Lies My Mother Never Told Me (4 page)

“What you need is to clean your sinuses out,” he pronounced after thinking it over for a minute. Then he told me that when he'd been a boat hand on a yacht in Florida back in the forties after the war, he'd caught a terrible cold. One of the yachtsmen was a doctor and told my dad to get in the ocean and tilt his head
back and let the ocean water fill his sinuses, that it would cure his cold in a day. And by God, my dad said, it did!

I considered this doubtfully. There were few things more terrifying than jumping into a pool or the ocean and having your nose fill up with water. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant. “But doesn't that hurt?”

“Not really.” He said he'd take me down to the Piscine de Deauville, an Olympic-size, heated saltwater pool just down the street, when he quit work in a couple of hours.

At the pool, in the shallow end, we were the only ones in the water. “Lie back,” he said, “like this, and hold your breath, but let the water flow right up your nose. If you relax and just stay calm, it won't hurt. And I'll be right here, holding your hand. Here, watch. I'll do it first.”

Scared as I was, I watched him do it, then did exactly what he had done. It didn't feel good, was unpleasant and frightening, but it didn't
hurt
, especially with him standing right there next to me.

“Do it a few more times,” he said. “Then we'll go to the drugstore and buy that spray. You'll have it if you need it, but you probably won't. And if your sinuses don't get better quick, then it means you have some kind of infection and we'll go see a nose doctor.”

He made it a point to go back to the same pharmacy and order the spray from the same pharmacist, taking his time, reading the labels, speaking to me in English and asking me which one I wanted. The pharmacist didn't say a word but looked miffed as he rang up the sale.

I did not need the spray again. But now I had the little white plastic bottle with a blue label, right on the bedside table, just in case. That night, I slept like a stone, feeling safe and protected and that all was right with my world.

 

In Deauville, on August 5, my birthday, my father gave me my mint-condition first edition of his newest book,
The Ice-Cream Headache
. He had all of his books bound in leather with gold lettering—blue for Jamie and brown for me—and gave them to us on birthdays and other holidays. In this one he wrote: “To Kaylie—on her ninth Birthday. Hoorah! A new one is almost finished! And so am I.”

My bound editions went high up on a shelf next to my brother's, to save until we “grew up.” All his books except for this one were big and fat and frightening. I knew that
The Ice-Cream Headache
was a collection of stories, so I asked my father if he thought I was old enough to read it. He considered this for a moment and said, “Sure—go ahead and start with the childhood stories.” And he told me their titles: “Just Like the Girl,” “The Tennis Game,” “A Bottle of Cream,” “The Valentine,” and “The Ice-Cream Headache.”

My father rarely talked about his childhood. He was eight years old in 1929, when his family lost everything in the Great Depression. Now, to prepare me to read the stories, he told me they were based on his own childhood in Robinson, Illinois, and that the grandfather in “The Ice-Cream Headache” was his own grandfather, George Washington Jones, a lawyer who was a quarter Cherokee and had written a book himself, a treatise on why Christ's trial was illegal. My father had loved and admired his grandfather, adored his own drunken father, whose best advice had been to always tell the truth, and hated—passionately hated—his mother, Ada, on whom the mother in the stories is based.

“Why did you hate her?” I wanted to know.

“Because she was a self-pitying, sanctimonious, self-righteous bitch.” And that was all he would say on the subject.

 

I was taking riding lessons and swimming in the ocean every day, living a dream life of privilege, far from Robinson, Illinois, where I'd never been. I'd never met a single relative on my father's side. His childhood was far removed from anything I knew, but his writing was so straightforward, so honest, the details so clear—the oppressive midwestern summer heat, the small backyard, the public school's hallways, the mother's sweating back as she toils over the kitchen stove—that I felt I was there with him, witnessing his childhood as an invisible onlooker. His mother beat him mercilessly and then demanded that he feel sorry for her, because her life was so hard, being married to the town drunk. He knew how to appease her with loving words of pity and compassion, when what he felt was revulsion and terror. And I knew that even if some of the details were changed—my father often said that's what a writer did, fool with the facts—the little boy was my father, and he'd lived through this. It was almost impossible to imagine this powerful, decent man in the care of such ignorant, self-centered adults.

