Born with Teeth: A Memoir (16 page)

We stood at the back of Resurrection Church, my father and I, in the very space where sixteen years earlier I had so earnestly recited
The White Cliffs,
only this time the room was completely empty, and I was about to get married. Dad was smoking a Pall Mall, and I repeatedly took it from him, inhaling deeply and discharging the nicotine through my nose and out the slatted window into the parking lot. Not very becoming, you might say, had you been watching. Nor was the manner in which we smoked, like two old Irishmen standing outside of the pub on a wet Saturday evening, legs splayed, arms crossed, the butt held Cagney-style between thumb and forefinger, ready to be flicked fast and sharp out the window should the priest come by. He
didn’t come by; he was a fussy, fastidious man with a lot on his mind and was probably going over his lines in the sacristy. Looking out the window at the rolling cornfields that hadn’t changed in twenty-five years, I asked my father how I looked.

“You look fine. Just fine.” Typical: a measured response without music and without exaggeration.

“I look like hell, actually,” I corrected him. “We were up till dawn.”

“Not too smart,” Dad countered, “considering the occasion. What the hell were you up to all night?”

I took another long, bitter drag on the cigarette and let the smoke escape from my mouth like a wayward cloud. “Well, Dad, we were playing a last game of Whoever Touches the Ground Is Dead.”

My father lifted an eyebrow, as if the game were not altogether foreign to him, and asked, “And who, if I may ask, were the participants?”

The usual suspects, I told him, although that crew could have consisted of just about anyone staying at Derby Grange for the long weekend. It so happened that assembled in the living room the night before my wedding were my brother Tom; my best friend, Beth; and my little sister Jenny. We had all consumed copious amounts of champagne and, in a frenzy of prenuptial madness, I had permed my hair and lopped a good bit of it off, so that I looked not unlike a sepia photo of a woman who had survived the worst of the Dust Bowl. This happy band had taken pity on me and, stealing a case of champagne from the dining room, had cracked open bottle after bottle while listening to show tunes on the stereo. It was Tom’s inspired idea to jump from one piece of furniture to the next, champagne glass in hand, not spilling a drop, at increasing speed, while singing along with whatever musical happened to be playing. If you touched the floor, you were dead. Tom was brilliant, or
so it seemed to us, as Professor Harold Hill in
The Music Man,
holding his champagne glass aloft in lieu of a baton, never missing a beat as he leaped, from chair to chair, shouting “You got trouble, you got trouble, right here in River City!” stopping only to change the LP, and then it was Jenny’s turn, and “everything was beautiful ‘At the Ballet,’ ” which was remarkably effective because at the time she was training as a dancer, and we screamed with delight as she sprang from the couch to the ottoman to the chair, as light as a feather. Beth was too drunk to remember the lyrics to anything, so she began to make it up as she went along, which somehow made perfect sense to us until Tom demanded that we all stop while I performed “I’m the Greatest Star” from
Funny Girl.
The game came to an abrupt end when they demanded that I dramatize the number standing alone in the middle of the living room floor, at top volume, with Barbra Streisand guiding me, effervescent and incandescent with champagne, and nothing to lose as dawn intruded and the clock ran out. When I finished, the three of them sprang from the couch, applauding, crying “Bravo!” and Tom, in a moment of liquid delirium, fell to his knees, arms outstretched, and shouted, “You
are
the greatest star!”

In the back room of the church, my father shook his head, wryly amused. We were shoulder to shoulder, facing the golden cornfields and the wide-open beauty of a hot July day in Iowa. The garland I had chosen instead of a veil was irritating my forehead, and I continually plucked at it until at last my father said, “Take the goddamn thing off for a minute, you have time.”

“Not much time,” I replied, and then my father startled me when he said, “All the time in the world, as far as I’m concerned.” This was a provocation I chose to ignore, so instead I asked, “How do you like my dress?”

He turned to study me and, after a brief appraisal, said drily, “Looks like an afterthought while fleeing Tijuana.”

