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The Loveliest Woman in America

Page 31

by Bibi Gaston


  Several days before Thanksgiving, my aunt Gail Gaston called to say that she and James planned to drive out to the Mill so that she could make sure her husband said good-bye to his brother. When I told my father his brother was coming, he gave me the tragic look. “Welllllllllll,” he said. “Do I haaaaave to? What would I have to say to him?” He pointed to his mouth. “I can’t speak.” I told him, “He can’t speak either, but perhaps he’ll make up for the past twenty-five years when he could.”

  When James and Gail arrived, I led them to my father’s room, the room that had been mine as a child. My uncle sat as if in a waiting room, fidgeting in a chair and eyeing the only thing on the wall, a colorized photograph of Rosamond. Meanwhile, Gail carried on in a light, pleasant banter to fill the stifling nothingness. My father was fine with small talk because he didn’t feel humiliated by his speech. But after about five minutes, James was getting antsy, so he got up and walked over to the hospital bed to shake my father’s hand good-bye. The right side of my father’s face had dropped like he’d had a stroke, but he still smiled a handsome lopsided smile and strained to lift his right hand to meet his brother’s. But in that instant, realizing his arm wasn’t moving, he winced and looked down at his limp arm and took his left hand to hoist his right wrist. But when he looked up, his brother was gone. It was as if something in the bedroom shattered and split off. James had abruptly turned and fled my father’s deathbed, mortified by what he thought was my father’s last act, a refusal to shake his hand.

  Realizing this was far too tragic for a last encounter, I jumped up from the foot of the bed and asked my father if he was all right. He shrugged his left shoulder, warped his mouth, looking perplexed, and asked in garbled words, “What happened?” I told him I didn’t know, but I did know; I’d grown up with the story of the two brothers who ran off to their separate islands and wouldn’t speak to each other. I followed my uncle down the long hall and into the living room where he stood stone-faced in front of the fireplace. Before I could explain that my father couldn’t raise his right hand because of the tumor, he grunted, “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.” I touched his shoulder and explained that the tumor was on the left, which meant that his right side was paralyzed, but he wasn’t listening. “You are a doctor, you should understand,” I said insistently. But his brother barked in an even harsher tone and made himself perfectly clear as he left the living room, “It doesn’t matter.” I raised my voice as he left the room—he wasn’t going to get away with it—“Yes, it does!”

  He went downstairs and I heard him go into the garage below my father’s room. Several days later he announced that after my father died, he’d like my father’s plaque from the Society of the Cincinnati and the colorized portrait of Rosamond. I told him that as my brother’s name was William Gaston, the first son of the first son, I planned as executor to offer it to him. The younger brother of a son couldn’t become a Son of the Cincinnati if the first son was still alive. But he argued in a monotone, one could buy into the Cincinnati. I put my head in my hands. Was this a game of old-family Monopoly? He had maneuvered Hurricane Island, the largest island, then come away with Rosamond’s property that would eventually be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and now he wanted the title to first son. I thought about falling over, but instead, I joined my father, speechless.

  A day or so before Thanksgiving, I admitted my father to a rehab facility for a short stay, where he was surrounded by doting nurses who gave him lessons on picking up paper clips and pronouncing words. He’d been there for only one day before cornering the most interesting person in the place, a 108-year-old woman who, he announced, was the oldest person in the county or the state or some jurisdiction. Within minutes, he’d managed to squeeze her story out of her despite her loss of hearing and his loss of speech. “She grew up in Prussia!” he exclaimed, fumbling with his paper clips. He said he was speechless, and I agreed. “What I mean,” he insisted, stammering, “was that if she was that old, she would have seen the Kaiser’s troops!” He was out of his mind with Little Billy curiosity and wanted to interrogate the woman, but, he said, she couldn’t hear him and he couldn’t speak. Between the two of them, all that history was gone forever.

  A few days later, the Irishman came up to the Old Mill. On Thanksgiving Day, I sat next to the Irishman, and my father sat next to the Moroccan, and together we all pointed like children at my shiny capon with its mounds of chestnut stuffing. My father teased the Moroccan in Arabic and French, and I suggested we all go to the pink house in Florida for Christmas where we could be together and my father could be warm and sit by the sea. He told us that he had once had a massive orange juice venture, a scheme to link the technological freezing prowess of Florida with the raw citrus genius of Morocco. He didn’t take much stock in Florida or its oranges—Moroccan oranges were vastly superior, he said—but if it was an escape from his fate, then fine, he’d go to Florida for Christmas. But the Irishman dissuaded me, elbowing me and jabbing me with his foot under the table.

