The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (21 page)

Your drinking made it difficult to trust you. I never knew what I would find when I came home from school each day. I dreaded going anywhere with you, worried that you might start drinking: on planes, at restaurants, parties. The person you became scared and angered me. I was never sure if you were aware of what you were doing. I assumed you were, but I didn’t know.

The day after you’d drunk too much, it would be as if
nothing had happened. It added another element of danger and fear to our lives, and contributed to the feeling that we were somehow adrift. Even now, typing this out, I feel that fear. I can remember it and realize I have spent much of my adult life making sure I never feel that way again.

It means the world
to me that you have come to trust me enough to express the feelings you have accumulated over the years about my drinking episodes. I can only imagine the courage this took. It is more than brave, considering the close relationship we now share.

It has been twenty-seven years since Carter’s death, and despite all the difficulties I have faced since then, I no longer have an issue with alcohol. At ninety-one, my liver and heart are healthy, as they have been throughout my life, and instead of an alcoholic, I am a workaholic.

As for the years before, I am sorry for the times I disappointed you as a mother. My flaws are rooted in things that happened way back in the beginning, as they are for most people, and I hope that knowing me now as you do, you understand where they came from, and can find it in your heart to forgive me.

You have proved, by your life and what you have made of yourself, that you have triumphed over whatever shortcomings I may have had as a mother.

Recently you asked me, “Do you think you are like your mother?”

I told you that I never really knew her, so how could I answer?

Well, the answer is, perhaps I am.

I
don’t view these things as failings, and I certainly understand their roots, more now than ever. As I said, I am very proud of you. I certainly don’t think you are like your mother now. Perhaps you once were. How could you not be, even though she wasn’t involved in your life? But you forged your own path, and broke the cycle that was set in motion long before you were born.

You have done so much with your life, touched so many people. You are open and honest, and you can reach out to others in ways your mother never could.

We have never spoken
of forgiveness, and I have no knowledge what your thoughts, or doubts, if any, are on the subject, but I still smile thinking of the line from the Lord’s Prayer, which Dodo taught me and which I’d repeat every night kneeling by my bed before jumping in to sleep, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

I hadn’t a clue what it meant, but today I understand, and although it has preoccupied most of my life, I’ve at last come to know that forgiveness is much simpler than I could ever have imagined: whatever problem you have with someone, project yourself into the other person and see it from their point of view.

When you do this, good and evil shuffle into patterns and you are capable of forgiving trespasses. When you understand from whence the good or evil came, and the other person’s actions or motivations, only then can you forgive and let it go. Most children believe that trauma, death, or divorce happen because of something they have done, though they don’t understand exactly what; they think it is their fault. I certainly believed I was to blame for all that happened when I was a child. I felt guilty about the custody battle between my mother and Auntie Ger, even though I couldn’t understand why. I also thought it was somehow my fault my mother was branded a lesbian.

It was difficult to let go of that. It took me years to understand and forgive her for the pain she caused and to forgive myself for the crippling guilt that has been with me all my life—guilt that has hung over me from the time I found out my father died an alcoholic at forty-five, and my half-sister Cathleen at forty of the same disease.

Finally I figured it out. It was not my fault. I wish it had been different, but I did what I could, as we all do with situations that are handed to us.

At best, I no longer agonize intensely as I did over my failings or the failings of others. I accept them. At worst, I have to admit that somewhere within still lurks a demon of rage. Age makes it impossible to put right the things that went wrong. There is little time left.

I
’ve never heard you mention the demon of rage before. It surprises me, because I have often felt that I, too, am fueled by rage, and I have only ever told a few people that.

It is not the “rage to live” you wrote about before, but rage at the unfairness of losing my dad and Carter. It is like a hot furnace that fuels a ship across the sea, but this rage requires no tending; no one needs to stoke its coals. It burns continuously, powering me forward through calm seas and rough.

Yes, it is different
from the “rage to live,” but perhaps connected in some way. For me it is rage over much of what happened. Rage at my mother for instigating the custody case against Auntie Ger. Rage at the position I was put in as a child. Had she not done that, and let me stay with my
aunt, so much would have been different. I became a pawn in a battle that never should have taken place.

I have no respect for those who harbor self-pity and I have none of it in reference to myself, but the rage is there, burning hot, deep in my core.

I
understand now how little I knew you when my father died. I always thought that you and I didn’t have much in common and that I was just like him. The fact that he and I looked so much alike made it easier to believe we were so similar.

“Buddy, that boy is the spittin’ image of you,” his sisters used to say when he would take Carter and me to Mississippi. I’m sure it was irritating for you to hear that, as if you didn’t have much of a role in the matter.

