Born with Teeth: A Memoir (3 page)

My mother attended the president’s funeral and returned a week later, just in time to have her eighth baby. This time, she stayed in the hospital longer than she had with any of her other deliveries, but what was most troubling was the appearance of a young farm girl at the back door one afternoon, a plain straw-haired girl who carried a suitcase and said her name was Dora Lamb and could she please come in. My father escorted this girl into the kitchen and introduced her as “a mother’s helper.” She was to live in the maid’s room and, evidently, she was going to “help” our mother.

When my mother came home, we all gathered in the front yard to greet her. Dad helped her out of the car and, smiling, she walked toward us carrying a pink bundle in one arm and a shopping bag in the other. She turned to Dora Lamb, transferred the pink bundle to her arms, and said, “Her name is Jenny. Good luck.” Then she went into the house, all of us trailing behind her like ducklings, and when she reached the
TV room, she took off her coat, reached into the shopping bag, and withdrew what looked like a large jar of preserves.

She then proceeded to pull an ottoman over to the fireplace, and, in one deft move, she jumped onto it, kissed the jar, and placed it with two hands dead center on the mantelpiece. “I think I’d like a drink!” she called to my father, and sailed into the kitchen. We all ran to the fireplace, mad with curiosity, and, climbing onto whatever pieces of furniture we could find, examined the mysterious jar. It was filled with amber liquid in which were floating my mother’s ovaries, which, just before she’d gone under, she had instructed Dr. Sharp to “pickle.”

On the ride home, she had taken out one of her felt pens and, on a broad strip of medical tape she had stolen from the operating room in which her hysterectomy had been performed, she had written in bold black ink:
FROM WHENCE YOU SPRANG
.

My parents decided that the Derby Grange schoolhouse was somehow insufficient to meet our intellectual needs, and so we were transferred to the local Catholic grammar school, which was called, disturbingly, Resurrection. A flat and unprepossessing building, it sat amid acres of farmland and had little to recommend it, from my point of view, other than a small woman named Sister Benedict, who taught the fifth grade and who first recognized in me the poet I longed to become. She was a plain woman with a severe overbite and kind, beautiful brown eyes. The sisters often attended Mass with the parishioners, and one Sunday I was keenly aware of Sister Benedict’s watchful eyes on my family. My father knelt at one end of the pew and next to him, in various states of regrettable posture, were Tom, Joe, Laura, Tess, Sam, Jenny, myself, and, finally, Mother, who was not kneeling at all but instead sat on the bench with legs crossed, a thermos of coffee open beside her, and in her hands a book entitled
The Ethics of Spinoza.
The next
day at school, Sister Benedict stopped me in the hall and said, “Your mother’s a very interesting person, isn’t she? Maybe you’d like to invite her to the poetry contest next week. She seems like the kind of person who might enjoy that.”

Home I went, full of happy anticipation. When I told my mother that not only had I been writing poetry on the sly but that it appeared my poems were of exceptional quality because Sister Benedict had chosen me, out of the entire fifth grade, to compete in the Resurrection School Annual Poetry Contest that was to be held the following week. “Not only that, Mom,” I said, “but she wants you to come and hear me recite my poems.”

My mother cocked her head and, looking at me curiously, said, “I think have something for you, Kitty Kat girl.” I followed her up the front stairs to her bedroom, where she kept a collection of her favorite books in a corner bookshelf near the window. She pulled out a slim volume with a blue-and-white cover and handed it to me. “This is a terrific poem about World War One by the writer Alice Duer Miller, and it’s called
The White Cliffs.
I think when you’ve finished reading your original poems, you should surprise the nuns and just sail right into this one and see what happens. Fun, don’t you think?”

My mother’s idea of fun was a fifty-page poem about an American girl and an English aristocrat who meet in London on the eve of World War I and fall in love. We follow the young woman’s narrative through romance, marriage, childbirth, war, the death of her husband, and, finally, into her middle age, at which point she stands overlooking the White Cliffs of Dover and says:

On the afternoon of the poetry contest, we were all led into the school auditorium (which doubled as the cafeteria) and told to take our seats as designated. The nuns and priests and a few of the ladies who worked the lunch shift sat on one side of the room, and the entire rest of the school body sat on the other. We, the poets, were given seats of honor in the very front row. The program began, and I sat stiffly through what I considered several really boring readings of very bad poems until, at last, my name was called. I walked to the podium with my sheaf of poems in hand and looked out over the crowd: kids of all ages and sizes, girls in ill-fitting uniforms and boys sporting John Deere caps, most of whom were making inappropriate sounds and fidgeting wildly in their metal chairs. On the other side of the room, the nuns and priests regarded me in austere silence. Suddenly, something at the back of the room caught my eye, and in a moment of tremendous relief and joy, I recognized my mother in her ubiquitous gray sweater, a red kerchief tied around her hair, leaning casually against the door. She acknowledged me with a small smile and a covert rolling of her hand, which I had been trained to understand meant,
Get on with it!

