Lies My Mother Never Told Me (24 page)

Nurse Linda said, “That's good, Eyrna. See, you're the only one who can make your grandmother eat.”

Kevin, just a few feet beyond the porch, who had been trying to rescue the 150-year-old lilac bushes from an invasion of fast-growing, choking weed trees, overheard this and came bounding up the porch steps. “Don't ever say that to her,” he said to Linda, his voice trembling with anger. “It's not her responsibility to make her grandmother eat. She's twenty months old, for God's sake.”

I'd never seen him this angry. At six or seven, Kevin had been the “hero child” in his family, the one who quietly went downstairs in the very early morning, after his parents' drinking binges, and turned off the oven that held the blackened and abandoned meal; he emptied the overflowing ashtrays; he searched for cigarettes smoldering in the corners of the couch and under the table; he washed the martini glasses and the shaker and poured whatever booze was left, if there was any left, down the sink. By the time his two brothers and his parents awakened, the house looked normal. Nothing weird going on here. Then, that night, they would start the whole chaotic, sordid dance all over again.

After she'd eaten a bit, my mother stood up on shaky legs, said she was tired and wanted to go back upstairs. Nurse Linda jumped up to help. “I'm fine, I'm fine,” my mother said, shrugging Linda off. She grabbed both sides of the door frame and slowly, deliberately, lifted one leg, then the other. She staggered a few steps, then grasped the stairway's wooden rail with a trembling hand and tried to pull herself up the steep stairs to her bedroom. We all had rushed to encircle her, to hold her if she fell, but it was Eyrna who stepped in behind her grandmother, placed her dimpled hands flat on Gloria's bottom, and pushed. “Me help, Gammy, me help you up stairs! Me push!”

 

When, a few months later, Gloria was once again able to drive, she relearned the topography of her neighborhood, inch by inch, mile by mile. She memorized the roads, her friends' names, their phone numbers. She taught herself to write all over again. She never let on that she didn't remember; she never asked a single question; she never asked for help.

This was one of my mother's favorite Willie Morris stories.

 

Willie Morris, the onetime editor of
Harper's
and best-selling author of the memoir
North Toward Home
had moved out to Bridgehampton after he'd left the literary life in New York. One of the main reasons my parents chose Bridgehampton as a place to settle was that Willie had made it his home.

On our first day in our new rental, the Vreeland house farther south toward the beach on Sagg Main Street, Willie, who was a renowned practical joker, decided to play a trick on Gloria. The phone rang, and Gloria picked up.

Disguising his voice and putting on an excellent local Bonacker accent which he'd perfected over the last few years, Willie said, “Hello, this here's Bob Wznyzfski of the Southampton Highway Department. We'll be arriving tomorra at, oh, three o'clock with the bulldoza and the wrecking crew.”

“What bulldozer? What wrecking crew?” my mother shouted, suddenly furious.

“Well, everything's in orda on this end—the papers all been signed for the new highway extension. It's only going to clip about, oh, ten feet off yer kitchen, nothing much—”

“What? Highway—what are you talking about? I just got here! I just rented this house!”

“Well, the ownas already been told all about—”

“Oh, why is this shit always happening to me? You can just go fuck yourself, Mr. Whatever-the-hell-your-name-is, that's all.”

And she hung up.

I had been sitting at the round, pockmarked wooden kitchen table, looking at the cartoons in a
New Yorker
magazine, listening to her side of this peculiar exchange. It was mid-June and a dense fog rolled in over the brilliant green landscape. Leading right up to the Vreelands' lawn lay an enormous, rich brown field with row upon row of young, bright green potato plants, stretching as far as the eye could see.

“Who was that?” I asked my mother, curious.

“Ah, no one. Some asshole from the Highway Department had the wrong number.”

Two minutes later, when Willie called back, howling with laughter, she realized she'd fallen prey to one of his infamous pranks.

“Well, goddamn you, Willie, you had me going,” she said, laughing with relief, a hand pressed to her heart.

