My mother became known for her hats, but I was never tempted by the hatboxes piled to the ceiling. I hated wearing them, more than anything else in the whole wide world. I loathed anything on my head. Felt, wool, even the silk of the babushkas that all the girls my age wore made me feel claustrophobic. As a small child, I tried to ease off the dreaded heavy knit hat that my nurse, Nora, outfitted me in for winter walks to school. But she pulled it down hard over my ears to make sure it stayed. (When everyone was wearing fur hats in the 1950s, I had a sable one made and wore it a few times. The exorbitantly luxurious fur didn’t change anything, and the old hate came back. The poor thing still sits captive and unworn in a see-through hatbox on the highest shelf in my closet.)
I tried on everything else of Mother’s and walked around, imitating her as best I could. I loved how my mother looked. Her taste was superb, even when times weren’t great. In addition to her unique hats, she wore scarves when others didn’t. And the way she threw a fur boa over the masculine suits that were stylish at the time put her own imprint on a popular look. With her expressive blue eyes, red lipstick, lean figure, and personal flair, I thought my mother always dressed the best.
I loved to watch her put it all together. With the logs crackling in the wood-burning fireplace in their bedroom, she got ready for an evening out while I sat at attention on one of the two huge blue-and-white sofas and Daddy stretched out on his bed with the newspaper. He had plenty of time to relax, since he didn’t need very long to pull on short sleeves and a suit.
Playing dress-up in my mother’s closet was not as much about being in her clothes as it was being with her. I was gifted so many good and beautiful things. Still, what I wanted above all else was to be with my mother. But she and my father weren’t home a lot.
Daddy, a workaholic, traveled all the time for business. He always seemed to be taking the Broadway Limited back and forth between New York and Chicago or catching a ride on a mail plane to even farther-flung places. When he was at home, my mother picked him up most every night, because that’s the only way we got him home. When she bundled me (in my pajamas, after my bath) into the car to drive downtown with her, it was the biggest thrill of my life. I’d been released from jail, if only for a night.
That excitement, however, paled in comparison to the times when Mother picked me up at school to run errands! She at the wheel and I by her side, we careened past the shops of Fifty-third Street, Hyde Park’s shopping district several blocks north of the University of Chicago campus, stopping first at the butcher, where chickens (later to be our dinner) kept in a pit outside the store squawked at our arrival. The unevenness of the sawdust that dusted the white tile floor felt good underfoot. Mr. Kline, frenching the bones of a slab of pork ribs for a crown roast, put down his slender silver boning knife when he saw us walk through the door. All weapons were useless against Mother.
After deciding that what truly looked the best were the tournedos of beef, although she’d been hoping for five-inch sirloin steaks, and reluctantly accepting a pound of unctuous sweetbreads as a gift from Mr. Kline, we were off to my most favorite store—the Italian grocery, where my love of everything green began. Tony, an awfully kind man who adored my mother and me, showered us with hidden delights. He held out a basket filled with the bright pods of fresh lima beans for my mother and a tissue-wrapped bunch of Concord grapes as pretty as any bridal bouquet for me. Pride swept across his face as he saw my mother’s reaction of joy at the sight of his persimmons. (I do think he was in love with her.)
The butcher, the grocer, the baker, and the florist—shopping was not one-stop. It took forever, pinching and poking everything, politely answering questions, and accepting little gifts of a macaroon or an apple. I was in no rush, though; the attenuation of every minor transaction meant a longer reprieve from the rigidity of home.
While I would happily have shopped with my mother for cream of wheat, true heaven was a trip to Marshall Field’s. It was impossible not to feel fancy as soon as you arrived in the Loop and glimpsed the department store that took up all of its State Street block (at the time it was the second-largest store in the world after Macy’s at Herald Square). That was just the start of the grandeur. Inside, the Tiffany mosaic ceiling, an iridescent trinity of blue ovals surrounded by swirling hues of gold, capped a six-floor atrium in the jaw-dropping manner of a Byzantine church.
