The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (20 page)

Had I married a man for security, without loving him, would it have made me happy? Would I have been capable of making him happy? I think not.

At my lowest ebb, an angel descended: Bill Blass, an acquaintance I hardly knew, came forth with incredible generosity, keeping me financially solvent for years until I was able to do so once again, on my own.

When my friend Nancy Biddle wrote to thank him, he replied, “Well, somebody has to.”

It astonishes me still that he would do this for me, a person he hardly knew.

What did not astonish me was the actual betrayal by Zois and Andrews. I was hurt by it, deeply, but I fought back immediately. I was trained in childhood by masters to roll with the punches. If I were walking on the street and someone threw acid in my face, it would not faze me. I don’t think I would miss a step.

I was devastated by the greed of those I trusted, but I should not have been. I learned of greed early through Naney, who watched over her stock portfolio as tenderly as she hovered
over me. For the last few decades of her life, she lived more than modestly in one tiny hotel room, a bottle of milk kept cool on the windowsill, her meager wardrobe worn for years. All the while, on the pages of her stock portfolio, a considerable fortune accumulated. Many times I tried to get her to move to a nice apartment that I was happy to pay for, but she always refused.

I adored her but could not grasp her values, her tight fist clinging to things I didn’t understand. No matter how much I tried to shower her with beauty and luxury, it meant nothing to her.

Do I have greed? Yes, but not for money, even when I didn’t have it. My greed is for beauty.

I
think I would have gotten along with Naney Morgan very well. She was practical and knew exactly what was important to her and what wasn’t. The gossiping about society people would have annoyed me because I don’t care about that kind of thing, but I love the fact that she lived simply in one room even though she had a big stock portfolio. That doesn’t sound like greed; that sounds like heaven!

No chaos, no stress, no high overhead, just money in the bank to fall back on if times get tough. That was actually a
dream of mine when I was a child, to live very simply but have money in the bank that could be used in emergencies to help those I cared about and people in need. I wish I had her discipline!

Yes, Andy, come to
think of it, you and Naney would have been a match made in heaven!

Five

In 1988, my twenty-three-year-old brother, Carter, killed himself. It is still hard for my mom and me to understand what happened. There is not a day that goes by that we do not think about his life and his death.

Carter graduated from Princeton University in 1987 with a degree in history and was working at
American Heritage
magazine when he died.

A few months before he killed himself, he came to my mom’s apartment disheveled and upset. He talked about quitting his job and moving back home, though he had his own apartment in the city. I was in New York that weekend, and when I saw him, I got worried. He had recently broken up with his girlfriend and seemed to have lost his usual confidence. He appeared scared, as if his thoughts were racing.

The following week, I returned to college in Connecticut, and Carter started seeing a therapist. He seemed to snap out of whatever funk he’d been in, and I was so relieved, I didn’t ask him again about what had happened.

We talked occasionally on the phone, but I didn’t see him again until the weekend of July 4. We ran into each
other by chance on the street in New York and went for a quick lunch together.

“The last time I saw you, I was like an animal,” he said. I was happy he could make a joke about it, and didn’t question him further. Perhaps he wanted me to, but I didn’t. I wish I had.

It was the last time I saw him alive.

On July 22 he came to my mom’s apartment once again. He appeared distracted, not to the degree he had been in April, but enough to concern my mom, who spent much of the day with him. In the late afternoon he took a nap, and at around 7:00 p.m. he woke up and walked into her bedroom.

“What’s going on?” he said, seemingly disoriented.

“Nothing’s going on,” my mom assured him.

He ran from her room and up the stairs of the duplex apartment, through my room, and out onto the balcony. When my mom caught up to him, he was sitting on the ledge fourteen stories above the street. She tried to talk to him, begging him to come inside, but he refused. A plane passed overhead, and after looking up at it, he spun off the ledge and hung from the side of the building, his hands holding on to the balcony.

After a few seconds, he let go.

I have heard it
said that the greatest loss a human being can experience is the loss of a child. This is true. The person you were before, you will never be again; it doesn’t just change you, it demolishes you. The rest of your life is spent on another level, the level of those who have lost a child.

If you are blessed with other children, you go on living to be there for them, but the loss will consume you at unexpected times for the rest of your life.

Just yesterday a moment clear as the day it happened flashed into my mind.

Carter, age six, at our house in Southampton, jumps out of the pool, exuberantly running toward me to hug me. “Mommy, I want to marry you!” he yells.

Hundreds of treasured moments: your father holding Carter as a baby, dancing around the room on a night when he couldn’t sleep, singing along to a Jobim bossa nova playing softly in the background. Carter, as a teenager, coming into my dressing room for the first time at 10 Gracie Square after we had just moved in, while, outside, fat flakes of snow swirled.

“Oh, Mom,” he said, “It’s such a hopeful room.”

And it was.

I will remember everything about him forever.

Is the pain less? No, just different. It is not something you “work through”; it is not something that goes away or fades into the landscape. It is there forever and ever, inescapable until the day you die.

I have learned to live with it. Carter died twenty-seven years ago. There are times he comes to me in dreams, appearing as he would at the age he should be now. But these are fleeting images that vanish as I try to hold on to them. Carter is not here. He has no brilliant career. No loving wife he is crazy about. No son named Wyatt. No daughter named Gloria. He . . . they exist only in memory and on this page.

