Everybody was poor. They were all college professors and they were always borrowing fifty dollars or a fifth of bourbon to get them to the end of the month. My parents may have run out of money, but they never ran out of bourbon, and the ice tapper would still go off at five o’clock, even on the last day of the month, even if we were eating Welsh rarebit for dinner, even if they had to borrow fifty dollars from my grandmother.
It was all about perfection. My mother and father presented a perfect picture to the world, a happy, witty, and charming young couple who were madly in love, and did nothing but have fun.
My mother would get dressed to go out to an evening party, and she would come out into the central hall upstairs to brightly call goodnight to us. Our bedrooms opened into the hall, or at least mine did and my sister’s did, and my brother would come and sit on my bed to watch her say goodnight. Sometimes, most of the time, she would come in and we’d say our prayers, and sometimes she’d sing “Lavender Blue,” or “Oralee,” which had the same tune as “Love Me Tender,” and then she’d stand for a second in the upstairs hall, as my father stood impatiently at the bottom of the stairs.
As she stood there, my sister would call out from her bed, “Twirl, Mama, twirl,” and my mother would twirl, like a runway model, and we’d watch her skirts billow and her scarlet lips and her scarlet fingernails and the light brown hair my father once described as beige. It was her gift to us, her final goodnight kiss, and we loved her for it.
One summer night, when it was still twilight outside, my father called from the bottom of the stairs and she came out of her room in a sleeveless dress made of something blue, probably fake silk, that had a layer of chiffon over it. It had green and blue stripes on it, and the stripes were diagonal, going one way on the top and the other way on the bottom.
“Twirl, Mama, twirl,” my sister called out, and she did, twice around, and the stripes blurred, like a funfair whirligig that you can’t focus on once it starts moving. Then she blew us a kiss, and told us to say our prayers, and then her high heels clattered down the steps.
“Jesus Christ,” my father said. “It’s after eight o’clock already,” and then they were gone.
This is the prayer we used to say, every night: “O Lord support us, all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed and our work is done and the fever of life is over; then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.” We loved all those ands in a row. I still say it, every night, even when I feel I’ve lost my faith forever and God has already abandoned me a long time ago.
Ten minutes later, we heard her rush up the stairs, and she went into her closet in the hall and then into her bedroom and came out ten minutes later in another dress. I don’t remember the second dress and my sister didn’t call out and she didn’t twirl for us that time, just rushed off as though we weren’t there.
We were shocked. My sister and brother and I got out of our beds and crept into my mother and father’s room and there, lying on the bed, was the dress with the blue and green stripes. We looked at it. We looked at it closely because we didn’t understand what could possibly have happened. Then we saw it.
On the skirt, on the blue and green skirt with the diagonal stripes going the other way, there was a burn hole the size of a dime. You could see the turquoise underskirt through it. Obviously, she had been smoking in the car and dropped a cigarette ash on the dress and the ash had burned a small hole in the chiffon part. It wasn’t perfect anymore. She couldn’t wear it.
We went to sleep and we never saw the dress again.
It was such a tiny, tiny thing. My mother smoked. She smoked in the car, her scarlet lipstick staining the filter. It was a gorgeous summer evening and they were on their way to a lovely party and they looked beautiful and my mother smoked in the car and burned a hole in the skirt of a blue and green dress. A tiny thing.
But it meant something had happened. Maybe they had a fight. They often did, terrible vitriolic fights. My brother would go to the top of the stairs and call out, “Please don’t fight, Mama and Daddy. Please don’t fight,” and my mother would come to the bottom of the stairs and look at her frightened son and say sweetly, “We’re not fighting. We’re just having a discussion, darling. Now go back to bed,” and he would and they would go back to yelling at each other. Too many drinks, drinks after dinner and my mother’s bitterness at her own failures—she had wanted to be a poet—and my father’s failures—he had never finished his thesis. All this would come out and they would yell at each other.
But something had happened in the car. Something had happened to her beautiful dress, there had been some tiny, visible flaw created in the perfection of the whole, which couldn’t be allowed, some visible unhappiness, and we never understood it and we never asked because we never asked anything and we never forgot it.
We loved our parents, our mother whom everybody adored and our handsome father whose hair turned snow white by the time he was forty. We loved them and we were afraid of them. We were afraid because we knew they were unhappy.
I used to think that there was something I could do to make it all right. I knew, somehow, that it was my fault, and I knew I could find the key to their unhappiness and open the door into a glorious world. I knew then we could all be happy and forgiven for the shame of being unhappy.
I used to concoct these ridiculous schemes. Every year around September, I began to dream that I could give them something for Christmas that would make a difference. I would build my father a boat. I would make my mother a diamond necklace. I would make detailed drawings in secret. With my twenty-five dollar Christmas allowance, I would find some gem dealer who would be willing to sell me lesser diamonds and I would learn jewelry making and my mother would be amazed on Christmas morning and my father would have a sleek sailboat and everything would be OK forever.
