I slept.
IX
I dreamed I was the child I had been long ago, the child with the custom-made dresses, the English nurse, the closets full of toys, the carefully selected playmates, the part-time bodyguard (the Lindbergh kidnapping had made a deep impression on my mother), and the miniature mink coat. I was very rich and very happy, although my nurse did her best to ensure I wasn’t also very spoiled. However, she must often have thought she was fighting a losing battle.
My mother used to worry in case Nanny was too strict with me, but in fact I enjoyed my well-regulated hours in Nanny’s company because they made the time spent being spoiled by my parents so much more wicked and exciting. If I’d been spoiled continuously I’ve no doubt I’d have been very unhappy. It was a lesson I was to remember when I had children of my own, and from the moment I knew I was pregnant I had made up my mind to employ an English nurse so that there would always be at least one person in my household who refused to indulge my children in every one of their whims. I reasoned that wealth would later give them far too many opportunities to have exactly what they wanted; the least I could do for them when they were young was to try to protect them from the undermining influence of a large income for as long as possible.
I lived in a Spanish-style mansion by the sea in Palm Beach, and my mother, a fairy godmother who flitted around in gorgeous clothes and smoked cigarettes from diamond-encrusted cigarette holders, lived with me. My mother called me “Darling,” never “Vicky,” and was so proud of me that I was regularly exhibited at her smart parties, where I became famous for my “cute” remarks. (It was the age of Shirley Temple.) Nanny somehow saved me from developing too inflated an idea of my own importance, but I still grew up believing that my mother had only to wave her magic wand to keep all misfortune at bay.
Then Danny arrived. My mother had met him years before in California, and one day in 1940 when Danny came to Florida on vacation he called to renew the acquaintance.
Danny was tall and slender, with sad dark eyes and excellent manners. He spoke without a foreign accent but once when he talked to his father on the phone he had spoken fluently in Italian.
“Such a pretty language!” sighed my mother, an incurable romantic. She was flushed with triumph at capturing Danny, who was ten years her junior, and soon, as he lingered on and on at Palm Beach—it was apparently unnecessary for him to work for a living—it was no longer I who was the prime exhibit at my mother’s smart parties; I had to take second place to Danny.
I didn’t like this at all, and neither did my father.
The custody struggle broke out afresh. I always enjoyed the custody battles. They made me feel important, and it was always so gratifying to know that my parents were constantly fighting for the privilege of my company. I never considered myself the product of a broken home; since the home had been broken even before I had entered the world, I had no memory of it, and relations between my parents were always so bad that it never occurred to me that they might one day be reconciled. All that mattered to me was that I loved my parents and that they loved me. I didn’t care if they lived in separate houses. I didn’t even care if they hated each other, although occasionally I did think it was a pity that the two people I loved best couldn’t be good friends. However, since I had no memory of them being anything but unpleasant to each other, I accepted their antagonism as a fact of life which could never ultimately harm me, since I knew they both loved me so much.
Regarding the approaching custody battle with equanimity, I began to discuss what I should wear when I went before the judge in his rooms for the customary chat to discuss the situation.
“It’s nothing to worry about, sugar,” said Danny, giving me a fresh box of chocolates. “I’m going to marry your mother and bury your father in orange blossoms. He’s only cutting up rough because he figures I’m a no-good wop battening on your mother’s alimony, but I got money, I got prospects he doesn’t know about, and the hell with the alimony, I don’t care about it, it means nothing to me. And once Viv and I are married, she’ll be all respectable again and your father’s demand for custody will fall flat on its face, just you wait and see. Then your son of a bitch of a father can go kiss a concrete block for all the good it’ll do him.”
With that short concluding sentence Danny made his fatal mistake. After those ill-chosen words I ceased to see him as a generous supplier of candy whose only fault was that he claimed too much of my mother’s attention, and saw him instead as my father’s enemy. Only my mother was allowed to call my father a son of a bitch. That was her privilege as his ex-wife. But no one else was allowed to abuse him in front of me. Ever.
I decided that Danny would have to go. I considered it my moral duty, as a sophisticated ten-year-old, to save my poor mother from a disastrous marriage.
“Well, let me give it to you straight,” I said to the judge as we chatted together in his room. “I’m real worried about this situation. I’ve never worried about my mother’s boyfriends before, but this is different. I think he’ll break her heart. I think that after they’re married he’ll go chasing other ladies. I think”—I summoned my most worldly smile—“I think he might even chase me. He’s always giving me boxes of chocolates and cuddling me when Mommy’s not looking.”
I remember sailing out of the room and thinking serenely: That’ll fix him. The judge would tell my mother that marriage with Danny was out of the question if she wanted to retain custody of me, and that would be that. On reflection I was proud of the way I had handled the situation by so skillfully embroidering the facts of life. I knew, of course, all about the famous facts of life. If you were a woman you eventually fell madly in love with the man of your dreams, went to bed with him, kissed him on the mouth in a frenzy of passion, and were immediately transported into rapturous bliss. My mother said it was as good as being in heaven. I could hardly wait to have the opportunity to sample such delights, and spent much time yearning for the onset of puberty.
