FLASH FORWARD
Foreword
This tale stretches over many generations and the way a set of myths conditioned my family and our varied inheritances of character and identity. A century after the tale began I finally broke away confused, traumatized, yet happily released into the inevitable struggle to define my own life. Myth may strike some asan odd term to use in a family history, a history familiar to many Americans involving immigrants and theirdescendants building lives together. But then, mythhas two primary natures.
The first is of a Sacred Tale dealing with the origin of the world and life, with divine to merely mortal players intermingled as in our great inherited mythologies, or those of fantasy like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings. But myth has a more mundane meaning relevant here, that of the innate daily way inwhich each of us participates in the largely unconscious story in which we feel our lives pass individually and in our group(s), and from which we gain our meaning and sense of identity. What we don’t know we fill in—we are all products of genetics, nurture, social influence, and imagination. This down to earth working of myth also provides a bridge to understand how generational patterns of behavior are passed on and modified, or become so oppressive they finally spark rebellion. This story traces the formation of my family’s movement through this pattern that climaxed with my parents and my ultimate break with them.
The family’s early roots were certainly transcended by my father who began as a young Jew from a poor background who graduated first from theUniversity of Pennsylvania and soon after its Wharton School of Economics in 1936 . But it was as a writer not a businessman that he broke into Young & Rubicam (Y&R) when the great advertising agencies were the creative engines for radio and, later, television content. They were not hospitable to Jews, yet my father soon became the director and producer of a hugely popular radio program, We The People. In WWII it reached 50% of American households. After the war he shone as an early pioneer in the development of television, reeling off famous shows, starting famous careers. He was an executive who transformed perennial second place NBC into the leading television network for a short time after he left Y&R in 1959. He was then one of the three most influential shapers of popular taste in the country. Thereafter as the creator of the first and still seminal television series, The Addams Family, he set that inverted yet oh so typical middle-class family careering into our culture.
He adored my mother, the former Lucille Wilds,one of the country’s first supermodels, whose face was everywhere by the late 1930s. She was the Queen of the Models, her measurements public knowledge, the model’s Miss America in 1939, the country’s Dream Girl in 1940. She modeled for Truman’s Cabinet in the mid-1940s, and was the scion of “The Correct Thing” that week in and out for decades advised Americans how to think and deport themselves socially in The New York Daily News. Once she was no longer the ultimate model she became the ultimate mother.
Culture, fame, identity, inheritance, religion, success: a WASP princess, a Jew climbing the cultural heights: theirs is a very American story.
Even more so is how my father’s deeply dysfunctional family warped his and his brothers’ youths, with parents who later fought tooth and nail to destroy their sons’ marriages, perpetuating their damages into new generations, a history which, ironically, was metamorphosized by my father into The Addams Family and became one of America’s favorite families in popular culture. His falsification of family life has found a permanent place in our collective psyche.
6
Blueprints
Recently I found the blueprints of the home in Great Neck, Long Island where I spent my first seven years with the exception of two in wartime Washington, D.C., 1944-46. I was transported back over fifty years in a flash: here was the house where Daddy Wilds, my larger than life maternal grandfather, died in my mother’s arms from a heart attack a month before I was born, according to family myth. Here I was so frightened by Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf that for years I ran across the living room to the stairs to the second floor, afraid a wolf lurked in the dark corner below the stairs as they reached the landing above. Here I had my first friends, first fights, first kiss from a girl at seven that flustered me then and which I still feel viscerally now. Here my father, Gar, and Uncle Bud, Unk, Mom’s brother, when he came home from the war, contested for mastery until Bud’s mother, Mothie, sold the house, and forced each to get their own apartment in NewYork.
I was called away and left the blueprints sitting on my desk. When I came back I was shocked at how badly they had faded from a short exposure daylight. Sadly I folded them away and stored them in a book of memorabilia. Moved by what unknown sense a few days later I retrieved them, wanting to look again even intheir faded condition at the site of my beginning. I was surprised by the pristine blue of the background that had recovered in darkness.
Truth can’t be taken for granted: it can be overexposed. It can require nurturing. Yet at other times it strikes with the force of revelation and we realize it was always there, only waiting for the right time. But there aren’t any guarantees about there being a right time, are there? I imagine there are entire lives that pass by with thesense of something pending that never arrives.
I was lucky.
7
One Evening in 1968
Late one early summer day in 1968 my sister Linda, my wife Jeanne and I sit in the living room of my parents’ Robin Drive house in the hills next to Beverly Hills in Los Angeles, California. We are stiff with tension. Decades of unhappiness in my parents’ marriage have come to a head, and one of them doesn’t know that yet….
As with most California days the sun is shining, now setting to the west. We can see the Pacific through the picture windows from our hillside perch above Beverly Hills. In the distance, fog hovers just off the long curve of the western shoreline south to Palos Verdes, whose hill arches like a whale’s back. A TV plays in the corner beyond the windows as we idle nervously on the long arc of the couch Mom is forever recovering. Those in the know when they sit take care not to be pricked by one of the pins invariably left behind.
Gar comes home late, working on a successor to The Addams Family, his greatest success. He immediately goes into his study and gets on the phone, as he did in Weston, Connecticut and before that in Manhattan, and earlier in Great Neck, Long Island. Some time passes before he emerges, wanting to know where are Mom and his dinner. He is used tohaving that served to him on a tray in his study everynight by her or her mother, always Alma to Gar. To Linda and me she is Mothie, Muddy in our childhood, while our mother is always Mom.
We explain Mom went to bed early, not feeling well; Mothie has gone to bed in the little room between the kitchen and garage. Jeanne and I and our two girls live in the studio apartment that was the garage while I wait to start teaching at the University of Southern California. We tell Gar something was left for him in the refrigerator. He frowns, fumbles in the kitchen, always terra incognito to him, passing the room where my mother is ‘sleeping’ as he goes back and forth down the long central hall. We stay put in the living room, except Jeanne, who has to take care of our daughters Alyssa, an infant, and Heather, just five….
He doesn’t notice our tension. We are all practiced deceivers.
The evening drags on interminably, the TV images no more than static to us as we wait for the moment of discovery. At last we hear the study door open, and a few moments later the master bedroom door close at the far end of the hallway. Linda and I look at each other. We imagine our father neatly putting his clothes away as he undresses, downing a few of his endless pills, and going through his bathroom routine. Finally he sits on the edge of the bed, alone. We can see clearly, from Mom’s description of his obsession, the moment before he turns off the light when he opens the cabinet beside him and pulls out his bankbooks for their nightly inspection. At least tonight there was no family dinner, no strange conversation about gun practice with his cardiologist friend, Steve, no veiled threats like the one he made when Jeanne and I first arrived from New Haven two weeks after Alyssa was born. At that dinner he told us he had a .38, practiced with his friend Steve, and was concerned about safety.
