Death makes me furious, which is a pity because I’m really up there myself, and someone is going to have to deal with my death sooner or later. I know there is no escaping it, but I resent all the holes in my life, the disappearances of those I hold dear. Death is not fair. Just when you get it—when you finally say aha!—the game changes.
I was not at the bedsides of those who gave me life when their lives ended. My vulnerable mother, who had thyroid problems, was overdosed with iodine by an arrogant new doctor, which made her so radioactive, she couldn’t join us in a house in the snow at Christmas. Indeed, she wasn’t allowed downstairs to be with her nursery school children for weeks. Her regular doctor was away, vacationing in Florida. I sat on the steps of the old house and called him. “My mother is radioactive—how could this happen?” Over the next fifteen years the cancer spread to her bones. “What’s wrong with me?” she moaned as she wandered the house at night.
I flew to her too late. Too late to hold her, to comfort her, to tell her how much I loved her. I know she expected me to save her. She thought I had all the powers she’d dreamed of when I was in her belly. The powers she infused in me to the point that I, too, believed nothing was impossible. I knew she was waiting for me to save her, and I knew I couldn’t save her, and that destroyed me. That she would reach for me, the way I did for her when I was drowning in chloroform on the cot in the Poconos.
The call came our last week of filming Tell Me a Riddle. I decided to take the red-eye to New York at midnight so I could finish the day’s shoot. I called my best friend Mary Beth back in New York and asked her to go to the hospital, to be there for my mother and my father. On the plane to New York I prayed my mother would still be alive when I got there.
I flashed on a memory of my Uncle Joe lying on a gurney, pushed up against a wall at Long Island Jewish Hospital. He had a blood clot in his leg. As we approached him, my mother and me, he fixed me with his eyes, desperate: “Get me out of here!” I was sixteen. My lawyer uncle was looking to me to save him. Did he think I had the power to save him?
Mary Beth had left Manhattan for Long Island at four in the morning and was sitting in the corner of the room when I ran in. My father sat facing my mother’s bed, his back to me. “I didn’t know I would miss her this much,” he whispered, bewildered, heartsick. My mother was gone, a frown of pain still visible between her eyes. Her lips were slightly apart. Where is Lyova? those lips said to me. Lyova? Standing in the middle of the room, I screamed and screamed and screamed.
She was laid out in a coffin in a neighborhood funeral parlor near her nursery school, where she had been the beloved of generations of little girls and their mothers for having infused in them a sense of their great talent and beauty.
Fremo was aghast at how the funeral people handled her sister’s hair and makeup. They had assumed she was a Long Island matron. She was not. We combed the curls out of her naturally straight white hair. She had always worn her hair in bangs like a schoolgirl. We wet washcloths and rubbed off the pink rouge and lipstick. We powdered her white face. Fremo took out a red lipstick from her purse and carefully smoothed it over my mother’s mouth.
Do I think I might have made it in time to my mother’s bedside if I hadn’t been directing Tell Me a Riddle in San Francisco—the story of a dying woman, riddled with cancer? If I hadn’t waited to take an overnight plane, after I was done working?
• • •
After my mother died, I asked my father to come and live with us. My father nursed a Polish intellectual Jewish contempt for Joey and clung to it fiercely. His sensibility, his intellect was confounded by the Italian working-class in-laws and being displaced as head of the household for the first time. He was a quiet, fierce man. Also, he was losing his eyesight to macular degeneration. We had seen the top eye doctor at Cedars of Lebanon. Nothing could be done. He had lost his wife, the only woman in his whole life, he was losing his eyesight, and he was living in a hated stranger’s house in a strange, unfamiliar location, far from home, with his anxious daughter.
Rachel, Joey’s mother, was also staying with us. She prepared Abe’s soft-boiled egg in the shell, just so, made him oatmeal, toast, jam, and tea every morning. He would walk with his cane down our road to the ocean and sit there on a fallen log with the neighbor’s dog. Then he’d walk back up for lunch, nap with his folded handkerchief over his ear, listen to the radio, and sit on the porch, where he and my mother used to sit facing the ocean when they visited.
• • •
A month or so later, our accountant read us my mother’s will. In it, she forgave the debt I had been paying back, the loan she’d given us for the Green House.
When my father heard this, he insisted that I pay him the rest of the debt. I said, “That’s not what Mother wanted.” “Yes, she did.” And so we battled for years. Stubbornly. We never discussed the debt when I visited him, but it was there like a big hard lump between us. Both of us fighting for my mother, over my mother, each in our own stupid and unforgiving way.
At the same time, Joey was asking for recognition: Look at me, respect me. Abe was dismissive. He was punishing me because I was with a man he bristled at. He was only happy when he was with Dinah, who was now in her twenties, living on the Pacific Coast Highway in her own apartment. Dinah adored him. With her, he relaxed and joked, answered her complex philosophical questions. Her grandfather was very proud of her; she was the bright spot in his life. But the situation in the house was becoming intolerable. I couldn’t breathe and I felt bad for Joey; he didn’t deserve this. “Motel management, that’s what you should go into,” my father would say to Joey. “Motel management would suit you.” It was demeaning and cruel.
I don’t remember who discovered the hotel with residents close to my dad’s age on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, whether it was Dinah or me. I know when I passed it families were visiting on the porch facing the ocean. I went inside and saw the rooms, the common dining room. I drove straight to the Chateau Marmont and checked in. I was alone. I collapsed on the floor in tears, in pain, in guilt, in sorrow, in helplessness—a terrible racking regret.
I asked my own father if he would prefer a hotel to living with Joey and me. He jumped at the chance.