What falls away : a memoir (34 page)

trusted you. You're supposed to do the right thing. Youn not supposed to fuck the kids.*'

Just then Sascha knocked at the door. "IVe got Andre on the phone/' he called.

"No, no!" Woody pleaded desperately, doubling over. "Don't tell Andre. Don't tell Andre. Don't tell him."

I picked up the phone and told Andre. "Woody's been fucking Soon-Yi."

"Oh, this is so humiliating." Woody was on the floor, groaning. "Oh, my stomach. Ohh, ohhh."

"What's that?" Andre asked.

"That's Woody, rolling on the floor," I said.

"Get him out of there right now!" ordered Andre, from California.

"I'm trying, but he won't go. What do I do? What do I do with Soon-Yi? Will you take her till the holidays are over? Till she can go back to school? She's your daughter too. I need help, Andre."

But Andre didn't know what to do. He was shocked and furious, horrified and disgusted. He wouldn't talk to Soon-Yi and he sure as hell didn't want her at his house in New York.

However I begged him. Woody wouldn't go. He talked m circles. He talked nonstop. He said everything I had ever wanted to hear during our dozen years. "It's conceivable that somewhere down the line we might even get married," he said to me. But I just kept saying, "I don't know, I don't know."

"I feel terrible," he said, "but we have to move on from here. I love you. I'm asking you to trust me. You can trust me. I will prove it to you over time. As horrible as this has been, it has shown me something, and right now you couldn't find a more trustworthy man on this planet."

"I don't know," I kept saying. "I have to take a bath."

When I went into my bathroom, I discovered little

Satchel crouching under the sink; he must have heard everything. I took him out to the baby-sitter.

Woody went in to talk to Soon-Yi: to tell her, he said, that he was wrong to have started a relationship with her and that it would not continue. My bath was drawn when he came back into my room.

"Please go away now," I said. "I'm going to take a bath. Please just go."

But he talked and talked and wouldn't stop talking until I gave up. I lay down on my bed exhausted. All those hours in that room—it was an existence unto itself. There were times when I expressed my rage and disbelief and horror, and there were times when he became again the man I loved and wanted and needed with all my being. At one point he kissed me and I, still crying hard, kissed him back. "Trust me," he said, "I love you." He was rocking me as if I were a little baby. "I know I did a bad thing," he said. "Shhhh. I can only promise you nothing like this will ever happen again. I will devote myself to making you happy. You'll see.

Finally I got him to go by leaving the room myself. He followed me, still talking, to the front door and out into the hallway, and he was talking when I pushed the button for the elevator, and while we waited, and even as the elevator doors closed.

I had a bath. I telephoned Matthew at Yale and told him there'd been a catastrophe.

Less than an hour later the kids were sitting at the dinner table. Sascha had told the older ones what had happened—but not Dylan, of course. Satchel knew what he knew. It was a stunned, silent meal. Woody walked right in and sat down next to Dylan at the table as if nothing had happened. He said hi to everybody and started chatting to the two little ones. One by one Lark, Daisy, Fletcher, Sascha, and Moses took their plates and went to their rooms, closing their doors.

I didn't know what to do. I went out, following them a little. Then, standing in the hallway, I said to Woody, "You can't just come in here and sit down at the table as if nothing happened. People have feelings, and very strong feelings." He told me to come into the living room, and there followed another hour of him talking and talking and me crying. I don't even remember what he said, and the whole time I was begging him to leave. Finally he went.

Nights were the worst.

"Please come over and talk to Soon-Yi," I asked Casey the following day. "Make sure she knows I still love her, she needs to know that. But I'm too angry to do it."

For the first time in my life I sought professional help. I saw to it that those of my children who needed it, including Soon-Yi, also received counseling to deal with the trauma. Woody encouraged this and paid for it. All the while I tried to see to It that life contmued as normally as possible for all of us. I got the children up at seven and fed them, teeth were brushed, they were dressed and taken to school at eight, when the baby-sitter arrived. The two youngest children saw and heard Soon-Yi crying, and although I tried, it was not possible to entirely conceal my own distress.

