A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  “You’re going to have that baby tonight,” he said.

  “Oh, no, it’s not due for two more days.” I couldn’t imagine the baby coming early. Matthew had been two weeks late. (I hadn’t taken into consideration Norman’s propensity for always being early, or Larry’s for always being late. I think there must be something to that.) We got through the party, went home, got into bed around one, and at two in the morning I woke up needing to go to the bathroom. Before I could get out of bed, my water broke. I nudged Norman. “Wake up, sweetie. My water just broke.”

  “I know it did,” he murmured. There was no way he could not have noticed. He was awash. “Just lay back down and take a little nap. It won’t be coming for hours yet.” And he turned over and tried to find a dry spot.

  “Take a nap? Take a nap? You get up right this minute!” I yelled. “We have to get to the hospital, now!” I jumped out of bed and went into action. I called my doctor, I called Fanny to come over and stay with Matt and the boys, and then I began to clean up and get my stuff together. With my encouragement, Norman finally dragged himself out of bed and staggered to the bathroom, where he started to shave.

  “Shaving? You’re shaving? Get your clothes on and take me to the hospital right now!” I called the ever-ready Heights Car Service, and in five minutes a car with a driver named Snake was outside. Snake was happy; he had just won the lottery. The boys at the car service, who were such gamblers they would bet on which pigeon would take off first from the ledge, had had a little bet going on when I would deliver, and Snake had called it—April 16, the early morning shift. The rumor was that Snake had done time in prison, for what I never found out. He was taciturn, always had a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, and had homemade tattoos of snakes running up both arms. I always sighed with resignation when his car drove up, as it was not the most comfortable one, the springs popping through the seats, and I’d torn an evening dress or two on them, but this time I didn’t care. He was going to have to clean up a little puddle of water.

  We made it to New York Hospital in record time. Norman and I got out and walked to the admissions desk, water still dribbling down my legs, pooling on the floor. The woman in charge couldn’t have cared less. When we told her we didn’t have insurance, she said flatly she couldn’t admit me. I was looking around for something to throw at her, but Norman happened to have a check on him, so on the spot he wrote a check for two thousand dollars. If we hadn’t had the check or, God forbid, if we hadn’t had two thousand dollars, I guess I would have had the baby right there in the waiting room. So up we went. By now it was around three or four o’clock and the pains had started in earnest. A nurse came in with a pan of water and a razor to shave me, but I wouldn’t let her.

  “There have been millions of women down through history who gave birth without having their twats shaved and their babies were fine. It’s too awful when the hair grows back in. No. You can’t do it.” I’d had the worst time when I’d been shaved last time. I broke out in razor rash and itched like crazy for weeks, and there was just no reason for it. Was the baby going to choke on a hair or something? It was ridiculous. She was not amused.

  “I’m going to have to call your doctor if you can’t cooperate, Miss Church.” She emphasized the Miss, I thought. That did it.

  “So call him.” She did, and the doctor said I didn’t have to be shaved. She flung the water into the sink and left in a huff. It was now getting to be daylight, and the pains had intensified. Norman sat beside me, not knowing quite what to do, so he tried to distract me by telling me stories of all his other children’s births, how all the other women had reacted. After about an hour of this, I asked him if he could just not talk for a while. That is one of the hardest things he has ever tried to do, just not talk. For want of something to do, he got up and fussed around my bed, trying to make me comfortable. I was up on my elbows, huffing and puffing, and he took my pillow and fluffed it up. Then he put his hand on my forehead and pushed, in an effort to try to get me to lie back on the pillow and relax. Of course, as I was up on my elbows, all he accomplished was cracking my neck. I’m afraid I yelled an ugly word at him and threw the pillow. Poor man. He didn’t know where to put himself.