“If I hear a strange sound at night, I’ll shoot first and ask questions later,” he said to Jeanne.
There is an odd expression on his face, ever more expressive as he ages. He knows Jeanne, with young children, goes into the kitchen at odd hours.
No one knew what to say. Jeanne is angry later when we are alone, and frightened. We both realize Gar has gone from odd if not at times bizarre to paranoid. We wonder how long it has been like this: no wonder Mom and Mothie are not coping. We wonder when Mom moved out of their bedroom, or when Mothie isolated herself in her little room.
Now Linda and I hear Gar come from the bedroom and walk down the hall. Our tension turns heavy as potatoes in our hands. But we aren’t afraid of zany behavior with the gun: Mom has tossed that out, along with a German Lugar he picked up for show while stationed in Washington, D.C. during his service in the Navy in World War II. He knocks at my mother’s door.
“Lucille? Lucille?” he calls. There is no answer. “Lucille?” He knocks again. Silence. He opens the door and goes in. “Lucille? Lucille…Lucille!” He storms into the living room.
“Do you know where your mother is?” he demands. We act puzzled. “She went to bedearly,” I say.
“She didn’t feel well,” Linda adds.
“She’s not there. She’s stuffed pillows under the blankets and left hair curlers on the pillow!”
We look astonished. It’s not hard to appear convincing: I know I am actor and audience at the same time. I’m sure Linda feels the same.
I can picture him approaching the sleeping form in bed. “Lucille?”
Picture how he hesitates, then reaches out to touch her shoulder. “Lucille….”
She’s not there. He flips on the light. “Lucille!”
He tears back the covers and bares the massed pillows imitating a body, stares at the curlers on the pillow at the head of the bed.
“She’s taken all my bankbooks!”
“What do you mean?” I sound innocent. He explains their bankbooks from banks on the EastCoast are missing.
“I check them every night!”
Words rise in my gorge. Did you think you could go on emotionally abusive forever? That you could regale me with tales of your sexual exploits, as you did all through college, and yet simultaneously claim to be faithful? Did you think your serial infidelities were a secret? What about all the arguments you’ve picked with all of us, with Mom most of all, of the months of tension building to her exasperated explosions year in and out? How much love did you think you could exasperate? How much beauty insult? All those criticisms to all of us, the demeaning remarks to Mom and Linda, to me about Jeanne, about myself,your glowering and unhappy face always certain to find us at fault for something! What of all those excruciating family dinners, the tension heavier than the food? Your bizarre inability to behave normally around children, and especially to the women in the family? What about our own relationship, virtually nonexistent for years during and after graduate school at the Yale School of Drama, when I wouldn’t talk to you, and for good reason? What about your demand for the truth combined with your inability to recognize it: what about….
“How could she do this to me?” “I don’t know,” is all I say.
I imagine his nightly ritual again, now. A distinguished looking man of 55 in his pajamas sits on the edge of his bed and takes all his bankbooks from the cabinet beside him. One by one he checks their balance. It doesn’t matter whether there has been any activity to check. He needs to see the solid, black figures. Done, he stacks them again in the cabinet, turns off the light, and lays down, until recently nextto my mother. Every night he does the same. Not long after this evening when the attorney my mother has retained looks at his accounts he is astonished how every expense to the penny is recorded stretching back to the 1930s.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
Gar did the same with everything, listing every book he read going back to the same years, and every article, paper, and magazine….
I realize his financial accounting was his wall against insecurity, against the chaos of chance, against the advertising agencies like Y&R where he started, or networks like NBC when he was in charge of programming there after Y&R. The nightly review reassured him about a world where security so often proved to be a mirage; against the stray intruder in thenight he now trains himself to shoot. They gave the lie to his parents,’ and especially mother’s, criticism that he had failed expectations as happened after he graduated from Penn and briefly worked as a sales clerk. His twin Charles, a few minutes older, never faced such criticism. “No,” Gar could say to all this, “look what I have, in vaults, beyond accident and criticism!”
Even now I don’t know whether to laugh or feel sad. That evening he is insistent.
“She’s absconded with my life’s savings!” Absconded, a thief in the night.
“I can’t believe Mom would do anything like that,” I say. We know she had had enough, seen a lawyer, and been told to go to New York City and close out all their accounts and bring their proceeds toCalifornia with its far more favorable divorce laws where all this would be community property, 50-50 in ownership. We knew about her bedroom disguise, of the farce that would be played out, the lines we would speak.
I follow him into his study. He calls airlines, determined to track her down, guessing where she hasgone. The airlines refuse to reveal their passenger lists.He calls his lawyer who advises him there is nothing he can do with phone calls to stop the banks from honoring her request to close accounts as a joint holder. When he realizes there is nothing he can do, he sits back with a sigh and becomes philosophic.
“I can’t understand such behavior. I’ve always given her everything, anything she wanted; why would she go take all that money? She’ll find me as understanding as ever when she comes home. There isno reason for any of this. I have never loved anyone else. There has never been anyone else. I have always treated her with love and consideration, no matter what the provocation.”
I let him go on, still an audience member watching the show in which I perform, as I had so often in the past. Occasionally I chip in with an assurance that I’m sure she’ll explain it all once she’s back, that she couldn’t be up to anything bad. But nothing stops his stream once provoked: he spends hours rewriting history until he becomes the misunderstood hero of the piece, martyred through his own goodwill by the unreasonable people around him. I thought about his wandering the house in the early hours, gun in hand, and of how he had gotten away with a lifetime of such behavior with us, intimidating us all with his aura of violence, if never actually physical. The evening felt surreal, like so much of the rest of our lives, ever deepening with the years.
I try to look through the window to the sweep ofLos Angeles’ lights in the night. But his curtains are drawn: from his fifties to his end his study, his inner sanctum, was shut off from the world.
When did that start, I wonder? When did the young man who transcended ethnicity and poverty into a famous career become this man? Or the Dream Girl of 1940 become a woman on a night flight to the East “absconding” with her husband’s bank books?
How could two so deeply emblematic of the American Dream come to a climax that would have embarrassed the credibility of a soap opera?
12
PART ONE:
THE DREAM IN OPERATION
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always
a child.
Cicero, Orator
14
MY BIRTH, THEIR MARRIAGES
Arrival
Something was wrong….
When my mother brought me home from the hospital I slept all the time. I never cried. When I was awake, I was happy. After I fed I burped with a contented sigh, and went back to sleep.
Mom and Mothie grew uneasy.
