How to Forget

by Kate Mulgrew

  The door to the dining room opened at last, and our father appeared. He looked directly at Joe, and so severe was his expression that all of us froze in our seats. This expression, specific to our father, signified an immediate end to our revelry, and introduced into the atmosphere an electrifying sensation of tension. No one moved. No one spoke. Our father walked slowly to his place at the end of the table, never once taking his eyes from Joe’s face. He stood looking down at his son for some time and then, after a harrowing moment of silence, made a request. Staring at my brother, he said, “Hand me my drink, would you, Dad?”

  Startled, my brother looked up. What did our father mean? Was he confused? Was he drunk? Joe slid the glass half full of scotch across the table, offering it to our father. “Thanks, Dad,” our father said. We were at once bewildered and intrigued. Only Mother, who until now had said nothing and did not seem particularly alarmed by our father’s obvious show of dementia, dared to speak up. “Tom,” she demanded, “what on earth are you doing?”

  “Well, Jick,” our father replied, turning to look at our mother, “it appears our son is about to become a father. That rather distraught fellow on the telephone was the father of a very young mother-to-be, otherwise known as our boy’s inamorata, and he informed me that he is slapping you, my fifteen-year-old son, with a paternity suit.”

  “That’s insane!” Joe shouted, jumping to his feet. “She doesn’t know it’s me—I mean, it isn’t me—that girl’s had everybody in the school! She’s easy! She’s a slut—”

  “Sit. Down.” My father’s voice, deep and authoritative, was more effective than a blow. Joe abruptly sat. We minor players regarded this interaction with awe, and not a sound could be heard in the room.

  Suddenly and without explanation, our father turned his back to the table and stood facing the window. He gazed out over the lawn, utterly silent. Then his shoulders began to move, very slightly, up and down, and this sight more than any other filled each of us with apprehension. Our father never wept. He seldom, if ever, showed any kind of vulnerability. This was completely out of character, and we, as a collective, were stunned. And then we heard what could only be construed as laughter coming from our father’s mouth. The laughter grew until it infected each of us and, against our better judgment and despite the bizarreness of the situation, we were soon hysterical. Only Mother rose and left the room, letting the door swing shut behind her.

  The corners of Joe’s mouth were just about to shape themselves into a smirk of righteous indignation when my father leaned into him and, jabbing a finger in his face, said, “A paternity suit at the age of fifteen. Now, that’s a real accomplishment. Something to be proud of. Highly original. And you’ll have plenty of time to gloat over it because you are grounded for the next year. No parties. No friends. No sports. No girls. Curfew will begin immediately after school. First, however, you will call the father of this young woman whom you have allegedly impregnated, and you will apologize, and when you are finished apologizing to the father, you will then apologize to his daughter. We’ll see whether this paternity suit is an idle threat or a real one, but either way you should know that as far as I’m concerned, you are”—here my father paused, as if thinking twice, before he went on—“in big trouble, pal. Big effing trouble.”

  As my father climbed the staircase, I thought I could make out what sounded like a short chuckle, followed by the words “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Joe, of course, had interpreted my father correctly. He understood that whereas impregnating a girl of fifteen was hardly laudable, neither was it a criminal offense in Dubuque County in the early seventies, and that soon enough the dramatic allegation would be disproved and his sentence would be commuted, leaving him free to once again enjoy his friends, his sports, his parties, and his girls.

  This curious sympathy between my father and my brother developed over the years into something akin to companionship. As soon as alcohol was introduced as a commonality, the relationship was solidified, and the two men, so alike in nature and temperament, could while away whole evenings sipping their respective drinks and speaking only when necessity demanded it. For example, Joe might ask Dad if he could top off his drink and Dad might respond, “Why the hell not.” They preferred it that way, didn’t care to ruffle the perfect calm of the cocktail hour with superfluous banter, and certainly didn’t want to run the risk of welcoming any of the womenfolk, whose voices would shatter the atmosphere like ice picks.

