Lies My Mother Never Told Me (5 page)

My dad, when he wasn't teaching, remained sequestered in the dark garage, which he'd turned into his office, using an old pool table as a desk on which he spread out his research materials. He'd been paid a sizeable sum to write the text for a book on World War II art, which he would call, simply,
WWII.
That, along with a new three-book deal from Delacorte Press, put us back in the black. “Jim wrote us right out of debt,” our mother would proudly say.

When his class was finished in June, we rented a house in the small hamlet of Sagaponack, two miles east of Bridgehampton, New York. Bridgehampton was still, in 1975, a rural, quiet farming community that in the summer attracted a more “artsy” New York crowd. Several of my parents' writer friends had already moved to the area. At the time, it was not unusual to walk into Bobby Van's, the local pub, and find Willie Morris, Truman Capote, Irwin Shaw, John Knowles, James Jones, Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Matthiessen, Winston Groom, George Plimpton, or any number of other writers, sitting around shooting the breeze.

Bridgehampton was close enough to the city for my mother, and far enough away for my father, who was trying to finish
Whistle
, the third novel of the World War II trilogy he'd begun with
From Here to Eternity
and
The Thin Red Line
.

That summer, Willie Morris took Jamie to his first major-league baseball game; a friend had given Willie seats behind the dugout. He said to Jamie, pointing toward a man sitting nearby,
“Look, Jamie, look! There's Willie Mays! We'll get his autograph after the game.”

Jamie said, “Who's Willie Mays?”

“Who's Willie Mays?
Who's Willie Mays!
” cried Willie. “Why, you're just a Frog, boy! I'm gonna make it my mission to teach you about this great country of yours.”

Willie started a local softball league called the Golden Nematodes, named for a potato-destroying bug that was the bane of the local farmers' existence, and put Jamie to work as an outfielder. “You! Frog!
Throw
that ball to first base!” Willie would shout, and Jamie would laugh and do his best.

My father talked me into trying out for the local community theater group, the Spindrift Players. The group's director was an accomplished actor who was also the nighttime bartender at Bobby Van's. I landed the part of the little Catholic nurse in their summer production of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
. The play was a big success and had sold-out performances six nights a week for a month. Just fifteen, in my stage makeup, I looked twenty-four, and soon realized that if I didn't wash it off after the curtain, I could go out drinking with the other actors and stagehands. I asked my father's permission, and he let me go; I'm not entirely sure why. He didn't seem worried. Maybe he made some kind of arrangement with the director; someone always made sure I got home. Personally, I never had so much fun in my life, and decided that I wanted to become an actress. For the next two years, I tried out for every Spindrift and school play and focused entirely on this goal.

In September, my parents bought an old, run-down farmhouse that sat at the top of the only hill in Sagaponack. My father started to design his renovations while my mother went back to Paris to pack up our apartment. Our Paris apartment had huge double doors, but it turned out my dad's beloved pulpit bar didn't fit through the Sagaponack house's doors, so he had the construc
tion crew take out a whole wall and add twelve feet to the small living room to accommodate it.

 

Growing up with a writer is a strange thing. I competed for his attention not only with the other family members and my parents' various friends, but also with all of my father's characters. At dinnertime during that cold and lonely first winter in Sagaponack, he'd come down from work exhausted and tell us what was going on with his characters, as if they were real people who hung out with him upstairs in his attic office.

The common foot soldier Bobby Prell, who began his literary career as Robert E. Lee Prewitt in
From Here to Eternity
, and was reincarnated as Bob Witt in
The Thin Red Line
, now, in
Whistle
, was languishing in a VA hospital with severe gunshot wounds in both legs. The doctors were considering amputation. My father was very upset.

“See,” he told us, “he's up for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but if they amputate his legs, he won't get it. They never give it to cripples.”

“Can't you just make it so he doesn't lose his legs?” Jamie asked, perplexed.

“Well, it's not really up to me,” our father said, struggling as if his own best friend were lying in the hospital and he couldn't do anything to help him.

After several weeks of vacillation, he came down, looking relieved and happy. “They took away the sulfa drugs and his legs are beginning to heal! He's going to be okay!” he told us. “He ain't going to lose them after all and he's going to get his medal.”

“Yes!” we shouted. That night, Willie Morris came over for dinner and we had a party, with champagne and ice cream for dessert.

 

I found in
Go to the Widow-Maker
a strange refrain—Lucky, while keeping up with Ron Grant's drinking, warns him to watch it, that if he doesn't, his drinking could become a problem. Any normal person reading the book will be stunned by the amount of alcohol the characters consume.

My father always thought he was watching it, aware of the dangers, since his own father had died as a direct result of alcoholism. But when people admire you and circle around you and compliment you and you have money and you can live in the most wonderful places on earth, and you adore your family, there could be no reason in the world to stop.

