Mother Daughter Me (20 page)

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M
Y FATHER’S MARRIAGE TO VIVIENNE LASTED ONLY FIVE YEARS
. In 1973, just a year and a half after Sarah left, Vivienne asked my father to leave as well. I was a junior in high school and set adrift. My stepsister was in college, Vivienne had sent her two boys off to a fancy boarding school nearby, and I stayed in the house alone with Vivienne, while my father paid her for my keep. That was the summer I went to visit my mother, got involved with the tennis player, and broke up with Matt. Once my father settled in a new place, I moved in with him, feeling rooted nowhere at all.

Since childhood, Sarah and I had given our father a free pass on life. We grew up worshipping him, all the more because we felt unfairly wrenched from him as small girls. My mother’s rants against him only made me love him more. I seldom mentioned him to her, however, because I didn’t want to hear her roll call of justifications for leaving him. I preferred an idealized picture.

In my twenties I came to view my father more realistically. He had been largely absent both times that we lived with him. I later came to understand my mother’s frustrations with a husband who coped with
domestic strife by escaping into work. At the same time, I came to appreciate his agile and steady mind. I believed that it was his optimistic nature I had inherited, his steadiness of spirit I had to thank for my own internal gyroscope. And the more I appreciated my father, the harder it was for me to believe that my mother had settled for someone as drab and monosyllabic as Norm. My father, for his part, wasn’t one to hold a grudge, but well into his seventies, his good-natured face clouded over at the mere mention of my mother. I knew little about how to read that cloud, but clearly his marriage to my mother was an episode in his life best left alone.

After retiring from Hampshire College, my father settled into a rich and full life in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, a beautiful small town in the Berkshire foothills. His house was filled with musical instruments, synthesizers, and various pieces of scientific equipment. His library consisted of more than four thousand volumes, many of which he had read more than once. He built bookshelves in every room, even the bathroom. The historic house doubled as a B&B, which he ran with an eccentric but well-intentioned hand. He learned to fly planes in his sixties and used the earnings he made from a sideline tuning pianos to pay for occasional flights in a little Cessna he rented from a local company. When he was in his seventies, he got a second PhD, in musicology.

After I left New England for college, my father and I stayed close and spoke often. He was my reliable source of bad puns and inane jokes, my word man. He drummed into me the difference between “further” and “farther,” and “liable” and “apt.” His eccentricities increased with age, and people found them charming. Denny once told me that when she was still living in Amherst, she occasionally bumped into my father at the local market, and he was always buying something “interesting,” like a single rutabaga or a bag of quahogs.

When Zoë came along, my father was thrilled; he manufactured any excuse to visit Austin to see her, and she adored him in return. She was “Poopsie” to his “Popsie.”

On a summer morning in 1998, my father and I chatted on the phone. He told me of the flight he was planning for the next day, and, while I could tell he was excited, I could also hear the fatigue in his voice. He was being treated for bladder cancer, and the treatments made him tired.
I told him that a flight in mid-afternoon, a time of day he should probably spend napping, might not be a good idea. He brushed it off. “I’m fine, dear,” he said, then had to hang up because he had guests coming and bread in the oven.

The next afternoon, as my father was flying with a local photographer to take aerial photographs of a music festival in the Berkshires, the Cessna crashed into the woods. Both my father and his passenger were killed. Near midnight, a search party found their bodies and the wreckage from the crash and went to Sarah’s house to break the news. My sister then called me.

It was the first time I had lost a close family member. My mind was filled with nothing and everything, so overwhelmed that it just went blank. Matt called Dick and Denny and put me on the phone with them. In Denny’s voice I heard not just profound sympathy for me but the deep fondness she and Dick had always had for my father. Then my mother called. Sarah had told her. Her reaction puzzled me. “How weird,” she said about my father’s sudden death. Not tragic, or awful, or shocking, but “weird.” I listened for sadness in my mother’s voice but heard none.

