Art and Life
The roses my mother sent survived the winter and bloomed again the following summer. I saved the tin box she’d brought the cake in, and the four scrapbooks she so lovingly put together exist outside the charged realm of imagination I reserve for the things of which I’ve been deprived. All these years later, their leather covers—orange, blue, green, yellow—are perfectly intact: I’ve never lost them, have always meticulously replaced the photos I’ve removed for any purpose. They are strangely buoyant, these large, brightly colored books, and, with the butterfly pin and a particular letter, are evidence that her love for me came to have substance: I often think of you in the early morning—Susanna and I have a half hour before everyone else gets up. She feeds Lucy—and we eat and talk—about things like the branches against the light of winter sky—and that her favorite colors are “bright black and silver”—She reminds me of you—and I wish I’d had the peace and composure to talk in those days when you were twelve. I remember we made coffee cake in Jersey City—and made artificial flowers but not under conditions of a bright winter sky! There are so many times in life when you really don’t know what you’re doing!
In her will, written the last weeks of her life, my mother left me her writings. I was to use or develop them in any way I saw fit. I took this bequest as her blessing of the life on which I was already embarked, the life of a writer, and when I left Washington after her funeral, I rented a car for the journey home, loading it with cartons of her manuscripts. Not only, I believed, had she left me what she had started to write, she’d left me her ambition, her dreams, her imagination. In my top-floor studio in Chelsea, I found refuge. Carefully, I filed her manuscripts and stored her letters to me in an Italian-paper document box.
But what would I write now? Looking for women writing about their mothers, I found Simone de Beauvoir, writing of her mother’s death: “as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky.” I was at the edge of a crater rapacious with darkness, at my typewriter holding on to its keys, beneath me my great-grandmother’s Chinese rug. I wrote my first attempts with purposeful melodrama: How will it impress itself on this cruel world that I am bereft of my mother? And in dreams, she returned, black-haired, breathing the death rattle from the dark of her hospital bed, or radiant, enthroned in a bright green field. And I dreamed of myself, on the lawn in Kent, trying to fix the dishwasher. The dishwasher broke down / My grandmother had a stroke. Now it was my mother I would approach in writing: a series of poems, taken from this journal, about Mom, I wrote in my diary that week after her death. First get it out, then give it form.
The four children still at home stayed on in Washington, my father with them, still on leave from the job in New York. A weekend after the death, I visited to help my sister Rosemary clear out my mother’s bureau and closets. My father was bereft, at a loss as to what he should do. How could he uproot my two youngest sisters again? They were ten and twelve, and their mother had died. But could he resign his job and live in Washington? One morning, I walked into the guest room where he was staying—no one was sleeping in the bed wreathed with baby pictures, the room my mother died from. My father was bending over, putting something into a suitcase. I asked a question. “Do you think you’ll marry again, Pop?” He looked up. “I don’t want to marry again quickly,” he said. “It’s so easy to get caught.”
In my dreams, my mother became insistent, night after night turning toward me, her face gaunt. Or reaching for my hand, hers in the cuff of a white Irish sweater, and I would wake, waking Venable. “Just go upstairs and write,” he would say. I read and reread Adrienne Rich. “A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them.” And then one day, I began. On a shuttle to Washington right after my mother was diagnosed, I had written, Ladies and gentlemen, my mother is dying, imagining myself walking the airplane aisle, past business travelers bent over newspapers. Now I made a poem, then poems, my friends offering support. One sent a silver letter opener that had belonged to her mother, dead when my friend was in her teens; another framed a photograph of Gertrude Stein. Paul Schmidt, who had stayed in the apartment over the summer, wrote: As I always do when I’ve been to your house, I come away very peaceful and full of strong literary resolve. Tell Venable his prodding has so far produced 15 pages which I am tempted to call a memoir—the inner me, in English at last. Venable had encouraged him to write the truth about his bisexual life. Now Venable was prodding me, too.
12/23 Washington. I am not sure that I am any more able to go pick out a gravestone for Mom than Poppy is. My father had asked that Rosemary and I go to the cemetery and decide between marble and granite. He was turning away from my mother, and, as I turned toward her in my writing, I could feel him also turn from me. Was he leaving me because I still loved her? Had he forgotten the day I remembered so clearly the week before she died? They had reconciled, he’d told me, radiant. Had found each other again. But now, he no longer talked to me about what he was feeling. In this way, my writing, the dimension in which I was most alive, the part of my life in which my mother was present, came to exclude my father.
