Lies My Mother Never Told Me (37 page)

I didn't trust Michael. He'd charged his aunt more than $3,500 for the food alone at the birthday lunch, and he'd fed the guests lamb that was left over from a wedding he'd catered the day before. He admitted this unabashedly to our cousins Kate and Joanie.

Jamie kept telling me that my mother had been insane, that nothing she'd done made sense. She'd been coerced into making this new will, and we had the medical papers to prove it. We
would most probably win in court, Jamie said; but it would take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“I'll do whatever you want to do,” I told Jamie. “I will never fight with you over this. Ever.”

Jamie, always the diplomat, told Michael he'd pay him his 10 percent from the proceeds of the sale of the house and whatever other cash there was, which was not much, but Michael would have to renounce his position as successor executor and trustee for Eyrna's share. And he had to abandon any claim to our father's literary works.

As he listened to Michael's response, my brother's eyes widened slightly and the color drained from his face. Then his mouth slowly hardened, and he began to concentrate. It was his poker face—pure, cold calculation. He was a great poker and chess player, and whatever Michael was saying, it was not sitting well. My heart started to palpitate, my mouth went dry again. How could we have allowed ourselves to get into this position?

But I continued to watch my brother, reassured by that calculating, calm, ruthless look. Jamie was preparing to go to war. But his was going to be a tactical, quiet war, one that would have scared the shit out of me if I'd been on the other side. Michael did not know Jamie well if he thought he was going to bully him. He did not know Jamie well if he thought Jamie would cave in.

“I'll get back to you on that,” Jamie said calmly and put the portable phone down on the table.

He sat in silence, thinking, and I asked, “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘I'm a businessman. How much is it worth to you?'”

I thought, And this is who my mother chose to protect Eyrna's assets if anything ever happened to Jamie? Jamie sighed, and, in a resolute tone, added, “We need a really good lawyer. And I'm never speaking to that greedy son of a bitch again. He has no honor.”

I felt immensely grateful to have this decent, intelligent man for a brother.

 

Two weeks later, back in Washington, my brother mentioned to me on the phone, in passing, as if it were common knowledge, that Gloria had been drinking for at least the last four years of her life. At first I didn't believe him. I thought he had his dates wrong. If I'd been asked to swear under oath, I would have sworn she had not been drinking.

In my mission to be uncompromisingly honest, I tried to look back, unflinchingly, to find the truth. When did she start drinking again, exactly? I wanted to know.

So I called Jamie again and asked him.

“If she was sober two years, that would be generous,” he said.

So, from about, say, 2002 on—all that time—she was hiding bottles? Secretly drinking? Why didn't I smell it? Why didn't I notice?

But I did smell it. Every once in a while I'd get a whiff of that strange, cool, fermented, sugary smell. Kevin had often commented on my mother's lack of physical affection. He'd never met a less physically demonstrative person than Gloria. Was that why, in the past four years, she'd never hugged or kissed me? Because she was afraid I'd smell it? I had thought it was because she hated me.

“I didn't know,” I said to my brother, at a loss for words. “How could it be that I didn't see this?”

“I don't know,” Jamie said equably. “She was drinking. I could always tell when she called me.”

So perhaps that was why she so rarely called
me
. She did not mind so much if Jamie knew, but did, terribly, if
I
knew. Was she afraid I'd keep Eyrna away from her? I would have done what Jamie did—come for a few hours on holidays. But I would never have moved in with her for the summer, or spent so many week
ends there, or let her drive around with Eyrna in the car. I would not have left them alone together.

It now occurred to me that she had perhaps not meant to be cruel by not calling me but simply had not remembered my birthday and other important dates. In my silent, righteous anger at this injustice, I'd sat and stewed, waiting for her to call
me
.

“But why didn't you tell me she'd started drinking again?” I asked my brother.

“I thought you knew.”

How could it be that Jamie and I never discussed this? It seemed inconceivable. Yet I realized now that Jamie and I had barely spoken to each other over the past four years. And we shied away from such painful topics as the condition of the house, or our mother's health.

Jamie would rarely spend even one night in the house he had worked so hard to hold together as a young man. While he called our mother several times a week, and he brought his wife and kids over for Christmas Day and sometimes Easter, they came from his in-laws' home in Westchester and left before trouble brewed.

