The reconciliation didn’t work. Malabar remembers an extended trip with her mother when she was about five, and records confirm that Vivian traveled to California in 1935. From there, Malabar dimly recalls their long drive to Nevada, the only state at the time that offered multiple grounds for divorce and required no waiting period or proof of residency.
But my volatile and charismatic grandparents couldn’t stay away from each other, and their first divorce didn’t stick. In a grand second marriage proposal, Bert got down on bended knee to declare, yet again, his undying love for Vivian, this time at a Christmas dinner party in front of a handful of close friends. He presented her with an extraordinary gift: a necklace of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other gems that she had seen and coveted on her last trip to India but never imagined she could own. Stunned by my grandfather’s extravagance and generosity, my grandmother accepted his proposal, and the two remarried in 1940. A year later, my grandfather secretly sired a son with a woman he promised to marry.
My grandparents split permanently after my mother finished high school, and Malabar ended up with the necklace. Over the years, this dubious trophy of Bert and Vivian’s doomed relationship took hold of my mother’s imagination. What it represented to her exactly, I’ll never know—the Raj, the glamour of another era, her parents’ love?—but I suspect that, deep down, it symbolized the life she yearned for and thought she deserved.
Malabar grew up, went to Radcliffe College, and began a career in journalism in New York City, where she worked first as a reporter at American Heritage and then as a staff writer at Time-Life Books. With a nudge from a psychiatrist who was helping her with commitment issues—unwed at twenty-eight, she was considered a spinster—she embarked on a marriage with my father, Paul Brodeur, who was then a staff writer for the Talk of the Town in the New Yorker.
My parents’ life together began promisingly. Their first child, Christopher, was born on October 15, 1961, and as their small family grew, so did their respective careers. My mother’s articles and my father’s stories were getting published. They were young and ambitious. Then, in early 1964, when my mother was pregnant with her second child, tragedy struck. Christopher choked on a piece of meat he’d hidden in his cheek as the family drove back to the city from the cabin in Newtown. My brother was two and a half years old when he died.
Peter had no choice but to marinate in Malabar’s grief until his birth in June. Then, sixteen months after Peter, I came into the world. I was born on Christopher’s birthday, October 15. My birth has always felt like the result of a powerful and subconscious maternal urge to replace the life that had been lost.
As a young child, I intuited something inexplicably awry about my birthday. Long before our parents told Peter and me about Christopher’s existence and tragic death, I understood that a little boy had been part of our family but no longer was. Clues abounded. A tiny pair of moss-green lederhosen, neither Peter’s nor mine, hung from a hook on our bedroom door in the cabin; a blue-jean-clad teddy bear that we were not allowed to touch sat on a windowsill in my mother’s bedroom. There were photographs of a smiling child wearing my mother’s sunglasses and fake-smoking my father’s pipe. He was a brown-eyed version of Peter and me.
When I asked my father’s mother, an apple-cheeked, born-again Christian, questions about the boy in the photographs, she told me about sin, about who got into heaven and who got sent to hell and why. The concept boggled my mind. My parents had never taken me to church, and I didn’t know about Jesus, let alone that I should accept Him as my Savior.
But what about the boy? I wanted to know. He looked like Peter and me. Where was he?
Her answer? Purgatory.
My takeaway, undoubtedly not my grandmother’s intent, was that I was a sinner, as were my parents, and Christopher’s death was connected to our collective trespasses. Why else would God play such a trick with my birthday? It also occurred to me that Christopher, wherever he was, must be none too pleased with my trying to replace him.
* * *
“Who do you love most in the world?”
This was the essential question of my childhood and one that I asked my mother almost daily, usually as she put on her makeup. We’d be in her dressing room, me on the bed, my mother perched on a cushioned stool in front of a skirted dressing table, a tube of frosted-pink lipstick at the ready, her pretty face illuminated by a multisided makeup mirror. Every time, she would appear to ponder my question.
