Lies My Mother Never Told Me (21 page)

Without another word, my mother turned on her heels and walked out the door.

I stared at Kevin across the room, my eyes and mouth wide with shock, wanting to say something bitter and angry.

“Don't,” he said gently.

 

As soon as we returned home from the hospital, Jamie and his wife, Beth, came up from Washington with their one-year-old, Isabel Kaylie Jones. Beth's parents brought Isabel's white wicker newborn bassinet down from Westchester for Eyrna, all festooned with pink and blue ribbons. I found this positively astounding—that Beth's mother would have spent hours threading ribbon through a bassinet for her daughter, much less for me. I thanked them profusely, and they just shrugged it off, as though it were nothing, as though this was what grandparents were supposed to do.

 

Three weeks before Christmas, when Eyrna was five weeks old, Kevin, Nora, and I flew with Eyrna down to Wilmington, North Carolina, to be on the set of
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries.
Most people don't even leave the house with a five-week-old baby, and here we were on a plane. There was so much luggage we looked like Fitzgerald's Dick and Nicole Diver—we had the stroller, the diaper bag, the portable crib, my industrial-size breast pump,
the little igloo for preserving breast milk, the baby clothes and two-way radio, the BabyBjörn, and sundry feeding and cleaning paraphernalia.

When we visited the set for the first time, I felt as though I'd walked through a
Star Trek
–like rip in the space-time continuum. Electric cables, television monitors, lighting and sound paraphernalia crowded the front hallway of the two-story saltbox house. Gingerly stepping over the wires, we crossed the foyer—and it was as if we were standing in my mother's Sagaponack house.

The novel closely parallels my childhood in Paris and then our move to the States, and Jim Ivory had warned me that I might be disappointed if his aesthetics did not reflect “reality.” I asked Jim which reality did he mean—his vision? My novel? My family's memories? Or mine?

On the walls hung three luxuriant Paul Jenkins paintings, on loan from the artist, a lifelong friend. In the living room stood a replica of our eighteenth-century wooden pulpit bar. My father loved that irreverent grandstand so much that when we moved to Sagaponack, he had to take out a wall to get it into the house. Standing in this miraculous reconstruction, I felt like a visitor from the future, beamed by transporter back into the past. I had a panicky feeling—the urge to tell someone this story was not going to turn out well at all. My mother had gotten to the point now where she was unable to go two hours, night or day, without a drink.

Above the landing hung the Alexander Calder mobile the artist had given to my father in the early 1960s. They had been friends, and my father had written a moving essay about Calder's work. But wait! My mother had sold the mobile years ago. It was a look-alike, of course, but for a moment it fooled me. Upstairs, on the wall in the boy's room was a sand-and-glue map of the United States, as crooked as the one Jamie had made as a schoolboy. In the girl's room was the watercolor alphabet my parents'
friend Addie Herder made for my third birthday.
A
is for Ace, in a family of card players.
L
is for Laughing, and all the faces of my parents' friends stare at me from behind the glass.
K,
in the original, was for Kaylie, and
J
for Jones.

Not here.
C
was for Channe, and
W
for Willis—the characters in my book. Poor girl, I thought, she has no idea what's coming.

I went to the window and looked out over a blue marsh leading to the Atlantic, visible on the horizon. The sun was setting, leaving streaks of pink and purple over the water, and there were tall reeds swaying in the wind, reminding me of Sagg Pond. Eyrna, in Kevin's arms, began to fuss, so we went back to the minivan so I could nurse her.

When we got out of the van, a tall man was approaching us with long strides across the brown, winter lawn. It was Kris Kristofferson. He shook my hand and lifted the baby into the air, an expert, with six small ones of his own. “You wrote so beautifully about your father,” he said. “He must have been a wonderful man as well as a wonderful writer.”

I looked up at him, suddenly choked up. He had eyes just like my father's.

In a little while, James Ivory filmed the scene of the father's first trip to the hospital. Nora took Eyrna for a walk, and Kevin and I watched the shooting from inside the house. Kris Kristofferson, sitting in his office, behind his typewriter with papers piled everywhere, breathed exactly as my father had in his last few weeks, as if he couldn't catch his breath, as if he were drowning. I started to tremble, overtaken with fear. I was witnessing the whole thing all over again. I felt like shouting, “No! No! We can fix this! We have to fix this, before it's too late!”

 

A few days later, Jim filmed the scene in which the mother lies on the couch, her ubiquitous bottle of scotch within reach, utterly paralyzed by her grief. I watched Barbara Hershey on the
monitor, then I went outside and walked down to the water's edge and breathed in and out, slowly, for a solid five minutes. Barbara came out to find me. She had gone to Sagaponack to spend a day with my mother, to acquaint herself with the person on whom her character was based. I never asked Barbara how that went, but the look in her dark eyes as she now approached me said it all. She hugged me, and I started crying on her shoulder. “I hope this film will bring you some peace,” she said gently. “I hope it will bring you closure.”

