A Ticket to the Circus

by Norris Church Mailer

  “Sue, could you go over and see about Judith? She is acting strange and I’m worried about her.” Sue went over, and while Judith was obviously not feeling well, she seemed to have her wits about her. She again blamed the antibiotic, Levaquin, and she refused to go to the doctor. Neither of us knew what to do, so we did nothing. Then a few days later, Judith decided on her own to go to the doctor, but she would share precious little information with us. She was fine. There might be some benign polyps on her liver, but she was sure they were nothing. They were going to take an X-ray, but the nurse who was to do it somehow tripped and fell over a cart and hurt herself badly, so it was postponed. Then Judith couldn’t get the X-ray because her insurance wouldn’t pay for it at the clinic she was going to, and she would have to go across town to another clinic. There was always some reason she couldn’t get this X-ray.

  Finally, she said she was going in to get a little biopsy, that while she knew it was nothing, they wanted to be really sure. And the next thing we got was an email from a dear friend of hers, Peter Levenda, telling us she was dead. She had died on the table, while they were doing the biopsy. She’d been riddled with cancer from all those years and cases of cigarettes—lungs, liver, and brain. I think nobody was more surprised at her death than Judith herself. She was a master of denial. She even said that cigarette smoke was good for her plants, that was why they were so big and lush. Her cat, though, didn’t fare as well. When her friend Noel came and got the cat, it started to go through nicotine withdrawal out in the fresh air and had to be treated at the vet’s with nicotine patches for a while. She’s fine now. If there ever was a case showing the harmfulness of secondhand smoke, this is it.

  Then started a bizarre chain of events, the likes of which I hope never to see again. Judith had no will. She was the only child of elderly only children who were long dead, and she didn’t have a cousin or any relative at all. Her friend Peter was the closest person to her, and she had Noel, whom I knew, but they weren’t allowed to go near her. She had sent Peter an email saying that when she got out of the hospital she was going to make a proper will and name him the executor, but that never happened. People from the office of the public administrator, Kings County, New York, swooped in and taped off her apartment, then ransacked it looking for anything of value; they took all her jewelry, a coffee can full of change, and a white satin ceremonial robe hanging in her closet. They dumped her family albums into the bathtub and ripped the bed apart looking for—what? Cash? Stocks? I don’t know. They threw Norman’s papers all over the room and confiscated her computer and all of her work materials that were in fact ours. They took her signed books from Norman.

  It was a scandal, the way they treated her possessions. And we couldn’t get back our papers or her computer hard drive. A lot of Norman’s work was in limbo. It took a lawyer and more than a year to get them back. I’m still not sure if we got everything. In the meantime, no one was allowed to claim her body, or even see the body. No one had permission to bury her next to her parents or do anything at all, so for months she lay in a cold storage locker, and then they quietly buried her in some potter’s field, without telling us. We don’t even know where. It was a ghastly lesson in the “kindness” of the state and the need to have a will.

  The only thing we could do was have a memorial service for her. We had it in Brooklyn, which was nice. She was a private person, as we’d all known, but we then began learning about her secret life, of which we’d had no clue. It seemed she had worked tirelessly for Palestinian causes. She had a website and had apparently spent all her money helping Palestinian people. She’d bought a bread oven for a small village, she’d arranged to have a little girl brought to the United States for surgery, and she’d been the mentor of a young journalist who wrote about Palestinian affairs. We’d had no clue about any of this. Maybe she didn’t tell us because Norman was Jewish. Maybe she didn’t tell us because she just didn’t want us to be a part of her life, but it was the saddest, most hollow feeling when I realized I hadn’t known her at all, and during those nearly thirty years she’d thought of us as only employers and not friends, as I had thought we were. I hope she is at peace, wherever she is.

