A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  I got to the point where I couldn’t cope. The kids all had their lives. They came and helped as much as they could, especially John and Matt, but I couldn’t expect them to drop everything and come and take care of us, so we began to talk about getting an assistant in Provincetown. Judith was in New York. She was not about to move to the Cape, and Norman needed someone intelligent who could help him on-site. He had begun writing The Castle in the Forest, and there was a tremendous amount of research involved.

  Norman and I thought of everyone we knew who might be a possibility as an assistant, and we remembered a waiter at one of the restaurants we went to a lot named Dwayne Raymond, who was an aspiring writer. We always liked having him as our waiter; there was something congenial about him. He was good-looking, personable, smart, and obviously overqualified as a waiter, but then, that is the case with most waiters in Provincetown, and New York, too. Probably most waiters everywhere.

  We were trying to remember his last name and get his phone number when Norman decided to go to the grocery store to get a few things, and while he was picking over the bananas, there was Dwayne. They had a little chat, and Norman asked him if he had any interest in working as his assistant, which he did, and then somehow the conversation turned to me and how I had been having so much trouble with the surgeries and couldn’t shop and cook like I used to, and Dwayne offered that he was a good cook and could do both jobs. Our lives immediately got easier and more interesting, and I think he could say the same—at least the more interesting part. He was good at both cooking and researching, and gradually he took on more and more of the Mailer duties. He also became my friend and confidant.

  Every morning when he came in, he would come upstairs to my studio and we would talk about what was going on with me and Norman and my mother, and his relationship with Thomas, his partner, who also became a member of the household. Thomas was a carpenter, and we always needed someone to fix something in the house. To my delight, Dwayne got along with my mother and she became somewhat happier. She must have been bored out of her skull with only me for stimulation. She was terribly fond of both Dwayne and Thomas, who was also a good-looking man, with long shiny black hair, and she was enmeshed in their relationship, getting upset when they fought, happy when they were getting along. They both loved to confide in her (to a point), which pleased her.

  I had been working on a novel, the sequel to Windchill Summer, off and on for years, that I called Cheap Diamonds, but circumstances had kept me from finishing it. Now I started it again. It was summer in Ptown, I was alive, and we had someone to help us. Things could have definitely been worse.

  I was scheduled for another surgery to remove the bag in October, and Matt and John both came up to help. Then, the day before my surgery, Norman had severe chest pains, and Brian O’malley, our local doctor, told him to go without delay to Hyannis to the hospital. They did an angiogram, which turned out unspeakably bad because they couldn’t get the wound in his groin to stop bleeding. They put a twenty-pound weight on it for hours until Norman was in agony, and it damaged his sciatic nerve, which caused him real pain for quite some time afterward. Then they told him they were going to have to operate immediately. The doctor called the kind of blockage he had a “widow maker,” and he didn’t want to let it go even one more day. Of course we were all up in the trees, not knowing what to do. I had my bags packed out in the car to continue on to the hospital in Boston for my own surgery, and I wanted Norman to go to MGH as well and have the surgery with the best surgeons there were. Norman decided he wasn’t going to let the doctors in Hyannis operate right on the spot, so against their strong advice, John took him home, Matt took me on to Boston to get my surgery, and once again chaos reigned in the house.

  My third surgery of the year was the worst of the three, but the bag was gone, thank the Lord. As far as the cancer went, Arlan had heard of a new experimental drug at Dana-Farber, and they got me into that program. The drug worked, the tumors were kept in check for the next four years, and my life slowly got back on track.

  Norman did go to Boston, found a good surgeon, and arranged to get the bypass. Unfortunately, they made him get all his teeth pulled beforehand as a precaution against infection. That was the beginning of his decline. An oral surgeon was going to pull the teeth and put in implants at the same time, a relatively new procedure. Stephen took him, and right from the beginning Norman was upset because every ten minutes, each time a bit of work was done, the doctor photographed it using a flash camera. Norman hated flash cameras because he had macular degeneration and the flash was painful to his eyes. He asked the doctor why he was taking so many pictures, and the answer was that he was making a record of it for his students, that it was such a new procedure they didn’t have any photos. Norman was enraged. He felt betrayed, and I don’t blame him. He may have signed a permission slip, but when you are in a situation like that and the doctor or dentist hands you a paper, you normally just sign it without reading the fine print because it’s either sign or go home. The doctor agreed to take fewer pictures, and on they went, for hours, through the hideously painful procedure. They were never able to completely deaden his gums. Then, afterward, the implants got infected and had to be removed. He was left with false teeth that he never got used to. They never fit right, and it was so difficult to eat that he began to lose weight.

  The family once again rallied around in the early hours of the morning. This time it was Norman on the gurney and me sitting in the waiting room with them, and again it was a long, brutal surgery. The doctors brought him to the recovery room, then had to rush him back to the OR because he began to bleed through a stitch. He was opened up again, problem fixed, and finally, some hours later, we were able to see him. We were all wrung out, especially me. He was just coming out of anesthesia, and was in one of his crazy-head moods.