This was the age of Dr. Spock, not the character from Star Trek struggling with his humanity but the real Spock, impervious to reason, dispute, or nature, the prophet leading mothers and children to a proper and perfect antiseptic upbringing. So I am certain my mother and Mothie carefully followed instructions for the right formula mix, bottle-fed me only when I was supposed to be fed, and, thanks to Mothie, not otherwise. It’s easy to imagine our kitchen full of bottles upside down on a clean cloth cooling, bottles steaming on the stove, and boxes of formula waiting to be mixed, poured, and delivered to me by the long, rubber nipples judged to be so much better than the real as though the moment’s fad had more weight than four million years of evolution.
But after two weeks of my unrelieved contentment Mom and Mothie were distraught.
They consulted the pediatrician without success. Then they consulted the hospital and discovered it sent my mother home with a rich formula for an undernourished, underweight child, anything but what I, at ten pounds, so the story went, should be having. They gave her a new, less nourishing formula.
Soon I no longer slept all the time. I rarely smiled when awake. I cried day and night, desperate for the thing of glass and rubber dispensing the milk that no longer satisfied.
They were happy.
Now, finally, it could be said I had arrived.
17
What I Believed
Until one late spring day in 2002 as I neared sixty I believed I was born Sunday, August 25, 1942 in Doctor’s Hospital in Manhattan opposite Carl Schurz Park and the mayor’s residence, Gracie Mansion. I weighed nearly ten pounds, and was named Lance Millard Lee, not Levy like my father. My mother went into the hospital under “Lee” to prevent the publicity that would have surrounded the famous model Lucille Wilds and the revelation she was now Lucille Levy, the wife of We The People writer, director and producer David Levy. They were afraid of such publicity reaching Philadelphia, my father’s hometown, because he hadn’t told his parents he was married, let alone about to have his first child. After I was born he sent them a telegram, “Dear Mom & Pop, Stop. Am married. Stop. Have son. Stop. Come see. Stop. love, Stop. David Stop.”
No occasional prying had changed that story when I was a child and later a young man. After that the story with all its ambiguities was just one of those givens I trotted out to amuse friends. Not even coming into possession of my father’s journals which he began in 1944 helped clear up any questions: I found those unreadable on casual browsing, and never looked up August 25th.
Those journals stretch to 1957, with a few late additions reaching into the 1970s. They should be a treasure trove for writing my family romance. Alas, they are an endless recital of ‘who I met today, what dinner attended and show saw and star met afterwards’ with only rare philosophical moments or expressions of tenderness as when my father wrote in the 1944 journal that leaning over my crib after everyone else has gone to sleep, sometimes lifting me a little to feel my weight, made his day worthwhile. Otherwise their constant ‘me me me’ was enough to make me slam them shut.
I knew too after a lifetime of experience with my father that he may indeed have leaned over my crib at night, perhaps prodded me in mystification, and risked waking me to satisfy his curiosity, but that his admirable sentiments were suspect.
Friends urged me to tell my family story when I regaled them with one piece of it or another, but until that spring day I was never able to face the reliving are telling involves. But my mother was now 87, my father had passed away two years earlier, and my imminent 60th birthday inevitably made me aware of my own mortality. Defiant, I didn’t want our lives to disappear, unplumbed and unshared.
19
My Parents’ Standard Versions
So on that spring day I picked up my father’s first journal, begun in 1944, and opened it to August 25, 1944 to see what he had to say in his first entry on my birthday, two years after the actual event.
He wrote how the weekend I was born his parents, Lillian and Benjamin (Nanny and Poppy tome) visited him in Manhattan at his Beaux Arts apartment. They would not have spent long at that small apartment where he lived with my mother: the morning of Saturday, August 24, 1942 she went into labor and was taken to Doctors Hospital. So his parents’ timing was good: they would be on hand forthe great event.
But my mother’s labor dragged on, and so my father, always eager to please his parents, left the hospital and took them around Manhattan as he did usually when they visited from Philadelphia. Occasionally he called my mother to see if there was any point in coming back, but I lingered in the womb throughout Saturday on into Sunday. Disappointed,Nanny and Poppy could wait no longer and went home Sunday evening. I was born late that night, almost ten pounds. My father sent them a telegram.
Naturally, he wrote, they returned on Monday. “They were delighted.” I tried to imagine my anxious father and grandparents at the hospital, then their growing dullness as I lingered, until Gar, seeing them suppress their restlessness, took them out to a good dinner and show, and more the next day. How obstinate of me to hold things up like that! How angelic of my mother to give her blessing to my father’s need to entertain his father and formidable mother. I imagined Gar’s solicitous calls to my mother between courses at the 21 Club, familiarly ‘21,’ the famous restaurant at the center of New York’s entertainment society, or between acts at the theatre, and her reassurance there was no reason to hurry back. No doubt Mothie was with her.
Mom knew how anxious Gar was to impress his parents. He was the son who had moved away from Philadelphia, entered a chancy world of writing and radio production and lived to prosper. Not for him the safety of an academic career with an initial sidestep into the Book of the Month Club, like his slightly elder identical twin, Charles. David was making it in Manhattan, he was a man with a future, a Jew overcoming the odds, the second twin defying everything on his way to the top, to first place…. That need to prove how important he was in part explains why his journals are so hard to read as he endlessly name-drops and piles up events and encounters with significant people like trophies.
He met quite a few of these through We The People which aimed at bringing representative Americans with dramatic stories and differing backgrounds to a national radio audience. The show, immensely popular at this time before television, brought him into contact with an ever widening circle of stars, producers, directors, and writers in the entertainment world as well as diverse ordinary Americans, and after the outbreak of World War II with individuals ranging from common soldiers to prominent members of the Roosevelt and Truman cabinets and war effort.
Yet even as I read his account of my birth I felt an underlying tug of incredulity. Was my father so driven to keep his parents amused that he took them around the city while his wife was in labor? Would his parents have wanted to be absent at such a time? What could Gar have said to them as he returned to his seat at dinner after he checked in with the hospital? “Well, Mother, she’s still in the early stages and urges us to enjoy ourselves.”
“Isn’t she considerate.”
“What show are we seeing, son?”
“Dad, I have tickets for….” Ridiculous.
Were Nanny and Poppy, once they were home, happy with the telegram announcing a tardy grandson so that they hurried back the next day, “delighted?”
I had grown up with that other story in which Nanny and Poppy did not know what was going on. In that story my father dreaded his mother. He had promised her never to elope, as Charles had done with his wife Erma two years earlier. It didn’t matter that Erma, a dancer, was also a nice, Boston Jewish girl: Nanny and Poppy forbade Charles to marry her.