12/24 Washington. I feel as if I must have full time for writing—and I don’t. I must go back and write every day or else, which the holidays, the terrible millstone of the family has helped me let slip . . . Irritation. Sickness. My poem. The most terrible missing of Mom. It is almost grotesque to sit around the table without her. The whole thing is undynamic without her, static. Cleaning up the various living rooms. The debris of death choking everything. At the typewriter, my fingers slipped from the keys. “Why are you doing something so private when you are such a public person?” asked a friend from Yale, a public woman herself. “It is difficult to write poems about one’s dead mother,” proclaimed the distinguished poet, a man who had been my mentor. “Keep going, Wonz,” repeated Venable, using his nickname for me. “You must do this,” said the older woman writer I barely knew. And I walk around my studio, my feet bare, Granny Moore’s Chinese carpet soft under my feet, its blue and creamy colors vibrating in the early winter light. Again I press the keys: If she could only sleep. Condense. Count syllables. Make poems.
For a reading in mid-January, I chose not only “My Mother’s Moustache,” my triumphant just-published poem, but the unfinished new ones about her death: Ladies and gentlemen, my mother is dying, I read, If she could only sleep . . . As I continued to read, silence thickened in the dark, and when I finished, there was prolonged clapping. Afterward, in the gathering of my excited friends, something like a scene from a Hollywood movie: a woman approaches, asks if I might like to see these poems on the stage, with music? Yes.
Reading my journals now, I am in search not of the story of my mother as I was in 1974, but of the story of my father and me. I find it, embedded.
The morning of my mother’s funeral, I stood in the kitchen, next to my father. Making coffee? Washing dishes? Suddenly my sister Adelia, married a year before, burst into the room and announced to him that she was pregnant. My father, turning, said something like, “Oh, how wonderful,” and leaned to hug and kiss her. I stood back and watched the embrace, her smile, his effort to be present. Why had she not been able to wait another day? What did I have to offer on this day of burial?
I took this tangle of rage, envy, and grief to my therapist, who after introducing the idea of “the good daughter,” told me he found it difficult to imagine someone of my temperament without a child. Within days I had a dream, which I recorded in my diary: I see Paul Schmidt in a field. He says he always goes to bed with the wrong person. I tell him I’ve had a dream. In it Hecuba is lying in a bed in a dark room, fat, distended, diseased, the mourning mother. Athena/Minerva (My-nerva) stands & transforms from dark to blond. I do not go to bed with Hecuba; it is Minerva who knocks me out. I go to bed with her. At the time, in the wake of my psychiatrist’s remark about my suitability for motherhood, I thought the dream spoke to my vocation as a writer. Hecuba had mothered fifty children, her sons had died in the Trojan War; I choose to be a childless woman, born from the brain of my father—from my own brain. But could it be that even then I knew of the turbulence in my father’s spirit? That this other Paul, Paul Schmidt, who loved men and had loved and married a woman, was a stand-in? That it was my father Paul who was always going to bed with the wrong person?
I had encountered, and repressed, the fact of my father’s homosexual desire only once. I was in college, home in Washington for a vacation, and it was an evening after supper. Perhaps my parents were out, because I walked into their bedroom. The giant bed was on the right as you came in, and in red frames, arranged around its semicircular headboard, the baby photographs of their nine children—an altar to the generative power of my parents’ marriage. Though the room was not off limits, I rarely went into it except to talk to one of them. Why was I alone there? I could have been looking for a safety pin or a Kleenex, but this night, the light in my father’s study, an alcove off the large bedroom, was on, and suddenly, mysteriously, I was in search of something else. First I looked at the little shelf above the built-in desk where my father kept small objects brought back by his grandmother from her trips around the world, two of which he later gave me. One of those he gave me was a lapis elephant, the other was a small Chinese figure carved of white jade—two men, one on top of the other, heads and feet at opposite ends so that the sculpture is of four men, the third and fourth, each squatting, composed of the head and feet of one of the others. A beast of two backs. Four backs?
