Fresh paint and a few hydrangeas made a world of difference.
I used to worry about getting up at night and going down to the loo and falling . . . how the New York Post would write, “. . . days later she was discovered in a heap at the foot of the stairs . . . wishing she’d worn her good bathrobe . . .”
We planted lots of daffodils, which bloomed beautifully, and lots of tulips which did not. I was naïve then about the deer problem in East Hampton. Oy.
The plan was to patch over the structural issues and decorate the house in “cheap and cheerful,” while I designed my dream house to build elsewhere on the ample 1.3-acre lot. Paint and slipcovers carried the day, and the rooms were furnished with pieces I’d bought at my friend the designer Richard Keith Langham’s tag sale and things I’d inherited from my mother. Atlanta designer and old friend John Oetgen, who’d guided my Buckhead townhouse to an agreeable state of chic, helped me with fabrics and such.
I had curtains and a tablecloth made from burlap for the upstairs “study.”
How the large-scaled furniture I’d bought from designer and friend Richard Keith Langham’s tag sale fit in this little cottage I do not know, but it did. I slipcovered most pieces in a Kravet cotton awning stripe. The botanicals I bought at the Paris flea market and the lamps from Target—but with custom shades.
The result was charming, albeit with drawbacks (there is only one bathroom, downstairs, while my bedroom is upstairs). I used to worry about getting up at night and going down to the loo and falling . . . how the New York Post would write, “. . . days later she was discovered in a heap at the foot of the stairs . . . wishing she’d worn her good bathrobe . . .” But I knew the house was temporary, so it was okay.
The kitchen sink got a striped skirt and matching awning above. Awnings are good solutions for dressing up windows with simple shades and nothing else. / A silly but economical shade for the kitchen light. / I painted the pantry and kitchen floor in a bright coral and white and trimmed the shelves in gingham.
We will not talk about the incident of the raccoons in the attic, but why no one has ever thought to send raccoons after terrorist groups is a mystery to me. They can destroy anything.
A pretty slant of sun in the kitchen. I loved the coral and white painted floor.
Chapter 9
A New Beau, an Old Pattern
I’d begun seeing G in the spring of ’06. We were introduced by a mutual friend. He was attractive, smart, charming, funny, athletic, and beautifully mannered. He took me on a carriage ride through Central Park. If any girl tells you she doesn’t fall for that kind of thing, she’s fibbing.
My status as cancer vixen was intentionally not widely known and I always worried about telling people, because sometimes it can scare them. In a long, late-night talk when I was in Sweden on a Soane Museum trip and G was in New York, we crossed that threshold from superficial to serious, signaling our new relationship might become more than casual. I decided the risk of the cancer conversation was worth it. The next night I wrote him a long email, and held my breath.
The master bedroom. Half-canopy and coverlet in Michael Devine’s Fretwork. Carlton V pillows. Schumacher headboard and slipper chair.
A ragtag collection of blue and white plates above a painted chest.
Around lunchtime the next day, early morning in New York, he emailed back, simply, “I want to hear your voice.” It was the sweetest, most loving answer I could have imagined. I nearly collapsed with relief right there in the middle of whatever Swedish castle I was visiting at the time, and I was endeared to G completely.
My mother’s 18th century mahogany table got a coat of high-gloss white. Sacrilege, I know, but I didn’t want a brown table. The two metal urn forms came from an antiques shop in town. I couldn’t resist them. The beautiful shell photographs are by Nina Rumbough.
The two years or so I, and then we, spent in that first East Hampton cottage, I was pulling it together while at the same time working on new house plans. Knowing it was temporary, I don’t know why I couldn’t be content more or less to camp out in the interim and not care how it looked, but I couldn’t. If my space is out of whack, then I’m out of whack. Admittedly I was not in the best of whacks to begin with.
If my space is out of whack, then I’m out of whack.
Admittedly I was not in the best of whacks to begin with.