  The relationship that grew between my father and my brother was remarkable in that it had been built on a very precarious foundation, one which almost all of us predicted would end in disaster or worse, alienation. Instead, there developed an understanding between them that appeared to the rest of us to be quite effortless, one that was eminently comfortable. Within the confines of this agreement, a love deepened that no one could have predicted, least of all the two leading players, neither of whom could have anticipated such an unexpected intimacy as they leaned into their advancing years.

  I looked out at the perpetual sunshine and relentless humidity of West Palm Beach, looked back in my mind at a boy with broken hands, and said, “Don’t say another word, Bobo. I’ll be there on Tuesday.”

  Chapter Two

  I didn’t want to go on the stage that night. I didn’t want the ten-minute walk from my apartment to the theater. I didn’t want the routine: the application of makeup, the snap of the wig cap over tight pin curls, the shallow breaths that always preceded the first act, the hardest act, the more precipitous slope of this two-sided mountain. In playing Katharine Hepburn, in a production which was staged in two acts, there was no reprieve. In the first act, I played the thirty-year-old Kate, and bounded onstage with youthful energy, equal parts vulnerability and dauntless ego. After intermission, during which I sat zombielike at my dressing table, I took the audience on a journey through all of the older Hepburn’s personal tragedies, each one of which demanded complete focus. If I took my finger off the pulse even for a moment, I ran the risk of losing the thread. This meant that every night, for the two hours I was on the stage, I was in a state of complete immersion.

  A challenge such as this is initially very exciting, and I had thrown myself into rehearsals at Hartford Stage with abandon. Every day, from ten until five, we worked in the rehearsal studio. Each night, I walked to the Goodwin Hotel, ordered dinner in the room, and spent the next four hours studying every book I could get my hands on about the life of Katharine Hepburn, watching every movie I could find that starred Katharine Hepburn, and reading my lines aloud so as to perfect every unfamiliar cadence I heard, every affectation. The work was intense and gratifying and, in the beginning, I was not lonely. As the weeks unfolded, however, and the play moved from Hartford to New York, and from New York to a national tour, a pattern developed that was rigid and unalterable. The play became a way of life, one that demanded order and discipline and absolute quiet. My voice, and in particular the tremor I used both physically and vocally in act two, required absolute rest between performances.

  This, in itself, was not unusual. What began to take its toll was my inability to justify this lifestyle to my friends and family. I began to sneak out the back door of the theater, avoiding fans, avoiding everyone. Everything outside of the theater threatened the “performance” and, instead of resisting the pull toward asceticism, or at the very least trying to strike a balance, I withdrew into a narrower, much lonelier world. By the time we settled in West Palm Beach for a four-month sit-down, most of the joy I’d known in developing the piece had been replaced by resignation. Loneliness had become routine, the kind of self-imposed exile that is grim and exhausting. My ego was so invested in the performance that I couldn’t recognize my own detachment, and this protracted entrenchment in make-believe had the dubious effect of deepening me as an artist while putting the rest of me on ice. When Joe had called and told me about our father, it was as if the little girl in me, a spirit nearly forgotten, suddenly kicked, and swam ha
rd for the surface. Enough, I said to myself.

  Thirty years earlier, I had missed the funeral of my sister Tessie, a sister whom I adored, because my father had been adamant that I stay and fulfill my responsibility to the producers, who had, after all, rolled the dice on an unknown actress and given her the lead in a celebrated classic at a well-known theater in Stratford, Connecticut, and who, while confident in her abilities as a performer, might not be so easily inclined to allow this actress to skip four performances so she could go home and attend her younger sister’s funeral. My father played this card skillfully, knowing how much I had wanted this part, how badly I had wanted to begin my career as a professional actress, and so I deferred to him, and stayed in Connecticut, where I played the entire weekend to full houses. What my father did not say was that he didn’t want me to come to the funeral because I would be a burden to him. My very presence would exacerbate my father’s anxiety and, regardless of the relief it may have provided my mother, he determined that it would be best for all involved if I were to remain back east, and do the honorable thing by staying out of his hair and fulfilling my obligations as a newly minted pro.

