Lies My Mother Never Told Me (19 page)

I wanted to call Kevin and apologize for my behavior that morning, but I didn't know where he was—probably somewhere in Midtown, visiting clients.

In the early evening, when she'd awakened in her private room, grumpy and in pain, Dr. Brenner arrived, checked out ev
erything, and then asked me to step out into the hallway. There, he squeezed my arm and said, “I'm going to talk to your mother about her drinking.” I felt flushed with gratitude: finally someone was going to face her down.

Dr. Brenner led the way back into the room.

“Mrs. Jones,” he said, “after you go home, you must get control of your drinking. You should only have one drink a day, preferably red wine.”

Had he never taken a course, not even a two-hour seminar, on alcoholism, in his seven years of medical school? Didn't he know that alcoholics can't drink
at all?
Didn't he understand that with one drink, the obsession is triggered? He was giving her permission to continue drinking, just as she had always drunk.

I walked out into the shiny, brightly lit hall, blood pulsing behind my eyes. Down by the elevators, a familiar figure in a pinstriped suit stepped out from behind a pair of sliding doors, then stopped and looked around. It was Kevin. I hadn't expected him—or asked him—to come. He saw me, raised his hand, and began walking briskly in my direction, his arms outstretched. My heart suddenly felt light as air and began to flutter wildly in my chest.

As a result of my having told Dr. Brenner about my mother's drinking problem, every time they brought her meal tray, they brought her a shot of bourbon in a plastic pill cup. I gather their greatest concern was that she not go into withdrawal on their watch. Her drinking problem, however, appeared to be none of their concern.

“Why are they doing this?” she asked me accusingly. “They think I'm an
alcoholic
or something. I don't need this.” She pushed away the tray and the offending shot of bourbon.

While I was around, she didn't touch the booze. I started to wonder if I wasn't completely insane. Perhaps she wasn't an alcoholic after all. Perhaps, unlike me, she
could
control her drinking. Suddenly I had the liberating thought, Yes, she's really all right.

On her third day in the hospital, Kevin and I walked into her room in the late afternoon to find my mother holding out her water glass and her old friend Ed Trzcinski—a renowned drunk—pouring scotch into it from a silver flask, his hand shaking so badly the metal rattled alarmingly against the glass. Addie Herder, the collagist, was there as well; and Cecile, who stood off to the side, looking annoyed but smiling nervously at her old friend's antics.

My mother turned her head toward us with a dismissive glance, then took a demure sip from her glass.

“The fun's over, folks,” she said. “Carry Nation has arrived.”

I felt everything inside me drop, as if I were standing in a fast-moving elevator. She had metamorphosed back into her old self, the Red Queen holding court.

Triz, as he was known, threw me a contemptuous look. “Amazing how two people who were always so much fun could raise such a wet blanket!” he said with a barking laugh.

I felt Kevin's warm hand move protectively to the center of my back. I gazed at Triz stonily, which clearly annoyed him and that was fine with me, because I had never liked him, not even as a child. He had been my mother's lover long before she'd met my father, and Triz never let anyone forget it. My father had tolerated Triz's presence, in small doses, the way one might tolerate a good friend's loudmouthed kid.

Ed Trzcinski had cowritten one successful play in the early fifties,
Stalag 17
, based on his experiences in a German POW camp during World War II. He'd had this one big Broadway hit, followed by a Hollywood film, and then spent twenty years embroiled in a lawsuit against the producers of the TV show
Hogan's Heroes
, who'd stolen his idea and not paid him a cent. He never finished another play. Behind his back, my mother called him The Playwrote.

I glanced at Kevin and saw such a pale, drawn look of dismay
on his face, I could feel a big attack of rage simmering in my chest.

Kevin murmured, “Let's go,” and we slipped out into the hall without another word, leaving them to their revelry. We could hear them talking and laughing all the way down the hall.

 

Kevin refused to give up his flying habit, so I had to go back to therapy to learn to stay calm on planes. Within a year—but not without a few anxiety attacks in airport bathrooms—we'd traveled to Mexico, Belize, Paris, and California, and down to North Carolina to visit his mother.

Just before Christmas 1994, we flew down to Miami for a long weekend to visit Don Sackrider, to discuss the future of the James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship. Don lived in a beachfront condo on Key Biscayne. The weather was unusually warm for December, low eighties and clear skies. Don knew we were avid scuba divers and drove us down to Pennekamp State Park on Key Largo, about an hour and a half from Miami, to explore their protected reefs. After our dive, Don suggested going farther down the causeway to Marathon Key, and stopping there for lunch at an outdoor restaurant he liked.

