Lies My Mother Never Told Me (35 page)

Afterward, I saw myself in the mirror, in my sharp, black
gi
and my new candidate belt, which was red with a thick black stripe along the center. I stared at my reflection, standing calmly, shoulders relaxed, and I thought, That is the person I want to be.

 

I began to walk around the city with a spring in my step, my eyes up and looking out and around, not down at the pavement. I noticed things. When a gang of kids walked brazenly in my direction down Eighty-sixth Street, I did not flinch or move out of the way. They must have seen something in my eyes because they silently split up and moved around me, like river water flowing around a boulder. I still didn't believe I would be able to survive if I were seriously attacked, but I knew I'd never let anyone tie me up, and I would never quit or back down. An attack like that is never personal, Mr. Sevilla said—well, I would make it personal, and I'd make the guy pay.

The nasty blind man I saw around the neighborhood was standing one day by himself at the light, listening for cars. I asked him if he wanted help across the street. He turned his head in my direction, his blind eyes rolling up under his eyelids. “Yes, thank you, that would be nice,” he said peevishly. I took his arm and walked him slowly across the avenue.

I let an old lady pass before me in line at the supermarket (she had three items and I had a million). At first she looked at me in
fear, as if I were a nut. It seemed to take her twenty minutes to count out her change, but I didn't even huff or sigh loudly.

I felt as if I suddenly had a new purpose in life: to get my Black Belt in tae kwon do, and to act like a martial artist, even if I didn't feel like one. Mr. Bill always said,
Face your greatest opponent with an open heart.

I wanted to live my life with that kind of open heart.

My mother liked to shock elegant guests with this story, which I heard her tell innumerable times at dinner parties.

 

Jim had some literary business to take care of, and an important New York lawyer came to Paris to meet him. He and Gloria threw a dinner party for the lawyer, and no expense was spared. They invited the fanciest people they knew and out came the good silver, dishes, wine, et cetera. The lawyer was an extremely proper and elegant Harvard-educated gentleman and had a much younger wife who had been a famous model. During the dinner party, his beautiful wife, after having sat silently, snubbing everyone for an hour, turned to Gloria and said, “I made my fortune on my face.”

And Gloria answered in a deadpan voice, “And me, vice versa.”

The ex-model's husband, the important lawyer, blanched, and my father started to howl with laughter and couldn't stop.

M
Y BROTHER CALLED AT
7:00
A.M.
, November 9, 2005. It was Eyrna's eighth birthday. Apparently Bobby Geisler—the shady producer who had first optioned
The Thin Red Line
for Terrence Malick—had just called him from Southampton Hospital. Flat broke and on the run from debtors and lawyers, Bobby had been hiding out at my mother's house. Last night, according to Bobby, Gloria misjudged the distance to her bed and had fallen and shattered her hip. Her prognosis wasn't good. She was profoundly malnourished and dehydrated, severely delusional, and so intoxicated they could not operate on her hip until she stabilized. Jamie was driving up tonight, after work.

That Bobby had moved into my mother's house was not good news.

In 1999, Bobby Geisler and his partner John Roberdeau's main investor, Gerald Rubin, had sued them for the $6 million seed money he'd invested in their company, and won. Rubin's lawyer, Barry Goldin, obtained judgments against Geisler and Roberdeau for extortion, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, misappropriation, contempt of court, and bad-faith bankruptcy proceedings. John Roberdeau had died of a heart attack in May 2002, and Bobby had not only managed to stay out of jail, but he had also continued to con innumerable people into investing money in his now nonexistent, bankrupt company. Gloria had not worked in years and
was now living off of her capital, and the money was dwindling quickly. Bobby had convinced her that he was two steps away from signing a huge Hollywood deal on
Whistle
, which she'd let him option for free, with no binding legal attachments.

A few minutes after Jamie called, the phone rang again, and it was Bobby. “It's that Russian in the attic, Vladimir. He's a nightmare,” Bobby said. “They drink together, and then he yells at her for being a drunk. Last night I thought he was going to hit her, I swear. I feared for her safety.”

An hour later, Vladimir called, almost hysterical with concern. “You must to get Bobby Geisler out of house. He is bad influence. He drink vith Gloria all night then she fall down and break hip. Soon as possible, he must to go.”

 

On a Monday, I was in Southampton to teach my writing class, and I visited my mother in the physical rehabilitation center. She had finally had surgery, and a pin had been inserted into her shattered hip. Lying in bed, she looked at me as if I were a Nazi officer arrived to interrogate and torture her. Bobby Geisler, with long, wispy gray hair and glasses and a big bulging belly, was sitting to her right in a utilitarian metal chair with armrests.

“How are you doing, Mom?”

“I fell off my horse, you see,” she said primly.

“You fell off your horse?” I repeated.

“Yes. She's always been a little wild.”