“But how could you tell the judge such disgusting lies?” screamed my mother to me after the judge had delivered his verdict consigning me to my father.
Her rage took me aback. I had expected sorrow, not anger. It wiped out my triumph and left me feeling frightened.
“Danny said some disgusting things about Daddy!” I screamed back. “So why shouldn’t I say some disgusting things about him?”
“But you stupid little girl, don’t you realize what you’ve done?” My mother collapsed in a storm of weeping.
The tears reassured me. I had fully expected her to cry at the prospect of losing Danny, so I felt that everything was at last going according to plan. “Don’t worry, Mommy, it’ll all be all right in the end, and once Danny’s gone, we’ll live happily together ever after.”
“Gone?” said my mother. “But he’s not going! I’m not giving him up!”
And she didn’t. In the end, I was the one who had to go away.
“I won’t give you up!” said my mother fiercely. “I won’t give up Danny and I won’t give you up either. We’ll go back to the judge and say there’s been a mistake.”
More custody hearings followed, but they were no longer amusing. I found I couldn’t eat and didn’t care what clothes I wore when I went to see the judge. Finally I broke down and cried in front of him. I was so ashamed.
The judge said, “The child is clearly disturbed. I’m afraid this situation can’t be allowed to continue.”
My mother had hysterics and lay for hours in a darkened room until I thought not only that she was dying but also that I was responsible. Finally, unable to endure my misery any longer, I burst into her room and shouted, “I want my daddy! He loves me even if you don’t!”—which was a stupid thing to say because it made my mother hysterical again, with the result that I became more terrified than ever.
“But, darling, I do love you, I do, I do, but you just don’t understand, I can’t give up Danny! The man I love … Oh, darling, you just don’t know what it
’s like, you can’t imagine how a woman feels when she’s approaching fifty, you’ve no idea of the sheer horror of growing old and knowing that soon most men won’t care anymore, and, oh, I can’t bear it, I’m so terrified of ending up alone and unloved—”
“But I love you, Mommy!”
“Oh, darling, you’re lovely, you’re sweet, you’re the most adorable little girl in the world, but …”
“This is all to do with those facts of life you told me about,” I said. “They’re all that really matters to you. You don’t care about me at all. You’ll be glad to send me off to Daddy, because then you’ll be able to spend all your time playing facts-of-life with Danny.”
“Vicky, no! Darling … my precious … oh, God, I can’t bear it, I can’t be torn in two like this any longer, I’ll do it, I’ll give him up—”
“Don’t bother,” I said. “Forget it. I don’t care anymore. I’m going to live with my Daddy, and I never want to see you again.”
I got my Daddy. But I also got a huge cold new home in New York and two stepbrothers I detested and a stepmother who fired my beloved nanny because she thought it was better for me to have “a fresh start” and who gave all my favorite clothes to charity because she said they were “unsuitable.” My father loved me, of course, but since I had only seen him sporadically in the past, I had never realized before how hard he worked and how much time he spent away from home. In my dreams of a new life there had always been just the two of us: my father and I. In the reality of my new life there were also just the two of us: Alicia and I. Sebastian and Andrew soon went away to school, and then I was alone day in and day out with my stepmother in that echoing mansion on Fifth Avenue.
The puberty for which I had longed during my precocious sun-drenched early years finally arrived on a dark morning when the snow was falling. I did not want it. Alicia gave me conscientious lectures about sanitary napkins and the way I could expect boys to behave now that I was growing up. I was revolted. She also told me the real facts of life, not the romantic misconceptions I had acquired from my mother. I was appalled. I thought: So it was all worse, much, much worse than I believed it to be. My mother wanted to give me up in order to do that. It wasn’t just kissing and cuddling. It was that. Unbelievable. Disgusting. Obscene.
Yet I knew all the time that my mother hadn’t wanted to give me up. I knew she had loved me. And I knew the whole mess was my fault. I had told lies to the judge, and now, not only was I being punished, but my mother was being punished as well. Sometimes I thought I would die of the guilt. Sometimes I thought I could hardly bear to live with the shame.
But then my daddy came to my rescue, wonderful Daddy, always so good with children, so kind and patient and concerned, and of course he soon realized something was wrong; he knew I was unhappy.
“Tell me all about it, sweetheart,” he said, and I did. I poured out the whole story to him and he nodded and listened and held me close.
Then he made it all come right. He said, “Sweetheart, it’s all wrong that you should blame yourself for what happened. This was your mother’s fault from beginning to end. If she hadn’t been messing around with a gangster like Danny Diaconi, you’d never have been forced to act as you did. Your mother’s a wicked, unprincipled, immoral woman and she’s not fit to bring up an innocent little girl like you.” And he went on telling me how immoral my mother was, sleeping with man after man, and all the while my father was talking, I felt so much better because I began to feel I wasn’t to blame after all for the events which had brought me to New York. I began to believe that my mother really had been setting me a terrible example and that my father had been completely justified to press for my custody long after I had recanted and begged the judge to be allowed to stay with my mother.
It all seemed so clear to me then. If I hated my mother, I wouldn’t have to feel guilty for what I’d done, and if I believed her to be wicked, then I could never resent my beloved daddy for dividing me from her.