It never worked, and I always ended up getting my mother some costume jewelry brooch at Leggett’s that she never wore, and my father got handkerchiefs or a tie or a belt. No diamonds. No boat. And I was always heartbroken at my failure. I knew a brooch or a belt wouldn’t make any difference.
When I was fourteen, and had made some money in the summer mowing lawns and pulling weeds, I had my own checking account, and I sent away to Georg Jensen in New York for six crystal water goblets. My parents loved them, but it didn’t matter. I still have four of them. When I was fifteen, I sent a check for twenty-five dollars to Andrew Wyeth and told him I knew it wasn’t much, but maybe he could send me a sketch he didn’t have any use for because my parents loved his work so much.
I waited in a panic for his reply, and it finally came, a nice note with a drawing of his house in Chadds Ford on it. He returned my check. My father showed the letter to everybody and then he had it laminated, destroying its value, and he had it framed in a cheap frame and hung it where everybody could see it and think what a funny and charming little fool I was.
When I was thirty, after my grandmother had died and the house my mother grew up in, the house we all grew up in, went into her estate, I bought it and gave it to my parents as a gift for their lifetime. My mother never even said thank you.
Nothing worked. They went on fighting in private and being charming in public, although some people began to see through the facade. One friend of theirs wrote in his photograph album, beneath a picture of the house I was later to buy, “When I first knew these people, I thought they were brilliant and beautiful and their house a magical place. Then I began to see them as ordinary and, finally, pathetic.” My brother saw it. He said later it was the exact thing that caused him to fall apart into his quiet madness some years later. I don’t know why anybody would write a thing like that in a photograph album.
She had burned a hole in her dress and we had, for the first time, seen through the veil of perfection. That was all.
It’s funny the things we remember when there’s so much we forget. We remember them in no p
articular order, and most of them we can’t put a value on.
My mother was good to us. Even when we had no money, and she served Welsh rarebit, she served it out of a silver chafing dish. Sometimes, when we had no money, she would make waffles on a waffle iron at the dinner table set with repoussé silver. And those memories are good ones.
When I was twenty-four, I wrote a novel. It was called “Documents of the Sleeper.” It is dense and abstract and turgid beyond belief and it was about my family and my brother getting thrown out of Williams at the end of his junior year. That’s at least what I thought it was about, at the time. I had written what I thought was a happy ending, although there was, by then, no hope for a happy ending. I wrote about the dress and about my sister saying “Twirl, Mama, twirl.” I wrote about scenes of our life, nothing terrible, but private moments that were less than perfect.
There was a family law that we didn’t talk about the family outside in the world, didn’t reveal the slightest crack in the facade, and I had broken the law.
I couldn’t afford to have it typed in New York, so I had a red-haired girl I’d grown up with type it at home. I paid her a hundred dollars. She was Sunshine’s daughter, as a matter of fact. My mother kept bugging her, so she showed the first hundred pages to my parents, and that was when all hell broke loose.
The phone calls stopped. The letters stopped, my mother’s frequent and charming letters. My father had already disinherited me—not that he had any money to leave, but, two years before, I had been living in Greece and I wanted to borrow three hundred dollars to get home. I wrote to my father, who responded that I was a disgusting lazy pig and “never in my lifetime or after will you ever receive a penny of my money.” See? They talked like people out of a Victorian novel. I had paid for my own college education, with scholarships and borrowed money, I had won a fellowship to study in Europe, won it twice in fact, and still I was the one who was a disgusting pig.
My father often complained about how hard he worked. He had three weeks off at Christmas, three weeks in the spring, and, generally, when he didn’t teach summer school because we needed the money, he had the whole summer off. He was home every day by lunchtime. He took a nap every afternoon. He never bought a house of his own. He never picked up a sock. Still, I was the one who was lazy. I was the one who was disgusting.
After he disinherited me, we went on as though nothing had happened. I borrowed the money from my grandmother and went home for Christmas. Christmas was just like it always was, and nobody said anything about anything. I went to New York for a New Year’s Eve party, on the bus, and decided to stay and find a job. When I first started working, I couldn’t believe you were expected to work fifty weeks a year. It seemed barbaric.
Finally, after six weeks, there was a phone call, and I was summoned home. I had to buy my own plane ticket. I was making $25,000 a year then. I had just moved into the disgusting walkup I went on to live in for almost sixteen years.
I was afraid. I was afraid of my parents. I was more afraid of my mother, whose rages and torments were unpredictable, than I was of my father, whose main behavior was righteous indignation. Dickensian bluster and spoiled meanness were what he did best, when he wasn’t busy being charming. Well, he had lost a lot, I guess, the brilliant future lost through laziness and ennui, the brilliant wife turned brilliantly cold and bitter, the whole sense of entitlement a lie that he was never too drunk to forget. He was a fool and a failure, and, like most people in middle age, the deceptions were harder and harder to pull off. All he had left was a thin veneer of charm, and there were fewer and fewer new people to tell the old anecdotes to.
