Lies My Mother Never Told Me (32 page)

 

On the day she was discharged, Eyrna and I walked behind her wheelchair as a hospital nurse rolled her down the hall. They couldn't wait to be rid of her, it was clear from the battered look on the nurses' faces. Gloria shouted at everyone she passed, “You can all go fuck yourselves!” Elbow on the armrest, hand in the air, her middle finger proudly extended, Gloria waved slowly from side to side, as if she were Queen Elizabeth II parading before her subjects in an open car.

Gloria did not remember her three-week stay in the hospital. Once home, she remained bedridden for months, telling her visitors that the local news crews were in a frenzy to find out who, in the Hamptons, had contracted the extremely famous West Nile
virus. According to Gloria, the ambulance that carried her home from the hospital was chased down Montauk Highway by several news vans with their cameras sticking out of their windows. “I'm a local legend!” she'd tell her company. “This is a very
famous
disease, you know, and
I
had it! The phone rang constantly, but I didn't talk to them. They parked down at the bottom of the driveway for days!

“Can you imagine?” she'd say, “
I
was the only one who got it!”

 

In March, now a Blue Belt, I went to a Saturday-morning class, one I didn't usually attend. To my great dismay, the teacher, Mr. Andy, told us this was going to be a sparring class. Frightened, I tried to move to the back, but Mr. Andy called me out and pitted me against a seventeen-year-old male Blue Belt. As soon as we'd bowed to each other and taken our fighting stances, I started giggling. The boy began to circle me, stepped in for a front leg front kick, and I reciprocated with a back leg round kick but was so nervous I forgot to pivot my standing foot. I heard a snap and felt a pain in my right knee that was almost as bad as childbirth. I fell to the floor with a scream. My stomach flipped over itself, and I thought I was going to throw up right on the golden parquet floor. For the next couple of days, I waited to see what would happen. The swelling abated, but I had lost all control of the lateral movement in my knee. On Tuesday I went to a sports surgeon and learned that I'd completely pulverized my ACL—the anterior cruciate ligament—in my right knee. Dr. Silver recommended surgery as soon as possible. I had the choice of “harvesting” the central third of my own patellar tendon, or doing an allograft, a “harvest” from a cadaver. Dr. Silver said with the cadaver “harvest,” recovery took about half as long.

“I want to get back to tae kwon do as soon as possible,” I told Dr. Silver. “So let's go with the cadaver.”

On the day of my surgery, Kevin took off from work and waited with me. As I lay in the rolling bed prepped for the operation, I began a litany of all the things Kevin would have to take care of if I died, and he talked me down, right up until I was wheeled into the operating room. I awakened to a searing pain in my knee, and his smiling face peering down at me. I was wheeled to a recovery room, where four of us were settled into recliners with our legs in the air and ice packs on our knees. We were given fruit juice and cookies.

It took me three months of rehabilitation to be able to walk without a limp, at which time I resumed tae kwon do classes. It took me another three months to be able to pivot at all on my right leg, wearing a brace.

When I returned to see Dr. Silver for my follow-up visit, he walked me down the hall and stopped in rooms along the way, pointing me out to patients and other doctors and nurses in the practice. “Three months,” he told them, “and she's back doing tae kwon do!”

Here is a story my mother never told anyone. The tale, however, spread like wildfire through Sagaponack and neighboring Bridgehampton. Employees of the post office and general store and other witnesses each had their own version, which when pieced together, created the following scenario, told to Jamie and me by our cousin Michael Mosolino, some two years later.

 

After Gloria recovered from her first bout of cirrhosis in 1999, she traded in her two-door Dodge behemoth for a minivan, which she took to calling The Fat Lady. Gloria was imagining the wonderful outings she would organize for Eyrna, in which we would fill up the minivan and head to the beach for picnics, or for garden parties with her friends who also had grandchildren Eyrna's age.

Every morning Gloria drove to the Sagaponack Post Office at exactly eleven to get her mail. She knew her mail would have been sorted and placed in her box by then, and she wouldn't have to wait. The post office was half a mile from her house. On this day, in the spring of 2004, she got into her minivan with her dog Lily, the obese German shepherd, in the seat beside her, and pulled into one of the parking spaces in front of the little village general store and post office. In the two minutes it took her to go inside and collect her mail, a large delivery truck pulled into the driveway just behind and perpendicular to The Fat Lady, blocking the way.

