Bettyville (23 page)

“I'll be all right, Betty, I'm okay,” he told her. We were all fine—fine, fine, fine.

I felt like there was something I should say to my father and every time we spoke, I tried to, attempted to let him know that I loved him in some way that didn't feel like some kind of parting gesture that would be too hard for us to manage.

I kept waiting for him to reach out to me too, to say something, to let me know that I was okay, that I was all right as far as he was concerned, but there was nothing in the end like that. I guess he had stopped trying, or maybe he had seen enough of who I had become to just go quiet.

He had looked up the Fire Island Pines on the map or read about it in some kind of magazine or tour book. “I know what goes on in that place,” he said to me on the phone. “I wouldn't think of you there.”

My father's hands were letting go of me.

. . .

Late one afternoon at
Vanity Fair,
the phone rang and I heard my mother's voice, excited, in a kind of unusual, keyed-up way. At a Christmas luncheon, she had met a woman with a piece of jewelry unlike any other she had seen, a bracelet purchased in Istanbul. She had to have one too. It was essential. Oxygen. She was racing, too driven, too wound up.

She wouldn't talk about my father. I could tell she was on the extension in her bedroom. She didn't want him to hear.

I was editing a piece centered on an interview with the mistress of a national political leader. Her quotes were mainly one-syllable words. It was a challenging effort to make it all seem revelatory.

It was not long before Christmas; Graydon had gone to dine with a writer whose daughter—Graydon's assistant—would, in the not too distant future, set the Dior-draped fashion closet partly ablaze while sneaking a cigarette.

All day long, the company mail conveyance, which looked like a train in a children's zoo, had delivered gift after gift to Graydon's office. A photo by Annie Leibowitz of his family was propped up by his office, displaying the cherubic children in Santa hats and holiday pajamas, et cetera. So perfect and adorable were they that I would have gladly drawn a mustache just above the baby's smile.

Betty had convinced the bracelet's owner to take a photo of the jewelry, which she was sending. Betty had decided that she would mail the picture to the American embassy in Istanbul and ask someone there to “run out” and get her a copy of it. It was all a little crazy. My mother seemed to feel that the State Department owed her some sort of favor. I guess she needed a little something; the bracelet appeared, something to hope for, something to change the way she was feeling.

She never went out of the house anymore. She was scared to leave my father. She was caged.

My job? To find the address of the embassy and help word the letter. “That's what you do,” she said, “you write. I never ask you to do anything.”

She didn't. I had to beg her to let me do anything for her. She was too proud.

I said I was going nuts. I told Betty about the deadline. She wanted the bracelet. I told her about the mistress. “How,” she asked, “did you get mixed up with that?”

Finally, I managed to get her off the phone. I was so busy; she was not one to chat, but this time she wanted to hang on. Was it really the bracelet she wanted? Did she want me to say that this was not our family's last Christmas together, that my father was not so sick as she was finally letting herself see?

For a solid month I had been shut up in the East Side apartment of the author of the piece, Tessa Neely—a famous reporter with a reputation for destroying lives, personal assistants, and editors. For many days I had desperately begged and cajoled her to actually write, while she, ignoring my pleas, worked out with her trainer and attended Christmas gatherings.

Finally, we had a draft of what seemed hundreds of pages. Graydon, bored with it all weeks ago, had approved the piece but ordered it cut by thousands of words. Tessa was peeved, hissing.

Now as Betty was reluctantly saying good-bye, all at the magazine were scurrying, though Tessa still refused to budge. This is “fucking history,” she cried again and again, jabbing my arm with the end of her pen but turning soft as a baby as she waved to Graydon on his way out. She was wearing a pink Chanel suit. It was getting later and later. The managing editor, Jan, was not pleased by all the delay.

Everyone was irate at Tessa and at me for not being able to corral her. I was so angry that when Tessa went to the bathroom, I threw her pink jacket out the window. It floated down through the air like a big, colorful bird. Tessa demanded so much. Betty demanded so little. But the bracelet thing was crazy. Betty was worked up in a way that was so unfamiliar to me. The weather had been bad at home. She had been cooped up for days.