The day after the crash, Matt, Zoë, age four, and I flew east. The entire town of Williamsburg was in mourning. A shrine of sorts had been erected in front of the library, where residents had placed flowers from their gardens. When we walked into my father’s house, we found he had left the door unlocked and the oven on.

In the next few days, the buckets and vases outside the library multiplied. People returned to straighten them up and freshen the water. Everywhere I went, I felt not just my own shock and grief but the shock and grief of an entire town. People came to the house to tell me they had known my father. They had been to his house for dinner and heard his stories, his endless repertory of jokes, his scientific and political ideas. They had known when he had visitors and when he was out of town. They knew he was worried that the tomatoes he was growing wouldn’t ripen before the first frost. They had argued with him at town meetings and read the letters he sent to the local paper.

In certain circumstances, when a death is accidental, when a loved one dives into the too-shallow pond, steps off the curb without seeing
the car, drinks another shot before getting behind the wheel, we hold fast to the notion that, but for an urgent clearing of the throat, we could have prevented it. I’d have done anything to roll back the tape to our phone call a few days earlier. In the new version of our conversation, I’d have pressed my father about his fatigue, insisted he rethink his plan. If that hadn’t worked, I’d have called Neil, the photographer—this part of the scenario didn’t actually make sense, since I didn’t know Neil’s last name or where he lived—and told him my father was too tired to fly. If only I had called out.

In the months that followed, I made a few trips back to Williamsburg—first for the memorial service, then to help Sarah sort through my father’s things. One night, alone in my father’s house, I found more than half a century’s worth of meticulously labeled folders, beginning with letters from the 1940s, from MIT, Columbia, and Cambridge, offering him positions in their graduate programs and physics labs. Eventually I stumbled upon a collection of legal papers, dating back to my parents’ initial separation in 1963. My father had neatly filed every document: the papers from the instant divorce my mother obtained in Mexico, complete with an English translation; my mother’s official 1965 petition for divorce; letters between my father and the social worker overseeing Sarah’s foster-home stay; and letters between the lawyers on both sides of the custody battle.

Alone in his house, I sat down on his bed and looked through the file. There were no real surprises—until I came upon a letter from Brooks Potter to Selma Rollins. Much of my parents’ marital endgame had revolved around money, of course. But for all those years I had also secretly hoped that my mother’s highest priority in the legal battle was Sarah and me, that she wanted nothing more than custody of her beloved daughters, that money was a side issue, relevant only as it related to her ability to take care of her children.

I was wrong. Ten days after the hearing, Potter wrote a three-paragraph letter to Selma Rollins. “That was quite a day we had in Northampton. It would have made a good television script,” he wrote, as if they were a pair of old fishing buddies who had gotten caught in a squall, not legal adversaries determining the course of two young girls’ lives. After congratulating Mrs. Rollins on her victory, Mr. Potter informed her
that he would not be appealing the custody judgment. He did, however, plan to contest the decision denying payments to my mother.

My first impulse was to shove the papers into the folder and put the file back in the drawer. Instead, I took the entire file folder and packed it into my suitcase.

———

I
N 1996,
WHEN ZOË WAS THREE, WE LEFT AUSTIN AND MOVED TO CALIFORNIA
, where I was sent by
Newsweek
. Matt landed a job as head of public affairs at the University of California at Berkeley. After a couple of years I was recruited to
The New York Times
, to work for a new technology section called “Circuits,” writing on a topic that fascinated me: the intersection of technology and society. I woke up every morning in love with my job. My editor, Jim Gorman, seemed to walk straight out of a dream and into my life. He was imaginative and funny and careful about not taking anything too seriously. He also understood what it meant to have a family. When I told him that Zoë’s class was planning a special field trip to a nearby farm on the day a story was due, he said this: “Katie, five years from now, what will you remember? That your story was a day late, or that you didn’t go on Zoë’s field trip?” I went on the field trip, and the story turned out fine.

