June 1983
In early June, two months before the wedding, a diminutive woman named Beatrice came at my mother’s request to the house by the sea to “do something” about the dress I was wearing for my wedding. “Primp it up somehow,” was how my mother put it. “We need to do something,” she’d tell Ruth Ann Middleton, the wedding planner, over the phone, and then lower her voice to a small growl: “Dearie, it’s a disaster.”
I had chosen what my mother called “frankly not much of a dress” to be married in. The dress was soft and old and fragile. It would cinch at the waist in a wide band of lace Beatrice would make. I had chosen pink grosgrain shoes to match, though I wanted red boots and this was our compromise, my mother’s and mine. In her opinion, I had chosen something unsuitable to the occasion. Too sexy, too boho, too, to use her expression, tartish. The dress was not one she would have chosen, one of the confections displayed in clear garment bags in the temperature-controlled bridal salons at Bergdorf’s, Bonwit’s, and Saks. My hippie dress, as she called it, was not her idea of the statement she wanted to make at her eldest daughter’s wedding. To her mind, it went with the choice of groom. Not the statement she wanted to make. But even she had to admit, as I tried on dress after dress while she sat on pastel-colored settees outside fitting rooms, waiting, that the entire exercise was all wrong.
“Look at your little face,” she said about one. “You are drowning in that dress.”
“I feel like a dessert,” I admitted. I’d try on another, the bridal advisers buttoning, hooking, smoothing, and smiling.
“Okay,” she finally conceded with a sweep of her hand. “I give up. You get your way.”
My mother and I did not always get along. There was a time, back when I was about sixteen and her marriage to my father was still fine, that we did. Late at night, we’d sit in the living room of our apartment in New York City in our nightgowns, feet up on the coffee table, drinking diet ginger ale and smoking cigarettes. I had just taken up smoking then, so on those evenings she’d open a long ebony cigarette box she kept on the coffee table, take out a cigarette, and pass the box to me. Then she’d take one of her cherished ceramic lighter holders, each fashioned to look like a small head of romaine lettuce, a disposable Bic lighter nestled inside, and light us up. I was working for a certain look, a sort of controlled nonchalance that I saw my mother as having perfected. The way she’d inhale deeply, raise her chin, and let the smoke drift out in a long dramatic waft. The way she cocked the cigarette between two fingers, her head leaning on a hand, elbow casually resting on the arm of the couch. She looked both wise and elegant to me, even in her nightgown and slippers. Cigarette smoke had such power, I thought. So I puffed when she puffed, exhaled when she did, and listened to her tell me dark stories from the lives of her friends.
Her topic was inevitably men.
“He left her flat,” she’d say about one or the other, or “With that weight gain, come on, she had it coming.” Above her head the cigarette smoke curled languorously, but her free hand cut the air as she spoke, her brown eyes flashed.
High above the honks and shrieks of the New York City streets, my father and my younger sisters far away in sleep, this is what she taught me: that after the braces, the music lessons, and the first pair of high heels, the next essential item was a man. “Maaahhhn” was how she said it, drawing the syllable out as if it wasn’t a word at all but an incantation.
“The army of women” is how she referred to her friends who were divorced or widowed, who were suddenly alone. “Don’t be one of the army of women,” she’d say, and though I didn’t know what she meant, I pictured them all: gray, elegant, with shiny black pocketbooks and Chanel suits, shuffling together past boutique windows on Madison Avenue. I believed her that it was something bad, something to avoid in this world.
But all that was long ago. Long before I met a boy named Dean and let the wild tide of romance funnel into one steady stream. It shattered her very heart, my mother confided to absolutely everyone, that I had never taken an interest in a boy named Eliot whose mother was a friend of hers.
“His family is in the Social Register,” she would point out, and sigh. It was a fragile sigh, a sigh of maternal resignation, that I could so easily let Eliot and his ilk slip through the family net.
“I suppose I am to blame,” she said. “The mother is always to blame. It’s our lot.”
The Social Register, a black book with orange lettering, came in annual hardcover installments and served as a GPS for my mother through the world of New York society. The yearly editions lined the bookshelves behind the couch in our library, within her easy reach. Often she pulled the most recent volume down and studied it, leafing through as one might through a magazine or a catalogue. It was filled with information she found fascinating and valuable, who had gone to what school, what clubs they belonged to, the names of their children, and the names of their houses.
Many families in the pages of the Social Register had houses with names. A house with a name spoke of legacy, of a gabled heritage, the faint hint of noble skeletons in every closet. A family seat. Though we had no such heritage, she intended to build one, and she named our house in East Hampton the very first summer we owned it, named it after the street sign she had the gardener erect in the driveway, Children at Play. That name reflected the mandate she bestowed upon herself in marrying my father, an older man whose first wife had divorced him when his children were very young. The Children at Play house was to be the warm cloak under which she gathered his four elder children, now adults, and restored them to him along with their wives and children, to join us every August by the sea.
