A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  Daddy.

  We ordered him a big beautiful bluish-gray granite stone, a double one with my mother’s name on the other side. I worried over a quote to put on it, and then I picked up his old Bible. He’d worn it out; there were literally Band-Aids holding the front cover together. The book fell open to a page of Proverbs in which he had underlined a passage, the heart of which said, “Love is strong as death.” So that was it. He chose his own epitaph, and that was what we put on the stone. I had picked out the biggest, fanciest coffin they had, too, a silver Cadillac of a coffin. He’d always wanted a Cadillac car but felt like it was too show-offy for him, that people would think he was getting above himself. Now he had his big old Cadillac, as close as I could get for him. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, to sit underneath the striped tent and watch as they put my daddy into the ground. I started to hyperventilate, I was crying so hard. Then it was over and we went back to the small house where I grew up, the one where we’d had the excitement of our first bathroom, the one he’d come home to every night, dirty from work, with his little girl running to meet him, crying “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” And he’d pick me up and whirl me around. I’d hang off his arm and marvel at the goose egg of his muscle. The house was so much smaller and emptier now that he was gone.

  I tried with might and main to get my mother to come back to Provincetown with us and live as I’d promised Daddy, or just to come for a while. Norman backed me up. He was always generous about taking care of her, but she was adamant that she wouldn’t do it. I told her Daddy had told me to take her up there and take care of her, but she wouldn’t budge. I had no idea how she was going to live alone. She had never been alone. Daddy had done everything for her; he’d given her an insulin shot every day and tested her blood sugar levels. She didn’t drive a car. She had never written a check. She was afraid to stay by herself at night. She was afraid of the dark. But nothing any of us said could convince her to leave, so I found a woman who would come and sleep at her house for twenty-five dollars a night, and one who would come three afternoons a week and take her to the store or anyplace else she needed to go. I had a friend who was a nurse who lived on the next block, who agreed to come and help her with her shots and her testing, and while it all added up in costs, it was better than anything else I could do.

  We all went back home. Mother and I spoke on the phone twice a day, and she made it pretty well, for the most part, for nearly four months. Then, just before Thanksgiving, I got a call from my aunt Chloe. Mother had fallen and broken her ankle. Once again, I got on a plane and headed to Arkansas. She was in the hospital, and the doctor there said there was nothing he could do to fix the ankle. Her bones were too fragile and they couldn’t be set. She would have to be in a wheelchair the rest of her life.

  I blanched. It was unacceptable. She was in good shape for her age. She was still beautiful and looked ten or fifteen years younger than she was. She had all the marbles. She had diabetes, but nothing else was wrong with her. I simply wouldn’t accept that she would never walk again. I knew there were better doctors in Massachusetts. I said, “Thank you very much,” and Matt and I packed her up and brought her to Provincetown. She didn’t want to leave Atkins, but we told her it was just temporary, that she could come back as soon as she got back on her feet. Whether we believed it or not didn’t really matter, she came more or less willingly. She didn’t want to be in a wheelchair, either.

  I took her to a good surgeon, Dr. Paul Benoit, in Hyannis, who examined her and said, “Well, it is a tricky operation. It will be like operating on a paper towel cone, and it will take a genius of a surgeon, but you’re in luck because I am one.” He was young and charming, and the operation was a success.

  But the events of the previous year had worn me down. Besides the trauma of my father’s illness and death, after my mother moved in with us I had the total responsibility of taking care of her, pushing her in the wheelchair, heaving the wheelchair in and out of the car trunk, getting up at four in the morning to drive her to Hyannis in the snow for six o’clock appointments, for months taking her to therapy in Orleans, which was forty-five minutes away, twice a week for carpal tunnel syndrome in her wrist, then finally getting surgery on the wrist as well. Then there were endless visits to the eye doctor, and laser surgery on her eyes. Right after that, we noticed an irregular mole on her leg, which was melanoma. That required a skin graft, and more therapy.

