Chanel Bonfire (5 page)

Mother started sleeping during the day and walking the halls of the apartment at night in a diaphanous, white Dior negligee, smoking, with a glass of something on the rocks in her hand, trying to figure out how to lure my stepfather home.

She tried threatening divorce and he accepted. She tried suicide and he called her bluff. It was time to fold and call her lawyer.

chapter four

THE LOVE CHILD

After their Mexican divorce, and per her plan, my stepfather sold my mother the apartment in the Dakota for one dollar. She in turn sold it for a lot more and moved us and Catherine to what my mother perceived as a more fashionable side of town.

Our apartment at 1192 Park Avenue was smaller than the one in the Dakota (four bedrooms instead of six), but it was no less fancy. Fortuny silk still covered the furniture, signed first editions of Hemingway and Faulkner still graced the shelves, and the black Steinway still sat in front of the living room windows, unplayed. What did have to change when we moved was Robbie and me. Mother was now a rich Upper East Side divorcée and she required children to match. From the day we moved east, Robin and I were always dressed impeccably and often identically in Florence Eiseman dresses and patent leather shoes. We looked like all the other sophisticated
little girls in New York who attended private school, visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Natural History Museum at least twice a year, and ate at Schrafft’s with their nannies on Saturday afternoons after seeing a movie at Radio City Music Hall or taking ice-skating lessons at Rockefeller Center. We were adorable. And even when we were miserable, we were miserable in the right clothes in all the right places. That was what mattered to my mother.

Once word got out that Mother was newly single and on the market, the boyfriends started to queue up, and Catherine always seemed to be ambling over to answer the front door, smoothing the apron on her new light gray uniform Mother had made her start wearing.

There was Peter Janover, the diminutive rich boy who liked to date women taller than him and wrote down every penny he spent in a little notebook. Then there was Henry Wolf, a successful Madison Avenue advertising man whom I prayed Mother wouldn’t marry because then my name would be Wendy Wolf. There was Herb Sargent, a TV writer who used to calmly roll down the cab window and toss Mother’s cigarettes out into the street. “Jesus Christ, Herb!” Mother would screech, her aggravation making it so much more entertaining for Robbie and me—we thought Herb was hilarious. There was Joachim Uribe, whom Mother called “that crazy Mexican.” He wore a wedding ring, had a hairy back, and owned a gun. And there was Claudia Costa, a sort of Brazilian Ava Gardner who had a love child our age named Lita, with a guy in the Mafia.

Claudia shared my mother’s bed one summer in a rented house in Pound Ridge—except when Claudia’s lover came to visit, of course. We loved his visits because he would bring Lita a huge Steiff stuffed animal so big we could ride it. He had once been a dancer and could jump up in the air and turn somersaults from a standing position like one of those windup monkeys. He always did it right before our bedtime; he would jump up in the air and turn completely head over heels backward wearing a business suit. I remember the whack of his shiny shoes on the floor when he landed. We girls would clap wildly and jump up and down. Years later he was found dead by the side of the road somewhere in the Midwest, shot in the head. By that time Claudia had disappeared—it was rumored that she had taken Lita and gone to Switzerland.

These were giddy times during which the doorbell was always ringing and the flowers and the gifts never stopped arriving. We rode around in limousines and taxis late at night, looking out at the lights of Manhattan on our way home from dinner or from seeing a Broadway show. Catherine would put us to bed and we would fall asleep listening to Astrud Gilberto records playing over the low din of conversation in the living room. In the morning, we’d wake up and graze last night’s party hors d’oeuvres for breakfast. Day-old clams casino was not tasty, but Brie was easy to spread, delicious, and could, in a pinch, be eaten with your fingers. Catherine did not approve, but the evenings ended too late for her to clean up then, and there was too much to do getting us off
to school for her to tackle the overflowing ashtrays and souring cocktail glasses before we awoke. But despite her clucking over our preference for French cheese over fried bologna, and extra conflicts over our late nights and heel-dragging in the mornings, Catherine remained our much-loved anchor in the whirlwind of Mother’s new life. Her strictness and resolve to provide some kind of structure made us chafe, but drew us closer to her.

On Saturdays that winter, Catherine took us down to Rockefeller Center for our ice-skating lessons. She’d take us into the dressing room and help us put on our skates, using the big lacing hook that she’d pull out of her battered but voluminous black handbag. Catherine’s purse was like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. We were constantly surprised by its contents, which she always presented with such nonchalance: a seemingly endless supply of dainty, embroidered hankies, little boxes of raisins, a small, collapsible drinking cup, a flashlight for seeing in a dark movie theater, a sewing kit, and a big whistle on a chain.

“I’ve never seen anything so crazy,” she said, leaning over and grunting as she threaded our skates. “People running around on a floor that’s frozen.” She laughed and shook her head at the foolishness of it all.

“Thank you, Catherine,” Robbie and I both said, as she slowly raised herself up and stashed the hook back in her purse for next time.

“I’ll go wait in the restaurant, you two go to Miss Yvonne.”

Miss Yvonne was our skating teacher. She was Austrian
and had once been in the Olympics, but now in her dotage was reduced to teaching little rich children. She always wore a short skirt and a pom-pom hat like Sonja Henie in the movies and was overly cheerful in a clipped way that made Robbie and me a bit nervous.

“
Und
now, time for skating!” Miss Yvonne announced at the start of every lesson, clapping her hands up in the air like a Spanish dancer.

