My mother sniffed plaintively. She is a redoubtable warrior, but take the hostilities into her territory and she acts more helpless than Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight.
“I’m glad you called,” she said after a pause long enough for me to have fully realized my unkindness. “I need you and Louise to help me plan the engagement shower for Betsey.”
“Doesn’t Betsey have any close friends to do that sort of thing?”
“Most of her family is in Connecticut, and her college crowd is scattered all over. I think she said her best friend from school lives in Dubrovnik or some terrible place like that.”
I didn’t understand the compulsion demonstrated by many of Betsey’s friends to join the Peace Corps or spread the gospel of liberty to nasty places in the Balkans. Was America suddenly short on poor people? And was our own democracy so perfected that we had nothing left to do but export it?
“You’ll have to plan the shower without me, Ma. I’m going out of town, probably right away. For a nurses’ strike.”
That would shut my mother up. We had not traveled so far from Boston that Ma could forget she was a good Democrat, an old-fashioned Democrat. My mother had never crossed a picket line in her life, and she still shopped with a keen eye out for the union label, though finding it was a lot harder than it used to be. While other children were sung to sleep with “Froggy Went A-Courting” and “Oh, Susannah,” my mother’s lullabies to us had been “Bread and Roses,” “Joe Hill,” and “The Mill Was Made of Marble.” She’d alternate these with Irish ballads of loss, such as “Freemantle Bay,” or “Grace, Please Hold Me in Your Arms,” this last being the farewell of a man to his new bride hours before being hanged for the Easter Rebellion. It was a wonder we weren’t all in therapy.
But I still get tears in my eyes when my mother sings “Joe Hill” while she’s doing the dishes. Joe Hill, as Ma had explained to me years ago, was an organizer in the Utah copper mines who was framed for murder by the copper bosses and executed in 1915. By the time she gets to the part where Joe says, “What they forgot to kill went on to organize,” I’m reaching for one of her dish towel calenders to sniffle into. I have a whole drawerful to choose from; my mother’s collected them since somewhere around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
To such a mother, a loyal union gal, you’d think a strike would be a valid excuse for failing in my girlish duties to Betsey. But no.
“You can at least design the shower invitations,” she said.
My degree in studio art and the layout skills I’d learned on the job meant that I was obliged to help with flyers for the parish carnival, funeral programs for distant relatives, song sheets for neighborhood caroling, and every other circular or notice my mother thought would look better “done up nice.”
“I’m going to be busy, Ma. A strike is no picnic. This one will probably be messy.”
My mother was proud that I earned in a year more than my father had earned in two when he was my age, but she didn’t want to hear about my job. She wanted to hear what color eye shadow I’d worn on my last date.
“You’ll have a spare half hour here or there. Look, Betsey may not have been our first choice, but we should still welcome her to the family.”
“What if I don’t feel like welcoming her yet?”
It had been a dark day for all of us when Betsey brought her cranky Toyota into River Road Auto, smiled trustingly up at Johnny and asked for rush service. For all her flowered, drop-waisted dresses and unpowdered nose, Betsey was no slouch in the man-catching department. She had reeled Johnny in with patience and skill, not letting up until he was, so to speak, flopping on the floor of her boat.
Ten months after they met, Betsey was playfully dragging Johnny into Tiffany’s to show him just what sort of engagement ring she’d prefer—platinum, with a pear-cut diamond. (Of course, my mother had sent Johnny straight to an old customer of my father’s who had a connection on Amsterdam Avenue. She wasn’t about to let Johnny go into hock so that Betsey could have a glittering trophy to show off to her friends. Johnny himself was enough of a glittering trophy, in my mother’s eyes.)
“We owe this to Johnny,” said Ma, with the false firmness that meant she agreed with me completely but was trying to set a good example.
“Hey, it’s a long way to a June wedding. You know as well as I do that if ever a couple illustrated the phrase ‘meant for each other,’ it’s Louise and Johnny.”
“And what do you suggest, Nicky?”
“You’re his aunt. Talk to him.”
“You’re my daughter, and talking to you does no good.”
I sidestepped that one.