Not even a week before, having settled on an exquisite vintage gown of ivory lace, I changed my mind and, on my way to catch the plane that would take me to my wedding, I asked the taxi to stop while I ran into a nondescript shop on Columbus Avenue and bought a two-hundred-dollar party dress from the Latina owner, who shouted after me that I could wash it in cold water, in the machine!

“It’s none of my business, Kitten,” my father said, lighting up another Pall Mall, “but what the hell’s the rush? You just met this guy a few months ago.”

“Last October, Dad, is when we met, and a lot can happen in a few months.”

“Well, I can’t keep it straight. It seems like you just got rid of the Italian and, bingo, you’re marrying this kid! Doesn’t make any sense. What’s the urgency? Unless you’re pregnant. Is that it?”

No, that’s not it, Dad, I thought, but you have a good nose. Just a few weeks earlier I’d been sitting in my friend Tina Ying’s Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, going over wedding plans with my husband-to-be.

I had said, “We’ll need to pull the wedding up. I don’t want to be waddling to the altar in some size-fourteen polyester muumuu. I’m ten weeks along as it is.” Egan shifted in his chair, deliberating.

“Fine, let’s make it July instead of October. What difference does it make? It’s not like we don’t want children. What number did we agree on?”

“We didn’t.”

“Yes, yes, we did. We’d like five.”

“Four.”

“Done.”

The kung pao chicken on my plate suddenly lost its appeal. When I excused myself to go to the bathroom, Tina Ying
appeared out of nowhere and rested her hands firmly on my shoulders. “Just wait a minute, Kate,’ ” she said. “There seems to be a little problem.” By now, I was feeling downright nauseous and really needed to get to the ladies’ room.

Robert looked baffled. “What’s up?” he asked, chopsticks poised.

“Look down,” Tina replied, indicating my chair.

When I attempted to rise, I saw that the entire seat cushion beneath me was saturated with blood and that it was beginning to leak through the rush weaving onto the floor.

In short order, I was wrapped in a tablecloth and bundled into a taxi, which took us home, where I lay for some hours on the living room couch drinking large quantities of gin, as per the doctor’s orders, in an attempt to relax my uterus. This method of saving the fetus proved unsatisfactory, so I was ultimately taken to the Roosevelt Hospital emergency room, where the young male ob-gyn on duty took one look between my legs and said, “Jesus Christ, this is a real mess! We’re going to need to perform a radical D and C immediately.” When I woke up the following morning, an IV was attached to my arm and there was no more baby. The fetus had literally come apart in my womb, requiring me to have a blood transfusion and a night’s observation in the ICU.

I turned and saw someone sitting in the armchair next to the bed. It was Beth. Always there in a crisis, a stand-in for someone far less brave. She put her book down, sighed deeply, and said, “Robert had to go to a theater conference in New Jersey. He said you’d understand. He loves you.” We smiled weakly at each other.

“It must have killed him to have to call you,” I said.

Beth laughed as she leaned down to kiss my forehead. “No, word on the street is he’s still alive. Caught the eight a.m. train to Princeton.”

My father had divested himself of his jacket and had loosened his tie. He watched as the congregation filed into the hot church, dusty and wilted. The air-conditioning at Resurrection on my wedding day felt like it was funneled through an old-fashioned fan attached to an ice block. Dad wiped his brow with his signature red handkerchief and said, “The hottest bleeping day of the year. And Egan’s already up there at the podium going over his homily, or his pledge, or whatever the hell he calls it. Never heard of that before, the groom giving the sermon.”

“He’s not giving the sermon, Dad,” I interjected, “he’s simply saying his piece. It’s his right. He wants the congregation to bear witness to our commitment.”

My father paced, as was his wont, then suddenly stopped and said, “Guy’s got an impressive résumé, I’ll say that for him. Boston College, Oxford, Stanford. Told me he was doing his dissertation on Marxist aesthetics, is that right? Jesus. What the hell has that got to do with your line of work?”

