honeymoon, managed to get a plane from the islands (no mean feat back then), and arrived within hours at the hospital, where the three of us kept vigil into the night. Then we went home to get some sleep and came back again the next day. We did that every day for five days. I was allowed into Peter’s room once to see him lying there, so small that he was barely a bump under the sheets, with all the tubes going in and out of him. On the fifth day, the doctors announced that Peter appeared to be coming out of the crisis zone. Several days later his condition was said to be stable. He was going to make it.
I returned to school in a zone of somnambulance. My routines were done, my homework turned in. But my body always felt tense, my breathing shallow. Nothing seemed to have a reason. “Isn’t she something?” the teachers said. “The worse things are, the stronger she gets.” The kudos I received for appearing strong satisfied a need for approval and locked me into a modus vivendi: Jane, the strong one. The shell that formed around my heart served a purpose by keeping me on my feet, but it solidified both my superficiality and my independence.
Peter stayed in the hospital for a month. He became a brat almost immediately and I began to backpedal on my promise to God.
The shooting accident had happened when Peter was visiting friends, one of whom persuaded the family chauffeur to drive them to a skeet range near Sing Sing to practice shooting an antique .22-caliber pistol. While Peter was reloading, the pistol discharged into his stomach. Fortunately, the chauffeur knew where the hospital was and acted fast to get him there. Given the timing, however, I can’t help but wonder if unconscious forces weren’t at work in a boy who was very hurt and angry that his father had remarried and that everyone seemed to have so quickly forgotten his mother.
I t had been a rough couple of years, starting with Mother’s illness and death. The following year, my classmates started having parties at their homes when their parents were away, where games like post office and spin-the-bottle were de rigueur. I wanted to be popular and fit in, but while Brooke and other girls seemed to have things under control, I dreaded these games. I don’t remember if I was more scared that someone would “get” me and try “to go too far” or that no one would want to. As other girls became more and more “feminine,” I seemed more and more out in limbo, a lump of androgyny, always behind, scrambling to catch up. What happened to the girl who was described in her third-grade report card as adjusted, self-confident, and assured—the girl who saw herself as heroic? She had slipped away so quietly that I never even said, “Good-bye, see you again in fifty years.”
CHAPTER SIX
SUSAN
Ah, as we prayed for human help: angels soundlessly,
with single strides, climbed over
our prostrate hearts
—R AINER M ARIA R ILKE
O NE AFTERNOON, Grandma took me to a New York hospital to visit Dad, who was recovering from knee surgery. I walked into his room, and sitting next to his bedside was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She seemed to be in her early twenties and had light brown hair pulled back tightly into a large chignon that accentuated her pale blue, slanted eyes, not unlike Mother’s. She wore a rather old-fashioned high-necked white blouse trimmed with lace. Around her wrist was a watch on a black velvet band. Dad introduced us.
“Jane, this is Susan.”
She was only nine years older than me. Still, I so desperately needed a woman to show me how to
be
that it must have been the angels who climbed over our prostrate hearts to bring Susan to us. If she was a “tomato,” it was definitely the sweet, sun-ripened kind.
In the summer of 1951, a little over a year after Mother’s death, was when I got to know her. I was going on fourteen. Dad was finishing the national road tour of
Mister Roberts
and would
I returned to school in a zone of somnambulance. My routines were done, my homework turned in. But my body always felt tense, my breathing shallow. Nothing seemed to have a reason. “Isn’t she something?” the teachers said. “The worse things are, the stronger she gets.” The kudos I received for appearing strong satisfied a need for approval and locked me into a modus vivendi: Jane, the strong one. The shell that formed around my heart served a purpose by keeping me on my feet, but it solidified both my superficiality and my independence.
Peter stayed in the hospital for a month. He became a brat almost immediately and I began to backpedal on my promise to God.
The shooting accident had happened when Peter was visiting friends, one of whom persuaded the family chauffeur to drive them to a skeet range near Sing Sing to practice shooting an antique .22-caliber pistol. While Peter was reloading, the pistol discharged into his stomach. Fortunately, the chauffeur knew where the hospital was and acted fast to get him there. Given the timing, however, I can’t help but wonder if unconscious forces weren’t at work in a boy who was very hurt and angry that his father had remarried and that everyone seemed to have so quickly forgotten his mother.
I t had been a rough couple of years, starting with Mother’s illness and death. The following year, my classmates started having parties at their homes when their parents were away, where games like post office and spin-the-bottle were de rigueur. I wanted to be popular and fit in, but while Brooke and other girls seemed to have things under control, I dreaded these games. I don’t remember if I was more scared that someone would “get” me and try “to go too far” or that no one would want to. As other girls became more and more “feminine,” I seemed more and more out in limbo, a lump of androgyny, always behind, scrambling to catch up. What happened to the girl who was described in her third-grade report card as adjusted, self-confident, and assured—the girl who saw herself as heroic? She had slipped away so quietly that I never even said, “Good-bye, see you again in fifty years.”
CHAPTER SIX
SUSAN
Ah, as we prayed for human help: angels soundlessly,
with single strides, climbed over
our prostrate hearts
—R AINER M ARIA R ILKE
O NE AFTERNOON, Grandma took me to a New York hospital to visit Dad, who was recovering from knee surgery. I walked into his room, and sitting next to his bedside was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She seemed to be in her early twenties and had light brown hair pulled back tightly into a large chignon that accentuated her pale blue, slanted eyes, not unlike Mother’s. She wore a rather old-fashioned high-necked white blouse trimmed with lace. Around her wrist was a watch on a black velvet band. Dad introduced us.
“Jane, this is Susan.”
She was only nine years older than me. Still, I so desperately needed a woman to show me how to
be
that it must have been the angels who climbed over our prostrate hearts to bring Susan to us. If she was a “tomato,” it was definitely the sweet, sun-ripened kind.
In the summer of 1951, a little over a year after Mother’s death, was when I got to know her. I was going on fourteen. Dad was finishing the national road tour of
Mister Roberts
and would
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