Kinsey and Me (23 page)

clue

I
N THE WINTER
of 1959, my mother spent five days with me in Charing Cross. Peter and I had moved
into the little house on Carousel Lane with all our matching Danish modern furniture
and almost a year of marriage behind us. We were waiting for the birth of our first
child, trapped for the Christmas holidays in a small southern college town emptied
of students. It was a dreary season.

The snow had piled up silently in a patchwork of soot and dog urine and the world
plodded patiently through it. Nights came early and the skies were pearl gray with
clouds. We were bored with each other, bored with the B-grade movies at the State,
bored looking for a bootlegger in a dry county, bored waiting for the baby, already
one week overdue. We talked, watched television, smoked, and thought of home. I did
not even know I was unhappy.

Vanessa came, with her birdlike energy and incessant chatter. She’d stopped drinking
the summer before. I don’t remember now what crisis precipitated the abrupt end to
her long and intimate relationship with alcohol. She’d been hospitalized. There was
an intervention of sorts—nothing formal or staged. Some combination of threats and
dire warnings got through to her and she quit cold. During the six months she’d been
sober, she’d begun to complain of pain on the left side of her jaw. The family doctor
and an ear-nose-and-throat specialist found nothing and we wrote it off as hypochondria,
a burgeoning need for attention that seemed like a small price to pay. The pain was,
in point of fact, a smoldering ember of esophageal cancer catching fire in her throat,
but the diagnosis wouldn’t come for another month. For me, there were a few false
labor pains. How irritable I was, grotesque and clumsy. It is the evenings I remember.
The house was full of light, sealed off by the chill of December, isolated, close.
We sat in the warm green of the living room, playing children’s games. One was a Perry
Mason detective game with little plastic cars, symbolic criminals, and dice. There
was a maze of paper streets, cardboard city blocks through which we ran, inch by inch.
And we played Clue with its secret list of suspects, the tiny plastic weapons and
the floor plan of a house.

“I believe the murder was committed by Mr. Black in the billiard room with the . . .
let me see, oh yes . . . the rope.”

“Very clever, Peter. Your dice.”

Over and over again, Clue and Perry Mason, television, the hands of gin rummy, naps
and false contractions, the constant flow of conversations which had no beginning
and no end, no rise, no fall, only words as level and as stale as the snow outside.
The year dragged its feet like a sulky child and we could not escape the weight and
pull of time.

We experimented with tea. It was the twilight ritual. There were five different kinds
in all: Jasmine, Formosa Oolong, Gunpowder Green, Earl Grey, and English Breakfast
tea. They came in metal cylinders, probably only an ounce or so in each, given to
me by Vanessa as a Christmas gift. We prepared the tea in a squatty china pot, white
with a pattern of floral blue. The cups were thin and they sat unevenly on hand-painted
saucers. Boiling water, a strainer, one rounded teaspoon of leaves. We debated them
one by one. Jasmine with its heady fragrance, its biting taste, a pale yellow tea
with a gentle debris in the bottom of the cup . . . Formosa Oolong with its taste
of curio shops and cheap silk . . . English Breakfast tea, flat to the taste and tawny . . .
Earl Grey with its smoky flavor, Gunpowder Green, which was sharp and unpleasant.

She left before the week was ended. She had come to see me through Christmas; she
would return when the baby was born. I remember her cheeks, downy, patterned with
surface veins; the way she closed her eyes when she laughed and the faded cap of hair.
She went home on the Greyhound bus, smiling at us through the window in a pantomime
of good-byes. She was wearing her gray fur coat and a cotton scarf on her head, nodding
and chatting to us through the tinted glass . . . another of her endless stories . . .
talking and smiling, talking and saying good-bye. And God! the guilt of the moment
afterward . . . that I was relieved to see her go.