How could this have happened to us? I thought. How did we get to the point that we've grown to expect nothing from each other but pain?

 

When it was time for me to start teaching again that spring semester at Southampton College, I decided to try to bring Eyrna with me to my mother's house, against Kevin's better judgment. Reexperiencing the past on the set had given me insight, and I felt a new compassion for my mother. She did not
have
to be alone, and I could surely be more understanding and kind. But I was not quite brave enough to leave a three-month-old baby alone with someone who was drinking, so I asked my friend Alice, an old friend from high school who was sober now also, and living in East Hampton, to come over and watch Eyrna at my mother's while I was gone for three hours to teach my first class.

When I got home, I could hear Eyrna screaming all the way from the kitchen, and I ran to my room, panic-stricken. I found her lying in her own excrement on a towel on the bed, her face red and contorted as a shriveled apple, and Phyllis Newman, my mother's old buddy, sitting in a chair across from Gloria at the side of the bed, trying to calm her down by making jokes about how they'd never been the kind of mothers who changed diapers. But the look on my face silenced Phyllis immediately, and before
I could say anything, my mother said, “I threw that Alice out. I can't stand her. She's an asshole.”

Alice had not called me, not wanting to disturb me, so she drove off and left fourteen-week-old Eyrna alone with my mother. Apparently Eyrna had started howling and wouldn't stop, so Gloria had called Phyllis and begged her to come. Between the two of them, they managed to get the dirty diaper off, but neither knew how to, or wanted to, clean her up or put on a new diaper. Neither knew how to fill a bottle with frozen breast milk and heat it, and perhaps they were too afraid to try.

I swiftly lifted Eyrna into my arms. The minute she recognized me she stopped howling. I was too upset to speak. I cleaned her up, changed her, and put her into clean footie pajamas. She reached up and started grabbing for my breast. When she latched on, she let out a sigh of relief that reminded me of how I used to feel after my first shot of vodka at the close of a very long day. When she was sated, she pulled back and gasped, her head lolling to the side, her eyes rolling back in her head as though she were completely drunk.

I picked up the phone and called Nora in New York. Nora listened to my gruesome tale and then said, “It's not just about you anymore. My aunt Maureen dropped her little Johnny on his head when she'd had a few too many cocktails, and he's spent the rest of his life in diapers, drooling in a wheelchair.”

Nora's words hit home: my mother's house was not physically safe. It was no longer about me being kind, or trying to help her contain her drinking problem. I could not be the alcohol police and the mother of a newborn at the same time. I had to make a choice. I had put my child in danger; I had relied on my friend Alice, who had not done the right thing. What if my mother
hadn't
called Phyllis? What if she'd dropped Eyrna?

I called Kevin and told him I was coming home. He asked me to wait until morning, because I was too upset to drive. He was
right, I realized, so I went out into the kitchen and told my mother I was exhausted and needed to go to bed. She didn't say a word.

First thing in the morning, I packed us up and left.

Later that day, I called her from the city and told her, as calmly and as gently as I could, that I wouldn't be staying with her anymore. It was too much stress for her and for the baby. For once she was not angry but heaved a great sigh of relief.

I hired a babysitter to stay with Eyrna in New York on Thursday afternoons, while I drove out to Southampton College and back. I carried a state-of-the-art, industrial-size breast pump with me to work, along with a little Igloo cooler, and collected so many little plastic containers of breast milk that Kevin said I could have fed an entire orphanage of newborns.

 

For the next five months, we did not see my mother. When she called, perhaps every three weeks to see how everything was going, I told her we were fine, but tired.

“I don't understand why all you mothers with babies are so tired all the time.
I
was never tired when I had you.”

I didn't bother to point out that she had not been the one to get up and feed me or change me in the middle of the night. Nor during the day, for that matter. What was the point of going into it?

I was finally, after six years without a drink, learning to keep my mouth shut.

 

The premiere screening of
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
took place in East Hampton in July. Ismail Merchant invited all the great American literary lions who'd been my father's friends to attend a lunch in my mother's garden, preceding the evening screening. It was a catered event with a big tent and tablecloth-covered tables, and all the writers showed up. Norris Church and Norman Mailer and Rose and Bill Styron flew over from Massachusetts. Inge Morath and Arthur Miller came from Connecticut; Kurt Vonnegut
and Jill Krementz, and Maria and Peter Matthiessen drove the half mile down Sagg Main Street; E. L. Doctorow and his wife, Helen, came from Sag Harbor. There were our good friend Joe Heller and his wife, Valerie, who lived in Amagansett; and Shana Alexander, who lived on the beach in Wainscott.

Kris Kristofferson arrived in a limousine from New York, with Ismail, Jim, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala—the novelist and screenwriter who'd won two Oscars for her Merchant-Ivory adaptations.