  “While I was out,” he told all twenty-something of us ganged around his bed, “I discovered the plan for the family. We will buy a ranch someplace out west, someplace where land is cheap, and build the Mailer compound. Every family will have their own house. We have enough talent in the family to do anything we want to. We’ll make movies, we’ll paint, we’ll put on plays, we’ll write, it will be great. We’ll all live together and have dinner together every night, and the beauty of it all is that it will be totally financed by the GFY card.” The what? “The GFY card. It will make us millions of dollars. We’ll copyright the letters, and print up cards. Can you imagine? It’ll sell like hotcakes. If you are in an elevator and someone shoves you, all you have to do is reach into your pocket and hand them a GFY card. You can give them out to anybody, anywhere, rude people in restaurants, people who have barking dogs, book reviewers and reporters.” What is GFY? “Go Fuck Yourself! Isn’t it a brilliant idea?” We all looked at one another, trying to keep from howling. He was dead serious. He had clearly had an epiphany while he was out, and this was going to be the family’s fortune. It was almost as good as the elevator that went to Miami.

  John’s girlfriend at the time, Gena, made up some cards with a beautiful sunset behind a ship in full sail and the letters GFY in white. She brought a box of them to the hospital, and Norman never had so much fun. He gave them to the nurses, to the doctors, to the cleaning ladies, to everyone he could give one to. People loved it and thought he was the most charming man who ever lived. However, he decided sadly, it was probably not going to work. Copyrighting the letters might be impossible, and it was too easy for someone to rip off the idea, but he got a million dollars’ worth of fun out of them.

  WITH THE NEW experimental drug, I slowly got better. I got interested in clothes again and spent a lot of time ordering things online in my new size, 2. I tried to take my mother out shopping and for lunch, or for rides, or find anything at all that would interest her, but she preferred to stay in her chair and read. It was getting harder and harder to live with. Norman had completely given up trying to talk to her. After he recovered from his surgery, he spent most of his time u
p in his studio, working, or in front of the TV.

  Finally, it was Mother’s Day 2004. John and Matt were there, and Danielle and her husband, Peter, had come up for a few days. I decided to make one giant effort to cheer Mother up. I bought her a new outfit, the boys got her gifts, we all took her out for lunch at a nice restaurant, and I arranged for a pedicurist to come to the house and give us girls all pedicures. She dutifully got through the day, and at the end of it, we were sitting in the living room and she started to cry and said, “I hate it here. I want to go home.” Something in me just snapped. I had been through too much, done too much for her when I was too sick to do it. I’d learned my patience quota, and I couldn’t learn one more lesson. I had my reading glasses in my hand, and I snapped them in two. “Okay,” I said. “You can go back. I’ll send you down there, and I don’t care how you make it. You are on your own.”

  Then I went upstairs and started making calls, trying to find someone who would live with her in Atkins, someone who would take care of her. There was no one. I called Susan and said, “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you’ll come and take her home and find someone to stay with her. She’s going to kill me.” Susan, who was usually so understanding said, “You better pull yourself together. I’m not going to take care of your mother. Nobody is going to take care of her. What if she falls and breaks something, like the last time? Who is going to be responsible? You can’t hire somebody to be you. You’re going to have to figure out something else.” And that was that. It was hard to hear, but she was right.

  That night, before I went to sleep, I talked to my father, as I sometimes did. I said, “Daddy, you have to come to me in a dream tonight and tell me what to do, because I’ve run out of options. You are the one who told me to bring her up here and take care of her, but it’s not working out. She’s going to kill all of us, including herself.” And I immediately fell asleep and had a dream. I was standing on the lowest step of a Roman-like arena, with a dusty circle in the middle and tiers of stone bleachers. It was a bright sunny day, and off to the side of the arena was a small stone building. My father stepped out, wearing a gray suit I had seen him wear dozens of times. He was young and handsome, and with him was my aunt Effie, who was a beautiful blonde with big blue eyes when she was a girl, and that’s how she looked. She turned to Daddy in surprise and said, “J.A., where are you going?” He looked right into my eyes and said, “Well, she said she wanted to talk to me.” And then I woke up.

  It was so real. It wasn’t a dream; it was a visitation. I had no doubt. But why did he leave so quickly? He didn’t tell me anything! Then somehow the idea popped into my head to look online for information on assisted living. I had never thought of that before. I’d been so focused on making her happy living with me, like Daddy had said. I got up, went to the computer, and immediately found a place in Orleans that was not only the closest place to us but the nicest and least expensive. The next morning I took mother and Danielle to look at it.

  It was beautiful. There were huge bushes of rhododendrons blooming, cool shade trees, and the building itself was red brick and well kept. We went to the office and a nice older woman showed us a couple of rooms that were occupied, and they were lovely. Each had a view and its own little terrace, and the women who lived there were friendly. She showed us one unit that someone was in the middle of moving into, a two-bedroom, which was really lovely, but unfortunately there was nothing available right then. I told her that we would take anything that became available, a studio, one-bedroom, or two-bedroom. I asked her to just call us the minute she had something. That put us at the top of the list, because most people weren’t that flexible. That was on a Sunday. The next morning, the phone rang early. “Mrs. Mailer? I have some news for you. The two-bedroom you saw yesterday is available. I didn’t want to say anything yesterday, but the person moving in died the night before, and I didn’t feel like I could offer it to you until I had spoken to the family. I’m sure you understand.” I was so happy, I nearly jumped for joy.