O
N AUGUST
2, 1999,
THE
summer of my mother's cirrhotic collapse, Willie Morris died in Jackson, Mississippi, from a heart attack brought on by advanced congestive heart failure, the disease that had killed my father. Willie was only sixty-four years old and had also struggled with alcohol abuse for many years.

When I went upstairs to tell my mother, she stared at me blankly and said in a dreamy voice, “That's such a shame,” as if she knew this was the appropriate response but had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. At that moment, my mother's loss of memory seemed a blessing, for if she'd been herself, the news of her dear friend's demise would have sent her on a bender the likes of which I didn't even want to consider.

 

While I did not remember ever meeting Willie before our return to the States in 1974, he'd come down to Miami to visit us during our first winter back from Europe, and had within two days become the uncle Jamie and I never had. It seemed to us we had always known him, and he'd always been a part of our family. He was a sweet, modest, jovial teddy bear of a guy, quite a few years younger than our parents, with unkempt hair, in wrinkled extra-large Lacoste polo shirts, and rumpled khakis sliding off his hips. A natural storyteller, he had us rolling on the floor with stories of his childhood dog, Skip, and his great-aunt who'd survived the
Civil War but had found no one to marry because all the boys from her hometown of Yazoo, Mississippi, had been killed fighting. He imitated his maiden aunt's high, warbling voice as she used to call to him from the window at four o'clock in the afternoon, “Willie, tahm fa beyed! Come on eein an' hayave a wahrm cup o milk, nahw!”

During that visit he talked my parents into moving to Bridgehampton. Many of my parents' writer friends had already made the move to the area, and the idea appealed to them both. They would be close enough to New York for my mother, and far enough away for my father.

It was hard for Jamie and me to believe that this sweet, unkempt, easygoing man had been, during the sixties, one of the most important, artistic, and innovative editors on the New York literary scene. He had been appointed, in 1967, the youngest editor in chief of
Harper's
magazine. At that time of great civil unrest, he published the works of some of America's most creative liberal thinkers, causing an uproar. He printed Norman Mailer's
Armies of the Night
in its entirety, without break. He published a big chunk of William Styron's hugely controversial novel
The Confessions of Nat Turner,
and helped launch David Halberstam's career as one of America's preeminent journalists. Willie stood opposed to the war in Vietnam, believed strongly in civil rights, and took a left-wing attitude to the other hot issues of the day. Eventually, he caused too much upset for the magazine's conservative owners and was fired from
Harper's
in 1971. Around that time he published
North Toward Home,
a best-selling memoir about his childhood in Mississippi, his education, and his move north. Nowadays, though, Willie Morris is best known as the author of
My Dog Skip,
a young adult novel about his childhood pet, which was a national bestseller and made into a Hollywood film in 2000.

 

There is a large, framed black-and-white photograph by Jill Kre
mentz that still hangs over the bar of Bobby Van's restaurant in Bridgehampton. In it, standing in front of the old Bobby Van's across the street, are Truman Capote, James Jones, John Knowles (author of the literary classic
A Separate Peace
), and Willie Morris. I used to love looking at that photo, but now it only upsets me, because the loud, echoing, overpriced new Bobby Van's has nothing to do with the quiet hangout the writers were drawn to in the seventies and early eighties. Once, while I was standing near the bar, waiting for a lunch table, I heard a woman ask, “Who're they?” pointing up at the picture. And a fellow beside her answered, “Oh, just some old writers that used to live around here a long time ago.”

 

During our first summer in the Hamptons, when I was about to turn fifteen, my dad gave me a copy of
In Cold Blood,
and I read it, gripped and horrified by every page. I became fascinated with the book's author. What I really wanted to know, and asked my father, was how Truman Capote knew so much about these people, not just the victims, but the murderers too? My father explained that Capote had gone to Kansas and spent a long time researching the book and had gotten deeply involved in the players' lives.

“I know him,” my father said. “He lives around here. He hangs out with Willie in Bobby Van's.”