After I read my five original poems, I eagerly awaited the response of my audience, but there was none. Sister Benedict clapped once or twice out of Christian charity, but other than that, it was dead quiet. At that moment, I pulled
The White Cliffs
from my blazer pocket and, taking a deep breath and without explanation, began to read. I didn’t stop until I had read the whole thing. When I was finished, I looked up and realized, with a pang, that my mother was no longer standing in the back of the room. She had moved closer and now stood next to the row of nuns, and she was clapping. The nuns were applauding, too, but something else was happening that I found even more disconcerting—most of the nuns had tears streaming down their cheeks! Sister Mary Elizabeth was laughing
and crying simultaneously, and Sister Benedict was standing, clapping delightedly, and beaming with pride.

On the way home, my mother was silent. This did not bode well, I knew, and although I was devastated, I turned my back to her and, feigning indifference, stared out the window as we drove past Gronau’s Creek and started up the long gravel road toward home. Just as we were about to drive through the stone gates, my mother suddenly switched off the ignition and turned to face me. “You know, Kitten, I watched you today, and it dawned on me that you can either be a mediocre poet or a great actress. Now, which do you think you’d rather be?” I didn’t know what to say to her then, but as it turned out no words were necessary. The following night, I found
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
tucked under my pillow and a note from my mother, which read: “Find what you love and the rest will follow.”

I threw myself into all things dramatic, joined the community playhouse, applied to summer acting programs, and read everything I could get my hands on. With seven children between the ages of thirteen and three, the house was in a constant state of turmoil, and I learned to escape by shutting myself in my room and burying myself in books. This was a trick my mother had taught me and one that she herself had mastered to perfection. Regardless of what was happening, and on pain of death, we were not allowed to disturb her afternoon nap. Like clockwork, she would run up the stairs at two o’clock, book in hand, and spend an hour reading or sleeping.

Increasingly, though, my mother would shut herself in her room for two, even three, days at a time. She had migraine headaches, and they were so severe (she explained, when I stood by her bedside holding a wet cloth and a glass of ginger ale) that when she had them she went temporarily blind and became violently sick. The most effective antidote to these
headaches was adventure. Her best friend, Jean Kennedy Smith, would call, and before we knew it, Mother was out the door and on her way to New York or Paris or London. My father did not try to stop her, but it was clear he resented these interruptions. She had to beg him for pocket money, which infuriated and embarrassed her. Often, someone else drove her to the airport.

When my mother was away, the atmosphere in the house changed. It was hard to put a finger on it: colder, emptier, less safe. My father, never one to join us for dinner, now appeared only after we were in bed, and it was evident from the way he slammed the back door and barked “Goddammit!” that he’d stopped at the Coach House and had a few belts with his pals. Often, he would pour himself a nightcap and listen to Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo. The smoke from his Pall Malls drifted up to my room.

Sometimes, I would lie in my bed and imagine him down there, sitting on the couch with his glass of scotch, listening to the blues. I wondered what he was thinking about as he sat there, hour after hour, lost in thought. I loved my father—loved his gallantry, his grace, his Irish good looks—but his quicksilver moods frightened me, and I was always slightly on my guard. Beware, something inside me always whispered. Watch out.

There came a night when the house was too still. It was dark, the moon was full, and I felt afraid. So I went downstairs and turned the knob to the TV room door, and there, illuminated by the moon, lay my father and Dora Lamb, in silhouette, on the couch. He had been lying on top of her and when he saw me cried “Jesus Christ!” and, jumping up, started after me. I was fast, but he was faster. He stood at my bedroom door, one arm blocking my way and the other extended toward me, as if in greeting. I noted with surprise that he was still holding his
glass of scotch and felt contempt for my father’s need to carry that glass of scotch with him as he ran upstairs to confront his twelve-year-old daughter and to plead for her understanding. He said “Kitten” then, as if that would change the game. “Kitten” had been his idea, and how like him to find a nickname that felt like a kiss every time I heard it. But I didn’t want that kiss now, and in fact, the very thought that my father might step into my room terrified me, and so I said, “Don’t come in here, Dad, I’m warning you. Don’t come in.”

