Chanel Bonfire (4 page)

To keep my mother occupied and feeling useful in Minneapolis, my father found her a volunteer position at the Guthrie. He thought using her English degree and poetry-writing skills to help with a new translation of Anton Chekhov’s
The Three Sisters
would engage her and get her away from the dull routines of the housewife. The translation was being overseen by one of the theater’s founders, Oliver Rea. And he was nothing if not engaging.

Oliver Rea was a successful Broadway producer who, disenchanted with the New York theater scene, had moved his family to Minneapolis to found the Guthrie Theater, where he and Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a scion of the English stage, planned to produce serious classical theater. He came from a very wealthy, old-moneyed, socially prominent family—the kind who appear in
Who’s Who in America
and the Social Register—and had been raised by nannies on an estate. He had been all over the world, spoke French, wore cologne, smoked Gitanes, and dressed impeccably in clothes that were tailor-made for him. He wasn’t handsome but had a craggy allure and an air of mystery that my mother found fatally glamorous. He was also fifteen years her senior and married with three children. Oliver was rumored to have gambled away a million dollars before he was thirty. The first time my mother walked into his office at the theater, she was smitten; he was like a movie star or a character in a book. Mother couldn’t resist him. He was everything my father wasn’t.

While my father was working with Sir Tyrone, Jessica Tandy, Hume Cronyn, and George Grizzard, my mother began having a raging affair with Oliver Rea. Soon, everyone at the theater knew about it—except my father, who innocently would never have imagined his wife capable of such a thing.

To celebrate the successful season at the Guthrie, Oliver and his wife, Betty, gave a soiree for the entire theater company and staff at their mansion in the fashionable Loring Park section of Minneapolis. They were the sort of people who threw big, fancy parties, effortlessly, all the time, and they did it well. Everyone in town was there, drinking and enjoying hors d’oeuvres around one of the few swimming pools in the Twin Cities.

While my sister and I played in the pool with my future stepfather’s children, my father stood out on the flagstone patio with his fellow actor and friend Douglas Campbell. Dougie, a larger-than-life Scotsman, was extolling the charms of an exotically beautiful French costumer who was standing on the other side of the pool surrounded by a throng of men, when my father suddenly realized he hadn’t seen his wife since they’d arrived an hour earlier.

All I saw from the pool was my father head for the bar under an awning on the other side of the patio and refresh his drink before going inside. Apparently, after winding his way through all the imposing rooms downstairs, aggressively decorated in the old-money manner of Sister Parish with lots of chintz and antiques, my father climbed the stairs, ice cubes clinking in his glass, to locate his wife.

When my father got to the top of the landing, he heard loud voices, one of them my mother’s, coming from behind a closed bedroom door. He opened the door and walked in. Oliver and my mother were standing very close together, and he had his hands locked on my mother’s wrists. He let go of her and they quickly sprang apart. Completely bewildered, my father asked, “What the hell’s going on here?” My mother walked wordlessly past him and Oliver followed. Then, perhaps emboldened by the discovery of their secret, the lovers walked down the stairs holding hands to where the party was in full swing.

Mother cleared her throat dramatically. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have an announcement to make.” She looked rapturously at my stepfather, and it was then that my father knew what was so horribly true. “Oliver Rea and I are in love.” Mother moved close to him and took his arm.

“We are leaving here together,” my future stepfather said, gazing into Mother’s eyes.

Everybody froze mid-canapé with a scotch stuck to their hands and their mouths hanging open. Oliver and my mother glided past this frozen tableau. My father followed them outside, speechless, and watched as the lovers got into a Jag and drove off. Betty ran out of the house and up to my father. They stood there together on the sidewalk, like fire victims watching their home burn as the car disappeared into the night.

My father turned to Betty and asked, “Did you know about this?”

“Yes,” she answered with the world-weariness of a woman who knows her husband has chased most of her girlfriends around the coffee table and caught quite a few. “This has happened before. But,” she said, maybe to reassure my father and herself, “he always comes back.”

My father then noticed that Betty was trembling and soaking wet. He took off his coat and wrapped it tightly around her. As they walked back to the house, she told him about the little blond girl who had started to drown in the pool.

“I’m not much of a swimmer but I jumped in. She had sunk like a stone to the bottom of the pool, poor thing. That’s where I was when all this happened.”

My father ran through the house to the patio, where he found my sister, bundled up in blankets on a chaise by the pool, her teeth chattering, her lips blue.

Like all the other kids, I’d been having fun and was oblivious to what was happening until I saw the dark flash of a fully dressed woman jumping into the water. After Robbie was safely out of the pool, I stood there next to her, holding her ice-cold hand, both of us in a kind of shock to be surrounded by a crowd of people. When my father rushed up, I watched his face shift from bewildered dread to relief as he saw my sister, grabbed her, and hugged her.

Daddy, Robbie, and I were eating hot dogs and baked beans around the kitchen table when the phone rang. He was still
in full makeup from the matinee of
Richard III
, and I remember how strange it looked to see him answer. It was my mother. The public announcement of the affair and the uproar it had produced caused her to suffer another nervous breakdown, and she had checked into a hospital to “rest.”

She told my father that she was sorry about all of it, and she wanted to come back home. The affair was over and she begged my father to forgive her. She had been so bored, so lonely—she had even warned my father that something like this might happen if he left her alone too much. So in a way it was partly his fault for being at the theater day and night.