I was the one who stayed. And what a torment it must have been for Gloria to have Kevin and me in her house, being assailed constantly by the desire, the
need
, to drink, and being forced to hide it, like a criminal. No wonder she was in a constant rage.

As it turned out, no one had been more in denial than I. I had attributed all of her inconsistencies, her weird rages, vicious attacks, and mood swings to my belief that she was suffering from untreated depression and anxiety. I thought she hated me, and of course, Kevin, because we were the only obstacles standing between her and Eyrna. Clearly she had not wanted to be with us in the least but had to tolerate our presence because we were Eyrna's parents. And I had tolerated her behavior because I thought it was important for Eyrna to have a relationship with her grandmother,
and that Eyrna's presence in her life—Gloria professed to love Eyrna to distraction—was keeping her sober.

Stunned by this news, I immediately called Cecile and asked her the same question. “When did my mother start drinking again?”

“Well,” Cecile said, and sighed. “She never drank in front of me, but people called me and told me she was drinking. I really knew it when I realized she'd been watering my scotch. I don't drink scotch, but someone came over for dinner, and I offered him a scotch. He said, ‘This is terrible!' and I realized Gloria had just stayed overnight, and had watered down a brand-new bottle.”

“But
when
was this?” I persisted. Cecile was not sure.

“And why didn't you tell me?”

After a pause, Cecile explained, “Because I knew you'd lose your mind over it.”

No one
told me. Apparently no one wanted to trigger my mother's ire. And I've always prided myself on my ability to smell alcohol from five feet away. I could always recognize the telltale signs of a person in trouble. So what does this say about me, about the writer with the acute talent for observation and bottomless memory for detail?

I began to doubt my own sanity all over again. How could I have been so completely shut down from reality that I failed to notice the blaringly obvious signs? I had never believed the psychology textbooks that described the human mind's capability of completely shutting out what it did not want to accept. But now I saw that not only was this possible, it had happened to me.

The same day I called Cecile, I picked up Eyrna at the school bus with our little dog Natalie, and we walked down to the East River promenade. It was mid-June; we were coming to the end of the school year. The sky was a warm blue and summer had set in, a mild, light breeze blowing off the water. Keeping my voice gen
tle and devoid of recrimination, I asked Eyrna, “Did you know that Grammy was drinking? I just need to know, honey. None of this is your fault.”

She looked at me with her tawny eyes. “I knew,” she responded, calm and serious.

“Do you remember when it was that Grammy started drinking again?”

“I don't remember how old I was. We went out to lunch and she had this stuff in a green bottle and it smelled really weird.”

Eyrna said that soon after, Grammy was hiding bottles all over the house—in the pantry, behind certain books in the bookshelf. She put vodka in her Diet Coke. When Eyrna confronted her, my mother said, “Don't worry about it. I can handle myself. Your parents are the crazy ones. They don't know anything about it. But don't
you
tell them. If you tell them, they'll take you away, and we'll never see each other again.”

How could it be that I didn't see it? Around my mother, I lost all sense of direction, self-discipline, self-esteem. I completely lost my sense of self.

Gloria's memorial service took place in her garden on July 2, 2006. The blue hydrangeas were in full bloom, large and round as children's heads gathered in tight clusters, as if quietly conferring. Here is what Eyrna wrote and read aloud to the gathered company.

 

I
N
A
UGUST
2008, J
AMIE AND
I
drove out to visit our storage unit in Bridgehampton, hoping to organize fifty years of family photographs—a task we had not felt ready to tackle until now. Cecile invited us to stay at her house. She had stood by us through all of it, never veering from her conviction that Gloria's mind had been poisoned by alcohol.

Jamie and I had driven out to Riverhead once before, to be deposed in our court case against Michael Mosolino. Seeing that we had a good case, Michael eventually caved in and renounced any claims to our father's literary estate, as well as his role as successor executor for Eyrna's trust. But Jamie had been obliged to pay him 10 percent of proceeds on the sale of my mother's house. Jamie called it blood money.

