The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (2 page)

One

A flashback this morning
when I woke up: it’s my seventeenth birthday and I’m striding along Madison Avenue, hastening to meet my boyfriend.

I
knew
the excitement, the anticipation that girl felt, and in knowing, I became, for an instant, seventeen once again.

But I am not seventeen. I am ninety-one.

No longer can I stride or hasten. I was unaware that if I lived long enough, there would come a time when this would be impossible. When I was seventeen this never crossed my mind; nor did it as the years passed and I got older. I was aware that “old age” happened, but to other people, not to me. Perhaps it’s because, as a child, I did not have parents and siblings as most people do, and I didn’t experience the circling spans of life and death.

My first reaction upon reaching ninety-one is surprise. How did it happen so quickly? Am I ready for it?

If I am ninety-one, it means my time on this earth is racing to the finish line. Will I have the power to complete the race
with a badge of courage, leaving those I love with a memory of me that will sustain them and give them strength when I am gone?

Until I fell ill with influenza and asthma this year, I believed my best years were ahead. I’d been blessed with superb health all my life, so it was a shock to find myself suddenly on a stretcher in an ambulance, the sirens leading me to New York Hospital, where your father, Wyatt Cooper, was taken by ambulance thirty-seven years ago, the hospital where he died.

Asthma is a terrifying experience, like having a tourniquet strangling your throat. You choke, gasp for air, wonder, “Is this it? Is this how I will die? Please, God, or whoever you are—
not yet
.” It is a cliché, but a true one, and I understand it only now: Health is your most treasured gift. As long as you have it, you are independent, master of yourself. Illness grabs the soul. You plunge in and out of hope, fearing you will never recover. All that I have been, all that I am, all that I might become no longer exist. I am alone. Nothing can distract from the truth of this finality.

How can my body betray me when there is so much still to be done? You see, it isn’t age itself that betrays you; it is your body, and with its deterioration goes your power. You end up obsessed, entirely focused on your health, paying attention to every nuance, every ache and pain. Instead of working or
living your life, you waste your time on appointments with doctors.

Do you know the poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne?

It is no mystery where time is leading us. No secret the road we are on. Hand in hand, or fist to fist, we move forward at a snail’s pace, relentlessly bent in one direction, toward the same end.

Death.

The word leaves a smear across the page as I write it in my journal. There is no denial, no wriggling out of it. The more I try to erase it, the deeper it grinds into a smudge of black blood. There is no other truth to depend on, no other certainty. It is as inevitable as birth. Death is the price we pay for being born.

How we die is another matter. If terminally ill, we have the
choice to take our own life. Secretly somewhere inside me lies the notion that I will slip away quietly in my sleep.

There is also the vague, crazy fantasy or hope that it simply is not going to happen to me. Perhaps I inherited this indomitable optimism from my mother’s mother, Laura Delphine Kilpatrick Morgan, whom I called Naney. She stipulated in her will that two nuns sit by her open coffin in rotating shifts for the four days leading up to her burial, to ensure that her eyes did not suddenly open and that she was actually dead.

Ready or not, I know that someday there really will be no more “you,” no more “me.” And when it happens, we will be hurled into infinity with no chance of return.

But don’t worry. I am on the mend. Last night I dreamt I jumped over that dwarf planet Pluto, trillions of miles away, the one they have sent a spacecraft to get pictures of for the first time. It was a cinch.

Y
our Naney Morgan had nuns sit by her coffin for four days to make sure she really was dead? I didn’t realize you could get nuns to do that.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be ninety-one. I’m still adjusting to the idea of turning forty-eight, which I will in a few months. I haven’t told you this before, but I’ve always assumed I would die at fifty because that is how old Daddy was when he died.

My doctor has assured me repeatedly I will live well past that, but I don’t entirely believe him. The benefit of thinking you will die at fifty is that it can spur you to accomplish a lot of things at a young age, which is what I have attempted to do, but now the prospect of living longer makes me uncertain about the plans I’ve made.

Clearly, I have not inherited your Naney Morgan’s spirit of optimism. I know that, as a child, you were very close to her, but other than that I don’t really know anything about her.

I’ve always wondered why, when we were growing up, you didn’t talk about your past. By the time I was six or seven, Carter and I knew all about Daddy’s childhood on a farm in Quitman, Mississippi. He frequently recounted stories about his brothers and sisters and their large extended family. He told us about his troubled relationship with his father and his deep connection to the place where he was born, but you never mentioned your family. Did you just find it too difficult to bring up?