“What's your horse's name, Mom?” I asked.

“Mary-Margaret O'Hara,” she said without losing a beat. Then she told me she was being held prisoner against her will. “You can't imagine what they're doing to me here. This place is horrendous. Last night this big black nurse kidnapped me. She took me to a whorehouse.”

“A whorehouse?” I repeated in stupefaction.

“Yes. And everyone was black.”

“And what did you do there?”

Her gaze wandered off, blank, unseeing. After a while, she focused on me and said, “You don't know how to have fun.” Then she pointed to Bobby with a limp hand. “He's fun. Jim was fun. Remember when…the woman said, ‘This is not the Chesa Grischuna?' and then I got into bed with the German couple and…‘This is not the Chesa…' we always had so much fun…” Her voice trailed off, then came back, sharp. “You are a cruel, cruel woman to keep an old lady in prison like this. You have no idea what they're doing to me. They're trying to kill me.”

Then she began to cry. I told her, without emotion, that it wasn't up to me. She had a broken hip, and the doctors wouldn't let her go home.

She stopped crying immediately, her mouth agape, as if I'd slapped her.

 

As I drove to the campus, I thought of my friend Pat, who'd been sober quite a few years longer than I. We'd met when I used to go to bodybuilding classes. Pat could talk a blue streak about the sales at Bergdorf's, or who the best plastic surgeons were in New York. Once, sitting over thick, green health shakes after our workout, she'd been telling me about her abusive father who now had Alzheimer's, when she suddenly said, “Have you ever met a victim who wasn't absolutely certain they were right? You can't talk to victims, because no matter what, they're right, and therefore, their own cruel behavior is always justified.”

“Wait…,” I said, quickly reaching into my bag for my notebook. “Wait, say that again.”

“What?”

“What you just said. About victims.” But she'd already moved on to worrying about what to buy for dinner. As she discussed a recipe for a Greek fish dish cooked with feta cheese, her words
bounced and echoed through my head. My mother was a victim, and I was her cruel oppressor. This was the role she had set for me, and I had unwittingly accepted it all of my life.

Now as I drove toward the college, the red sun was setting to my right, and the shadows of the dark, bare trees stretched across the narrow back road. I felt gloom descend upon me as rage was once again ignited in the pit of my stomach and would not burn itself out. I felt poisoned, as if I'd just spent two hours in a toxic waste dump.

 

The day after Christmas, Jamie called me to say Gloria had tried to escape from the physical rehabilitation center and broken her other hip while falling out of her wheelchair. He said she'd screamed at him on the phone, insults you couldn't believe. Oh, I could believe, I replied.

“Yes,” Jamie said somberly, “I guess you could. I'm sorry. I never understood before.” I didn't blame him in the least. It was only at the Caron Foundation that I had understood for the first time that Jamie and I had not had the same relationship with our mother. Up until then, I'd always thought he was simply in denial about her cruelty. But that wasn't true. He had never experienced it. I never had that kind of easy, joking, back-and-forth relationship with her that he did. I was the dark and moody one, the one with no sense of humor.

“The rehab center wants her out. I'm driving up tomorrow and taking her home,” he said resignedly. “I think we better hide the Calders and whatever else of value is left in the house.”

“Well,” I suggested, “we can always put the good silver and stuff like that at Cecile's.” A few years ago, Gloria had been robbed of most of her table silver—platters, bowls, candlesticks. The house's doors still didn't lock from the outside.

My mother had no valuable jewelry left. But I decided to take
what was there and keep it in my apartment, where it would be safe. Vladimir took the Calder prints to an art dealer in the city to be appraised and restored.

I didn't think she'd survive a month.

 

A hospital bed was set up in my old bedroom downstairs. Gloria was happy and grateful to be home. For two days. Then she grew antsy. She wanted to drink. She wanted Bobby to call the liquor store. She kept on him and her nurses about this. She confused night and day and hollered for liquor at 4:00
A.M.
, insisting it was cocktail hour. No one could calm her down.

When I came to see her the following Monday, Bobby was sitting in a wicker armchair beside the bed, laughing and joking as if they were at some cocktail party.

I was reminded for some reason of
The Lord of the Rings
—Wormtongue, envoy of the evil Saruman, hovering, hunched and solicitous, over King Théoden, who has been bewitched and can no longer think or see that his world is collapsing around him. His own son lies dead in the next room, his favorite nephew banned from the kingdom for standing up to Wormtongue…I tried to shake this image from my mind.

My mother glared at me accusingly and shouted, “What have you done to the hallway that leads upstairs? How dare you remodel my house without my permission!”

She spotted a bottle of rubbing alcohol on the bedside table and reached for it greedily, trying to twist off the top as she brought it toward her lips, craning her neck forward. Horrified, I made no move. Her nurse came running and wrested the bottle from her grip.