I ignored signs in my relationship that maybe it wasn’t the best fit. Things I did and said in the course of just being Frances became points of contention. Innocent remarks became offenses. Those first few eggshells you walk on are sharp and crackly, but after that you get used to it. Your friends notice but don’t tell you. What would they say? What could they say? G and I had become engaged.
There were of course ways in which we were well suited and comfortable together. I liked his friends, we loved playing tennis and golf together, and we both loved East Hampton. I used to tease G about proposing. He’d say, “Do you want to go get a hamburger?” And I’d say “Was that a proposal?” He’d say, “What movie do you want to see?” And I’d say, “Was that a proposal?” I thought it was hilarious, and he was a good sport about it, which I took as a sign he was open to the idea. Then one day on the tennis court, after we’d finished playing, he said “So you think we ought to get married?” I said, “That was definitely a proposal!”
Cheap and cheerful. Hardware store shelving with shells and starfish creates a focal point in the downstairs landing.
I continued to work on designing the new house. I came to an impasse with one architect and began anew with another. By the time I started loving the design, we decided not to go through with it. It was going to be expensive (duh) and a touch grand for that particular block. Houses should belong to where they are.
We planned an April wedding. I told myself everything was okay, that the pit in my stomach was natural, nerves, stress, the strain of trying to get it all done.
The guest room was just big enough for a double bed. The pretty metal lit a la Polonaise was also from Keith Langham’s tag sale. Bedding, Manuel Canovas.
Chapter 10
Another Loss
March 30, 2008, was a Sunday, less than a month before the wedding. Planning had not gone all that smoothly and we were in Tarboro, where the wedding would take place, working through details. My cousins Rena and Louise were acting as wedding planners and floral designers, great at both.
Tarboro being Tarboro—population 10,000—ballrooms and banquet halls are scarce. We used to have a country club, but it burned down years ago and was never rebuilt. So we were standing in what used to be the corner gas station and auto supply store on Main Street discussing its merits as a rehearsal dinner venue. That a wedding six-plus months in the making for 250 people was a few weeks away and still not organized was not a good sign, and I had the knots in my stomach to prove it. The body does not lie.
William Grimes Clark III, Bill, Uncle Dubba, in Nags Head, North Carolina, where various members of the Clark family have had houses since I don’t know when. My 90-something cousin Teeny remembers having chickens and a cow right by the beach when she was a child.
I looked across the concrete-floored room to see Louise answer her cell phone. Her face contorted and her body slumped. “Dubba,” she gasped. The sheer, heart-stopping incredulity of it froze any of us from reacting. My Uncle Dubba’s dying was in the distant future, but not that day. With his wife Gray by his side as she always was, Dubba was at that moment in a fancy hospital suite at the Medical College of Virginia, watching ACC basketball and recovering from back surgery. Serious surgery indeed, but not something you die from. Unless a blood clot loosens itself from somewhere and goes to your heart and stops it.
Dubba was the last man standing who was close to us.
He was handsome, funny, charismatic, and charming.
A diminutive of W for William, Dubba had been his nickname since college. My sister and I adored him. Safe to say our mother—his sister—adored
him too, though not in a fawning way. With our father absent and former stepfather estranged, Dubba was the last man standing who was close to us. He was handsome, funny, charismatic, and charming. A consummate gentleman with not a pretentious bone in his body, he had no idea how many people considered him their best friend.
Not only were Dubba and Gray hosting our wedding reception at their home, but also Dubba was walking me down the aisle. I was even told part of the reason he had the damn back operation in the first place was because he wanted to feel good and to dance at my wedding.
There was a part of me that felt responsible for his death. That is absurd, I know, but I was about to make a pretty major mistake, which my mother would have seen coming a mile away . . . and I could hear her voice in my head saying, “Dubba, do something.” So maybe if I hadn’t been such a clueless, stupid, bad person, I wouldn’t have gotten in the situation in the first place, and maybe he wouldn’t have died. This is the worst kind of irrational fantasy, of course, but it left its tracks.