  “I think I’ll go down to the cafeteria and get some ham and eggs,” he finally said, dying to get out of that room. Just at that moment, I had a tremendous pain, and the nurses came rushing in. I hadn’t taken any anesthetic. I had been so drugged for the birth of Matt, and I wanted to be awake for this one. By that time the pains were pretty good ones.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” I yelled at Norman. “You’re not going anywhere. This baby is coming right now!” And it was true. They rushed me next door to the delivery room, where the doctor was waiting. They got Norman into a gown and mask, and then the doctor took one look and said “Push!” and I pushed. It felt as if my body were being ripsawed in half. “It’s almost here. Push one more time!” A steam whistle scream that I never dreamed could be inside me erupted, nearly shredding my throat, and the baby popped out like a watermelon seed. Instantly, the pain stopped. “It’s a boy!” I knew it would be, of course. I’d known for years.

  The doctor laid the baby on my belly as Norman stepped up to get a look at him. I’ll never forget the look on his dear little face. It was as if a grown person, not an infant, were looking out at us. His eyes were clear, his mouth was in a little moue, with the top lip stuck out, and he frowned as he looked at the two of us, who were grinning at him like maniacs. He blinked at the lights and the room as if he were saying, “What the heck is going on? Who are these people? Where am I?” Then a light dawned on his face—“Oh. My. God! I’m a BAAAAABY!”—an astonished look that made everyone laugh.

  They took him away to clean him and put silver nitrate drops in his eyes, which must have hurt like the dickens because he cried and squeezed his little eyes shut, and when he opened them again, he was truly a baby. The aware person had retreated somewhere inside and an infant was in his place. The afterbirth was one more pain, and then they cleaned me up and wheeled me to the recovery room. I told Norman he could go and get his ham and eggs, he had done his job brilliantly.

  Baby John Buffalo with Norman and me.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL KREMENTZ

  Thirty-two

  We did name him Buffalo, as the old man had predicted. John Buffalo. The sturdy old name John balancing the peculiarity of the Buffalo. The origin of his name is his secret to keep or tell. He was a happy baby, and all his brothers and sisters loved him, as well as his nana Myrtle Bennett and his grandma Fanny. I once caught Fanny whispering in his ear, “You’re going to be a great man one day.” She turned to me a little sheepishly and said, “Well, I used to do that with his father, and it worked. So why not?”

  I worried that the kids—Matt, particularly, who was six and a half—would feel displaced by John Buffalo, and I tried to compensate by doing special things with him. Matt and I went out to lunch every weekend, just the two of us, and to the Metropolitan Museum to visit the knights, or the American Museum of Natural History for the dinosaurs, or to a movie, and to antique-toy stores, where we bought old G.I. Joes for him and antique Barbies for me. Matt never appeared to be in the least jealous. He was a terrific big brother from the beginning. The first night we brought John Buffalo home from the hospital was a chilly April evening, and Matt kept going to look at the baby, worried he would be cold. Finally, he came in and said, “I wrapped the baby up. He was cold.” He proudly led me in to see how nicely he had done it, and the baby was wrapped head to toe in a blanket, which I immediately threw off so he could get some air. I explained to Matt that you had to leave a little space for his nose so he could breathe.

  Matt carried him around, helped me feed him, and played with him constantly. As they got older, he made up games for them to play. He took paper bags and made hats and they played Civil War or Revolutionary War (although John always had to be the rebels and the British), and they played G.I. Joe endles
sly. Matt had a collection of the bigger Joes, and John desperately wanted one, so I made Matt give him one of his treasured Joes. John promptly tore its arms off, and I felt terrible, remembering once when my father made me give away my beloved Barbie to a little girl who was dying. He thought I was too old for dolls, and it would be a good, Christian thing for me to do, but I loved that Barbie and I didn’t even get the moral credit, because I didn’t really want to give it to her. You can’t force your kids to be generous if they don’t want to be. But for the most part, John and Matt were best friends from day one and are still.

  John and Matt.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY JILL KREMENTZ

  My parents softened after the baby arrived, and finally came to see him when he was four months old. I was changing his diaper when they walked in the door, so I scooped him up and brought him out, diaperless, to show them. I proudly held him up, and John let go a long arc of golden pee right onto my father’s spotless shirtfront. Daddy laughed with delight and took the baby. And I never heard them say another word about how I had disgraced them.