There was no point in playing this game with my father, who, I was fairly sure, had a pretty keen understanding of dialectical materialism but little appreciation for the way it sounded, smacking, as it did, of grandiose idealism. My father had been well educated, read voraciously, and used language like a poet, sparingly and with elegance. He had written my mother love letters, witty, ardent, brimming with confidence. No talk of socialist ideals, why should there be? It would have been redundant. My parents were dyed-in-the-wool Irish-Catholic, yellow-dog Democrats, and not without their own sense of elitism, but neither of them could tolerate posturing. I studied my father for a moment, looked at him with eyes that saw what they’d seen from the first: a face that would never lose its fascination for me.

Robert Egan, too, was one of the most handsome men I’d
ever laid eyes on. I suppose he knew this. He was a black Irish beauty, no question about it. Pedigree notwithstanding, he was smart, practical, ambitious, and gifted. But he had a terrible time making up his mind.

This had been made exquisitely clear one afternoon in May, on a green hillock in a small park where Robert and I were enjoying a picnic before the evening performance of
Major Barbara.
I’d returned to Seattle to play the lead in this Shaw play, directed by Dan Sullivan, with a serious goal in mind, and it didn’t have much to do with Barbara Undershaft and the Salvation Army. I wanted to get married. Egan knew it, and so, I suspected, did everyone else.

As we finished our picnic lunch of hard cheese and green grapes, I stretched out luxuriously on the woolen blanket we’d stolen from the property department and lit a cigarette. It was a sunny day, glorious for Seattle, and the park was full of people enjoying the afternoon. As I lay there, I made up my mind that I would say nothing. Absolutely nothing. If Egan didn’t have the balls or the desire to pop the question after months of romantic intimacy, then I wanted nothing more to do with him. I had my pride, I had my faction of devoted suitors, and, perhaps most compellingly, I had a six-thirty half-hour call.

Robert stood, having long ago lost interest in the picnic, and began pacing. This, I understood from years of watching my father and my brothers, was not necessarily a good thing. Either Notre Dame was losing, we were running out of scotch, or an exceptionally pretty woman had entered the room. Pacing is a form of agitation and uncertainty. It is not calming, nor does it inspire confidence.

Egan circled the tiny hillock, again and again, until the sun shifted and people began to leave the park. He had his hand in his pocket, toying with something. An engagement ring, I thought. I raised myself up on an elbow in a very leisurely
fashion and said, “It’s getting late.” He stood for a long time looking out, past the park, beyond the theater, into the safety of his imagination, and there he must have found the same unrest he found here. So he hunkered down beside me and showed me the little ring in his hand. A slim band of gold, somehow cleaved, adorned with the tiniest diamond I’d ever seen. He looked at me questioningly. I looked back and smiled, making it clear that this was his moment. I believe he proposed formally. I think I heard “Will you marry me?” but I was so concerned about being late for the half-hour call that I only remember feeling relieved, and slightly irritated. Once the band was on my finger, and lips perfunctorily pecked, I made a mad dash for the stage door.

“Who knows, Dad, we may start our own theater, get the kids their equity cards before they’re ten.” Music was playing inside the church, and my stomach was churning. Beads of sweat stood out on my forehead; my frizzy hair framed my face like coils of hay; I felt ridiculous in my garland with its long blue and white ribbons—signifying what? I wondered.

After the rape, Beth had quit her job, and the two of us had fled to Barbados, where we’d found some measure of peace because no one knew us there, and we felt unshackled. Beth had left an abusive husband, and I had assisted her in the getaway, outside a Spanish restaurant in Midtown, shouting in her husband’s face, “I’ll call the police if you come any closer, you sonofabitch! Get in the taxi, Beth, get in!” As the taxi sped up Eleventh Avenue, Beth started tearing off her clothes and throwing them out the open window, until I grabbed her wrist and, pointing at her wedding band, shouted, “That’s what you need to throw away!” So, laughing hysterically as tears streamed down her cheeks, she hurled that ring into the darkness.