Angered, he and Erma eloped immediately. Nanny threatened to commit suicide with such fervor it took the entire family to dissuade her. Thereafter she dedicated herself to destroying Charles’ marriage. It was during this turmoil my father made his promise. After he eloped in turn he couldn’t face her with his betrayal.
Worse, he not only broke his vow, he married a gentile. We think of prejudice running one way: that Jews suffer from antisemitism. Wasn’t the Holocaust, unbeknown to us then, underway in Germany? Here the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ was in full sway. Nanny and Poppy traveled as Mr. and Mrs. Lee. Charles permanently changed his name to Lee in order to remove the glass ceiling prejudice would have imposed on his career at the University of Pennsylvania. This is all true, yet leaves out that there were Jews like my Grandmother Nanny who despised gentiles.
I learned all this in pieces from Mothie and Mom as I grew up, and for all these reasons believed my father resorted to subterfuges to avoid facing Nanny, like persuading my mother to marry in South Carolina in 1941 by proxy under his nom de plume Peter King, my mother using Lucille Marjorie Widdecombe. Her mother and father knew she was marrying. My mother’s fame provided Gar with his excuse for secretiveness from the beginning of their relationship: he didn’t want his parents to know he was married until he had time to bring them around.
“They were his parents,” my mother said once. “I left him to deal with them. I was mistaken.”
The result was that while my mother waited for him to ‘bring his parents around,’ she stayed with her parents in Great Neck whenever his parents visited after their South Carolina marriage, removing all sign of her married presence from the Beaux Arts apartment. Once Nanny and Poppy returned to Philadelphia she returned and unpacked. Their getting to know her was strictly limited to an occasional encounter at dinner or a theatre. There was no way for them to know when she became pregnant…. That was why in their primal origin story Mom registered as “Mrs. “Lee” at the hospital: the news of the famous model’s marriage had only to appear in the local Sunday papers and the cat would be out of the bag. And yet now I had this new version from my father’s journal: why had the original story of total ignorance on the part of his parents been allowed to stand?
I let the journal rest on my lap. Their marriage was an additional puzzle. There was rumor of a New York marriage license that expired before the very murky South Carolina marriage by proxies: but why did they need South Carolina for that? Perhaps its distance had the air of a ‘getaway,’ or theSouth was ‘Siberia’ for the New York press. How any of these maneuvers were kept out of the press my mother and Mothie assiduously cultivated was another mystery: my mother was a cultural icon.
At least it was indisputable that I grew up a Lee,not Levy. As I grew older I never got beyond the myth summed up by the telegram informing Nanny and Poppy of marriage and birth simultaneously. By the time I was ready to ask my father directly our relations were so poor and I had so many other things on my mind that the distant past was a buried soreness I didn’t want to touch as well as a founding piece of the mythology in which I lived. I knew my family well enough to know no one would give a straight answer to any questions. They wouldn’t lie because at this point they believed the lies.
I decided to call my mother.
23
Revelations
I reach my mother after lunch at The Canterbury where she has her own assisted living apartment. The Canterbury is on the top of the Palos Verdes peninsula south of Los Angeles, and only a few minutes from my sister Linda’s home. The views sweep across the Los Angeles basin from the Pacificto the surrounding Angeles Crest mountains from thecommon dining room. The Canterbury is a series of two-story wings of mostly retirement apartments set in lawns and gardens. One wing is consigned to those needing assistance, and one upper floor for those needing acute care. My sister and I never thought Mom with her fierce independence would give upher apartment for such a community. Once when Itried to arrange help for her with household chores shewept because she thought I didn’t consider her capableof managing on her own. But after a broken hip and hip replacement operation a social worker advised finding an assisted living facility. Mom had known about The Canterbury for years while active in All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, which sponsored it. She had even visited there while still in Beverly Hills. To our surprise, she was delighted when we mentioned the possibility. By sheer good luck there was an opening the morning Linda and Iinquired. After a short time there Mom likened her experience to “being on a cruise.”
At eighty-seven she uses a walker, although the lack of cartilage in her right knee is painful enough to drive her soon permanently into a wheelchair witha sigh of relief. The years shortened her and added weight, thinned her hair, and turned her face into an old woman’s, but the years rolled away with her smile and it was possible to believe she was once one of the most beautiful women in America. Friends are dazzled when they see the modeling shots from herheyday.
She is happy to hear from me, now.
“Hello dear.” Her voice is clear, and sounds surprised, as if hearing from me wasn’t commonplace. In her late years she acts surprised Linda and I extend ourselves for her: we can’t imagine why.… We talk about the immediate events of the day, and then,
“You remember Gar’s journals?”
“Oh yes. He started writing them in 1944. I was impressed at how he sat down every night and kept them up. But you know him, once he set his mind to something he just kept on.”
“Yes, I know.”
His relentless pursuit of his career despite all its ups and very considerable downs flashes through my mind, together with his late career as a writer, publishing his last book, Executive Jungle, while he lay in his acute nursing facility.
“I’ve never done more than glance at his journals,” I go on now, “even though I got Linda’s from her a while ago. They’re hard to take, all surface activity and name-dropping of stars or influential people in the industry (‘the industry’ always meant first radio, and then television) with hardly anything of himself.” She laughs.
“That’s so typical. We used to float around Manhattan from show to show, cocktail party to party. Mothie was a godsend that way, we could leave you andLinda with her.”
“It’sall ‘mememe.’”
“It alwayswas.”
“I just read his account of my birth.” There is silence on the other end of the phone. “Don’t know why I haven’t in the past. Anyway, he wrote—” and I repeat his description carefully. There is a prolonged silence on the phone. Then she blows up in a way I have never heard before.
“None of that is true, Lance,” she starts, her voicesharp and clear. “It was never like that. I went into that hospital and his parents never knew. Believe me, they weren’t delighted at the end, either!”
“Oh?”
“They used to come visit your father at the Beaux Arts where we had an apartment. Whenever they came in 1942 I would go to Great Neck to be with Mother. They didn’t know I was pregnant.”
I interrupt with a laugh, and repeat the mythological story about the telegram, “Am married, have son, come see.’ She doesn’t laugh.
“Oh no, they knew we married in January 1942, in a public, Jewish ceremony.”
“Jewish?”
“Yes, we got married earlier in 1941 in South Carolina, but under the pseudonym of Phillip King he used sometimes when he wrote. Only Mother and Dad knew, and a few friends.” I laugh. “But it made no difference. I could never be at the apartment when his parents’ visited—he couldn’t bring himself to tell them. When I discovered I was pregnant your father counted the weeks: with eight months left you could be premature. But how would he explain seven? Atlast he realized he had to act. So yes, in a matter of weeks I converted, and we held a ceremony in a synagogue for the sake of his parents so they’d know we were married. Everyone came but them.”