I love to talk about him to his friends. Recently someone whom I hadn’t seen in a while and who knew Carter told me she thought it might be too painful for me to speak of him, and was somewhat surprised when I told her how happy it made me to do just that. It brings him to me. He is not forgotten. How proud today he would be of you and what you are making of your life.

I imagine you two interacting, not as you did as children, but today, as men. Your father is there, too. But these images fade quickly as well.

Only you and I are left. Even though I don’t get to see you as much as I’d like, because you are so busy, I do get to see you every night on a TV screen, and what better gift could a mother receive?

So thank you, God or Whoever or Whatever is in charge of things. I have no complaints.

Y
ou and I are different in how we handle grief. I know for you it’s important to talk to people. I remember in the days after Carter’s death you would tell everyone who came to the apartment what had happened. Reliving the horror over and over again helped you and I was glad something did, but I found it hard to talk about what I was feeling. In times of crisis, I grow silent. I wish I were better at talking about painful things.

After Carter’s death
, I sensed your withdrawal, which continued on into the weeks that followed, as friends came to the apartment hoping to bring solace to our grief.

I lay in bed in my room unable to stop crying, a verbal stream of details pouring out, going over it, again and again, talking about how it happened. If indeed you did actually spend long stretches alone with me, I don’t remember them.

But I knew you were in the apartment somewhere, talking with others, especially Carol Matthau, my lifelong friend, who had arrived from California. I knew this because she told me that the two of you had long conversations alone, although she kept their contents secret from me.

Although at first I was aware of your distance from me, and upset by it, soon the waterfall of tears that kept flowing from me washed away any awareness that you were shutting me out.

I wanted to die and I knew that only the stream of pain I kept going over and over and over again was what was keeping me alive.

A month after Carter died, you had to go back to school. You didn’t want to go, but I knew you should. The day you left, you gave me a letter.

“From now on we are partners,” you’d written. I felt that, too.

But soon after, you said to me, “Don’t drink.”

It stunned me that we were not as close as I had thought, that you were unaware that even though I was once again besieged by grief, I would never have turned to drinking to dissolve my pain.

I
did feel we were partners and still do, now more than ever. What I said about drinking was that I couldn’t be as close to you as I wanted in the wake of Carter’s death if you began to drink again. I didn’t think you would turn to alcohol immediately, but I feared you eventually would. If you had, it would have been impossible for me to remain close
to you. I would have shut myself off from you for my own protection.

After Daddy died, you didn’t drink for several weeks, and I thought perhaps you never would again, but then one cold winter’s day I came home from school and I could tell that you were drunk. Alcohol transformed you into another person and left me angry and feeling very alone.

You didn’t drink after Carter’s death, however, and I am so proud of you for giving up alcohol altogether.

It is strange for me to talk about this with you. For my entire childhood, this was something that was never spoken about in our house. Your drinking, occasional and unpredictable as it was, felt like a constant presence, and yet it was never discussed. How many silent dinners did I sit through pretending I didn’t notice?

You mentioned drinking as a teenager that summer in Los Angeles, when you lived with your mother, and you alluded to her drinking as well. Was that when it began for you?

Though I’d started drinking
sherry before going out on dates that summer of 1941 in Los Angeles, it was not until my marriage to Leopold that a pattern emerged. It was infrequent at first, but toward the end of our marriage I began to have spells of drinking and sobbing. The first time
it happened, Leopold was by my side, and he put his arms around me, saying, “Pray to Divine Mother,” the deity he believed in.

I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. I kept sobbing and couldn’t stop.

I lived in terror that I had inherited the alcoholism of my father. My beautiful, generous half-sister Cathleen, my father’s daughter from his first marriage, was also an alcoholic. I never even knew of her existence until I was fifteen and Auntie Ger told me I was to meet her. She had waited to introduce us, to make certain Cathleen would not drink in my company. She never did.

Episodes of drinking and sobbing came and went as thunderclaps erupting in dark night. I would pass out into sleep and awake the next morning with a headache, but no memory of why I had been crying. The waves of tears had washed me back on the shore, safe and sound, but once again balanced on the tightrope.

These episodes were never a daily occurrence. A look in the mirror at what drink and tears did to my face shocked me. (Vanity! Vanity!) I was too preoccupied with beauty to risk continuing. Purged and clear, I’d press on. But time would pass, and the pattern would repeat itself.

I needed someone to talk to, but betrayed and lied to by
Leopold, I found he was no longer the god I’d worshiped, trusted, and adored.

The fear I might lose control led me to the psychiatrist I mentioned, Dr. McKinney. Well into my time in therapy, I asked him if he thought I was an alcoholic like my father and my half-sister.

“No,” he said, “you like being independent too much.”

D
o you think Mom is an alcoholic?” Carter once asked me when we were in high school.

I was so shocked he said that word out loud that I didn’t know how to respond. We had never spoken of it before. Each of us dealt with it in silence. I was so surprised to hear him use the word that I dismissed his question, and never spoke with him about it again. Put off by my silence, he never attempted to, either.