In “A Bottle of Cream,” the cruel, angry, self-pitying mother sends the little boy out to return a bottle of spoiled cream. He's angry too, because she's interrupted his imaginary championship tennis game, in which he plays both sides, hitting the ball against the garage door. On the way, he breaks the bottle by accident and sits down on the sidewalk to cry, because he knows she'll beat him. A notorious local outlaw named Chet Poore appears out of nowhere and asks the little boy what's wrong. Poore's impatient goon friend wants to take off, but Chet Poore kneels down and listens to the boy's story. Poore takes him to the store and explains the situation to the shop owner. But the man won't replace the spoiled bottle of cream. “‘All right then, damn it,
sell
me a bottle of cream,' Chet Poore said irritably, ‘you tight bastard.'” And just like that, the little boy's problem vanishes.

My father's world, it seemed to me, was upside-down. The
hero was an outlaw, and the villain was a fine, upstanding, churchgoing mother. Chet Poore probably had a mother or a father just like Ada Jones too. No wonder my father had helped me with my swollen sinuses. He remembered.

I ran to him and threw myself into his arms. “But, Daddy, these stories, they're not true, right? They're not really true?” I wanted him to reassure me.

“They're all true,” he said in a quiet tone, “I just had to change things sometimes, you know, lie a little, to make them better stories.”

I pressed my forehead against his thick, reassuring neck, and his calm and even voice explained to me that the world was not always a nice place and that people were sometimes pretty awful, even though they usually thought they were doing the right thing—and he wished it could be otherwise and that he could tell me it wasn't so, but there it is.

“What happened to Chet Poore?” I asked him.

“Oh, he died in jail, I guess,” my father said wistfully. “That wasn't his real name.”

“What was his real name?”

“I don't remember,” my father said. “I don't remember if it really happened that way at all.”

This story my mother reserved for special occasions. It was usually delivered in a confessional tone, her voice deep and somewhat reticent. She might share it with a person she admired greatly, whose moral fortitude and intelligence she did not question.

 

In the spring of 1957, Jim brought Gloria, his bride of a few weeks, back home to Marshall, Illinois. He had built his new house, with his
From Here to Eternity
money, right next to the Handy Colony grounds. Lowney and Harry Handy had supported Jim through his writing of
From Here to Eternity
, and after the novel's success, he had tried to repay them by pouring money into a writers' colony Lowney wanted to run. During all those years while he wrote
From Here to Eternity
, while Lowney had mentored and edited and encouraged Jim, she'd also been his mistress. But Jim had neglected to tell Gloria this. He'd told her that Lowney was his foster mother. Apparently Lowney didn't know her love affair with Jim was over until she received a telegram from him stating that he'd gotten married. How he planned to pull this one off is anyone's guess, but he brought his shining, long-legged, beautiful blond bride back to his ex-mistress's home turf.

At night, Lowney tried to scare Gloria by wearing a sheet, stalking and
whoo-whooing
her way across the lawn. Gloria, looking out the window, said to Jim, “What's wrong with your foster mother? Is she crazy?”

One afternoon, Gloria was at the sink washing the lunch dishes. Her two young cousins, Kate and Joanie Mosolino, twelve and ten, had come from Pennsylvania for a visit. Lowney appeared at the screen door, brandishing a large carving knife. She slashed her way through the screen and came at my mother.

“You think you're something special, don't you? He tells everybody you're the best cocksucker in New York City.”

Gloria grabbed Lowney by the wrist and they struggled, banging around the kitchen. The two little girls stood there, paralyzed with fear. Gloria screamed for help, and Jim came running from his office, where he'd gone back to work after lunch. He separated the two women and grabbed the knife away from Lowney.