“In a Jewish ceremony, converted….”
“Oh yes! But that hardly helped. His mother was already furious at Charles eloping and marrying Erma. Just the fact that another woman dared claim on one of her boys, especially another of her twins, was too much. She certainly wasn’t coming to the wedding on a few weeks abrupt notice of someone she hardly knew who was a last minute convert and was taking her other twin! I never realized it at the time, but I was already hated!”
“Well—”
“But your father was so deathly afraid of his mother,” she races on, “he couldn’t bring himself to tell her I was pregnant even after they knew we were married! I still had to rush off to Great Neck once I started to show.”
“And they never learned of South Carolina?”
“Which time?” she laughed. She can tell from my silence I’m stunned. “There were two times! The first time we eloped we got off the plane and your father looked at me.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ he asked. Itook one look at him and knew he was having doubts. So I made him turn around and bring me home. Thesecond time is when we did it through proxies.
“The weekend I went into labor,” she goes on, “his parents came to visit. I went into Doctor’s Hospital near Gracie Mansion, and he still didn’t say anything to them! He did what he usually did, explained I was at Mothie’s because she or Dad was ill, and sent my regrets. So he took them out to dinner and a show as if nothing was happening! Sometimes he’d disappear and check in on me. Then he’d rush back. I don’t know what they thought. Sunday afternoon they went home and I was still in labor: it wasn’t until that night that you finally arrived.”
I make an inarticulate sound.
“It was only after you were born that your father knew he finally had to tell them. That’s when he sent a telegram informing them they had a new grandson.They came up the next day to see us. They were horrified.”
“How could he write what he did, then?”
“Your father wrote what he wanted to believe happened. He probably eventually believed it did happen that way. He believed what he wanted to where these things were concerned.”
I thought of how Gar always idealized his mother—at a distance, and suffered in her presence.
“He behaved the same way with associates. I couldn’t understand how he could warp reality so much. Some of them stabbed him in the back, or he stabbed them—I always thought his business behavior was disgraceful—but he’d remember their birthdays with a friendly card as if nothing had happened.”
I remembered how once I sat in his study in Beverly Hills as he consulted the book where he kept such information. He had recently fought bitterly with Alan Courtney, who was still at NBC, though Gar had been fired. But he saw it was Alan’s birthday and muttered he’d have to get him a card. He never met a man he wasn’t prepared to make an enemy, or an enemy he wasn’t prepared to share a warm wish with on a birthday. It was his enmity others remembered.
“So,” I say, “none of what he wrote is true.”
“No. And you know, when you were born his mother Lily counted back from August and decided with you nearly ten pounds that I had gotten pregnant to trap your father and force him to marry me. From the end of January to the end of August she made out barely seven months. She didn’t know about the earlier marriage, and your father never told her. The truth wouldn’t have mattered anyway. They all believed what they wanted.”
I can’t tell whether she is choking with rage or laughter. “That I had trapped him!”
“So there was a telegram, but they knew you were married; and you converted, and even held a Jewish ceremony for them, and they refused to come.”
“Yes.”
The 1944 journal is large and heavy on my lap. Gar’s handwriting scrawls across the pages I flip, the lines growing shorter as the year progresses. In later journals the indentations squeeze in at times from each side, and the entries grow ever less frequent. Still, he persevered. The journals shrank in size over the years: detail lessened, and the last, only partly filled, has a few scrawled, lengthy entries that finally, a few years after their divorce, stop. I sigh, almost not hearing her as she rushes on.
“I never knew just how hostile they were of course,” she goes on, talking of Nanny and Poppy, “until a few years later. We used to have them come up to Great Neck before your father went into the Navy in 1944 and we moved to Washington D.C., and then again after he was discharged in 1946 and we moved back. Mothie’s home was much better than we could have managed on our own! He came to think of it as his. And when his parents came Mothie would turn herself inside out trying to give them a pleasant time.”
I can picture Mom and Mothie making the stay in Great Neck as pleasing as possible, a form ofWASP noblesse oblige. I’m sure that alone was enough to make Nanny see red, and Nanny always made sure her sons knew how she felt. Phone calls were followed by letters, and Gar’s behavior steadily worsened after each parental visit.
“After they went home after Christmas in 1946 your father acted badly. I couldn’t understand it because we had given his parents such a nice time! When a letter came from Philadelphia, Mother and I steamed it open.”
The kitchen at Great Neck rises to my mind’s eye with the two of them holding a letter over a boiling teapot. My mother is dressed with a model’s sense of style, while Mothie has the red kerchief tied around her head she sometimes wore when housecleaning. Gingerly they pick at the letter’s rear flap until the steam has done its work and they can peel it open. They sit on a bench at the kitchen table near the door out to the yard with a great apple tree, and read. Silence—then their voices burst with incredulity, then anger. For hours they debate what to do, forgetting about the boiling teapot on the stove until the water burns off and the metal begins to burn. From then on there were no details of my mother’s marriage not known to Mothie.
“Imagine how shocked we were when we read it. It was a really vile attack on me and poor Mother who only wanted things to go well.
I was “that blond shiksa” who had stolen her boy and poisoned his life, and the unkind things she wrote about Mother! She said Mother flirted with the neighbors, carried on with one widower in particular, and called her a prostitute! Lily (Nanny) went on and on. There was nothing in our background to prepareus for anyone like her.”
“What did you do?”
“When your father came home I confronted him. He was horrified, less at my opening the letter than over what we found out. He backpedaled as fast as he could, apologizing for his mother and for his behavior. He always caved in when confronted, but it just wasn’t my way to argue with him constantly.
“He knew he was in the wrong, but what could he do? Lily was his mother! He just couldn’t see how horrible she was unless confronted with the evidence, and then he would just try to beg off with an impossible parent. She put him in terrible conflict all the time.”
She doesn’t say, but the thought is clear. He had no backbone. He couldn’t face her. He couldn’t face the truth. I wonder, as I write this, if that is why he immersed himself in a career of make-believe, one I often heard him speak of with contempt even as he pursued his latest project.
“After that I told him he could go to Philadelphia as often as he liked, but not with you or Linda. His parents could visit twice a year for a weekend. I was firm.”
So that was how Philadelphia and the family there became strangers, and the root of why I was brought up Episcopalian. I didn’t see Philadelphia after 1946 until 1982 when I was forty.
***
An hour and a half has gone by. Her voice has not flagged. She isn’t trying to convince me, either: hers has been a stream of outrage and long felt hurt.