  Over the next few days, the Irishman and I walked the lawns around the Old Mill where I described my recent adventures in mowing. I took him on a tour of my childhood landscapes, including the Moat, where creepy things happened, and Giant Rock, where I’d learned to be alone, and the former site of the chestnut orchard that had suffered a blight back in the 1970s; but he wasn’t paying much attention. He was in a splendid mood. It didn’t seem like the time to ask why he had jabbed me under the table. There was never a good time to talk about things or ruin a perfectly good time talking, when talking, he said, never got you anywhere. So I decided to just be grateful that he was there, that I was able to celebrate Thanksgiving with the two men who meant the most to me.

  A week later, I answered the phone at the Old Mill. The Irishman began in a tone of voice I’d never heard before. “Are you sitting down?” he said. “I’m leaving you.” As if I didn’t know what that meant, he said, “And I’m not coming back.” There were to be no questions and there was no reason to talk things through—we were over. I asked him if there was someone else, and he said no. I asked him, “Well, then why couldn’t you have told me at Thanksgiving? You know, my father only has another month to live and then I’ll be home. Why did you come to the Old Mill? Why couldn’t you have waited?” There was nothing to say. “I just needed to be sure,” he said.

  “Of what?” I asked. He had no reply.

  “So nothing,” I said, “after almost eight years together?”

  For the first hour, I was numb and went downstairs to the kitchen and pretended nothing had happened. I was alone with the Moroccan, who regularly made light of others’ emotions. She wasn’t a good audience for a meltdown in progress, but she did notice I didn’t look well and asked me what was wrong. Nothing, I said. For her sake, I made it easier to understand: after eight years, he’d broken up with me over the phone, that’s all, I said. The Moroccan poured me the strongest drink in the house. I tried to call my mother, who had raved about the perfection of the Irishman. There was no answer in San Francisco, so I walked around in circles and fended off strange comments from the Moroccan. “You can’t make a man stay if he wants to leave. Someday you’ll laugh about this. Stop thinking about it. Move on.” I felt as though I was about to drown. Move on? If this was some sordid, bloody short story by Paul Bowles set in the Maghreb where hawks picked the eyes out of human carrion, I’d move on. But I’d shared everything with this man, trusted him. We’d spoken of marriage that summer. He was living in my house with my cat!

  I spent that night in the Old Mill, holding down my chest so it didn’t heave through the ceiling. The next day I went to see my father at rehab and discovered him in his bed with his paper clips and scissors, happily mangling a copy of the New York Times. “Here, read this,” he garbled. “Get yourself a new wardrobe, march back to New York, go back to the Park.” “Central Park?” I said. “Read the article, you belong there,” he sputtered. The piece was about a new administ
rator for Central Park, but he never explained why I belonged there, that the article referred to a family, the Minturns, his relatives, who had the first idea for the park.

  A few weeks before Christmas, I was near collapse. I saw my brother at a Christmas party in New York and asked if he could spell me for a few days at the Old Mill while the Moroccan went to see her son in California and I went back to Florida to button up the house.

  “You might hold some affection towards Papa, but I don’t. What you are doing is your choice,” my brother said. My father and he had spent time together in Maine in the last few years, and my brother had won the $10,000 bounty my father had set for the first grandchild. “If you won’t help him, then think of it as helping me. Certainly he wasn’t a good father,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t be a good daughter.” In what felt like the darkest days of my life, my brother never showed up. I saw, starkly, the wounds of family, and how the pattern repeated.

  During his illness, everyone, it seemed, came forward with opinions. My mother’s mother, who had always hated my father, said of his rare brain tumor, “Leave it to your father to come up with a glamorous way to die.” My mother, on the other hand, staged a gallant effort at decency, rallied her circumspection, and understood exactly what I was doing. In her own inimitable way, she said it was she who belonged at my father’s side, but since his girlfriend of thirty years was there, I was to act as my mother’s emissary. She had finally found a reason to feel sorry for him again, and now that he was dying, she remembered how much fun they’d had together. “Oh,” I said, “you just started remembering all that?” “Yes, I was crazy for him. I was so sheltered and he was so worldly and we were so young, just seventeen when we met.” Every so often, she said, extenuating circumstances called for understanding, and death was one of those extenuating circumstances.