In the mid-’60s, East Hampton was a quiet town. The old post office had been converted to a movie theater where the feature changed weekly, and children old enough to ride bicycles could follow a narrow bike path single file under a canopy of giant elm trees all the way into town to spend their allowance at the five-and-ten, or at Marley’s stationery store. The houses with names had a steady soundtrack of sprinklers, and the summer air smelled of fresh-cut grass. The drive from New York City took four hours, the final stretch from Southampton along Route 27 past corn and potato fields that in those days gave a view clear to the horizon. At Children at Play my mother saw lawns, with children to run on them, and she saw herself presiding over the extended “clan,” as she called it, a nod to the Scottish roots of our last name. She set about posing us in front of the house each summer in clean pressed clothes, smiling for a hired photographer, our mouths open in a semblance of spontaneous laughter. One year someone drove the family car, a Chrysler Imperial convertible with tail fins and push-button gears, onto the front lawn, and we posed in and around it, my parents in the front seat, my mother holding a parasol and my father gripping the wheel, as though we’d all just merrily driven out from the city and somehow missed the driveway and landed square in the middle of the grass. Behind us stood the gray shingled house. Children at Play. She ordered stationery, thick ivory cards with “Children at Play” embossed across the top in bright green print. The name, in Portuguese, was painted on a mosaic of enamel tile that hung over the entryway to the house, “Quinta de Crianças Brincar.” My mother’s friend Judy had gone to Portugal and brought it back, and to my mother it christened the house with familial vision.
The Social Register registered faded love with no apparent hint of irony. Beside the name of any divorced woman, even those remarried, the name of her first husband sat in parentheses, a coded palimpsest for all to see of her romantic past. Beside my mother’s name it said “(Van Devere),” referencing a shadowy first husband in Florida never spoken of.
“Eliot Andrews is in law school, and if the truth be known, he has very good genes,” she said. “He looks like a young Greek god.” She went on, “Please, for me, just think about it. Look at him in profile, dearie, that profile could be on a Greek coin. Strong chin. Nothing out of place.”
Where she saw Adonis, I saw Bacchus, a fraternity boy whose chiseled features would swell to paunch and puffiness over time.
“His genes are really like anyone else’s, Ma. Levi’s.”
“Very funny. You have a lot to learn about the world, little thing. A lot to learn about men. Your mother,” she’d go on to add, because when she had something important to say, she always referred to herself in the third person, “your mother knows a few things.”
“He was a very nice boy for a college romance,” was how my mother explained Dean. “You know, the kind of romance a girl should age out of, not marry.”
My mother was telling this to Ruth Ann Middleton, her wedding planner. She spoke to Ruth Ann in a British accent. Though she was from Miami, my mother had various accents, and it was the British accent she deployed to speak to Ruth Ann as well as to the ladies from the bridal salons at Saks and Bonwit’s and Bergdorf’s. In Ruth Ann’s case, she added a certain entre nous air that sounded less imperious and more clubby, as if, being two women who had memorized entire swaths of the Social Register, they could speak to each other from within a sort of gilded cage in confidential tones. Ruth Ann was a large woman with black stubble on her chin. A pocketbook dangled from her forearm at all times, from which she pulled lists and lists of crucial wedding information—caterers, club membership directories, and her contacts at the society desks of key newspapers around the world. Ruth Ann had a credo that weddings start on time. If she was “doing” a wedding, it started when it was supposed to or her name wasn’t Ruth Ann Middleton. On her hands, she wore short kid gloves.
“Don’t you think the gloves are a bit much?” I’d asked my mother after our first meeting with Ruth Ann.
“Peh,” she said. “That girl is a type.”
My mother always called women girls, no matter how old.
“What type?”
“They never marry. They compensate by doing other people’s weddings. Occupational hazard, I guess. Destined to be one in the army of women.”
“A lieutenant in the army of women,” I added. “Poor Ruth Ann. Ruth Ann Middleton, lieutenant first class.”
“It’s sad, dearie,” she’d say. “Don’t make fun.”
It was late June, still a slight chill in the air the morning Beatrice came to “do something” about my dress. A few people walked the beach in sweaters, long pants rolled up their calves, some with dogs trotting alongside.
When she arrived, Beatrice thumped a bolt of lace up the staircase and down the long carpeted hallway to my mother’s bedroom. The bedroom was large, with French doors that gave out to a deck with a view to the sea. As the day warmed, a soft wind blew through the open French doors.
Beatrice brought her bolt of lace into the middle of the room and stood beside it, holding it firm so as not to let it teeter and fall. Then she laid the bolt on the rug and unraveled a simple inch, then a yard; finally an intricate pattern emerged, the delicate fabric lopping across the pale pink carpet.