It never ever occurred
to me to talk to you or Carter about my childhood. My life had been scrambled, so filled with strange events and surreal subplots, that to try to lay them out would have been like combining Franz Kafka’s
The Trial
with Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
.

Also, your father didn’t have just anecdotes to tell you about
his childhood—he was a great photographer and had hundreds of pictures to illustrate whom and what he was talking about. The people in these photographs gazed into the camera, free of makeup and artifice. I couldn’t help but wonder what they would think of me if they had any idea of the chaos I had come from.

Of course, I spoke to your father about what happened to me, but trying to explain my feelings exhausted me, and all that emerged was a brief encapsulation, nothing that got to the heart of the matter.

If it was too complicated to lay it out for the man I loved, how could I even begin to translate it for my children?

I had never had the experience of talking about my thoughts and feelings. When I was a child, adults really didn’t communicate very much with children. I needed time to sort out what had happened, to understand the motivations of others that I had not been aware of as a child.

The first time I went to a psychiatrist, I was about twenty-seven. I sat down in his office, and said, “I’m here, but there’s one thing I don’t want to talk about: my mother.”

Well, that was ridiculous of course; it was exactly what I did want to talk about, as I was still fearful of my mother in many ways. It is one of the blessings of age that the fear is now gone.

I later had an extraordinary experience with a different therapist. In 1960, LSD was being heralded as a possibly miraculous
new way for some patients to delve into unexplored areas of the subconscious. My therapist asked if I wanted to try it under his supervision, and I eagerly said yes.

Even today, I can recall everything that happened in that one session as if it were a few hours ago.

I saw myself as an infant in 1925, in my crib at my father’s house in Newport, while he lay in the next room dying. I heard footsteps running through the hallways, doors opening and closing, voices signaling to each other. It was night, and I knew something terrible was happening. I could stop it, I believed, if only I could get out of my crib and go to my father, but I lay on my back in the darkness, fists clenched, unable to do anything.

Suddenly the noises stopped. The door to my room opened. Sharp against the light from the hall was the shadow of my beloved governess, Dodo, and my father’s mother, my Grandmother Vanderbilt. They drew close together as they stood whispering to each other in the silence. Screaming, I pulled myself up against the bars of the crib, still believing that if I could get to my father I could save him. Dodo picked me up and rocked me in her arms, while Grandma patted me, but I kept screaming. Yet they didn’t take me to him. I choked on my tears, unable to tell them anything at all.

What I experienced while using LSD changed my life. It enabled me to reconcile with my mother after fifteen years of
estrangement and begin to put together the pieces of the puzzle of my past.

Before you read any further, I should probably fill you in a little on my mother’s background, so you can better understand some of the events she is referring to. Much of it is new to me as well, and I had to look it up in history books, since she had never mentioned it.

My mother was born Gloria Laura Vanderbilt in 1924, into a family of tremendous wealth. The first Vanderbilt to arrive in America was named Jan Aertson. He came to the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam in 1650 as an indentured servant hoping to escape a life of poverty in Europe. He settled on Staten Island, and that is where his descendants remained for nearly a century, until Jan Aertson’s great-great-great-grandson Cornelius Vanderbilt changed the family’s fortunes forever.

Cornelius dropped out of school when he was eleven and began working on his father’s boat ferrying passengers and cargo between Staten Island and Manhattan. By sixteen, he was in business for himself, using a small two-masted schooner in the waters around Manhattan. Cornelius was a cunning businessman and eventually moved into the steamship business.

He was frugal and restless, and expanded his empire by buying real estate and, later, railroad lines, which he combined to create the New York Central Railroad. When he died in 1877, he had amassed one of the greatest fortunes of his time, worth more than one hundred million dollars, which today would be equal to about two billion.

My mother’s father, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, was Cornelius’s great-great-grandson. When he turned twenty-one he inherited millions of dollars from a family trust, but Reginald had none of Cornelius’s work ethic. Reginald liked horses, gambling, and drinking. He died in 1925 of cirrhosis of the liver. He was just forty-five, and my mother was fifteen months old.

My grandmother Gloria Morgan was Reginald’s second wife, having married him two years before his death. She was eighteen when she gave birth to my mom, and was completely unprepared to be a widow or a parent.

Like many children born into wealthy families at that time, my mother was taken care of by a governess. Her name was Emma Keislich, but my mother called her “Dodo.” She was the most important person in my mother’s young life.