A Ticket to the Circus (57 page)

The wedding was to be on the beach underneath a golden orange canopy. The day dawned bright blue and sunny. Norman and I, like two ancient old ginks, were helped out to the chairs that had been set up on the beach. Then, to everyone’s horror, the wind whipped up until the sand was swirling in ferocious blasts. All we could do was sit there and squeeze our eyes shut as the sand scoured our faces and piled up in our hair and on our clothes. Matt and Salina were amazing. They pretended to ignore the sandstorm. They went through the vows, the musicians played, and John gave a beautiful little talk. Others spoke. Salina was heroic. She has a contact lens and a glass eye, which were both filled with sand, and she could hardly see her vows as she read them, it was so painful. But she persevered, and was so gorgeous in her white dress against the Prussian blue sea with its wind-frothed whitecaps and the orange-gold silk blowing in the wind. Finally, we all staggered inside, shook off the sand, and went on to a great party in a restaurant by the beach.

Norman gave a toast that began, “If this marriage works out…” He went on to say a lot more, of course, and it was one of his funniest, wildest, best toasts ever. He always did rise to an occasion. I danced and had a good time, but all the while, my kidney was blocked by a tumor and urine was backing up. By the following morning, I was in agony, and all I could do was take as many pain pills as I could until the plane landed in Boston. Then I went directly to the hospital, where I had another surgery. But at least I was at my son’s wedding! Now they have two beautiful children, Mattie James and Jackson Kingsley Mailer.
Mattie was named after her father, Matthew, and her grandfather James Davis, and Jackson was named after Norman Kingsley Mailer.

John Buffalo was busy writing and acting. He had a novella,
Hello Herman
, published while he was in his sophmore year at Wesleyan, and has been my mainstay throughout these last few difficult years.

Norman began to lose weight. His breathing became more and more labored, and he could hardly walk across the room without sitting down. The doctor was treating him for asthma, which I didn’t believe he had. I was afraid it was his heart, but again he refused to go to Boston. He preferred to use an inhaler, take asthma medicine, and do the best he could.

The only bright spot in these days for him was Texas hold ’em poker. He had started watching it on TV, and soon books began arriving. That was the sign he was interested in a new project. He would buy a complete library first and learn everything he could about a subject before he tackled it. We began having poker games at the house after dinner, with Mike and Donna Lennon; Chris Busa; Pat Doyle; Astrid Berg; Hans Janitschek; Norman’s sister, Barbara; any of the kids who were there; and any assorted visiting firemen, as Norman used to say. Anyone at all who was willing was dragooned into playing poker.

The person to beat was always Peter Alson, but even pros have bad card nights, and sometimes he would lose. We wagered just enough to make it interesting, twenty dollars to ante. The games were hilarious sometimes. Once, Danielle and her daughter Isabella were playing together because they were just learning the game, and they kept upping the bet until everyone dropped out. It turned out that they had nothing, not even a pair, and had unbeknownst to themselves bluffed the whole table out. Norman won a lot. I pretended with great drama to relish beating him, but I secretly was happy when he won.

He finished his book on Hitler,
The Castle in the Forest
, and we went back to New York for the launch party given by his editor, David Ebershoff, in January 2007. Sue and Marco had gone back to Chile after his year of sabbatical, and our apartment was empty for the first time ever. It was so good to be back home in Brooklyn, so good to have the kids a short subway ride away instead of six long hours. It had been
much easier since Dwayne had joined us, and my mother was happy in her own apartment in Orleans, but life on the Cape was still hard on me. I was constantly driving somewhere. My mother lived forty-five minutes away, and my doctors were more than two hours away. I was continually either taking one of the three of us to doctors or visiting Mother, going shopping for her, taking her out to lunch, while trying to write my own book. I was grateful to Dwayne for shopping and cooking and keeping Norman going, but he was there only four hours a day, and there was only so much he could do.

I began to think about moving back to Brooklyn so we would be close to doctors, and finding a place for my mother that would be closer to us so I wouldn’t have to travel so far all the time. Not to mention it would be great to have the kids nearby to help us. I discussed it with Norman, but he didn’t want to move. He loved Provincetown. He loved his life there and he wasn’t going. End of conversation.