  THE MAILERS CONTINUED to grow. Sue and Marco’s three children, Valentina, Alejandro, and Antonia, were in school in Chile. Danielle and her husband, Peter McEachern, lived in Connecticut with her daughter, Isabella, and his two children, Colin and Hayley. Betsy and Frank Nastasi lived in the Village with their daughter, Christina Marie. Kate and Guy Lancaster had a little girl, Natasha. Stephen and his wife, Lindsay Marx, had two children, Callan and Teddy. Michael married the talented and gorgeous singer Sasha Lazard at a ceremony in Tulum, Mexico, which I wasn’t able to attend because of one of the surgeries, and a couple of years later they had Cyrus, a beautiful little boy with his mother’s blond curls, his father’s and grandfather’s blue eyes, and his grandfather’s ears. Barbara’s son, Peter Alson, married the writer Alice O’Neill on the beach in Provincetown, and they in time had Eden River, whose second name comes from the poker term, as Eden was conceived at the World Series of Poker. Then Matt and his beautiful girlfriend, Salina Sias, got married on South Padre Island in Texas, and we all went down for that. I wasn’t feeling well at all, but I took a lot of pain pills and pasted on a smile.

  The wedding was to be on the beach underneath a golden orange canopy. The day dawned bright blue and sunny. Norman and I, like two ancient old ginks, were helped out to the chairs that had been set up on the beach. Then, to everyone’s horror, the wind whipped up until the sand was swirling in ferocious blasts. All we could do was sit there and squeeze our eyes shut as the sand scoured our faces and piled up in our hair and on our clothes. Matt and Salina were amazing. They pretended to ignore the sandstorm. They went through the vows, the musicians played, and John gave a beautiful little talk. Others spoke. Salina was heroic. She has a contact lens and a glass eye, which were both filled with sand, and she could hardly see her vows as she read them, it was so painful. But she persevered, and was so gorgeous in her white dress against the Prussian blue sea with its wind-frothed whitecaps and the orange-gold silk blowing in the wind. Finally, we all staggered inside, shook off the sand, and went on to a great party in a restaurant by the beach.

  Norman gave a toast that began, “If this marriage works out…” He went on to say a lot more, of course, and it was one of his funniest, wildest, best toasts ever. He always did rise to an occasion. I danced and had a good time, but all the while, my kidney was blocked by a tumor and urine was backing up. By the following morning, I was in agony, and all I could do was take as many pain pills as I could until the plane landed in Boston. Then I went directly to the hospital, where I had another surgery. But at least I was at my son’s wedding! Now they have two beautiful children, Mattie James and Jackson Kingsley Mailer. Mattie was named after her father, Matthew, and her grandfather James Davis, and Jackson was named after Norman Kingsley Mailer.

  John Buffalo was busy writing and acting. He had a novella, Hello Herman, published while he was in his sophmore year at Wesleyan, and has been my mainstay throughout these last few difficult years.

  Norman began to lose weight. His breathing became more and more labored, and he could hardly walk across the room without sitting down. The doctor was treating him for asthma, which I didn’t believe he had. I was afraid it was his heart, but again he refused to go to Boston. He preferred to use an inhaler, take asthma medicine, and do the best he could.

  The only bright spot in these days for him was Texas hold ’em poker. He had started watching it on TV, and soon books began arriving. That was the sign he was interested in a new project. He would buy a complete library first and learn everything he could about a subject before he tackled it. We began having poker games at the house after dinner, with Mike and Donna Lennon; Chris Busa; Pat Doyle; Astrid Berg; Hans Janitschek; Norman’s sister, Barbara; any of the kids who were there; and any assorted visiting firemen, as Norman used to say. Anyone at
all who was willing was dragooned into playing poker.

  The person to beat was always Peter Alson, but even pros have bad card nights, and sometimes he would lose. We wagered just enough to make it interesting, twenty dollars to ante. The games were hilarious sometimes. Once, Danielle and her daughter Isabella were playing together because they were just learning the game, and they kept upping the bet until everyone dropped out. It turned out that they had nothing, not even a pair, and had unbeknownst to themselves bluffed the whole table out. Norman won a lot. I pretended with great drama to relish beating him, but I secretly was happy when he won.