“Kitten, you don’t understand, it means nothing. A stupid, silly mistake and it means absolutely nothing because nothing happened. You know how much I love your mother—”

I stopped him right there. “Okay, Dad, that’s enough. I need to go to bed now.”

He looked at me—a soft look, a pleading look, a look that didn’t belong to him—and said, “I promise you, sweetheart, this will never happen again, and it’s something your mother doesn’t need to know about. No point. Understood?”

“Sure, Dad, whatever you say, but now I really want to go to bed.”

He looked at his scotch, as if discovering it for the first time, and then, backing away, said, “Love you, sugar.” He was still standing there when I closed the door and locked it.

A few days later, my mother returned from her trip, took one look at me, and said, “Let’s go to your room.” It didn’t take much for me to betray my father. Maybe she stroked my hair, although that’s unlikely, maybe she gave me a present, maybe she even suggested an afternoon at the movies, but within minutes she had the whole story.

As I stumbled through the memory, fighting tears, she smiled at me and said, “Slow down, honey, and don’t forget the details, details are crucial,” and curled up on my bed like a child being read a bedtime story. When I was finished, she sighed as if she
was sorry the story had ended but that it had been, nonetheless, a dish well served and, kissing me lightly on the top of my head, started downstairs. It was time to make dinner.

The next morning, I hurried into the kitchen and found my mother standing over the stove, making eggs. I looked expectantly at her, or perhaps beseechingly, but she just smiled and turned back to her cooking. It was then I heard my father coming down the stairs. He walked into the kitchen, smelling of Old Spice and strikingly handsome in a seersucker suit with a yellow-and-pink paisley tie, his thick black hair still wet from the shower. Mother looked up at him and asked, “Would you like some breakfast, Tom, or are your lips too parched too eat?” Incredibly, then, she turned and winked at me. In a flash, my father grabbed the chair next to me and, just as he was about to pick it up, my mother put her hand on his arm and, looking directly into my father’s eyes, said, “I don’t think so, Tom.”

Without a word, my father walked out of the kitchen, got into his car, and started the ignition. He was my ride to school, there was no other way, and so I gathered my book bag and, screwing up my courage, started after him. But in the five seconds it took me to pass through the kitchen and open the back door, my father had performed yet another magic trick, this one more stunning than all the rest. He had vanished into thin air.

After a particularly disheartening day in my freshman year of high school, in which my arrogance had once again stirred up the insecurity of my classmates and driven them to acts of ill-concealed hostility, I came home and announced to my mother that I found high school a complete waste of time, that I was going to apply for early graduation, that I had my heart set on the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and that nothing was going to deter me. “Very good!” my mother responded, slapping the kitchen table for emphasis. “But you’ll need to get a job to cover expenses. And I couldn’t agree with you more about high school. A wasteland of mediocrity. Besides which, I’ve always said that all boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five should be incarcerated.”

Once I had redirected my focus, there was no time to waste. I got two jobs in quick succession: after school, I flipped burgers at Pete’s Coffee Shop, and on weekends I served cocktails at the Holiday Inn. It didn’t seem to faze anybody that I was underage, least of all my employer, whose only complaint was that I wore my skirt to just above my knee, rather than to the preferred panty line. I worked hard, made good tips, raced to rehearsal at the University of Dubuque, where I was a member of the Player’s Club, won the lead in almost every school play, and spent my free time applying to summer acting programs.

There were boys, too, of course. All kinds. Amazing the elasticity of time when romance must be squeezed into the schedule. There was the captain of the football team, tall, good-looking, and Irish, who deceived me and broke my heart; there was the charismatic psychopath at the university who, after I slapped him for standing me up, pleaded for another chance and drove me deep into the country, where he threatened me with a crowbar and left me in the middle of a pasture, miles from nowhere.

There were the men I encountered at home, some of them friends of my father, some of them acquaintances who had just stopped by for a beer and a laugh, most of them drinkers and all of them old enough to know better, but none of them disciplined enough to resist the impulse to flirt with a precocious sixteen-year-old girl. Curiously, this neither alarmed nor dismayed my parents. “A certain je ne sais quoi,” my mother said, to which my father responded, looking me dead in the eye, “Trouble.”

