Lies My Mother Never Told Me (23 page)

The aging literary giants got up one by one and spoke about my father and his place in American letters, and their personal relationships with him. They all spoke of his war novels, feeling strongly that they would endure.

Bill Styron read the eulogy he'd written for my father's funeral
service in 1977. It was a beautiful piece of writing, condemning the critics for their lack of foresight and their pettiness. Budd Schulberg told of meeting my father as a young man in New York, just after
From Here to Eternity
was published. But to Budd, Jim still seemed like a lost and lonely country boy, and Budd told the funny story of how early one morning, my father described the kind of woman he was looking for. “I need a girl, but not for tonight. I need a partner for life. But she has to be beautiful. It would be nice if she looked a little like Marilyn Monroe—but she has to be smart, and she has to understand writers.” Budd instantly thought of his friend Gloria Mosolino, who had been Marilyn's stand-in on
The Seven Year Itch,
and had just written a novel herself.

My mother once told me that while they were dating, my father read her book, which was about her father the Italian gangster in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. My father told her the book needed massive revisions. She put it away and never wrote fiction again.

Norman Mailer talked about his reaction to reading
From Here to Eternity
for the first time. “I truly suffered,” he said, “because it was too damn good.” He added that when he first met James Jones, he felt he'd met an extremely honest and simple man who “had the wisdom of an elegant redneck,” probably the finest oxymoron I'd ever heard. Larry Heinemann, sitting on the steps leading into the front of the room, howled with laughter at that one.

I was so pleased that Norman Mailer had come to offer such kind and generous words. Especially because he and my father had such a terrible falling-out in the early sixties that my father went ballistic whenever Norman was mentioned. It had apparently been over a nasty comment Bill Styron had made about my father's writing, which Norman reported to my father. Bill had apparently apologized profusely to my father, explaining that they'd been drunk at the time. My father had taken Bill's side in
the matter, and Norman, taking offense, wrote very nasty stuff about both of them in his book
Advertisements for Myself.

The first time I ever spoke to Mailer was at a cocktail party at Jean Stein's Central Park West apartment ten years earlier. The dining table had been pushed back to make a bar, and I was standing in the overcrowded room with my mother when Norman walked in with his wife, Norris Church.

“Shit, there's Norman,” my mother muttered. “Run!” But we couldn't run, we were hemmed in by the crowd trying to get to the bar. Norman approached us, and I steeled myself for some sort of confrontation between him and Gloria.

“Hello, Gloria. I'm glad to see you,” he said with a warm smile, holding out his hand.

“Hello, Norman,” my mother replied stiffly, taking it. “This is our daughter, Kaylie.”

He turned to me and said simply, “I loved your father. He was the best friend I ever had, and I've missed him every day of my life. Losing him was one of the worst things that ever happened to me.”

This was the tough-talking, wheedling, arrogant son of a bitch my father was so angry at all through my childhood? I couldn't believe it. Norman introduced me to Norris, and we shook hands. Her smile was kind and wide open in her beautiful face. She towered over us and had long, thick auburn hair, the kind of hair and creamy pale skin you read about in romantic nineteenth-century novels.

They stood with us in the crowded room for a long time, much longer than one ever expects at a cocktail party packed with luminaries. Norman told me that the thing he regretted most was the last exchange he had with my father. They'd run into each other at Elaine's, sometime in 1977, which must have been, Norman supposed, just before Jim died. My father was sitting at the bar, and Norman, feeling brawny, walked up to him and said, “Let's
settle this thing once and for all, Jim. Let's go outside and fight it out.”

“I can't, Norman,” my father said, “I'm sick. I've got a bum heart.”

Norman said it was the way he said it that had struck him so. There was no bravado, no self-pity, no anger in his words. Just a fact, and the total exhaustion in his eyes. Norman had not known his old friend was sick, and hadn't known what to say. So he said something foolish, like, “Well, then maybe next time.”

And that was the last time Norman had seen my father.

Now he said to me, “I'd like to make it up to you. I want to be your friend.”

“You can make it up to her right now,” my mother interrupted, “you can give her a quote for her new book about Russia.”