  The phone rang a few days after Christmas. The Moroccan had left for California and my mother had learned the coast was clear, so she wanted to speak with my father. I handed him the phone. He told her he didn’t really feel up to talking, but she carried on a sweetly nervous diatribe about the stolen Florida election and recent articles she’d read about various tragedies, never mentioning anything personal. She’d sent him a book, Making Miracles Happen, about a man who had beaten back a brain tumor by being pragmatic and positive, but he thought it was a load of bunk. He knew there were no miracles in his case. My mother hadn’t lived in reality all those years, he said, so her call rattled him. That night, he was unusually sad and told me how sorry he was that he had left us as children, that my mother had been a good woman, a great beauty, but when she’d let herself go, he’d run away; he didn’t know what for, he had just run. Later that night I found him staring at a photograph of the five of us at the wedding on Crotch Island. He couldn’t maintain the regret for too long. “Your mother was such a brilliant woman, but for all that education,” he said in his broken speech, “she wasn’t very smart and was completely impractical. She signed everything over to the lawyers, to James Gaston, that belonged to you.” I told him that it wasn’t that she hadn’t been smart, she had been an alcoholic and was busy destroying herself when she signed on the dotted line. I told him the brief story of growing up, the suicide threats, the bottles of vodka I poured down the drain. The Gaston family scourge had found its way to her. He didn’t know how bad it had become. Of course he didn’t know, how could he, he’d vanished. The tendrils were making their way through the deep crevasses of his brain and firing up electrical charges. That night he had the first seizure since surgery.

  My father seemed in a very bad state and on the day before Christmas, he announced he would die. The doctors said he was plateauing down, surely, but they thought we would make it through Christmas, after which I could call hospice to get help. I was alone with him, and each night, after I put him to bed, I’d go back to my room, fall over exhausted, and cry myself to sleep. The only person I talked to was an eighty-year-old lady named Jane Carter, a Christian Scientist, a painter, who had been our next-door neighbor in Florida. Over the phone, she read to me from the Psalms every night explaining that, according to Psalm 91, I was protected and covered with wings and feathers and shields and bucklers. I’d been spared from a lifetime of misery when the Irishman left. “That wasn’t love, but it was the greatest gift in your life,” she said. “Your work now,” she said, “is with your father.”

  On Christmas Eve, I set up a tree in the living room with giant lights and crumbling ornaments that looked like they came from a yard sale. I wrapped several gifts, a big beautiful book on landscapes and a CD of some mariachi music. He’d never had a filet mignon so I prepared one, cutting it into tiny chewable pieces. I’d called a photographer I knew in Maine, Paul Caponigro, and asked him if I could borrow a print of rocks from Brimstone, an island my father and I used to go to off the coast of Maine. “I can’t afford a Caponigro unless it’s to take one to lunch,” I told Paul. The print arrived just in time for Christmas.

  He couldn’t read his New York Times anymore, and he’d choke on a banana, so on Christmas night, the two of us stayed up, he fidgeting by the fire and I writing in my journal about his Moroccan bag and his Rolleiflex. I could tell he wanted to talk, and though it was a struggle, he told me he was very sorry about what I had gone through with the Irishman, that I’d given up my work and my home to be with him at the Old Mill. “It must be very, very tough. We need each other now,” he said. For the first time ever, I was moved by my father’s tenderness, by the words I had first heard from the Irishman. My mother had taught me that even if a man had behaved badly, there were extenuating circumstances to consider. No earthly circumstances would explain what the Irishman had done. So, I supposed it was a mystery. Meanwhile, I knew two things: the man I believed had failed me, and now my father, the man who had failed me, was the man I believed.

  On Christmas night, my father told me that he hadn’t gotten a chance to go shopping. “Instead,” he said, “I want you to have something that belonged to my mother.” He directed me to two colored German lithographs and a plaque hanging in the attic room. “What are they?” I asked. “They are from Austria. My mother received them for acting in a play called The Miracle.” Looking at them carefully for the first time, I noticed mountains and lakes and a little fishing pavilion. A stadium with a ring and, in it, a horse that seemed to lead a rider around a ring. The two lithographs appeared old and dignified, but on closer inspection, the images seemed whimsical. The plaque had a date, 1925. I didn’t understand German, but I was touched that he’d given me something of his mother’s for Christmas.