  I still had to take care of Norman and the house, drive him to his doctors in Boston, drive to my own doctors in Boston, shop, and cook. The stress the previous year had brought had taken my health. My mother was desperately unhappy with us in Provincetown, and with all she had been through, who could blame her? She had a lovely room and bathroom of her own, but she felt it wasn’t her home. She and Norman were cordial but had nothing to say to each other. It was like they were from two different planets. She was in a deep depression and did nothing all day except sit and read in a chair tucked into a corner of a small room off the living room, the black ink of her mood seeping out around her. Nothing I could do to amuse her would help. All she wanted to do was go home, back to her old life, which was the one thing I couldn’t give her. So we struggled on, trying to carry on our lives as normally as we could, none of us happy.

  TEN YEARS EARLIER, in 1993, we were trying to figure out a fund-raiser for the Actors Studio, and Norman came up with the idea to do a reading of Don Juan in Hell by George Bernard Shaw, with Gay Talese as Don Juan, Norman as the commodore, Susan Sontag as Doña Ana, and Gore Vidal as the devil, a subtle little dig that Gore wickedly relished. The evening was a big success. It seemed for both Norman and Gore, the feud had faded. Gore and I even exchanged a few letters after Norman and I got back from Moscow. He was terribly claustrophobic, as I was, and we traded claustrophobia stories. Once, in Russia, we walked up several flights of stairs together rather than get into a tiny elevator jammed with too many overstuffed people.

  I was still artistic director of the Provincetown Repertory Theatre in 2003, and while it was not easy to put together inexpensive programs, David Fortuna and I were doing the best we could. The reading George Plimpton, Norman, and I had done of Zelda, Scott and Ernest had raised so much money that we wanted to try to do it again. So Norman came up with the idea to do Don Juan in Hell again. This time, Norman played Don Juan, and Gore delighted us when he came all the way from Ravello, Italy, to play the devil. I played Doña Ana, and our friend Mike Lennon played the commodore. It was beyond kind of Gore to come all that way to help our little theater, given the state of his health. In some way he must have been trying to make it up to Norman for what he had done all those years ago with the “3M” piece.

  When I saw him, Gore had aged, as we all had. He had traveled all that way with his only luggage a small duffel bag of the sort cosmetic companies give away with purchases of perfume. His knees were so painful that he could hardly walk. We had booked him into a guesthouse down the street from us called the White Horse, which was run by a lovely couple of friends, Mary and Frank Schaeffer. It was about ten at night when he arrived at our house from the airport, and he and Norman sat in the bar for more than two hours drinking and talking, and then Matt, who was visiting us, and I took Gore to the inn. Mary and Frank had stayed up waiting for him, and offered us a glass of wine, which we accepted. We sat in their living room, which was also the office, and talked for another hour or so. By this time, Gore was pretty far into his cups and could hardly walk the short distance down a gravel path from the office to his room. Matt and Frank practically carried him.

  Norman and Gore.

  When we finally got him there, he wanted to call his partner, Howard, but there were no phones in the rooms, so we had to walk him all the way back to the office to make the call, another torturous journey. He picked up the phone to dial, but he couldn’t remember his phone number. We spent a frustrating two hours calling information and trying different numbers, none of which worked, while Gore drank more red wine. An
d more. No amount of pleading or cajoling could get him to go to bed. It was now three o’clock, and Mary, Frank, Matt, and I were turning into zombies. Gore continued to punch in numbers. Finally, by some miracle, he got Howard on the phone. He practically wept, he was so happy to hear his voice. They spoke for a few minutes, and then Gore said he would like to go to bed.

  The cast of Don Juan in Hell in Ptown .

  We managed to get him back down the path one more time, and Matt and I waited while he unpacked his little bag. He had brought one change of underwear, one extra shirt, his razor and toothbrush, and a framed photograph of himself and his parents taken when he was about nine. He looked at it for a moment and lovingly set it on the bedside table in a gesture that brought tears to my eyes. Then he got into bed, fully dressed, wearing his jacket, shoes, and socks. He fell asleep and we tiptoed out the door. “At least I can sleep late,” I thought. “I’m sure he will be out cold until noon.” Before eight the next morning our doorbell rang. Gore had managed to navigate the several blocks in spite of his knees, and wanted breakfast. He asked for bacon, eggs, and an English muffin, which I made. And lots of coffee. Then we began rehearsals.