Please say me. Please say me.
Malabar’s favorite was a constantly shifting point on her compass. My mother would take her time before answering, applying a perfect coat of lipstick, and then surprise me with a sudden embrace and a conspiratorial whisper: “You, my silly girl. You.” God, I adored having her full attention, being wrapped in her arms and reassured. But love was conditional with Malabar. If I’d disappointed her in some way, had acted selfishly or broken an unspoken rule, she would stay silent, allowing me to feel the full weight of her abandonment and the possibility that she loved Peter or Christopher more than me.
Prone to melancholy, my mother used to recite a poem to me called “Monday’s Child,” always slowing down when she reached the final lines.
Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesday’s child is full of grace
Wednesday’s child is full of woe
Thursday’s child has far to go
Friday’s child is loving and giving
Saturday’s child works hard for a living
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe and good and gay.
I came to understand why her eyes got misty. Peter and I had been born on ordinary days, but Christopher was Sunday’s child, the most special of all. He’d been her cherished firstborn, a boy whose birthday I had unwittingly hijacked. Christopher became my obsession, but there was no competing with a ghost. I couldn’t help but think that if my parents had been given their choice between Christopher and me, they would have picked him.
As children, Peter and I got the story of our brother’s death bit by bit from various sources, and, as happens, the facts changed in the telling. Christopher had stashed a piece of meat inside his cheek, that much we knew. No one was aware he’d hidden the meat. Everyone knew he’d hidden the meat. Christopher started to choke when the car hit a bump in the road. The choking started in the parking lot of an antique store. Our parents were with him at the time. Our parents were in the store, but the au pair ran to get them. A fireman tried to resuscitate him. A doctor, who had an office next door, refused to help. Our father felt responsible, according to our mother. Our mother felt responsible, according to our father. The au pair was responsible, according to our aunt. It was God’s will, our grandmother declared.
But nothing changed the outcome—our older brother had died before Peter and I were born, and we would always live in his shadow.
I have known my mother only as the person she became after Christopher died: a mother who had lost a child. Who might she have been before? I imagine her, in the days and weeks and months that followed Christopher’s death, engaging in magical thinking, as the grief-stricken do. I picture her daily shock on waking up after a few hours of respite, thanks to her sleeping pills, and remembering again that her son was dead. Forgetting and remembering. I wonder if that part of it is over for her now, if five and a half decades is long enough to metabolize such a loss or if there are still moments when time collapses and her agony overtakes everything.
* * *
Whenever Malabar got sentimental, she would pull out the Indian necklace. She would retrieve the purple velvet case from the depths of her walk-in closet, place it on her bed between us, and pop open the lid. There it was.
“This necklace is the most valuable item I own. Do you understand, Rennie? It’s extraordinary and priceless, absolutely priceless,” she would say. “I should leave it to a museum. It would be irresponsible to do anything else.”
Then Malabar would make me promise, again and again, that if she left the necklace to me, I would never sell it, no matter what. I swore on my life that I wouldn’t.
On one occasion, she wrapped the sparkling collar around my neck and I felt the mighty weight of it, our yoke. I might have been ten at the time, no longer a towhead but still with light blond hair, almost invisible eyebrows, and round, childish features. Everything about me was soft—my nose, my cheeks, my jawline—and I lacked the essential gravitas for the piece. My mother, dark-haired, dark-eyed, fiercely beautiful, laughed. We both did. I looked ridiculous.
“Don’t worry. You’ll grow into it,” she said, unclasping it. “You shall wear it on your wedding day.” Then she lovingly placed the necklace back in its box.
Four
To cover for Malabar’s affair, I would tell Charles one thing, my father and Peter another, my friends something else, attempting to explain either my mother’s absences or my own. Someone had to take care of Charles when she was gone. He still went to the office every day but required assistance at home. With his right side paralyzed and his weak heart, my stepfather needed help preparing dinner and uncapping his bottle of nitroglycerin pills, those tiny white dots of relief that he popped into his mouth at least a dozen times a day. I learned to make excuses and bury the truth with whatever I could throw at it.