If there was a remotely conceivable silver lining, it was in postponing the wedding so G and I might sort out our relationship. We rescheduled the wedding for October, and we continued couples therapy. Note “continued.”
Yes, we had been in therapy a while.
Dubba and his wife, my beautiful Aunt Gray, on safari in Botswana, 1986. Trigg and I were lucky to go with them, my first of many trips there.
In 2006, celebrating Gray and Dubba’s 50th wedding anniversary, our families went to Africa together, a magical trip.
Not to be rash, but if you’re having issues that require therapy before you marry, maybe you ought to consider an alternative . . . like not marrying.
But I so much wanted to be a good girl, to do the right thing, to make it work, to fix myself so it would work. If I tried hard enough, I knew I could rearrange my thoughts and feelings to where I could make the relationship work. What was wrong with me?
Well, there was nothing “wrong” with me. I was just wrong for him. I see it now, but I didn’t then.
What I saw was twenty years of being single, and that seemed like enough. I was tired of dating. Putting yourself out there to meet people and make plans is a hell of an effort at middle age. It’s tedious going to a party or out on a blind date when you’d rather stay in watching Downton Abbey. Not that relationships don’t take effort, but it’s different. The last few years had wrung me out emotionally. My spirit was sagging. I wasn’t just tired of dating, I was tired, period. In my Southern vernacular, I was wo’ OUT.
Moreover, there was the stark fact of mortality. Having cancer and losing both parents and a precious uncle in one’s forties does draw one’s attention to the impermanence of life. I happened across this verse by Robert Frost:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
So dawn goes down to day.
I looked at where in the day I was.
Why are we so often focused on what we don’t have and what we haven’t done? Why are we so stingy in giving credit to ourselves? I actually realized I’d achieved many of my career goals–writing for magazines, publishing several books, and hosting a television show, for example. But I’d missed some of the personal ones. Married and divorced in my twenties, I’d never had children. Being a mother was not a burning desire for me, but I took it for granted that I would be. Cancer treatment cancelled the possibility of motherhood, an ache I reckon will come and go all my life.
I was alone. I didn’t want to be. I’d always been able to find a port in a storm. I had seen by this point, however, that life’s storms could pick up my little boat and toss it on the rocks without warning. What I wanted now was safe harbor, and I’d chart a course from there.
The marriage was to be my harbor. So I hung in there with G.
Chapter 11
Finding the House, Losing the Marriage
The so-called “hanging in there” was rather a bleak combination of denial and obligation in which there is neither pride nor nobility. Nor common sense, for that matter. A bright spot, however, was the distraction of house-hunting. I love looking at houses.
When we pulled up to the stucco cottage on Fithian Lane, my pulse quickened a smidge. “I’ve had a thing for this house,” I told G, excitedly. In fact I had seen the house a year earlier and was enchanted by its storybook charm and blue shutters. But prices in the Hamptons were at their most insane in 2007, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of buying it then. However, 2008 was a different story. The stock market had crashed and the financial world had collapsed. People selling houses in the Hamptons were a little bit gladder to see you.
When a space is right for you, there is an instinctive response to it—an intuitive sense of how you would live there, where your things would go, what you would keep and what you would change.
It’s a project, but not a struggle.
The house was in an estate and had been vacant for more than a year, but the furnishings were largely still in place. An elderly man and his male companion had lived there previously. Before that the man had lived there with his wife, who had long ago retreated to upstate New York. I learned later from a neighbor that the former wife was an English aristocrat—she was the countess or dowager countess of something—which perhaps partially explained the interiors. You could tell that those who lived there had style. The lines of the furniture, the cut of the curtains, the art—it all just felt right, dated and worn as it was. We could see ourselves there. “It has good joss,” G said. We made the offer.