night visit, corridor a

A
T FIRST, YOU
think you’re in the wrong room. You’re nineteen and you’ve flown to New York to see
your mother after her surgery. Your luggage has been lost, sent to La Guardia on the
plane you missed, so that you arrive in the city strangely free. You check into the
St. Regis Hotel and then you take a taxi to Memorial Hospital through streets grown
dark, in a month that is bitterly cold in a city you love at once because it is vast
and unknown to you. You pay the driver and you stand for a moment on the sidewalk.
The hospital itself is massive and old. The concrete steps look ancient and drab and
the lamps on either side are turn-of-the-century wrought iron with milky globes. It
is a building alive with light and you view it with the same sense of mystery and
excitement you feel for all hospitals. They represent a kind of freedom to you. Your
mother has spent many hours there and so have you and by now, a bond has been formed
between you and the sight of that concrete world with its miles of brown corridors.

You climb the steps and move into the lobby through revolving doors. The whole of
it reminds you of some elegant hotel, a very exclusive club to which you have gained
access through your mother’s suffering. It seems odd to you that she’s come so far
to suffer when she suffered so well at home, but this, you learn, is a special kind
of suffering in which you can only participate indirectly. You inquire at the desk
and you’re given the number of her room and the floor she’s on. You go up in the elevator,
feeling strangely that you’re moving back in time. For a moment that puzzles you and
then you remember that you’ve seen the city before, or a version of it anyway, in
a book of Peter Arno cartoons depicting the war years in New York. That same feeling
pervades, from the gray night outside to the charcoal lines of the building; a sense
of simplicity, a sense that something somewhere is remotely funny if you only knew
the reference points. The elevator is exactly like the ones in old, respectable department
stores and you add that notion to the other notions in your head.

By the time you reach your mother’s room, you feel disoriented so that you’re not
exactly surprised to see the stranger in her bed. You cannot immediately connect this
woman with your mother though you notice, almost at once, that she’s as thin as your
mother is and lean in the aching way of alcoholics. This woman is sober though, with
a long blank face and a cleft chin, a flap of gauze across her throat and a look in
her eyes that chills you when she turns. It’s Vanessa. The sight of her alarms you,
like a nightmare, because so many parts of it are familiar that you have to struggle
wildly with the rest. Trembling, she gets out of bed and reaches to embrace you, pantomiming
joy, surprise. She has not known you were coming and she acts out her amazement. She
reaches for her Magic Slate and scribbles a message to you—simple, angular writing
more familiar to you than the sight of her face. You laugh and chatter, light up a
cigarette and smoke and all the while you register what has been done to her.

The catalog of change is fearful, horrifying. They have cut down through her lower
lip, through her chin, and across her throat, a razor-thin incision that curves up
along her left cheek. They have taken away her vocal cords and most of her tongue.
They have left her a hole in her throat through which she breathes. She motions to
you that she wants a cigarette but when she tries to puff at yours, she can’t even
draw smoke. The flap of gauze at her throat moves ineffectually and she acts out her
disgust. A pack and a half of cigarettes a day for twenty years are probably responsible
for the cancer, but you can’t help admiring her spunk. She has written you in a letter
that she was angry that she survived the surgery and you can see why. She has no sensation
in her lower lip, can taste nothing, and she tells you, as though it were a bother,
that the stump of her tongue makes her feel that she’s constantly choking. Still that
valiant little body of hers, after years of abuse, has resisted this staggering blow.
The day after surgery, she was sitting up, watching television, writing notes on her
Magic Slate, jokes about her “face-lift.” She has learned since then how to change
her own bandages, how to suction mucus from her windpipe, how to insert the tubes
through her nose three times a day for her liquid meals. She tells you, in silent
detail, how she’s had a wisdom tooth removed on top of everything else and she’s tickled
about it, pantomiming
What next?
with a shrug.

It’s odd to talk to her this way. Your own voice sounds loud and the messages you
give her seem not to the point. You tell her about the flight, the loss of your luggage,
of your room at the St. Regis which looks out on that blazing city. Her room is high
up too, she says, but the view is different. She asks you about Peter Blue and your
baby, a girl only eight weeks old, and together you think back to that January night,
before all this, when she was whole and sat with you through labor.
You see?
you say to one another mutely with your eyes, all the best things have happened to
us in places like this, all the best things have come to us just this way. And you
know that the whole of your relationship probably has to do with holding hands in
rooms no bigger than this, in cities no better known to you than the one where you
now reside.