  In all the years that have passed since Tessie’s death, I have never felt anything but intense regret that I missed that last good-bye, that ritual so crucial to those left behind. Tessie, of course, would have been completely indifferent—she lay inside that coffin with her lovely almond-shaped eyes closed tight against the living—but I was left outside, unable to touch her, and made to say good-bye from very far away, on the stage of a summer theater in a small and unfamiliar New England town.

  * * *

  “NO MORE REGRETS,” I said, as my dresser fitted the wig snugly onto my head. I had walked to the theater in the moist, dense air of a West Palm Beach evening, and had submitted as I always had to Kara’s ministrations. The small clock resting on the vanity table said 7:30 P.M. I felt a familiar tightening in my solar plexus and sighed. Kara smiled at me in her sphinxlike way and whispered, “You do what is right for you. They’ll get over it.”

  As, of course, they would. As they always have, and always will. Someone else steps in and before long word on the street is that the replacement is in many ways even better than the original, things happen for a reason, que será, será. This is the getting of wisdom, I thought, something my mother often said before she was afflicted with the getting of dementia. At fifty, I knew what I could not have known at twenty. It had taken thirty years for me to understand that regrets do not dissipate, they do not abate into sadness—they harden until they have formed into a small fist that often rests quietly in the pit of your stomach but that can suddenly, and without warning, land a punch so powerful you are left doubled over in pain, gasping for breath.

  “I’ll play the weekend and then go home. My father has an appointment with the oncologist on Tuesday. I need to be there for that,” I said, summoning the courage to sound confident. Again, Kara smiled softly and turned her attention to my costume, which needed steaming before the evening performance. The room was very quiet, but soon, I knew, the backstage area would fill with the noise of the technical crew, as they moved furniture and adjusted props, checked the lights and ran the sound cues.

  There was a knock on the dressing room door, and Christine, the stage manager, looked in and asked, as she always did, “You good? We’re at half hour. Can I get you anything?” I didn’t immediately respond, so Christine stepped lightly into the room and closed the door behind her. Like Kara, she was sensitive and intuitive, alert to any change in the wind.

  She waited until I turned and said, “I have to go home, Christine. We’ll need to put the understudy in or cancel the rest of the run. My father’s not well. I think it’s pretty serious. My brother would not have called me if it weren’t serious.”

  Christine cocked her head to one side, a sign that she was processing this information. The responsibility of delivering the message to the producers would fall to her, and therefore she was careful not to speak until she had formed a clear and honest opinion.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, at last. “I’m so sorry, Kate. The producers won’t like it, but they’ll live.”

  “Whereas my father may not,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Christine agreed, her voice soft.

  These two women understood that the central conflict lay not with the producers, but with me. Years of honoring the unspoken laws of the theater had, instead of deepening my self-awareness, done just the opposite. I was confused, and I was scared. Theater etiquette warned me that this sort of thing just wasn’t done, not if I wanted to maintain my otherwise unimpeachable reputation. The consummate professional, whose every job had been hard-won, whose every success had meant some sort of sacrifice, whose own children had suffered countless disappointments, warned against the rashness of a decision that might not bode well for the future. What had looked from the outside like fierce independence was, in fact, ferocious ambition.

  Now, as I prepared to go onstage, I felt the weariness of someone who has followed orders all her life.

  * * *

  I ROSE FROM my chair and applied the last strokes of lipstick to my mouth, a minor but exacting exercise, which, if not successful, threatened to redefine the entire performance. I then began my journey from the dressing room to stage right, where a small red light would be waiting for me, winking its approval. Too soon, the light would be switched off and, in that moment, everything would be transformed, all the mundane concerns of life forgotten, my sick father and my long-dead sister put summarily and deftly aside, and I would walk onto that stage transfigured, an actress leaping out of the blocks, a shining crusader for Art.

