A Ticket to the Circus (22 page)

Susan.

Maggie was the baby—four years old, just six months older than Matthew. I’ll never forget the first time I saw her, when she came to visit with her nana, Myrtle Bennett, who later came and worked for us when I got pregnant with John. Maggie was an adorable little elf; her blue eyes seemed to take up half her face. She was scared and shy, and I could see it wasn’t going to be easy, so I decided to take it slow, to gain
her trust when it came. Maggie had wild curly hair, long enough so she could sit on it, like a Liddle Kiddles doll, and her face was a perfect sweet miniature of Norman’s!

Maggie.

Danielle, eighteen, was away in college at Bowdoin when I came to New York, and was the last one of the kids I met that November at a dinner at Barbara’s. She had similar coloring to Betsy. (They had the same mother, Adele, Norman’s second wife, who is half-Spanish and half–Peruvian Indian.) But while Betsy had black curly, wiry hair, Danielle’s was long and almost straight, which I so envied. She was a beauty with eggplant-colored eyes; she was lively and funny, and she quickly became another great friend. She’s the kind of girl who can sit next to you on the couch and in ten minutes learn more about you than some of your nearest and dearest friends know. She was a strong, healthy girl, and a good athlete, like I wasn’t, but she was also an artist, like I was.

All of the kids look like Norman in different ways. All of them have a talent for writing, too, although some of them prefer to do other things. Danielle and Maggie are painters, but both are good writers.
Sue is an analyst who writes professional papers; Kate is an actress but has her masters in writing and writes a lot of her own material; Stephen is an actor and is working on a screenplay. Everyone else is a writer in some larger way. My son Matt is a writer-director with a degree from NYU film school, and his senior thesis film called
The Money Shot
won the Wasserman award, which is NYU’s version of the Oscars. Michael is a movie producer who has written screenplays, and John Buffalo is a playwright-screenwriter, as well as an actor. Norman’s sister, Barbara, worked at Simon and Schuster for many years and edited a book called
The Bold New Women
, for which she wrote the preface. She is currently writing her memoir. Her only son, Peter Alson, is a journalist who has written about gambling and published two memoirs.

Peter’s true vocation is poker playing, and he has been in the World Series of Poker several times. Peter was only six years younger than me and was at Harvard when I came onto the scene. Being the only child of Norman’s only sister, he always felt like one of the kids, and was closest to Danielle until the boys got old enough to hang out with him. It was odd to have all these grown-up children, some of them my age or nearly my age, in the role of stepchildren. If any of the kids—except Maggie, of course—were unhappy that Norman and Carol’s
relationship was ending, they didn’t tell me. I’m sure they were all confused, unsure of what was going to happen. But they were too well mannered to even be impolite to me, although what they said to one another I can only imagine.

Peter Alson.

The one thing Norman always did throughout all the changes of wives was to keep the family together, especially in the summers, so they truly thought of themselves as brothers and sisters, not a collection of half siblings. Maybe by the time I arrived they were all shell-shocked from a surfeit of stepmothers and it was a relief to have someone young they could play with. I don’t know why we all got along so well, and I don’t want to analyze it too much. It just happened, and I was so grateful for having a large, wonderful family. Norman used to say that if the two of us were in the water drowning, the kids would save me first. I’m glad we didn’t have to find that one out.

I always respected the kids, and tried never to say anything bad about their mothers in front of them, although Norman didn’t share that characteristic. In fact, when one of the kids did something to displease him, he always started chastising them by saying, “You’re just like your mother…” and then he would rant on about whatever bad thing the kid had done that was just like the mother of the moment. He did the same thing to me about
my
mother even, and once, fed up, I said, “Why don’t you ever say we are like our mothers when we do something good?” He didn’t have an answer to that, but he never gave up the pleasure he got from the comparisons, although it drove all of us crazy.

I began to meet his friends, too. He didn’t have a lot of literary friends like I thought he would. He was friendly with people such as John Cheever, John Updike, and Saul Bellow when he saw them, and while we sometimes went out to dinner with Kurt Vonnegut and Jill Krementz—Kurt’s girlfriend, later his wife—Norman’s closest friends were from other walks of life. Like Harold and Mara Conrad. Harold was tall and suave with a black pencil mustache. He was a tough reporter in his youth who worked the sports desk for the
Brooklyn Eagle
, among other papers, and he then was a fight promoter who spoke with a gruff Damon Runyon accent. His wife, Mara, was a dancer and actress in the musical comedy genre, a long-legged blonde who took a lot of Gwen Verdon shows on the road. She had beautiful legs, the straight
posture and carriage of a ballerina,
two rows of big white teeth, and bottle-blond hair, with a strong dash of Lucille Ball in her personality. She played, among other things, Marilyn Monroe’s girlfriend in
Let’s Make Love
, and a wild jungle girl (with incongruous red lipstick) in the 1950s
Prehistoric Women.
Hanging in their apartment was a cool picture of her in a leopard skin from that movie.