After lunch we kept driving west along the causeway, cerulean green water stretching into aqua blue to the rounded horizon on either side. We followed the declining arc of the sun until we reached Bahia Honda, a state park shaded by enormous coconut palms.

“Why don't we drive to Key West for dinner?” Don suggested. “It's only forty minutes from here. If you guys share the driving on the way back, it won't be so bad. We can make it back to Miami by midnight.”

Don had spent a good deal of his life traveling, and being adventurous, in his opinion, is what makes travel interesting. We readily agreed and got back into his big, comfortable Lincoln Continental with cream-colored leather seats.

In Key West, Don parked the car at the edge of Old Town, and we got out and stretched. We found ourselves in the midst of some weird mass exodus, people of every age walking slowly and joyfully down the street.

“I wonder what's going on?” Don mused. “Shall we?” He opened his arm, and we stepped into pace with the crowd. The shop windows and palm trees along the street were bedecked with Christmas lights, a strange sight, with everyone suntanned and in shorts and T-shirts and summer frocks. One toy store window had a train set, complete with a snowy alpine village, “Jingle Bells” playing, and a miniature Santa hanging from a nylon string, flying round and round on his sled. When the street came to an end, I realized with a sudden jolt that we were standing at the far end of Mallory Square, and the crowd was gathering to observe the sunset, excited as children waiting to enter a circus tent.

It was much more crowded than the last time I'd been here. Jugglers, acrobats, and tourist kiosks on wheels dotted the square. From the neon-lit open bars at the corner of Duvall Street came Jimmy Buffett's voice, still wasting away in Margaritaville.

“It's Sackrider luck,” Don said delightedly.

The sun's red glow outshone the bar's neon lights, the ocean spread out below it like a wrinkled blue silk sheet sprinkled with rubies. An awed silence descended over the square as all faces turned toward the horizon. We weaved our way to the edge of the concrete pier for a better view. Kevin stood behind me, and I could feel his solid chest against the back of my head and shoulder blades. Just as the sun touched the waves, two bagpipers began to play the first chords of “Amazing Grace,” the hope-filled, mournful notes skirling out over the crowd, dissipating as they touched the water, brave and unapologetic and resonant as only a song about grace can be.

Two and a half years ago I had stood on this square, straddling my rented bicycle, and stared at this setting sun and asked
God for help. At once the past and present seemed to fold over each other, and I was my old self, standing here, alone and afraid, believing I was broken and unfixable; but I was also myself, here, now, no longer the person who stood outside of the circle of human experience, jealously looking in. My life suddenly seemed filled with possibility. The sun was sinking so fast I could feel the roundness of Earth and its quiet rotation beneath our feet, and the planet's tiny fraction of space in the vast universe, and for the first time in my life, I felt the true nature of something immense and indefinable, but immeasurably tender and forgiving, holding me in the palm of its gigantic hand.

You see
, it seemed to whisper,
I've been here all along
. All I'd needed was time, but time was never something I'd been willing to let pass slowly, at its own pace.

My breath was knocked out of me and my knees buckled and I dropped to the ground and sobbed, folded in two as the bagpipers continued to play. I felt Kevin's hands grip my shoulders and his knees pressing into my back.

Long after the sun had set and darkness fallen, I sat there, trying to pull myself together, to breathe, swallowing hard. I riffled through my handbag for twenty dollars to give the bagpipers. I stood on shaky legs, looking up at Kevin. He silently took the money from my hand and turned to find the musicians.

Kevin came back, gazed at me for a long time, and his lips turned into a tentative half-smile. Don, standing a little ways back, came forward and placed his hand gently on my shoulder. I began to babble, to try to explain, but words simply couldn't do justice to the enormity of what had just happened to me. In all my years of drinking and experiencing moments of ecstatic communion with humanity—feelings of such warmth and overpowering love that I thought myself one with the universe—never, never once, had I experienced anything close to this, and I was stone-cold sober.

After I'd stabilized and gained some sober time, it was not quite as difficult for me to be around my mother, and once in a while, on the nights I taught my class in the MFA Program at Southampton College, I would sleep in my old bedroom in the Sagaponack house.

On this particular late-winter night, my mother had set the table elegantly, with wineglasses and her good silver, and waited for me to come home. It was around nine when I walked in, exhausted from the long day. As she sautéed shad roe, I picked up the
New York Times
TV guide from the top of the television, folded to today's date. She'd checked off certain programs in ink. I turned the pages and saw that she'd done the same for every night of the week, almost like an appointment book, and I suddenly noticed how quiet and empty the house felt around us.