Mostly, looking at the lace that was to cinch my wedding dress, I thought of old aunts with secrets, and spiderwebs, and the passing of time. It smelled softly of tea and roses. I tried to feel respectful of all these meanings, and believe I could wear this delicate lace and pull it off. I had heard tales of girls, girls more sedate than I, losing arms off antique wedding dresses when they started to drink and dance. I was relieved to know there were girls who had dresses that fell apart at their wedding receptions, and yet in their gay dishevelment they went right on.
“This is so feminine,” Beatrice said as she looked at the lace, now unfurled along my mother’s carpet. To my mother she added, “There is something so feminine about your daughter’s taste.” She gently shook her head, a quiet gesture of appreciation.
On her head Beatrice wore a purple straw fedora that matched her purple-and-yellow sundress. She wore bright fuchsia lipstick and seemed impatient with my muted tones. “Let’s try more color,” she suggested quietly, unraveling pink and orange satin sashes she kept neatly coiled at the bottom of her canvas tote.
“All she ever wears is black,” my mother agreed. She sat on her bed pulling on the tassel of one of her silk throw pillows. It was an embroidered scene, a prince and princess wearing silver crowns, dismounting from a carriage. Each of her pillows, which ran along the headboard of her bed, depicted a different fairy tale. In another the prince was kissing a sleeping princess while in the background a naked cherub played a lute.
My mother was tall, taller than I; her face had not softened with age but grown more angular, more defined. Her skin was delicate, aged over time like a sheet washed and dried too many times in the sun. Though now slightly stooped, she still strode with the assurance of someone who held herself strong against the world, someone who was used to getting her own way.
At Children at Play, her bedroom was her command central. The bed in the room was enormous, two queen beds pushed together, though for years no one had slept in it but her. By her side of the bed, a pink princess phone hung on the wall within easy reach for late-night chats with her sister in Florida or one of her children. Next door, my father slept in his study, adjacent to the bedroom. It was decorated by my mother in a forest green plaid, the shelves and tables filled with his well-thumbed language books, the leather bindings cracked at the spines. My father would spend entire mornings with his books, a can of Budweiser by his side, his glasses in a slow slide down his nose.
My mother’s closets were organized by category. One had only tennis dresses, another her entire collection of bright Lilly Pulitzer shifts. Long A-line muumuus that she wore for dinners at home were hung in a closet with slatted sliding doors for proper ventilation. Another closet was only shoes, mounted vertically on shelves so that the shoes—flat sandals in shades to match the Lillys, a few grass-stained Tretorn tennis sneakers, satin slingbacks, and white summer pumps—appeared to be climbing the wall. Another closet was arranged in color-coded stacks of sweaters and sharkskin slacks for colder summer days. The doorknob of the tennis dress closet was employed to hang a necklace made up of numerous strands of tiny freshwater pearls, hung there to keep the strands from getting into the frenzied tangle that would be inevitable if left to their own devices. When she wore it, as she did often in the summer, the eruption of pearls hung in tiers of zany frivolity from her neck and looked, my sisters and I would tell her, as if an oyster had had multiple orgasms on her chest.
“I’m wearing blue to the wedding,” my mother told Beatrice as she pulled on the tassel.
Beatrice nodded. “That’s a lovely color for the mother of the bride,” she purred encouragingly.
“Not really a robin’s egg,” my mother went on, “but darker, an almost, I don’t know, a no-color blue.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. I was standing at the mirror, a sash of cantaloupe silk looped around my waist over my jeans. I looked to the dressmaker. “Beatrice, does that make any sense to you? ‘No-color blue’?”
“Oh,” she replied. She spoke softly. “Every color is a color. Blue is one of our very true colors. We depend on blue.” She looked at the silk tassel my mother was worrying with her hand. “That, for example, is a periwinkle. From the periwinkle family. A periwinkle is also a very true blue.”
My mother did not like to be corrected, particularly by someone she was paying to be agreeable. “No-color blue,” she repeated. “It’s the color of my dress for the wedding.” She flitted her hand. “A color worn only by me.” She looked at the clock at her bedside.
“Let’s get this done with,” she said, “Betty.”
Though the dressmaker’s name was not Betty but Beatrice, my mother had persisted in calling her Betty since the day I found my wedding dress at her shop in SoHo in the late spring.
“Peh, come on,” she had said to me that day as I rode uptown with her in a cab. “She’s an out-and-out Betty, there’s nothing even remotely Beatrice about that girl. She’s just trying to be pretentious.” She looked down at her manicure as she spoke. “She’s a very common girl, if the truth be known.”
We drove another ten blocks or so, the cab threading through the late-morning traffic. “And, I might add, I am not an ‘automatic Pat.’”
