My father got sober when I was sixteen. My mother threw him out and made rehab a condition of his return. I should have been happier that he stopped drinking. He finally started paying attention to me, but it was not the kind of attention I’d craved. I arrived home one evening from hanging out with Asia, and he demanded that I talk to him. He told me he thought I was doing drugs.
I wasn’t—not at that moment, anyway. Asia and I had done all our heavy drinking and drug experimentation when we were fourteen and fifteen. Two years past that, I was smoking a cigarette or two a day and drinking a little on the weekends. And I wasn’t trying to hide it. No one ever told me I couldn’t do those things. My father had said I should try drugs but just not get addicted to them, which, good girl that I was, is exactly what I’d done.
When I wound up needing knee surgery that year, my father didn’t visit. Looking for scrap paper when I was back home and convalescing, I came across a notebook in which my mother had drafted a letter trying to convince him to visit me at the hospital, so I’d know he cared.
He often tells the story of one conversation we had at the time in which he tried to get me to attend his rehab group with him and to start going on my own to Al-Anon meetings. I said I didn’t have the problem so I shouldn’t have to go sit on a folding chair in a basement and be punished for what he had done. Infuriated by his timing, I apparently said the following, a line he repeats often for company: “Let me get this straight—now you want to be my dad?”
I am definitely overly identifying with Lucas Matthiessen, because as soon as I hit Play on the interview with his stepfather, Mike Goldberg, I feel combative. I’m put off by the lack of humility in Goldberg’s voice, even after he’s had eighteen months of inpatient psychotherapy and another decade back out in the world.
My father clearly considers him a friend. I learn that he even went to stay with Goldberg for a week and a half after he split up with his first wife, Linda. And so he seems sorry for Goldberg that when pop art came in, abstract expressionists like him were passé.
“You must have had an ambition to become rich and famous?” my father says. “And it must have seemed in the late fifties inevitable that you would be? Or famous anyway?”
Goldberg says he’s okay with his lack of fame, but he doesn’t sound very convincing.
They critique the work of Grace Hartigan, who divorced her husband and sent her son to live with her in-laws in order to focus on her art. Hartigan was one of the only female painters on the scene who had a child. For a while, she showed under the name George Hartigan. In an oral history conducted by the Smithsonian, she said she hadn’t seen her son since he was twelve, though now that he was in his midthirties, he’d sent her pictures of his three children. She hoped to meet them: “My oldest granddaughter, she looks like me. It’s the grandkids I want, I don’t want the son! [She laughs.]”
These people are the worst.
My father and Goldberg muse about who Gregory LaFayette—who shows up in a poem of O’Hara’s—may have been. My father has asked around and come to the conclusion that he must be “some Cambridge person.”
This is where living in the computer age gives me an advantage. I didn’t get to drink at the Cedar Tavern, but I can look things up on IMDb. Gregory LaFayette was a blond actor who appeared in movies such as the 1957 war film Under Fire. He died in a car accident in Wyoming on the Fourth of July, 1957. His wife, Judy Tyler, had just filmed Jailhouse Rock with Elvis. The couple was driving back to New York with their cat and dog when they were in a head-on collision. The “other Gregory” of the poem was Beat poet Gregory Corso, whose intensity the two on the tape agree was more appealing when he was young.
Goldberg recalls O’Hara talking about the deaths of his grandfather and father. “That’s something you should talk to Maureen about: What is the first family death that you remember? You see yourself in that. It’s always scary.”
That had actually never occurred to me before Goldberg said it. When our family members die, it’s sad not only because we loved them but also because we see our own features drained of life. My father doesn’t seem to register this insight from Goldberg, and he moves on to yet another question about sex.
My father’s interview with Lucas Matthiessen’s mother, Patsy Southgate, which I listen to next, offers some perspective on Goldberg. According to her, the reason he went into a mental hospital was because he was wanted by the FBI. He’d forged checks and paintings, and Southgate left him not only because of the criminal activity and lying but also because she began to suspect he was a sociopath: “I was bothered by what’s known as a personality defect,” she said to my father. “In his case, in matters of money, things like forging checks, stealing paintings, and forging signatures. Where you or I would get sweaty palms and increased heart rate, anxiety, Mike would experience nothing whatsoever.”
Southgate was probably O’Hara’s best friend toward the end of his life. O’Hara called her “the Grace Kelly of the New York School.” She responded, “I don’t think I was quite as uptight as Grace Kelly. But I was blond.”
