be performing in Los Angeles all summer, so he had arranged for Peter and me to spend the vacation with them there.
We were ensconced in a magnificent mansion built years earlier by William Randolph Hearst for his paramour, actress Marion Davies. It had been converted into a hotel with marble columns, mosaic tile floors, gold-leafed mirrors, an Olympic-size tile swimming pool, and a beach club. We spent that entire summer at the beach, partly because it was a fun place to hang out and partly because Susan, a New Yorker, didn’t know how to drive. Other wives might have demanded that Dad get a chauffeur in order to spend a lot of time in Beverly Hills engaging in “cash therapy.” Not Susan. She hung in there with us. I don’t understand it, given what might be my own callowness at her age, but somehow her twenty-two-year-old soul had the generosity and know-how to wrap itself around Peter and me and be a mother. Peter liked to call her Mom Two.
Susan on the beach at Ocean House.
One perfect California evening, when the sun was setting red and the breeze was velvet and smelled of salt and kelp, she and I were sitting on the marble steps leading down to the pool when she asked me how I was feeling about Mother’s death.
I stopped breathing. In all that time—more than a year—no one had raised the subject of Mother with me, much less asked how I
felt.
It was a germinal moment. The problem was that I had no words to offer her. I was so unused to expressing my feelings that I’d become emotionally illiterate. I did tell her that I hadn’t been able to cry at the time and that I had learned it was a suicide from a movie magazine. She was quiet for what seemed a long time. I don’t think she knew what to say. I certainly wouldn’t have at her age, but I remember her suggesting that perhaps Mother’s death had been a blessing in disguise. It seems strange to me now that I could have found those glib and potentially insensitive words comforting, but my thinking about Mother was so utterly confused that “blessing in disguise” provided me with a handle, a way to explain the event to myself. Maybe Susan knew I needed a handle.
She was lithe, with tiny, well-turned ankles and long, El Greco knees. She’d studied dancing with the fabled Katherine Dunham, and dancing was important to her. She was superb, often twirling or cha-cha-ing around rooms with pretend partners, her waist-length hair flying, while singing Broadway show tunes. Sometimes she’d doo-wop to a jazz record, fingers snapping, head shaking, eyes closed, while she’d dance a cool little jitterbug in place. I would go to my room afterward and try to imitate what I’d seen her do. I imitated her a lot. If I could be like her, maybe Dad would love me more.
Laughter, which had been an unfamiliar sound in our family for a long time, was a gift from Susan to us. She had a repertoire of jokes, some long, elaborate ones that would crack her up when she finally got to the punch line; some Jewish jokes that required my learning Yiddish words; some from the dark, smoky world of jazz musicians, a world with which she was familiar. Susan was a wonderful combination of goofy and sophisticated, with a little pioneer thrown in for ballast. Her joie de vivre washed over us that summer.
Mother’s younger sister and her alcoholic husband had joined Grandma as our caretakers in Greenwich and were reportedly trying to get legal custody of us. Susan told Dad that it was unconscionable for us to be adopted by relatives and that he absolutely had to take us to live with them in New York. I guess he was thinking of leaving us in Greenwich and just visiting from time to time. If the wife who followed Mother had been someone other than Susan—say, like wife number four, the Italian one—I honestly don’t know what would have become of us. I would have survived, maybe, but not as a productive citizen. During her brief five years with my father, Susan taught me
We were ensconced in a magnificent mansion built years earlier by William Randolph Hearst for his paramour, actress Marion Davies. It had been converted into a hotel with marble columns, mosaic tile floors, gold-leafed mirrors, an Olympic-size tile swimming pool, and a beach club. We spent that entire summer at the beach, partly because it was a fun place to hang out and partly because Susan, a New Yorker, didn’t know how to drive. Other wives might have demanded that Dad get a chauffeur in order to spend a lot of time in Beverly Hills engaging in “cash therapy.” Not Susan. She hung in there with us. I don’t understand it, given what might be my own callowness at her age, but somehow her twenty-two-year-old soul had the generosity and know-how to wrap itself around Peter and me and be a mother. Peter liked to call her Mom Two.
Susan on the beach at Ocean House.
One perfect California evening, when the sun was setting red and the breeze was velvet and smelled of salt and kelp, she and I were sitting on the marble steps leading down to the pool when she asked me how I was feeling about Mother’s death.
I stopped breathing. In all that time—more than a year—no one had raised the subject of Mother with me, much less asked how I
felt.
It was a germinal moment. The problem was that I had no words to offer her. I was so unused to expressing my feelings that I’d become emotionally illiterate. I did tell her that I hadn’t been able to cry at the time and that I had learned it was a suicide from a movie magazine. She was quiet for what seemed a long time. I don’t think she knew what to say. I certainly wouldn’t have at her age, but I remember her suggesting that perhaps Mother’s death had been a blessing in disguise. It seems strange to me now that I could have found those glib and potentially insensitive words comforting, but my thinking about Mother was so utterly confused that “blessing in disguise” provided me with a handle, a way to explain the event to myself. Maybe Susan knew I needed a handle.
She was lithe, with tiny, well-turned ankles and long, El Greco knees. She’d studied dancing with the fabled Katherine Dunham, and dancing was important to her. She was superb, often twirling or cha-cha-ing around rooms with pretend partners, her waist-length hair flying, while singing Broadway show tunes. Sometimes she’d doo-wop to a jazz record, fingers snapping, head shaking, eyes closed, while she’d dance a cool little jitterbug in place. I would go to my room afterward and try to imitate what I’d seen her do. I imitated her a lot. If I could be like her, maybe Dad would love me more.
Laughter, which had been an unfamiliar sound in our family for a long time, was a gift from Susan to us. She had a repertoire of jokes, some long, elaborate ones that would crack her up when she finally got to the punch line; some Jewish jokes that required my learning Yiddish words; some from the dark, smoky world of jazz musicians, a world with which she was familiar. Susan was a wonderful combination of goofy and sophisticated, with a little pioneer thrown in for ballast. Her joie de vivre washed over us that summer.
Mother’s younger sister and her alcoholic husband had joined Grandma as our caretakers in Greenwich and were reportedly trying to get legal custody of us. Susan told Dad that it was unconscionable for us to be adopted by relatives and that he absolutely had to take us to live with them in New York. I guess he was thinking of leaving us in Greenwich and just visiting from time to time. If the wife who followed Mother had been someone other than Susan—say, like wife number four, the Italian one—I honestly don’t know what would have become of us. I would have survived, maybe, but not as a productive citizen. During her brief five years with my father, Susan taught me
Similar Books