“I never want to grow up like her!” I sobbed. “Never!”
“Of course you won’t grow up like her, sweetheart,” said my father. “You’ll be a good girl always, and when you fall in love you’ll get married and be the perfect wife and mother and live happily ever after. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You’re a good girl and you want to make me proud of you.” And of course he was right. That was exactly what I wanted, for I loved my daddy, my wonderful daddy who had ridden up on his white horse to save me when I had been in despair, and all through the years that followed I did everything I could to show him how much he was loved. For if I hadn’t loved him so much, I might have started loving my mother again, and once I started loving my mother again, I mightn’t have been able to go on believing she was as evil as I’d been told she was, and once I admitted those kinds of doubts to myself, I might even start to wonder whether it had been my mother who had been so wicked and unprincipled all those years ago, but of course those terrible dilemmas could never arise because I would never give them life by acknowledging that they could exist. So long as I went on loving my father and hating my mother, I’d be safe, and that was why any variation in my attitude toward my parents had become literally unthinkable … unthinkable … unthinkable …
X
“Unthinkable!” I shouted, and woke with a gasp to find myself in my suite at the Savoy.
It was only five o’clock in New York, but in England the morning was already well advanced and I had to get up. I knew I could eat no breakfast, so I only ordered coffee. Afterward, when I was dressed, I phoned the London Clinic and was told I could visit Mrs. Diaconi at any time, since she was so much better.
I went on sitting on the edge of my bed. I felt sluggish, full of a vague dread which made me want to shut myself up in the suite for the remainder of the day. Presently I realized with surprise that I was thinking of Danny. He had been killed in a shooting incident at one of his father’s Las Vegas casinos. I supposed my mother had been very upset. They had been married for five years, but of course I had known nothing of their marriage, because my father had always refused to let me visit them.
I left the hotel abruptly and took a cab to the clinic.
London slipped past me beyond the window. I had a fleeting impression of gray skies, gray buildings, gray people, and gray pigeons. The red buses made a welcome splash of color in that forbidding landscape, but the city still seemed chillingly alien, reminding me of the last unhappy years with Sam. I wondered how Scott could have tolerated his years of exile, but then I found I could no longer think of him. All I could think about now was my mother.
“Can you stop at a flower shop, please?”
Thank God I had remembered flowers. One always took flowers to hospitals. I could remember everyone bringing armfuls of flowers to me in the hospital after Sam’s death, everyone except Sebastian, who had brought me a book of poetry.
We reached the London Clinic. I was feeling very sick by this time, so I just thrust a five-pound note at the cabdriver and ran inside without waiting for change. At the reception desk I was directed to the appropriate floor, but I had to force myself to follow the directions.
“Oh, Mrs. Diaconi will be so pleased to see you. … All the way from New York? Oh, she will be thrilled! Not a very nice day, is it? But they say the sun’s going to shine later. …”
The nurse’s English platitudes washed over me, but I barely heard them. We were walking down a long corridor, and seconds later she was opening the door at the far end.
“Good morning, Mrs. Diaconi! Now, here’s a lovely surprise for you!”
The room was light and airy, freshly decorated, spotlessly clean. Scott’s secretary had organized the appropriate flowers, chocolates, and magazines, and making an immense effort, I managed to look past these trappings of illness to the occupant of the bed.
I had not seen her since 1959 when she had paid her last visit to New York and Sebastian had helped me to cope with her. I remembered a woman with dyed black h
air, a mask of makeup, and a nauseating range of false small talk and affected mannerisms. Her parody of various Hollywood sex symbols had become more repulsive with her increasing years, and by that time had made her grotesque. Just to look at her had revolted me.
Fully prepared to feel revolted again, I faced her, but nothing happened. For I was no longer the same woman I had been eight years ago in New York—and neither was she.
An old woman with dull gray hair, a creased face, and a soft shapeless body was lying propped up in bed against the pillows. Only her eyes were unchanged, the blue eyes which I had always refused to admit had been inherited by Benjamin. She looked at me, and those eyes softened with love.
“Oh, Vicky,” she said, “how very, very good of you to come.”
And suddenly all I could hear was my father’s voice echoing down the years, and I remembered with terrible clarity that scene at Kennedy airport after Scott had left for Europe. I remembered my father’s confessions about his desolate private life. I remembered saying to him: “That’s why you stopped at nothing to take Scott away from Steve,” and instantly, before I could blot the thought from my mind I heard myself add the words which had never been spoken; I heard myself say: “And that’s why you stopped at nothing to take me away from my mother.”
I saw then exactly what he had done.
He knew I had loved my mother. He had been afraid I might want to go back to her when I had become so unhappy at his unhappy home on Fifth Avenue, so he had distorted the truth, bent it and rent it with lies, so that I would wind up hating my mother and loving him more than ever.
I went on looking at the mother who loved me and had gone on loving me through all the years of my neglect, and at last—at long, long last—I was able to see her as she really was: no monster, no obscene personification of unmentionable vices, but just a foolish woman who had made mistakes and paid for them, just another mother not as good as some but better than others, just one more of my father’s many victims.
Sins of the Fathers Page 74