by Alan Alda
“Nothing,” Solange said. “You spilled a little tapioca on your suit.”
The next night, he waited quietly until I made another joke, and then he turned to me and said witheringly, “You know, you’re very immature.”
“I am?” I said.
“Yes. I’m sorry to say. You laugh too much. Last night, you said something that was only mildly funny, and your laughter was all out of proportion to what you had said.”
Well, I couldn’t argue with that. I agreed with him that I needed to work on the laughing, and he seemed satisfied. Silently, Solange grinned, showing her guilty two front teeth.
I liked Solange. She was a positive person. When I translated some trite English phrase directly into French, it sounded to her like poetry. “Yesterday,” she told me, “you said, ‘I’m going out now to commune with nature.’ You have the soul of a poet.” She helped me with my French and made the best potage. I never tasted anything like it again. I guess nothing matches your first potage.
Paris was everything I’d wanted it to be and, unfortunately, more. “April is the cruellest month,” Eliot said, “. . . mixing / Memory and desire.” I didn’t know what he meant at first, especially because I remembered it wrong. “Mixing desire with dead leaves” is what I remembered from my freshman poetry course. I repeated it to myself over and over. Dead leaves in April? What does that mean? Then I got it: April is cruel because the desire of youth mixes with the moldy leaves of ancient winter, still wet and slimy underfoot. As long as I was able to just be young in Paris I was okay, but the winter of my past kept showing up, and for me it was April in Paris all year long.
My parents came down to visit from Amsterdam, and we went to dinner at a fancy Parisian restaurant, where even before the main course, my mother was drunk on champagne. Suddenly, we realized one of us had said something she took as a slight as she angrily slammed the champagne bottle onto the table, spraying wine like a geyser all over my father and me. At the other tables, the French laughed. We were acutely embarrassed. She kept downing more wine and loudly accusing us both of transgressions ranging from adultery to homosexuality, while not excluding the possibility of bestiality. Then she passed out. The main course came and sat on the table uneaten as my father and I carried her out of the restaurant. He was at one end and I was at the other, much the way we had carried my dead dog to be buried. The French applauded our exit.
On the street the air revived her, but we couldn’t get her back to the hotel because she thought we were trying to kill her. We tried to pull her along, but she held back, clinging to flowers in planters outside the restaurant, pulling them out by the roots. She began screaming for help. A man on a bicycle stopped to watch, trying to decide if a woman was being abused. I told him in French that she was my mother and we were taking her home. My mother screamed that we were trying to kill her. He stood, holding his bicycle, observing, trying to decide which of us was telling the truth.
As this was happening, I was thinking, I have to remember this. I’ll write about this someday. This will be a powerful scene. I was young, and I was as drunk as she was—only I was drunk on self-dramatization.
A few weeks later, I visited my parents in Amsterdam—but I couldn’t take it for long. She showed me a European radio and told me they were using it to spy on her. I didn’t ask who “they” were. “Look at the word on the back of the radio,” she whispered. “Telefunken. You know what that means?”
“It’s the name of the company that makes the radio.”
“No, it isn’t. Don’t try to manipulate me. I have a good mind.”
I knew what was coming when she told me she had a good mind. My heart sank. “What does Telefunken mean, Mom?”
“It means they’re trying to listen to your father and I having sex.” She pulled the plug on the radio and hid it in a closet. “They must think I’m a fool. Look at the ceiling.”
I looked at the ceiling. It had a few cracks in it. They were living in a small, charming Dutch house with flowers in the window boxes and white curtains in the window, through which you could see Dutch people bicycling down the street. I wanted to be out on the street cycling with the Dutch people, but I let her tell me about the ceiling.
“What’s wrong with the ceiling?”
“You don’t see the camera?”
“Where do you see a camera?”
“Right there, where the cracks come together. You think I’m stupid? You think I can’t see that? They’re taking pictures of me.”
I couldn’t take it; I left early and went back to Paris.
A month later, I was driving a car full of friends to San Sebastián in Spain, trying to get there in one night because we were all poor students and we couldn’t afford even a cheap hotel. We stopped for dinner and ordered paella. While the food was on the way, I left the table to call my father in Amsterdam. Somehow, he’d gotten word to me that we needed to talk. When I reached him, he gently told me my mother had had another episode—this time very serious. She’d had to be hospitalized. My reaction was cold fury. “How could you let her be taken to a mental hospital?”
His voice got softer. He hadn’t told me the whole story because he didn’t want to alarm me. “They had to take her,” he said. “She was running down the hallway of the hotel with no clothes on. She was screaming and banging on doors. They called an ambulance and a doctor sedated her and then they took her to the hospital. They don’t know how long she’ll have to be there.”
I went back to the table and said nothing to my friends. I was too ashamed. I was still furious with my father, and with myself, because I was sure one of us had caused this. We got back in the car, and I drove. Before long, everyone in the car was asleep except me. And then, for a brief moment, we were all asleep. I felt a rumbling under us and woke up to see that I’d drifted off the road and was heading for a stand of trees. I stopped the car and woke them all up. “I’m a little sleepy,” I said, and asked for someone else to drive.