Catching her breath, Gloria said to Lowney, “First of all, that's not true, Jim would never say that. I'm a terrible cocksucker, I have buckteeth.”

W
HAT MY MOTHER EVEN MORE
rarely told anyone was that this lie of my father's almost caused my parents to break up. In my mother's version, five minutes after Jim threw Lowney out of the house, he admitted to having been her lover, and Gloria demanded a divorce.

He said, in a surprisingly calm voice, “Take what you need. We're leaving.”

According to my mother, she grabbed a few things—my father's manuscript of
Some Came Running,
his big, chunky Navajo silver and turquoise jewelry, and his mother's silver tea set—and threw them into the trunk of the car. He took nothing but a change of clothes, turned his back on all his collections—guns, knives, bows and arrows, handmade western boots, chess sets, books, not to mention the house he'd just built—pushed Gloria into the car, got in, turned the key, and sped off.

They drove across the Midwest, down to Florida, then back up through the South, fighting and yelling the whole way. They arrived at some kind of truce before they reached New York, making a solemn vow never to speak of it again.

My father never returned to Illinois.

But what happened to cousins Kate and Joanie? How did they get home? How come we still have my father's first editions of
Wolfe, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald? Did
he
throw those into the trunk of the car? Why did my mother throw his manuscript and silver into the trunk if she was going to leave him?

These questions would make my mother's mouth pucker up tight as a change purse, and she'd turn stone-faced and silent. Afraid of displeasing her, I stopped asking.

Recently, I brought up the matter with Cousins Joanie and Kate, who remember the day with absolute clarity. They were nice Catholic girls from Pottsville, P.A., who'd never left home before. They'd never seen anyone brandishing a knife, nor heard the word
cock
. Later that day, when things calmed down a bit, they asked Gloria, “What's a cock?”

Gloria responded in a grim, preoccupied tone, “A man's thing, I guess.”

Neither Kate nor Joanie remembers my mother, during the altercation, saying anything about her own talents, or lack thereof, as a cocksucker.

“Are you sure?” I asked them, perturbed.

Both insisted my mother never said anything to Lowney in response to the cocksucker accusation. I asked them how they got home. They said they'd taken the train from Pennsylvania to Illinois, but Gloria and Jim sent them home on the first available plane from Indianapolis, which was not until the next day.

My mother never said the name Lowney Handy without a high-pitched, nasal, midwestern parody of Lowney's voice. If anyone else brought up Lowney Handy in my mother's presence, that person went to her shit list, exiled forever. She would also use her wheedling Lowney Handy tone whenever she was angry at my father:
“Jeee-i-um,”
she would call across the apartment. This drove my father to shatter more than one glass against the wall, as well as expensive candlesticks.

Lowney Handy died of a drug overdose in 1964, four years after I was born. And, according to my mother,
because
I was
born. “She waited for him, but then you came along, and he still didn't come back, and she realized he never would,” she told me. Apparently, at the news of Lowney's death, my father displayed not the slightest emotion. The only thing he ever said to me on the subject was, “Don't ever let anyone make you feel guilty for anything. I'm done feeling guilty, and I'm glad.”

When he closed the door on her and on his past, he never looked back.

 

Recently, for the first time in thirty years, I went back and looked at my father's novel
Go to the Widow-Maker,
a thinly disguised account of how he and my mother met and fell in love and were married within six weeks. I felt like a child entering the forest primeval, afraid of what I would find on every page. The experience gave a whole new meaning to not being able to see the forest for the trees.

The dedication reads:

 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO MY DAUGHTER
KAYLIE
WITH THE INFORMATION THAT THE REASON HER FATHER NEVER TRIED TO WRITE ABOUT A GREAT LOVE STORY BEFORE WAS BECAUSE HE HAD NEVER EXPERIENCED ONE UNTIL HE MET HER MOTHER.