Gloria got back into her car and honked the horn several times. The truck driver did not appear.

“Well fuck you, then, you asshole!” she shouted out the window, put the car in reverse, hit the gas, and plowed The Fat Lady into the truck. At the appalling sound of twisting metal and shattering glass, a small crowd gathered on the porch of the old post office–general store, including the truck driver. They watched impassively as she repeated this maneuver several times. The delivery truck suffered no damage whatsoever, but the back end of The Fat Lady was completely smashed in, the rear bumper hanging by a thread. “Take that, you son of a bitch!” she shouted out the window, to the amazement of the gathered crowd.

She swung a U-turn and lurched home, the back end of the minivan caved in, the bumper dragging and making sparks on the ground.

The Fat Lady was totaled, the damage irreparable. Gloria was forced to trade her car in for scrap and buy a brand-new minivan.

I
N
J
UNE
2004,
TWO MONTHS
after my knee surgery, I attended a seminar of American writers in Caen, Normandy, to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the D-day landings. I was still wearing my imposing neoprene and metal leg brace, but I wasn't about to turn down this opportunity. If I could walk, I could go. So I went.

Richard Price, my teacher from Columbia, was also invited. I hadn't seen him in several years, but now he called me a few times to make sure I was still going. He seemed nervous about being in a strange French city without his French publisher or a translator or a guide. I told him he had nothing to worry about, that I'd translate for him if the need arose. By now, Richard was hugely successful. He'd written a number of bestselling and critically acclaimed novels, including
Clockers,
which was made into a Spike Lee movie, as well as several screenplays that had become box office hits.

The Centre Régional des Lettres de Basse-Normandie in Caen, our host, did not have a lot of money to spend on accommodations, but the hotel, which had once been a monastery, was a quaint, nicely appointed space with small, low-ceilinged bedrooms. The local Calvados was flowing freely in the evenings, and many strange, disjointed political discussions took place. I translated for our French hosts, as did Jérôme, our representa
tive from the Centre Culturel, who was the only one besides me drinking pear juice.

On our last day, the Centre hired a tour bus with a guide to take us to Omaha Beach. I took two seats for myself so I could stretch out my right leg in its brace. Apparently it was the guide's first day on the job, and his English was far from fluent. He started out the tour with a garbled lecture on the centuries-old friendship between our two nations. Having grown up with French and French accents, I could decipher some of what he was saying, but most of the American writers were straining, mouths agape, their faces frozen in expressions of total incomprehension, as the guide waxed forth with grand gestures and words like
Lafayette, Jefferson
, and the
Independence Declaration.

Richard was stirring impatiently in the seat behind me. He grumbled through the first twenty minutes of this and then said to me, “Go up and tell him we don't want a lecture on American history. Tell him to talk about D-day and the landings.”

The guide must have been pushing forty, and he had a wide-open, innocent face with big blue, sad eyes. I felt sorry for him, but I got up and moved through the rows of seats to the front of the bus, and told him in French what Richard had said.
“Ils veu-lent que vous parliez du débarquement.”

The poor man looked positively petrified, but he bravely launched into his speech.

He stretched a hand out flat, making a horizontal motion and declared, “We 'ave a French bitch.” He placed his other hand a few inches above the first. “Ze Nazis are on top of the bitch. Under ze bitch are the
Américains.
And they are fighting over zis bitch.”

“What bitch?” asked Richard from behind me.

“He's saying
beach,
” I translated, caught up suddenly in one of those fits of laughter that only escalates the more you try to swallow it.

“So vey are fighting and fighting over zis bitch. It is a long fight for ze bitch. And finally, ze
Américains
win ze bitch.”

“Good, I can't wait to hear what they do with her next,” muttered Richard.

“Vey 'ave now the bitch under control, so now it is ze time for to make in ze water large erections all around ze bitch. Vey do this…”

“I had one of those once, as I recall,” Richard called out, and the busload of American writers erupted into howls of laughter. By now I was laughing so much I could barely breathe to translate. I figured the tour guide was talking about the temporary floating Mulberry Harbors that had been constructed around Omaha and Arromanches beaches so the Allied ships could disembark their matériel. I tried to stop laughing long enough to figure out what the guide was now trying to explain.