I sat in the backseat and thought about the drama in my life until I fell asleep.
Back in Paris, I didn’t go to classes. Instead, I stayed in my small room reading existential philosophers and taking long walks in the cold fall winds in the most wretchedly ugly parts of Paris. In a notebook, I wrote down my theories on what I thought would make me a good actor and what steps I would take to get to heaven. Every entry was an intellectualization, an attempt both to escape and to control my life. Meanwhile, my actual life went more and more out of control. My father, who still had no money to speak of, sent me a couple of hundred dollars a month, which ought to have been enough to live on in those days but which I spent on books and gasoline for my car as I tried to live out a crazy scheme to drive around the entire Mediterranean. Toward the end of every month, I was completely free of money. One night in Nice, I slept in my car, which for some reason I had parked on the beach. In the morning, a policeman woke me and asked me to leave. He wasn’t harsh with me; in fact, his face showed concern for this boy foolish enough to bring his car out onto the sand.
I didn’t know how cars worked. I didn’t understand about oil, for instance. The motor began to grind slightly. Parts were wearing out and falling off. The windshield wipers stopped working, and when it rained the road looked like an impressionist painting coming at you at fifty miles an hour.
On the way into Rome, I ran out of gas. With two friends, I pushed the car into Rome. The loaf of bread on the front seat was all there was to eat until I could get to the American Express office, where next month’s check would be waiting.
In Rome, my friends checked in to a hotel. I slept in the car and walked endlessly through the streets, feeling the drama, often sobbing at the thought of having a mother in an insane asylum. It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford a room; it was that I could suffer more this way. Living out of my car, I didn’t wash or change my clothes. For two weeks, I wore the same socks. Cracks appeared on my heels, and my feet began to bleed. I was limping, able to walk only a
block or two at a time. Then, just as they should in a drama, things got worse.
As I left my car one night for an evening out, I saw a man sitting on a railing, cursing me, impatient for me to leave. When I came back after dinner, I saw why. He’d broken into my car and taken my suitcase. My clothes were gone, except for a few things in the trunk.
I went to my friends’ hotel and got a room.
At Christmastime in Paris, I got a call that my mother was being released from the hospital. At the same time, she’d received a letter from her mother in California: She was dying. My mother had to fly home immediately, and I was being asked to fly back with her. We took off from Copenhagen on a flight that would land just once for refueling in Reykjavík, Iceland, then take us over the North Pole to Los Angeles.
It was a long flight, during which I began to realize that we were now deep into our drama and would never get out of it. Listening to my mother’s version of the last few months in the institution, I began to realize she had not so much been released from the hospital as had talked her way out of it. Every week, they’d asked her a series of questions to evaluate her. After a while, it had become clear to her that if she gave them the answers they wanted, they’d have to let her out. She was right—she did have a good mind. On the other hand, she believed her husband wanted to kill her. She’d arranged for her mother to fake a medical emergency so she could escape with her life. And this was why we were on the way to Los Angeles. As she talked, the relief I felt when I’d heard my mother was released from the hospital was replaced by dread. Before we landed in Reykjavík, she suddenly realized she was sitting next to an emergency exit and put two and two together. Obviously, I’d been sent on this trip to push her out of the plane. She insisted on changing seats with me, pleased at how she’d outsmarted me.
We landed in Los Angeles and went to my grandmother’s small house in Burbank. Within a few hours, my mother was holding my grandmother by the hair and had her down on her knees, screaming at her. Later that night, reclining in the La-Z-Boy chair, she passed out in front of the television. The next day, I made an attempt to open up this forbidden subject with my father. I wrote him a long letter, telling him what had happened. I sealed the letter and left it on a chair while I took a shower; then I took it to the post office, bought stamps, and mailed it. A few days later, at a sidewalk café in Rome, my father opened the envelope in front of friends, happy to have a nice fat letter from his son. But paper napkins spilled out of the envelope. My mother had steamed it open while I was in the shower, read it, and short-circuited my first attempt to speak about her illness. My father, not knowing what to say to his friends, laughed and told them I was a great practical joker. For a while, he actually thought I’d sent him a wad of paper napkins.
We went back to our accustomed silence, and somehow we got by. But this silence had not made me an understanding person. There was a knot of anger that resisted untangling. Even when I was into my forties and fifties, she could still enrage me with an irrational accusation. It wasn’t so much that I was impatient with her madness. I could understand that. What I resented her for was not being a mother. And I didn’t just resent her; I hated her for it. She wasn’t what I thought a mother was; I felt I had never had a mother. But what more could she have been? When we laughed together, wasn’t she a mother then? And when she told me I could do anything, wasn’t she the source of my confidence? She convinced me I could do anything. I believed it, and I went out and did things I wasn’t remotely capable of. All thanks to a few words from her. Fortunately, I accomplished these things before I realized they were the words of a madwoman.