  Norman’s divorce from Beverly rocked on, frustratingly slow. It was a worry hanging over us, disrupting our lives. We had to plan everything around the long trips to the Cape, the delays, the canceled court dates. The year 1978 was half over, and then it was three-quarters over. I had only a few more months of worrying about Norman’s dying. Then one day, the courtroom drama turned particularly bad. Norman had been under a lot of pressure going back and forth to Utah, the IRS was about to take the house and sell it at auction, and the newspapers were still reporting every little thing that was said in court. On this day, Beverly was recounting something that Norman thought was a total misrepresentation, and he started having an anxiety attack. He was having difficulty breathing, so he got up and walked out of court, me right after him. We sat on the stone steps of the courthouse and he unbuttoned his shirt collar, loosened his tie, and said he felt like he was having a heart attack. Oh, God. This was it. This was going to be the moment he died, and I would be left with a tiny baby and all the responsibilities and he would still be married to Beverly. “I’m going to call a doctor,” I said.

  My daddy, Matt, and John Buffalo.

  “No. Don’t leave me. Just sit here and let me get my breath.” He was as pale as new milk curd, and his face was slick with sweat. I desperately wanted to get some help, but he was adamant. He took my hand and looked into my eyes. “Listen to me. If I go today, or anytime soon, I want you to finish The Executioner’s Song.” What? Me? “I know you can do it. In spite of what you think, I know you can write. I’ve got the research all laid out, and Judith can help you. It’s almost finished. It’s a simple style that you can do. You know you can. Promise me you’ll finish the book.” I’d given up on my novel, but he had read plenty of my letters, from the one to Michael and Stephen to ones I wrote to him all the time. If I ever had anything serious to talk about, I always wrote him a letter. I knew that way he would hear me. If I just talked to him, his mind would be racing to his next reply, or he wouldn’t really hear what I was saying and we would have a fight. But if it was on the page, I knew he would get every nuance. “I promise I’ll do my best, sweetie, but you are going to finish that book yourself. Let me get you some water.” I went and got him a cup of water, and after a while he began to feel better. We went back in, and somehow he got through the rest of the day.

  HE DID FINISH the book, and in April 1980 it won the Pulitzer Prize, his second, which gave him an emotional boost, to put it mildly. Then, in late October, after nearly three years, the divorce war was over. Beverly got a little too much for Norman’s taste, not quite enough for hers, but it was done. We kept our apartment and he bought her another one in Brooklyn Heights. Rather than seizing the Provincetown house, the IRS had given Norman a chance to sell it and pay them off. After the taxes were paid, he was going to give Beverly half of what was left, and put his half into a college fund for Michael and Stephen, but she wouldn’t agree. She still wanted the house, free and clear. Finally, it seemed the lawyers had convinced Beverly of the urgent need to sell, and on the appointed day, Norman, taking Michael with him, went to the lawyers’ office to sign the papers. Beverly didn’t show up. The sheriff had to come to the house and forcibly remove her, which of course was in all the papers, and the IRS took the house and put it up for auction. (Coincidentally enough, a relative of the IRS agent had the winning bid for the house, which was about half of its appraised worth. What a small world! I mean, what are the chances?) What was left barely covered the tax debt. There was no college fund. But Norman was at last free to marry. Again.

  Thirty-three

  “MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND! Norman Mailer is not a cheap bigamist,” the papers screamed, “he’s a TRIGAMIST!” It seemed that every week I was calling my mother and father in Arkansas to say, “I hate to have to tell you this, but before you read it in the papers…” and I’d relate the latest in the ongoing saga of my life with Norman. Although Norman’s divorce from Beverly was final, she didn’t like the settlement and was suing for more money. It seemed to me that in her mind that meant she was still married to Norman until he gave her what she wanted. Fortunately, the law said differently, so we started making plans for the wedding. Or weddings, as it were, as Norman was going to marry two women, hence the trigamist headlines.

  On Friday, November 7, Norman was going to marry Carol, to legitimize their daughter, Maggie, who was at that time nine. He would fly alone to Haiti the same night to get a divorce on Saturday (we’d researched it, Haitian courts grant quick divorces and are open on the weekends), then fly back on Sunday and marry me on Tuesday, November 11. Which was also Veterans Day, an appropriate coincidence, as he was certainly a veteran of the marital wars.