O’Hara confided in Southgate more, perhaps, than in anyone else. She recognized, behind the courtliness and the effusive conversation, a reserve. She said the drinking and the perfect manners were ways to hide that shyness: “When you’re helping someone on with their coat, you don’t have to talk to them,” she said.
Southgate knew about his childhood, about his affairs, about his tough relationship with his family. She was there when his mother called, drunk and out of control, begging for money. He left those calls feeling terrible, she said, whether or not he gave her any.
When Goldberg and Southgate split up, O’Hara took Southgate’s side, which I’m happy to hear. He was protective of her and her children, and he was angry about how poorly Goldberg treated them. O’Hara and Southgate began spending even more time together then. She saw how exhausted his increasingly challenging job at the museum made him. He was working more, writing less, and drinking an awful lot.
“He would finish off the vermouth in the morning if all the gin was gone before going to work,” she said. “Or he’d put bourbon in his orange juice before going to the museum.” As he neared forty, she suspected him of having something like a midlife crisis. “He was getting bald,” she said. “He was combing his hair over, but his hair would blow away. He was very vain about his looks.”
Patsy Southgate—New York City—9/22/77
Peter Schjeldahl: Did he talk about death much to you?
Patsy Southgate: Well, I think it was very romantic. As I say, we spent a great deal of our time late at night listening to opera, during which people expired … I think he had a romantic notion of death. I don’t think he was at all suicidal—
PS: Absolutely not.
PSo: —or had any intention of doing himself in. As a matter of fact, he never laid any sort of depression on anybody.
PS: Except in terms of getting angry?
PSo: Umm-hmm. The only time I realized something about him was that after Mike and I split up, Frank and I went around together everywhere. He was living on Broadway across from Grace Church. I would come over to his place every night, and we would go do something. And I became aware— Often in that period, the museum would be sending him places like to Poland and to Spain, places like that where he didn’t know anybody. He would be in an advanced state of panic about packing. He needed someone there to say, “Should I take the red tie or the black tie? How many pairs of socks should I bring?” As though he completely turned into a child at the prospect of leaving. I felt very able to help him in the role of being almost sisterly or motherly or wifely. That’s the only time I saw him really seem needy or vulnerable or confused was prior to traveling.
When LeSueur moved out of the Broadway loft into an apartment near Second Street, at 26 Second Avenue, Southgate observed that O’Hara became frantically social. LeSueur hadn’t liked very large crowds or very late nights and so he’d served as a kind of bouncer. When it was up to him, a fun night would consist of playing bridge, eating a good dinner, and going to sleep at a reasonable hour. Southgate became annoyed that now she had trouble getting through to O’Hara on the phone because his line was always busy, and he always seemed to be hanging out with Bill Berkson, whom she didn’t love. Asked if she agrees with some others that “Bill was Frank’s pet monster,” she won’t go that far but she does grant that “Bill was very possessive about Frank.”
Southgate says what O’Hara really craved, out of everything, was companionship and love and even the comforts of family life. “I think human exchange recharged Frank’s batteries,” she says. “He’d have made a wonderful father. He was tireless in his patience.”
Then she asks my father his age.
PSo: Being forty is a big one. Are you forty yet?
PS: I’m thirty-five.
PSo: When you hit forty, it’s the worst birthday in the world.
PS: I haven’t been bothered by birthdays since twenty-nine practically killed me. Ever since then it’s sort of been easy.
PSo: You’re too old to die young at forty. You can still die young.
PS: I don’t want to die young. I just hope I can make forty in some style.
PSo: I’m sure you can. Anyway, I think it would be a mistake to try and read into Frank’s life a desire to die.
PS: Oh, absolutely. I agree completely with that. It’s completely unfounded. The contrary is true.
PSo: He had a great desire to live. Although there were a great many blows, and forty was a tough period, and Frank’s life was in a certain turmoil, with a lot of tension, that’s a part of life.
PS: Sure. In his case, that’s something I’m going to have to unravel to my own satisfaction. What exactly were the factors? It’s peculiar. If he’d gotten older, if he’d lived, it would have resolved one way or the other.
O’Hara didn’t have a death wish, but at forty he was drinking an awful lot and throwing himself into the surf. I wonder if O’Hara is where my father got the idea that healthy lifestyles were for boring people, that it was cool to be cavalier about one’s health.
“I don’t bother my body and my body doesn’t bother me!” he has always crowed.
But it was a lie. He smoked three packs of cigarettes a day from his teens on. He drank heavily until he was fifty. He never exercised, didn’t take care of his teeth, and most mornings he would eat Entenmann’s chocolate donuts or bacon for breakfast. I asked him to at least take vitamins, but he said he was suspicious of them. He seemed to believe that he could miraculously get whatever nutrition he needed from snacks of corned beef hash out of the can.