But she gave me strength. And I wanted so much to be able to love her, there were times when even the madness itself seemed to be fun. Sometimes the only way to survive living with her was to behave as though we were characters in my own private farce. Sneaking out of a hotel with her without paying the bill, rather than a harrowing experience, became a lighthearted adventure, as long as I could act as if it were happening to someone else.
I was twenty, in my last year of college, and my mother and I were staying in a hotel on Lexington Avenue. My father, unable to deal with it anymore, was divorcing her. Within a year or two, he would marry Flora Marino in Italy, and they would have a son, Antony. I would finally have a brother, even though we would be a generation apart, and for most of his childhood we would live an ocean apart.
My mother had heard somewhere that it’s smart to accumulate possessions before the divorce is final. So she bought a piano, furs, jewelry, and gold place settings, but mostly things that would have little or no value as time went on. We were running up a hotel bill that was enormous. While she still had a husband, she was spending money recklessly and wiping him out financially. Finally, he cut off her funds. The hotel let us owe them for a couple of months, but eventually they got the idea that she would never pay. They informed us that on Friday night at eight o’clock we would have to be out of our rooms, and we couldn’t take our baggage with us. Suddenly, this was an adventure. We decided to make repeated trips out of the hotel, wearing layers of clothing, and leave only our suitcases behind, weighted down with telephone books. I got George, my friend from school, to help me. We made trip after trip down in the elevator and through the lobby wearing our coats over four layers of clothing, which we dumped in a car around the corner. We looked extremely heavy on the way down and extremely thin on the way back up. We were proud of our straight faces. On one trip, we almost went too far. One of us tried for a sixth layer. This was pushing it. The elevator operator turned and stared at us all the way down the long descent to the lobby.
George saw him staring and after a pause said, “God, what a meal!”
“Oh, God, yes,” I said. “I’m stuffed.”
We thought this was hilarious. The elevator operator just stared at us. We made it out to the car, where we pulled off the clothes and headed back upstairs for more.
And she loved it. She laughed with us. She was a kid, like us.
When she laughed, she laughed from her gut, with all of herself. It made you happy to see her young and carefree like an eight-year-old. But, always, mixed in with the spring of her laughter were the dead leaves of the winter of her madness.
I needed to get to a temperate climate.
chapter 8
THE MUSE FROM THE BRONX
Bea Brown’s apartment was filled with people talking and eating and drinking. I’d been invited to listen as musicians got together to play chamber music, and I was looking forward to this night because I’d been working on it and I could tell the difference now between tuning up and playing.
Four string players were getting instruments out of their cases. There was chatter and laughter, ice clinking in glasses, people going inside to throw their coats on the bed—and in the middle of all this, sitting at a music stand, was a beautiful young woman warming up on a clarinet. The musicians settled in, adjusted their stands, turned down the corners of their pages, agreed on a tempo—and started in to play the Mozart clarinet quintet.
The music washed over me: first the strings—sweet, haunting, and sad, throbbing with intensity—and out of this the clarinet emerged, softly at first, then with mounting energy, the notes rising to the ceiling, taking my heart with them. By the end of the first movement, I was in love.
She played with confidence, yet there was something about the way she listened for her entrance, the way she prepared mentally for each passage, that was endearing: She wasn’t coasting. In every moment of the music, it seemed, there was something fresh she paid attention to.
Having first been aroused by the chorus girls of my childhood and then having learned to be guilty of my carnal thoughts in my teens, I was both inflamed and struck dumb in the presence of someone I desired deeply. I couldn’t speak to her.
All I could manage was a mumbled, unintelligible compliment about her playing. Then the evening was over. We all went home, and I didn’t even know her name.
&
nbsp; Bea Brown was a violist and orchestra conductor I had met on the boat coming home from Europe. Bea knew I wanted to learn more about music, and I was hoping she would invite me to her apartment again. Weeks later she did, this time for dinner and then to the opera, where Bea was playing in the pit.
The clarinetist was invited, too, and this time we talked. There were twelve of us around the table, and I was thrilled to see that I could make her laugh. But what brought us together was the rum cake. Bea had made a cake for dessert and put it on top of the refrigerator to cool. It was an ancient Philco refrigerator with a sloping top—so old that it shook from the grinding of its moving parts. Slowly, during dinner, the rum cake jiggled its way to the edge of the sloping top and finally took a dive to the floor. When the guests heard the cake splat, there was laughter, but I couldn’t let it rest at that. I reached for my fork and headed for the kitchen. The only other person who picked up her fork was the clarinetist. We sat down and ate rum cake off the linoleum with a flirtatious show of appetite. Was ever woman in this way wooed?
After the opera, we walked across the park. It was April 10, yet six inches of snow had fallen on Central Park. She had just come back from a year in Germany on a Fulbright, and we got lost in talk about travel, history, and art, and before long we were lost in the park as well. We had made a complete circle back to where we’d started. Then we crossed through the snow again, found the subway, and rode to the Bronx.