Daddy, although understandably shell-shocked, agreed to take her back, thinking it was best for Robbie and me to have a mother even if she was unbalanced and a faithless liar. This was the way people thought in the sixties—a mother, even a lousy one, was better than no mother at all. Parents stayed together for the sake of the children back then; his own mother and father had remained in their loveless marriage for the same reason. And so he forgave her. Mother told him she was tired of weaving baskets and making those goddamn pot holders in the recreational therapy room and could he bring her typewriter to the hospital the next day. Sure, he said, and he hung up.

The next day, we all drove to the hospital to see Mother and bring her the typewriter, but she was gone.

“She checked out with her husband,” the nurse said, looking at my dad like he was as screwy as everyone else in
the place. My sister and I looked down the empty hallways of the hospital, smelling the familiar medicinal chlorine odor.

“But I’m her husband,” he yelled at her. Robbie and I sought each other’s hands.

Mother had made a break for freedom, and if she planned to do any writing, it would have to be with a pen.

A week later, a postcard arrived from the Caribbean. In my mother’s curly, perfect Catholic-school handwriting she wrote that she was there with my stepfather, she wanted a divorce, and that the weather was warm and sunny.

Mother still had not returned when Daddy told us to sit on the sofa. He knelt in front of us and explained that Mother had decided to marry someone else. He said it was a good thing because it would make her happy. He told us the most important thing to remember was that he loved us and nothing would ever change that.

“But who are you going to marry?” I asked. I didn’t want him to be alone.

“No one right now, okay?”

I nodded and felt the saddest I had ever felt, my eyes burning with tears. Robbie said nothing but buried her face in my shoulder, most likely trying to block out what our father was telling us.

“You are going to go live in New York with your mother, and I’m going to stay here.”

I bit my lip and looked down at my hands.

“But when will we see you?” asked Robbie, her voice muffled by tears and my sweater.

“Every summer, I promise.” Then Daddy gathered us in his arms and kissed us. Holding onto his neck, I smelled the starch on his shirt collar and numbly realized that there was nothing I could do to stop this from happening.

Mother returned from the Caribbean, and my stepfather-to-be swept us all off to Manhattan. Daddy got his own two-bedroom apartment near the Guthrie. Once the divorces were final, my mother and stepfather were married in the apartment in the Dakota, which was his wedding present to her.

On the morning of the wedding, Robin and I were summoned to Mother’s room to show her the new white dresses with lace trim she had chosen for us to wear to the ceremony. I held my breath, hoping we would pass inspection. Mother was sitting at her vanity table in front of her Clairol light-up mirror in a white silk bra, pearls, and a half-slip. She was teasing her hair, which was a good six inches above her scalp, making her look as though she’d been electrocuted.

“Let me look at you.” She twirled her comb in the air as we turned in a circle.

“Good Lord, Robin, come here and let me brush your hair. It looks like chicken feathers.”

My little sister always had a look of dishevelment. Her flyaway hair and a big gap between her two front teeth made her look as if she’d been running backward through the briar patch. She usually had food on her face and looked slightly guilty, like she’d been playing with matches. She was a slob. I, on the other hand, always looked like the little girl in the
Breck shampoo commercial. My blond hair was smooth and shiny, my teeth were straight, and I never had chocolate on my face or dirty fingernails. Robbie was seemingly untouched by the prospect of Mother’s disapproval, whereas I constantly sought to avoid it. I accepted the job of protecting Robbie as a part of my role as flawless older sister. The differences between us could have been a source of conflict in our relationship, but they weren’t. It was clear even then that being Miss Perfect never gained me any points.

If Robbie’s crime was lack of grooming, mine was looking just like my father. “You look just like your father,” Mother would say, making her eyes all small and mean looking.

“Ouch!” Robbie winced as Mother attempted to tame her wild-child hair.

“All right, that’s better.”

Mother leaned toward us, opened her arms, and drew us to her. She smelled like her new perfume, which was very sweet and expensive. It even had a name that went with her new life: Joy.

“You are both very pretty.” Mother turned back to her mirror to finish her hair.

“Are we really?” I asked.

“Well, of course you are—if you hadn’t been pretty, I would have given you away,” she said casually, lacquering her bouffant with Final Net.

My sister and I looked at her, confused. Mother caught a glimpse of our perplexed faces in the mirror and smiled. “You sillies, it’s just an expression.” She laughed, shaking her
comb at us as if it were a magic wand. “Now run along and don’t get dirty.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Blushing with happiness that we had pleased our mother, Robbie and I went out into the foyer to practice our handshakes and curtsies with the wedding guests as Mother had taught us.

My mother and stepfather were married in front of the mantelpiece in the living room by a man in a long black dress who must have been someone who officiated at the weddings of people who had been married before. Mother looked radiant in a chic Oleg Cassini suit of robin’s-egg blue. Her blond hair shone like Grace Kelly’s and her beauty lit up the room. She smiled as my stepfather slid three Cartier bands on her finger—she hadn’t been able to decide which one she liked best so, of course, he bought them all.

It must have seemed to my mother as if she had finally realized the life she had dreamed about when she planned her escape from Kansas City. A million-dollar apartment in New York, servants, shows, nightclubs, shopping, and lunches with the beautiful and wealthy. But, after plucking Mother from her life as a Midwestern housewife, dressing her up at Bergdorf’s, and surrounding her with elegant things, my stepfather took off. I never knew if it was to work, to drink, or to screw—probably all three—but his intent was definitely not to squire her around.

Once again, as in her first marriage, she was alone. The apartment in the Dakota was just a more glamorous cage to
be locked in, along with the rest of my stepfather’s possessions: his autographed first editions, his cavalry sword from military school, and the signed photo of his flight instructor, Charles Lindbergh.