“Send it to me tomorrow,” he said, and searched through his pockets for a piece of paper to write down his address and phone number.

“If you give her a quote for her novel,” my mother persisted, “I swear, Norman, I'll…I'll…give you a blow job.”

Norris burst out laughing, throwing her head back, and Norman chuckled delightedly as blood rushed to my face. I started laughing too, out of nerves. When we finally parted company, I murmured to my mother, “Are you crazy? And anyway, you always said you're terrible at blow jobs.”

“Yeah, but he doesn't know that. And anyway, they know I'm outrageous and full of bluster. He knows I'm never going to give him a blow job. Look”—she pointed with her chin across the room—“Norris is still laughing.”

 

After the symposium, I was having a big garden dinner party at my mother's, catered by cousin Michael, and paid for by the Society.

Kevin and I reached home only a half hour before the guests
and hurriedly changed our clothes and walked around, making sure the house was presentable. Michael's staff was still setting up the bar and the round tables, covered in white tablecloths. Just as cars began to arrive, it hit me.
My mother
was the hostess, the one everyone turned to for amusing anecdotes and irreverent humor. But she was upstairs, lying in bed, a blank slate, with no notion of what was going on around her. I began to shake and hyperventilate. What was I going to do? For a few minutes, I felt what it would truly be like without her, and I was petrified. I had to go stand by the tall lilac bushes by myself and take deep, calming breaths. The grounds were beginning to look run-down, even though purple and white phlox and bright orange poppies bloomed all around among the weeds. Gianna found me standing there, and I could see the concern and compassion etched in the lines of her face.

“I don't know what I'm going to do,” I said helplessly.

“You're going to do just fine,” she said, and she went to find Kevin, who came quickly. He said I didn't have to do a thing, the party would take care of itself.

“The lilacs need cutting,” I told him helplessly.

“Don't worry about the lilacs. I'll cut them back tomorrow,” he said.

 

When Larry Heinemann arrived, he took me aside and asked if he could meet my mother, and I led him quietly through the bustling kitchen and empty living room.

Since the publication of his novel
Paco's Story
in 1986, my mother had kept a hardcover first edition of the book on her living room coffee table, a place of honor reserved for very few books. The publisher had sent it with a “compliments of the author” card. Larry saw the book lying there and asked if I'd put it out just for him.

“No way,” I said. “It's been lying there since your publisher
sent it to my mother in 1984.” I could tell by the look in his huge, armor-piercing blue eyes that he didn't believe me.

Paco, the eponymous narrator, tells his Vietnam tale of woe to “James,” his tone bitter and angry and full of reluctant admiration. I asked Larry what I'd always wanted to know—if the “James” to whom Paco speaks is James Jones.

“Yes,” Larry told me. “Yes, it is. But,” Larry added, “in Vietnam, the soldiers called to each other, ‘Hey, Jack!' Soon, with the war going from bad to worse, this was elevated, with exquisite irony, to ‘Hey, James!' So, ‘James' is James Jones, the quintessential World War Two writer who'd been a grunt himself, but it's also every single filthy, hard-core, buck-ass private who ever fought a war for his country.”

“God, my dad would have loved that,” I told Larry.

We climbed the steep stairs and entered my mother's room to find her sitting up in bed, all washed and brushed and looking beautiful in a pale green Indian-style caftan. She kept smoothing down the flowery blue comforter that covered her legs, a repetitive, strangely unnerving motion. Her dark blue eyes, the same color as the comforter, looked up at us expectantly, uncertain of where she was or what we might want from her.

“Hello, Mother,” she said to me in a sweet, innocent, formal, little-girl voice that chilled me to the bone.

I said, “Mom, this is Larry Heinemann, the writer. You remember
Paco's Story
? He wanted to meet you. You loved his book. You have it downstairs on the coffee table.”

Larry kneeled by her bedside and took her hand. “Gloria, I'm Larry Heinemann. I loved your husband. His work—” He took a deep breath, and suddenly choked on his words. Tears began to fall from his eyes. As his face contorted, he dropped his head, and his shoulders began to shake. I felt like I couldn't stand up and went and braced myself against the wall.

