Dear Cary - Dyan Cannon [81]
As summer came to an end, I was starting to feel stifled. Dr. Gourson had recommended exercise, saying it was good for both me and the baby, so I came home one day with a tennis racket and told Cary I wanted to find a teacher.
“Silly child,” he said, though there was a noticeable deficit of silliness to be found anywhere. “I don’t like it for you. With tennis, you only use one side of your body. It throws you out of balance, physically and mentally.” When I protested that Billie Jean King struck me as an overall well-balanced person, Cary pointed to his temples and said, “You see these gray hairs? Gray is the color of wisdom. I’ve been around a lot longer than you, Dyan, and I’ve learned a few things.” Our age difference had never come up before we were married, but since our wedding, Cary had begun pointing to his wise gray temples with increasing frequency.
The consensus of Mary, Addie, and the rest of the sisterhood could be summed up by that familiar refrain: “Once the baby comes, everything will be fine.” Mary was of the opinion that more men than not went through a pretty difficult adjustment period when fatherhood loomed the first time around. Conveniently, she said, it lasted just about nine months. “I’ve experienced it more than once. Right up to when the baby is born, you’d think the husband is planning his own disappearance in the Andes. Then when the baby arrives, he’ll be so proud you’d think he’d brought the child to term himself.”
A couple of aspects of this rang true. I had never really pondered our age difference—Cary to me was timeless and ageless—but he was going to be sixty-two a few weeks before the baby was due. He didn’t look it and he didn’t act it, but the fact was Cary had spent nearly sixty-two years not being a father, so becoming one sure had to be an adjustment.
But there was something else at play, too, and you didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to figure it out. Having a child on the way was dredging up a lot of unpleasant memories for Cary, and they played musical chairs with his emotions and his imagination. He would be sitting back in his armchair, nursing a drink and lost in silence, and then suddenly spring up, take me in his arms, and say, “Please, let’s never argue in front of our child, Dyan.”
“I don’t want us to argue, period,” I’d say. And he’d recall the terrible shouting matches between his parents and shake his head sadly. My parents, of course, had their own bouts of yelling, but I never once feared that our family was falling apart, though I hated it when they fought. My parents’ battles were always a draw, but Elias and Elsie’s dramas gave Cary every reason to fear the worst. And the worst happened: his mother suddenly vanished and his father abandoned him.
“A child needs to know that his parents are completely devoted to each other,” he said more than once. “If children grow up thinking one of their parents is going to jump ship, it does horrible things to them. It puts a real crack in their foundation.”
“Family history doesn’t have to repeat itself, Cary.”
“Damn it! I watched it, I did it, I didn’t know how to stop it!”
“What are you talking about, Cary?”
“Without meaning to, I turned every one of my wives into Elsie.”
“I don’t understand what you mean by that.”
“Dyan, my mother vanished on me. One day, gone—out of my life. I realized at a certain point that I drove my wives away before they could vanish on me.”
Cary cupped his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.
“Will you promise that you will never let me do that to you?”
“Of course, I promise you, Cary.”
I felt that Cary had opened a window that allowed me to see into his heart in a way I never had—perhaps in a way that no one ever had. No wonder it was so painful for him to trust.
As it happened, we had returned from our honeymoon just days before the Watts riots erupted and the streets of south Los Angeles churned with violence. From our privileged house on the hill, we could see the pillars