I see now just how much like you I really am, how similar we are and always have been. It makes me feel so much closer to you.

I may look like my dad, but I am most definitely your son. We share the same drive and determination, the same restlessness and rage. It is good to know you’ve felt these things, too, and to see how they have both helped and hindered you.

To quote Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
“I love you in ways that are infinite and as in eternity have no beginning or end.”

But are we alike?

Sometimes I think hardly at all. You are the living image of your father, not only in appearance, but in valuing the same standards he held in high regard, standards that are sometimes hard to live by.

Other times, yes, we are indeed completely alike. We share sensitivity, tempered by poise and the reserve to reveal only what we wish to communicate.

We have the gift of editing, presenting ourselves in different ways to different people. We are not gossips. We are worthy to be trusted with secrets of family and friends. We have fun going to the movies together, sharing a bag of popcorn. We do not burden each other with trivial troubles, or pull each other down with unsupportive comments. We advise each other on pressing matters from time to time, and you always give me a short, sensible, well-thought-out solution to any problem. I try to respond in the same manner.

We both spend a lot of time organizing our lives, secretly working out various options and scenarios in our heads. Luckily,
yours are far more practical, and more likely to become reality than mine, which continue to be influenced by the enchanted fairy tales I read as a child. In spite of this, I treasure those fairy tales still, for they are, in large part, what spur my creativity.

We share a restless spirit; in fact, we are never at rest, and rarely, if ever, will anything satisfy Andy and his mom. Soon something beckons. It’s there, around the corner, just out of sight. All we need do is follow.

All my life I have craved and longed for love, and I have not been deprived; my cup hath runneth over, but it was never enough. It never got anywhere near where the trouble really was: no mother and father, as my secret sister Susan Sontag knew about so well.

Here, Andy, thankfully, we are not alike. Even though you lost your father when you were ten, you knew that there wasn’t a moment from birth when you didn’t have and know his support. How fully, completely, he loved you and Carter. Although only those years were given, they were enough for him to pass on to you the values that have made you the person you are: my son, treasured each moment of my life.

Y
ears ago I asked how you made it through all the traumas in your life.

“I had an image of myself: that at my core there was a rock-hard diamond that nothing could get at, nothing could crack,” you said.

It was not a boast. It was a statement of fact. The words were tinged with sadness.

Do you still feel you have that rock-hard diamond in your core, or has that changed with time?

As death approaches
, I no longer imagine a diamond at my secret core. Instead, I see shimmering flashes of moonlight on the calm of a midnight sea.

A voice calls across the water, “Forgive me.” It is my voice, but I am not speaking to “Our Father, who art in heaven.” I’m calling out to those I have hurt. They know who they are. I pray they forgive me, as I forgive those who have trespassed against me.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” the words I banished so long ago, now come foremost to my mind. For me, this has nothing to do with the confessional, but with an acknowledgment of the mistakes I have made. You may find, as I have, that the longer you live, time becomes a giant jigsaw puzzle,
with the missing pieces not only unexpectedly discovered, but sliding into place, irrevocably and finally, as
B
comes after
A
in the alphabet. Even if it’s too late, alas, to rectify every mistake, what matter the bitterness or regrets? I have found solace in living long enough to understand and forgive the person I once was.

I couldn’t have written that thirty years ago. That is one of the things I like about being older. It frees you in many ways. With time, I have come to understand why things happened the way they did, and that has allowed me to forgive myself.

But it is painful, because when you reach this point in life, you know the years left are numbered and there isn’t any going back. There is nothing I can do to change what’s already happened.

Omar Khayyam wrote that, and he was so right. That is what is difficult about getting old: that finger has already written; you are stuck with it. It doesn’t stop me from trying, however. One of the most unexpected things that is happening as
I age is discovering that relationships with those I have loved and lost have changed. It is somewhat like rewriting a story.

The mother I feared has in memory become the exquisitely beautiful woman whom I longed to get attention from as a child. Today I am fulfilled as I pass by her portrait hanging in my living room; she is here now, though she wasn’t there then. That is good enough for me.

Dodo, whom I truly loved and who was always there for me, is now, alas, not. It ended tragically, and there remains a scream of silent pain, but she is here in photographs and letters written to me over the years. It must suffice.

And last but not least, Naney Napoléon, mastermind behind the scenes of the whole, terrible mess that affected the lives of those she truly did love. Her “rage to live” was a passion for money and society, not something I admire, but no matter. I love her as I did then, and always will. I say to her now, as she often would say back then, “You are my own flesh and blood.”