He was slowly dying of congestive heart failure and he knew it. And he continued to watch it but did not stop, long after it had already affected his health and, consequently, his work. Soon he could no longer climb the stairs to his office. He had elevator chairs installed on both staircases to carry him up and down. He worked tirelessly and without self-pity, right to the very end. And yet he never finished
Whistle
, his last and most important novel.

 

Many years later I found a little red spiral stenographer's notebook in the back of a drawer filled with papers, in my mother's house. It's my father's meticulous record, written in pencil in his familiar block letters, of everything he ate and drank during the last year of his life. The first date is June 20, 1976, and the last is May 1, 1977, eight days before he died.

From that day in June until January 14, 1977, when he was admitted to Southampton Hospital for the first time and stayed there two weeks, the word
wine
is written at every meal, even breakfast, followed by a 0.

What prompted this meticulous record keeping?

In Willie Morris's memoir of my father,
James Jones: A Friendship
, Willie describes a day in 1976 when he drove my father to Southampton Hospital for tests. My father didn't need a special
ist to tell him he was getting worse, that it was going to be bad news. On the way to the hospital, Willie writes, my father wanted to stop in a bar, empty at that early hour of the afternoon, and have a few drinks. My father ordered a bottle of white wine, and, concerned, Willie asked him if he was sure this was a good idea. My father said to Willie, “I can't drink no more, goddamnit,” and these glasses of wine were his last.

In his stenographer's notebook, my father even recorded how many cigars he smoked each day (usually four or five); but why did he include the word
wine
if he wasn't drinking in the first place? Perhaps he felt it was important that he wasn't drinking
at all
, as if each meal without alcohol could remedy his failing heart. He was watching it for real now. Meticulously, with an iron-fisted resolve. Right up until he was admitted to the hospital for the last time.

His last entry, on May 1, 1977, reads:

 

This story of my mother's is hard to beat.

 

Once, during their many visits to New York during the sixties, Jim and Gloria met Frank Sinatra for a quiet drink in the dark bar of the Blackstone Hotel on East Fifty-eighth Street, where they always stayed. Sinatra had appeared in the film version of
From Here to Eternity
, and in many ways it had resurrected his career. Afterward he remained friends with Jim and Gloria, and they got together periodically in New York.

On this occasion, there was a fire or a bomb threat on the street, and the hotel was evacuated. A huge crowd formed inside the police barricades, and Frank Sinatra grew very anxious. He walked up to a uniformed policeman and quietly asked, “Hey, buddy, do you think you could let me through?”

And the cop answered, “Who the fuck do you think you are, Frank Sinatra?”

I'
VE NEVER SEEN ANYONE WORK
as hard as my father did through his last winter and spring, trying to finish
Whistle.
Meanwhile, I was applying to colleges, and he was concerned I wasn't sufficiently prepared. He decided to give me a reading list and got out his old first editions, the ones he'd read himself as a young man. I read
A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Light in August,
and
Pale Horse, Pale Rider,
all books with terrible endings. He was planting the seeds for my future education, knowing he most likely wouldn't be around for much longer to help me.

During my dad's last hospital stay the first week in May 1977, one night, his heart stopped several times. Dr. Diefenbach could not believe he had survived to see the morning. The next day, my father was serene yet seemed somewhat distant and bemused as he told us, his family gathered around his bed, that he'd had a vision the night before of his own death.

He saw himself lying in the center of an object shaped like a giant vegetable steamer, and as each leaf of the object opened, he'd felt his body floating upward, unmoored. He knew instinctively that if the last two leaves, the ones behind his head, opened, he would die. With all his will and strength, he mentally forced the leaves to close over him again, and he knew he would not die that night. He told us it had not been a painful experience, and he had not been afraid.

Upon hearing this, my only thought was for myself, But what about me? How am I supposed to deal with this?

Later, sitting in the waiting room in shock, in despair, my mother told me that while Jamie and I had been home asleep the night before, our father had suddenly sat straight up in the Cardiac Care Unit, tried to pull out the IV tubes, and shouted for her to get him a glass of scotch.

“What did you do?” I asked my mother.

She told me she poured him a big glass of scotch, because at that point, with only hours left, what damage could it possibly do him?

He lived another two days.

But he was no longer himself. He continued to talk into his little tape recorder, leaving explicit directions for Willie Morris, who was going to write down the end of
Whistle
. But he was slipping away. I felt a marked change in him, felt he no longer cared, really. He tried, and it took great effort, to focus and listen to me when I came and sat by his bedside and talked about school and what I was feeling. I told him our lilacs were in full bloom and tomorrow I'd bring him a bouquet. He said, “No, don't. I hate to see flowers cut…. My mother used to cut roses and leave the petals in a bowl of water in her parlor. God, I hated that smell….” His voice drifted off. That was more than he'd ever told me about his childhood home. I swallowed hard to stop myself from bursting into tears.