She'd prepared steamed broccoli and boiled new potatoes smothered in salt, pepper, and olive oil. She sat at her usual place at the head of the long antique table, with me on her immediate left, the same table that had made the journey from Paris some twenty years ago. I didn't know what to talk about. I never knew what to talk about with her. Dinners at this table seemed to me more like a hostage negotiation than a time for relaxing conversation.

My mother, sipping inexpensive white wine poured from one of those magnum bottles, launched into the latest news. At least now she'd stopped pouring me wine. A famous writer friend, she told me, was “back in the booby hatch.”

“What kind of booby hatch?” I wanted to know, because with Gloria, this could mean anything.

“I don't know what kind of booby hatch,” she said, exasperated. She was never a detail person. She said that the writer had developed an addiction to sleeping pills.

He had been calling my mother weekly from the place to update her on his progress—why he called her, she had no idea, but she thought maybe it was because she could still make him laugh. Last week he told her he'd thrown the finger paints at the finger-painting therapist. “Don't you know who I am?” he'd shouted at her.

Most recently he had called Gloria to tell her that his doctor had talked him into making an amends list, and on a piece of paper, he'd written down the names of all the women he had slept with. He then presented this to his long-suffering wife, when she came to visit on Family Day.

“What a stupid thing to do,” my mother said with dismay. “Now she's furious at me.” She knocked back her wine and refilled her glass.

“You slept with
him
?” I cried, aghast.

“No, you dope. She's mad at me because now she thinks I've got something over her. I'm the only one of all her friends who wasn't on the list.”

K
EVIN AND
I
MOVED INTO
a railroad flat apartment in March 1994. For the first few months I felt like I did as a little girl when my best friend Lee Esterling used to sleep over on a Saturday night and I felt so happy it was like a national holiday. But with those sleepovers, I knew it would end on Sunday afternoon, a dark cloud on the horizon.

“Now we can have a sleepover every night!” I said to Kevin. Every morning upon waking, it still seemed a perfect miracle to me that he was still there. But Kevin was not free from the effects of his own childhood traumas. We had bizarre communication problems.

“Shit. I forgot to buy half-and-half,” I might say late at night. Kevin would sigh and get up off the couch, heading for his coat. “Where are you going?” I'd ask, perplexed.

“Didn't you just ask me to go buy half-and-half?”

After we'd been living together for a few months, his taciturn moods became more pronounced, staying with him for days, and he had trouble sleeping. When I tried to coax him into talking about it, he shut himself up in the far end of the apartment, the room we'd turned into his study, at times staying there all night. I had trouble sleeping without him and paced the bedroom in a fury, feeling rejected and victimized, watching the thin strip of yellow light under the closed door. He had newspaper clippings,
magazines, papers, and books spread out across the floor, as if he were desperately searching for something.

Panic set in. I was certain he was planning to leave me. I had no idea what was wrong. When talking calmly didn't work, I started shouting at him, insulting him, as if that would help, but he remained distant and silent. The more I hollered, the more he withdrew, to the point where I felt like hitting him. I told a sober friend I wanted to kill myself, and she urged me quite vehemently to call the Caron Foundation in Pennsylvania, which had a rehabilitation program for children of alcoholics.

The lady who answered the phone asked me if I was suicidal, which freaked me out. Absolutely not, I told her. She explained the program was a six-day intensive during which I would have no communication whatsoever with the outside world. Also, she recommended I not talk to any Caron “alumni,” because knowing what was coming would decrease the effect. There was an opening in two weeks, and she made me pay the entire fee, almost $2,000, by credit card over the phone. “Why can't I pay when I get there?” I asked.

“Because we've learned from experience that unless people pay up front, they cancel, or don't show up. It's insurance.” She chuckled, but I did not see the humor.

Later that day, when Kevin got home from work, his face ashen with exhaustion and tension, I told him I'd called the Caron Foundation and would be going in two weeks to their ACOA workshop, then burst into tears. He came toward me and held me. “I have to get help too,” he said. “I don't know how to live with anyone. Don't worry, we'll work this out. When you come back, we'll go shopping for an engagement ring.”

I woke up the next morning, cured. I immediately wanted to call the Caron lady back and cancel, but since I'd already paid the money—which I could hardly afford—I knew I had to go. Now I understood why she'd laughed.