The year previous—the year after Gar died—Charles visited us with Ruth, whom he married while my father slipped towards oblivion. Ruth was in her early 70s, still beautiful, dottily in love with Charles. She was hungry for family history, and one day during her visit joined myself, my older daughter Heather, my sister Linda and her husband, Pete, my wife Jeanne, and my mother for lunch. It was a lively lunch and Charles, as always, was the epitome of professorial culture and sartorial smoothness although his short-term memory was failing. Inevitably the conversation turned to family matters, and inevitably to Nanny.
“The twins—Charles and David—were always in touch with her,” my mother tells Ruth. “They wrote her every day of their lives, and talked to her at least once by telephone every day.”
“Isn’t it nice they were so close to their mother?”Ruth asks innocently.
Charles smiles.
“She was an awful woman,” my mother snaps. “She ruined their marriages, and tried to ruin Abner’s.” She leans across towards Ruth. “The best thing Nana Levy could have done for Charles and David was die young.”
We sit stunned.
“She was a terrible influence on everyone in the family through them.” Ruth is dumbstruck. “She wrecked Charles’ first marriage with Erma, and mine too! After Ben died Nana moved in with Margie and refused to leave. ‘My son wants me to stay’ she told Margie. She usurped Margie’s home until Margie took the kids and left, telling Abner it was them or his mother.” Abner was Nanny’s youngest son. “Only then did Nana’s boys get her an apartment with live-in companionship. She warped her sons, and all of us through them!” My mother isn’t being unpleasant, but laughing as she talks. Charles’ smile hovers over us, disembodied. He is silent. I’ve never heard her speak so bluntly.
The conversation turns.
Afterward as we leave I stand next to Charles and Ruth. Ruth is dying to have a moment to talk to me without anyone around. Charles beams at her.
“Wasn’t that a pleasant lunch?” he says. Ruth stares at him. “What did we talk about?” It would have been in his and Gar’s character to have forgotten already even without short-term memory loss.
But it is only that year Mom grew so frank. She was taking stock, preparing to go, though there were still four years ahead before her real decline set in. But she seized opportunities now nonetheless to square accounts here-to-fore unresolved.
I tell my mother we’ve been on the phone for along time. She is still angry, repeating pieces of ourconversation.
“So much for his journals,” I laugh.
“He lied and then believed his lies,” she repeats. We say goodbye. My ear is sweaty from the conversation. I return the journal to the shelf with the others. Next to them is the book where I keep the blueprints of the family home in Great Neck that fade when I stare at them in the light, trying to recall how it was.
I realize I’ve begun our family romance.
31
The Real Story
Immediately after this conversation I found a plethora of material I had pushed aside over the years or only recently obtained, whether my father’s journals, later family photos of familiar and obscure relatives he assembled with histories; scrapbooks of his, Mom, and Mothie’s, including his own newspaper notices; her modeling shots, press releases, and much else. I discovered and used our current genealogical resources. Included in all this material were items both had preserved, so at odds with their stories, and forgotten. I’m no longer puzzled by the wealth of information, which I keep discovering, but that anything was ever obscure! I have to keep reminding myself as I tell our story in order to be accurate to keep to the moment-by-moment stream of experience with its omissions, deceptions, and half glimpsed truths that shape us.
As for the facts about my birth and their marriages:
On July 25, 1941 my parents flew to Greenville, South Carolina, and married. They saved pictures of themselves standing by their two witnesses, strangers who were involved because they were on hand. My father identified himself as Phillip King, my mother used Lucille Marjorie Widdecombe. From their recollections there must have been a moment of cold feet, but there was no return flight to New York followed by a second, proxied Greenville occasion.
Back in New York my mother did leave the Beaux Arts apartment whenever Nanny and Poppy visited, removing all trace of herself until they left, seeing them only as my father’s ‘date.’ Only Mothie and Daddy Wilds knew the truth. When she became pregnant Gar did realize he had to arrange a public marriage quickly: he never revealed his elopement to his mother. Nanny and Poppy put a notice in their local paper announcing a prospective ceremony at Chapel (!) Beth El in Great Neck. They referred to Mothie and Daddy Wilds as Mr. and Mrs. Louis (not Leonard) Wildes (not Wilds). In my family ofassumed identities, spelling matters.
A clue to the controversies that raged is found at the back of an idealized photograph taken before my parents’ marriage. My mother and father sit romantically before a fire with Mom at his feet, leaning back against him in an elegant pose full of thethen conventional attitudes about the roles of the sexes. On the photo’s back she wrote,
Let’s contend no more, Love Strive nor weep:
All be as before, Love
Teach me, only teach, love! as I aught
I will speak thy speech,Love think thythought—.
Contend, strive, weep….
They did not marry in ‘Chapel’ Beth El but “eloped”—around the corner from her parents’ home to that of Mark Warnow, a popular bandleader of the time my father knew. My mother did convert to Judaism, something that survived these events as a rumor she routinely denied. There is a witnessed statement of conversion at Temple Beth El on the morning of her marriage.
For a change there is reliable evidence on these events from a 1941- 42 diary my father kept at the time, a diary not written with an eye for later readership as with the journals from 1944 on. Here the decision to marry openly is only made January 6th, two-and-a-half weeks before the ceremony. He doesn’t tell his parents until January 9th, hoping “all at home come around—and let there be an end to strife….” Only on the 11th does he arrange with Mark Warnow to hold their marriage two weeks later at his home. On the 12th a note from his parents makes clear they are not coming. On the night before the ceremony he talks with his father and Charles, but in vain: no one comes from his family. Mothie and Daddy Wilds also stay home once it is clear the entire thing is a pointless sham. My parents almost bungle getting their marriage license, too: my father forgot some necessary documents when they drove to Manhasset to get it on only the 17th, and it isn’t until the 21st they succeed, two days before the actual ceremony January 23, 1942. On the that morning Rabbi Rubin received my mother’s conversion, and then performed the ceremony. My father wrote,
The ceremony was lovely and L. a beautiful bride—and we were all impressed
by the sincerity of her conversion and the material sacrifice it entailed.
Even in this account there are grey areas: was ‘Chapel’ Beth El ever really seriously considered as an alternative to Mark Warnow’s? Did Gar, more likely, accept Mark Warnow’s offer of his home on the11th when he told him of his marriage plans, but before he knew his parents wouldn’t come? It takes time to organize a marriage and reception, to send out notices and invitations and receive replies even to a sham marriage like this one, and this was already rushed.
The bewildering truth is that my parents made five attempts at marriage. This public one, the actual South Carolina elopement, their memories of a second South Carolina excursion that never happened, and in a later biographical fragment of my father’s, references to a marriage license taken out in March, 1941 in New York that they let lapse, and a second ‘miss’ at getting another license when they drove up to Newburgh where Mom’s maternal Grandmother Charlotte lived—but where they arrived too late.