“At the very least, you don’t have to take this shower on, Ma, do you? We’ll all be standing around, gritting our teeth, and Betsey and her little kindergarten-teacher friends will be cooing over cat stuff.”
Not only did Betsey have a cat, but she was one of those people who collect whimsical cat-related objects. That seemed to me grounds for being jilted by any man worthy of his salt.
“I wasn’t going to get involved, but Johnny asked me to,” said my mother. “And he asked me to ask you to do something pretty for the invitations, with your artistic talent.”
“Ma, you know Johnny never said any such thing. We could do the invitations on construction paper for all he cares.”
“Nicky, have you thought that maybe Johnny loves Louise like a sister?”
“No, Ma, and neither have you. He loves me like a sister. His attitude to Louise is very, very different.”
“Okay, Dr. Joyce Brothers. You may be right, but that doesn’t mean we can treat this girl like dirt. If Louise had wanted Johnny she’d have done something about it by now.”
“Ma, Louise can barely manage to get her car inspection renewed every two years. We’re not talking about someone with a life plan here. She’ll float along until the week before the wedding and then it’ll hit her and it’ll be too late. Besides, she was definitely prickly with him this afternoon. I think that’s a good sign, don’t you?”
“Has she dumped that long-haired boyfriend of hers?”
“It’s only a matter of time, Ma, you know that.”
Joey had said once, when asked if he liked one of Louise’s beaux, “I’ve learned not to get too attached to them.” None of Louise’s boyfriend oddities lasted long with her, which is what you’d expect from a woman who convinces herself she’s fallen in love every nine months just to distract her heart from the subconscious pain of wanting what it can’t have. In her own eyes, Louise was still the fat cousin who listened to Johnny talk about his evening when he came home from a date. A noncontender.
My mother would have agreed readily with this analysis. It was amazing how many things we could agree on and still fight constantly. The quality I share with my mother, and which keeps me reluctantly convinced that I am her blood child, is an insatiable nosiness about the true facts of other people’s lives and an overpowering desire to see to it that the lives of those we love turn out the way we think they should. It always surprises both of us that the rest of the world is so willing to deal on the surface, when we feel it’s a waste of living not to know what’s really going on, not to address the real and interesting problems.
Ma said, “Enough about Louise’s love life. What did you two agree on at lunch today?”
“If you’re talking about matchmaking, we agreed on nothing. If you’re talking about the new knee-length skirts, we both think they’re hideously unflattering.”
“Everything’s a joke to you, Nicky. Do you want to be alone when you’re forty?”
“I thought I was going to be a gray-haired mother at forty, isn’t that what you said? Make up your mind. I have to go now, Ma. Ron will be here any minute.”
“Fine,” said my mother, in a voice that meant, “If your slick, glamorous career means more to you than your own mother, so be it.”
“I’ll call you before I leave town.”
“I put something in th
e mail for you,” my mother said. “Maybe you’ll get it before you leave.”
As I hung up the phone under Phyllis’s interested gaze, I wondered what my mother had sent me this time. Probably another pamphlet in what Joey called the “Catholic, Come Home” series. They had titles such as “It’s Okay to be Angry at the Church,” “Are You a Lost Sheep?” and “Our Lady’s Tears: How the Blessed Mother Leads Catholics Back to God.”
My father had not said a word when I ceased going to church, one month to the day that I left to live at college. I hadn’t gone far, just to College Park and a soulless dorm room at the University of Maryland, but it was far enough to pull loose the never-very-strong roots of my faith. Ma, of course, had said plenty. But Dad had always subtly encouraged the rebellious streak that ran through all his children. It was my father who’d bought me my first set of oil paints when I was only eight, bought them despite the fact that my mother didn’t understand why I couldn’t be satisfied with temperas in plastic jars and drugstore watercolors.
It was one of the few times I ever witnessed my father disagreeing with her. He said, “If she wants better paints, she should have better paints. We can call it an early birthday present.” That was my father. He never seemed to notice anything—he was certainly not like the prying, vigilant, cheerful fathers so common on television in those years. He worked hard, and he was silent with exhaustion most nights when he came home. Then, out of nowhere, he’d do something just perfect, something that required an intuition for children and how passionately children want what they want.