She called back. When I had told her that the bracelet plot was going to be pretty hard to pull off, she seemed hurt. “I am here, by myself, all alone, with him,” she said. “I need you to help me with just this one thing. Can't you help me just this once?”

Jan's assistant, Lulu, a whopping Texas girl, came in to say that she had to get something off her chest. She said that she had missed her therapist's appointment because she had to stay late to help with the piece. She felt angry and unsupported. I thought that this was probably the day that Lulu and her analyst had planned to discuss her feelings about cheese.

Tessa was soon looking for her jacket. When the phone rang, it was Betty again. “I need to get out of here,” she said. “We are just stuck here. I'm just stuck here, about to go nuts.”

. . .

“I don't like the way you sound.” Betty said again and on the phone, time after time, night after night. “I don't like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. I'm fine,” I told her a hundred times, but she didn't believe me. “I don't like the way you sound. I don't like the way you sound.”

I was her focus, but as my father's face got grayer, turning a more ashy color, she became obsessed with him as well, though it was just a bit late, her waking up to take in what was happening.

My father spoke of waking to find my mother, her face right up in his, checking to see if he was breathing. “I'm dead, Betty. I'm dead,” he'd say. “Well, how would I know if you were?” she'd respond. “I'd have to wake up and find you.

“I don't like the way you sound. I don't like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”

“I am fine. I am fine.”

. . .

Sucking on a Camel cigarette, hair arranged with perfect artfulness, Graydon, who had grown more and more hostile, eyed me with an expression that nearly knocked me out, a kind of contempt.

“Why,” he asked me, as he surveyed a marked-up Streisand photo (“Don't tint the lips,” she had demanded), “do you always have to try to be so fucking perfect? Why can't you let the writers be themselves?”

After that, nothing was really right between us. He ridiculed my outfits, my coffee brand, my story ideas. He exiled me from meetings, accused me of always looking bored. I somehow knew he would never be there anymore, I would never win his affection again. Yes, I had grown increasingly testy; yes, I was holding things up, trying to make the writing fine, missing deadlines; yes, I was marking up my galleys so endlessly that I had blinded more than a few copy editors.

Yes, I was on drugs, but only enough to kill a rock band and only at the end. Whatever it was that took me away from what I didn't want to feel or remember, I sniffed right up. I had, at some point, made a mistake. I was running fast. I think maybe I had forgotten that Graydon wasn't my father. When things are changing too quickly, things can get confused. All hands were empty now. No one was reaching out.

. . .

“Put Daddy on the phone.”

“He doesn't want to talk. He hasn't left his chair all day. I don't know what to do about him. He won't do anything.”

. . .

I started to go out alone. Early mornings on Sundays, I often found myself at the Sound Factory, dancing in a sweaty mob. Junior Vasquez was the DJ. The bass beat boomed. I sniffed this and that, took this and that, watched it all, sometimes joined in. Disco kites flew in the air above me. Flashes of strobe lights flashed on crazy eyes, slices of bare chest, tiny Japanese girls twirling in swirls of Gucci. Beside me one night, two large black women, dancing with gestures so perfect that I still remember them. There were street kids, ballet dancers. There were blacks and Puerto Ricans, whites, big-chested gay boys from Chelsea, fashion models, and people who looked distinctly dangerous. There were silhouettes of dancers on a screen bursting with colors. Everywhere was the current of sex, drag queens from the Houses of LaBeija or Extravaganza, doing runway turns on the sidelines. Work, all those crazy writers, my boss: They did not exist. I was alone, falling into situations I had never expected to encounter.

The disco ball spun fast; glitter fell from the ceiling and liquid smoke swirled on the dance floor. Flash forward, through faces, names I never bothered to learn, taxis with the music blaring, speeding through the late-night streets through the streams of light: It was 2 a.m., 3 a.m., 4 a.m., I was picking up a cell phone, dialing a drug dealer.

It could not last. I knew that, knew I would have to pay. And I did. I would pay and pay and pay. I am paying for it still, all those nights.

Around this time, I met a friend for coffee. He had made a sensible match, given up the party life. “I think I am out of control,” I told him. “You always were,” he said. “You just didn't know it.”