So you hold her hand and watch TV and you try not to think what it means, her life
or yours. At ten, when you leave to go back to the hotel, her eyes fill with tears
and you hug her briefly. Oddly enough, you try not to care because caring is too painful.
The caring is made up of things you can’t deal with yet, things you won’t understand
or accept for a long time to come. So you kiss her good night in a quick way and promise
you’ll be back by morning. She walks with you as far as the nurses’ station where
she introduces you, mutely and proudly, to the nurses sitting there.

The elevator doors slide open and you step inside, turning then to look at her once
more as the doors slide shut. And you understand in that moment how like a prison
this place is also, how like a prisoner she is, shut away now in the captive silence
of her head. And you understand that she’s always been this way, locked away from
you, locked away from life. And you know that death is the only way she can ever be
free.

You go out to the street, out through the glass revolving doors to the bitter cold
beyond. An icy March wind whistles down the deserted street and the night stretches
out before you, stark and chill. A taxi pulls up and you step inside, glancing back
at the hospital once as you close the door.

april 24, 1960

T
HE PHONE RINGS
and you say, “I’ll get it,” moving into the downstairs hall to the telephone stand.
Peter Blue, who’s been your husband for a year and a half, is sitting on the couch
in the living room watching a baseball game on TV. It’s a Sunday afternoon and he’s
drinking beer, bent forward slightly, elbows on his knees, chin propped on one fist.
From time to time, almost idly, he lights a cigarette. He’s excited by baseball games,
which he watches most weekends while you sit, not quite involved, but hoping to be.

The phone rings again and you take up the receiver, glancing as you always do at the
photograph of your older sister which hangs there on the wall. The picture was taken
when she was six. She stands, smiling broadly, hands at her sides, wearing a light
wool coat. Her hair is arranged in long dark ringlets to her shoulders and her two
front teeth are missing. Whenever you see the picture, you remember the story that
goes with it, of how you were meant to be there, too. You were three at the time and
frightened of the photographer who’d been out hunting squirrels. When he came to the
house with the gun, you believed he meant to shoot you, too, and you wept so hard
you were not allowed to stand there with her on the steps.

“Hello?” you say, and your father’s voice comes through the line.

“Hello, Kit?” he says, his voice tilting up with uncertainty. “This is Daddy. Oh,”
he says, and he sighs then before he goes on. “I just thought I better call and let
you know. Vanessa died a little while ago.”

“Are you all right?” you ask him, not knowing what else to say.

“Yes, I’m all right. I’m just waiting here for Dr. Belton.”

“Do you want me to come down to the hospital?” you ask.

“Oh, no, that isn’t necessary. He’ll have to sign the death certificate and then I’ll
be home. It shouldn’t take long. They’ve put in a call for him now.”

“Do you want me to do anything?”

“No, just tell Del for me if you would. We’ll talk more about it when I get home.”

“All right, Daddy. We’ll see you soon then.”

“All right, that’s fine. Bye now, sweetie,” he says, and his voice holds ever so slightly
the tremor of tears locked away.

Del stands at the head of the stairs and you see her now as you set down the phone.
She’s twenty-three and a long way from the girl in the photograph.

“Vanessa died a while ago,” you say.

“Well,” she says, “did Daddy say when he’d be home?”

“Pretty soon he said. He’s waiting for Dr. Belton now to sign the death certificate.”

“Well,” she says again, “I’ll be down in a minute.”