 

It's the only book he dedicated to me, his love song to my mother.

From the time they met, they were never apart, except for the month he spent in Vietnam in 1973, writing for the
New York Times Magazine
. His descriptions of Lucky, my mother's doppelgänger, are painted with careful, loving, precise brushstrokes.

This is the scene in which he meets her for the first time, arriving at her apartment for their blind date. “Her shoulderlength champagne-colored hair was combed straight back above the smoothly rounded forehead in a sort of lion's-mane effect. She had high slightly prominent cheekbones that slanted her eyes the least tiniest bit. But beneath the short straight nostril-flaring nose, her mouth was her most attractive feature. It was wide enough that it seemed to go all the way across her face although it didn't and the full sweet upper lip was so unusually short that it appeared unable to cover a perfect set of prominent upper teeth except by an act of conscious will on the part of its owner.”

His perception of their early days together is highly romanticized and sexually explicit, and he holds nothing back, trying to be as straightforward and honest as he can, showing both of them at their best, but also at their worst. This is very brave, but reckless too. He was so intent on throwing off the shackles of sexual repression and hypocrisy he'd been subjected to as a young man, he went to the other extreme, being as open—not just in his writing but also with me and my brother—as he could.

Now, thirty years later, still uncomfortable with his descriptive sex scenes, I skip over them, just as I did the first time I read the book, at seventeen.

Using Jamaica as the setting for the novel, he condensed what took place over four or five years—in New York, Haiti, Illinois, Paris, and Jamaica—into a six-week period in New York and Jamaica, which includes my parents' courtship and marriage, and the tumultuous rupture of his relationship with the Handys.

I found the scene of Lowney Handy crashing through the screen door, and it is almost identical to my mother's version, except it takes place in Jamaica; there is no knife; no little cousins there to witness; and no retort from Lucky.

Yet even before she learns of his longtime affair with his “foster mother,” Lucky threatens Ron Grant with betrayal: “One day
I'm going to cuckold you.” And he tells her to go right ahead and do whatever the hell she wants to do. This battle for dominance between them reminds me of a late-night poker game in which the last two players keep raising the stakes, hoping the other will fold before the bluff is called. My father, on some level, must have felt that way about love affairs in general, for he always said, only half in jest, “In any love affair or romance, the one who quits first wins.” Meaning, the one who cares least wins.

Who cared least between the two of them? I have no idea.

In 1962 to 1963, while my father was writing
Go to the Widow-Maker
, we spent the winter in Montego Bay, and Judite came with us. My father did a great deal of scuba diving and skin diving and other research for the book. Many years later, Judite told me that in Jamaica, my parents had been befriended by a very rich and good-looking English lord, and my mother liked very much to flirt with him.
“C'était pas sérieux,”
Judite added quickly—nothing serious, of course. One night, my father came home without my mother, at around two in the morning. Steaming drunk and in a rage, he threw open my mother's closet and with a razor-sharp diving knife, sliced up all her clothes—everything—to ribbons.

“Were you scared?” I asked Judite.

“Un peu.”
A little, she said. “He never raised a hand to me, you know, nor to you. We just hid in a corner, you were in my arms.

“Then, a while later, your mother came back with the English lord. I thought your father was going to kill them! But five minutes later, they're all sitting at the kitchen table, having a drink!” With that, she laughed, blushing, as if she'd said more than she should.

She waited another fifteen years to tell me the rest: “You know, out on that diving boat in Jamaica, your daddy was doing his diving and you and me we were just sitting there, playing on the deck. Your mother got out of the water and took off her bathing suit right in front of that English lord. He was right below us,
in the water, watching her. The look in his eyes…I could never forget it.
J'étais écoeurée,”
she said, a hand on her sternum. “It made me sick to my stomach.”