  He finished his book on Hitler, The Castle in the Forest, and we went back to New York for the launch party given by his editor, David Ebershoff, in January 2007. Sue and Marco had gone back to Chile after his year of sabbatical, and our apartment was empty for the first time ever. It was so good to be back home in Brooklyn, so good to have the kids a short subway ride away instead of six long hours. It had been much easier since Dwayne had joined us, and my mother was happy in her own apartment in Orleans, but life on the Cape was still hard on me. I was constantly driving somewhere. My mother lived forty-five minutes away, and my doctors were more than two hours away. I was continually either taking one of the three of us to doctors or visiting Mother, going shopping for her, taking her out to lunch, while trying to write my own book. I was grateful to Dwayne for shopping and cooking and keeping Norman going, but he was there only four hours a day, and there was only so much he could do.

  I began to think about moving back to Brooklyn so we would be close to doctors, and finding a place for my mother that would be closer to us so I wouldn’t have to travel so far all the time. Not to mention it would be great to have the kids nearby to help us. I discussed it with Norman, but he didn’t want to move. He loved Provincetown. He loved his life there and he wasn’t going. End of conversation.

  We went back to New York in March 2007 when he and Günter Grass did a show with Andrew O’Hagan at the New York Public Library. The kids all came to hear him, and the ones who hadn’t seen him in a while were aghast. Kate said, “We shouldn’t let Dad do this. We have to take him to the hospital right now!” He had lost so much weight that it was frightening. He couldn’t walk more than a few steps, even with his two canes, without resting. He was living on oysters, orange juice mixed with red wine, and Hershey bars. He could hardly breathe. The audience gasped when he walked out on the stage. Still, when he got under the spotlight, all of those problems dropped away and his mind came out, as sharp as ever. He was astounding in his clarity and scope of thought. Andrew was giving Grass a hard time about hiding his youth membership in the Nazi party, and Norman defended him roundly, saying, “How many of us would have the courage at age seventeen to go against the reigning government and fight it alone? Especially one as brutal as the Nazis? Of course he would have gone along with it, and why would he rush to tell about it later? He did no more than any one of us would have done.” Günter was grateful to him, and I was so proud of him. No matter what was going on with his body, that powerful mind was still in there, and he was going to say what he thought, no matter if it was popular or not.

  But this trip to New York also underscored just how weak he had become. I had to get him and my mother back to the city whether he wanted to go or not. I had to have the help of the kids. I could no longer go on caring for my mother and Norman by myself. I would make the arrangements and he would just have to go along with it.

  I researched assisted living places near us in Brooklyn and found a perfect one for Mother, the Prospect Park Residence. Salina and I went and looked at the rooms that were available, and we picked out a sweet one-bedroom with a view of Prospect Park. I went back to Provincetown and told Norman that I was moving my mother to Brooklyn, and I wanted him to come with me. We had to be closer to the kids. I had to have some help. He said he would stay in Provincetown and take care of himself. (I heard the echo of my mother’s determination to go back to Arkansas in his voice.) I actually believed that once I moved he would change his mind, I don’t know why. I’d certainly known him long enough to know better.

  Christina came back to help and we packed up my mother and moved her to Brooklyn. Mother was kind of excited about it. It was an adventure for her. She had changed with the Prozac and her new independence. Thomas came in a truck with her furniture and we spent a couple of days arranging her apartment. It was a lot to learn and get used to for her, but she had her stuff, which means so much to a woman. “Home is where your stuff is.” I had gone to Arkansas the previous year and sold her house and had brought up a truckload of her things from there, so she had her old lamps and stereo, her china cabinet, and lots of other things that meant a lot to her. I think she had at last made peace with living out her life in New York. And there was the bonus of being closer to Matt and John and the grandbabies.

  The only problem now was Norman. I went back and forth to Ptown every couple of weeks, spending June and July there with him, and then I went on my book tour for two weeks in August 2007 when my second novel, Cheap Diamonds, came out. Various of the kids and our friends had been coming to stay with Norman, and of course he had Dwayne, but Norman’s breathing was getting so bad that something had to be done. So we took him to Boston, where they drained container after container of fluid from his lung for a week. One lung was covered in scar tissue from the fluid, and the other one was working at only about half strength. The Boston doctors were undecided on what to do about his problems, and Maggie was getting married at the house on the beach. He was determined to come back for that, so we checked him out of the hospital and home we went.