You move back to the living room and tell Peter Blue that your mother has died and
you sit down with him on the couch and watch TV for a while. It isn’t that you don’t
care. It isn’t that the death doesn’t give you pain. You wished her dead many times
and you’ll have to deal with that in the years to come. For now, you simply don’t
know what to do with the death. And Peter Blue doesn’t know. He tries a consoling
pat to your shoulder but you haven’t asked for that and you shrug him off. You don’t
even know, in that moment, how annoyed you will be with Peter Blue for offering all
those wrong gestures and all those conventional sentiments when you’re struggling
so hard with the fact of Vanessa’s death. His clichés are just a distraction, just
an impediment to the pain which you reach for tentatively in your head. You can’t
even tell him why he’s wrong to pat you that way and you have to pretend you’re simply
shifting positions on the couch.

By and by, your sister Del comes down and sits in Vanessa’s rocker nearby and the
baseball game goes on, a tableau of men on a field of gray. For a while you take refuge
in the sight. Del lights a cigarette and so do you and the silence in the living room
is peopled only with the sounds of shouting fans. The announcer tells you what is
taking place but it’s all the same to you. You don’t even know which teams are playing
and you doubt that you’ll ever care anyway. You’re twenty years old today, on this
Sunday when Vanessa’s elected to die. You add the fact of your birthday to the fact
of her death and you think what a strange anniversary that will be next year, what
an odd celebration, birth and death. Both have been a freedom to you—both have set
you free but you won’t understand the freedom any more than you’ll understand your
own life for a while yet.

Upstairs, there are two babies sleeping, your daughter and Del’s son, and Del’s husband,
Andy, will be home later in the day from a visit with his mother, who lives next door.
Your life is crowded with people upstairs and down and you’d like to get away from
them. The need to be alone is the same need you felt when your daughter was being
born and you lay on a hospital bed for two days, thinking, God, go away, just leave
me alone to bear this pain in peace, just leave me alone to call out if I must, to
cry. But you sit there on that couch with your sister and Peter Blue and you all avoid,
at any cost, the mention of death as though it would be out of place. You’re all pretending
the baseball game is real, that Vanessa’s death is the game you can shut off at will.
And you wonder, sitting there, who won Vanessa’s life and you feel a faint moment
of relief, not knowing yet that the loss is yours, too.

After a while the babies wake, and you have to take care of that: the feeding, the
bathing, the changing of diapers, feeling with your daughter just what you felt with
Peter Blue, that hint of annoyance that she’s intruded on your grief, a hint of dismay
at finding yourself a mother to her when you haven’t recovered yet from being a daughter
to the one who died. It’s very complex, this life of yours, full of strangers who
make demands; a husband and baby who want you to be someone you’re not ready for.
And a nagging voice says, You did it—you chose this life and now you’ll just have
to bear it—you’ll just have to bear what has to be borne. But you won’t, of course.
The fact of Vanessa’s death will change all that in a way you never dream of, hugging
your daughter tightly as you do.

In the meantime, your father comes home looking tired and he talks in a weary way
about her death, about how he sat by her bed while the nurse left the room, about
how she died in the space of a breath before the nurse returned. You had sat there
too, by that bed, and you know what it was for him, to sit there with her, holding
her pale white hand, the fingers as cold and as unresisting as the empty leather fingers
of a glove. You know what it was to listen to her breathing, counting once and twice
and then pause and counting once and twice again. Now and then her breath would come
quite softly, like a sigh from someplace far away, a sleep too far down for her to
come up again. She would die. You knew that then, when you sat with her, and in some
ways you knew it better then than you do now. Now, in this house, with the babies
to be fed, with dinner to be managed and the long-distance calls to be made, with
Peter Blue smoking cigarettes, saying all the wrong things—now Vanessa’s death seems
less than real.

And later when you get in bed and the day is done, later when you think you’ll have
a moment to yourself, later Peter Blue is asking in that absolutely silent way of
his if he can make love to you. And you think, Oh Peter Blue, you are so damn dumb,
you are so insensitive. But you married the man because he was normal and now that
burden is yours, too. And you say to yourself, He means well—he means to comfort me,
and the same voice says, He’s dumb anyway.

“Just leave me alone,” you whisper harshly to him in the dark and he creeps away and
you cry then to yourself without a sound, as much for his being dumb as for her death.