I Remember Nothing [11]
Lillian Ross was young at the time, but she was already famous for her reporting in The New Yorker, and for her ability to make her subjects sound like fools. She had just published her devastating profile of Ernest Hemingway and was in Los Angeles reporting her piece on John Huston and the making of The Red Badge of Courage. My mother told St. Clair McKelway that he was welcome to bring Lillian Ross to dinner but that Ross had to agree that the party would be off the record.
So Lillian Ross came to the party. Before dinner, she asked my mother for a tour of the house. My mother showed her around, and at a certain point, Ross came upon a picture of my three sisters and me.
“Are these your children?” she asked my mother.
“Yes,” my mother said.
“Do you ever see them?” Lillian Ross asked.
That did it.
My mother walked Lillian Ross downstairs and back to McKelway.
“Out,” she said.
And Lillian Ross and St. Clair McKelway left.
That was the legend of my mother and Lillian Ross. My mother loved to tell it. It was practically a cowboy movie. We’d been raised to believe that a woman could do everything and Lillian Ross had dared to question it. In our house. So my mother threw her out.
I loved this story. I loved all stories that proved that my mother was right and everyone else was wrong, especially since there was a piece of me that couldn’t help wishing she was exactly like everyone else’s mother.
It was at least ten years before I began to wonder about it. Had it ever actually happened? There are all sorts of stories you grow up with, and then you get older, and there’s just something about them that doesn’t pass the nose test. They’re somehow too perfect. And the most nagging part is the coup de grâce, the perfectly chosen last line. My father wrote a memoir once, and in it are several completely unbelievable episodes in which he tells people like Darryl Zanuck to go fuck themselves. This legend of my mother and Lillian Ross was in some way a version of those stories. It was too good to be true.
My mother became an alcoholic when I was fifteen. It was odd. One day she wasn’t an alcoholic, and the next day she was a complete lush. She drank a bottle of scotch every night. Around midnight she would come flying out of her bedroom, banging and screaming and terrorizing us all. My father drank too, but he was a sloppy, sentimental drunk, and somehow his alcoholism was more benign.
By the time I went off to Wellesley, their movie work had dried up, but somehow they were sober enough in the daytime to collaborate; they wrote a successful play called Take Her, She’s Mine, about a Southern California family whose daughter goes off to an eastern women’s college. It quoted the letters I’d written from college, and it opened on Broadway during my senior year, starring Art Carney as the father and Elizabeth Ashley as the daughter. Everyone at Wellesley knew about it and about my remarkable mother, the writer who could do everything.
I didn’t expect either of my parents to turn up at my graduation, but a few days before it, my mother called to say she’d decided to come. She arrived in all her stylish glory. She wore her suit, and her three-inch heels, and her clip-on earrings that matched her brooch. She slept in the dormitory, in the room next to mine, for two nights. I lay in my bed and listened through the paper-thin wall to her drunken mutterings. I was terrified that she’d burst from her room into the halls of Tower Court and mortify me in front of my classmates, that she’d stagger down the hall banging and screaming, and my friends would learn the truth.
But what was the truth?
I was invested in the original narrative; I was a true believer. My mother was a goddess.
But my mother was an alcoholic.
Alcoholic parents are so confusing. They’re your parents, so you love them; but they’re drunks, so you hate them. But you love them. But you hate them. They have moments