Oddly, Ma never lectured Louise about being lapsed, perhaps because Louise was afflicted with an originally Protestant mother, my Aunt Pamela, who’d grown up a Methodist in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Ma once commented to my aunt that Methodists “seemed to do nothing in church but sing.” All that singing was clearly too enjoyable to have anything to do with religion. No wonder Louise had imbibed the idea that faith was supposed to make you feel good. The poor girl never had a chance.
In books and movies, the grown child learns to appreciate the aging, difficult parent who has never been properly understood. It turns out that behind all the crotchetiness, there always beat a vulnerable, sensitive heart that hungered for filial affection. I waited for any sign from my remaining parent that this was the case, but clearly my mother was going by a different script, one that included the lines, “You weren’t a pretty child, but people always noticed your hair,” or, “If you ever put me in a home, don’t even bother coming to visit. I won’t want to see you.”
My kind and silent father was gone. My grandmother was a memory, a woman with eyes like mine and a will so fierce that it had dragged an entire family onto the boat to America when no one but her really wanted to go. A will so fierce that she had been the hands-down victor in every fight that she and my mother had ever had. I missed seeing that. And I missed my father’s interested approval, an approval I’d never had to win.
I still had my mother, though, and the beautiful relationship we might develop in her golden years. Somehow, that wasn’t much comfort.
3
“YOU’RE LATE,” I said to Ron.
“Last-minute crisis at the office,” he replied.
In other words, he’d had to floss his teeth and admire his profile in the luxurious privacy of his executive washroom. Ron took an innocent delight in his own beauty. He had windswept hair—dark with a gleam of silver here and there—that fell in Regency locks on his forehead, a square chin with the proverbially dangerous cleft, and broad shoulders shown off by the war correspondent trench coats and black turtlenecks he affected. Another woman might have been weakened by constant exposure to his melting good looks, but there was something slightly wrong about Ron’s mouth that put me off; it wasn’t quite resolute enough, and the general outline of his lips wasn’t defined enough for my taste. Besides, I knew better than to fall for a man who appeared in black turtlenecks anyplace but on a ski slope or during a burglary. Somewhere along the way a man like that has looked in the mirror once too often.
Ron wound up in public relations because communism collapsed, leaving him high and dry, James Bond looking for a day job. In the golden last days of the Cold War he’d been a hired hand for the American Foundation for Freedom, a quasi-governmental organization that funneled a lot of money to Poland and Cuba and worked closely (many said too closely) with the most staunchly anti-communist AFL unions—and with other more sinister organizations, perhaps. Maybe it wasn’t for nothing that it was sometimes joked about as the “AFL-CIA” back then.
In his single days, Ron liked to hang out with the World Bank cocktail-hour crowd and tell stories about sneaking into Havana or taking secret video footage of Mexican factories violating NAFTA by dumping toxic waste. (The truth, I suspect, is that Ron was just a glorified delivery boy, getting cash into the right hands but not clued in on anything else.) Among D.C.’s plentiful Euro-snobs and embassy hangers-on, he became a ubiquitous lounge lizard. Women in those circles would smile dismissively when his name came up: “Oh, yes, I know Ron. Everybody knows Ron.”
Then he met Dana in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Dana was a stunningly attractive child psychiatrist with a firm yet sympathetic air ideal for managing Ron and, I assumed, her small clients. Dana knew malleable raw material when she met it. Three months after their first dinner together, Ron was married to Dana and living in a split-level in Bethesda. Six months after that, he was promoted to account exec at the prestigious PR megafirm Swinton McClaine. And four years later, he went out on his own.
Ron’s character was flavored through and through with a conniving sleaziness, but his wife, who had few illusions about him, kept his worst excesses in check. If it weren’t for Dana’s restraining influence, I wouldn’t have gone to work for Ron. Even so, there had been plenty of times when I regretted my decision. For example, the week I first came on board with him as “creative vice president,” renouncing my secure berth as a copywriter at Swinton, Ron shook my never-very-robust faith in him by entertaining the possibility of the Mothers in Motion account.