The only other man I'd ever seen cry like this was my father.
I could still picture him in our Paris living room, down on one knee, reading from his own manuscript, as tears dripped down his cheeks. And the time he showed us the poor Japanese soldier's wallet. And once, listening to a recording of Robert E. Lee's great-grandson reading the great general's surrender at Appomattox, my father sat down, hands on his knees, and began to shake, his face contorted, tears streaming, just like Larry.

I slid down to the floor, knees to my chest, and sat there with my back against the wall, unable to speak. My mother looked toward me, her eyes afraid, questioning. What is it you expect me to do? her expression seemed to say. The three of us remained like that, not speaking, for what seemed like a long time.

“Well, then…,” Gloria said lightly, her hands continuing to stroke the blue comforter. “Well, well, well…” Her downcast eyes seemed to have discovered some new and fantastically interesting pattern in the weave.

A moment later, Nurse Linda walked in. Larry stood up, breathed deeply, ran his hand roughly over his face, and I slowly got back on my feet. Downstairs, Larry led me straight to the garden bar under an ancient hops hornbeam tree and ordered a bourbon on the rocks. “What'll it be?” he asked me.

“I can't drink,” I said. “I'm a drunk. If I drink, I'll end up just like my mother, but much faster.”

“Well then I'll drink for both of us,” he said, and asked the bartender to make it a double. The smell of bourbon—a liquor I'd never liked—wafted up my nose and ignited my taste buds, and I suddenly wanted a drink very badly. The white wine the bartender was pouring suddenly looked very crisp and appealing. Maybe just one glass…But who the hell was I kidding? I wanted a whole fucking bottle of vodka, not one nice, crisp glass of white wine.

My mouth went suddenly dry, and I didn't know what to do with my hands. Then I heard Eyrna's high-pitched laughter re
verberate off the big, leafy hops hornbeam tree behind the bar; I turned toward that lighthouse of sound, and like a person navigating through a dense fog, made my way toward the new swing set in the back garden. As I came around the house corner, I saw Kevin pushing Eyrna in her bright yellow sundress and pantaloons and matching canvas sneakers, high up into the darkening air alight with fireflies.

After a while, my mother was drawn downstairs by the tinkle of ice in glasses and the general commotion. She floated out to the porch and sat next to Joe Heller on the swing that hung by thick chains, and he held her hand, patting it gently, as if she were a child. I was reminded of an evening many years before, when Joe Heller had tried to fix my mother up with his close friend, Mario Puzo, who had recently been widowed as well. “You're both Italian, he's a writer—what could be better?” said Joe, and he set up their date, even accompanying them on it.

I came home late from an evening at a local bar and found the three of them in the living room. My mother, sitting regally in a hard, tall-backed Spanish chair of carved, dark wood, was holding Mario Puzo's hand, who sat at the very edge of the couch, as if he were about to fall off. My mother was crying (which meant she was completely plotzed, for she never cried), and Joe Heller, their silent chaperon, sat at the other end of the room, sadly shaking his head.

“You're very sweet and charming,” my mother said to Mario Puzo, “but I still love my husband, you see. And he was a much better writer than you.”

Now, pale and luminous, she looked around at her oldest and dearest friends, and seemed slightly calmed and comforted by the familiarity of their faces. Yet, she was strangely disconnected from her surroundings, as if she were a ghost wafting through her own house. Joe Heller continued to gently pat her hand, calmingly, as if he understood exactly what she needed. It occurred
to me for the first time that they were all silver-haired now, their beautiful, intelligent faces lined by hard-earned experience and the ravages of time.

 

Some weeks after the party, Gloria suddenly came to, sitting on the low wicker couch on the porch, and there, before her, was a curly-headed baby face peering up at her.

“Eat, Gammy, eat!” Eyrna had taken the chewed piece of chicken nugget out of her own mouth and was pressing it to her grandmother's lips.

My mother's eyes snapped into focus, as if some switch had been flicked on. “Okay.” She took the soft morsel into her mouth and made an effort to chew and swallow, looking into the golden eyes of Eyrna.