When on the last day of July my mother returned from Portugal, tanned and sleek, with presents, she called us all and said, “Come for dinner, your father is coming over too, I’m sending a car for him.”
He was pasty after a month at the Carlton House without her, and could hardly hold his head up. He slumped on his side of their couch, his mouth agape. She looked at him, and looked at the lists and lists of wedding details she’d spread out on the coffee table, and issued an ultimatum. “Look,” she told us, speaking about him as if he were not in the room, as if he were not on his side of their shared couch. “Either he stops drinking, right here and now, or he is not welcome at the wedding.”
He looked up as she said this. With my hand clenched in the armchair beside him, I dug my nails into my palm. “Honey,” he said, and then some words, mumbles really, no one understood. His head went back on his chest, and he appeared to pass out sitting up.
“You kids go on home,” she told us, ringing the bell for the elevator. “I’ll get him into bed in his old room. I’ll handle this.”
The following day she took him out to East Hampton and began her own enforced dry-out strategy with no medical supervision. Looking back, I can’t fathom why she did this without a proper detox protocol, except that maybe she didn’t know of that necessity, or she felt she simply knew best. It would have been like her to think she knew best. In her defense, I would say that maybe she was trying to save him the only way she knew how.
In the kitchen, Johanna loaded fruits and vegetables into the blender following instructions my mother had carefully written out on a yellow legal pad in green ink. The recipes for “health shakes” came from a book called Thirty Days to a Healthier You that my mother had found in the local bookstore. “Your poor daddy,” Johanna would say in her Irish brogue. “Saints in heaven, bless this poor man having to drink these concoctions.”
In the mornings and then again at dusk, Vincent walked my father up and down the driveway at my mother’s request. In the flat glare of late-morning summer light and then in the lavender twilight, holding Vincent’s arm, my father stepped slowly, teetering from side to side as if balancing, not walking, his legs brittle. Together the two men progressed slowly, Vincent in canvas work trousers and a denim shirt, my father in his smoking jacket. Step by step they made their way down the long gravel driveway and around the border of the property. Upstairs in the house my mother would be on her pink princess phone, seated on her bed, with lists and calendars. She’d speak with Ruth Ann, discussing the final wedding details, or with her sister and Bertcher, the secretary, to book her sister’s travel plans to arrive urgently, earlier than planned, or with my sisters and me, reassuring us that everything was proceeding nicely and our father was “getting better every day” under her care. Meanwhile, the home my father had bought years earlier, to create a sense of family safety, family identity, he now shakily patrolled in the stark August light of morning and in the fading light at dusk. At age seventy-four, he was little more than a trespasser on the outer edges of that long-ago dream.
Quinta de Crianças Brincar. House of Playing Children. Children at Play.
By the time of our conversation in the sunroom, he had been off alcohol for a week. “I have such great hopes for you, for your life. I promised not to drink until after the wedding, and I won’t. But right after, I will. That’s fair.”
Try to be fair, he had always told us. The world might not be fair, but you be fair.
I wanted to say something in the sunroom that evening, something that would keep him there.
Much as I couldn’t get off the bus to stop him on Madison Avenue weeks earlier, I could not summon a voice he would hear. Perhaps I didn’t know what I could possibly say. Even as an adult, the child of an alcoholic forgets how to speak; or, more accurately, loses the belief that their words have any power to make a difference or to matter. It was part of the strategy of retreat that we learned early in childhood to master. My father was a genius of language, but in the fog of his alcoholism, we all lost the power of impactful speech, the gift of communication. And anyway, I thought, he isn’t here. He’s long gone. He had disappeared behind his eyes. Disappeared somewhere cloudy and forever, somewhere no one could reach.
His voice grew soft, and he knew he was speaking the words that would disappoint. “I’m an old dog, honey,” he told me. “No new tricks.”
It was very still in the sunroom just then, just the sound of two people being quiet together, and the scratch of the fir tree’s needles on the picture window in the dusk. And I knew that he was already gone.