It took two weeks for me to reach a point when I could send the baby-sitter to Woody's screening room to take away his key. Until then he kept on coming to our apartment and he went on talking; each time he came over, and every time he called me on the phone, I came undone all over again.

We went to Frog Hollow that weekend: all the children, including Soon-Yi. In the lobby of our building I hugged her and told her I loved her.

"You're incredible, Mom," she said.

As a family we were in the habit of discussing everything, but the trauma of these last days and my own implosion

had prevented me from forming a coherent picture of what had happened. Still, I felt it was important that we find a way to talk, so I scribbled a note and used it to open a dialogue in our kitchen.

January 18 My children.

An atrocity has been committed against our family and it is impossible to make sense of it. You know that I share your pain and bewilderment and anger. But I feel the need to talk and think further with you. It is essential that none of us permit ourselves to be in any way diminished by these events—we must struggle to find a way to learn and perhaps even grow stronger through them. We have seen firsthand that there are terrible consequences to terrible acts, and therefore how crucial it is that we proceed through our lives with respect for others, and be guided by a sense of responsibility. You have seen the full measure of mv love for Soon-Yi, and therefore for each of you—my love for you is unshakable, and that is no small thing. Here, in this moment, in the bright light of pain, we have been able to define ourselves, to ourselves and to each other. We have been granted a perspective that only a trauma such as this could lend. Let us hold it close, never allow it to fade, and let us use it to enrich and enlighten our present, and to build our future.

Finally, know how grateful I am to each of you. You have brought depth and joy and meaning to my life. I love you beyond all words. Because of you, even my darkest days have not been without light.

Soon-Yi left the room. In the talk that followed, Daisy, who was seventeen, told us that over the last three years Woody had tried to initiate four intimate conversations with her. He had asked her how old her friends were when they began doing things with boys, and how old she was when she started fooling around, and what sorts of things she'd done. Daisy told us he'd said, "Tell me everything you've done that you wouldn't tell your mother. I promise I won't tell her." Woody had never talked to Daisy privately before, and she was uncomfortable with his line of questioning. She didn't have anything to tell him anyway, and she didn't stick around.

Lark said, "He probably didn't try with me because Jesse"—her football-star boyfriend, who was also present— "would have thrown him through the window." Then Jesse recalled a trip back to New York the previous summer in the limousine with Lark, Soon-Yi, and Woody. He'd been dozing in the back; opening his eyes, he saw Woody place his hand on Soon-Yi's thigh and caress it. He had told Lark, and she had refused to believe it. Fletcher remembered a moment the year before when he had walked into the laundry room and Woody had spun away from Soon-Yi. Sascha, Lark, and Daisy remembered that durmg the previous summer Soon-Yi had questioned them about birth control. Moses recalled coming into our study when Woody and Soon-Yi were sitting on the sofa watching a ball game. They both moved over so that Moses could sit down. Soon-Yi was wearing a miniskirt. As Woody moved, he dipped his head for a very long second and looked between Soon-Yi's bare legs.

Now I viewed his behavior with Dylan m a completely different light. I no longer believed he could control himself. I no longer believed he was dealing with his problems responsibly, I was no longer sure that his "inappropriate" and "intense" behavior with Dylan was not sexual. At ex-actly what pomt does it become child abuse? What kmd of

WHAT FALLS AWAY 257

person puts his thumb in a little girl's mouth for her to suck on? And when he was told by the therapist that it was not appropriate and no good for Dylan, what made him persist? The last time I caught him doing that had been when I came back from Vietnam. Dylan was six. Satchel was asleep when I u'alked into the kids' bedroom. Woody was standing next to Dylan's bed. He had his thumb in her mouth, and the nursery night-light was reflected m his glasses. "Please," I said, and he quickly pulled his thumb out of her mouth.