I told none of this to Giorgianni. I told no one, admitted nothing. I kept my secrets battened down. Giorgianni and I talked about work, about how angry I got if one day passed and I was not, after all my hours, after all my work, after all my effort to get it right, singled out for special praise. If I was not told I am good, I was a wreck. If I was not perfect, I was nothing at all. If I am not successful, I am nothing at all. I tried to turn my pieces into masterpieces.

I was thirty-five years old, desperate, though I didn't know it, empty, though I didn't know it, raging in a way even I could not have managed to just ignore, though I did not know why. Often I could keep it in check, but when I needed most to be calm and confident, when I was exhausted, sleeping deeply, almost unconscious, I would spring a leak and all my anger would come out. I was a wreck. That is what happened when the phone rang on a Saturday afternoon while I was sleeping so deeply that I could barely manage to rouse myself to answer. When I picked up the receiver, I heard my aunt's voice saying that we had lost my father.

E
very Wednesday night, on the way to our favorite restaurant for the prime rib special, Betty and I pass the empty Presbyterian church in Perry, another town with one foot in this life and another in wherever little towns go when no one lives there anymore. Many churches in this area barely survive on the donations they collect. Congregations have dwindled and worshippers are mostly old, living in dire need of church communities, but existing on fixed incomes. People without jobs have little cash for collection plates. Those who might once have shown up on Sundays watch celebrity ministers broadcasting from megachurches. They post passages from the Reverend Joel Osteen on Facebook, promises of prosperity from a man who lives in a ten-million-dollar house in a neighborhood populated by oil millionaires.

On the highways there are new temples of faith, Pentecostal congregations, tabernacles of the Holy Spirit, often housed in the kind of sheet-metal outbuildings once used for machine sheds and equipment storage. It is the old churches that are on the verge of closing their doors. The merchants who sustained them are gone. Wal-Mart, the store that wiped out the merchants, shuttered everything, has never offered a lonely widow a turkey dinner, a day of fellowship among friends, or hope.

In Perry, at this church with stained glass windows that the sun still shines through, the end came, almost unnoticed by many. Last year, in a special final ceremony, the ancient Bible with the names of all the members of the congregation through all the years was carried out to be stored. The big old building stands waiting with rows of plants for sale along the sidewalk in front, though there is talk of a mini-mall with booths for antique dealers and purveyors of home craft items.

My mother fears the day that our church will be vacant. The notion of her town without her church, her life without her church, her world without its center is enough to make her turn her head away.

Like Betty, I am scared about the days to come and am reluctant to desert the place where people who know of my mother's bad days come up to embrace me. They say they will do anything to help. A guy I went to high school with wants to know how I am doing and asks if I want to accompany him and his family to Branson to see Kenny Chesney. I thank him, but say I cannot forgive Kenny for what he did to Renée Zellweger.

“You always were real different,” my friend tells me, touching my arm and smiling a little before getting into his vehicle.

Gradually I have come to feel that I fit here, at least a little. I suddenly know people again and am Dear Abby for those who are real different. A week or so ago, a woman from my high school class stopped me to say she is stuck in a trailer with a son who thinks he has a black woman living inside him.

“Tell him to let her out,” I said.

Politically, I have a lot of differences with many I encounter here. When visiting the homes of reactionary friends and neighbors, I enjoy hiding their copies of books by Glenn Beck and other lunatics around the house while my hosts cook or adjourn to relieve themselves. Ducking into a garage to deposit the latest ravings of Ann Coulter into a bag of aging peat moss lifts the spirit as unfailingly as a summer tent revival. But I am trying to behave. I have a Cardinals cap, but cannot always remember what it is they play. Yesterday, when I heard that Evie Cullers is sick, I took her a dessert and listened to her talk and talk. She was recovering nicely from her respiratory difficulties, but I fear that after my sludgelike pudding, life support will be required. “Where did you come across this?” she asked when she gazed into the bowl.

I water the roses, try to keep them alive as there is still no rain. I no longer think of selling this house my father built. Maybe my attachment is temporary nostalgia, but I don't think so. I'd like to come back here in the summers at least. This is my home, my trees. Because of the drought, a lot of trees have died or are dying, and according to an article in the
Post-Dispatch,
many have been so damaged that the losses will continue for three or four years, even if the clouds finally decide to open. My father would be hurt to see this. He worked so hard to give his little trees a chance.