Anyhow, when I first came to New York, Norman wanted to play a joke on Mara, who was a practical joker herself. We cooked up one with the help of Harold. Norman told them he had met a new girl he was crazy about but there were some problems, so he wanted them to take a look at her and give him some advice. He took me over there dressed in a sexy red dress (that I had borrowed from Sarah Johnson, one of my students in Russellville), a cheap blond wig, and a lot of makeup. He told them my name was Cinnamon Brown from Texas (Waco, no less) and that I had come to New York to get into pornographic movies.

We rehearsed at home, with great glee, and I was prepared, even though I had never seen a pornographic movie. (Norman asked me in Little Rock if there were any theaters that showed them, and I just said, “Huh?”) At the Conrads’, I swept in, brash and loud and trampy, and the two of them had their mouths hanging open, even Harold, who had met me and was in on the joke. (I was having so much fun, saying bad words like a naughty child and pretending to be someone so totally different from myself. I was using words I had never said out loud until I met Norman! At that moment, Norman decided I was going to be a movie star.) We went on and on with the charade, pretending to get into a big fight about my choice of career, him trying to stop me, and me adamant it was what I wanted to do more than anything else in the world. At one point he said to Harold and Mara, “Cinnamon
can’t
be in pornies. She has no tits!”

Me as Cinnamon Brown.

“Tits, what are tits?” I answered. “I have a
great
pussy!” At that, Mara took Norman into the next room to talk to him while I went and changed into the elegant Diane von Furstenberg dress Norman had bought me at Saks. I took off the wig, brushed out my long red hair, and toned down the makeup.

The Diane von Furstenberg dress.

In the other room, Mara was saying, “Look, Norman, you’re in way over your head. You can’t be with a woman like that. She’s too much for you. She’ll kill you. Just let her go and be in the pornies if she wants to. She’ll be great at it. She’ll be a big star and make a ton of money. And
you
have to stay away from her, got it?”

“But I think I love her,” he whined.

“Snap out of it! She’ll never love you. She’s trouble, and you don’t need more of that.” He nodded sadly, and they came back into the living room, where she took one look at me sitting there talking with Harold, and said, “Who are you? Where is Cinnamon?” She was genuinely confused.

We laughed until tears rolled and our stomachs hurt. She kept saying, “I can’t believe it! You had me. You totally had me!” At that moment, in walked Don King, the fight promoter, who had that hair that looked like he had just plunged down an elevator shaft, as Norman described him in
The Fight.
And of course we had to tell him all about it. (The problem is that I think the only sentence he heard was “I have a great pussy,” because he chased me around for years after that evening.)

The next week, we were invited to Harold and Mara’s house for dinner again, and we couldn’t wait to go, mainly—for me—because Mara always made great fried chicken and mashed potatoes. As we rang the doorbell, we started laughing again at how we had so totally gotten one over on her. She opened up the door and was standing there—stark naked. We screamed. She ran through the house doing pirouettes and saying, “You’ll
never
get one up on me!”

F
anny by this time knew that I wasn’t Francis Gwaltney’s niece, and I don’t think she cared. It was never mentioned again. She did make one small gesture toward saving Norman’s relationship with Carol, which I think she felt was her duty because of Maggie. When we told her we were going to the fight in Manila, she took me aside and said, “Darling, I want you not to go.” She held my hand as she said it, and I knew she was torn. Here was her beloved son, who could do no wrong in her eyes, breaking up another family, the
fifth
one, leaving another child, which went against everything in her upbringing. But she had gone through so many of his breakups and remarriages (and one of Barbara’s) that it wasn’t something earth-shattering like the first one must have been. Plus, she liked me, and she wanted him to be happy.

I didn’t want to hurt her, but I said, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I really am, but I’m going with him. We love each other, and we are going to be together.” She stood up, gave me a hug, and said, “Well, I had to try,” and that was that. From then on, she was totally in my corner.