The six-day workshop at the Caron Foundation was the most intense and painful experience I've ever gone through in my life. It was the gateway to a lifelong journey of dealing with my anger and my terror of abandonment.

 

Kevin and I got married in August 1995, a week after my thirty-fifth birthday. Peter Matthiessen, an ordained Buddhist priest, married us in the garden of his zendo in Sagaponack. Kevin's brothers, Joe and Jon Heisler, stood as his best men, along with Jamie. We were a little worried about how Kevin's two staunchly Catholic, elderly aunts would react to the Buddhist ceremony; they were greatly reassured when my mother introduced her old friend Pat Kennedy Lawford to them as “the sister of the president.”

A few weeks later, as we were walking up Second Avenue, we passed a children's furniture store, and I stopped to look in the window at the beautiful, shining white cribs and brightly colored bedding. “Oh, look how pretty!” I said, turning to him with a smile, but he had fled to the end of the block and was standing there innocently, waiting for the light.

By February 1997, Kevin's fear of fatherhood had diminished somewhat, and I wanted a baby desperately. We had been trying to conceive for eighteen months and were getting ready to start infertility treatments. On one of my Southampton teaching nights, exhausted from stress, too tired to drive back to the city, I decided to stay at my mother's. I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a slice of apple pie when my mother came in from a dinner party. She was shivering, in a flimsy black knitted coat.

“Do you realize what today is?” she asked me. I had no idea. “Today is February twenty-seventh, Jim's and my fortieth anniversary. Can you believe we've been married for forty years?”

This seemed a strange way to put it. “That's amazing,” I responded.

Still shivering, she poured herself a big glass of scotch. She said, “I really need to get myself a good winter coat. I have nothing to wear out.”

“What about your mink?” I asked, surprised.

She seemed startled for a moment, and then annoyed. Apparently she realized too late that she'd backed herself into a corner. “I gave it to Cousin Anne,” she said abruptly, dismissively, then puckered up her lips and stuck out her jaw petulantly, as if she expected me to say something judgmental or nasty. Remember, I told myself, restraint of pen and tongue…Keeping my voice steady and devoid of sarcasm, I said, “Wow. How did that happen?”

During the Christmas holidays, she told me, she'd been invited to a party at John and Julienne Scanlon's house in Sag Harbor. John Scanlon was the public relations guru who'd made a fortune fixing the tainted reputations of such giants as not only a major tobacco conglomerate but also the Catholic Church, and a cardinal who'd been caught having an affair. John and Julienne Scanlon were friendly with my mother, but not close friends. All I knew about Julienne was that she'd been married to James Earl Jones. Once, at some cocktail party, I was sitting on a couch next to my mother and Julienne Scanlon, when my mother said to her, “How was it, being married to James Earl Jones? I'd like to ask him to marry me, that way I wouldn't have to change my stationery.”

My mother continued her story: “Their house was done up all Martha Stewart.” There were candles flickering in all the windows and an enormous Christmas tree in the foyer. It was a very cold evening, but the Scanlons' enormous, opulent house was warm and filled with music and laughter, and the crème de la crème of Hamptons society.

Gloria arrived in her full-length, ebony-colored mink with a shimmery chocolate brown satin lining—a gift from Walker. The
mink was the only trace of Walker remaining, much like Clementis's fur hat in Kundera's
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
. I tried to recall exactly the novel's opening: the Czech Communist leader stands bareheaded on a balcony overlooking a victory parade with his number two man, Clementis, beside him. It's so cold that the solicitous Clementis takes off his own fur hat and places it on the leader's head. Photographs are taken. But within a year, Clementis is accused of treason and executed, and quickly airbrushed from the photo. The only thing left is his hat.

My mother was telling me the names of all the rich and famous people arriving at the party, but I was thinking about
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
and can't remember what she said. Nevertheless, Gloria, standing in the brightly lit foyer of the Scanlons' house, was surprised to find her own niece, Anne Mosolino, in a maid's uniform, greeting guests and taking their coats as they entered. Anne had married a local boy, a builder like her older brother Max, and during the busy summer months and winter holidays, Anne picked up extra money by waitressing for different catering companies.

“Hi, Aunt Gloria,” she said, and reached out to take Gloria's mink coat.

For a few hours, my mother drank and watched gloomily as her niece played servant to the rich and famous, carrying around trays stacked with fancy hors d'oeuvres and drinks. “It just pissed me off,” she told me. “That's all. I felt sorry for her.”

As Gloria was getting ready to leave, Anne approached, buried under a pile of coats, including my mother's mink.

