What falls away : a memoir (31 page)

All of the children I had adopted before Dylan had been classified as "difficult to place." With my fingers crossed, I showed Woody pictures of little girls in the United States and other parts of the world who were no longer babies, or who had disabilities. When my mother asked why, I told her that I had learned from Moses, firsthand, that meeting special needs is a special privilege, which brings a parent special rewards. It seemed that on the deepest level the other children understood this. Matthew, at seventeen and Yale-bound, had written in his college application essay, "Only now do I fully understand that my mother's way of making life meaningful was to give a home to orphaned children. As a result she has saved four lives and enriched her own. If I can do so much, my life will have been a success."

Woody hadn't been open to the idea before, but now he didn't rule out the possibility, so long as it was a girl. We would see. Dylan wasn't yet two. We were still slogging away on September when I learned I was pregnant.

Woody's response was unemotional, almost formal. September was in Its seventh month, I reasoned, and had taken

its toll on all of us. It was understandable. Having a baby was the last thing on his mind.

I can only suppose it had never occurred to my children that their mother would ever do anything that could result in pregnancy. It was an adjustment for all of them, and they seemed a little stunned at first, particularly Soon-Yi, whose dislike for Woody had always been palpable. Because she had arrived m our family just as Andre was leaving it, I worried that she had lacked a positive male role model in her life. So when she was little, I asked Woody several times if he would take her for a walk, buy her an ice cream or something, but he had declined. Now, when I told her I was pregnant, she burst into angry, uncomprehending tears. She didn't like Woody, she said, he was nasty and ugly, and the baby would be ugly like him. I held her and tried to reassure her.

My own reaction was more surprising. I'd given up thinking it was possible for Woody and me to have a child. My first elation turned to worry: Woody's lack of enthusiasm was depressing, I felt shut out. I began to wonder where I stood and to take stock, to clarify the way I wished things were for this coming child, and for all my children, and for me. I had begun to feel that his behavior with Dylan was strange. And it was not easing off, it was growing more extreme. But when I tried to talk to him about it, he got so angry. He had grown remote since our first years together, and cruel; not all the time, but so often he made me feel stupid and worthless. We were in each other's company constantly, but I no longer felt needed or loved. I did love him, but for the first time I admitted I was afraid of him.

I felt I should end the relationship, but I didn't know if I would be able to do that. Emotionally I was dependent on him, and the possibility that he would not want to work

with me anymore was frightening. I seemed to have lost whatever definition I had once had of myself as an independent working woman, and in the process I had also lost confidence in my ability to survive without him.

Perhaps the new life inside me gave me the strength to tell him that the relationship, as it existed, was unacceptable. The conversation took place first thing in the morn-mg. Standing face-to-face in his dressing room at Astoria Studios, I told him everything I felt. He was surprised and angry. Finally I said that I couldn't continue, and that I needed some distance from him.

But he didn't go away. He would not go. It was so strange. September ended, and he kept right on coming over to my apartment every single day. He started showing up at five-thirty and six in the morning. He'd be sitting in my kitchen hours before anybody was up. He came to Frog Hollow too, even overnight. I didn't know what to do. We politely ignored each other while he followed Dylan around. And then, afiier some weeks of this, I lost my resolve, the line blurred, and we were together again. I needed him and I loved him.

We went on a trip together that same summer of 1987. It was the first time we had brought all the children to Europe. I was no longer throwing up, and I felt fine. It was the celebration of our new beginning. Woody is a restless traveler so we kept moving—Paris, Stockholm, Helsinki, Venice, London, Luxembourg—we were averaging almost a country a day. We drove, in a van and a limo, six or seven hours at a stretch. We were driven from Paris to Mont-Samt-Michel, which has probably been a tourist trap since the Middle Ages, only nobody told us. Woody took one look, checked the rooms, ate an omelette, and we drove all the way back. We would have stayed overnight, but there was something wrong with the bathroom.

Parisians are a lot nicer if you're with Woody Allen. His efficient assistant Jane was there, ensuring things went with-

out a hitch. During the day, while the kids and I goofed around in the hotel suite or went sight-seeing, Woody would write in the separate room he kept, for that purpose and for the bathroom.