It is easy to imagine Nanny’s hysteria in the buildup to my mother’s public wedding, together with my mother’s anger over the pointlessness of a ceremony and conversion to placate my father’s parents. The story of Abner’s marriage a few years later gives a good idea of Nanny’s behavior. “What do you think he [Abner] is,” she complained to Margie’s father when told of the marriage plans, “an apple you can pick off the tree?” Poppy refused his blessing since he had not been asked by Abner to approve his engagement, while Nanny threatened to kill herself (again).
Her hysteria grew worse as they neared theceremony. Finally Margie’s father had had enough.
“Lillian,” he said, “there is going to be a ceremony. Make up your mind so I know whether to dress for a wedding or a funeral.”
Faced with the inevitable, she gave in. Nonetheless she had to be bodily carried into the synagogue. I was there, four years old, but only remember the crowd, and a drummer especially adept at making his cymbals shiver.
Daddy Wilds was even angrier at his daughter’s mistreatment with regard to the South Carolinian elopement as well as the disastrous public ceremony.
“He and Mother didn’t approve of your father because he was Jewish,” my mother told me, “but they made the best of it for my sake.” More to the point, and closer to the truth, was the way both Mom and Mothie so often said in later years that had Daddy Wilds not been so sick from heart disease the last three years of his life that “he would have sent your father packing at the start.” This became a refrain trotted out in every crisis….
After their public marriage feelings continued to run high, for once my mother’s pregnancy showed she did avoid Nanny and Poppy for Gar’s sake by again retreating to Great Neck. Marriage he could divulge: pregnancy, no. That July Daddy Wilds died from his heart disease. My birth a month later, seven months after the public marriage, came amid theseevents.
Nor was my mother in secret labor over the crucial weekend when Gar’s parents visited, with my arrival late Sunday requiring their return Monday. Instead, when they came to visit my father that weekend, my mother checked into Lexington Hotel instead of retreating as usual to Great Neck because of her advanced condition. While there, labor began and she transferred to Doctor’s Hospital, in the company of Mothie. I was born late Tuesday, August 25, 1942, and weighed eight pounds, twelve ounces.
Gar was not with her in the hospital although Nanny and Poppy were gone. He was indeed at dinner at 21. He raced across a blacked out, wartime city with Burgess Meredith in tow, whom he approvingly records admiring my mother’s beauty, specifically not meaning her beauty as a mother. She was my father’s ornament, dazzling even exhausted after giving birth.
Then Nanny and Poppy were told of my arrival. I like to imagine a revised telegram,
Dear Mom and Pop, Stop.
Am married—as you know. Stop.
Have son. Stop. Come see. Stop. Love, Stop.
David, Stop.
Whether they came to visit immediately or over the following weekend is unknown. Poppy was still at work. There is no known response from them until a congratulatory telegram arrived, two days later. They were not “delighted.”
There is also the matter of my last name, Lee—not Levy. The newspaper announcement of my birth a week later (to allow my father time to notify his parents) mentioned me as a “Lee,” and my parents as Mr. and Mrs. David Lee. Why didn’t they use Mr. and Mrs. Peter King if the idea was to avoid publicity? Telegrams immediately after my birth addressed to “Lucille Levy” had no difficulty in reaching my mother at the hospital. Why was “Lee” maintained when there was no longer any need for secrecy by my father? The answer is implicit: ‘contend, strive, weep.’ My mother was angered by his and his parents’ behavior years before she and Mothie opened the fatal letter from Nanny after Christmas, 1946. Across the years I think it is clear she insisted I be a Lee, and my sister four years later too, and that both of us be raised Episcopalian. Her conversion to Judaism was an act, like one of her countless staged scenes for a photo shoot.
Years later Gar wrote he was “immature” to register my mother as Lucille Lee. But he was concerned “about my parents’ feelings about the suddenness” of my arrival, apparently only seven months after marriage. Did he think he could keep me hidden a few months more? In the event my name simply became “fixed,” while he “lost my name for posterity.” Besides, as name change was common in his family, why not with me?
This is a weak rationalization for he didn’t register my mother as “Lee:” she did when she went without him, in labor, to the hospital with Mothie. I wonder if it didn’t all come as a shock to him, with rationalizations and revisions of history to follow. Oddly, my father never mentioned his second, open marriage to Linda and myself, but wrote and talked as if their elopement to South Carolina had been open and the start of “us all.” Yet their maneuvers came at a steep pricefor me. Gar was my father, yet I always believed in some inner recess that I had to find myfather, and sought out appropriate figures all my life. I was at once bound to him, and set free to make out of “Lee” what I would. I suppose I am lucky “Lee” was not “King,” with all the inchoate fantasies that might have spawned in a child in my situation.
37
Further Complications
The convoluted story of my parents’ marriage leaves out their equally convoluted courtship. My father was not my mother’s first choice. At first he unwittingly conspired to give my mother to someone else. There was a Bill Kent she became engaged to in avery public way after a prior publicity coup of having her legs insured by her modeling agency, according to the story, for $150,000, a phenomenal sum then. It was in fact $100,000, and for her figure. At the same time Walter Thornton, head of my mother’s modeling agency, insured another model’s smile for $75,000.
My mother’s feelings for Kent were partly real, partly made up by Thornton for publicity. There is one photograph of her and Bill at a club with others, including Mothie. That immediately raises suspicion that a publicity stunt was underway, for Mothie pushed Mom’s career, living it vicariously as a former Gibson Girl from her youth at the turn of the century. It was Mothie who kept the albums of Mom’s modeling shots and press releases, removing all dates as she enjoyed a notoriety missing from the settled life she built with Daddy Wilds.
My father met my mother in 1939 during this engagement to Kent, which, in a crescendo of nonsense, was said to be publicly opposed by her father and Thornton. My father, thoroughly duped by mother and daughter, even wrote a broadcast for We ThePeople with Mothie and Mom interviewed on air about how a hard-hearted Walter Thornton refused to let Bill Kent marry his star model by enforcing a $10,000 marriage penalty clause in her contract which apparently the lovers could not pay. As a consequence Thornton’s wife Judy threatened to leave him, while Mothie threatened not to go home to Daddy Wilds in Great Neck unless he removed his objections to the marriage, too.
Incredibly, after that We The People show myfather floated a proposal that the ‘lovers’ actually marry on another episode once Thornton and Daddy Wilds relented. When he got wind they might not actually want to marry, he suggested they could divorce immediately afterwards. He was overruled by his superiors on the grounds that any marriage had to be real. This was, after all, 1939. My mother later broke up with Kent, not because of the $10,000 marriage penalty, but because “Bill,” as she said one day when this story came up, “was a Catholic, and he drank.”
