The Family Cracks Open
In September 1968, my mother published a book, The People on Second Street, the memoir of Jersey City. She appeared on the Today show and was photographed for a spread in Life magazine, which also included a review of the book by Kim Myers. There were photographs of her returning to Jersey City, photographs of the past in Jersey City, and a portrait of our entire family. She traveled the country giving readings and talks, and the book went into a second printing. Her friend and Washington neighbor Eugene McCarthy nearly won the New Hampshire primary on an antiwar ticket, and Johnson withdrew from the presidential race. My mother spent the spring campaigning, first in Indianapolis, where she introduced the candidate and his wife to her old Democratic friends, and later in several primary states, where she did advance work for Mrs. McCarthy. In Washington, she and my father gave a small party to present the senator to some of their colleagues from the civil rights movement who were skeptical of him. Knowing exactly who his audience was that night, he did not say a word about race. My mother was furious and told him so. My brother Paul, who had also worked for McCarthy, had shifted his support to the McGovern campaign. “I am beginning to feel he is a Montague and I am a Capulet,” my mother wrote Pam, “and discovering to my horror that people could break up over such crises!” In August, my mother and Paul had both gone to the Chicago convention, and were gassed outside the Hilton, a spectacle I watched on television in the Berkshires. That year changed my mother’s life. She had journeyed out into the world; she now had an identity, she felt, independent of my father’s. And, like many, she saw and experienced violence in Chicago that challenged her faith in institutions she had never questioned.
I was in my second year at Yale Drama School, and that spring the black students formed an alliance, and one of them, my friend Pamela Jones, asked me to ask William Sloane Coffin, the Yale chaplain, if we could reserve Battell Chapel as a venue for Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers, who was flying in from California to give a speech as part of a Black Arts Festival. I had never met Bill Coffin, but he knew who I was because of my father and my brother, and he said yes. And my new boyfriend approved. I had fallen in love with Arnold Weinstein, a man almost twenty years older than I was. He was the first older man I’d slept with and the first to make love to me in daring, experimental ways. He used words that scared me like “pussy,” but that was not the part of him I loved. I loved his miraculous silvery curls, his button-shiny brown eyes, and how he touched me. He wrote poems and plays and lyrics and opera librettos, and if he wasn’t talking in puns and swervy off-rhymes, he was scrawling fragments on scraps of paper that he left all over his turreted faculty apartment. He believed, for instance, that you should write the lines of a play first and then decide what character said them—and so when he was writing a play he stayed up all night, wild-eyed, looking on the side table or the bureau or searching the cracks of the sofa for the right little squiggle of paper. I’d follow him, searching too, reassuring him the scrap of paper would turn up, until he kissed me, until he put his tender, precise hands under my short skirt and we fell onto his narrow university-issue bed. He wore wonderful Italian cashmere turtlenecks, and his beautiful Italian trousers were held at his narrow hips by a braided cordovan belt with a shiny brass buckle. But being with him was turbulent, the poetic part of him often nudged into rage by a small frustration, a professional slight, or the political situation, which in 1969 supported both his idealism and his anger. The part of him that ranted also shot up speed and vitamins under the supervision of a Central Park South doctor, even snorted the odd whiff of heroin with his best friend, Larry Rivers, the famous New York Pop artist whom Arnold considered “great” and with whom he had once had a brief homosexual affair.
I was trying to write Sylvia Plath–like lyrics, often after evenings of too much drink. I had kicked the diet pills, Dexedrine, that I’d been taking since Indianapolis—one day after running out, I’d gotten so depressed, my insides so heavy I could barely walk. Change is the only constant, I remember saying to myself, looking at the bookshelf I’d painted bright orange enamel as I tossed the orange pills into a wastebasket. That spring, an actor, a fellow student, asked to photograph me nude. He had a girlfriend and so, naïvely, I had no suspicion of his motives. The day he came to my apartment it was raining, and we drank Scotch; he photographed me, then pushed me down, coming into me. It was that involuntary coupling, rather than sex with Arnold Weinstein, I believed, that made me pregnant during the spring of 1969; I was on the pill but often forgot to take it. I managed to get a psychiatrist’s excuse and had a legal abortion at Yale–New Haven Hospital, keeping my secret from Arnold, the photographer, my parents, and all but two or three of my friends. Recovering in his apartment, I told Arnold I was ill and did not want to sleep with him: the doctor said I had to keep from having sex for six weeks. When I contracted an infection and got really sick, I told Arnold about the abortion, though not about the nude photography, and he flew into one of his rages, this time at me. How could I meddle with something so sacred as a child? His child! He would have married me!