Lying wasn’t wholly new to me. It comes with the territory when your parents get divorced and the two people you love and need most become adversaries. When I saw something disturbing at one parent’s house—an overnight guest or a dozen pills on the bedside table—I knew better than to seek comfort from the other because that bit of information would be used as ammunition in their warfare.
What’s more, lying and stealing were never truly discouraged in my home. The taking of “small liberties” to ensure that my mother got what she wanted in every situation was routine and often great fun, usually part and parcel of some elaborate game Malabar devised for our family’s amusement. There was our annual raid of the Millers’ vineyard to filch grapes for her homemade jelly. “They’re old friends, they won’t care,” she would insist, but she left the station wagon idling as we sneaked onto their land at dusk, furtively snipped off vines, and filled the trunk with fragrant bunches. Those adventures were as inexorably tied to the sweetness of her jelly as the wax seals that covered each jar and gave a delightful pop when pressed with the back of a spoon.
When I was about five, I decided to cheer my mother up by picking her a bunch of flowers. That day, my mother had been moping around our cottage in Nauset Heights, looking forlorn. She might have had a fight with her own mother, or maybe she felt frustrated by how long Charles’s divorce was taking; I’ll never know. Perhaps she was just hung-over from a party the previous night. Whatever the cause, I wanted to make her happier. I always wanted to make my mother happier.
Determined to pick her the most beautiful and bountiful bouquet she’d ever seen, I grabbed the kitchen scissors and embarked upon my mission. I dismissed the daisies that grew weed-like down the grassy center strip of our long dirt driveway, the random tiger lilies that poked through the brush, the dainty tea roses that twined around our picket fence. None were quite right. Then I saw them, the flowers for my mother’s bouquet, beckoning me from the top of the hill beyond ours: a zigzagging line of lipstick-colored zinnias in bright oranges, pinks, and purples, winking at me from the garden of our next-door neighbor. Undeniably cheerful flowers. I leveled the patch in three minutes, leaving a trail of decapitated stalks in my wake, never pausing to worry what the neighbors would think.
I floated home, my pinkie looped through the scissors’ handle, my arms barely long enough to go around my bounty. At the screen door, I was greeted by my mother with unabashed delight.
“Oh, Rennie,” she said, scooping me up along with the flowers and placing me on the counter. “You are the sweetest girl.”
My mother must have recognized these were someone’s zinnias, but there was no talk of right or wrong, no lecture about private property, no nod toward creating what today is known as a “teachable moment.” Instead, my mother arranged the flowers in a vase one stem at a time, first brushing the petals against my nose, then christening each zinnia with a lavish and silly name—Francesca, Philomena, Evangeline—and plunking it in the water. Pleasing my mother came with warm and immediate rewards. A week or so later, when Philomena and her friends started to droop, my mother handed me the scissors and nudged me out the door. I brought home bouquets all summer long.
Then there’s our flatware. To this day, among the flotsam that can be found at the bottom of the junk drawer in Malabar’s kitchen are errant pieces of Pan Am cutlery, circa the 1970s, tarnished reminders of my early life of crime. After Charles and my mother fell in love, when they were in the thick of their contentious—and, in Charles’s case, protracted—divorces, the four of us started to travel by plane with some regularity, flying to Boston, where Charles lived, to Martha’s Vineyard, where his family had property, and to various vacation spots.
This was at a time when air travel was luxurious, and we were treated like customers at a fine restaurant; even in coach, hot meals were served with cloth napkins and petite metal silverware. My mother coveted those Pan Am forks and knives. She loathed plastic utensils and liked the idea of having real cutlery for our beach picnics, so whenever we flew, we had a competition of sorts: How many sets could each of us lift? I would press the stewardess call button—thrilling in and of itself—and tell the attendant that my meal had come without utensils, and she would deliver a spare set, along with silver pilot wings. A short while later, I would ring that tantalizing button again and this time announce that I had dropped my fork. The attendant would bring another napkin-wrapped bundle and give me a smile and a wink. My record, I believe, was four sets, scored on a flight to visit my grandparents in Phoenix, Arizona.