Then, on his last day, he made a strange request: “You've got to get your mother to stop drinking so much.”

“I will, Daddy,” I said, nodding quickly. I would have done anything—anything—for him. I had no idea what I was promising.

 

He died later that day. Dr. Diefenbach helped him along with a massive injection of morphine. I watched the light go out of my
father's eyes. He arched his back, squeezed my mother's hand until their knuckles turned white, and the heart monitor took much too long to flatline. I was overtaken by nervous laughter, and Dr. Diefenbach pulled me out of the glass room and gave me a 20m Valium. The image of my father's green eyes clouding over has haunted me all my life. It was 7:00
P.M.
on May 9, 1977. I was sixteen years old.

Television stations interrupted their broadcasts with the announcement. People called from all over and showed up for days. The writer Harold “Doc” Humes, whom my parents hadn't seen in years, arrived in a flatbed truck with a rock that had a history somehow tied to Buddhist belief. It took four men to lift it and place it in our garden.

James Jones's lengthy obituary in the
New York Times
was written by one of the most acclaimed critics of our time, Herbert Mitgang. In a slightly begrudging tone, he focused on the critics' dismissal of my father's novels, especially those not dealing with war and warfare, and intimated that James Jones had sold out. “Unlike Hemingway, Mr. Jones continued to be criticized as a writer, regardless of his themes. Unlike Hemingway, he did not avoid writing for films and turning out books clearly designed for the commercial market. And unlike Hemingway, he had gone to Paris, not in his youth, but in his flourishing mature years.”

I was so incensed I called the
New York Times
and complained. The gentleman on the other end of line listened to me, then offered his sincerest apologies. Somehow, Liz Smith heard about my call, and, herself displeased with the obituary, she wrote about it in her
New York Daily News
column.

Many years later, my mother told me that back in the sixties, in Paris, there had been some trouble between Herbert Mitgang and William Styron, apparently over a woman. My father, naturally, had taken his good friend Bill's side, and Mitgang had never forgotten it.

 

My mother collapsed on the living room couch and lay prostrate for days with a bottle of scotch on the floor beside her, while worried friends stood vigil. In a kind of twilight state, she ranted that she was going to walk into the ocean and drown herself. “Where's my daddy?” she kept saying. “I want my daddy.” Her daddy had died of a heart attack on New Year's Eve when Gloria was nineteen years old. But this wasn't
her
daddy, this was
my
daddy who had just died.

I thought shouting this at her would make her snap out of it. I told her to pull herself together. When that had no effect, I went out to the local bars where by now everyone knew me quite well, and sometimes I didn't come home until after sunrise. I felt like I had a category 5 hurricane raging inside me, which seemed to quiet down only after many, many, many drinks, when I was calmed enough to feel the intensity of my grief. I'd lie under the hammock on the wet grass in the garden and cry until I was wrung out. I did not eat a solid meal for eight weeks, because every time I brought food to my mouth, I saw my father's green eyes looking up at us as the light slowly left them. No religion, philosophy, or any other type of belief system had been imparted to me in childhood, and after my father's death I had no idea where to look for solace.

The one thing my father had always been adamant about, the one plan he would never diverge from, was that Jamie and I go to college. He'd finished only two semesters of college himself. He'd studied at the University of Hawaii for six months, before Pearl Harbor. And after the war, in 1945, he took advantage of the G.I. Bill and came to New York to study writing at NYU. When he told his literature professor that he wanted to be a writer, the man tried to talk him out of such a hopeless aspiration, and suggested journalism school. My dad had hated New York, been desperately lonely, and couldn't wait to go home. So he quit school, went back to Illinois, and wrote
From Here to Eternity
.

I knew my father had been a good father and a kindhearted and wise man. But now that he was gone, now that he was no longer there to protect me and teach me about life, I wanted to know: How good was he, as a writer? What would people say about his work in, say, fifty years? Would he be dismissed? Or would people still be reading him when his great-grandchildren went to college? I decided to read his books.

That spring and summer, I read his big novels, beginning with
From Here to Eternity
. I had no concept of literary technique and read strictly for story. In my narrow view of things,
Jaws
and
Moby-Dick
had quite a lot in common. Both were about crazy men chasing after huge white malevolent predators from the deep, and
Jaws
was a lot easier to read. But I could hear my dad explaining that just because
Moby-Dick
was harder to read, did not make
Jaws
a better book.

In
From Here to Eternity
, the common foot soldier, a thirty-year man, Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a dirt-poor boy from a long line of western Kentucky coal miners, is good at two things—both of which he learned in the army—playing the bugle and boxing. He is so good a bugler that he played taps at Arlington in front of presidents. He's a world-class boxer too, but he won't box anymore, because he blinded a man in a match.