Then I turned to leave. I don’t remember if the book of photographs was already open, or if I opened it, but the image it was opened to was unlike anything I’d ever associated with my father. The photograph, in black and white, was of a young man, naked, standing on a stony beach. The texture was almost grainy, and the youth was beautiful, dreamy, almost sullen. I remember that he stood, three quarters turned from me, facing out to the sea so his genitals were obscured. I understood that if I turned the page, there would be another photograph like this one, that this was a book of such photographs, but I did not want to see another photograph like this one, nor did I want to be caught looking at the book, even though it was out there, maybe even open, on the neatly painted white surface.
It was soon after I saw the book of photographs, the photograph of the naked young man, that my mother became certain my father had lovers outside their marriage, and that the lovers were men. She made the discovery, I was told by a friend in whom she confided, not as the result of a single event, but from putting things together—a series of suspicions suddenly becoming in her mind enough of a certainty for her to consider leaving my father, for her to make a dramatic announcement to her oldest child during the summer of 1969: I am having some problems with my marriage. Until she reached that conclusion, she had not seriously considered that my father had been unfaithful to her, or that he might have another sexual preference. She confided her new belief only in her sister, her brother’s wife, and Bette, a woman she became close to before her death.
My mother had struggled with what she and my father agreed were their sexual problems, and he had gone to a psychiatrist, my mother assumed for depression related to the war. In fact, I learned years later, the psychiatrist my father had first seen was Bertram Schaffner, homosexual himself, a pioneer who had counseled gay men drafted into World War II on how to avoid the draft or to live undetected in the armed services and one of the psychoanalytic profession who had worked hardest to get homosexuality removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which happened in 1973, the year my mother died and a few years after I saw the open book of photographs. But my foray that night into my father’s study took place before my mother’s announcement of her discontent, and so I was ignorant of the fissures that would eventually break my parents’ marriage. There was no context in my conscious mind to conclude, from seeing the book of photographs, any new information. I believed that my parents took Christian marriage seriously, and I assumed they did not argue with the commandment “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
I learned that my mother’s dissatisfaction with her marriage had a sexual element sometime after her announcement in the Adirondacks. I was in Washington to visit once in the early 1970s, just after she had gotten out of Payne Whitney and moved back, but before we started to become friends. It was a spring day, April or May as I remember the light, but mild, the edge off the cold because it was Washington. The Roma was not a fancy place, but a big neighborhood trattoria that was quite empty at lunch. The maître d’ took us to a table in the back. In the shadowy darkness, splashes of light from the few windows fell across red-and-white-checked tablecloths. We sat down, an unlit candle in red glass on the table between us. My mother was on one of her perennial diets and she had no gray in her black hair and no wrinkles on her long face. We rarely looked directly at each other, so I saw her face turning aside and looking down, her fingernails, as always, bitten to the quick. I was still wary of her, but I was trying to respond to her overtures of friendship. We both ordered wine, and then she looked up at me. I don’t remember how the conversation began, but suddenly she was saying, “I didn’t have an orgasm until I was forty.” I had no reply. “And when I finally did,” she continued, “Paul said, ‘What’s the matter, Jenny?’” Venable, who was just four years younger than my mother, had introduced a new discourse of sexual candor into our family, an ease with Oedipal conclusions, ardent talk of Freud and Jung. But this, like the picture of the young man in the book of photographs, was nakedness I did not want to see—my father, fumbling and insensitive as a lover, my mother new to pleasure in her forties.
Night after night, the summer after my mother died, I watched the characters I had made from my mother and father, from myself, from my sister Rosemary and her boyfriend, from my mother’s doctors, reenact the six months of my mother’s terminal illness. Ladies and gentlemen, my mother is / dying, said the actress-daughter. What has happened to all the cures? asked the actress-mother, in white light, startled from her coma, The miracle wheat sprout juice / they gave me hourly. / . . . The predigested protein which tasted like melted muscles. I allowed the mother to say what I feared my mother had believed. You have all betrayed me, she rages when she realizes the remedies are exhausted. But I didn’t allow my father to rage. I did not know my father well enough to imagine his grief.