One night in Paris, after Dylan's second birthday, I'd just given her a bath and put her to bed when, for the first time, I gathered all my courage and told him what I'd been thinking for many months and could no longer remain silent about: that I was worried about his behavior with Dylan. I had been hoping it would change, but it hadn't. It was getting worse. I told him that he'd been looking at the little girl m a sexual way. He stared at her whenever she was naked, and he was all over her, all the time, fondling her, not giving her any breathing room.

All that happened was that he got very angry.

When we returned from the trip I learned that the baby, due in December, would be a boy. A more perceptive person might have noticed Woody's interest slip from zero to minus. His focus was on the next movie. And Dylan. He wanted to adopt her, to be her legal father, but his lawyers didn't know if it would be possible since we weren't married. They were trying to figure out a way. I just listened. And privately, I worried.

The next WAFP, in 1987, was Another Woman, a film for which I had inadvertently provided the pivotal device. A year or so earlier. Woody and I had been sitting in my living room. I was staring at the fireplace, thinking about how fascinating apartment buildings are, with people living their separate lives inches apart from one another. In fact, just on the other side of my own living-room wall, a renowned therapist conducted her sessions; some of her patients were acquaintances of ours, including Woody's agent. We used to see them in the hallway coming and going.

"Wouldn't it be so cool to get one of those spy listening devices?" I said to Woody. "We could hear what they're saying through the wall."

''Would you want to define yourself as a person who would do that?" he asked disapprovingly.

"God no, absolutely not, just joking." I felt like a worm. My unworthy thought was somewhat redeemed when the script of Another Woman was built around just such a situation.

I was seven months pregnant when we began shooting Another Woman, and I worked right up until a week before the baby arrived. Gena Rowlands played the lead. Sadly, her husband, John Cassavetes, could not join her in New York for the filming; he was in California seriously ill with a liver disease. Woodv persuaded my old friend Sven Nykvist to shoot the film; he had been Ingmar Bergman's cinematogra-pher on so many of Woody's favorite films.

As my body expanded I felt fat, undesirable, and exhausted. Woody seemed put off by my condition; he never touched my stomach, or felt the baby kick, or tried to hear his heartbeat. In fact he scarcely mentioned the baby. So I wasn't surprised when he declined to be my Lamaze coach. Casey took the classes with me.

On December 19, 1987, the baby was delivered by cesarean section. To my great surprise. Woody agreed to be in the operating room with the provision that if it got too disgusting, he wouldn't stay. I wouldn't have blamed him, but I think I hung on to his hand so tight he probably couldn't leave. He was by my side even when the epidural wore off while they were cutting me open.

We called our not-so-tiny (nine pounds, four ounces) baby Satchel, after Satchel Paige the ballplayer. The name was Woody's suggestion. I wasn't sure about it, but it was better than Ingmar, which was his first choice.

On the second day of my stay in the hospital I was given a form, the umpteenth, which I filled out and gave back. The next morning my doctor came into the room looking slightly embarrassed to say that unfortunately I couldn't legally fill out the box marked 'Tather" because I wasn't

married. If I wanted a father listed on the certificate, I would have to give the form to that person, and he could have his name put on it. If he wished. The doctor, a nice m^an, gave me back the original form along with a new, blank one, and he apologized again. I said. Oh I see, I'm sorry, no problem.

I didn't know whether Woody would want his name on the form or not. I decided I would pick a moment to give him the form and just tell him it was an option. No big deal. Whatever. I hated the form.

Later that week I gave it to him. He said he'd have his lawyer deal with it.

I had never spent even one night away from Dylan and I was eager to get back home. Christmas is a Very Big Deal in our family and there were only a few days left. Because of the fall work schedule, I always began shopping and organizing in August. So the lists were already checked off, the tree was trimmed, the stockings were hung, and presents were in giant labeled bags hidden in my closet. Mavis would make her stuffing, and there was nothing left to do until Christmas Eve.

During the operation I had lost more blood than was usual; I felt as if I'd spent a week with vampires. The doctor told me I could go home on the morning of the third day, provided I had a hospital nurse around-the-clock for a week.