“You guys
know
him?” I practically shouted, as if we were talking about Mick Jagger. This made my dad laugh. After a moment, he added, in case I had plans to marry Truman Capote, “He's a homosexual.” Over the years, I'd announced my desire to marry Keir Dullea, who'd been in the first film of
The Thin Red Line
and spent a great deal of time in our apartment when I was three; then I'd transferred my affections to Johnny Hallyday, the French pop star who rode a black motorcycle; and most recently, I'd announced my intention to marry Willie Morris in about ten years.

My father proceeded to tell me a strange tale of Truman's rela
tionship with the murderers. Truman, my father said, had fallen in love with weaker, subservient Perry Smith, and that after Truman witnessed Perry's execution by hanging, he had a nervous breakdown from which he never fully recovered. My dad also told me that Perry Smith had slit Mr. Clutter's throat because he'd been dared to do it by his dominant lover, Dick Hickock, the tougher and meaner of the two thieves. Perry didn't want to come off as a wimp in front of Dick, who constantly teased him for being a
girl
. My father believed—as Truman apparently did—that Dick had shot Mrs. Clutter and her daughter Nancy, who were bound and lying in their beds upstairs, though Dick denied this to the end.

“How do you know this?” I asked, mystified.

“Well, Truman talked to me about it. And he talks a lot to Willie. I'll introduce you to Truman, if you want,” my dad concluded mildly.

A few days later, I walked across the street to meet my dad in Bobby Van's. My father said, “There's Truman.” He was alone, sitting in the very back of the now empty restaurant, knocking back martinis. My dad stood up and walked me over to the table.

“Hi, Truman. This is my daughter, Kaylie. She just read
In Cold Blood
and wanted to meet you.”

Truman looked up from his martini and said, “Hi, Jimmy! Why, darling girl, how
sweet!
” in the highest, most effeminate voice I'd ever heard in a man. We shook hands; his was limp and damp and I was struck speechless. I couldn't believe this funny-looking, boiled shrimp of a guy was responsible for the massive, macho book I'd just read. Despite Truman's strange voice and effeminate demeanor, my father treated him with extreme deference and respect, which for some reason impressed me.

On the way home, I asked my dad what he would do if two guys broke into our house like the guys did in the book.

“First of all, I'd never let them tie me up. Very calmly, I'd say, Look, kill me if you're going to, but I ain't lettin' you tie me up.”
He turned his eyes toward me. “Never let anyone tie you up,” he said. “Never. If they're gonna kill you, they'll kill you anyway. If there's a chance they're vacillating, you're better off untied. Show 'em you're not scared. If someone was going to hurt my family, that's the only reason I'd kill anybody anymore. I'd kill 'em first chance I got.” He said this so simply, so serenely, that I felt a chill run up my spine. I was so glad he was my father.

 

Willie had been my father's closest friend in the last two years of his life. And like some kind of modern-day Pied Piper, he was a man to whom children and animals were naturally drawn, and they adored him absolutely and blindly. But showing up consistently had never been one of Willie's fortes, though his heart was filled with kindness; at times, he'd disappear for weeks, refusing to answer the phone. Then he'd amble into Bobby Van's and find his crew sitting there at the bar or at a quiet corner table, knocking back the booze.

My father once told me, while he was teaching me to drive, speaking in the same quiet and measured voice he'd used to describe his own father's troubles with booze, that Willie was an
alcoholic
. He said Willie was trying these days to stick to white wine because he couldn't handle the hard stuff at all anymore.

One dreary winter night in 1977, I wrote up a proclamation naming Willie as my godfather. My father, Willie, and I solemnly signed it, at first as an amusing joke. But as my father's illness progressed, Willie seemed to take his responsibilities more seriously. My father, at the end of his life, really needed Willie, and Willie came through for his old friend, a real trouper. I was a senior in high school that winter, and Willie took my mother and me to visit colleges, because my father was too sick to go.

Only weeks after my father died, I had my senior prom and was graduated from high school. At that time I could have asked Willie for anything, and he would have done his best to give it
to me. My fabulous twelfth-grade English teacher, Ms. Weaver, didn't have a date to the prom, and he escorted her—because I asked him. He came to my graduation and practically held my mother up through the ceremony. The valedictorian, a boy named Andrew Fisher, mentioned my father in his speech, and I sat like a statue on the stage among my classmates, stony eyed.