The mosaic of hundreds of thousands of handmade pieces of glass wasn’t at all an outsize gesture. At least not in my book. Marshall Field’s was no ordinary store, but a wonder of the world, a civic institution, a temple of quality! Once surrounded by the ground floor’s dark-stained wood, marble floors, and white Corinthian columns that were grand enough for Cinderella’s ball, you could find anything. Replacement bags for a Hoover vacuum or a Mikimoto cultured-pearl necklace. Anything.
Any day I got a whiff of the cocoa, Oregon peppermint, and butter wafting down from the large melting pots on the thirteenth floor that produced Frango mint meltaway chocolates was a good day. But if I were really lucky, Mother would take me for lunch and a fashion show in the Walnut Room, where the Great Tree dripped with lights over diners during Christmas. It was oh so glamorous in the massive wood-paneled dining room where Austrian chandeliers glittered overhead.
At our table for two, I took boundless delight in my usual order, the Field’s Special Sandwich, a wonder in itself with a piece of buttered rye topped with Swiss cheese, turkey, iceberg lettuce wedges, more turkey, enough Thousand Island dressing to puddle around the plate, bacon, tomato, egg, parsley sprigs, and, lastly, a stuffed green olive. Mother, though, hardly broke the crust of her chicken potpie, preferring instead thoughtful drags on her cigarette. We made some small talk, what I imagined to be the regular gab of ladies who lunch, but mostly I watched her large blue eyes take in the fashions on the runway as the models paraded around our table.
I saw how other people looked at and talked about Mother, who was the opposite of staid or housewifey. She always ran a good house, because she had good help, but she never did housework. Instead she was front captain among her circle of friends and beyond. There was no doubt about it. Mother did all sorts of pacifying when her friends were fighting among one another. She took them to buy clothes and to have abortions. How many and how often, I had no idea. My mother was very secretive about things she didn’t want made known. My entire family was quite Germanic in that way. Lots of “Shhh, the baby is in the room.” Still, I heard enough to know that Mother, strong-willed and take-charge, was the leader of the group in every sense.
I completely adored her, but I didn’t have that much of her. I was the child left dusting and rearranging my room. That’s why those grocery-shopping or Marshall Field’s expeditions were very important to me. I never knew when our next excursion would be, because I didn’t dare ask her. I was as frightened of her as I was in love with her. The last thing I wanted was to do anything wrong.
My mother’s comings and goings weren’t the only mysteries I wasn’t supposed to know anything about. The other, much larger mystery was the man she was once married to, the one who was my real father. I had understood that the man I called Daddy wasn’t my biological father from as early as I could remember. My real father would resurface unexpectedly out of the shadows from time to time. Other than the fact that he was my father, I knew very little else about him, because Mother kept the details of his identity in her pantheon of secrets and Daddy hated him enough that any mention of his presence was barred from our home.
Occasionally, out of the blue, he would be waiting across the street from my elementary school to pick me up, a stranger in an ordinary dark suit. I felt like I was doing something wrong. Perhaps he had told my mother he was picking me up, since I was never unattended as a child, but I was not privy to that information. Instead ours felt like a sneaky affair. When he took me out for ice cream, I felt the burden of living with a lie and a deeply shaming embarrassment. Nobody e
lse had two fathers.
Despite my otherwise very good memory, I remember little of the visits and not much more of my father, as if my memories, too, obeyed my parents’ wish to obliterate this man’s existence. Tall and slim, he had overly kind brown eyes that always seemed to be filled with tears when he saw me. He had attended the University of Chicago. And both my mother and father called him “weak.”
Just as no information about my real father was permitted, neither were any physical traces of him. I never had a single picture of him, and if he brought me presents during our secret meetings, I had to get rid of the evidence. The maids were my accomplices, helping me to hide the Mickey Mouse watch or the charm bracelet I came home with when I returned from one of my sneak visits.
