised her so. I'd felt that way
when I stopped drinking almost eight years before, and I felt a strange new kinship with her.

“Do you want to take a walk?” I asked her.

“No, this is nice, just sitting here.” She opened the plastic bag of tomatoes and eggs and picked out half an egg with two fingers, then handed it to me. It was marvelous and made me feel as though I'd never tasted an egg before. Suddenly starving, I reached for a tomato and another half an egg.

I watched her eat a slice of tomato and realized I hadn't seen her enjoy food in years. She'd tied her thick, lustrous silver hair back in a little ponytail, and her face, without the bloat and expression of constant outrage and fury, had gone back to being beautiful, with her fine, straight nose, sculpted mouth with slightly protruding teeth, and prominent, rounded cheekbones. I saw glimpses now of the person she had been when she'd met my father, and of the shining, mercurial goddess I had so loved and adulated, and also feared and dreaded, when I was a little girl.

There were so many things I wanted to say to her now, but I had no idea where to begin.

“Remember how we used to dance?” I asked her.

She turned to me, her eyes seeming to search back through her scrambled memory banks. “Yes…I was a great dancer,” she said, as if by rote, as if her mind were playing a tape. I would never know, over the next seven years, what she remembered, what she was simply repeating, what she'd relearned through sheer will and trial and error, and what had been erased from her mind forever.

Nervous, I changed the subject, and filled her in on Eyrna's latest tricks.

For about a week, Kevin had been leaving for work late almost every day because, invariably, something crucial was missing from his pockets—his Metrocard, keys, billfold, or one of his
credit cards. Finally, he'd discovered all these missing objects pushed deep into the toes of his sneakers, boots, and shoes.

“Who's been putting my things in my shoes?” he said in a deep, Big Bear voice.

Eyrna replied with an innocent face, “Mommy did it!”

When I asked her why she hid Daddy's things, she said it was because she wanted him to stay home and play with her and not go to work.

Terri, the nurse from the doctor's office who was supervising Eyrna's development, had recently given her a verbal developmental test, and Eyrna's responses were literally off the chart for her age.

“Hmph,” said my mother with a sniff, “I could have told you that.”

I told my mother that during a recent drive, Eyrna had said, “Mommy, I have two questions.”

“What's that, Baby?”

“Can we stop at McDonald's? And why are we here?”

“Here, you mean, driving home to New York?”

“No, here, right now.
Here
.”

My mother wanted to know how I'd answered. I'd said, “Yes, we can stop at McDonald's. And we're here on Earth because God put us here.”

My mother gazed at me for a long time and said, “There is no god.”

“Oh, but there is a god, Mommy,” I said, feeling something huge pushing against a wall inside me. I'd been standing with my finger plugging that dam for so long, I was frightened of what lay behind it. “Look.” I gestured to the sparkling ocean, the sky, the golden beach stretching out before us in both directions, rounding to a fine line at the horizon. “Look at us sitting here. You've got a chance, now, Mom. There is a god.”

She continued to gaze at me, but there was no meanness in
her eyes. “Well then, he can go fuck himself,” she said, her voice hollow.

I shoveled the last tomato into my mouth, followed by a chunk of bread. I was eating out of nerves now. I swallowed hard and charged bravely on. After that conversation with Eyrna, I told my mother, I had pasted luminescent replicas of all the planets on her ceiling, in an order that made them seem to be circling the overhead light, right above her bed. And we'd memorized them together—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune…I told her which one was ours and why it was the only one inhabited—that we knew of, so far.

But Gloria was no longer listening.

After a long silence, I said, tentatively, “You're so much better when you're not drinking, Mom. You're like your old self again.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“I always thought I was so much more fun drunk.” After a while, she added, “I don't remember anything, you know…about when I was sick…Not a thing.”

“It was awful,” I told her, my voice unnaturally low. Where was my anger now? It had left me, and I felt completely lost. I felt that thing pushing inside me, and tears blocking my throat. “I stayed with you the whole time. I never left your side.”

“I know you did. You're the best daughter anyone could have. I don't know what possessed me to drink like that. It was stupid. I'm not an
alcoholic
, I guess I was just bored.”

Ah, here it was. Rage, my old friend, my protector—not gone, after all. As it pulsated inside my chest, I could feel the wall getting stronger, the onslaught on the other side of it receding. “It was awful,” I said again, my voice going tight and hard. “You hurt a lot of people, not just yourself. You can't drink, Mom. You
can't
drink.”

She looked at me, her rain-cloud blue eyes defiant, then afraid,
then they skipped away toward the ocean, which continued to glitter calmly in the sunlight.

“Please. Please, don't ever tell me. I don't want to know,” she said.

I thought about this for a moment and considered giving her the gruesome details. Perhaps if she knew, she would take responsibility. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. She was still not well, and perhaps with time, she'd see the truth. As long as she didn't drink, there was hope. “We were very scared, Mom,” I said slowly, evenly. “You have so many people who love you…You have your grandchildren—you have Eyrna—who wants to spend time with you…”

“I know,” she said. “You're a good girl. And I'm very grateful.”

 

In 1977, after my first semester of college, I drove back to Sagaponack to spend Christmas with my mother and Jamie. It was our first Christmas without my father. He once told Jamie and me that on Guadalcanal, soldiers in his company would shout “Home for Christmas!” as they charged across open fields under heavy Japanese machine-gun fire. It made them feel brave, and I felt anything but that.

The last place I wanted to be that year was home for Christmas, but there was no way around it. I wasn't going to abandon ship now. Our dad's last words to Jamie, who was just sixteen, had been, “Take care of the house. Take care of the house, and everything else will be all right.”