 

By the middle of July 2006, just a few weeks after Gloria's funeral, her credit card bills began to arrive, and we learned that Bobby Geisler had been making forays in the City using Gloria's Visa and Amex cards. Jamie was left with a $15,000 credit debt, and receipts for elegant New York City hotels, fancy restaurants, designer food stores, and even a brand-new laptop computer. Around $4,000 had been charged to her cards after her death. When questioned, Bobby said he was working for Gloria as a producer and had permission to use her cards. The police did not
pursue the case—they felt that legally it was a “gray area” and not worth their while.

 

Jamie, who was driving, asked me if I ever dreamed of our dad.

I told him I'd had three dreams about our father over the past thirty years, perhaps one every decade. In the first, I was a freshman in college, and while I was having a quick nap one afternoon, there was a knock on my dorm room door, and it was my father. I walked him around the campus, pointing out my classrooms, and it felt like a holiday until suddenly he said he had to go, and I woke up covered in sweat, calling out to him to come back. In the second, I was living in New York, writing my second novel, and I dreamed he'd married another woman. I went to him and begged him to go back to our mother, but he solemnly shook his head no and turned his back on me. Our mother tried to kill herself by jumping out a high window of a white hotel, onto a shimmering green lawn. In the third dream, which was much more recent, I was visiting our mother in Sagaponack and learned that our father had never died; our mother had told us he was dead because he'd left her for another woman, and now he and this woman had three kids and lived happily somewhere down the street from our mother's house. When I went and knocked on his door, he stared at me blankly, as if he no longer remembered who I was.

 

It felt cozy and safe to be in a car with Jamie driving. He was the best driver I knew—fast, but completely alert. Our dad had taught him on lonely back roads, as he'd taught me, a small gift in the last months of his life. We had been talking for an hour straight, comfortably, as if we'd always done this. Getting to spend twenty-four hours alone with Jamie felt like a holiday, despite the nature of our trip. It was never easy for us to go back there, but I was not afraid.

I'd passed my Black Belt test on December 9, 2006, six months
to the day after our mother's death. Mr. Bill, too ill to suit up, had watched from the sidelines, dignified, quiet as a statue. Anna the Valkyrie, George, and I shared the floor with several younger and stronger men; two were from another branch of the school. During the one hundred push-ups, my arms began to shake and I thought I would not make it, that I was going to pass out. I heard Kevin's and Eyrna's voices shouting from the sidelines, “Come on, you can do it!” And a cold, calm fire ignited within me. I decided I would die before I quit.

After the push-ups, I knew I'd passed the worst of it. One of the young men from the other branch of the school, in his twenties, had to take a break to go barf.
I am not my thoughts, I am my actions
. I said this to myself as a mantra, over and over again. Toward the end of the ninety minutes of grueling endurance exercises, we each had to pick our best
Palgue
form and perform it alone in front of the judges. Then I had to spar against six-foot-five, 240-pound Mr. Acosta, who kept yelling at me to hit him harder. I gave him all I had, and he didn't even flinch.

Mr. Sevilla handed Mr. Bill our Black Belts with our names embroidered on them in gold—in Korean and English. Mr. Bill stood at the front of the
do-jang
and tied the belts around our waists and bowed. I took his hand in both of mine and bowed deeply, holding the bow several seconds longer than required.

 

“I've had only one dream about Dad,” Jamie told me after a few minutes' silence, keeping his eyes on the road. I'd learned that if I pushed with Jamie, he'd recoil. He had to be given space and quiet to talk intimately about his feelings.

Around fifteen years ago, Jamie had dreamed that he was sitting in the kitchen of the Sagaponack house, when our father walked in the door. The rest of us were in the house, but not in the kitchen. Jamie thought, Thank God, everything is going to be all right now. He jumped up to pull out a chair for our dad.
Jamie wanted to ask him where he'd been, but it didn't seem like the right time. Our dad sat down at the long, dark, beautifully waxed wood table, and everything continued normally, as if we were whole again and his death had just been a horrible nightmare. But our father didn't speak.

Jamie finally asked, “Where have you been, Dad?”