“And vey do this because why? Because vey 'ave too many nuts. Vey must to 'ave sree nuts or less.”

“I thought it only took one nut, although two is better,” Richard offered.

“I think he's saying knots. Knots. The ships carrying the matériel were too fast. They had to slow them down to three knots or less in order to dock.”

“How can you understand what he's saying?” Richard asked suspiciously, poking his head through the space between the seats. “I think you're just making this up.” I knew about the floating ports from my visit to the beaches with my father in 1973.

“And now we will present to you an emu,” our guide pronounced.

“An emu? Where?” Richard stood up and looked out the windows in all directions. “They have emus in France?”

The tour guide, opening a pamphlet, blew out his chest and began to recite:

Hymn
, I thought. He's trying to say
hymn. Ee-mu
.

“Is he…is he reading ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers'?” Richard asked in horrified disbelief. “Hey!” he shouted toward the front of the bus. “Hey! There were Jews there, too, you know. And they sure as shit weren't singing that
emu!”

My stomach ached, and I had tears streaming from laughing.

 

By the time we disembarked at the American military cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, which lies at the top of the cliff leading down to Omaha Beach, all possibility of decorum and solemnity was lost. It was a hot, sunny, beautiful day. I tried to compose myself as I walked slowly toward the lines and lines of white crosses and intermittent Stars of David that spread out in perfect symmetry, shrinking into the distance in their even rows, but the tour guide's speech kept interfering. I still felt oddly light-headed from laughing so hard; I hadn't laughed like that in years.

We were there two weeks after the June 6 sixtieth anniversary festivities, which had been attended by many heads of state, including George W. Bush. On French TV, a news clip had shown the U.S. president failing to stand for the old veterans until President Jacques Chirac leaned over and quietly urged him to his feet.

Now, dozens of buses were disgorging tourists into the parking lot, many of them German. Inside the cemetery people were talking loudly, joking and smiling and horsing around, taking pictures of themselves in front of the American soldiers' headstones.

When I was growing up in France in the sixties, the war was still strong in everybody's mind. There were whispers among the shop owners on the Île Saint-Louis that the concierge a few doors down from us had been a
collaborateur
and had helped the Nazis
round up Jews. So many people said they'd been in the Resistance that it seemed the whole country had been fighting against the Germans. The black-and-white war films I'd watched on TV as a child had left me with nightmares of Nazi jackboots marching down cobbled streets, the sound growing louder and louder as they came for the good guys, holed up in some dark apartment.

The American tourists were cavorting around as much as the Germans. There seemed to be a lot of kids and teenagers on vacation. Annoyed, I wandered off by myself to the farther reaches of the cemetery, where the hordes rarely ventured. I suddenly felt very old.

I remembered how quiet the cemetery had been on that cold December day in 1973 when I'd come here with my parents. We were the only visitors. The landscape—the cemetery's grass, the trees, bushes, and the beach—had seemed washed of colors, all blending in sepia tones like an old photograph. The tide had been out, and the beach seemed to stretch for miles toward England, where the choppy sea and dark, cloudy sky merged on the horizon. The rusty iron antitank barriers, shaped like giant
X
s, had still marred the vista, a frightening reminder of what had taken place here. I wondered if they would still be visible today at low tide.

Finally I looked down the path through thick, flowering shrubs to the beach below, now bustling with chattering tourists. My knee was aching and I did not want to limp all the way down there, but I felt I had to. I made my way with mincing steps down the steep path. It was high tide and the beach was just a narrow, rocky strip that looked very much like any other beach in the area. The tourists seemed to be standing around, waiting for something to happen. I tried but could not conjure up a picture of the scene in 1944.

I'd also been to Omaha Beach once before our visit in 1973. When I was nine months old, in 1961, my mother and I accom
panied my father on a business trip. He was writing dialogue for the American sections of the screenplay
The Longest Day,
based on the book by Cornelius Ryan. My father's friend Romain Gary, the renowned French author, soldier, and diplomat, was writing the French dialogue; Erich Maria Remarque, the German author of one of the greatest antiwar novels ever written,
All Quiet on the Western Front,
was in charge of the German scenes; and David Pursall and Jack Seddon took on the task of writing the British dialogue, after Noël Coward declined.