The night we had that fight was the night of Bobby Seale’s speech, and I woke up at 2 a.m., Arnold not there, having slept through the enire evening and its aftermath. The murder of a New Haven Black Panther that night led to the arrest of Bobby Seale and other members of the Black Panther Party; the ensuing trial would eventually lead to May Day, 1970, a massive demonstration in New Haven, to which I’d travel from New York City with my women’s consciousness-raising group. But in the spring of 1969, the women’s liberation movement, which had begun roughly a year earlier, had not made its way to the Yale School of Drama—even so, I knew that I did not want to have the photographer’s child, and though I believed I was “in love” with Arnold Weinstein, the playwright, I understood there could be no domestic tranquillity with him. And I could hear my mother on the subject of premarital sex: Don’t come home pregnant.
The abortion was months behind me the day the family began to crack open. I had quit the drama school and was moving to New York, to the Chelsea Hotel, to write. It was a morning during August of 1969, and we were in the Adirondacks. You can’t count on sun in those mountains, but that day was clear and as I walked the boardwalk toward my mother, I imagined her sunning on the big porch over the boathouse, her skin getting darker and darker, burning into me how pale I was. Two weeks earlier, Arnold had visited me in the Berkshires, lain in my bed surveying the shelf of books by Mao and Marx and Herbert Marcuse I’d assembled to impress him, complained that the theater where I worked did nothing worthy, then turned and fallen into an uninterruptible sleep. The next morning he departed on the bus to start his new revolutionary improvisational theater in Chicago, and I hadn’t heard from him since. I’d wanted to go to Chicago with him, but, he said, I wasn’t “helpful” enough. Again I’d made a decision for my independence without meaning to, and so I was grieving as I approached my mother. But I put a lift in my walk and pretended I was enthusiastic about moving alone to New York.
My mother was not sunning but standing on the porch wearing long pants, her back to the green railing. Behind her was Silver Mountain, and the tree that still juts out over the lake, and of course the lake itself, where at twilight often you hear a loon call its mate as mist rises off the water. But it was morning and so the lake was blue, a pale, intense blue. My father was not in camp, otherwise my mother would never have said what she did that day. I can’t get back much of the conversation, but I remember the sentence and the singular possessive pronoun: “I am having some problems with my marriage.” At twenty-three and with limited information, I had facile explanations for her shattering announcement—she was tired of marriage to my father; Senator McCarthy, who often came over for morning coffee, was much more exciting than an Episcopal bishop in a purple shirt. It would be many years before I learned the deepest secret of my parents’ marriage, but that morning in the Adirondacks, I learned there was a secret and also that I didn’t want to know it, though the fact of it came into my imagination right then, and into my body.
Because I didn’t want to believe what my mother said, I focused my attention on the fact that she had used the singular pronoun—I am having some problems with my marriage—and since she did not implicate my father in any way, I was angry only at her. Furious. And sad. This was not her marriage, it was our marriage. Weren’t my brothers and sisters and I as much a part of the our as she and my father were? Suddenly this woman, my mother, was a stranger. Her tan skin looked pale and there was a dizzy blankness in her blue eyes and the black of her hair no longer called forth words like obsidian or ebony. When I got to New York, there was a letter from my father—“Things are a little bumpy here, as I guess Mom indicated.”
That autumn, on the second ballot, my father was elected bishop coadjutor at the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. Coadjutor means “with the right of succession”; “the Episcopal Church,” my mother once wrote, “uses a lot of words you have to look up in the dictionary.” In three years, my father would run the most urban and most influential diocese in the Episcopal Church—this had been his life’s ambition since he became a priest. In the weeks after his election, their differences put aside, my parents traveled to New York for parties, interviews, tours of the bishop’s quarters on the grounds of St. John the Divine. That winter, after one of those trips, my mother visited her mother in Boston—the date was January 10, 1970—and on her way home accepted a ride from the airport in Washington with an old friend. At an intersection not far from Newark Street, his Volkswagen Beetle was struck broadside by a car running a stop sign. My mother was thrown forward, the gearshift stick punching her lower abdomen. When she got home, she complained of stomach pain. By the time she and my father were dressed to go out for the evening, she was in agony on their bed. At the hospital the doctors discovered her body cavity filled with blood, and a surgeon cut away the damage, seven-tenths of her liver; the fraction’s strange specificity is as I remember it.