VII
The LIE
On the radio in the summer of 1983, Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” topped the charts, along with the Police, “Every Breath You Take.”
Two days before the wedding, Smokey Robinson was singing “Cruisin’” on the radio as Dean and I made our way out of town through the Midtown Tunnel.
In the back of our car we had my wedding dress in a garment bag, plus a duffle bag with two small blue Tiffany boxes, a single gold wedding band in each, and two slightly larger blue boxes with presents for the bridesmaids: a single pearl on a delicate gold chain, just short enough to allow the pearl to sit in the nape of the neck. Both of my sisters wore the necklaces the rest of the long week ahead. I remember looking at them several times during those days, remembering back to when we were in the car, wedding items in the back seat and the radio on. I remember Catherine fiddling with hers unconsciously, day after day, and thinking she should be careful not to break the delicate chain.
The road was mostly empty late morning on a Thursday in mid-August. Occasional trucks passed, making mid-island deliveries. The Long Island Expressway often had the reputation, in those days before HOV lanes were put in, of being “the world’s largest parking lot,” and so Dean and I left for East Hampton early. At any given stretch in the LIE, usually mid-island, the parking lot effect came into play: an accident or commuters or beachgoers—it all clogged the road, and hours would be added to the trip. Dean and I were both in a hurry and not that morning as we headed toward our wedding. As we loaded up the car, the trunk open, the radio already playing, it felt much the same as any other trip to visit my parents in East Hampton. We worked almost in silence, attending to details—wedding dress, suitcases with clothes for our honeymoon in Italy, the rings, and the presents for the bridesmaids. As we got closer to the Jones Beach exit, there were signs of holiday traffic, pickup trucks with surfboards piled in the back, convertibles filled with teenagers in sunglasses. And at that point the car slowed to a crawl.
“So now we’re fucked,” I said.
Dean laughed, his eyes on the road. He was like that; he didn’t get rattled easily.
“Don’t you think it’s ironic,” I said, “that no one ever comments on the fact that when you say ‘LIE,’ referring to the Long Island Expressway, what you’re really spelling out is the word ‘lie’?”
We were inching along behind a blue VW bus with bicycles strapped to the back and surfboards tied on the roof. “How do you boggle your brain like that,” he said. “It just amazes me. What’s going on in there?”
“No, I mean think about it. Just that as you hear the traffic reporter tell you, as we heard on the radio a few minutes ago, that ‘traffic is running on or close to normal,’ you promptly get snagged in a major rat fuck of a jam, you know? So, in essence, what you just heard on the radio about the LIE was in fact an l-i-e.”
“A lie.”
“Precisely.” I held my arm out the window and cupped the warm humid August air in my palm as we passed the Jones Beach exit and gradually picked up speed again. “Lies, lies, lies. Far as the eye can see. This entire stretch is paved in lies. In each of the houses off every exit, people are telling lies. In every house, I bet there is at least one lie told a day.”
Dean and I lived in a tiny ground-floor apartment on Horatio Street in the Far West Village, with a super who thought spacemen were speaking to him
through the faucet in our bathroom. We had a small garden and a fireplace and a bedroom where a full-size bed filled the entire space. By day, Dean fed mice in a lab and took notes on their memory function. I had my first editorial job, as an assistant to the features editor at Vogue magazine in Midtown, a place where toned women editors clacked designer heels down smooth white corridors under harsh fluorescent lights.
Nights, I curled around Dean, or he around me. Our bodies fit perfectly together as we held each other through the night. Whatever else about us might not have fit perfectly—our life’s ambitions, our priorities, our values—we assumed that those too gradually would evolve and softly form around each other’s contours as well. I felt this was the protocol of love: you start in a safe embrace, and then that evolution as a couple, that growing to each other’s contours, followed in time. You had to start somewhere. We were together, we were safe. The rest, we trusted, was bound to happen.