. . .

The last time I saw my father was over Christmas a few months before he passed away. His face was pale; it had gone from gray to pallor hard to gaze on without fear. Because of his arthritic knees, stiff after two operations, he could barely get around, though he made a cane for himself in his workshop in the basement. He kept calling my attention to that cane; he had tried to make it special, something beyond an old man's walking stick. When, unbeknownst to him, I watched him trying to go a few steps without it, I knew that the life we had shared together was coming to a close. A few days before my arrival, before our last holiday, he pulled his sciatic nerve struggling with the mattress on the antique bed where I try to sleep, trying to make it comfortable.

A few days before I left to go back to New York, he was in such pain that I took him to the emergency room. Betty stayed at home, but—still astonishingly spry then—ran out into the street as we left with the gloves my father forgot to wear, old work gloves from his lumberyard days. It was the coldest kind of winter afternoon and he hurt so badly that even breathing seemed hard labor. I watched him as he dragged himself to the admissions desk—weak, sad, and sick. He needed something fast for relief, but when the nurse said we would have to wait, probably for a couple of hours, he made no complaint, just shrugged his shoulders and made a joke. He made the old starched nurses feel like babes.

I remember my father at church, passing the communion plate during the service to the old, blue-haired high school principal, finally retired. “Take two,” he told her as he handed over the tray with the grape juice in tiny cups. “They're free, you know.”

For the longest time, there in the emergency room, he got no help and we sat with me on guard, watching him, his cheek still wet from melting snow. So tightly did he clutch the handle of that cane that I thought his fingers would leave their marks in the wood. Finally someone saw the shape he was in and ushered us into an examining room. A doctor scrawled a prescription, but Big George could barely make it back to the car. When I found an open pharmacy, I think he was scared to wait alone. His heart was so vulnerable, ready to give out; something could happen and we both knew this and it was hard to leave him even for a moment.

He watched me, my every step away, from behind the frosted window of our old Lincoln as I trudged across the snow to buy the pills. On the way home, he looked straight ahead, not at me, and whispered, “Getting on time to die.”

When he did leave us, he was all alone, in the basement at his workbench on a quiet Saturday afternoon in February. The night before, I had finished editing four or five articles for the Hollywood issue of
Vanity Fair
at midnight. The phone rang at 4 p.m. My aunt Alice called, my mother somewhere in the background. Betty just could not tell me, Alice said. She said Betty could not speak and had gone to her room to lie down. “Please don't leave her,” I requested, but I knew she would soon be motioning Alice toward the door.

My first instinct was to call the dealer. I didn't want to feel. But it seemed disrespectful. My life felt disrespectful. For months, I had been struggling to give up drugs. Through a long, uncomfortable autumn of craving and withdrawal, I sat in a recovery group, surrounded by people who were trying to get better too. We came together in a little place with pink walls known as the Miracle Room. I took a few steps up the mountain, then would start to fall back, but someone always appeared to push me along, a little further, through another day to a place where I could feel a little better for a while.

. . .

I flew at 6 a.m. the morning after he died. At home, I felt his presence. The place was filled with him, as it had been, though he was missing and his big chair, where I had last seen him, empty. Near his workbench, I spotted two gifts, handmade, left for me to find: The first was a small cube with photographs glued on every side. To keep the pictures safe, to make them last, a coat of polish had been carefully applied. The photographs, views of our backyard at different times throughout the year, showed the way it looks in snow, in springtime when the trees are in blossom, in summer when all is green, and in the fall when the leaves are colorful. There is a picture of rain falling with the woods behind the house, just greens run together, like in some old painting. There is an image of a foggy morning when the ground is hidden and the bare trees reach out of the mist.

My father's hands were swollen when he made this memento, all the seasons of home, for me. He was dying. He could barely grip a pencil. Notes and old checks I find from this time in the drawers of his old desk are written in a hand so shaky I can barely recognize it.

In the city, in my apartment, on the bookshelf by the cube of photos, I also keep his second gift, a wooden hand created by tracing his own on a piece of wood. Like the cube, it was carefully polished. At the base where the wrist is, there are three letters carved: GAH, his initials and mine.