We went back to New York in March 2007 when he and Günter Grass did a show with Andrew O’Hagan at the New York Public Library. The kids all came to hear him, and the ones who hadn’t seen him in a while were aghast. Kate said, “We shouldn’t let Dad do this. We have to take him to the hospital right now!” He had lost so much weight that it was frightening. He couldn’t walk more than a few steps, even with his two canes, without resting. He was living on oysters, orange juice mixed with red wine, and Hershey bars. He could hardly breathe. The audience gasped when he walked out on the stage. Still, when he got under the spotlight, all of those problems dropped away and his mind came out, as sharp as ever. He was astounding in his clarity and scope of thought. Andrew was giving Grass a hard time about hiding his youth membership in the Nazi party, and Norman defended him roundly, saying, “How many of us would have the courage at age seventeen to go against the reigning government and fight it alone? Especially one as brutal as the Nazis? Of course he would have gone along with it, and why would he rush to tell about it later? He did no more than any one of us would have done.” Günter was grateful to him, and I was so proud of him. No matter what was going on with his body, that powerful mind was still in there, and he was going to say what he thought, no matter if it was popular or not.

But this trip to New York also underscored just how weak he had
become. I had to get him and my mother back to the city whether he wanted to go or not. I had to have the help of the kids. I could no longer go on caring for my mother and Norman by myself. I would make the arrangements and he would just have to go along with it.

I researched assisted living places near us in Brooklyn and found a perfect one for Mother, the Prospect Park Residence. Salina and I went and looked at the rooms that were available, and we picked out a sweet one-bedroom with a view of Prospect Park. I went back to Provincetown and told Norman that I was moving my mother to Brooklyn, and I wanted him to come with me. We had to be closer to the kids. I had to have some help. He said he would stay in Provincetown and take care of himself. (I heard the echo of my mother’s determination to go back to Arkansas in his voice.) I actually believed that once I moved he would change his mind, I don’t know why. I’d certainly known him long enough to know better.

Christina came back to help and we packed up my mother and moved her to Brooklyn. Mother was kind of excited about it. It was an adventure for her. She had changed with the Prozac and her new independence. Thomas came in a truck with her furniture and we spent a couple of days arranging her apartment. It was a lot to learn and get used to for her, but she had her stuff, which means so much to a woman. “Home is where your stuff is.” I had gone to Arkansas the previous year and sold her house and had brought up a truckload of her things from there, so she had her old lamps and stereo, her china cabinet, and lots of other things that meant a lot to her. I think she had at last made peace with living out her life in New York. And there was the bonus of being closer to Matt and John and the grandbabies.

The only problem now was Norman. I went back and forth to Ptown every couple of weeks, spending June and July there with him, and then I went on my book tour for two weeks in August 2007 when my second novel,
Cheap Diamonds
, came out. Various of the kids and our friends had been coming to stay with Norman, and of course he had Dwayne, but Norman’s breathing was getting so bad that something had to be done. So we took him to Boston, where they drained container after container of fluid from his lung for a week. One lung was covered in scar tissue from the fluid, and the other one was working at only about half strength. The Boston doctors were undecided on
what to do about his problems, and Maggie was getting married at the house on the beach. He was determined to come back for that, so we checked him out of the hospital and home we went.

Maggie was a beautiful bride with her startling blue eyes and thick mass of dark curls, and her husband, John Wendling, was Ralph Lauren handsome, a blond, blue-eyed carpenter who had that healthy clean-wood aura about him. Carol, Maggie’s mother, came, and we had a happy little reunion. Over the years we had become friends, and we emailed each other nearly every day. It was bizarre, but what the heck. (Maggie and John had a baby boy, Nicholas Maxwell Mailer Wendling, in November 2009, two years later.)

The boys somehow got Norman down the stairs to the chairs on the beach, and Maggie and John were married by Mike Lennon, who had his minister’s license, on a clear, sparkling day in September. Then Norman struggled back up the stairs, had a polite glass of champagne, posed for a few pictures, and went to bed. I knew we would have to move soon, and finally, so did he.

Danielle and Peter stayed with him while I went back to New York to get things ready. They drove him to Brooklyn and it was a monumental struggle to get him up the stairs. I could see why he didn’t want to come. He would never get to go out at all. The next couple of weeks were tough. His breathing was worse in the city air in spite of the air purifiers I had bought, and before he had been there long, we had to take him to Mount Sinai hospital, where they promptly put him in the ICU.