 

The first week in January, I went to the biyearly, weeklong residency at the MFA program at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, where I taught fiction, but my mind was not on my work.
Students and faculty must have seen the stricken look in my eyes because they treated me with deference and kindness. Bobby Geisler called me on my cell phone while I was in the middle of a class, to say my mother had called a limousine service and, for $250, had gotten a driver to come pick her up and take her to the liquor store in Bridgehampton. How was this possible? She couldn't even dial a phone.

Desperate, I called Nora, who told me: “If she wants to go out that way, who are you to tell her she can't?”

Nora called again, the next day. She wanted to know how I was doing. I told her I was not doing so well. “You're going to have to make amends to her,” she said bravely.

“Amends?” I shouted. “What the hell did I ever do to her to deserve this?”

“It isn't for her,” said Nora. “It's for you. If she dies this week, or next week, or in a few months, you'll never be free of it. You have to clean up your side of the fence.”

 

Dan, one of the graduate students I taught, came from Pottsville, where my mother grew up. I told him my grandparents were buried in Pottsville but I had no idea where. His mother worked for the Catholic Archdiocese in Pottsville and had access to all the records. He asked if my grandparents were Catholic. My grandmother was, and my grandfather, while raised Catholic, believed the Church was corrupt and worthless. You know, Dan said, Pottsville is less than an hour from here.

I'd had no idea. This seemed providential, so I asked Dan to call his mom.

Within an hour, Dan's mother had the exact location of my grandparents' graves in the Catholic cemetery. Dan volunteered to drive me there the next morning, before classes.

We left just before sunrise and drove through the mountains. On the highway, the sun shone, weak and watery, but down
below, a murky fog hung over the valley like a white sea. We went down into Pottsville, the hilly town so ensconced in fog we couldn't see ten feet ahead. I didn't recognize a thing. We drove up Mahantongo Street, where the rich people's imposing mansions stood on a steep hill, gazing quietly down on the rest of the town. I had an approximate idea of where my grandmother's house should be, right across the street from the Yuengling Mansion. There was a redbrick Victorian standing behind a tall iron fence, with black chimneys and white trim, on a frozen green lawn shrouded in fog. “This must be it,” I said to Dan. Gone were the wild gardens and tall trees that had hid the house from the street in my grandmother's time.

When we were twelve, Jamie and I had stayed with Gertrude for a week. We wanted to visit our Mosolino cousins, but apparently things weren't going so well over there, and she wouldn't take us. I needled and pressured and pushed her until she spat out, “You're just like your mother, a stubborn little bitch. I bet you lie just like her too. A teller of tall tales. And I bet you show the boys your butterfly, just like she did.” I was so aghast I couldn't even formulate a response beyond, “What are you talking about, Grandma?” And I remembered now, my mother telling me that as a girl, she used to suddenly lose her breath and faint the minute she walked through the doors of the church. No number of beatings from Gertrude could cure Gloria of this malady, which caused Gertrude endless shame before the priests and nuns.

 

Dan's mother met us at her office. She had taken out the original leather-bound volume that listed my grandfather, Mark Anthony Mosolino, as having died of “indigestion” on New Year's Eve, 1947.

Dan drove me to the cemetery with his mother's hand-drawn map. The pale gravestones on both sides of the narrow asphalt road drifted in and out of sight through the fog. The road curved,
and Dan pulled to a stop. We got out and began to search the headstones. Who was this woman who had given birth to me? I wanted to find some connection, some way back to who she had been, in the hope that I might better understand who she had become.

We found the Mosolino monument, a marble rectangle with both my grandparents' names engraved on it: Mark Anthony Mosolino; Gertrude Mosolino Dietman. In middle age, she'd married a sullen, nasty old man with webbed fingers on both hands, who wouldn't let us watch TV in the living room.

I took out my cell phone with a shaking hand and called my mother.

“Mom?” I called out, as if reaching out to her across a great distance. I took a deep breath. Dan politely wandered off down the path. “Mommy, I'm here in Pottsville! I'm standing in front of your parents' graves.”

“You poor thing,” she said, slurring, as if waking from a deep sleep. “You had such a terrible mother.”

“This is Kaylie,” I said, baffled. “This is your daughter.”

“You had a terrible mother. Kick her grave for me.”

“Are you talking about Gertrude, Mom?”

“Gertrude…,” she said vaguely. “Spit on her. For me.” My mother had run away from this place and never come back; and yet, she had never truly left it behind.

I made a spitting sound, pretending. “There,” I said to my mother. “Done.”

We giggled together breathlessly, like naughty children. Then I started heaving deep, painful sighs that caught in my throat. “Mom, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for everything I ever did that hurt you.” Tears cascaded from my eyes, as if a dam had suddenly cracked open.

“Oh, honey…,” she said, crying as well. “You had a terrible time.”