We seated Kris Kristofferson next to my mother, because I knew she'd like him, and if she was going to act up, he'd be able to handle it.

“My God,” he said to her during the appetizer, “if they dropped a bomb on this tent they'd wipe out half the canon of American letters in one swoop!”

She liked that a lot.

After lunch, as we stood in the garden and Kris bounced Eyrna up and down in his arms, he told me my mother had asked him to spend the night with her.

“She asked you to spend the night with her?” I repeated, incredulous.

Yes, he told me. Apparently my mother had said, “I like you, you remind me of my husband. Why don't you stay and spend the night with me?”

“And may I ask you what your response was?” I said, trying to make light of it.

Kris told me that after some thought, he'd said, “Well, I'm honored. But this is kind of a business trip. I think I'll have to take a rain check.”

Stunned, I complimented him on his gentlemanly behavior and quick thinking.

 

That night, Ismail Merchant escorted Gloria down the red carpet and into the East Hampton Cinema as the cameras flashed.
My mother was extremely nearsighted but would never wear her glasses at public events. Ismail walked off for a moment, and meanwhile the writer Salman Rushdie approached through the crowd and was now standing beside Gloria. Unable to see, she mistook him for Ismail. “It must be wonderful, traveling all over the world, hanging out with so many interesting people,” she said, making conversation. “Do you get back to your homeland much?”

Rushdie, who'd been hiding for several years from an Islamist fatwa, gaped at her in silence.

The only thing she said to me all day was in the limo on the way to the post-screening party. “That was a terrible movie. They miscast everyone except for Kris Kristofferson. It was boring and dreary. Our life was much more interesting than that. You don't get me at all and you never will. I'm much too complicated for you.”

Gloria loved to tell the story of the summer in the early seventies when they were “dead broke,” and for the last two weeks of August, she and my father borrowed a damp little apartment in Trouville from a friend of theirs named Johnny Romero, who owned a nightclub in Paris. Trouville is the hilly coastal village across the inlet and over the bridge from her much fancier sister, Deauville. They sent us kids off to the beach on rented bicycles, or to horseback riding lessons, or to tennis lessons, or to the Deauville pool, and at night we were left with a babysitter, while they got all dressed up in black-tie attire and hit the Deauville casino.

My father had decided to try to alleviate his money troubles by playing chemin de fer baccarat, which is like blackjack, but the highest number you can achieve to win is nine, and you can't go over and bust, because the tens digit is ignored, so tens and face cards are worth zero.
Baccarat
means zero, the worst hand in the game.

On this particular night, Jim had lost several thousand dollars and was getting ready to quit. Gloria had been watching him intermittently, playing a little roulette across the room. Out of nowhere, she hit three wins in a row—low-paying (one to one), easy wins on red, or black, odd or even. She bet again, and won again.

“Mesdames et messieurs, faites vos jeux,”
called the croupier. Place your bets.

Knowing Jim was in trouble, and with the all-or-nothing
recklessness she was renowned for, Gloria placed her winnings, five hundred francs—a hundred dollars—on zero.

“
Rien ne va plus
…,” said the croupier, calling an end to betting. She closed her eyes and began to mumble a Hail Mary, her favorite foxhole prayer.

“Zéro, mesdames et messieurs. Zéro.”
She couldn't believe her ears. The croupier deftly began to slide her 17,500 francs' worth of chips toward her.

She felt a tingling sensation, the charge of electricity buzzing down through her fingertips and through her feet to the floor. She could feel people murmuring, watching with sudden interest. Knowing it was sheer folly but unable to resist, she pushed the entire hill of chips over to Black. Double or nothing.

“Rien ne va plus,”
said the croupier.

She watched him spin the wheel and drop the little ivory ball. She held her breath.
Click, click, click,
around it went, then it fell to the thin circle of numbers, and landed. The wheel slowed, and she saw that the number was black.

She had just won 35,000F—$7,000. Her audience clapped and cheered. She gave the croupier his tip, then inelegantly shoveled as many chips as would fit into her elegant little evening purse, and pressed the rest to her chest.

“Excuse me, please.
Pardon, s'il vous plaît
. Excuse me.” She dodged her way through the black-tie-and-evening-gown-clad crowd to the chemin de fer table, where Jim sat stoically, his chiseled face unmoving and unreadable to anyone but her.

Without saying a word, she bent over and dumped her chest-load of chips and then the ones in her purse onto the green felt table before him. He looked up at her, his countenance suddenly straightening, his eyes glowing with relief.

“Lucky,” he said to her, with a twitch of his thin lips. He'd always thought of her as extremely lucky and even named her Lucky in
Go to the Widow-Maker
, his love song to her. On the
next hand, he became the banker and held the bank for several hours, winning every hand.

By the time he turned the bank over to the next player, he'd won 100,000F, or $20,000, enough money at the time to pay for a brand-new Peugeot station wagon and one year's tuition for Jamie's expensive private American school.