If it feels right, it probably is. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. Instincts are not wrong; ignoring them is. Worse is getting so off-track that you lose your instincts altogether.
When a space is right for you, there is an instinctive response to it—an intuitive sense of how you would live there, where your things would go, what you would keep and what you would change. It’s a project, but not a struggle.
Why couldn’t I see that in my personal life as well? An analogy both obvious and simple, how could it be so clear with a house and not with a man? In a way they both entail important, intimate relationships. If it feels right, it probably is. If it doesn’t, it isn’t. Instincts are not wrong; ignoring them is. Worse is getting so off-track that you lose your instincts altogether. My heart had so many ifs, buts, and shoulds wrapped around it that I barely recognized it. The relationship with G did not feel right and had not for a while.
The one thing that did feel right was this house, and I took comfort there. That search was over.
Elsewhere in my life, another search continued.
Celebrating the closing with then-real-estate agent and still-friend, Frank Newbold.
Bee Cottage as I found her in 2008, with a somewhat overgrown yew hedge and ivy growing up the walls.
As we found it, the house had been lived in until recently by an elderly couple with quiet good taste.
Chapter 12
Seeking a New Path
The week I received the cancer diagnosis, a seemingly random encounter would become one of the most important of my life. I was with friends in a restaurant, and as the evening wore on we lingered at the bar. I found myself in conversation with a stranger, and no, he wasn’t hitting on me. But you know how you’ll tell a stranger something you wouldn’t tell a friend? I told him about my diagnosis. He told me his mother was a healer. It was like an angel landed on my shoulder. I called her the next day.
We met in her office, and she asked me if the tumor was in the upper left quadrant of my left breast. I had not told her, and she had not seen test results. “Yes!” I said, “and you should be on TV!” A practitioner of the Barbara Brennan School of Healing, Anna Schalk and I worked together for three years. I am certain she is
one of the reasons I did so well during those cancer treatments and later was able to navigate the numbing grief of my mother’s death.
As our energy work progressed it became less about the body and more about the spirit. I was honored when Anna referred me to her teacher, who had progressed from medical nurse, to energy healer, to spiritual teacher. She had developed a three-year course called “Awakening Into Presence” based (mostly) in Tibetan Buddhism. Entailed were four weekend workshops per year, as well as weekly telephone sessions, and twice-daily meditation practices. It was a serious commitment. I had meditated off and on since college, but the practice I began then I continue to this day. If you can be an Episcopalian Buddhist, I suppose that is what I am.
At one of the workshops, a fellow student and wonderful soul named Cheryl recommended to me a book called Sacred Choices, by Christel Nani. A former emergency room nurse and a medical intuitive, Christel can clairvoyantly “see” physical illness or injury in the body. Another of Christel’s books, Diary of a Medical Intuitive, chronicles these experiences and how she eventually, if reluctantly, left the ER to be an energy healer and teacher.
The labyrinth at Canyon Ranch, Tuscon, Arizona
I didn’t so much read Sacred Choices as inhale it. It affected me so that I could literally feel its energy running through me. That sounds so weird, I know. It was weird, to be honest. In addition to her own story, Christel recounted those of her clients, all in situations not right for them but in which they stayed in loyalty to a “tribal belief.” This is a belief that may once have served to preserve the “tribe,” but that had ceased to serve the individual. A woman holding the tribal belief that “marriage is forever no matter what” might stay in an abusive relationship despite the damage to herself and her children. Not good. Another example: “All the Jones men are engineers,” is a fine tradition and had served the family well. But what of the son who really wants to be a teacher? Instead, Son follows the tribe, and twenty years later he’s in a slump and doesn’t know why. Christel might say it’s because his energy wasn’t behind his work, because he was not living his “energetic blueprint.” He’s not being who he was born to be, and that is not good for anyone. The same principle applies to relationships.
The Bee Cottage Story Page 3
