My Life So Far (4 page)

A faux family picnic in Greenwich for Harper’s Bazaar magazine. That’s Mother in the background.

(Genevieve Naylor/Corbis)

Sometimes Dad would come out on a Sunday and take Peter and me fishing for flounder in nearby Long Island Sound. Dad was usually in a bad mood, which meant these excursions weren’t exactly “fun times,” but I enjoyed them anyway—all of us together in the little rented motorboat, the salty smells mixed with engine fumes, the anticipation as we’d pull out of the harbor, round the buoy, and head to sea. Because flounder are bottom feeders, we’d never go out very far before Dad would turn off the motor and tell us to bait our hooks. This was always the moment of reckoning.

Baiting the hook meant reaching into a bucket filled with reddish brown kelp, among which writhed long reddish brown bloodworms with what appeared to be claws in their heads. Peter didn’t like them at all. Peter, in fact, would refuse to touch them—which in itself took guts. Dad wouldn’t even try to disguise the disgust he felt about Peter’s squeamishness, and his moods would get blacker and blacker. Whereupon I, the Lone Ranger, would ride to the rescue and be man enough for both of us. I’d pick up that worm and stick the hook right through its squirmy head without even a shudder. I didn’t do this to make Peter look bad. I loved my brother. I just wanted to prove my toughness to Dad and make the tension go away.

Peter was who he was. When he was scared he showed it; if he was sick, he’d complain about it—damn the consequences. I often wished he’d pretend like I did, just to make things easier. But, no, Peter was himself. And I, well, I’d gotten into the habit of leaving myself behind someplace in order to win Dad’s approval.
Make things better. I know I can make things better.

Once, Dad had us come into the city and took us to the circus. A New York columnist, Radie Harris, who knew our family, was also there and was quoted as saying:

Then one day, when I’d just finished breakfast and was heading out the door to school, I saw that Mother was standing at the entrance to the living room. She motioned me to come to her. “Jane,” she said, “if anyone tells you that your father and I are getting divorced, tell them you already know.”

That was it. And off to school I went.

I had realized the year before that parents getting divorced didn’t mean that you, the child, would fall through a crack in the floor and no one would ever look for you again. Some of my friends had divorced parents and seemed to have survived just fine. I do remember that day at school feeling a little out of body, as if I’d had some of the dentist’s ether, but I also felt oddly important and deserving of special attention. Divorces were fairly uncommon in those days.

A few days after “divorce” had been uttered (only to me, not to Peter) I was lying on Mother’s bed with her and she asked if I wanted to see her scar from her recent kidney operation. I didn’t really want to. But since she’d asked, I felt she needed to show it to me and that I shouldn’t say no. She pulled up her satin pajama top and lowered the pants and there . . . oh, horror
—that’s
why they were getting divorced! Who would want to live with someone who’d been cut in half and had a thick, wide pink scar that ran all around her waist? It was terrifying.

“I’ve lost all my stomach muscle,” she said sadly. “Doesn’t that look awful?” What did she want me to say, that it wasn’t bad? Or did she want me to agree with her?

“And look at this,” she said, showing me one of her breasts. The nipple was all distorted. I felt so bad for her—it must have hurt so much—but I also didn’t want to be her daughter. I wanted to wake up and discover I was adopted. I wanted a mother who looked healthy and beautiful, at whom a father would want to look when she had no clothes on. Maybe then he’d want to stay at home. This was all her fault.

I think it was around that time, maybe right there on that bed, that I vowed I would do whatever it took to be perfect so that a man would love me. Fifty-three years later, Pan told me that Mother had had a botched breast implant. I guess Mother had tried to be perfect, too. I will return to the sad topic of breast implants in act two.

Howard Teichmann, who wrote my father’s authorized biography,
My Life,
wrote that when Dad told my mother he wanted a divorce, she said, “Well, all right, Hank. Good luck, Hank.”

Yeah, sure. Mother was acting by the rules. If she could love the
right
way—selflessly, with understanding and no anger—perhaps Dad would come back to her. In private, though, she was disintegrating. She hacked off her hair with nail scissors and, while staying in a friend’s New York apartment, walked the neighborhood in her nightgown.

In those days, I too walked in my nightgown, but in my sleep, always propelled by the same nightmare: I was in the wrong room and desperately needed to get out, get back to where I was supposed to be. It was dark and cold and I never could find the door. In my sleep I would actually move large pieces of furniture around my bedroom trying to find the way out, and then, because it was futile, I would give up and get back in bed. The next morning the furniture would have to be moved back into place. It was a nightmare that stayed with me—albeit with variations on where I was trying to get to—until I married Ted Turner, when I was fifty-four.

One of my most vivid memories of that time was sitting in silence at the dinner table in that spooky house on the hill—Peter, Grandma, Mother, and me. Through the window I could see the gray March landscape. Mother, at the head of the table, was crying silently into her food. It was spinach and Spam. We ate a lot of canned food in those days, as though the war and food rationing were still going on. I used to wonder about this, but now I know that Mother was terrified of running out of money and not receiving anything from Dad in the divorce.