My mother spent the next several months in the Washington Hospital Center, first hovering between life and death in intensive care, then recovering in a capacious room in the luxury wing, receiving friends and her children, masses of notes and flowers. She learned how much she was loved, independent of her children and her husband, and she understood it was remarkable that she had survived. For the weeks she lay there, she meditated on her life. There was the family to think about, and my father’s career. At the time, divorce for clergy was allowed by the Episcopal Church only in special circumstances and was unthinkable for a bishop. After the move to New York, she would write another book. She would make an effort to repair the marriage. It would be a new beginning.
On a luscious evening the June after my mother’s accident, my father met me at a restaurant on Eighth Street in New York City. I was twenty-four and he was forty-nine, not so many years older than my lover, and he was wearing a seersucker suit and a necktie. This is my father, I remember thinking to myself as I looked at him sitting opposite me. Normally he would be wearing a clerical collar and a purple shirt, but tonight he is not, and so somehow he is more present, and I am looking at him, suddenly, as a man. Let’s say I am waiting. Waiting to feel what will come in my direction. What do we talk about? It is not the conversation that I will remember about that night in the restaurant that became a jazz club later in the evening. Instead I will get back a sense, a sense of my father’s presence. He is handsome, I think to myself, handsome and slender, his hair starting to go a little gray, and his haircut is different, his hair maybe a little longer than it had been in Washington. Sexy. I say it to myself: sexy. Yes, my father looks sexy. I was fresh into serious therapy, and I imagined that the next day I would carry this new impression of a sexy father uptown to my psychiatrist like a trophy. I had sought out this psychiatrist when I moved to New York, so sad and confused about what my mother had told me that day in the Adirondacks that I thought I must be crazy like my mother’s mother. I said I was writing poems, but the truth was I hardly knew what to do with myself. I couldn’t say that to my handsome father, or even, for that matter, to my handsome psychiatrist whose analytic couch I lay on twice a week on East Ninety-sixth Street.
This would be a new gambit: “Look,” I could say, “I had dinner with my father and I thought he looked sexy.” But what was sexy? There was a sheen to my father that night, a glitter as he looked this way and that, and I thought it had to do with me, his daughter in her twenties coming into sexuality and desire, even beauty. I felt both an uncomfortable charge between us and a new distance, which I ascribed to our new circumstances: I was living on my own, and so was he—my mother and the family wouldn’t move to New York until late summer. I had never talked to my father about what my mother had said about the marriage, and so a silence about her hung in the air. It was tempting; here we were in New York City. I finally had my father to myself. The waiter brought our food. I was wearing a very short skirt, crossing and uncrossing my legs. I could feel my new sexual sophistication push it further: my mother had nearly died and my father was turning me on. That phrase had scared me the first time Arnold used it, because his eyes got strange as if I were suddenly not who he was looking at. Now, as my father talked, his skin looked different, more alive. Always, when I remembered that night, I would feel a strange silvery nimbus pulling me in, implicating me in something illicit that excluded who my father and I had always been to each other and that caused me to think thoughts that betrayed my mother. Many summers later, when I learned of my father’s hidden erotic life, that supper on Eighth Street came back to me.
My mother arrived in New York three months later. Two moving vans carried the possessions of twenty-five years of marriage and of five children north from Washington. “The move was pretty grueling,” she wrote Pam, “but accomplished, in that week of 93°, smog, squatters hurling human you-know-what at the Cathedral doors etc.” My father’s first challenge as coadjutor was a demonstration by squatters in an apartment building owned by the diocese right across Amsterdam Avenue from the cathedral, which was scheduled to be torn down. “But I got through it,” my mother continued, “and have arrived at the strength plateau where one night of sleep cures the day’s fatigue as opposed to 3 days of hysteria.” But she was being optimistic. What no one then understood, including my mother herself, was that she was still too fragile for such a change. It was 1970, and the benefits of a certain kind of post-traumatic health care—vitamins, homeopathy, nutrition, short-term psychotherapy—were not yet generally understood. My mother had always been healthy and athletic—in Washington, she played tennis two or three times a week—and resilient, but the damage to her liver was not an ordinary wound, and recuperating was nothing like recovering from, say, childbirth. After initial optimism, the placement of the children in progressive, integrated private schools, the hiring of a full-time Chinese couple to cook and clean, the glamorous welcomes—Mayor Lindsay and his wife threw a dinner dance for their old friends, the new bishop and his wife and family, a magical evening at Gracie Mansion—it became clear that my mother had not really recovered.