  It was a wild and woolly week, to say the least. Every day was much like the one preceding it—early breakfasts (always scrambled eggs, bacon, and English muffins), rehearsal all day, some kind of lunch, and dinner, ending with a late night of drinking and verbal sparring between Norman and Gore in our bar. I didn’t for the life of me see how Gore was making it so well. He had more energy than all of us combined. We were all exhausted. There was still a little friction between Norman and Gore, as Norman was the director and didn’t hesitate to direct, but for the most part it was civilized. Norman had masterfully cut an hour-long script from the play, and Don Juan and the devil were delightful adversaries. The night of the performance, town hall was packed to the top balcony, more than a thousand seats. Backstage, before we went on, Gore, who had changed into a red checked shirt for the performance, said, “Norman, when I walk out on that stage, you are going to hear a roar of applause the likes of which you have never heard in your life.” I don’t know if Norman had ever heard a roar of that magnitude, but when Gore walked onstage, with red lights flashing to announce the devil, it was pretty loud. The audience loved him, and we made enough money to keep the wolf from the theater’s door for a few more months.

  At the party afterward, he paid me the compliment of saying, “Norris, I’m going to outlive Norman, you know. I have longevity in my genes. When that unhappy event occurs, I will marry you and take care of you.” I thanked him but said I didn’t think I’d want to get married again after Norman died. He’s a hard act to follow. Gore, of course, wasn’t serious (I don’t think), but my idea of married bliss was not drinking until the wee hours every night and then cooking bacon and eggs for Gore Vidal every morning. I didn’t have the energy to keep up with him.

  Forty-three

  Norman had always been fascinated with Adolf Hitler, and had an idea for a novel about him that had been brewing in the back of his head for more than forty years. He called it The Castle in the Forest. He wanted to take a trip to Germany and Austria for research, and our Austrian friend Hans Janitschek was delighted to be our guide. We rented a big BMW near the border of France, and I drove it all across Germany, down through the Alps to Vienna. We stopped at every town in which Hitler had lived and tracked down his houses. We went to Wagner’s house and to Bayreuth where they performed The Ring every year. We visited a huge merry beer hall in Munich, drank gigantic steins of beer that took two hands to lift, and ate delicious sausages and fries from a roadside stand near the stadium in Nuremberg. It was a fun trip, in spite of the somber reason we were there. We went to Dachau, which echoed with spirits, and to Berchtesgarten, Hitler’s eagle’s nest aerie, high in the mountains, which was breathtaking and chilling.

  Hans was Viennese. He had been the ambassador to the UN when we met, back when I was pregnant with John, and he and his pretty wife, Freidl, were our great friends. He sat in the front seat with me and navigated while I drove, but he was more interested in turning around and talking to Norman, who was in the back. I’d be roaring down the autobahn at nearly a hundred miles an hour, which was totally exhilarating, and I’d say, “Hans, aren’t we supposed to turn soon?” He would keep talking to Norman. “Hans? We need to focus here. Where do we turn?” He would leisurely finish his sentence, adjust his glasses, fumble with the map, stare out the window for a minute, and then say, in a panic, “Turn right here! NOW!” and I would screech the brakes and try to zip through the traffic to get off the road.

  Once, he guided me into an outdoor shopping mall, and I had to navigate between the benches and shops, the trash cans and trees and pedestrians, until I found a place to get out. People were yelling at me, hustling their baby carriages out of my way. I kept calling out the window, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” I was mortified, but Hans was unperturbed. He had once missed his plane in Czechoslovakia and chased after it down the runway as it was about to take off. The pilot saw him out the window and stopped the plane and let him on. That was Hans; every day was an adventure with him. Norman got a tremendous amount of research accomplished, and began what would be his last novel.