My father combed the D-day beaches and tried to imagine what it must have been like. This was only sixteen years after the war ended, and nothing much had changed in the landscape. The German fortifications were still intact, and from his position on the beach, the pillboxes stared down ominously from the bluffs. I'm certain he could still hear the explosions and the shooting, the shouting and crying of the wounded.

When we visited the beaches in 1973, my father told me, his eyes watering from the cold or from emotion, that in 1944, after he'd recovered from his ankle surgery in an army hospital in Memphis, he'd received orders to return to combat duty with a regiment that was soon shipping out for Europe. He knew he would have been part of the invasion force and was certain he would not survive. “I knew my luck had run out,” he told me. So he went AWOL and pretended to be insane—or perhaps he really was a little insane—and started fights in bars until the army saw fit to give him an honorable discharge.

There is a photograph of him on the set of
The Longest Day
with Peter Lawford, looking down the barrel of a rifle, perhaps checking it for authenticity. Another photo shows my father talking with Darryl Zanuck, whose back is turned, only a cigar extending from his mouth. My father is smoking a cigarette and grabbing a bottle of French wine by its neck.

As research, my father toured the Normandy shore from Utah
Beach, ten or twelve miles farther east, to Omaha Beach. He had no trouble imagining what the men must have felt, facing German artillery and machine-gun fire. There is a wonderful description of it in his nonfiction book,
WWII
, which re-created the war from the soldiers' points of view; it is a synthesis of his own recollections, analysis, anecdotes, and graphic art from the war. In his words, D-day looked and sounded much like Steven Spielberg's version in
Saving Private Ryan:
“The terror and total confusion, men screaming or sinking silently under the water, tanks sinking as their crews died inside, landing craft going up as a direct hit took them, or grating ashore to discharge their live cargo into the already scrambled mess, officers trying to get their men together, medics trying to find shelter for the wounded, until out of the welter a certain desperate order began to emerge, and men began to move toward the two bottleneck exits. I sat there until my friends began to yell at me from down below, and I fervently thanked God or Whomever that I had not been there.”

There were more artists at Normandy than at any other battle in World War II. The Germans may not have known where the Allies planned to invade, but the Allied photographers and writers did. Paintings show men with their arms shot off; bodies slung over the iron crosses on Omaha Beach, like casual crucifixions; a battlefield execution of a German soldier, blindfolded and bound.

My father described some extremely graphic carnage in
The Longest Day
, but the Hollywood censors were displeased. His final assessment of the film was that it did not honestly portray war and warfare, especially the carnage suffered by the Americans on Omaha Beach. They removed all of the soldiers' language, which my father had already softened in an attempt to pass the Production Code board's litmus test. Geoffrey Shurlock, the Production Code administrator, objected to the “casual profanity” and vulgar dialogue:
crap, stuff it, motherlover, SOB, bastards, jeez, damn, puke;
all had to go. Shurlock's conclusion: “We are
concerned with what seems to us to be an excessive amount of slaughter in this story. We realize that it is impossible to tell the story of the invasion of Normandy without indicating the staggering loss of human life. We do urge you, in those scenes you stage, to minimize the dramatization of personal killings. We think that such an effort on your part would avoid the ‘bloodbath effect.'”

My mother, in order to lift my father's spirits, took to calling the administrator No-Shit Shurlock. My father's response to No-Shit Shurlock's letter: “What the fuck do they think war is? What did they think Omaha was, if not a ‘bloodbath'?”

Ultimately, my father wrote a blistering ten-page memo to the studio criticizing the final script of
The Longest Day
, demanding that his name be removed from the credits. Cornelius Ryan, however, wanted full screenwriting credit anyway, and fought the producers to have his name appear alone on the screen. He won his case, so my father's little revolt against the Hollywood machine was moot.

My father wrote the following in 1963, in an article for the
Saturday Evening Post
, as a result of his experience on the set of
The Longest Day:
“Most deaths in infantry combat are due to arbitrary chance, a totally random selection by which an unknown enemy drops a mortar or artillery shell onto, or punches an MG bullet into, a man he has never seen before—and perhaps never does see at all! Such a death is totally reasonless and pointless from the viewpoint of the individual, because it might just as well have been the man next to him. It only has meaning when it is viewed numerically from a higher echelon by those who count the ciphers. And for that very reason it is a much more terrifying death to the individual soldier and to an audience seeking ‘meaning.'”