But our dad still wouldn't say a word. He got up and started walking around the house, Jamie following. Our dad looked around, inspecting things—the pulpit bar, the books on the coffee table and shelves. Everything was exactly as it had been before he died. He climbed the stairs to his attic office and shut the door. Jamie realized something was wrong, but he wasn't sure what, the feeling of relief leaking away.

He had awakened, lying in the darkness, heart pounding, aware that it was only a dream.

I did a slow, silent breathing exercise to get ahold of myself, for Jamie had never appreciated my emotional displays.

 

In February 2007, I'd finished emptying our mother's house. I left Eyrna in New York with Kevin, because I wanted her to keep her good memories. Many friends came and helped me, and I was amazed and stunned by their generosity. The only object left in the end was the imposing pulpit bar. On the last day, I waited for my friend, who was a carpenter, to come and take it apart, because there was no other way to get it out the door and move it to storage. I stood in the empty, echoing living room and stared at it as the edges of the long room darkened in the afternoon gloom. The prayer stools, its longtime companions, were gone now, and the bar looked forlorn, like the prow of a galleon shipwrecked on a shallow reef.

 

When I felt pulled together, I told Jamie that recently, in the magazine
Time for Kids
, there was an article about a planet that
astronomers had discovered that they believed might support life. A planet, like ours, but circling a red dwarf sun. Eyrna was amazed when I got choked up while reading it. “My daddy always believed there were other planets that could support life!” I told her. Years ago he'd already thought it was absolutely egomaniacal to believe ours was the only inhabitable planet in the entire universe.

I said to Jamie, “Remember how he used to watch the Apollo missions, and said he couldn't believe men would get into those tiny capsules and go out into space? He said imagining all the things that could go wrong would make a job like that totally impossible for him.”

Jamie smiled. “I loved watching
Star Trek
with him. He thought Mr. Spock was the coolest character ever. He used to analyze every show!”

We fell silent once again, and I continued to think about all the things—good and bad—our father had missed. I turned to my brother now and said, my voice coming out raspy, “He would be so proud of you, Jamie. What a brave and strong man you are.”

I looked out the car window and saw new buildings going up in what had once been beautiful green fields. Tonight, I would not be home to put Eyrna to bed and stretch out beside her until she fell asleep. On many nights she still wept for her grandmother, shoulders shuddering. She'd turn to me and murmur, “Grammy didn't love me enough. If she'd loved me more, she would've stopped drinking.”

“There's nothing you could have done, my angel. She was very sick and couldn't help herself. She loved you more than anything.” I had not managed to keep the disease away from my child, and my heart felt cleaved in two.

 

Eyrna, my brave girl, passed her own Black Belt test on June 9, 2007, on the one-year anniversary of her grandmother's death.
Watching her test was harder for me than getting through my own. I almost jumped up and pulled her out a couple of times, but the other mothers and Mr. Bill held me back. Eyrna did not want to quit, never even considered it, even as tears streamed down her cheeks. I was so proud of her I cried myself. As a child, I'd been nothing like her. I was afraid, and if something was hard, I ran away.

Mr. Bill was not running away. He still came to the
do-jang
almost every day, weak and in pain, to teach us our advanced forms. Anna, George, and I had learned the
Koryo
and
Bassai
forms and performed them in front of all the Premier schools, in Mr. Bill's honor, at the last promotion test.

 

I know now that if I see my father again, in a deathbed vision, I will tell him I was not able to keep my deep-sworn vow to him to stop my mother from drinking. But I am not sorry. I could not have stopped her. It was never my responsibility.

Perhaps for me heaven is a well-lit, shining room with a long, beautiful table piled high with delicacies. On both sides sit all the writers I have admired and loved, even Nabokov, that persnickety snob. But here, their egos and earthly problems have left them, and all they do is eat, and drink the nectar of the gods, which doesn't get them drunk. And they talk about books. My father is sitting next to Tolstoy, whose eyes have lost their hounded look. They're comparing the battle scenes in
War and Peace
and
The Thin Red Line.
Stendhal is listening in rapt attention.

I approach, a little uncertain, and my father turns to me. His fifty-five-year-old face breaks into a warm smile, his eyes bright with recognition. He stands, introduces me to the gathered company, pulls out a chair for me, and welcomes me to the table.