The East End landscape was incredibly stark that night as I drove for long stretches on Montauk Highway with no light for company but the distant stars and the two yellow beams of my headlights. Then I'd pass a house with one or two windows glowing warmly in the surrounding darkness. Eight
P.M.
and I drove through the town of Bridgehampton without hitting the brakes.
Bridgehampton was still the un-chic Hampton, the poor relation in that fancy family. There were a few dim storefronts, and private homes with Christmas decorations twinkling in the windows. Garlands of white lights sparkled on the potted evergreens along Main Street. The town had two restaurants, Bobby Van's and Billy's Triple Crown, dimly lit and almost empty as I passed.

I turned off the highway onto Sagg Main Street with a heart so filled with grief there was no space left for other emotions. I passed the old cemetery where my father is buried, straining my eyes through the blackness for a sight of his pale new headstone. Until my father, there had been no new graves in that cemetery since 1886.

The street was deserted. Our house, which stood atop the only hill in Sagaponack, was lit up from basement to attic, as welcoming as a passenger ship in the night. The house had been raised by shipbuilders shortly after the Civil War, according to the real estate broker who'd shown it to us. My dad bought the house on sight, although it was in disrepair. What had thrilled him most was the view of fields in every direction. He said they reminded him of Illinois.

I entered the house through the kitchen, went on to the living room, where I saw a Christmas tree still bare and my mother sitting on the couch, staring at it. The boiler in the basement clicked on and began to hum, breaking the silence.

“I couldn't face doing the tree,” she said in a barely audible murmur, and took a long swig from her scotch glass, the ice clinking loudly. I could smell it from the entryway—familiar, pungent, sweet, and cool, it reminded me of her kisses when I was a little girl.

Jamie, then a senior at East Hampton High School, came downstairs, and we set about solemnly untangling the Christmas tree lights brought from Paris, which our dad had picked out with meticulous care. There were strands of bright red strawberries
nestled among green leaves, and another of darker raspberries, and two strands of clear, beautifully realistic icicles—my favorites. Digging through the ornaments, I pulled out a heavy golden sphere speckled with tiny glass stars; it was a music ball that played a lighthearted, tinny, hopeful rendition of “Silent Night.” Our tradition had always been to place this ornament on the tree first and listen to the song while our father untangled and hung the lights. I hooked the musical ball onto a strong inner branch.

The simple, high, hopeful notes echoed through the room.

“Oh, God,” my mother said in a small, high voice and buried her face in her hands.

How would we ever pull ourselves together, and go on? My mother was talking about moving into the City. It might be less lonely there. But always there were our dad's words,
Take care of the house
…

My mother did end up renting an apartment in the city for several years, but she never permanently moved, and never gave up the house.

 

By 1999, my mother's first sober year, the Sagaponack house was surrounded by what old-timers refer to as McMansions, at varying stages of construction, on crowded half-acre lots. Hammers and saws buzzed all day long. Cars zoomed by, radios blaring. One day, while walking with Kevin and Eyrna along Third Avenue, we saw a woman in a sweatshirt that read
SAGAPONACK
.

“The beginning of the end,” my husband grumbled, and we laughed uneasily.

The summer before, while Gloria had lain upstairs in her bed in that gray zone between life and death, Eyrna and I had taken a short break from watching her and gone to explore the new paved road behind the house, in what used to be a vast potato field. A woman who'd just moved into one of the new McMansions shouted at us, “This road is private property!”

“Private property!” I shouted back, not at my calmest. “Private property! You have some nerve, lady. My family's been living here for a quarter century. So why don't you try a little neighborly civility?”

 

On our way out from the City that Christmas, with Eyrna in her car seat and the trunk filled to bursting with Christmas presents, the highway was crammed with cars. Even the ancient cemetery had new graves, including Cecile's husband, Buddy Bazelon, who had died after open-heart surgery in August 1995, ten days before our wedding.

As we drove by the cemetery, I looked for my father's and Buddy's gravestones in the gathering gloom, and I liked to think of them keeping each other company. It seemed a less lonely place.

This Christmas, despite the wild and extreme construction going on all around my mother's house, we had a great deal to celebrate. Gloria had survived her bout with cirrhosis and hadn't had a drink in six months. Jamie and his wife, Beth, and little Isabel Kaylie were driving up from Washington, and Cousin Anne and her husband, Frank, would come from Sag Harbor with little Andreas. Cousin Michael now lived in Watermill with his wife, Julie, and their baby, Andrew. Max and his wife, Jennifer, were driving over from Connecticut with Olivia. And Cecile, of course, would cross the highway from her house a half a mile down Sagg Road.

Eyrna, just over two, had moved into Gloria's bed from her own single in my back room. Sometimes I'd go check on them and find them sound asleep, entwined like our old Christmas tree lights.

That night, as we decorated the tree and the ancient and resilient music ball played its tinkling, hopeful “Silent Night,” the music could barely be heard above the joyful din of children, who I hoped would never remember this house any other way.

 

Looking for picture books for Eyrna, I came across a book I'd adored as a child,
Are You My Mother?
by P. D. Eastman. I opened it and started reading, feeling as if I'd found an old friend. A mother bird with a little polka-dotted red scarf tied around her head decides to leave her unhatched egg in the nest for a minute, to go find food for the baby bird who's coming soon. While she's gone, the egg hatches and the baby bird finds himself alone in the nest at the top of a tree. He decides to go looking for his mother. He falls out of the tree and starts walking. He finds all kinds of animals—a kitten, a hen, a dog, a cow—and asks them, “Are you my mother?” and they all impassively answer no (with no great concern, I might add, for his well-being). He sees a jet plane and starts shouting up at it, “Here I am, Mother!” until he freaks out, and a great big crane with a digging shovel at the end carries him gently back to his nest. A moment later, his mother returns with a fat worm for them to eat.