Catherine always sat inside the café that looked out on the rink, drinking a cup of Lipton tea, which was her favorite. She watched us while she sipped her tea, waving periodically. Afterward, in the dressing room, she rubbed our frozen feet, trying to warm them up, as we shivered.

“Did you see me?” Robbie and I both asked, even though we knew she had been watching us the whole time.

“What do you think—of course I did! Both of you looked like little dancing snowflakes!” she chuckled.

“Really?”

“Yes, lamb. Now your momma gave me money for a taxi, so hurry and put on your shoes.”

We rode home in a cab, sitting on either side of Catherine with our faces against her coat, drowsing while the city went by, happy and warm.

With a Park Avenue address, plenty of money, and her freedom, Mother had become a New York socialite. She was not, and could never be, a member of Mrs. Astor’s old-moneyed
Four Hundred, but was a part of the modern, more democratic “society” formed at the confluence of new money, liberal politics, and the arts described by Tom Wolfe as the Radical Chic. In addition to dating, drinking, and partying in all the most fashionable places, Mother and her girlfriends were to be found drinking and partying for all the most fashionable causes—campaigning for John Lindsay, visiting the leftist Puerto Rican Young Lords in their East Harlem stronghold, and raising money for world peace at Yoko Ono’s latest performance. None of them would know by looking at Mother’s Pucci pantsuit and blond flip hairdo that she had been living in a trailer park only a few years before with people who killed their own chickens for dinner. That was another world, a world my sister and I got to return to in the summers when we went to stay with our father in Minneapolis.

Although we were apart for nine or ten months at a time, Daddy sent us letters, and sometimes cassettes of him talking about his day at the theater. Listening to his deep, velvety voice, we imagined him in his apartment, sitting in the scratchy plaid armchair near the bookcase, drinking a beer in his white Fruit of the Loom undershirt after work—the edges of his face tinged here and there with makeup the cold cream failed to reach. Closing our eyes, we wished ourselves there, next to him.

Though we grew accustomed to our lives as children of the privileged Upper East Side and enjoyed many of its perks, in late spring we would begin to count down the days
until we could kick off our party shoes, get to wear jeans, and go to Minneapolis. At the end of June, we’d get off the plane and Daddy would take one look at us in our fancy frocks and Mary Janes and take us straight to Dayton’s department store (where Mary Tyler Moore throws up her beret in the introduction to
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
) to buy us play clothes: Danskin shorts and tops, and Garanimals. It was sort of a crazy version of
The Sound of Music
in which the roles were reversed. My father played Maria and saw kids who needed to have some fun, and my mother was Captain von Trapp, worried about our appearance in case the baroness stopped by for tea, or in Mother’s case, a vodka gimlet.

In Minneapolis, my sister and I would spend all day outside in our play clothes, never wearing shoes. We would bomb around with a big pack of kids, riding bikes and playing games of red rover or capture the flag that sometimes went on all day. We had a babysitter, always a teenage girl who would inevitably develop a crush on Daddy as the summer progressed, who watched us when he had rehearsals during the day and performances at night.

Once the play was open, his days were free and he spent them with us. We went swimming in Lake Calhoun, to the movies, or sometimes out to eat at the Lincoln Del, our favorite restaurant, which had spaghetti with huge meatballs that we adored.

Daddy was always clowning, making us laugh while he feverishly conducted to Beethoven blasting on the car radio, or driving a hundred miles an hour while we screamed and
rolled around giggling on the backseat. Every night before he went to work, we scratched his back and he would grimace and grunt like we were hurting him, even though Robbie and I both knew he loved it.

Sometimes he would take us to the theater with him and we would hang around the greenroom, playing pool and bumming money off the actors to buy snacks from the vending machines. I loved the smell of the theater: an intoxicating perfume of coffee, paint, and wood that to me smelled like romance, beauty, and possibility. I felt about the theater the way Holly Golightly did about Tiffany’s—nothing very bad could happen to you there.

At the end of the summer, Robbie and I would tearfully call Mother and beg her to let us stay in Minneapolis with our dad. Mother would listen to us sobbing into the receiver and then ask that we put our father on the line. They exchanged a few words, Mother reiterating the terms of their divorce agreement, and Daddy looking down at the floor, frowning slightly as he listened to my mother tell him we had to return to her.

“I’m sorry, girls,” he would say, then carefully and deliberately pack our suitcases himself and put us back on the plane to New York. He always stood at the window of the terminal, waving and smiling, until we took off. I could see the little, dark speck of his head through the small fishbowl window as the plane lifted off the ground and my sister and I cried our eyes out. The flight attendant would come down the aisle and pin on our little gold wings, the accessory of
the traveling child of divorce. They were meant to make you feel special but only made you feel even more alone and pathetic. What we really needed was some Kleenex and a hug. At least we had each other—another small hand to hold as the plane rose into the air and the other passengers stared at us, shaking their heads and wondering who would let two little girls fly alone.

The annual ritual ended in New York when my mother would unpack our suitcases and, without skipping a beat, throw out all our play clothes. Those polyester separates just didn’t fit in with our cosmopolitan lifestyle. Eloise didn’t wear Garanimals to the Plaza for tea, or to her French lesson. Of course, by throwing the clothes away, she cast aside our summer, our time with our father, and our memories, as well as her own. She did not want to be reminded of a time when she’d eaten three-bean salad and certainly not that she had liked it.