The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (17 page)

He had his first heart attack in 1976, then the next year he had another, more serious one. He was placed in intensive care.

When a patient was very ill, the hospital relaxed its rules and allowed children in to visit. We made plans to spend Christmas Day with him and bought a tape recorder to create a memory of our conversation. The presents were wrapped and ready to go, but on Christmas Eve he had another heart attack and was moved into a unit with dying patients.

In the days that followed, I was permitted to be by his side only briefly. Much of the time, he was unaware I was there as he gasped for breath.

One day he seemed to suddenly focus on me and said, “This was not part of my plan.”

“But you’re
not going to die
!” I shouted back.

He looked startled, as if I knew something he didn’t.

“I’m not?” he asked.

“
No.
You’re not.” And it was true. I believed it.

The next night, January 5, the doctors decided to operate.

I followed as they wheeled him down the hall on a gurney to surgery. He appeared as a man taken from a crucifixion: his body limp, stuck with needles, face unrecognizable, covered with breathing equipment.

I walked by his side, leaning in close, telling him I loved him. He didn’t know me.

During the surgery, I waited in a small private room with several friends and your father’s sister Marie and her daughter, Beth.

Angel, the nurse on the floor, put her head in the doorway as she departed her shift. “Be brave,” she said.

Hours later we heard footsteps coming down the dark, empty, silent hall. It was nearly midnight. “We did the best we could—”

I went home to wake you and Carter. “Daddy’s dead,” I said.

I
remember you sitting on the bed saying that while I looked up at you and Carter. I was sleeping on the floor nearby.

That moment, those two words, reset the clock of our lives. I think back to the person I was at eight or nine, the boy who had a mother, a father, a brother, a nanny he loved; the boy who was funny and not afraid to curl up in his father’s lap and show affection and vulnerability.

I think back to that person and know I am a fraction of who I once was, who I was meant to be. As much as I want to break out and laugh the way I once did, feel joy the way I used to, I can’t, not fully, not with the abandon that child with a father once knew.

When he died, the thought of him not being in our lives was something I couldn’t comprehend. It wasn’t just that I was ten years old and didn’t understand the finality of death. He loomed so large in all our lives, he so defined our family, that I couldn’t imagine us without him.

Many years later I was talking to my former nanny, May McLinden, about Daddy’s death. She remembered that the day after the funeral, I said to her, “It will be okay,” and she realized I didn’t comprehend what had happened.

“Nothing was ever okay again,” she said to me softly, all those years later, and I saw that she was crying.

There are times
even now when dark thoughts take over. Instead of fighting or pushing them away, I pursue each to its final destination. Entering the tunnel, I know I will circle back, as always, to the place I started from; wishing it had been me who died instead of your father. How much better he would have been at guiding you and Carter, far better than I could ever be.

Carter died at twenty-three. He and his girlfriend had recently separated. When I tried to communicate with him about the breakup, he withdrew, cut me out. If your father had been there, it would not have happened as it did. He understood your every mood and would have had the power to get you both through anything that was happening in your young lives.

When your father and I went together to parent-teacher meetings at your school, I would look around at the other mothers and marvel at how much better equipped they were to be mothers than I could ever be, how much more suited to be wives to my beloved husband.

These were thoughts I never voiced, but they were there, hidden, so painful I tried to block them, focus on being a happy wife and mother, believe that everything was going to turn out all right.

But it didn’t.

It was your father who died when it should have been me.

In my deepest heart I know this to be true. I knew this then and I know it now. I have known it since it happened, and I will know it till the day I die: a lifelong sentence with no reprieve.

I
hope you know that I do not feel this way.

If things had been different and you died and Daddy lived, there is no telling what would have happened to Carter and me. Who knows the direction our lives would have taken?

What I do know is that I’ve learned things from you that I never could have from anyone else. You opened my mind early on to the idea that I could achieve anything I wanted if I were willing to work relentlessly for it. It was by watching you that I began to imagine what my own life could become,
and I love the life I have now. I am this person because of all that happened, the good as well as the bad. I am this person because you are my mother and you lived and Daddy did not.

Sometimes in high school when I’d visit friends’ houses and meet their moms I’d wish you were more like them, more conventional. My friends had kitchens full of home-baked bread and cookies, and their mothers seemed to know everything that was going on in their lives. You didn’t cook, and you weren’t really aware of what I was doing in school or who my friends were, but the idealization of my friends’ moms never lasted very long. The more time I spent at their houses, the more smothered I started to feel.

It was then that I began to see how unique you were. You were never the type of parent to lecture Carter and me or tell us what to do or think.

From the time we were little, you treated us as if our ideas mattered. You and Daddy encouraged us to form our own opinions, and listened when we expressed them. We were not just children in your eyes; we were people who deserved respect. That was a powerful lesson.

It is remarkable how both of you included Carter and me in your lives. I recently found a photograph from the
New York Times
of me shaking Charlie Chaplin’s hand when he arrived for a party at our house on Sixty-Seventh Street. He had just
returned to the United States for the first time after many years in exile in Switzerland.

We watched his films with you both in the weeks before the party, so that we would understand who he was and what he had accomplished. I was five years old, and I remember when I met him being surprised to discover the youthful little tramp was now a white-haired man of eighty-three.