I imagined that Mother or Daddy would be furious if either found out I’d been seeing my biological father—and had accepted a cheap gift from him! Both had epic tempers for which they were unapologetic. (After smashing an ashtray against the wall in anger, my father simply said, “We can afford another.” When my mother left hairbrush marks on my arm because I didn’t want to go to school, it was Nellie, my nursemaid after Nora, who cried in my room with me.)
The fear when my real father rang the bell of our apartment one night, however, was new. Paralyzed in my bed, I could hear every single sound of the altercation on the outside landing as if it were one of my programs playing on the radio. I wished I hadn’t heard Daddy yelling at the man, hitting him, and the man falling down the stairs, but I was always listening. After that there were no more sneak visits or presents, as he, too, agreed to disappear.
The chronic nightmares began soon after. Everything was taken care of for me, and yet I had no control over anything, even when the adults in my life came and went. One Christmas, Mother and Daddy went on holiday to Florida without me. But they left a very lonely child, who on Christmas morning, terrified of the big, empty rooms of the apartment that were typically bustling (and of waking Martha, who would certainly have a raging hangover), crept toward the living room. After soundlessly opening the doors, I found there under and around the tree, spilling out like a department-store display, many, many presents that were all for me. I methodically undid my mother’s lavish wrapping, trying my best not to rip the stunning paper or crush her straw chrysanthemums. She’d bought me the wonderful doll I wanted, but more—a high-chair and a complete layette, too. Without any siblings I was secure in the knowledge that I wouldn’t have to share any of it. That was all I was sure of.
Nana picked me up after a tense breakfast with Martha, and I took my new doll, dressed for the cold weather, with me. On the ride to her house, a block from Lake Michigan, you could hardly tell the water from the sky. The bleak gray of winter was very beautiful as well as forbidding. Dolls and dollhouses made up for a lot, but they couldn’t make up for what I believed others had. Later, sequestered in Nana’s closet, I had all but forgotten about the doll. A gorgeous clementine-colored peignoir that tied at the hip bone in a great floppy bow was taking up all my attention. In this secret world of clothes, a world that I controlled, there was no need for the company of playmates, because the clothes were my playmates.
CHAPTER
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Two
Outside my great-aunt and great-uncle’s cabana in Miami Beach, I took in the rays, absorbing them internally like a medicine I desperately needed after the last six devastating months. Although I had always loved the sun—it’s terrible for your skin but wonderful for your being—I had never before experienced anything like the therapeutic heat of Florida.
Mother and I had flown to Miami to join my father’s uncle and aunt for a couple weeks of their season wintering at the Atlantis Hotel. The express purpose of the trip was to get me away from the boy next door with whom I had had an unpleasant breakup. While I found the sea and salt water extremely soothing, I was already beginning to bore of spending every night with my family. Uncle Sam, a dour man, had seemed old to me even when he was young, and his long-suffering, second wife, Aunt Etta, was always complaining of how her son, whom they had to take care of, never did anything right.
As if someone were reading my mind, a shadow and a polite voice broke the sun’s intense hold on me.
“Excuse me, miss. Sorry to bother you.”
I opened my eyes to a cabana boy standing over me.
“There’s someone who would like to meet you,” he said. “And his father owns the hotel.”
What a direct request! A blush appeared under Aunt Etta’s snow-white hair and across her proper bosom. I pictured some ninety-seven-pound weakling with his swim trunks up to his chest sidling over. No, thank you: I wasn’t that bored. But my mother just rolled her big blue eyes.
As soon as the cabana boy was out of earshot, Aunt Etta, Uncle Sam, and Mother started to confer.
“Otto Halbreich is quite something,” Aunt Etta said.
“He’s in the dress business,” Uncle Sam added.
“And you should see his wife, Florence,” Etta added, “and her jewelry.”
“Mother,” I protested, unsure about some hotelier’s son.
“My, Betty, have a little fun,” she said.