Six

S
ometimes as a child I would see a shadow of sadness pass behind your eyes, and there are moments I see it still. After all we have talked about this year, I have a much better idea where that shadow comes from.

Did you know that after you speak, you often silently repeat the words you have just said out loud?

I used to wonder why you did this, but now I understand. You are reviewing what you have just said, replaying it in your mind. It is a sign of how lost in thought you often are, even in the midst of conversation with other people.

We are very similar in this way, but I am usually lost in thought thinking about the future, and you are reviewing moments from your past. I wish sometimes we could break out of ourselves and just be in the present, but it’s not easy for either of us.

Since we’ve started communicating
like this, I hope we will be able to do that, but you are right, I tend to replay moments from my past, imagining how they might have been. Some experiences are more real for me when I play them over in my mind’s eye than when they first occurred. Of course, it would be better to be in the scene originally, to “be present,” as you say.

This replaying of scenes from my past is one of the side effects of aging. It occurs rarely in younger years when time is speeding by, something new happening every minute. Now when I remember a painful scene from the past, I reconstruct it from another point of view, to make it bearable. I re-edit it, changing the outcome so the story has a happy ending, but sometimes I become overwhelmed and just have to stop.

Do you do reconstruct scenes from your past?

I
think about events that have happened—it’s impossible not to—but more often than not, I am imagining scenes from the future, unknowable as that future may be. I am always planning, preparing myself for what comes next, and what may come after that, and after that. I find looking backward too painful; there is no reinventing the past for me.

I have drawers full of photographs, snapshots from my childhood, and I keep telling myself that someday I will go through them, but I haven’t yet. It’s as if I’m compiling evidence, as a reporter gathers facts for a story, but for now I find it too difficult to open the drawers.

Well, I wish
I’d had the foresight to consider the future as you do. The idea that I would ever be ninety-one never had any reality for me. It was inconceivable. If it had ever entered my mind, I naively wouldn’t have thought it
would be all that different. Wow, what a surprise. It certainly is different. No more swinging on the trapeze, no more running up and down stairs, lots more contemplation.

Once upon a time, long ago, women made up charming fantasies about themselves and fibbed about their ages. Until the day she died, Naney skillfully sidestepped the reality that she was eighty-six years old. It was a harmless preoccupation to hold time at bay.

There is something touching about the idea, the trusting hope that it is indeed in our power to control what is happening to our faces, our bodies. Today we can delay the decline, but the inevitable lies ahead. Inside, however, in our core, past the aches, pains and creaking joints of age, youth still resides. Keep that in mind.

As I write this, I am stretched out on a sofa. Flakes of snow drift past the arched windows of my living room. As I look back at my life, I become once again an acrobat on a tightrope, poised, suspended. I close my eyes and take a deep breath. But as I breathe out, I am no longer an acrobat. My life no longer depends on balance. I am free. I am nearly ninety-two, but at this moment I feel ageless.

D
o you think about death a lot? Over the years, you have talked to me about dying many times. Plenty of people say they don’t want to be a burden, or may discuss a living
will or a “do not resuscitate” order with their children, but you have always been a bit more, shall we say, detailed?

You have talked about ending your life on your own terms—taking pills if you were no longer able to enjoy your days.

This used to make me nervous, but the more death I have seen over the years, the more I know that no one can predict how he or she will react as it approaches. In the abstract, people talk about how they want their lives to end, but as the time nears, and the reality becomes clearer, their perspective changes.

This morning I woke
up thinking I could have died in my sleep. Instead, here I am ready to go, “Up and at ’em.” Over my first cup of coffee it came to me that life starts out as a straight line moving upward, but as we age, it starts curving down ever so slightly, then faster and faster as the years pass, merging into a full circle at death, completing the journey from where we began. No matter how we plan ahead, there is no certainty when the curve will complete itself. It can, might, will at any instant. (Yes, even before I finish my coffee or this next sentence I could die.) No matter what our age, death is not in the distant future. It is here in this present moment, right now, alive and waiting. Accepting this fact puts a different light on how I think about death, and I wish I had become aware of this sooner.

Despite Botox and so on, time is not reversible. It has been marching steadily on since the moment we are born. “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching!” No secret the destination.

Woody Allen wrote, “Rather than live on in the hearts and minds of my fellow man, I’d prefer to live on in my apartment.”

Well, here I am, living on in my apartment. I am not afraid, only apprehensive sometimes that death may happen sooner than I think. I’m not ready yet.

If not in my sleep, I am determined to go into death serenely, not kicking and screaming, but using whatever foolproof medication is available to get the job done. Will I have courage to do this? This is only a possible option in later years, if I’m seriously ill and ready to go.