I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn’t have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused. What I knew then was that nothing made me feel more loved than making my mother happy, and any means justified that end. Starting when I was fourteen, what made my mother happy was Ben Souther. With that, my lying took a dark turn. Lies of omission became lies of commission. What began as choice turned into habit and became my conscience’s muscle memory.
In the early summers of their affair, evenings went like this: After Peter and I finished dinner, we rode our bikes to our friends’ houses. We had a core group of pals, half of them summer residents, like us, and half of them locals. There were some friends who came and went, but mostly it was a group of about eight of us. We played endless games of spin-the-bottle on the bay beaches below their houses where the air was heavy with salt and the beers in the cooler tinkled like dice. On particularly daring nights, we’d swim out to a floating dock not far from shore, take off our bathing suits underwater, leave them on the raft, and swim, thrilled to be naked yet unseen in one another’s presence.
My routine changed once I had my mother’s secret and a job to do. When the Southers were visiting, I felt compelled to leave these teen gatherings early so that I could make it home for the tail end of dinner. By the time I arrived, the two couples were usually soused. I would take a few bites of whatever feast my mother had concocted and then innocently suggest we all take a walk—a “constitutional,” as my mother called it—knowing Charles and Lily would never join. Who could be suspicious of a postdinner walk with a teenage chaperone? No one. At some point early on, my mother must have told Ben that I was in on their secret, and, apparently, he was unfazed by this fact. After all, my presence made everything possible.
I would take both their hands and tug them toward the door, and out we’d march onto the road singing “I see the moon and the moon sees me.” The scene looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but once the three of us were around the bend and out of the glow of
the street lamp, my mother and Ben would kiss passionately, often with me still in the middle, part of a three-way embrace. We were in this love affair together. We’d make our way to the top of the hill, sometimes going a bit beyond but never much. The walks were not the main purpose of our outings. When we circled back, Ben and my mother would veer off the road and slip into the guesthouse, my mother’s rental property next door, frequently unoccupied.
I’d wait for them on a rock overlooking the bay at the front of the property and watch the moonlight shimmer on the water’s surface. They told me they needed some time to talk and make plans for their next visit. I sat under the lollipop tree, so dubbed by my mother for its charming shape, and listened to the distant thud of waves breaking on the outer beach. From my perch, I imagined that I could hear my mother’s dress slipping off, the sound of Ben’s kisses across her collarbone, the groan of floorboards beneath their tenderness.
Five
My life during the school year was vastly different than during summers on Cape Cod. For one thing, it was lonely. The mansion Peter and I had called home since our mother married Charles did not encourage familial proximity or interaction. Neither Peter’s bedroom nor mine—nor any of the other fifteen bedrooms in the house—was close enough to the family room to allow us to overhear the mumble of our parents’ conversations, let alone fall asleep to those distant vibrations. The house was so big that there weren’t even distinct smells associated with particular rooms, like cinnamon sugar in the kitchen after our mother perfected her doughnut recipe or the smoke of old fires in the den. Sounds and smells—just about everything, really—disappeared into the vastness.
There was also the fact that 100 Essex had been on the market since the day we arrived, lending a feeling of impermanence to our living situation. The house was impossible to heat in those energy-lean years and even more impossible to sell; the only legitimate offer had come from the Unification Church, aka the Moonies, but accepting a bid that would damage Charles’s family’s name wasn’t an option. What would the neighbors think? So my mother and stepfather did what WASPs have done for generations: they lived off the vapors of family wealth, maintained appearances, and drank copiously.
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