No one said anything about the fact that Mother was crying. Maybe we feared that if one of us put words to what we saw and heard, life would implode into an unfathomable sadness so heavy the air wouldn’t bear it. Not even after we left the table was anything said. Grandma never took us aside to explain what was happening. Perhaps if “it” was not named, “it” would not exist. Peter and I went to our rooms as always, to do our homework. The dinner scene got buried in a graveyard somewhere next door to my heart, and the habit of not dealing with feelings became embedded in another generation.

But life goes on, as life does—until it doesn’t, especially when you’re in the discovery mode of an eleven-year-old. That year I managed to take a horse over a four-foot jump for the first time and became obsessed with the card game canasta. And Brooke Hayward and I began a successful writing partnership that won us “Best Short Story” awards at Greenwich Academy.

Within walking distance of the house was a riding stable—not the big one where Teddy Wahl broke my arm, but a small one with only an outdoor riding ring, where I often took jumping lessons on a borrowed white horse named Silver. My best friend, Diana Dunn, took lessons there, too. We both adored the teacher, a cozy Irishman named Mike Carroll. Next to being inside my cardboard “home” with my sister’s saddle, this was where I most liked to be. Horses were my passion, my escape.

Grandma told me many years later that it was around this time that Mother had been moved, on the advice of her doctors, from the Austen Riggs Center, a more open residence for the affluent “mentally afflicted” in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to the Craig House sanitarium in Beacon, New York. The doctors said that her emotional deterioration and suicidal tendencies required she be under constant guard. Grandma was with her for the move and told me that Mother was in a straitjacket and didn’t recognize her. I can’t manage to wrap my mind around that image of Mother in a straitjacket, or what Grandma’s anguish must have been.

One day Mother came home accompanied by a uniformed nurse. I refused to see her. I was playing jacks with Peter on the hardwood floor upstairs when she arrived in a limousine. Grandma called for us to come down.

“Peter.” I grabbed his arm. “Don’t go down. I’m not going to. Let’s just stay up here and play jacks. I’ll let you win. Okay?”

“No, I’m going,” Peter said, and he went downstairs.

Why didn’t I go down? Was I so angry with her for not being there for us? Was it I’ll-show-you-I-don’t-need-you-either?

I never saw her again.

She must have known it would be her last time home. She’d come, I guess, to say good-bye—but also to get the small razor that she kept in a black enamel box given to her years before by her friend Eulalia Chapin. Apparently, she had rushed upstairs and just managed to slip the razor into her purse when the nurse, who’d been sent to make sure such a thing didn’t happen, caught up to her.

A month later, in April, on her forty-second birthday, Mother wrote six notes—one each to Peter, Pan, and me; one to her mother; one to her nurse, telling her not to go into the bathroom but to call the doctor; and one to the doctor, her psychiatrist: “Dr. Bennett, you’ve done everything possible for me. I’m sorry, but this is the best way out.”

Then she went into her bathroom in the Craig House sanitarium, carefully withdrew the razor she’d managed to keep hidden, and cut her throat. She was still alive when Dr. Bennett arrived, but she died a few minutes later.

The fluttering slowed; the wings grew still. Then peace.

I
came home from school that afternoon, and as I walked through the front door, Grandma called down to me from her bedroom at the top of the stairs.

“Jane, something’s happened to your mother. She’s had a heart attack. Your father is on his way here right now. Please stay in the house and wait for him. Don’t go out.”

I turned right around, ran out the door, and ran all the way to the stables, where I was to have a riding lesson. I don’t remember feeling anything at all, though I must have known something serious was happening, because Dad didn’t just travel out from the city unexpectedly on a weekday.

In the middle of my lesson the phone in the stable rang. It was Dad telling whoever answered to make me come home immediately. But I took my time. There were so many dead bugs and interesting rocks in the dirt driveway that I needed to stop and examine. Eventually, when I could find no more ways to stall, I trudged up the hill. A strange car was parked at the bottom of the steps. Must be Dad’s rental, I thought with a shudder. In some deep part of me that wasn’t my mind, some part that could keep secrets from the rest of me, I knew what was coming. My
conscious
mind knew this was all a dream, that I was about to wake up. I opened the heavy front door and walked into the living room. Nobody had turned on any lights, and the room seemed grayer than usual. Dad and Grandmother were sitting up very straight, each on a different couch, facing each other. Dad took me on his lap and told me that my mother had had a heart attack and was dead.

Dead.
Now, there’s a word. Short, heavy. I felt myself holding it in my hands, like a brick.
Dead, like the butterflies mounted on that board on the other side of the living room wall. Her jars and tweezers were lying spread around on the table out there. I’d seen them only yesterday when I’d gone to polish the saddle. She couldn’t be dead. She hadn’t put her things away. Maybe I
was
dreaming.
Then I was outside my body looking back at myself, waiting for myself to react. Everything was familiar, yet nothing was the same. From another room came the loud ticking of a clock—jarring, wrong. Didn’t it know that time no longer mattered? I noticed wrinkles in the chintz slipcovers and tried to smooth them out.
Make it better. I know I can make it better.

Peter came home a few minutes later. Dad got up and switched seats with Grandma, taking Peter on his lap and repeating the story to him. I had to get away from all of them, to be by myself, try to get myself back into my body, figure out how I felt.