Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [24]
“Isn’t that your mother’s helper, Patty?” Mrs. Murphy said.
And then, according to what Mrs. Henley told me the next morning, the two women carried me back to the house and put me to bed. The next day at breakfast when Mrs. Henley asked if I had been drinking, I said, “No, why?”
Dad could relate to my situation, I guess; in Bronxville he had no one to talk to, either—there were no artists around. (Local newscasters Bill Beutel and Chuck Scarborough lived there, hardly the Algonquin Round Table.) Mom was a phone person, but talking on the phone wasn’t possible for me in Nantucket, there was always someone around. So writing letters became a way to tell my family about my job, my boss, a way to be miserable and have fun at the same time. Dad was the only person in the family who had time to write back, so we became pen pals. He was thrilled. My father thought I should compile all of my letters home and call them Letters from a Mad Mother’s Helper. We signed off our letters with Andrews Sisters lyrics, “I sove you lo much, Dad” and “No bout a doubt it, Jean.” It was probably the first time I saw language, formally put together as opposed to just whizzed around back and forth for comic effect, as a kind of fun. It was also the first time I saw that bad life equals good art. My miserable summer left me with a pile of funny letters home and a connection to what my father did or didn’t do, a connection to him.
MY SENIOR YEAR in high school all my sisters were away at college. Things got particularly lonely when Julia went to college and I had to deal with Mom every night by myself. Mom’s gloom was nocturnal; it came alive at night, after about seventeen glasses of Dewar’s. When I’d pester her to perk up a little, easy on the drama, s’il vous plaît, she’d remind me, “I was born on Pearl Harbor, baby.” Which wasn’t true. She was born four days after Pearl Harbor, December 11, 1941, but if I brought up that fact she’d say, “Close enough, dearie.” She fell off a horse at thirteen and broke her arm; she fell out her bedroom window at eleven and was in a leg cast for months; she drove her Thunderbird into a ravine, God damn it, she was legally blind; she was teeny, five feet, which isn’t that much fun except when the Randy Newman song “Short People” came out, which she thought was “a riot.” (“Oh, isn’t that a riot?”) But generally things were not a riot to my mother.
When I would call Katharine at Vassar, I’d tell her about the arguments on the front lawn, or the Sarah Lawrence professor my mother was convinced was Dad’s lover, who mom was calling, screaming, every five minutes. I might as well have been living in a Blarney Stone bar near Grand Central, considering the tenor of the place. One Monday morning Mom had just disappeared.
“Mom’s MIA. I think she took off to St. Croix to see Corky.” Corky was a friend of my mom’s from Villa Duchesne. “Are you reading?” I’d ask her.
“No,” she’d snap back, long used to the accusation.
“It seems like you’re reading,” I said, from the pink Princess telephone in my room, which came from my grandmother’s house in St. Louis. It still had her old exchange phone number on the front, that Hitchcockian combination of words and letters. I loved it, not because I liked pink or irony, or was sentimental, but because the ringer was broken. I could call out but was never disturbed by incoming calls in my bedroom. The perfect form of communication in my mind, a model for what I fantasized about in a romantic relationship.
“I’m listening. I’m listening!