  Maggie was a beautiful bride with her startling blue eyes and thick mass of dark curls, and her husband, John Wendling, was Ralph Lauren handsome, a blond, blue-eyed carpenter who had that healthy clean-wood aura about him. Carol, Maggie’s mother, came, and we had a happy little reunion. Over the years we had become friends, and we emailed each other nearly every day. It was bizarre, but what the heck. (Maggie and John had a baby boy, Nicholas Maxwell Mailer Wendling, in November 2009, two years later.)

  The boys somehow got Norman down the stairs to the chairs on the beach, and Maggie and John were married by Mike Lennon, who had his minister’s license, on a clear, sparkling day in September. Then Norman struggled back up the stairs, had a polite glass of champagne, posed for a few pictures, and went to bed. I knew we would have to move soon, and finally, so did he.

  Danielle and Peter stayed with him while I went back to New York to get things ready. They drove him to Brooklyn and it was a monumental struggle to get him up the stairs. I could see why he didn’t want to come. He would never get to go out at all. The next couple of weeks were tough. His breathing was worse in the city air in spite of the air purifiers I had bought, and before he had been there long, we had to take him to Mount Sinai hospital, where they promptly put him in the ICU.

  I wasn’t feeling at all well myself. I had a horrible urinary tract infection of some kind, and I could feel the symptoms of the cancer growing again, but I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t have time for that now. I had to be in the hospital every day with Norman, and also I had to see that my mother was taken care of, that she had her medicine and everything else she needed.

  We tried to keep Norman’s whereabouts a secret, but those things leak out, and we had to get a policeman to sit outside the door after a photographer tried to sneak into the ICU and photograph him. Someone in the family was with him all the time. All his friends and everyone he knew came to say goodbye. He was about to publish his last book, a small work he did with Mike Lennon called On God. In fact, it came out while he was in the hospital, in his last days, and his picture was on the cover of New York magazine, a picture of him with artwork behind it as if he were at the gates of heaven. I read him an excerpt from the book that was printed in Playboy magazine. Not the worst way to go out.

  At first, he was able to talk, and we had a few conversation
s. He knew his time was up, and so did I. I was sitting beside his bed crying one day when he said, “You’re crying. You must really love me.”

  “Of course I love you, you silly old coot! Why else do you think I’ve stuck around all this time?” After all we had been through, he still wasn’t sure I loved him? I didn’t love every single last thing about him, nor did he about me, and there were a few things I am sure we definitely disliked about the other, but all in all, we had found someone whose quirks we could live with, and we had done all right. We’d made a great son together, and we’d had some fun. There are people who have less. I don’t think I ever did take that step back toward him in my heart, but I didn’t take another one away, either. I didn’t know what my life was going to be like without him, and I didn’t know how long I would live after he went.

  “I’ll be right behind you,” I told him. “So have all the fun you can before I get there.”

  He smiled and took my hand. “Remember the Taxicab Kiss?” he said.

  “Like it was yesterday.”

  “It’s gone by fast, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes, it has.” It surely had. I know everyone realizes that when they get older, but it is always a shock, how fast it goes.

  Forty-five

  “What is that noise?” the nurse whispered, looking alarmed. “Is the ventilator malfunctioning?” I was dozing, and jerked awake at her abrupt entry.

  “No,” I croaked, and cleared my throat. My voice felt like it had lain out in the rain and rusted. “It’s the iPod. We recorded the sound of the ocean for him. It soothes him.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” She looked at the iPod, checked a few dials on the various machines, and went back out. It was morning on the ninth of November, 2007. I was alone with Norman in the ICU, but the rest of the family were on the way. Sue and Marco had come in from Chile, Danielle and Peter from Connecticut. It was Peter McEachern, our beloved son-in-law, who had driven the six hours to Provincetown to put his recorder under Norman’s bedroom window and record the waves washing the beach. He’d taped a half hour of it, which was now on a loop, so the sound was heard around the clock, the occasional faint wail of a foghorn punctuating the rhythm like a note from a tenor sax.