Mothers in Motion was a group of right-wing female fundamentalists leading a thousand-woman journey from California to Capitol Hill to lobby for private school vouchers, an end to sex education, and a return to the values that made this country great. Unfortunately, on the third day of the walk, a few of the more overzealous Mothers had the inspiration of throwing smoke bombs and firecrackers into a Planned Parenthood clinic in Nevada, leaving MiM in need of some speedy damage control. Ron received a hysterical early morning phone call from a Florida senator with uncomfortably close ties to this posse of Mrs. Cleavers.
“You can’t be serious,” I said, when he broached the idea of pulling MiM’s irons out of the fire.
“What do you have against motherhood?” said Ron.
“Nothing. I just have a problem with felons in flowered aprons.”
“Those were just a handful of fringe members.”
“Save it for the press statement.”
“Shouldn’t feminism mean that all points of view are embraced?” said Ron, quoting perhaps from some Heritage Foundation radio program he’d turned on by accident once in the car. Like all good PR men, Ron was a magpie. Without being especially thoughtful or perceptive, he could pick up snappy phrases like this and retrieve them when the occasion called for it.
It was only by pointing out to Ron that our left-leaning clients were likely to blacklist us if we started shilling for MiM that I persuaded him to pass on the project. In the past few years, I’d slowly managed to convince him that since we couldn’t compete for the kind of big-dollar accounts the major players went after, we should carve a niche as the plucky little firm that gave its offbeat, affordable best to every noble but underfunded cause from carpal tunnel syndrome to the rights of circus elephants.
In our first year together, we won a few big victories that put us on the map. We got a pro-gun-control state senator elected in Mo
ntana. We kick-started the fund-raising efforts of a well-meaning but naive women’s health services collective, raising enough money to open a shelter for victims of domestic abuse in downtown Memphis. Ron enraged me by calling it “Tempura Home for Lightly Battered Women” in private, but he drummed up a million to open its doors.
“I told you, you wouldn’t regret it,” Ron said when he took me out for sushi on the anniversary of my first year with him and handed me a bonus check that brought my Advocacy, Inc. salary up to nearly two-thirds of the one I’d left behind at Swinton McClaine. It was typical of Ron that on this occasion he chose a sushi bar, never inquiring if I had any taste for raw fish (I don’t) or saki (I do). I ordered shrimp teriyaki and let myself bask in the five-minute glow of Ron’s gratitude.
“When did I say I didn’t regret it, Ron?”
“Nicky, Nicky. Working with you has been an adventure. We’re like Lewis and Clark.”
“I’ll be Clark. I think Lewis had syphilis.”
“You know, if I weren’t married, Nicky, I could really go for you.”
“There’s a thought to keep me awake at nights,” I said. Ron took this as a compliment. He liked to flirt with me in the hammy way that reformed rakes adopt, but I never felt threatened for a minute by his smarmy glances and regretful allusions to his lost single state. If Ron were to be, say, run over by a bus, Dana would grieve but she would go on, personally and professionally. Ron might stray occasionally—though I had no firsthand knowledge that he did—but, if the reverse happened, Ron would wind up a wreck of a man, living with his married sister in Wisconsin, selling used cars or model homes.
Why did I work with Ron, whose morals were flexible on a good day and priced for quick sale on a bad day? Probably because he didn’t care that I wasn’t a real public relations professional. He knew that I’d gotten my start at Swinton when, after I’d temped there for six months, they decided to keep me around rather than go to the trouble of training a new junior copywriter. Ron knew I had no ad agency experience, no communications degree. He didn’t care, because as a business team we were perfectly complementary. Ron could put together long-range media plans as beautiful and inventive as da Vinci’s blueprints for a flying machine. He was a fountain of what that brilliant adman David Ogilvie called “big ideas,” the overarching concepts without which no campaign is truly a campaign. For my part, I turned out snappy copy that combined sincere emotion with low-key credibility. I laid out ads and brochures for clients who couldn’t afford a real graphic designer. I even pinch-hit as an events planner when I absolutely couldn’t get out of it.
The Side of the Angels Page 4