And his body bothered him right back. It had been decades since he’d been able to sleep without Ambien. He was weak and easily fatigued. He had almost none of his original teeth left. That he’d stayed relatively healthy for so long seemed to be more of a tribute to his parents’ hearty Norwegian genes than to some internal deal he’d brokered.
Perhaps Frank O’Hara’s death at forty, while he was still a strong swimmer and first-rate party guest, let my father believe that there would never be a reckoning. Cigarettes and drinking didn’t kill O’Hara, and so maybe they wouldn’t kill him either.
The winter Oliver was four, he refused to wrap his scarf around his neck. When I asked him why he said: “Poppa doesn’t take care of himself, and I don’t either!” I was relieved when a few years later, no longer enamored with my father, he chose instead to model his diet and exercise habits after those of my stepson, Blake, a physical therapy student with a black belt in kung fu.
PS: I think I turned some kind of corner on this book. I’m starting to live with him.
PSo: Oh good. He’s a fun person to be with.
With that, my father said goodbye to Patsy Southgate and then put the tape recorder into his bag. But he unwittingly left it on. I listened to the sound of him walking through New York City, the tape player bouncing around in his bag: scrumpf, scrumpf, scrumpf. I expected to hear it switch off, but instead, a few minutes later, I heard his voice again.
Peter Schjeldahl: [A telephone booth door opens and shuts. A church bell chimes in the distance.] Hi! I just got out. I’m over by Fifth Avenue. What time is it? [It seems he’s calling my mother.] Uh-huh. I’m over by Fifth Avenue. Would you … Let’s see. I could come and pick you up and ring and we could go? Five thirty. I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes? Okay. I’m going to buy a bottle of wine on the way. Did you get the mail? A letter from Maureen? I thought I mailed it yesterday. No, no. Because I talked to Joe LeSueur. He said Maureen had gotten my letter and mailed me one. Yeah. Well, I didn’t know. I just talked to him now with Patsy. He said he’d been talking extensively to Maureen the last couple days and he wants to see me tomorrow. This thing has gotta be resolved. I don’t know. He sounds supportive, yeah, of me. I don’t know, though. I mean, it’s so strange. But evidently Maureen is just … Yeah, well, I feel immune. I really do. Yeah. Okay. I’ll talk to you in about fifteen minutes. Bye. Bye-bye.
[Sound of the receiver being replaced and the telephone booth door opening. Chimes get louder.]
Listening to this call, which I am probably the only person to ever hear since it was recorded, I think of how reliant he’s always been on my mother. He was fifteen minutes from home but still had to call her. I can’t hear her end of the call, but I can imagine her reassuring him, calming him, encouraging him.
Where would my father have been without her? She cooked his meals, raised his daughter, cleaned his house, kept their social calendar, and most years made more money than he did at the same time. She rearranged the furniture, set out flowers, rotated in holiday decorations. She did it all very well. The best hosts make everything, from the couch’s slipcovers to the meringue dessert, seem like no trouble at all.
She’s always had a gift for painting, and sometimes she’d get out her basket of acrylic paints and cover trays, walls, and lampshades with intricate floral patterns. But no one ever took it seriously. Once when I encouraged her to make more space for herself in the apartment, she said she was fine with her little table by the window in the living room, where she also balanced their checkbook and paid their bills.
Why was he still considered the head of the household? Why was he the genius who needed all that time and space? You don’t see many women baffled about why history lacks more women artists or novelists or stand-up comics. How dare anyone say that an entire group of people aren’t funny if for millennia they aren’t allowed to try writing jokes until they’ve done all your laundry, cooked all your food, and put your children to bed?
My friend Abbott says women who want to create anything need to train themselves to be 10 percent more narcissistic. You need the extra edge of not caring, of self-assurance, of giving yourself permission to take up space. If your whole life you’re told by the world to be quiet, to be small, to be pleasing, how do you override all those messages and go a different way? I read male memoirists with thousands of pages of stories and thoughts, and I don’t know how they do it. And I wonder if I want to be like that or if I’m just intoxicated by how free they seem to feel.
I’ve spent decades hitting my assigned word counts and quoting other people at length, standing back from the text so as not to get in the way of my research. But where has that gotten me? My father’s the star. I’m the good girl.
Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz—a poet of my generation and fellow graduate of PS 41—once told me that the age requirement for drinking on St. Marks Place was “confidence.” Maybe that’s the age requirement for everything.