  On the day after Christmas, hospice staff came to the Old Mill and offered my father “spiritual counseling.” I was surprised when he nodded in agreement, mumbling something about Kent School. The masses and the monks, he said, hadn’t been all that bad, and who knew, it wouldn’t hurt to boot up a late-life belief in God. The next day, a towering chaplain named Konrad Kaltenback arrived and seemed fascinated by my father’s case, but because of my father’s speech problems, he turned to me and asked me what it was my father loved. I smiled and told him that he loved women, of course, and ones who hadn’t always been easy to love because they’d either killed themselves or gotten fat. He had once loved Morocco, but it had turned into Dante’s fourth ring of hell. And oh, yes, there was a deserted island off the coast of Maine where he’d spent almost every summer of his life, where he had built a shack of driftwood with windows that looked like eyelids fashioned from a double-holer that had floated up at high tide. That was something that had never failed him. By twilight off the coast of Maine, I told Kaltenback, my father could be found performing minor surgery on “Old Faithful,” his favorite smoking, hissing outboard, after fishing her out of Crane’s tiny harbor, after shoving her overboard in frustration.

  The chaplain looked at me and said that it was far more stressful being a caregiver than a patient. But every few days he would appear unannounced and retreat into the back
room for half an hour and cast what he called long lines to my father. In no time, the bait had landed, and the two men were equally charmed. My father would smile and gesticulate, but by that time, the tendrils had wrapped themselves around and up and over and through, controlling the hills and deep valleys of his brain, so there was barely a sentence that came out that didn’t sound like a foreign language.

  On one of his last visits, instead of being his usual jovial self, Kaltenback emerged dazed and speechless from the back room. He walked over to me, looked at me in dead seriousness, and said, “So who is going to write the book? It looks like it’s going to be you.” His sessions with my father were confidential so he couldn’t tell me why he thought my father deserved a book written about him, but he did mention the colorized photograph of Rosamond hanging on the wall. Perhaps it wasn’t just his book, it was to be a book about her as well.

  After Kaltenback’s last visit, I felt it my duty to snoop. I barely knew what my father had been doing all those years, because I had been afraid to ask. Despite his illness, his fax machine was still buzzing with orders for a rare piston or a screw, yellow legal papers decorated the floor in neat little stacks, and squadrons of bees dive-bombed the stacks and died there, belly-up, having lost their pilot holes to escape. There were desks filled with spark plugs and postcards I’d sent him many years earlier and photographs of boats and cars and desk journals he’d kept religiously that recorded the number of miles he’d run, the shower and shave at the club, and the futile jabs he’d made at the attorneys. In the back of some cabinets in the old country kitchen, I found pieces of English Cauldon white bone china with gold trim, stamped with a small gold owl and the words FAMA SEMPER VIVIT (Fame Lives Forever), the Gaston family motto. Also in the kitchen, wrapped in plastic, was an incomplete service of highly ornamented silver plate with the initials RPG. On the bookshelves were Kipling and Flaubert and Stevenson and a fully illustrated edition from the thirties entitled, Give Your Hair a Chance. There were books by William L. Laurence on the atomic bomb, and there was the Edie book and the book of half-truths on Mary Pinchot Meyer, a collection of pocket dictionaries including the Collins Spanish Gem dictionary with my mother’s handwriting in it, and the Juncker’s English-German Dictionary, and the Dictionnaire Francais-Anglais by Ch. Cestre copyrighted in Paris in 1918 and a Turkish-English dictionary published by the Correspondence Institute Yayinlari with a word scribbled in the overleaf, Istakoz, the Turkish word for lobster. There was a wonderful old stamp collection that once belonged to someone named “Goldie,” and a moth-eaten red fez with a rose on its label, and a gold-embossed leather journal with dates of what seemed to be parties held in New York and Hollywood with hundreds of handwritten names of attendees, separated into lists of men and women. The men included Count Ilya Tolstoy, Livingston Longfellow c/o Cass Gilbert, Maurice Chevalier, Robert Montgomery, Norman Bel Geddes, Cecil Beaton, Frederick Warburg, Rudolf Kommer, Richard Crane, Bennett Cerf, Conde Nast, Joseph von Sternberg, David O. Selznick, and Ed Knopf. The women’s list included Toni Frissell, Fannie Hurst, Lillian Gish, Dorothy Parker, Betty Field, Helen Hayes, Kay Francis, Katharine Hepburn, and on and on. I had no idea to whom the book belonged.

 

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