I once knew a woman who shot her husband and then killed herself because she was scheduled to give a cocktail party two days later and realized, as they lay in bed, her husband asleep by her side, that their lives were so hopelessly lost to debt and drugs and liquor and terrible, terrible sadness, that she could not produce the illusion, like a magician who had run out of rabbits.
My father didn’t even have the strength to realize how out of control it all was; he just went on, anecdote to anecdote, and he and my mother fought over after-dinner drinks and the mornings were foul and the naps were clammy and his sweat smelled musty and foul but he went on, because that’s what gentlemen did, and he wasn’t a drunk like his father, which was a lie, even if his posture was perfect, his hair snow white, his lips pursing as though he were kissing somebody as he leaned into his next sip of bourbon.
The battle took place after dinner, when the round of drinks had been made. Grease cutters. My mother had changed into a long quilted blue bathrobe, and she curled up in a chair, her legs under her, while my father smoked an inch of a hundred cigarettes and it went on for hours and it was excruciating. They loathed me with such a palpability it is difficult to recall.
When I was a teenager, we went to parties every night in the summer. Most nights, we had parties at our house. We’d drag the old cabinet record player out into the back yard, and hook it up with a long extension cord and we’d lie around with our friends, listening to Dylan, the older ones drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, which we just thought the coolest thing since pockets in shirts. People would bring guitars, and we’d sing old ballads out of Alan Lomax, and in the morning, my mother would always ask whether anybody had gone bundling, meaning making out in the box bushes. She was glad to have the house filled with young people. They all adored her, and she’d sit up in her bathrobe and they’d go in, one by one, and talk to her.
We once had a party one New Year’s Eve, my brother and I, in my grandmother’s part of the house. My parents had some friends over for drinks, all the women in long skirts and fancy jewelry, like something out of a movie about charming sophisticates, all gay chatter by the fire in another part of the house, the part our family lived in. At one point, I opened the door to the room where the grownups were and my mother said, “What are you all doing?”
“We’re pretending we’re drunk,” I said.
“We’re pretending we’re not,” she said, and I closed the door.
She didn’t like it as much when we went out. In the morning she’d always ask what we talked about. This and that, we’d say, stuff. “Did you talk about us?” she’d ask. “Did you talk about me?” We would stare at one another in disbelief.
She’d listened to all those young people telling how their parents didn’t understand them, or wouldn’t let them do the one thing they had their hearts set on, and she was always sympathetic, the mother everybody wanted to have. She let my sister fly to Mexico on her own when she was seventeen. She gave all our friends the illusion that she uniquely understood their teenaged torture, the illusion that she would have let any of them do anything: take drugs, move to France, get married. But she was terrified that her children talked about her behind her back. “Did you talk about us?”
I had talked about them, in the novel, and the sin was unforgivable. The incidents were trivial, there was nothing particularly revealing in the small anecdotes in the book, but things that were private had been made public.
I had written about how trapped women must feel, left alone all day in houses filled with possessions they had to care for but could never really own. I had talked about a present my brother once found for her, the most marvelous present ever, and he’d found it on Christmas Eve—a nineteenth-century Tiffany ladies’ traveling case, covered in leather and filled with crystal bottles with vermeil cloisonné tops and hairbrushes and a sewing kit and buttonhooks for shoes and dresses, a toothbrush still in its crystal flask with its lavender enameled top, the whole thing incredibly stamped with my mother’s initials. My brother had found it in Ray Miller’s junk shop on Christmas Eve and bought it for twenty-five dollars and I, with all my mail order passions and my dreams of diamonds and yachts, was more jealous than I had ever been of anything. It was perfection, and it made my mother impossibly happy, and it was only by luck, which my brother had and I did not.
And I had written abou
t the cigarette burn in the green and blue dress. I hadn’t commented, I had only reported. I didn’t understand its power then and I don’t now, but I had told the story and my mother remembered it. She objected, screaming at me, to my telling family stories, to my telling things about the family that the world didn’t know. There was little chance that the book would be published—even my mother pointed out that it was obtuse and overwritten—but that wasn’t the point.
I had talked about her.
The tirade went on so long my father had to refill their drinks several times, the ice tapper tapping out its familiar sound. He would scream at me from the bar in the pantry. He would say things like, “How dare you!” The kind of things offended debutantes might say in movies of the thirties, before they slapped Adolph Menjou or somebody in the face. The more my mother and father drank, the more insane with anger they got.
By this time, they weren’t young anymore. Everybody went to Europe. Nobody gave going-away parties. Nobody had weddings with twelve bridesmaids, each one wearing a different colored pastel linen dress with a matching cartwheel hat. Even we had a television by then.
The wear and tear on them showed in their faces and in the way they dressed and the way their cleaning ladies had left them, and their napkins weren’t pressed. It showed in the fact that women didn’t wear gloves or carry clean white embroidered handkerchiefs in their purses, and men didn’t wear ties in the evenings when they went out for drinks. It showed in jaundice and cirrhosis of the liver. The children all had long hair and smoked dope and took acid, although we, my brother and sister and I, still wrote our own mother thank-you notes if we came home for the weekend.