Sergeant Warden, Prewitt's superior, despises everyone equally, but in secret, he tries to protect his men from their officers, men like Captain Dynamite Holmes, who wants to win the boxing championship more than anything, because it will advance his career. Captain Holmes orders the company to give Prewitt The Treatment, and they punish him mercilessly. But Prewitt still refuses to fight. He will not break the solemn vow he made to himself. So he suffers The Treatment in dignified silence.

Staff Sergeant Warden watches all of this, doing what he can when he can to protect the stubborn, prideful, ignorant soldier in
his care, who hasn't learned yet that he is nothing but a number. Warden despises Captain Holmes, and thinks one day he'll make a fine general.

“Good generals had to have the type of mind that saw all men as masses, as numerical groups of Infantry, Artillery, and mortars that could be added and subtracted and understood on paper. They had to be able to see men as abstractions that they worked on paper with. They had to be like Blackjack Pershing who could be worried about the morality of his troops in France so much he tried to outlaw whorehouses to save their mothers heartache, but who was proud of them when they died in battle.”

Here, I thought, as my heart started to pound inside my chest, was a tiny corner of James Jones's Higher Truth revealed.

When Prewitt, after suffering The Treatment for several weeks, plays taps at lights-out in the Schofield Barracks quadrangle, the hairs on my arms stood up, as if electrified.

“This is the song of the men who have no place, played by a man who has never had a place, and can therefore play it…This is the song you drink five martinis every evening not to hear…This is the song you'll listen to on the day you die. When you lay there in the bed and sweat it out, and know that all the doctors and nurses and weeping friends dont mean a thing and cant help you any, cant save you one small bitter taste of it, because you are the one that's dying and not them.”

Was that how
he
'd felt, lying in the hospital those last few days?

 

A few weeks after my father's memorial service at the Bridgehampton Community House, I received a phone call from Leo Bookman, an agent at the William Morris Agency. He'd seen my picture in the
New York Times
, taken with Lauren Bacall when we
were coming out of the service. He told me he'd discovered Candice Bergen and thought I had “that look.” Would I come to New York to meet him?

I look attractive in that picture. I'd lost twenty pounds over the preceding two months and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Being too thin is usually a good thing for photographs.

I took the train into the City by myself and went to the William Morris offices on Sixth Avenue. Leo Bookman had a corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the New York skyline. He asked if I'd give up my plans to go to Wesleyan if I got a part, say, on a soap opera—I could perhaps take a couple of night courses at NYU if it meant that much to me. Without even thinking about it, I balked. I told him I'd promised my father I'd go to college and that was what I was going to do.

“Too bad,” he said with a rueful smile. “I could have made you a star.”

On the train going home, I put
From Here to Eternity
down on the seat beside me as the conductor, an aging man in a blue uniform, probably a veteran, came over to punch my ticket.

“Great book,” he said, handing me back my ticket and nodding toward my book on the seat. “Best book I ever read.”

He moved away, down the corridor between the seats, punching tickets, talking to passengers, his hips bouncing against the backrests. I was so stunned I couldn't find the words to tell him my father had written it.

 

Next I read
The Thin Red Line
.

Private Bell, missing his wife, wanting to survive, after his first combat experience on Guadalcanal, reflects, “Nothing had been decided, nobody had learned anything. But most important of all, nothing had ended.” He suddenly understands with soul-shattering clarity that there is no way in hell he can survive. He is only a number, a statistic, and his individual life counts not at all.

And yet—every one of them, the common foot soldiers, including Bell, soldier on. They know, they understand now, that the individual does not count, and has not counted since rich men figured out how to send their minions into battle to gain more riches. The buck-ass privates, as James Jones called them, were not fooled into believing for a second that what they were doing was fighting for Freedom, or Liberty, or The Pursuit of the American Dream. Their pointless pride, their self-annihilating loyalty, is not for their superior officers but for their companions.

Bell and his buddies throw themselves in front of bullets to protect one another, and to prove to themselves that they are not cowards. And the truly best fighting machines, the fearless ones, are the sociopaths, the ones who see the whole thing as a child's game of cowboys and Indians, who've never had so much fun or been given so much power in their lives. They try to one-up one another, for a stripe, for a promotion, for a medal—some of them even collecting enemy trophies, like ears—and their commanding officers stare at them with distaste, and a certain begrudging admiration.

Jamie had asked our father once, “How come you never show us your medals, Daddy?” He went up to his office and dug them out. He had two medals. A Purple Heart, for the head wound he received on Guadalcanal; and a Bronze Star. He explained, in a strange, distant, hollow tone, that they were not for display. Common foot soldiers never wore their medals, only their Combat Infantryman Badge; it was a matter of pride. He showed us that too. A plain, thin, rectangular blue pin with an embossed rifle, surrounded by a laurel wreath.