"What's that for?" Woody asked the nurse with the wheelchair when the day arrived for me to go home.

"It's to take her downstairs," she replied.

"We don't need it," he said. I was all stooped over, and I couldn't straighten up, my stomach hurt so much. Step by tiny step we made it to the car, settled ourselves into the back, and started home.

"Please," I begged the driver, "go slow." And I cried all the way up First Avenue.

One of my eight children was entering Yale and another was about to begin nursery school. I had been picking up pieces of Lego for almost two decades.

So when I had entered the hospital, it was with confidence that I'd bounce back from the cesarean in no time. I would pouch my baby and take him everywhere. This baby I would nurse as long as he wanted, like mothers do all over the world. The other kids would accept and adore him just as they had Dylan, who for months now had been laughing at the thumps from my stomach. "Mjy baby," said Dylan as she folded the tmy clothes and put them into freshly lined drawers. She could hardly wait to help me dress and bathe the new baby. We taked about how she would curl up beside me while I read to her like always, and "her" baby would sleep peacefully in her arms along with her teddy, Flo-Bear.

But the baby screamed day and night. When sleep overtook him for scant minutes at a stretch, he jumped himself awake in full cry. It was colic, said Dr. Stone, he was a "high-needs baby," he had an "immature nervous system." He was exhausting.

"Take him outside for a walk," the doctor finally suggested.

"Throw him away," wailed Dylan, fed up with so much howling. I would put on his woolly hat, pop him into the pouch, strap him onto any willing brother or sister, zip a goose-down jacket over the two, and send them out the door. As the elevator descended and the screams faded, I fell back in bed. Never had I been so tired.

At night I put Dylan's favorite part of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on the stereo, and I lay on her bed with my arms around her, and told her how I loved her, and that I was eating my spinach, so soon I'd be as strong as Popeye, and we would ride on the merry-go-round, and ice-skate in

Central Park, and visit the elephants at the museum. Then just when the flowers are opening, we will go to Frog Hollow, and a beautiful giant butterfly will be waitmg in the field. We'll climb on its back and fly up into the sky where we can bounce on pmk clouds with baby angels and slide on the pieces of rainbow they keep up there. And our own baby will stop his crying: he'll look around, and when his tears are dry, he will smile, he'll be so happy to see us all, especially Dylan.

Dylan and I had planned for this to be our special shared time, but now I could barely stand up, and Woody kept taking her off to other rooms. He rarely came in to see me and he hardly glanced at the new baby. He never held or touched him, and he didn't seem to like me nursing him. He seemed stern—or was it angry? It made me cry.

The doctor told me to eat meat for anemia, so Woody brought me steaks. "Thank you," I said, "and thank you for offering to pay for five days of a private nurse. You've done these nice things for me, but you're so cold."

This was a mistake, because he shouted, ^'That's a lie, that's an out-and-out lie!"

Scared in my bed, I said, "I'm sorry, I just meant I need you to be kinder. I feel you don't love me anymore."

But he was on his way out of the room. "Please leave Dylan with me," I called after him. "Every time you come over, you take her away from my room. No, don't go. I'm sorry. It's the hormones, or the operation, or it's that I haven't slept in weeks, the baby cries all the time. I don't know what it is, but I'm sorry."

Less than a month after the birth I was back in the camper with Dylan and Satchel, for reshoots—now with a pillow to replicate my pregnant stomach. My costumes were adjusted to accommodate nursing the baby. At that moment I would have given almost anything not to have had to work, but at least my part wasn't huge. I never saw the

movie, or Nnv York Stories, which followed immediately. All I remember about makmg them is wanting to go home.

The baby finally stopped crying, and eventually I was almost as strong as Popeye.

In the summer of 1988 the whole family went on another trip. We visited Grieg's birthplace m Norway, and the Munch museum, and we wandered aimlessly around Helsinki. The centerpiece of the trip, our visit to the Soviet Union, lasted less than twenty-four hours. Woody was so unnerved by the way of things there—the lines for tour buses and terrible food, the fact that he was just another tourist in Leningrad. So he told his assistant to get us out on the next Jtight, he didn't care where to.