At exit 70 in Manorville, we stopped for gas and called the house from the pay phone to say we were running late. Dean had his hand in a bag of potato chips, the phone in the crook of his neck, when he suddenly stood straight and handed the phone to me. My mother’s housekeeper spoke to me using my baby name. “JJ,” she said, “keep driving straight to Southampton Hospital. Your daddy’s had a stroke.”
“A what?”
“A stroke,” she repeated.
“I can’t hear you, a what?”
“Your mother is there,” she continued. “She said, if you called, to tell you to hurry up.”
Just that morning, probably as Dean and I were leaving our apartment in the city, probably when Helen was laying her clothes on her bed and Raymond was securing the ribbons on the canoe, my mother, already in her tennis whites for the morning, found my father unconscious in his bed. She rode along in the back of the ambulance, down the sloping lawn, past the tent that was just that morning being erected, past the gardener making even lines as he mowed the grass, past the wild honeysuckle, past the cottage where the future in-laws would be housed, and past her driveway sign, “Drive Cautiously/Children at Play.” The sirens wailed as they turned onto the main road. Wearing her pleated tennis skirt, the wedding preparations in full swing on the lawn as they passed, my mother sat helplessly, watching my father’s labored breaths behind the oxygen mask that covered his face.
When Dean and I entered the hospital, we came upon my mother, as one would upon a familiar face at an airport, sitting in her outfit in the ER waiting room. A young doctor in green scrubs sat speaking with her in hushed tones, a clipboard on his lap.
“Well, there they are,” she said, pointing at us, and the entire waiting room of the ER looked in our direction expectantly, as if we’d either done something wrong or brought the pizza they’d called out for. There was a mother with a crying child, two men in baseball caps, one holding a towel around his hand, an older couple holding hands, a few more people either sneezing, or bleeding, or whimpering, or reading, victims of minor colds and mishaps on a summer weekday. My mother swept her hand across the room to the assembled. “These are our lovebirds,” she announced.
The doctor looked impassively at me. “I understand you’re to be married on Saturday,” he said, and nodded, perhaps a cue for us to do the same.
“In two days,” my mother added to everyone in the room.
It was clear the doctor was used to giving people unwelcome information; he nodded and we nodded and he invited us into a private room. He pulled a shade down over the window on the door after he closed it shut.
“So, let me be candid with you, Jeanne.” He pronounced it like “Gene.”
My mother went into her French accent. “It’s ‘Jeanne,’” she said. “Jeanne Robineau, like Jeanne Moreau. Not Gene. Jeanne. More like the a in the word ‘man.’” She pronounced it as she always did: “mahhhn.” “My family is a French family.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Call me whatever. What’s happening?”
“She hates us for giving her that name, but it’s a beautiful name, she’s named for my sister. Her aunt Jeanne. And her father cares very deeply, as do I, that she not go through life being called Gene or, worse, Genie, like she came out of a bottle.”
“Mother, I don’t care if he calls me an elephant’s whore,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Your father has suffered a massive stroke,” he said. “There is no telling now if he’ll make it or not. It could be tomorrow, it could be six months from now.” He shrugged. “We can’t be sure of anything. But it’s serious.”
“Well,” my mother said, “the only thing we are sure of”—and she clenched her hand around mine—“is that there is going to be a wedding at our house this weekend. This is my baby girl. We have to get these two kids married. Isn’t that right, Doctor?”
The doctor looked up from his clipboard. He thought for a moment.
“All I can say, not knowing your father, but being a new one myself, is that I’m sure he’d want you to go ahead with your plans for your wedding this weekend,” he said. “It’s supposed to be beautiful weather.” To my mother he said, “A terrific day.”
“Well, we took our chances, didn’t we,” she said, looking at me. “I mean, August can be hurricane season. But,” she added, “I was raised in hurricanes. Nothing scares me.” She flicked her hand. “Anyway, we have to get these kids married. That’s all I care about.”