I worked from home, and more often than not the messages on my work line were from Jim. Zoë grew used to hearing them and absorbed the rhythms of my job. Sometimes after dropping her at school, I would go into my home office, punch the playback button on the answering machine, and hear my child’s tiny voice parroting my editor’s baritone: “Hi, Katie, it’s Jim [then a pause]. The story’s good [another pause] … but I didn’t like the lede,” she would finally announce, tossing off the word journalists use to refer to opening lines of a story. “So I’m sending it back to you with a new lede. Tell me what you think.” And she could be a far tougher critic than my actual editor: “Hi, Katie, it’s Jim. The story [lengthy pause] … it just doesn’t work. Call me. I’ll be here until six my time.”

Our life bumped along. Like most marriages, mine to Matt wasn’t always easy. We were both stubborn and competitive. And Matt was much stricter with Zoë than I was, which was perhaps the biggest source of friction between us. I did not enjoy the good cop–bad cop routine, mostly because I thought he was far too bad a cop, which made me in turn overcompensate in my role.

But Matt knew how to love, and he loved me fiercely, unapologetically. Dick and Denny had taught him all about that, just by being who they were together.

For their forty-fifth wedding anniversary, Dick and Denny came to visit us in our new home in California. We took them out to dinner, and as we pondered the menu, I posed a question I had always longed to ask them: What was the secret to the longevity of their marriage?

Denny’s spiritual side often expressed itself at moments like this, but now she said something at once simple and profound, completely romantic and utterly practical, something that has stayed with me to this day: “It’s like this menu. You know you can’t have everything on it. You have to pick one thing. And you know that if you get the chicken it will be wonderful and satisfying in a lot of ways, but it won’t be the same as the steak, which you didn’t order. But you made your choice.”

That was it. She had said all she wanted to say on the topic. Dick looked pleased, and very content with his own choice.

In late 2001, Denny’s menu analogy saved my marriage to Matt. Shortly after Zoë turned eight, Matt and I hit a terrible patch. We found
ourselves fighting over things large and small. We disagreed more violently than ever over how to raise Zoë. I felt tyrannized by him, and he felt frustrated and pushed away by me. Then, whatever behavior I had internalized as a child reached up and grabbed me from somewhere very deep. Instead of turning to the menu lesson imparted by my mother-in-law, instead of staying true to Matthew and working things out, I had an affair.

Matt found out, and he was enraged. Were he here to tell the story of the night he shook me out of a deep sleep to confront me, I would be a pathetic figure, sitting on the edge of our bed in my pajamas, hugging my knees to my chest, sobbing, and—of all outlandish heat-of-the-moment reactions—blaming my mother. Her infidelities had been the model for both Sarah and me. I was simply following her example.
She
was the one without a moral reference point.

And this is where mother-blame is a dangerous thing. “Don’t blame your parents too much!” the writer Katherine Mansfield said in a letter to a friend nearly a hundred years ago. “We
all
had parents. There is only one way of escaping from their influence and that is by going into the matter with yourself—examining yourself & making perfectly sure of their share.” In my eagerness to deceive myself, to talk my way out of disgrace, I failed to acknowledge that my mother did not blindfold me, take me by the hand, and thrust me into the arms of someone other than my husband. I made that choice.

My regret was profound, but the force of Matt’s anger and hurt was so great that he struck back with an affair of his own. He matched me blow for painful blow. As a child, I had witnessed so much giving up and fleeing that I nearly gave up and fled myself. Even Matt, who had loved me steadily for thirty years, began to wonder if we should stay together. That’s how far to the edge of the marriage we went. Then, over a period of months, we quietly returned to each other.

Friends once told me the story of their near divorce. They were close to arriving at an amicable split when, one day after going to see their divorce mediator, they stopped for coffee at a nearby McDonald’s. While sitting there, they realized how miserable they were at the prospect of being divorced from each other. One of them said, “Let’s not do this,” and the other broke into a wide grin. They’ve been together ever since. For Matt and me, there was no such McDonald’s moment. We
both just gradually realized that together was the way we belonged—for us and for Zoë. We emerged from the crisis singed but stronger than ever. And I knew never again to trifle with someone’s heart.