There was also John Mineke. Mom had “a terrible crush on him” in Great Neck High School, then lost sight of him as she took up modeling and he went off to college. But they met again during theFinnish Relief Ball in 1940. She was now at the height of her fame, the acknowledged “Dream Girl” of 1940. Walter Thornton, James Patterson, and AlexRaymond, the creator of Flash Gordon, performed the ceremony and made sure it got maximum publicity.
John asked her out after the Ball: she accepted, then broke the date, broke a second date, and only after he sent her two dozen red roses, saw him. It was soon intense, and that spring at Jones Beach he dropped on his knees and asked her to marry him.
“I had a lot of beaux, some of them older. I wasn’t ready to be tied down, to live in some apartment in New Haven while he went to Yale Law for three years.” That was the end of John. Later she admitted,
“I should have married him. But your father seemed such a nice young man, too.”
She was with Linda and myself. Linda smiled and said,
“You should have told John you needed someone complicated, devious and deceptive, with terrible parents.” Mom laughed.
There was also Pip Waldren, an older man, whom Daddy Wilds liked but considered “fast,” and James Hasty, among others. James reproached Pip for bringing my mother to a risqué place, and she dropped Pip for James. More than a year passed after the We The People show before my mother consented to a “serious” date with my father in early 1941. If things moved swiftly then, there were still setbacks, my mother often disappearing on jobs, at one point leaving a message breaking off their relationship in my father’s refrigerator in his Beaux Arts apartment. The following gives some idea of her breeziness.
Tuesday
Dear Dave,
The fates still seem against us because I have toleave this evening for a
Lucky Strike job inDurham———You’ll have to forgive me for this last
minute note because it was a very last minute booking. But just to be
sure you have—I’ll call you in a week when I return.
Lucille
In such a competitive field Gar would not have betrayed any of his own difficulties at home nor any romantic ambivalence. Once launched in pursuit of a goal he was relentless, and my mother was his dream, in and of herself and as the symbol of the world he wanted to move into and master, leaving his poverty and ethnicity behind. He must have been frantic from the emotions pulling him in different directions that he had to hide as she was obviously of two minds about him: all those delays or missed timings for licenses made her reluctance clear.
Beyond this, a Jew was even less acceptable to the WASP gentility Mothie embodied than a Catholic—yet my mother chose the former. She possessed her own streak of rebelliousness, and asserted her independence by marrying out of caste. I never heard my mother say she loved Bill Kent, and however she strung my father along and suffered through him afterwards, she did love him.
Age was yet another undercurrent in their marriage. My father was twenty-nine, my mother twenty-seven, in 1942. He thought she was twenty-two. In a late biographical fragment he gave his age as twenty-six and hers as twenty-one. His confusion about himself doesn’t make sense: about her, it does given her and Mothie’s lifetime of altering dates. This was also an era when one was a matron at thirty, middle-aged at forty. My mother was certainly aware she was now looking towards that fate. She had no desire then, or earlier, to follow friends to Hollywood for a movie career, so what was left for her but marriage? She strung my father along then married him, startling him with how swiftly she turned into a homebody. My father remained ignorant of her age until she sought Social Security. Once he got over his fear that her check would diminish his own, he reacted in shock as he finally realized only two years separated them.
Another twist to this tale is that although I was certainly adored by my mother and Mothie, my father, as my mother said once, “painfully rejected” me. He was interested in the fact of me, the weight of me, the puzzle of my being there at all, the first born, his son; and he was interested in being in photos with me. Here and there he gives the game away in his journals, referring to how he “resisted” any childish pleas or tears, imagining instead it was his role to discipline, not please. He had no real interest in me until I was older and we could begin to talk. By then I was half a stranger.
I became conscious of this rejection slowly despite the immediate impact of being rejected. As I grew older, first I blindly took my mother’s side, then turned away from all of these stories, treating them as curiosities so I could distance anger and grief, until old enough now to know better. I knew a part of me was in the fairy-tale position of the boy who discovers those he thought his parents were not and that, instead, he is the son of others, at least of another man. I was left with the feeling I must have a special, hidden destiny, in which the discovery of the truth is coequal with the discovery of who I am. That’s a hard thing to live with amid the world’s ever-denying reality, and doesn’t compensate for the reverse feelings of inadequacy his rejection generated.
Hovering over these events was Daddy Wilds. He was larger than life in his children’s eyes while alive, and grew larger in death. Central to his disproportionate size was Mom and Mothie’s belief that Daddy Wilds died young at 58. After his death their belief grew ever stronger that had he lived he could have fixed not just her marriage, but anything.
In the end as a child I ‘knew’ that my parents had eloped, and that Nanny was mad at my father fordoing so. South Carolina figured in that, somehow. I ‘knew’ my father kept his forbidden marriage secret as long as possible from his forbidding mother, who only learned about everything the night of my birth. These beliefs shaped my childhood and youth as they were maintained by those around me in place of the truth. Over time they forgot that themselves. My truth has been…myth. These are the stories I told myself to give my life meaning and shape. To alter such a shaping takes the greatest effort, for change sparks the fear of both unhinging our world, and of being unhinged—mad. Barring some sudden crisis, change can take a lifetime of erosion until the truth emerges at last with a sigh of relief mixed with incredulity. We are less free than we think, and hunger for the truth far less than any of us admit in the midst of, paradoxically, that hunger.
In the end the ‘truest’ story of my birth and their marriage is that Gar sent his parents a telegram one Sunday night announcing both to them.
42
Letters
My mother rummages through a closet in their Beaux Arts apartment one day during her pregnancy. She pulls down a shoe box she doesn’t recognize from a high shelf. There she discovers the letters Ruth wrote my father during their earlier courtship.
Ruth was the girl my father dated for years even after he moved to Manhattan where she routinely visited him his Beaux Arts apartment although, as Gar said to me, “Nothing ever happened. Men and women didn’t behave like they do today.” What he meant was that in his youth in the 1930s men weren’t supposed to take advantage of good girls, however often good girls did get into trouble. Ruth wasn’t one of the women in the entertainment industry that came his way and he felt no such inhibitions about: she was a good girl.
Gar continued seeing Ruth even as he pursued my mother, but Ruth soon realized what was happening and at the end of one weekend refused to let my father accompany her to the train station. She stopped him at the steps down to the subway and held out her hand.
“Goodbye, Dave.” He was nonplussed as he shook her hand, but understood.
She turned and disappeared from his life for forty years.
My mother sits on the floor reading Ruth’s letters. My father finds her there in tears when he comes in, Ruth’s letters scattered around her. He prepares himself to reassure my mother that Ruth is history and my mother the woman he pursued, loved, loves, but she forestalls him.
“She really loved you,” my mother sobs. “How could you let her go? You should have married her.”