I sighed in resignation and smoothed down my light blue Mabs of Hollywood bathing suit out of nerves rather than necessity. Wrinkles were simply not possible, since it was made out of Lastex—a corset material that dancer Mabs Barnes had first used to create clinging swimwear in the 1930s and that later set off a revolution when Marlene Dietrich walked into a department store and ordered twelve suits, one in every color. The last thing I wanted to do was spend the rest of my holiday trying to dodge the hotel owner’s son.
But the cabana boy’s request was immediately followed by the most handsome human being I’d ever seen. The man’s six-foot-tall frame was athletic and suntanned. His coal-black hair was cropped short, and his eyes, a chocolate brown, had a slightly Asiatic slant to them. There was a small beauty mark under the right one to give his obvious good looks a signature. It was love at first sight. But that was hardly unusual for me.
There weren’t enough boys in the world for me. When one of my best friends back home said that boys were obsessed with me, I explained that, well, they might or might not have been obsessed with me, but I was definitely obsessed with them. From the age of twelve, when I started going with Danny, a long-lashed lonely child like myself whose father had passed away and whom my father called a “lounge lizard” because of how much time he spent at our house, I had averaged a new boyfriend every month.
Through high school I liked dancing with boys, hayrides in the country with boys, double features with boys—basically anything that involved lots of kissing and believing that one was in love. There were many first kisses, because one came with each new fellow. And that was the best part, because after the chase and capture I often tired of them as quickly as I’d fallen for them. The game of catch and release got a little hairier when, at sixteen, I arrived on the campus of Colorado College as a freshman.
When it came time to attend college, I wanted to get as far away from home (and my father’s strict rules) as possible. I wanted to go to the University of Southern California, but Mother and Daddy said that was too far. So when my best friend, Annette, applied to school in Colorado, I did, too.
As World War II wound down, I found college filled up with girl-hungry veterans of overseas combat and occupations earning their degrees on the GI Bill. These were not boys, but men who had seen war in Europe and the Pacific.
Sprung from the strictures of Chicago, I dove into a heady social life. Preppy and young in Shetland sweaters, blouses with Peter Pan collars, pleated skirts, and one of the first pairs of penny loafers (with the penny stuck in, naturally), I went to lots of “beer busts” where dinner was 3.2 beer (that tasted like dishwater) and hard-boiled eggs. In cocktail dresses I danced at the ballroom of the Broadmoor Hotel. And everywhere
I went, there were men: members of the air force, sailors, army officers. (I even went out with a captain in the ski troops just back from a tour in the Italian Alps.) They were years older than I, decorated to the hilt, and sexually sophisticated. Not that I did anything with them, although they sure wanted to do something with me.
I was smitten with being on my own and let my attentions guide themselves, which they did everywhere but academics. In no time at all, I went from being a very good high-school student to an undergraduate who flunked modern dance, no less! I only got more distracted sharing a room with Annette from home.
When Annette and I boarded the Rocky Mountain Rocket with the same trunks we’d taken to all our years at camp together, I couldn’t imagine a better person to start the rest of my life with. I met Annette because her grandparents, who doted on her after her very beautiful mother became a widow and took to her bed, lived in the same building as my grandmother. Although we grew up eating and sleeping at each other’s house, we lasted only one semester in the same dorm room. Annette did not partake in the new social experience the way I did. When I took to wearing mascara, Annette exclaimed, “What would your mother say if she saw what you have on your eyes!” I was deeply saddened by the rift, one that grew so big we put bookcases in between our beds to separate us until we got our own rooms.
And a little mascara was the least of it. If Mother were scandalized over my makeup, how would she react to my latest beau, George? A hockey player from Saskatchewan, he was one of a group of Canadians brought down to play for the college while American boys were fighting in the war. A WASP from the northern prairies who supplemented his living by selling homemade sandwiches to coeds in the dorms was not exactly what my parents had in mind as a suitable partner. On campus, however, George was a star athlete and different from any man I’d ever met. I don’t know if it was the rum and Cokes or mountains made gorgeous with wild lilacs, but by the time I headed home, I thought maybe I would marry him.
I'll Drink to That: A Life in Style, with a Twist Page 4