The cathedral on Morningside Heights stood at the center of an almost monastic world. My mother was expected to be the bishop’s hostess, while making a new life for herself and a refuge for the five children still at home in two stories of a mammoth stone mansion. The close, as the cathedral grounds were called, was thirteen acres of lawn, gardens, and granite buildings that housed the offices of a nearly entirely male community. Through the leaded windows of the apartment, my mother could see priests walk from office to cathedral, cathedral to office. One of them, bald and bearded, nearly always wore a cassock and an embroidered hat. He was a canon (senior priest) of the cathedral and lived in a cathedral apartment with a rottweiler, which, one day, as my mother watched from a window, attacked a smaller dog, the corgi belonging to my father’s predecessor Bishop Donegan, which had been a gift from the Queen Mother. My mother shouted, called cathedral security, and ran downstairs; by the time she reached the scene, the dog had died. Weeping, she berated my father about the canon’s carelessness, and the incident obsessed her.
She no longer had the boundless energy required to keep everyone happy, and every day, five children came home from school homesick. A night of sleep no longer revived her. She went first to doctors and then to psychiatrists. She sought out old friends living in New York and took freelance writing assignments for the Washington Post. But she began to long for her lilacs on Newark Street, her rose garden, her circle of friends. In my first consciousness-raising group, I was coming to see her predicament as a woman. I was reading whatever women’s liberation literature I could get my hands on, and I was one of a group of women raising money to free Joan Bird, one of the two women Black Panthers incarcerated in New York. We were writing about her, flyers and analyses to be published in the underground newspapers that would bring to women’s liberation, as feminism was then called, a politics of antiracism. My mother was wary. “Honor,” she wrote Pam, “is a little overboard (I think) on Women’s Lib. & Black Panther fund raising, but who knows.”
She was trying to write again, and I was encouraging her. The People on Second Street had sold well and an excerpt had appeared in the Washington Post; after publishing several features there, she had a contract for a book on aging. She was forty-seven, she had survived, what came next? She’d done some exploratory interviews with older people, but now she couldn’t bring herself to continue. New friends and some people she had known for years—the group included psychotherapists, actors, and playwrights—were meeting, trying to combine prayer and introspection with some of the new thinking about psychotherapy. After a few meetings, though, my mother left the group. She couldn’t speak openly, she said; she didn’t want to compromise my father. To me her situation was not so complicated: why would she silence herself for a man? I didn’t know that she and my father were trying to figure out how to separate. Later I would believe my mother was having affairs on the sly, and that my father was suffering alone. Actually they had agreed to see other people, and he was dating no fewer than five women, among them, Nona Clark. Once that fall my mother surprised me by asking me when oral sex had come “into vogue.” I had no idea what to say.
We were sitting in the Palm Court at the Plaza having lunch. The space was open, white floors, high ceilings, palm trees. My mother’s face was impassive, seeming almost to look away as I told her about Johnny, the man I was now seeing, who rode a motorcycle. I would go to his small apartment in Chelsea, a corridor of darkness, one room behind the next. He was my age, and he worked in advertising so he had real furniture, a leather sofa, low wooden tables, shiny lamps that had once been tobacco cans or outdoor lanterns or automobile equipment. One day he said, “I’ll buy a real Tiffany lamp, keep it for a few years, and sell it at a great profit.” My family didn’t sell their antiques, and I wasn’t used to people who talked like that about money; I spent most of my time with radicals who talked about Mao and the end of capitalism. I remember sitting smoking in the dark, each of us with a glass of Scotch. Perhaps we would go out to dinner to some undistinguished restaurant of the kind common then: booth, burger and salad, red wine. And then on the motorcycle we would ride back to his place and have sex, sex in which the silences were vacant, the breathing athletic. One weekend he took me away to the Delaware Water Gap with a couple of his friends and their girlfriends. Each couple had a cabin; the men did the barbecuing and the women made the salad. In our cabin there were two small rooms; Johnny gave me one and took the other; we didn’t have sex, and after that weekend, he never called again. I couldn’t tell my consciousness-raising group that despite the fact that another male chauvinist pig had fucked me over, I was sad, and so that day in the Palm Court, I decided to confide in my mother. But as I talked, she sat there without speaking, her hands in her lap, or fingering her glass.