You even took us to Studio 54. Twice! I am pretty sure that was completely illegal, but it was a fascinating experience, and I’ve never forgotten it.

I didn’t know how rare it was for parents to include their children like that, and it had a tremendous impact on the person I became. It gave me confidence and a deeply held belief that I was valued and worthy.

It was through your
father that I learned what a family really was and what it meant to be a parent. Your father grew up talking nonstop about everything with his brothers and sisters and his large family, and he just naturally communicated with you both.

One summer Frank and Barbara Sinatra visited New York and were staying near us with friends, who threw a party for them. Your father and I asked if we could bring you and Carter.

“No way!” Barbara said. “This is a party for grown-ups.”

She didn’t understand that you both would have been great additions at the party. After all, you were old enough to be seated next to Diana Vreeland and Charlie Chaplin at our dinner table. Needless to say, we stayed home that night.

I
am envious of my friends who still have both their parents, but as I mentioned before, I don’t believe I would have done all the interesting things I have in my career and my life if I’d known the stability that two parents can bring.

I certainly longed for that sense of safety as a teenager. It would have been nice to have a male figure in those years. It always surprised me that none of the men you were friends with made an effort to reach out to Carter or me after Daddy’s death. I kept secretly hoping someone would come forward as a mentor or a friend, occasionally taking me out for a slice of pizza or to a movie.

It is clear to me now just how much I turned inward in the aftermath of Daddy’s death, hoping to steel myself against further losses or pain. I started keeping my thoughts to myself, never letting on how much I wished that instead of doing it on my own, I had someone who would guide me.

Did you ever think about getting married again? Many times I wished you would, though I never talked to you about it.

When your father died
, I knew I would never remarry. Sidney Lumet did come back into my life. He was getting divorced from Gail Jones, and we started seeing each other constantly—and once again became lovers. He soon asked me to marry him. I seriously considered it, but it was only two months after your father had died, and it was happening too fast.

I wish you had told me that you hoped I would marry again. It would have strongly influenced my way of thinking, my perception of the direction our lives were taking. No doubt, I would have married Sidney. He had loved Stan and Chris and would have extended himself in his devotion to you and Carter.

It really occurs to me only now that there was no man in my family as I grew up, no father or father figure. This is why, after your dad passed away, I didn’t think I needed to find a man to be there for you and Carter, but I should have sought a suitable mate capable of loving and supporting us, creating the family your dad would have wanted us to be.

I
remember when Sidney came back into your life. I liked him a lot and would have been happy if you had remarried him.

Over the years, Carter and I would meet your more serious suitors, and sing the praises of the ones who seemed stable. Unfortunately, the more reliable and steady they were, the less interested you became.

“He likes sports,” you’d say, and we knew you had soured on him.

Or, “He tells jokes,” which always meant the relationship was doomed.

Once, when I was older, I remember you described a man you were seeing as “the Nijinsky of cunnilingus.” I don’t know much about dance, but I’m guessing Nijinsky was pretty limber. I rolled my eyes at you, but you just kind of giggled and looked at me like I had no sense of humor.

“Oh, come on,” you said, laughing. “It’s funny.”

Perhaps the only thing more embarrassing than hearing about your sex life was discovering it was more interesting than my own.

Well, I do think
it’s important to have a sense of humor about sex and “this funny thing called love,” to quote Cole Porter.

Symptoms: weakness in the knees, shortness of breath, pit of the stomach flipping over, heart a whirligig twirling. Looking into someone’s eyes, about to faint, while that someone
becomes the center of your universe. Is it chemical, or the soul’s deepest search to feel complete at last?

Sometimes, unable to sleep, I count lovers instead of sheep. How far back can I go? Unannounced, troubadours emerge from the darkness, parading one after the other before vanishing once again. How fortunate I have been that I have only good things to say about my suitors. Many remained devoted friends, even those who passed like ships in the night and one to whom I bitterly regret behaving badly.

Y
ou recently read me a quote by Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead, it’s not even past.” That is true for all of us, but it seems especially so for you. Your past and present seem to coexist. The little girl being led into court by detectives, the teen dreaming in a darkened movie theater, the woman in her twenties in search of a father. You are all those people still, in addition to many others you have been.

So much of our adult lives is influenced by what happened to us as children. It is all still there, the memories, the feelings, and fears, stored just beneath the surface in the hidden crannies of our cortex.

You wanted to right the wrongs of your mother by becoming a mother; Daddy wanted to fix his father’s failures as a parent. There are echoes of your mother’s passive nature in your own youthful willingness to let strong men
determine your actions and choices. Your mother’s inability to reach out and talk to you was repeated in your own difficulties early on talking with your kids. There were echoes of your relationship with Dodo in my relationship with May. We repeat patterns without even knowing it or wanting to.

We like to think we are our own people, but sometimes it seems we are just playing out a script that was imprinted in us long ago. I’ve never asked you what happened to your mother. You said you didn’t see or talk with her for fifteen years. How did you reconnect?

After I stopped talking
to my mother in 1945, at the urging of Leopold Stokowski, I didn’t see her again until 1960.

The therapist’s session with LSD that year gave me a new perspective. Perhaps it was also the wisdom and understanding that time brings. But it was confusing. I was ready to forgive, but I wasn’t sure who I was forgiving, my mother or myself?