Willie took the tapes my father had recorded in the hospital in his last weeks and finished
Whistle
for him. But the tragedy of my father's untimely death sent Willie over the edge, and in his grief, he gave up the white wine and went back to the bourbon he'd been trying so hard to avoid the last several years.

Willie fell into a deep depression after my father died, and a few years later, while I was still in college, he left Long Island for good and returned to Mississippi.

Four years passed, and when I was a senior at Wesleyan, I called to tell him I'd made Phi Beta Kappa, and that I'd won the hundred-dollar promise he'd set forth on the day I'd left for college. Willie had been Phi Beta Kappa, as well as a Rhodes Scholar. He sent me a hundred-dollar check the next day. I learned later that he was flat broke, and this was a huge amount of money for him, and I felt guilty for holding him to his promise.

 

I had to go to his funeral, so Kevin booked us tickets on a flight to Jackson, Mississippi, with two layovers each way because that was all that was available on such short notice, and we packed Eyrna up for the long, hot, arduous trip.

Willie's casket would lie in state under the dome of the old state capitol in Jackson, with the service and funeral following in Yazoo City, his hometown, on August 5, my thirty-ninth birthday.

We left our bags at the motel and drove our rented car straight to the old capitol building. The wet heat in Jackson felt like a clawing, angry presence. Willie's close friend Dean Faulkner Wells, the niece of William Faulkner, was standing outside on
the steps, smoking. She was with several people I didn't know. I'd met her numerous times, with Willie, so we went over and said hello. It took her a moment to place me; then, her eyes tearing, she said Willie had left life exactly the same way he left parties. With a cigarette smoldering in her shaking hand, she reminded us of how, late in the evening, when a few last friends were gathered around talking, Willie would simply sneak away, retire quietly, without saying good-bye to anyone. This was true, and I suddenly felt the great chasm of the last decade, and of being cheated of a last opportunity to say good-bye.

We found Willie's wife, JoAnne, and I hugged her stiffly, formally. She seemed immobilized, struck numb by grief. I told her my mother was too sick to come. She looked at me with her dark, velvety eyes and asked me what was wrong with Gloria. Tired of the bullshit, the pretenses, I said she had cirrhosis and Korsakoff's syndrome and had almost died. I told her Gloria had completely lost her memory.

“My mother was an alcoholic. She died of cirrhosis at thirty-six,” JoAnne said. “I know exactly what you're talking about.”

And suddenly her marriage to Willie no longer seemed such a mystery.

 

Under the large, echoing dome of the state capitol, Eyrna played on the white marble floor with Willie's twenty-two-month-old step-grandson, while towering above their heads, illustrious persons, including politicians and Hollywood producers, arrived from all over the country, forming a line to pay their respects. David Halberstam, William Styron, Pat Conroy, Richard Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Winston Groom, and John Grisham were among those present. I saw my childhood friend David Rae Morris, Willie's only son, whom I hadn't seen since my last visit to Mississippi, in May 1986. It was the spring when Dennis and I decided to drive down to New Orleans. We'd stopped to see Willie in Oxford, Mis
sissippi, where he was then writer in residence at Ole Miss.

By 1986, Willie's drinking had progressed to such an extent that he was barely functioning, and I had trouble imagining how he conducted his classes. He pulled himself together and took us on a day trip through the cotton fields of the Delta, his old black Lab Pete, a stray he'd picked up in Bridgehampton, panting and drooling in the backseat. Willie sipped Scope the whole time from a bottle he kept between the front seats, and smoked Viceroys nonstop, so his car was cloudy with smoke.

On our last night, we went to dinner at Dean Faulkner and Larry Wells's house, and met her nineteen-year-old son, John-Mallard, known as J-Bird. We drank and drank and drank and finally, around midnight, we all—except for Larry Wells, who begged off—piled into Dennis's car and drove to the old Oxford cemetery to visit William Faulkner.