I wasn’t feeling at all well myself. I had a horrible urinary tract infection of some kind, and I could feel the symptoms of the cancer growing again, but I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t have time for that now. I had to be in the hospital every day with Norman, and also I had to see that my mother was taken care of, that she had her medicine and everything else she needed.

We tried to keep Norman’s whereabouts a secret, but those things leak out, and we had to get a policeman to sit outside the door after a photographer tried to sneak into the ICU and photograph him. Someone in the family was with him all the time. All his friends and everyone he knew came to say goodbye. He was about to publish his last book, a small work he did with Mike Lennon called
On God.
In fact, it
came out while he was in the hospital, in his last days, and his picture was on the cover of
New York
magazine, a picture of him with artwork behind it as if he were at the gates of heaven. I read him an excerpt from the book that was printed in
Playboy
magazine. Not the worst way to go out.

At first, he was able to talk, and we had a few conversations. He knew his time was up, and so did I. I was sitting beside his bed crying one day when he said, “You’re crying. You must really love me.”

“Of course I love you, you silly old coot! Why else do you think I’ve stuck around all this time?” After all we had been through, he still wasn’t sure I loved him? I didn’t love every single last thing about him, nor did he about me, and there were a few things I am sure we definitely disliked about the other, but all in all, we had found someone whose quirks we could live with, and we had done all right. We’d made a great son together, and we’d had some fun. There are people who have less. I don’t think I ever did take that step back toward him in my heart, but I didn’t take another one away, either. I didn’t know what my life was going to be like without him, and I didn’t know how long I would live after he went.

“I’ll be right behind you,” I told him. “So have all the fun you can before I get there.”

He smiled and took my hand. “Remember the Taxicab Kiss?” he said.

“Like it was yesterday.”

“It’s gone by fast, hasn’t it?”

“Yes, it has.” It surely had. I know everyone realizes that when they get older, but it is always a shock, how fast it goes.

“W
hat is that noise?” the nurse whispered, looking alarmed. “Is the ventilator malfunctioning?” I was dozing, and jerked awake at her abrupt entry.

“No,” I croaked, and cleared my throat. My voice felt like it had lain out in the rain and rusted. “It’s the iPod. We recorded the sound of the ocean for him. It soothes him.”

“Oh. Sorry.” She looked at the iPod, checked a few dials on the various machines, and went back out. It was morning on the ninth of November, 2007. I was alone with Norman in the ICU, but the rest of the family were on the way. Sue and Marco had come in from Chile, Danielle and Peter from Connecticut. It was Peter McEachern, our beloved son-in-law, who had driven the six hours to Provincetown to put his recorder under Norman’s bedroom window and record the waves washing the beach. He’d taped a half hour of it, which was now on a loop, so the sound was heard around the clock, the occasional faint wail of a foghorn punctuating the rhythm like a note from a tenor sax.

Maggie and her husband, John, had come from the Berkshires. The rest of the kids—Betsy, Kate, Michael, Matthew, and John Buffalo—were in New York already, along with their spouses and their children, as well as Norman’s sister, Barbara, her son, Peter, and his wife, Alice. Our cousin Sam Radin and his wife, Pam, were there. Everyone was there except for Stephen, who was trying to get back from Arizona, where he was performing in a play. Today was the day we were all gathering to decide whether or not to turn off the ventilator.

Norman had been steadily going downhill since he’d gotten to Mount Sinai, and had been in the ICU for five weeks. He was lying there now, unable to speak, with his leg laid open from an emergency surgery to remove infection that had set in from so many IV needles. He had been good about it all, never complaining—at least not overly much—but we were all worn out. I had a fever of 102 from an infection that would send me to the hospital myself soon, and I felt like crawling up into the bed with him. Before the tube took away his voice,
we had spent our days talking about everything that needed to be talked about, and now all I could do was hold his hand, kiss his fingers from time to time, and talk in a one-sided monologue that was most unsatisfactory. We had begun talking nearly thirty-three years before, and had never not had something to say to each other. He slept on, hovering somewhere above his body, I imagined, watching with interest.