He spent July in Europe, so he missed the play. By the time he returned, there were reviews—“intense, yet detached, somewhat as if Emily Dickinson had written Noh plays”—and a producer, teamed with the women who mounted the play in the small tent theater in the Berkshires, had made plans to bring it to New York. By the end of summer, I had made minor revisions, and Mourning Pictures was scheduled for a November opening at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway. I was twenty-eight. What was it like for my father to see this play? From his oral history, I learned that he had “quite a lot of ambivalence about it,” but that on balance he thought “it was a lovely job.” At the time, I was sure he was angry at me. I had made him a minor character and I felt guilty about it. But he proudly acted the part of the doting father, trekking down to West Forty-fifth Street to photograph the Broadway marquee with my name on it, and he came to the play, once with Susanna and Patience, my two youngest sisters, and a second time, to the opening.
In the wake of sold-out houses in the Berkshires and rave reviews from such critics as the venerable Eliot Norton of Boston, I thought the play was invincible. I ignored those who questioned the wisdom of the producer in moving such an intimate work to Broadway, where, in 1974, no one had yet seen a character speak openly about cancer or watched a young woman’s last months with her mother unfold at the center of a play. And I reveled in the glamour of my new prominence. But rehearsals were difficult, and at one point, with barely any directing experience, I was drafted to take over rehearsals. I knew even in previews that the revised production lacked the simplicity and power of the original, but I did not expect the chorus of hostile and uncomprehending reviews that descended, all in one day, or that the play would close after a week of previews and one performance. An interview in the Washington Post was accompanied by an enormous photograph of me wiping tears from my eyes, but I took solace in the fact that my father understood what I had made—“It was a liturgy, liturgically done,” he said—and that The New Yorker declared that I was “a very good writer.” I had left room within my text, Brendan Gill wrote, that put him “in mind of passages in Eliot’s Four Quartets.” But I was humiliated, and now, with my mother no longer alive each night on a stage, I was faced with the actuality of her death.
In Europe that summer, my father had visited Nona Clark: I thought of the tall, willowy, red-haired woman I’d met at twenty, and I remembered his saying that morning in Washington, It’s so easy to get caught. Would Nona become my stepmother? I had no idea she was just one of five women my father had been seeing and that another one of the five was only two years older than me. My father had performed Brenda Eagle’s marriage, and recently, after just two years, Vernon Eagle’s funeral. In her twenties, she’d lost a first husband to a sudden, aggressive cancer.
“How are you, Pop?”
“I’m fine.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Last night I went dancing with Mrs. Eagle.” Mrs. Eagle. My mother, who had been a friend of Mr. Eagle, had once briefly mentioned meeting his new wife; now my father spoke of Mrs. Eagle with romance in his voice. Nona would never marry him, I thought; she was much too sophisticated and worldly. Mrs. Eagle. Eagle. Crowding in came a story my father liked to tell of my childhood. We were in Kent and he’d taken me for a walk across the road, deep into the fields, down toward the river. “We’re going to look at birds,” he said. He had binoculars around his neck. He took my hand. It was a hot, clear morning.
“What kind of bird do you want to see?”
“I want to see a bald eagle.”
“Okay,” my father said, knowing full well that eagles rarely came to that part of New England. But at the river, suddenly, there appeared in the sky a dark speck of bird. My father lifted the binoculars and looked through them, and then he placed them over my eyes, and there gliding across the blue sky was the eagle I had imagined, its head silvery in the bright sun.
I first met Mrs. Eagle in the Park Avenue apartment her husband had been given when he was the director of a small foundation. At dinner there, with my father, we sat in half darkness, the large dark leaves of houseplants dramatic against the white woodwork. She was from Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of a Cadillac dealer; her first husband had been a diplomat with whom she was posted to Ethiopia. All Virginia had vanished from her speech; she was slender and small with dark hair; she was not beautiful like an eagle or like my mother, but she had energy; and a sense of humor. On December 15, I wrote, Met Brenda Eagle, Pop’s amour. Very pretty. I liked her enormously tho felt shy.