“This is supposed to be a decent year, actually,” the doctor said. “Not much chance of a turbulent season, hurricane-wise.” And he walked off with his clipboard to make plans to transfer my father to the ICU.
“Well, I’ll tell you kids one thing,” my mother said as we drove home along Route 27 from the hospital. “First of all, that doctor didn’t look old enough to be a father, did he. He didn’t even look old enough to be a doctor.”
“Let’s hope he is one,” Dean said.
“Second, luck is on our side,” my mother continued. “First, I found Daddy this morning in time. That man could have been dead.” She thought about that for a minute before adding with a sigh, “Good god, dearie, your father could have been dead. Can you imagine. After all this planning.” Then she resumed. “Okay, back to the project at hand. We’re damn lucky your brother Keith already rented a morning suit. If you hadn’t asked him to be an usher, he wouldn’t have it, and now he’s really, really going to need it, I can tell you. He’s going to have to walk you down the aisle. I know you wavered about imposing on him to be in the wedding party, but thank god you did. Kids, I think we can call that a blessing in disguise.”
The usual roadside landmarks rushed by as we drove. The windmill by the Penny Candy Shop in Water Mill, the Bridgehampton drive-in, the driving range in Sagaponack, the Seafood Shop in Wainscott. After a time, my mother let out another long sigh. “Oh, my,” she said, “your father’s really gone and done it this time.” She sat in the front seat, next to Dean. I sat in the back, next to my wedding dress. “I’m going to call the rest of the clan as soon as we get back to the house and tell them what’s going on. This is now officially an emergency.”
“Everyone’s already on their way, Ma,” I reminded her.
“And thank god for that. That’s another blessing in disguise. We’re lucky about a lot of things here today, all things considered.”
As we got out of the car, we stood in the driveway. The party tent was up, and beside it the sprinklers misted the air in graceful arcs, making rainbows as the sunlight caught the spray.
This is now officially an emergency, I was thinking. My wedding is officially an emergency.
Out on the road just then there was a racket. People were shouting, horns were honking. Then the wood-sided Jackson family station wagon came into view, turning into the driveway from the road, a long green canoe attached to the roof, green and yellow ribbons flying behind. More cars followed in quick succession.
“Party! Party!” they all shouted, careening up the driveway as we watched helplessly. “Woo-hoo!”
Helen yelled from the front seat, waving, honking a portable bicycle horn, as several more cars rounded the driveway into sight, one by one, with bicycle horns honking in each. A festive mob heading straight toward us.
This is now officially an emergency.
VIII
Ceremony
The morning of the wedding, in the toile guest room at the top of the stairs, my sister Darcy was propped up on one twin bed and my cousin Pierre on the other. Both of them were staring straight ahead, smoking. In my father’s sunroom, my half brothers, hunched over coffee mugs, whispered on the phone to the doctor. Someone had started a vacuum cleaner on the long hall down to my mother’s bedroom, the familiar whir of the quotidian breaking the quiet of the day. Out the window my nephews sat on surfboards just beyond the break, and my mother walked into the sea.
Down the driveway, the Jackson family was in hiding. They were playing tennis on the court off the patio of the guest cottage, where they had been lodged. They were trying to stay out of the way.
Helen was knitting, her legs stretched long on one of the wicker lounge chairs. Raymond and his youngest son, Chris, were in a heated match against Dean and his best friend, Jim, down from Camden to be the best man. In the tiny kitchenette Dean’s oldest brother, also named Raymond but called Raymond Jr. in the family group, was chatting with Josephine, the teenage daughter of the gardener, who had been hired to help out for the wedding. Raymond Jr. and Josephine were working on fixing the juicer. “You know, there are weeks I only drink juice,” Raymond Jr. was telling her.
Josephine laughed. “Have you ever heard of food stamps? You’re so down to your last dime, you live on juice?”
All Happy Families Page 7