 

In the novel, my father compares the effect of Lucky's cruel and threatening words, “‘Would you like me to have an affair with Jim [a scuba diver]?'” to the echo that hangs in the air “like the end of the stanzas in Yeats's
Innisfree
, going on and on in silence after the words themselves have been said and have faded away. Grant felt almost exactly as he had felt [on a spearfishing expedition] when he watched the shark's flank going on and on and on past him and then the numbing jerk on his hand.”

What is Yeats's poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” doing here? This feels to me like a secret key to my father's psyche, for the last message he left on his tiny tape recorder in the Cardiac Care Unit of Southampton Hospital—which I have listened to only once, and still have but cannot bring myself to hear again—was a slow, deliberate recitation of this poem, followed by a long, piercing yell, like a Native American war cry, that faded only when his breath ran out.

And why does my father compare love, and the fear of losing it, to being next to an enormous shark in the murky blue depths of the sea?

Was my father describing that half-beat of time between the absence of fear, and fear? The moment just after disaster strikes, but before the adrenaline has kicked in? Or is it the numbness that sometimes takes over and paralyzes the emotions in the face of great danger? This explanation may only partly answer my question, but it is important: most alcoholics, if not all alcoholics, suffer from an abnormally pronounced fear of abandonment, which they unwittingly pass on to their children. They also suffer from a fundamental terror of intimacy, which is disguised by the false intimacy that develops between people when they're drinking excessively. I know it was true for me, and in rereading this novel of his, I see it was also true of both my mother and father.

 

A few years ago I saw a film clip taken of me in Jamaica in 1963. In it, I'm two and stark naked, and it's so sunny the light is blinding. I'm on the house's stone terrace, very busy filling an aluminum basin with water, which I then get into with my German shepherd puppy, Sir Dog. My mother is in the foreground, sitting in a deck chair. This film was a window onto my own childhood, and I watched her intently. Who is this young, golden, incredibly beautiful woman? In a moment she raises her hand and takes a sip of a drink and I realized—like a blow to the head—that in 90 percent of the candid photographs and film clips I've ever seen of her, she is holding a drink.

 

My father must have seen me as the perfect product of their unbridled love for each other. But I always felt more like Athena, born from the head of her father, than the product of my parents' great romance. I know he worried about me. Perhaps he recognized in me the same loneliness he had felt as a child, the same isolation and constant anxiety. He gave me more of his time and patience than most of the fathers of his generation gave their kids. He tried to compensate for what he could see did not naturally exist between my mother and me—and had certainly never existed between my mother and her mother, or his mother and himself.

 

My father first found out in the summer of 1970, when we were visiting Bill and Rose Styron on Martha's Vineyard, that he had congestive heart failure. The experts believed it was congenital, exacerbated by the malaria he'd caught in the Pacific during the war, and, of course, by his years of heavy drinking. His doctors told him to stop drinking. He switched from scotch to white wine. By 1974, he knew it was only a matter of time before his heart gave out, and he wanted to be treated in the United States, by American doctors. Also, by 1974, he realized that he was getting deeper and deeper into debt, and that our lifestyle had to change radically.

He was offered a high-paying job as writer in residence at Florida International University in Miami. My parents decided to try it for a year, so they rented our Paris apartment to a rich American couple, and off we went with our three cats and a couple of suitcases each. Although it was never explicitly stated, I knew that we would never be coming back to Paris.

The four of us, who had never spent more than two or three hours a week together, moved into a small, unassuming ranch house on Key Biscayne. My father had always loved Florida and would probably have been content in a trailer, but my mother immediately hated everything about Miami and spent the entire
winter sitting alone in the house, sipping scotch or white wine, in a kind of low-grade depression that nothing, other than visits from friends from New York and Paris, seemed to shake. Gloria hated the people and hated the weather. She hated the flat, hot beach and the closed-in feeling of the small ranch house. Even the pool was enclosed by mosquito netting, and all day every day lawn mowers disturbed the silence. By the end of our stay, she had gained over twenty pounds and was drinking all the time.