The second time I met Brenda was at a family supper at the cathedral; by now she wore the emerald and ruby intertwining engagement rings my father had presented to her in Central Park. We talked about furniture. I asked her where I might get a table refinished. “I’ll take you,” she said. “I take all my antiques there. I’m going to take Paulo!” My father laughed, but I flinched. Brenda’s looks, I realized that night, were the result of hard work. She had a disciplined waist and a face that had been pushed to prettiness. Soon I heard a rumor from Washington: over breakfast somewhere, she’d pointed at my father’s photograph in the Washington Post: “I’m going to marry him.” Stories like this began to make me nervous, but my father seemed madly in love. “She has bedroom skills,” Venable quipped, and I asked him to shut up. She certainly seemed to love my father, and she knew how to describe herself as a perfect wife for him. “I wanted you to know, before the wedding,” she wrote Gami,
. . . the real joy and happiness that Paul has brought to my life. I was extremely happy and very much in love with my late husband Vernon Eagle. As we suffered together in his long and impossible fight against cancer I used to think that when it was over, I would be empty and capable only of the most mediocre feelings. I didn’t think that I would be able or entitled to love someone so deeply again. It still seems incredible that Paul has come into my life and brought me an even warmer and deeper feeling of closeness and love than I thought possible or dared hope for.
That he is a very, very special person, must be an old refrain to you. He is the most wonderful and loving father with his children (and his congregations) that I have ever seen. He is tough as nails when he goes to work for a cause or against some social injustice. And he is an exuberant, funny, peaceful and loving suitor. I so look forward to being a good friend to the children whom I love dearly. I also adore going with Paul to his Sunday services . . .
The wedding was in May 1975, a year and a half after my mother’s death. Among the wedding pictures—my father tall, his hair long in the fashion of the 1970s; Brenda in a short white dress, holding a bouquet—there is a shot of me, all smiles and dressed in turquoise, bending over the newlyweds, who sit at one of the round tables placed in the cathedral azalea garden for the bridal supper. But I was still fighting wariness. During the short outdoor ceremony, the garden garish with coral blooms, the seven of my father’s children who could be there and my mother’s sister, brother, and sister-in-law had stood as my father, having kissed the bride, said, at least twice, “This is the happiest day of my life.”
After Brenda moved with my father into “the Manse,” as Venable and I called the vast cathedral apartment, everything that had to do with my mother was quickly removed. Brenda reminded me of Natasha, the woman from the rising middle class whom the brother marries in Three Sisters, Chekhov’s uncompromising metaphor for those who sweep away the past to create a new order. Brenda painted the headboard white, threw the baby pictures with the red frames into a box, and put them in the attic. Away went the bean pot used as a kitchen sugar bowl ever since Jersey City. Nothing was offered to us. Familiar pictures, except those that were valuable, came down, and what she referred to as “my collection” went up—on every wall, it seemed, hung the mournful works of the Polish postwar painter that her second husband had collected. Then my father informed me that he and Brenda would be removing certain family objects from the house in Kent, which they now shared with Venable and me on alternate weekends: the trophies of real gold that my great-grandfather had won racing four-in-hand, various paintings, and sets of china. A moving truck was dispatched for most of the furniture, including Nathaniel Moore’s four-poster that Venable and I slept in. In short order the house was emptied of everything of value and aesthetic appeal as Brenda furnished the enormous bishop’s residence and “my house on Martha’s Vineyard,” left to her by Mr. Eagle. I had thought these were family things, and, while I now understood they actually belonged to my father and that he was entitled to them, I felt pillaged.
“What are you doing, Paul?” my father’s old friend Bob Potter asked him. “Stripping the joint?”
It was as if Brenda had suddenly come upon a shop at which she was the sole and favored customer and everything was free. But my father saw it differently: “She reminds me of Great-granny,” he said, recalling his adored grandmother, as “the Manse” gained baronial splendor. From Brenda’s point of view she was simply deconstructing the frayed remains of another woman’s residence and making it her own, something I would certainly do, I kept telling myself, under the circumstances. I had barely recovered when, one June Saturday, a month after the wedding, Venable and I were in Kent. The morning was close and cloudy, and I was in my study trying to write when the telephone rang. “Your sister Marian,” my father said, “has been in a motorcycle accident.” Marian had just finished her sophomore year at the University of California at Santa Cruz. On a bike . . . behind a boyfriend . . . coming down a mountain. The words seemed to float in the humidity of the small room. “She’s broken her leg in several places,” my father continued.
“Will she be all right?”