“A who?”
“You heard her, don’t act like you didn’t. As soon as she saw my name on the checkbook, she took it upon herself to call me Pat.”
I had heard her, and my heart had frozen when Beatrice called her Pat. There were certain things guaranteed to irk my mother, things other people would never imagine gave offense, like taking a seat on what she considered her side of our living room couch, or saying “folks” when you meant “people” or “drapes” when you meant “curtains” or “hose” when you meant “stockings” or “gift” when you meant “present.” The “automatic Pat” offense was the worst of them. Beatrice now was sunk, and try as I might, I would never be able to redeem her in my mother’s opinion.
“Ma, to be fair, it is your name.”
“Not automatically it’s not. I’m Mrs. McCulloch until such time as I say otherwise. As, I can assure you, I will not in the case of this girl Betty who owns a thrift store in the bowels of SoHo.”
She watched out the window, hands in her lap, one gesturing ever so slightly from time to time. It was a vague twitch her thumb and forefinger made, rising up in sudden small darts from her lap. This was evidence that she was carrying on a conversation in her head, often in French. Clearly she had a few more words for an imaginary Beatrice that required a change to a more imperious language. My mother’s spoken French was not entirely fluent, but when she constructed imaginary conversations in French in her head, her command of the language was perfect and her repertoire full of chilling mots justes.
After a time, she took my hand. “Listen to me,” she said. “Listen to your old ma. We’re going to get through this damn thing with grace and style, baby girl, even if it kills us.”
Apparently I owe my entire existence to a ladies’ lunch that took place late in 1956. My mother was reluctant to have children. So the story went, at least. She was thirty-seven when she had me, a relatively unusual age to be having a first child in the late 1950s. According to legend (a.k.a. my mother’s college friend Nancy), my entire conception, not the act, of course, but the promulgation of the act, was decided over lunch on the Upper East Side of Manhattan sometime late in 1956. My father had proposed to her the day earlier, in a taxicab going over the Triborough Bridge, and in a panic my mother convened her two best friends, Nancy and Mu. I don’t know what they ate, but I do know they were at Gino’s, which was in its day an institution: a classic Italian spot on the Upper East Side that drew a regular crowd from its opening in 1945 until its ultimate closing in 2010. The décor never changed; zebras (allegedly 108 of them) leapt along on a tomato-red background on the signature wallpaper that ran from the kitchen in the back all the way to the front door. The menu never changed from classic Italian red-sauce fare, and the clientele ranged from a handful of local celebrities to tourists hoping to spot them, and a steady inflow of the East Side ladies who lunched (it was after all just up the block from Bloomingdale’s). Hence the three-way huddle in 1956.
At thirty-seven my mother had black hair that she wore in bangs across her forehead and in an even row of flip curls along her jawline. She was working in the publicity department at Dior, and shared an apartment with Mu in the East 50s. They were two bachelorettes in careers in Midtown at a time where women in their late thirties were usually long settled. The fact that she was probably, if you do the math, which I did as soon as I knew how many months it took to have a baby, already pregnant with me notwithstanding, she was apparently in need of counsel. Marrying an older man who did not work concerned her, is how the story went, and her two lifelong friends, Nancy and Mu, talked her into it.
A word about these women at this ladies’ lunch. They had met at Sweet Briar College in the ’40s and liked to refer to themselves, with a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan, as “the three little maids from school.” Nancy, who was short and sassy, was a journalist at Life magazine. She was married to a famous journalist of the day, though he would be only the first of five husbands. Mu—her real name was Muriel, but she couldn’t stand it and preferred this moniker suggestive of a cow—had long, luxurious brown hair she wrapped in a twist on her head. At the time of the ladies’ lunch, Mu had met and later married a lawyer she originally came to know because my mother had so many parking tickets, she had hired him to get her off the hook. When he did, she brought him back to the apartment she and Mu shared for a celebratory drink. He took one look at Mu, with her mane of hair and hourglass curves, and fell instantly in love. Nancy and Mu regularly came with their husbands to visit us at the house by the sea, and the three women would do exercise classes together on the lawn, poking their pedicured pink toes into the air for a few minutes to tone their legs, then breaking for a cigarette. Nancy wore a bikini and her reading glasses all day long until it was time to dress for dinner, when they all three put on brightly colored muumuus. In the evenings, they played hands of bridge with the husbands, or bent over one of the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles on a yellow table by the piano.
Back in 1956, at a November conference at Gino’s, the advice from Nancy and Mu would translate in today’s argot roughly as “Go for it, girl. Have the baby, marry the man, have more babies—it’s now or never, if you catch our drift.”
So I was born, and my two sisters followed in relatively quick succession. As creation myths go, we all three owe our lives to a ladies’ lunch in 1956 at Gino’s.