I redrafted my will. In the event of my death the children were to remain together m the care and custody of their adult brothers, Matthew and Sascha. I then remembered that only three weeks earlier I had signed papers that made Woody the adoptive father of Moses and Dylan. In horror, I called the lawyer, Mr. Weltz, who had set up the adoptions for Woody. I told him there had been a terrible mistake—I had not known the facts. Woody Allen had deceived me, deceived him, deceived the judge, and deceived the children. For months, maybe years for all I knew, he had been screwing one of my kids. He had taken pornographic pictures of her. He was completely untrustworthy. He was without morals or self-control. He was not at all the man I supposed I knew. He was not an appropriate father for my children. He was dangerous. We needed to go back to the judge and tell her. She would have to undo the adoptions, because we were tricked.

Mr. Weltz was outraged and said he would do everything he could to ensure the protection of my children, but he did not see how we could overturn the adoptions. A second legal opinion was far more promising; there was precedent m the state of New York for undoing adoptions on the basis of "fraud against the court."

I insisted that since I had been deceived into consenting to the adoption. Woody should agree to waive his custodial rights if I predeceased him. On February 3 we both signed a document to that effect. I attached a statement, which I

showed only to Woody, articulating my concerns about his behavior and my reasons for believing he would be an inappropriate custodial parent; and as proof I included photocopies of the Polaroids he'd taken of Soon-Yi. We sealed the documents and gave them to Woody's business manager to be kept in a vault, and opened only in the event of my death.

On the same day, unbeknownst to me at the time, Woody signed a second document in which he stated that he had no intention of abiding by the agreement we had just signed.

The few scenes I had yet to shoot for Husbands and Wives were put off for ten days. I don't know how I went back and filmed them. Woody's behavior to me on the set was gentle, apologetic, and caring.

But as the days went on and I reran the events in my mind over and over, I could not believe that the Polaroids were left out accidentally, as Woody claimed. He was not an incautious man. He was meticulous, he had a cleaning woman and a housekeeper; in twelve years, nothing in his apartment was ever moved or out of place. And he knew I would be in that room. It was his phone call that brought me within inches of the pictures. Why?

Perhaps, as my son Moses believes, deep inside Woody there was an unfathomable and uncontrollable need to destroy everything good and positive in his life, and so he tried to destroy our family. For him to have sex with one of my children, a child he had known as my daughter since she was eight years old, was not enough: he had to make me see, graphically, what he was doing. What rage did he teel against me, against women, against mothers, against sisters, against daughters, against an entire family? The pictures were a grenade he threw into our home, and no one was unharmed.

After January 13, I didn't leave him alone with any of my kids.

At one point, toward the end of that first week, I went to talk to Soon-Yi. She was sitting on the floor with the phone in her lap. I asked her when this had begun. "Senior year in high school," she said. Unbearable details emerged. 1 pounced on her. I hit her on the side of her face and shoulders. I went into the kitchen, crying. In her room I heard Soon-Yi sobbing, "I'm a bad girl. I'm a bad girl."

What were we supposed to do?

I went back into her room and told her I loved her. "He shouldn't have done this to us," I said. "We shouldn't he in this position."

She was my child, but I could not help her. I could scarcely look at her. We had become something else to each other. We had to go through this separately. In anger she threatened to kill herself. In anger I told her I hated her. It was a relief when she went back to college. I loved her, I missed her, and I worried for her, but it was hard for me to be near her. She gave me her word that she would not have any contact with Woody and promised that if he tried to call her, she would hang up the phone.

Panic attacks are visitations of undiluted terror. I have had four in my life, all between January and March 1992. Those were weeks of sleepless nights fiUed with rage and tears when I phoned Woody and expressed my fury at what he had done to us. Some nights he called me ten or twenty times or more and I'd hang up. Other nights I called him to say. Please don't leave me now, I'm so afraid. I couldn't let him go from my life, yet I could not even look at him. In my worst anguish, he was the one I needed most. But there had been so much damage. Now when I looked back over the years, I saw that they had been paved with lies and deceptions.

For my birthday Woody gave me three lovely leather-bound volumes of Emily Dickinson's poems, and he took me to dinner at Rao's.