I suppose that while she sat looking at her hands my mother was trying to decide what to say to me about Johnny. Usually she was not at a loss for words, but she didn’t say, for instance, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.” If she started to talk, it was probably about my brothers and sisters, for instance, how Susanna and Patience, the two youngest, were getting to Manhattan Country School on East Ninety-sixth Street or how she was having so much trouble getting started on the aging book. I didn’t know she had a lover and so I did not understand what the significance was when she told me that after lunch she was going to visit a man she had mentioned frequently. Years later I would learn she had been involved with this man and that he was the only man for whom she had ever considered leaving my father. Now, though, he was marrying another woman and she was going to meet that other woman. “This is very important,” she said. “It is very important that I meet her, that we become friends.” Perhaps she lit a cigarette, or perhaps she was picking at her food. As I fumbled for something to say, I could hear forks scraping and hitting china as waiters moved across the wide spaces carrying serving plates protected with silver domes.
Letters between my parents from this period were anguished. The reconciliation they’d hoped New York would bring had not come about, and my father was mystified, desperate with hope my mother would return to their physical life together. Her letters were alternately angry and desiring of reconciliation: “I want to live with you and be your lover.” Beginning to see my mother’s suffering, I now had less sympathy for my father, who seemed to me to have all the power. As my mother came to mistrust my father’s feelings for her, I felt myself internally withdrawing from him, as if putting him on probation. I was not aware they were again struggling, turning over alternative plans: a dual household with residences in Washington and New York; a scenario in which my father would quit his new job, the position he had so longed for, and they would move the family back to Washington.
Eventually I hear enough from each of them to know all is not well. My mother tells me of her return to the psychiatrist she’d seen when they lived in Jersey City, of lunch with this or that old friend. My father tells me he misses her, her participation in his work. At first, it seems, he will do anything to please her. Does she want to live in an apartment off the close? He buys one on Park Avenue, but she finds it sterile and they never move in. Eventually his pastoral empathy deserts him. He seems to forget she is still in a weakened state; he is angry, even a little vengeful. But she is simply surviving: she has almost died, had lain in that hospital bed for months—what had happened to her life? She meets my psychiatrist at a party: “I met your doctor,” she reports. I ask him what he thinks of her. “Your mother is very seductive,” he replies.
That October was my twenty-fifth birthday, and my mother asked if I’d like her to give me a party. I could ask anyone I wanted, she said. I invited the members of my women’s consciousness-raising group, new friends, and she invited a woman writer whose parents she’d known in Jersey City, Toni Cade Bambara. I was surprised and pleased that my mother wanted to give me a party, but nothing prepared me for her present. Though I didn’t think of it at the time, it was as if she was trying to repair what her declaration in the Adirondacks had shattered the year before. The box was enormous, and when I opened it I found four leather-bound scrapbooks—orange, blue, yellow, bright apple green—all identically embossed with gold borders. In them were enlargements of perhaps fifty photographs—of the family, of each grandmother and grandfather, of herself and my father when they were children, teenagers, engaged, a wedding picture. And pictures of me throughout my life. Now, of course, the age of twenty-five seems barely the end of childhood, but at the time I believed I’d had a life and gotten myself to the conclusion of one phase of it and to the threshold of the next. I was amazed and delighted when my mother acknowledged this by giving me those four scrapbooks.
Present-giving is a challenge for a mother of nine children. When does she begin shopping for Christmas? How will she manage to perform the act of imagination necessary to find each child a present that will give him or her the new sense of self we in our family believed a birthday present should represent? Perhaps it seems strange, even melodramatic, this emphasis on birthdays. But think of it. There are nine of us, and there is just one day a year when each is celebrated for who she is independent of the others, and that day is her birthday. You are a child of privilege but one of nine; love is spread thin and so its material demonstrations are especially important. Each Christmas, each birthday as well, you receive several presents, one of which is designated your “big” present “with love from Mommy and Poppy.” It is the “big” present that you scrutinize for clues as to who you are, or at least who your parents think you are.
Often, for me, the message was unclear. Our final Christmas in Washington, I had opened with great anticipation a large package. In it, I found sixteen glasses—eight tumblers and eight short glasses. They were rather heavy glass, painted turquoise and gold, and I thought they were hideous. I tried to stretch and distort my mind to find them at least “attractive,” a word we used to denote something that partook of our family aesthetic. Turquoise and gold stripes were an aberration, and I didn’t understand what my mother meant by them. I must have looked, what, shocked? Disappointed?