“I’ve talked to her, Paul is there.” (My brother Paul lived in Oregon.) Now Venable was standing behind me, his hand on my shoulder. “And also,” my father continued, “I want the rug back.”
“The rug?” I was still thinking about Marian, six feet two, one of her unbelievably long legs broken in three places, her marvelous smile, her long blond hair.
“Granny’s rug.”
“Granny’s rug?” As if I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then, “But Mom gave it to me.”
“Brenda and I want to put it in the attic office.” The attic?
“Mom gave it to me, Pop.”
“It was my grandmother’s, and I want it.”
In the letter I wrote him announcing my refusal to give him the rug, I invoked Virginia Woolf, enclosing, inscribed, my copy of A Room of One’s Own. I believed that the rug belonged to me. I remembered the phone call, my mother’s offer to have it cleaned before it arrived, her excitement that I would have something of my great-grandmother’s, Venable and I unrolling it on my study floor.
The first headache I can place in time came that day. Think of my skull bones as an open flower, think of my father’s words swirling, of the bones closing on the flesh of the brain, and staying there. Years later, I would stop drinking alcohol and eating certain things, and then find remedies: the laying on of practitioners’ hands, acupuncture, migraine medication, medication for allergies, further medication. Now on the rare occasions when I have a headache medication does not reach, I take a hot bath, cancel appointments, lie down, apply ice, and begin. I have learned how to separate my thinking and emotion from the physical pain, to follow its trajectory backward to its origin, a fine point of throbbing force. Digging my fingers into the cavities around the jaw, at the edge of the occiput, I can calm it, even celebrate its power to vanquish me. If I’m lucky, I’m able to take those hours as the visitation of all that remains snarled and unresolved, as an expedition to a far edge of my thinking, even an encounter with the suffering of others.
But in 1975, I thought only of myself. Each headache was evidence of my imperfection, punishment for failure to align my life with an ideal I believed possible, and its hours were hours of shame. I knew only palliative care. Take a bath, Venable would say, and I would, and then, wrapping myself in a towel with a hot washcloth on my forehead, two Bufferin quickly swallowed, I’d lie down. Perhaps I’d fall asleep, and, if I was truly fortunate, when I woke up, the headache would have gone, leaving only its shadow. The day of the phone call about Marian’s accident, about the rug, I went to sleep in the attic room at the back of the house so I wouldn’t hear cars snap by on the road or trucks bang down the hill. The bed was an extra-long mattress; my father had slept there when he came for weekends before my mother died, before Brenda, when I thought being in love with Venable would make me permanently happy. But now I had “terminated” therapy, my mother was dead, and the gathering pain offered nothing but the most violent inchoate truths. I could barely consider the suggestions that presented themselves: leave this house which after all is your father’s house; make your way to understanding so that even the worst pain won’t confuse your thinking.
Venable tried his best. Sometimes he brought tea, other times, misjudging, he aggravated the wound, cursing my father, ridiculing Brenda, analyzing my need to keep hold of my dead mother, fetishized now in a Chinese carpet. Even his admiration hurt. I was heroic, he kept saying, for holding my ground. I saw no way to another choice, but unlike Venable, who as a child had suffered the abuse of a violent stepfather, I had no experience of a life under siege. I was frightened of the future. My dreams became a sequence of spectacles: a pyramid of discarded fetuses, each wrapped in tinfoil; the collapse of the log cabin, an outbuilding next to the house in Kent where I’d camped out as a child. Another night I dreamed I went to a surgeon who recommended cuts to each eye. One would extend the eye opening so I would see better; the second cut, a more risky procedure, would free me, entirely, from my family. I chose only the cut that would make me see better.
All these years later, it was a surprise to read in my journal of my father’s repeated approaches. His acknowledgment of the letter and of the book by Virginia Woolf. His request that we talk about the rug. His second request that we talk about the rug. But I was frightened of this new father and his new wife. I visited Marian at the hospital in Santa Cruz, and when Rosemary moved to New York to become a writer, she rented an apartment in our neighborhood and became part of the life Venable and I were making. But I shut my father out, except for formal encounters at the cathedral on Christmas and Easter. I watched him celebrate and preach, went back to the Manse afterward, exchanged with him the customary brief kiss, watched his life with Brenda evolve, feeling in his tall presence, and over and over again, the loss of him.