  I’m not going to pretend Carol and I were all sweetness and light about this arrangement. I was in favor of him adopting Maggie to make her his legal daughter, while Carol had made it clear she would prefer to be married to him longer, for a year or so, and then “quietly” divorce, as if that would be possible with the ravenous press, but that was not his plan. He felt bad that he hadn’t divorced Beverly years ago when Carol had gotten pregnant, and he wanted to marry Carol to “honor their years together.” He didn’t want Maggie to be his only child whose mother he had never married, even if it was for only twenty-four hours. I truly sympathized with Carol—she hated publicity and was intensely private about her life, and now she was right in the middle of this media frenzy—but when you fall in love with somebody like Norman Mailer, you have to understand publicity is a given.

  Since divorce papers can’t be signed before a marriage, Norman had to trust that Carol would go along with the plan and sign the divorce agreement immediately after the wedding ceremony. The press was having a fine old time, constantly calling the house (every wire service in the Turkmen Republic and such places had our home phone number, it seemed), so Norman thought the best thing to do would be to call Liz Smith, who was a dear friend and the fairest columnist there ever was, give her quotes, and that would defuse the others. I think I told Liz something like, “Of course it is all a bit disconcerting, but I understand why Norman wants to do this, and I am in support of him.” And I was, finally. Really. It would have been horrible for Maggie to be the only child whose mother was never married to her father, and his years with Carol had lasted longer than some of the other marriages. Besides, Carol had never caused Norman a lot of headaches or publicly gone after him for more money or said ugly things about him in the press, as some of the others had, and she deserved better.

  Still, as I watched him walk out the door that Friday night, I had a brave face, but I knew he was on his way to marry a woman he still had feelings for. (He would always have feelings for her. It was something I learned to live with, like arthritis.)

  After I had a loud, cleansing cry, I layered on the makeup, put on one of my best dresses, and went out to meet Louie Cabot and his then wife, Maryellen, who had kindly invited me to the bal
let that night. Rudolf Nureyev was dancing, the first time I had ever seen him, and we sat in the front row, where I had an unimpeded view of his powerful musculature and graceful moves. That pleasure aside, I vowed never again to sit in the front row. It took all the magic out of the show. We were privy to the grunts of the dancers as they jumped and executed difficult moves; we saw the sweat fly from their faces; and the shoes that from afar seemed a part of the foot, so soft and pliable, clattered alarmingly loud across the stage. I prefer to be farther back and imagine that the dancers are magically flying. At any rate, it was a diversion from the business that was transpiring at just that moment with Norman and Carol, who were being married by a friend of ours, Judge Shirley Fingerhood, in her offices. They had written their own vows, which were on the order of, “I want to honor the years we have spent together and the love that created this beautiful child, Maggie.” I’m sure if I had been there I would have been weeping.

  After the ballet, I came home and checked on my sleeping children. Then I went to bed. Alone in our room, I lay awake, wondering if Carol would indeed allow him to marry me, or if she had changed her mind and decided to be Mrs. Mailer for a while and let me stew, as she had stewed for the past ten plus years while he was married to Beverly or living with me. But my worrying was for nothing. She signed the papers. Carol was a decent woman, and she knew that I, too, had a small child who was waiting to be legitimized.

  Norman came back from Haiti two days later, Sunday, with the promise that the decree would be delivered on Monday. We couldn’t plan a wedding without the divorce papers in hand, and we had tickets to fly to London on Tuesday night, where Norman was acting in the movie Ragtime for Milos Forman, playing the architect Stanford White. I didn’t dare even tell anyone the wedding might happen. I let it be known that we would probably get married when we got back from London. Norman had secretly gone by himself on Monday morning to Tiffany’s and bought me a ring, one that made my heart sink when he presented it to me with a flourish. It was a thin band of tiny alternating diamond and ruby stones, which seemed to me like the cheapest ring he could find. It wasn’t my style at all. I am a big girl with big artist’s hands, and a ring that delicate was just not something I would have picked for a wedding ring. Although I didn’t want to be ungracious, I let my feelings be known. I couldn’t help it.