“Thank you, Mommy,” I said.
“Don’t you think they’re good-looking?” she said, reaching for the next child’s present.
Was I supposed to give cocktail parties? Learn precisely how much alcohol went in what size glass? Or was I supposed to move to the suburbs? Who did she think I was? I wanted to be a writer, and my love life, such as it was, showed no sign of evolving into a suburban marriage. My efforts to disguise my disappointment apparently failed, because, later in the interminable present-opening process—nine of us, one at a time so we could all admire and exclaim, so the list could be kept that ensured a thank-you note went to the correct giver—anyway, sometime after I opened the glasses, my mother disappeared and returned with a small box. “Here,” she said. “I thought you might feel gypped.” The replacement present was extraordinary, a Victorian brooch I had never seen my mother wear, a butterfly, its abdomen a large baroque pearl, its wing a banner of tiny diamonds and different-colored sapphires. It had belonged to her grandmother.
The jump cut from the ugly glasses to the glorious pin was confusing. It took me decades not to dismiss the butterfly because it was a last-minute idea. The scrapbooks, on the other hand, were remarkable. They represented something I had desired without knowing it, my mother’s individualized and particular time and attention. They were also unusual for a “big” present in that they were specifically from my mother. She had arranged the pictures chronologically, and the colors of the books may have been a reference to The Golden Notebook, the novel we were both reading at the time, in which Doris Lessing’s heroine inscribes her life and thinking in different-colored notebooks. To complete the final book, my mother had snipped out a passage from the end of The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne, long past her humiliation and suffering, has become the wise woman who assures young women who come to her “of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world would have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” This she pasted inside the back cover of the yellow scrapbook, opposite a black-and-white photograph of me that Pop had taken the summer before, smiling, long-haired, wearing a swagger of a hat that I remember was salmon pink and a purple band jacket trimmed with gold—very 1970.
The party was in the living room of the cathedral apartment, a nearly perfect cube, leaded windows set high in the walls, a granite fireplace in the Gothic style. You entered the room by stepping down three stairs. I was sitting on a sofa as my father came in, kissed the top of my head, said “Happy Birthday,” and tossed into my lap a cheap set of brandy glasses, the kind that come six to a set and are packaged in a light cardboard structure that resembles a six-pack for beer. Glasses again!
That is when it breaks into the open, the difficulty that had been building between my father and me.
As I replay the memory—the tall man, fifty years old, coming down the stairs into the room where his eldest daughter is celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday, and tossing a six-pack of cheap glasses into her lap—what I see is not only the stinginess my psychiatrist suggested it was, but indifference bordering on anger. Anger at what? When my mother announced that day in the Adirondacks, I am having some problems with my marriage, I was angry at her, but not at my father. I saw him as victim of her insatiable and inexplicable need for some life independent of us and him. I had not really understood my mother’s situation, and I’d felt terrible for my father. By the time this change played itself out, I would see my father as my mother saw him, and he would see me as he now saw my mother, as a woman who was rejecting him. But I knew none of this the night of my twenty-fifth birthday; his distance only confused me. Why had he tossed those glasses onto my lap?
In the years to come, I would learn that my father expressed anger easily but rarely in language, and that he knew how to put a passable spin on a hostile message. But back to the brandy glasses. He knew I liked to drink, but he had not stopped to consider whether at the age of twenty-five I drank much brandy. Actually I drank wine, but the glasses were liqueur glasses, so, not only were they cheap, they were of no use to me. They were an insult. “Your father is a little stingy,” my psychiatrist explained, “a little withholding.” If your father were generous, the doctor continued, he would have had some of your poems privately printed in a little book.
What an idea! I still hold that nonexistent little book in my imagination. It has a rust-colored cover, my name under a title my father has invented. The book is a surprise. Because this imaginary version of my father had always been so interested in my writing, he was always the first person to whom I showed a poem. He’d kept them all in a folder he treasured, and when I turned twenty-five, he’d had this small collection privately printed, the most wonderful gesture of support a father could give a poet daughter. The psychiatrist’s imagining was not so far-flung: it had always been my father to whom I wrote what I was reading, with whom I shared my innermost thoughts, not my mother. So why this sudden shift, this insult? And what did I do with the glasses? Perhaps I had the nerve to toss them into a garbage bin on my way home that evening, but it’s more likely I kept them, allowing them to gather dust in the back of a cupboard.