“Take it. It's yours,” Gloria said, pushing the mink coat back into Anne's arms.

And my mother went home coatless in the icy night.

“She just took it? That seems a bit strange,” I now said, thinking, How could she take a fur coat from a drunken old lady on a freezing cold night?

“Why shouldn't she take it?”

I was assailed by the weird image of Anne, only around five feet tall, in my mother's long mink coat. She'd look like a child playing dress-up. This whole story perturbed me.

“You're just mad because you wanted me to give it to
you,
” my mother said. “Because you'll never have a man rich enough to buy you a ten-thousand-dollar mink coat.”

First of all, if I'd wanted a mink coat, Kevin most certainly would have gone out of his way to buy me one. We were getting ready to try in vitro fertilization at $10,000 a pop, and insurance would only cover the first attempt. But I'd never had a fondness for mink coats or any other coats made of animal fur. This was probably a result of seeing a
Life
magazine article when I was six or seven that showed horrifying pictures of baby seals being clubbed to death and skinned. Also there is no fucking way Walker spent $10,000 on a mink coat. Maybe two or three thousand.

I could no longer restrain myself. “You're completely out of your mind,” I said, my tone brittle with contempt.

“And you're an asshole,” she said with finality, and lit a cigarette.

“And you're a woman without a mink coat.”

After a while, since she didn't say anything, I said, “I'm going to bed. Good night.”

I could feel her eyes boring into my back as I made my way across the long kitchen, toward my room.

 

A few weeks later, I learned I was pregnant. And then everything happened at once.

James Ivory, the film director, called and told me they had gotten the money together and were starting preproduction on
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
. “We're going to start shooting in Paris in October,” he told me. I could tell by his tone that he was delighted.

Jim Ivory and his producing partner, Ismail Merchant, had first optioned
A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries
in 1991, and that option money kept me from having to find a real job for the last six years.

“I have some news too, Jim,” I told him now. “I'm going to have a baby at the end of October.”

“Well, that's inconvenient.” He didn't sound quite so delighted. But we both laughed, and there was a silence, after which he said, “You'll just have to bring the baby with you down to North Carolina for the second half of the shooting.”

A week or so later, the director Terrence Malick announced that he was starting production on his own adaptation of
The Thin Red Line
, the second novel in my father's war trilogy that had started with
From Here to Eternity.
Then, not long after that, my fourth novel,
Celeste Ascending
, was bought by HarperCollins. It seemed to me that, as the Georgians of the Caucasus say, “God stumbled over the mountains and dropped the horn of plenty upon our land.”

 

Terrence Malick invited Kevin and me to visit the set of
The Thin Red Line
in Queensland, Australia, over the summer. But mine was a “high risk” pregnancy, and there was no way I could fly that distance at six or seven months pregnant. My mother went, traveling with her close friends Barbara Hearst and Betty Comden.

Upon their return, Barbara Hearst called me, terribly upset. According to her, my mother had drunk continuously, from the moment she got into the limousine that picked her up at her door, all through the plane ride, during the visit to the set, and during the return trip. There had not been a moment when my mother wasn't incapacitated from drink.

Barbara said she'd had no idea the problem had gotten that bad. “Did you know Gloria was that bad?” she asked me. Of
course I knew. She'd been this way for a solid decade; she'd just been able to hide it. But now, instead of feeling righteous, I felt guilty, because the implication seemed to be that I should have done something to stop my mother.

Barbara told me she was organizing an intervention. I had looked into this option several years earlier and discussed it with experts in the field. What I'd learned was not encouraging. For an intervention to work, the entire family, friends, and anyone else directly involved with the problem drinker have to be in agreement, and present a cohesive, united front. I did not know the man Barbara had hired to plan the intervention, although he was a professional with a good reputation, but I knew already that Barbara would not be able to convince my cousins and my brother and many of my mother's friends to go along with it, and I told her so. Jamie did not know Barbara well and certainly would not trust her to organize something as personal and emotionally difficult as an intervention. I told Barbara she had no idea what she was getting into and the plan was bound to backfire.

Nevertheless, Barbara called our cousin, Max Mosolino, to elicit his help. As soon as they hung up, he called Gloria and told her what Barbara was planning. No doubt Max felt he was being loyal, but just as I had feared, Gloria did not wait to hear Barbara's point of view. She simply shouted, “Off with her head!” and exiled Barbara from her inner circle. Of course Gloria could not afford to lose some of her closer friends, who were perhaps only peripherally involved, like Betty Comden, so she simply decided that Barbara was the only one to blame.