“Trouble,” in my father’s vernacular, referred to anything sexual in nature. It was delicious trouble, mischievous trouble, the kind of trouble everyone longed to get into and, at Derby Grange, frequently did. There were bonfires in the front yard, conclaves in the kitchen, and a piano in the dining room, and seated at that piano was a woman whose fingers danced over the keys, long black hair falling over her tired, pretty face.
Sometimes, my father would pass through the dining room on his way to the bar and, resting a hand on her shoulder, would say, “That’s the way to do it, sugar,” and her eyes would light up with laughter and longing. Nancy Gilbert, we all knew, was in love with our father, but we didn’t hold that against her. She had a sad, sweet manner that softened the chaos around her, and she lifted my father’s mood.

My life was so full and so busy that I actually needed an assistant, but since such a notion was inconceivable I settled for the second-best option, which was a slave. An in-family slave, one who would both serve and adore, was what I wanted, and I found her in the person of my younger sister Tess. Six years my junior, she was known as the Creature, was splendidly limber, and had almond-shaped green eyes and an olive complexion, long, slender fingers, and a complicit smile. She was the perfect slave, and I was a beneficent slave driver. I allowed her free access to my room, I provided her with cigarettes, candy, and any junk food I could get my hands on, I occasionally permitted her to take a nap with me, and in exchange for all this, I expected my bed to be made, my dirty clothes to be thrown into the closet, my coffee fetched, my dialogue rehearsed (however haltingly), and an absolute and utter show of devotion and fidelity. This was our pact, and we sealed it, again and again, by playing a game in the front yard called Robe. I would let Tessie get into my long pink velour robe (which she coveted), and as she took her place at one end of the yard, I would take mine at the other. At the count of three, I would shout, “Tessie!” and she would shout, “Katie!” and we would fly toward each other until we met, and then I would take her hands and, lifting her off the ground, swing her around and around and around, screaming, “I simply
adore you!
”

Alternatively, we would lie in the grass and gaze heavenward, reciting our favorite quote from the New Testament. The
goal was to deliver it in as many accents as possible within a prescribed period of time. Jesus, near death, is fed up with the thief on his right and says to the thief on his left: “You will be with me in Paradise.”

My ambition knew no bounds, and I worked tirelessly toward my goal, which was to get out. I yearned to become a real actress. I lived at home, but I was already separating myself from the family. My siblings crossed my line of vision on my way out the door, to rehearsal, to the coffee shop, or into my boyfriend’s car, but I seldom engaged with them. I was on a mission. Tessie alone witnessed my frustration, my anxiety, and my unrelenting longing to be free. She sat on the bed and helped me pack for Europe when I was invited to participate in the final audition process for acceptance into the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and she was there when I came home, in defeat, devastated and mortified. Too young, they had said.

My father was furious with me for having ignored his telegram insisting that I return home immediately. In London, I had been introduced to Hal Bagot, the youngest member of the House of Lords, and he had invited me to his parents’ home in Kent for a long weekend. Hal had no idea that I was only sixteen, but his mother, Lady Bagot, was a woman of great sensitivity, and when I appeared in the library wearing pink bell-bottoms and a black angora turtleneck, my long hair pulled back with a black velvet ribbon, she took my hand and said, “Oh, my, what an absolutely charming little American girl!” That night, at a formal dinner, I was seated far away from Hal, next to a much older man in a deep-blue uniform elaborately decorated with medals. “Now, my dear girl,” he said, turning to me, “do as I do, and all shall be well. Always remember, work from the outside in, follow Lady Bagot’s example, and you’ll be splendid.” Dinner was followed by a movie and then by dancing in the ballroom,
and the following day I was put in a small open car and told that we would be following the hunt but not riding in it.

Lady Bagot had put me in the Rose Room, where my bath was drawn by a maid who laid my pajamas on the bed and placed my hairbrush on a small white cloth next to the bed.

Hal was eager to get me back to London, but I told him that my father would come after him with a shotgun if I didn’t get on the next plane home.

Instead, my father gave me a punishment calculated to teach me a lesson I would never forget. Dad insisted that I attend the local women’s college in Dubuque for at least a semester because, as he put it, “You’re in such a goddamn hurry, you’ll break your neck right out of the gate.” Strangely, it didn’t really matter; nothing mattered but reaching my goal. I set myself on a course and didn’t look back.

My slave was always around, but I didn’t always require her services. I wanted to be alone, to daydream about my escape and the world that awaited me: the work, the glory, and the promise just beyond that front yard. Once or twice, I passed Tess in the kitchen, and it struck me that she looked tired, even mournful, sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. That’s not like her, I’d say to myself. I’ll ask her if something’s bothering her when I get home.