  IT WAS OUR BIRTHDAY, January 31, 2003. It would be Norman’s eightieth, my fifty-fourth, so we decided to go to New York and have a party to liven things up a little, but a couple of days before it was to take place, I had a checkup and discovered the cancer had returned. We canceled the party, and on my birthday I was once again getting surgery in Boston.

  This time was harder. This time I knew there were no treatments that were going to make this go away. It would in all likelihood come back again, even though they would put me through one of the worst chemo regimes I think exists, intraperitoneal cisplatin, which involved dripping a strong chemo drug directly into my abdominal cavity through a port and then making me roll around on the bed so it could wash over my intestines. The nurse administering it had to wear thick rubber gloves in case a drop got on her skin, it was that toxic.

  John drove me home after the surgery and the first treatment. I was climbing gingerly up the stairs to my bedroom when my mother announced that she was going to go back home to Arkansas. She was going to take the bus and I couldn’t stop her. It was all I could do to get to my room and into bed. Norman, I think, was happy to have me back, but he was not at his best when I was sick, and until I was able to come back downstairs and function, he pretty much left me to myself. Cancer had always been Norman’s metaphor for evil, and now here was his wife, suffused with it. Was it his fault? Had he given it to me? It weighed on him, tormented him, and caused him to stay away from me. He moved into the bedroom down the hall, which hurt me at first, but the luxury of having my own bathroom and my own TV compensated. John and Matt were my mainstays during that time, and then Christina Pabst, my friend from the Actors Studio (we had once done A Streetcar Named Desire together and forever would call each other Stella and Blanche), came from Wisconsin and cooked and looked after me for a couple of weeks. She played poker with Norman and talked to my mother while I stayed in my room and recovered. She was a godsend.

  After a few months of the brutal chemo treatments, I wasn’t getting better. Then I stopped having bowel movements and had to be rushed to the hospital. In June, another surgery ensued. Before I went in, Arlan told the family there was a 99 percent chance that I wouldn’t survive it. He said afterward that when he cut in, it was so bad he almost just sewed me back up, but he felt like he had to try, and in the end, after an eight-hour surgery, when I woke up, there was a note on my pillow from John that said, “Mom, you’re the 1 percent!”

  My intestines had become glued together by scar tissue from the radiation and the fiery cisplatin, and only by the grace of God and Arlan Fuller am I here. Arlan worked on me, cutting away the scar tissue and pieces of ruined intestine like he was untangling a fine gold chain, and it worked. I also woke up with a colostomy
bag on my belly, which would come off in three months with another surgery to reattach the ends of the small intestine. Living with the bag was not the easiest thing I have ever done—for those of you who have had one, you know—but I knew it was only for a short time, so I tried to take it with a bit of humor. I told my friends I was going to design a “Bag Bag,” in all different colors and fabrics, so people could wear them outside their clothing instead of having to find ways to disguise them and stuff them inside. But I was getting scared. Everything I ate went almost immediately into the bag, and not much was being absorbed by my truncated intestines.

  It was during this time that I lost a lot of weight, going from a high of 173 down to 103. Suddenly I was a different person. None of my clothes fit. I bought a few smaller-size clothes and they soon became baggy. I decided to wait and just wear what I had, belted. My skin became baggy, and I had wrinkles I had never had before on my arms and body, my face and neck. I watched myself age, day to day, as in time-lapse photography. I had no breasts or hips at all, and my legs were long sticks. Christina came back and stayed another couple of weeks, as did a friend named Elke Rosthal, and Aurora came and spent a week with me, but they eventually had to go back to their lives. Norman tried to help by making his own breakfast and lunch, but he was not in good health himself. He was having chest pains, and of course he wouldn’t go to the doctor in Boston. He kept popping nitroglycerine tablets like they were candy, which upset me no end. My mother, who was at least out of the wheelchair and walking with a walker by this time, was more depressed than ever and just continually wanted to go home.