The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (3 page)

As a child, you generally
aren’t aware that your family is different from any other. You have no frame of reference. It is only later that you learn your upbringing was not the same as everybody else’s.

My father died when I was fifteen months old. I have no memory of him, and never missed him until I came to know that it was unusual for a child not to have a father. He remains, as he always has been, a photograph in a picture frame. Growing up, I was passionately curious about him, but no one except Dodo ever mentioned his name.

She told me he was “a darling,” and that he loved horses. But that was about it. Did he love me? I never dared ask, and she never said.

Later, in my twenties, she handed me a sapphire ring, claiming that my father had given it to her when I was an infant with the instructions “Keep it and give it to Gloria when she grows up, because she’s going to like jewelry.”

Well, he was right about that.

I was thrilled. It was a message from him. A long-awaited sign that he did love me. But the story seemed odd, unlikely somehow. When I finally took the ring to be insured, I was told it was not a real sapphire.

My father was an alcoholic. Perhaps, in an expansive moment, inspired by the sentimental impulse of a cloudy fantasy, he had reached out to Dodo and given her the ring. But if so, where had it come from?

I said nothing to Dodo. The ring may have been from my father, but it also may have been a kindly gesture on her part, a way to prove that I once had a father who cared about me.

When your father and I were living in the house on Sixty-Seventh Street, shortly after you were born, we were robbed, and the ring was stolen along with the rest of my jewelry. I never saw it again.

Y
ou used to quote a writer, Mary Gordon, who said, “A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”

For a long time I didn’t understand what that meant or how it related to you. Now I do understand, and I think it’s true of fatherless boys as well. I certainly think it applies to me.

When you lose a parent at an early age, you lose the fantasy of childhood. The veil is lifted. You learn that bad things
happen and that no amount of crying or hugging will make them all right. Nothing is safe, and all things are possible: good things, beautiful things, but ugly and harmful things, too.

We both learned this lesson in different ways when we were ten years old: you with the custody case that thrust you into the headlines, and me with my father’s death. The person I was and the person I was meant to be are very different from the person I became after his death, a change I think you experienced after the custody case as well.

After my father’s death, I retreated into myself, and when I emerged, I had changed. I was more quiet, and serious. I’d become an observer of the world around me instead of a participant in it. Nothing has ever felt safe since.

“I suspect that being fatherless
leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical, having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a fatherless girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”

That is the full quote from Mary Gordon’s novel
The Company of Women
, and when I came across it, I knew it to be the foundation of my life. It explained countless actions I’d taken thoughtlessly. Unbeknownst to me, my life decisions had been
based on this principle. Even now that my eyes have been opened, they still are.

For a long time I couldn’t identify the impact of my father’s absence; it’s taken me years to see it, but now it is all so clear. Looking back, I see time and time again that decisions I made, impulses I followed, and the kind of men I was attracted to all stemmed from my not having a father.

I used to imagine that my father had left me a letter, or a series of letters that would be delivered at key junctures of my life. I still hold out hope that one will show up.

I
t’s interesting that you fantasized that he had written you a letter. For a long time I have had the same fantasy, that I would receive a letter from my dad. It may sound silly, but I still think about it every time I see a stack of mail waiting for me to go through, and it always makes me sad.

I hold on to the hope that there is a note from him somewhere out there that will reveal all the things I want to know about him, all the things I wish he’d had time to tell me.

Several months ago, I sent you a copy of a public radio interview he gave in 1976. It had been restored and posted online by Clocktower Radio.

It was so strange to sit in my office at work and suddenly hear his voice coming through the speaker on my desk. It
was the first time I had heard it since I was ten years old. He didn’t sound like I remembered, and I wouldn’t have recognized his voice if I hadn’t known it was him. He was talking about me and Carter and the close relationship he shared with us. I couldn’t help but wonder what he would think of me now, and what it would be like to have a father still.

He was alive for only a fraction of my life, and yet there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of him and miss him. The feelings of loss remain so sharp, and I still feel a twinge of anger toward him for dying, the irrational anger of a ten-year-old boy who suddenly learns that anything can happen and nothing is safe.

Although you lost your dad
when you were so young, you did have him as the major influence in your life until you were ten. It’s said that even though our brains do not fully develop until we are in our early twenties, the first seven years of our lives are crucial for influencing future development. Your dad gave you a firm base and a sense of the familial bonds he experienced from birth.

It was a gift I could never give you, as I didn’t have this. I was not bound to any place or person. What I do have are little souvenirs of my past: my father’s cigarette case, my mother’s brush, and family photographs in frames. This is the only evidence I have that I did in fact belong to a family, though I so often felt like an imposter.

I point these items out to you now when you come to visit because it is my way of telling you part of my history and because I often wish Dodo, Naney, and others had revealed more things to me in this way. Everyone’s life is a story, and these things are part of the story—my story and your story, too, because you are my son.

As I write this, I can see a photograph of my father, this man I never knew, in a silver frame on my desk. I have more than once written him a letter and imagined I would stuff it in a bottle, seal it tight, then walk down a few blocks to the East River and twirl it fiercely around my head before hurling it into the rushing water.

After my father died
, my mother never mentioned him to me, and she never once spoke of the Vanderbilts. She hotfooted it out of Newport and took me and Dodo and Naney to Paris, where we lived along with my mother’s identical twin sister, Thelma, on the Avenue Charles Floquet. We had a big house, and Dodo, Naney, and I were installed on a separate floor from my mother and Thelma.

My mother led an active social life, going every day to lunches, cocktail parties, dinners, and cabarets. Though Naney, Dodo, and I lived in the same house as she, it didn’t feel like we did. It was as if two families were occupying one house. We had our floor, and a beautiful stranger glimpsed only fleetingly, my mother, occupied the rest.

Though I rarely saw her, I had Dodo and Naney, and I was happy. Dodo had been with me from the moment I was born. Cut by cesarean section from my mother’s womb, I was handed straight into Dodo’s arms. My newborn body took root in her embrace and found a home. Dodo’s voice was the first I heard. Naney’s the second. They were all the family I needed.

In my young eyes, they were a couple: Mother Dodo and Father Naney.