But she was always asleep when I got home, or it would simply slip my mind. Sometimes, she complained of headaches, but this she would do sotto voce because it was an unspoken rule in our house that children didn’t get sick, that hypochondria was unacceptable and would not be tolerated. We understood this and toughed it out most of the time, although there had been some close calls over the years.

There was the time that Joe fell on the ice and punctured his thigh, at which point Mother told him to put some salve on it and go to bed. When he woke up, the wound had become
infected, and his leg looked like someone had wound a purple ribbon around it, a sign of imminent septicemia. They made it to the emergency room just in time. On another occasion Tom, from fifty yards away, threw a dart at Joe and hit him in the back of the neck, and when Joe staggered into the house howling for Mother, she reached up, plucked the dart from his neck, and said, “Don’t be a baby. Put some salve on it and go back outside.” And I would have to live forever with the memory of the mortifying incident of my faux pneumonia. I was having trouble breathing—does it matter why?—and evidently the medical staff agreed because I was put into the hospital under an oxygen tent, and when I looked up from my bed, I saw my mother leaning against the doorway, and the look on her face said it all:
I hope you’re enjoying this, Sarah Bernhardt, because it’s going to be all over in the morning.

Outsiders regarded my mother’s inability to cope with sickness as a kind of sickness itself, but then, no one understood my mother like I did, and very few were privy to her history, which explained everything. My maternal grandmother had died in childbirth when my mother was just three years old, whereupon my grandfather quickly remarried a woman named Alfreda, who was beautiful, glacial, and utterly self-absorbed. My mother was sent to a convent boarding school where she met a plump little girl by the name of Jean Kennedy.

This little girl became her best friend and saved my mother’s life by taking her home for Christmas holidays in Boston and long summer vacations in Hyannis. They were wonderful to my mother, the Kennedys, but even their glorious largesse could not make up for what my mother secretly yearned for: a mother of her own.

To that end, my mother approached me one day and asked me to sit and have a cup of coffee with her in the kitchen. “How old are you now, Kitten?” my mother asked, as if we were second cousins who had come across each other at a family picnic.

I sighed heavily and said, “I am fifteen years old, Mother.”

She tapped my hand lightly with her fingers and, looking out the window, said, “You know, I’ve missed having a mother. It’s a gaping hole. I think having a mother is one of the great things in life—one of the only things that can save you. I’m always looking for my mother and, frankly, Kitten, it’s becoming exhausting, so I thought I’d ask you if
you
would be my mother. You just have that way about you. You’re not really what anyone would call a typical daughter, but I think you have exactly what it takes to be a mother. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

I was flattered, I was appalled, and accustomed as I was to her eccentricities, I was rendered temporarily speechless when suddenly, as if God had taken a moment out of His busy day to check in, the phone rang. I picked it up and, looking at Mother, whispered, “It’s Father O’Rourke.” She jumped up, made the
not home
gesture (a quick slash across the neck with the right hand), and pantomimed that I should hang up.

“Jeez, Mother, what’s going on?” I asked. “Are you and Father O’Rourke having a fight?” Kevin O’Rourke was the head of the archdiocese, a big, strapping Irish priest with a penchant for power, palaver, and seduction.

A long, long pause, then my mother spoke: “That’s something else you’re going to have to handle, if you’re going to be my mother.”

I shook my head in disbelief. My mother laughed. A short laugh, devoid of mirth, followed by a keening sigh. Oh, I said to myself as my heart sank, my mother’s in trouble. Big trouble.

Father O’Rourke had many names, which made him seem very important. To the community, he was Father Kevin, over drinks with my parents in the front yard he was Dave, and when Mother and I were alone together, and she needed to talk, he was Star.

“He thinks he’s a big star, Kitten,” Mother said, staring out the kitchen window, “so that will be our code for him from now on.
Star!” We laughed, thinking of all the wonderful, devious ways we could make fun of him using our secret name. My mother again looked out the window. “I could kill him,” she whispered, and then, looking at me, said, “I must be out of my mind.”

The kitchen table served not only as a confessional but as a theater. It was where everyone’s mood was on display. Food was the one common interest that both united and betrayed. It told the truth of who we were while we were eating it, and the process, though loud and unruly, was always honest. We needed to eat as expeditiously and efficiently as possible, in order to get the maximum bang for our buck. At breakfast one morning, it was puzzling to see that Tess was not eating and that she had actually pushed her plate aside and was, once again, holding her head in her hands.

“Eat your eggs, Tessie, or I’ll give them to Sam!” Mother threatened from where she stood behind the counter.

Twelve-year-old Tessie looked up, took her hands from her face, and said, “I have a headache, Mom, I told you.”