I was grateful for these gifts. I had wanted some good-bye and he had left it, without saying anything. My old silent man.

. . .

The night before the funeral, my mother and I talked very little. I think she was shocked by how it felt to lose him. I don't think she expected to feel so overcome. I had never seen her look so fragile and what I sensed in her strongly was regret, guilt: She should have heard him in the basement; she should have checked on him.

Finally, she began to speak. “You know,” she began, “I didn't think he was really going to die. I couldn't believe it was going to happen, though I look back . . . last year . . . I had just gotten my new cornea. They wanted me to wear contact lenses, but I was too nervous to put them in. My hands shook. You remember. Every time I tried, I made a mess of it.”

“Betty, quit your damn fretting.”

“Your father calmed me down. I sat on the edge of the bed. He put them into my eyes in the mornings. He took them out at night. I was too nervous . . . My hands shook. Not long ago, he said I was going to have to learn to do it myself. He looked at me and put his hand on my cheek. I should have known how close it was.”

“Betty, don't worry so much. Sit down. Please sit down and hold still.”

One detail consoled me a little. Just before it happened, he and Betty were finishing lunch, and before he went to the basement where his heart gave out, my aunt Alice arrived with a slice of warm coconut pie. I told my mother that it was a gift to send a good man off. She just stared back until she said quietly, “I really didn't do much for him. I wish we could go back.”

Before she headed into the bedroom, she said, “I don't want to go in there,” so I walked back with her and laid my head on his pillow while she brushed her teeth.

On the day of the funeral, I had taken food up to my aunt and uncle's. Harry, recently sick himself, was sitting in his recliner, already in his suit, clipping his nails. When he saw me he stood, as if for some sort of salute, and put his hand on my shoulder. His face showed more pain than I had seen in him. Of all of us, he was the one who cried the most at funerals, and he and Big George had worked together almost fifty years, always arriving before the sun came up, whatever the weather.

Harry had aged since Christmas. With his eyes watering, he said, “Your father was a better man than me.” I said no, but he kept on. “Your father kept us going,” he said. “He could make you laugh. Sometimes it bugged the hell out of me. But the customers loved it. Everyone loved George. They came in just to see him. There was no one like him. He helped keep the business going.”

At the funeral, a community choir, made up of all the choirs of all the churches, sang a hymn called “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” I had not realized what a popular guy my father was, but there they all were, the people who had filled his days, his life.

My mother asked me how I could wear the suit I had chosen. “Because it was the only one I had that wasn't at the dry cleaners,” I yelled at her. “I didn't plan for this.”

Betty was in a mood with me. I knew I looked bad, still skinny from speed and tired from years of stress and no sleep. She treated the son of my father's sister from California as her partner in public. He was a married man with children. He had the right suit. He was appropriate for public display. All this may have been my imagination. Maybe she was just trying to show my cousin that she was grateful for his attendance. Maybe I just felt ashamed of myself.

Evelyn Fleming held my hand when they lowered the casket into the ground. After it was done, my mother looked at me, stumbled, and then caught herself, just stood there for a minute looking completely undone as if she had no idea where she should go or what came next. I went over, took her hand, and led her to the hearse, where she closed her eyes until it was certain we were far away from the grave. I never let go of her hand.

. . .

“Are you mad at me?” Betty asks today. “Have I done something wrong? I'll bet you wish I would die.”

“Not until you eat this damn meat loaf,” I say, shoving a casserole dish into the oven and trying not to hear her. She is an old woman, but I still hate to hear her talk about dying. “Actually, I am so grateful,” I tell her, “to have you here. I cannot imagine a world without you. You know that I love you?”

Looking a bit uncomfortable, she says, “Yes, I do.”

I know not to expect a response. This is not
On Golden Pond
. My mother's reticence is not something that will change. She signs birthday cards to old friends, “Sincerely yours, Betty Hodgman.” She is of a generation who existed before feelings were spoken of.

We are two Americas colliding here, old and new.

When people ask Betty if she is on e-mail, she stares back and asks, “What kind of a question is that?” Every day it becomes more apparent to me, and I think to her—a woman who still calls the refrigerator an “icebox”—that her world is gone and she is standing almost by herself now, the only one who remembers how it was here, wondering half the time what it is that people are talking about.