  Tonight, as air-conditioning blasted from every conceivable aperture into the soggy atmosphere of the theater, as I listened to the rustling of programs and the putting on of sweaters and the first crunching of candies, I was overcome with loneliness. I could not define myself, I could not defend myself. I felt again, just as I had felt thirty years earlier, that same elemental longing to say good-bye to one I loved, a longing that transcended the hooks of responsibility, and the fear of being permanently unmoored.

  I looked up at the cue light, calibrating the switch as I did every night and, as I did every night, offered the performance to Tessie. This night, however, I offered it to Tessie in my father’s words. I whispered, “This one’s for you, kid,” and in the moment of so doing I understood with absolute clarity that I must go home, that I must return to whoever I was before I became this. This creature of unbearable habit.

  My father could not have calculated the pain he caused me when he forbade me to attend my sister’s funeral. I assumed he had been immersed in his own agony. Likewise, I assumed I had forgiven him.

  Just as this long-held assumption felt the first tap of the psychic ice pick, the standby light was switched off, the theater was plunged into darkness and, a mere heartbeat later, the stage was flooded with light.

  Chapter Three

  You must understand, it was a setup. An arranged marriage masquerading as a romance. There was no love lost between them. My paternal grandfather won her on a bet, having spotted her across the room at the Dubuque Golf & Country Club and, turning to his companion, said, “I’ll take that.”

  “Not in a million years,” his friend replied. “She’s hands off. Catholic. Teaches at the women’s college. Strict family, German.”

  My grandfather, whose name was Russell, studied the woman who would become my grandmother, and as he watched became increasingly, shall we say, peckish. She was indisputably beautiful, magnificently formed and very graceful, with a pair of the shapeliest legs my grandfather had ever seen. Petite, she may have been called, although I’m more inclined to say she was the ideal size for that time, which would have been around 1918. Standing at five feet, three inches, Genevieve Meysembourg gave the impression of greater height because of her enormous self-regard. Not only was she wonderful to look at but hers were the cadences of an educated w
oman, as indeed, she was. Genevieve had matriculated at Northwestern University, where she had excelled in speech and drama, in consequence of which she had been offered a teaching position in the speech department at the local women’s college in Dubuque, Iowa, which is where this story takes place.

  Russell took note and acted. Pulling his wallet from his pocket, he placed a hundred-dollar bill on the table in front of his friend and declared, “A hundred bucks says I get her.”

  My grandfather’s crony, brimming with bonhomie and bourbon, slapped Russell on the back and said, “You’re on!”

  Six months later, they were married. Genevieve was exquisite in an ivory lace gown with silk-covered buttons running down her spine, disappearing into the fluted train. A veil of similar lace covered her light brown hair, which had been artfully marcelled to frame her heart-shaped face and glittering almond-shaped emerald eyes. My grandfather had her firmly in his grasp, one arm straying around her tiny waist, the hand coming to rest just inches above her hip. Genevieve’s eyes remained fixed on the distance, her hands inert within the confines of their ivory kid opera gloves. She knew the jig was up, and that no excuse of faintness or frailness or even monthly indisposition could prevent my grandfather from taking his winnings, that night in the wedding bed.

  Genevieve did not immediately become pregnant. She had learned a few worldly tricks, despite her fervid devotion to God, and knew enough to leave the bridal bed immediately after Russell had fallen asleep, and to fill an antiseptic syringe with warm water, and insert it carefully between her lovely legs. We learned this as children at the dinner table when, one evening in early summer, my mother announced she was pregnant once again and my grandmother, from the far end of the table, put down her napkin and, white with anger, said, “Joan, you’re not a cow, you know. There is such a thing as a douche.”