There have been times when, filled with despair, I thought of taking my own life, but I never wanted to leave you and your brothers with the burden of wondering why.

These thoughts pass. New projects appear unexpectedly, new adventures pull me back into life. My imagination takes charge, giving me strength to edit and reconstruct whatever the current situation happens to be; or I turn a corner and see something beautiful or someone extraordinary running toward me, arms outstretched, ready to fold me in an embrace.

I hope to be around for a while, but I do want to mention some thoughts regarding my funeral. I don’t want you
scrounging around thinking, “What is she going to wear?” This way you don’t have to worry about anything; it’s all mapped out for you.

I want to be cremated, and I’d like you to place a handful of my ashes in your father’s grave. When I visited Ned Rorem in Nantucket, I noticed a glass jar with an adhesive label on his desk containing what appeared to be small white pebbles.

“What is that?” I asked.

“The ashes of my mother and father,” he responded. This was the first time this possibility occurred to me. I had always thought ashes would be dirty, black, like soot in a fireplace after the wood burns down. But it turns out ashes don’t have to look like that. I wish I’d known this before, so we could have done this with Carter and your father and have kept their ashes close by.

I told this to Nancy Biddle, and when her son died she kept some of his ashes and found comfort in doing so. If it interests you, please keep some of mine in a jar somewhere. If not, no problem. Just scatter what remains in the ocean on a sunny day.

I had thought not to have a religious service, but maybe something more is required? It’s up to you, and however it’s easiest. My wishes are whatever you decide.

If you do want to have a funeral in a church, St. James is probably appropriate, as that’s where Carter was confirmed
and where his funeral took place. If there is an open casket at Frank E. Campbell’s funeral home, dress me in one of the Fortuny dresses (the yellow one perhaps), which are in a box in the cedar closet in my apartment. Please have Aki do my hair (“Vanity, vanity, all is vanity”). Also ask him to select someone to do my makeup—I do not want the funeral home’s cosmeticians to do it. If Aki and his makeup person are not available, please ask my dear friend Nydia Caro to supervise. She will know exactly what to do.

At the service, I would like to have a number of my friends speak, and please ask my friend Judy Collins to sing “Amazing Grace.”

W
ell, I think you will be around for a lot longer, but I will be sure to do just as you wish.

You’ve talked a little about forgiveness and failures. Do you have many regrets?

Ah yes, let us
come to regrets and as we do let me sing to you, Anderson, a song I once heard Naney singing as I burst into the room without knocking. She stood as if in a trance, her back to me, looking out at the rain lashing against Auntie Ger’s guest bedroom window.

On the wedding finger of her left hand, a gift from her husband, three round diamonds representing her three daughters:
Gloria, Thelma, and Consuelo. Her red mahogany nails tapped the windowsill in time as she sang.

She pressed her cheek hard against the glass as if to break it so rain would splash on her face. Then she hummed another melody before once again singing,

It made me so sad I wanted to cry, but instead ran and put my arms around her. Where had my adored, and adoring, valiant Naney Napoléon gone?

“Come, little one,” she said, “There, there now, don’t let’s be gloomy. Everything is going to turn out all right!”

And I believed her.

I
wish I could be like Edith Piaf, belting out that I have no regrets, but I’m convinced that even the Songbird
of Paris had some; why else would she so insistently sing a song denying she had any? My greatest regret is not making more of an effort to be closer to Carter, not talking with him about feelings or experiences we may have shared. Perhaps it would have made a difference in what happened to him. I always imagined we would be closer as adults, once we had lives of our own. I thought there was plenty of time.

For me the list of regrets
is so long I wouldn’t know where to begin or to end.

It is only today, with the passage of years, that I can look back on choices I made and see how many were mistakes. At the time they seemed like wise decisions, triumphs even.

But the heart of the matter, the nitty-gritty truth, is that I am grateful I was able to pass this way. I wouldn’t want to go through it all again, but I am thankful that I was bestowed at birth, by my Fairy Godmother, with the gift of being able not only to give love, but to receive it in return. For I have come to believe that love is all that matters, and I have had more than my share.

So thank you, God, Moosha Moo—remember, from William James’s “Anesthetic Revelation”?—or whoever or whatever you might be.

Coming right down to it, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss a moment. Well, maybe one or two. And if you flirt with the idea of reincarnation, who knows, we may meet again. But this time, Andy, I promise I will get it
right.

Earlier I sent you a letter I had written to my long-lost father. I thought I would write one to myself at seventeen, a letter I wish had arrived before I headed to Los Angeles for the “two-week” visit to my mother that changed my life forever.