  “Thank you, Daddy. That was quick!” I said to him when I got off the phone. “But you really didn’t have to kill somebody off to do it.”

  My mother became a new woman. I took her to Dr. Brian O’malley and he put her on Prozac, for starters, which had not occurred to us before, amazingly. And we went to a furniture store and picked out a whole houseful of furniture. She had some money from my father, and she just went through the store and picked out anything she wanted. She didn’t once look at the price. She had never in her life done that. She had always scrimped and saved; my father had never wanted to buy anything new. She used to have to buy the cheapest desk or chair and pay it out, and now she was getting anything she wanted! We went to the mall and she picked out sheets and towels and dishes and silverware. It was like she was a girl again and was getting her first apartment. I had never seen her so happy. We had a great time arranging the furniture and fixing things up, like girlfriends, finding art and hanging pictures. We went every week to the Christmas Tree Shop and got flowers and cushions and everything she needed for her new little place. Dwayne and Thomas came and made planters for her to put on her patio, and we got a wicker table and chairs so she could sit outside and watch the birds at the bird feeder and the squirrels. I got bookcases for all her books. She was a different woman, and we were so much happier, too. Norman was getting better, and the tension in the house was gone. If only she had been on Prozac throughout my childhood, it would have been a much different childhood.

  Mother in her new apartment.

  Forty-four

  The phone rang at seven in the evening; it was Judith. “I’m sending that fax Norman needed,” she said. “Look for it to come through any minute.” I heard the hum of the fax upstairs as it started to work.

  “Oh, Judith, you sent that already this afternoon. I guess it slipped your mind. But thank you so much. It’s late. You really ought to take off for the day.” Judith worked out of her apartment in Brooklyn, so taking off didn’t mean she would go anywhere. For twenty-odd years she had worked down in the little office we’d owned on the floor below our apartment, but Judith was a chain-smoker and nobody in the building except for her smoked. We had tried everything to keep the smell down. We had professional-grade fans and smokeless ashtrays, and we had asked her to smoke outside, which did not work, as her office was three flights up and she couldn’t go longer than five minutes without a cigarette. Finally, when one of our neighbors threatened to take us to court, she moved her center of operations two blocks over to her own apartment and Matt took over the office as his room. It was great for him, but to get it in habitable shape, he had to sand and scrape, seal and varnish and paint, getting rid of layers of brown nicotine stains and smoked-in smells.

  At nine o’clock, the phone rang again, and again it was Judith, saying she was going to send the fax.

  “Are you all right, sweetie? You’ve sent that fax twice now. Is anything the matter?” It wasn’t even a fax that was worth anything, just a small thing that could have been taken care of in a few days.

  “I guess it’s these antibiotics I’m taking. Levaquin. They seem to be making me a little hazy.” Judith had been sick for months with a nasty little cough, a smoker’s cough, which, in fact, she had had for years. But it had recently gotten worse. She did not appreciate advice, and if I ever said anything such as “Maybe you should stop smoking until your bronchitis clears up,” she would get icy and tell me it was not any of my business, thank you. She even believed that smoking was good for her, as the smoke killed germs. I had never in my life seen anyone smoke as much as she did. There were few breaths in her day that did not contain smoke. Still, she was positive she was going to live to be in her nineties, as her father and mother had both done. They’d been smokers, too, after all.

  But Judith was increasingly making me nervous. She had begun to do odd things in the previous few months. She had bought a house, sight unseen, in Appalachia, a house that even by Appalachian standa
rds was cheap. It had formerly been a double-wide trailer, but somebody had taken the wheels off and put it on a concrete slab foundation. She was taking driving lessons. She was going to move to a place most people were fleeing from. It was going to be beyond bizarre—Judith, who was a Wiccan priestess, who read charts in the stars and divined spirits, was going to be living in the land of the fundamentalist Christian churches. Would she bring a sweet potato pie to potlucks? Or would she keep to herself and troll the Internet? I couldn’t imagine. She fully intended to continue working for Norman, that much we knew. I guess Appalachia was no farther than the keyboard of her computer.

  The phone rang at ten o’clock. It was Dwayne. He was out at a restaurant across the street from his house, and his roommate, Tony, had come over carrying a cellphone with Judith on the line. She had told Tony to go get Dwayne and tell him he had to come to the office and receive the fax she was sending, that it was most important. Tony was so used to her precise competence that it didn’t occur to him it was a little strange that she had called on his cellphone and told him to walk it over to the restaurant where Dwayne was having dinner. Dwayne assured her that he had gotten the fax at two in the afternoon and not to worry about it. But he was concerned, as was I. The phone didn’t ring anymore, but she started to send the fax, over and over, until I finally went upstairs and unplugged it. Sue and Marco were staying in our apartment in Brooklyn for a year—Marco was taking a sabbatical—and as soon as I thought Sue would be up the following morning, I called her.