Dear Cary

by Dyan Cannon

  The four of us—Jennifer, the nanny, Cary, and me—had set sail from California to Acapulco, where we were docked for two nights before cruising to Europe. At my suggestion, we were bringing Jennifer to meet Elsie, and we were taking the long way around, south down the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and then across the Atlantic. In Acapulco, we spent the day at the famous Las Brisas Hotel, and I took in the view of Acapulco Bay showing white tufts of surf amidst the otherwise smooth surface of the water that sparkled like blue quartz. And I wondered, seriously, what was wrong with me.

  I wondered if I was crazy, and I berated myself for being crazy. Then I decided, no, not crazy, just terribly ungrateful, and I berated myself for that. How could I be discontent, if not outright unhappy? What did I have to be unhappy about? Here I was, married to Cary, with a beautiful baby, visiting with good friends, and all I felt was stifled and drained. We were sipping margaritas in the Acapulco sun. I was visiting with my dear friend Darlene, who had married a nice Jewish boy and moved to Mexico City. What was wrong with this picture? Me. That’s what was wrong with it. Me, me, me. Me had everything and everything wasn’t enough. Who did I think I was?

  I thought of the night Darlene and I went with Cary to Palm Springs, how engaged he was, how interested. How he made us cocktails and teased us and laughed and ate from our plates. Now he was merely polite and, in company, superficially convivial. He’d retreated behind a mask of amiable civility, and I’d retreated into a shell of uncertainty. I no longer trusted myself or my thinking about much of anything.

  The day before, I’d taken Jennifer into the pool. “Dyan!” Cary moved to the edge of the pool and beckoned me toward him. “Get her out of the water,” he ordered. “There are too many people in the pool.” I started to dismiss his objection. But then I stopped myself and thought that maybe he was right. Anything could happen. Hazards were everywhere. I was starting to believe that I was too dim to see them, so I saw them through Cary’s eyes.

  Really, I had stopped thinking for myself. Little by little, I surrendered my very mind to Cary and let him do the thinking for me—except he never really let me in on the actual thinking process. I only got the commandments that came from the thinking, and the less they made sense to me, the more I obeyed them without question. I felt like I was driving a car blindfolded, and Cary was in the passenger seat giving me directions I did not understand. I never knew when I was going to hit a bump or take a wrong turn and draw a recrimination.

  There had been an awkward moment when Darlene asked why we hadn’t brought Bangs. I said something like, “Traveling with a baby is enough,” and let it go. I was trying to let it go. It was hard, though. The morning after I came home to find Bangs gone, I tried to nurse Jennifer but overnight my milk had dried up. I had to supplement what little was left with baby formula. Cary never told me where Bangs was. Cary made a big point of the fact that he’d given Gumper away, too, to his driver. But Cary had never given Gumper much thought; Gumper was an ornament. Sometimes I felt like an ornament, too, one that had become tarnished and dull.

  I tried my best to see things from Cary’s perspective. When I told Mary Gries about Bangs, she went silent, and I found myself defending Cary. “Mary, he gave Bangs away just like his father gave him away,” I said.

  Mary took my hand and said, “He’s a late-life father, Dyan. He’s going off the rails being overprotective, but I think his intentions are good.” I believed that, too. In his own way, he thought he was defending his family. I never thought for a second that Cary had another motive than ensuring Jennifer’s safety when he gave Bangs away. It was just that the loss of my pet had remained an open wound.

  During Jennifer’s first few months, relations between Cary and me were chilly but polite. In fact, more than one person complimented me on how courteous we were with each other. And we were courteous, because common courtesy was the only thing that seemed to make life under the same roof possible.

  When she first saw me in Acapulco, Darlene had taken one look at me and I could tell she knew something wasn’t right.

  “Have things changed since you and Hal got married?” I asked when the two of us had gone water-skiing together, one of my favorite activities.

  “Only for the better,” she replied. “You?”

  “I’m still head over heels, but I don’t think he is,” I told her. “Maybe I’m not as much fun since I’ve had Jennifer.”

  “That’s not it. Do you think there’s another woman?”

  “No, but that would at least make all of this easier to understand. I’m clueless, Darlene. Clueless.”

  “He does seem different,” Darlene remarked.

  “How so?”

  “Just kind of like he’s not all here. He’s nice and everything, but it’s like he’s in Acapulco but his mind is in Timbuktu.”

  Being with Cary had become like tiptoeing through a minefield. I never knew what was going to set him off. I’d gotten so nervous around him, I’d started smoking again, a habit I’d only briefly taken up in college. Only in secret, of course. But one night when we were having dinner back aboard the S.S. Oriana, he smelled tobacco on my breath and asked to see my purse. I refused, but he took it from me and found the cigarettes.

  “Of all the disgusting things,” he complained. “And you’re doing it behind my back.” He twisted the cigarette packages in his hands. I truly felt like I’d been caught committing a felony. He was right, of course. How could I jeopardize our baby’s health and my own by indulging in such a filthy habit? But then I remembered that Cary himself had been a heavy smoker; he knew it was hard to quit. Why couldn’t he be a little more sympathetic?

  I lifted my glass of water and noticed my hands were shaking. I got up from the table and went to the ladies’ room, where, without giving it a second thought, I stuck my finger down my throat and purged the meal. When I was done, I felt strangely purified. It was a good feeling, and, I thought, it had the extra advantage of calorie control. Cary liked me thin and I intended to stay that way.

  One night as the S.S. Oriana churned across the Atlantic, I lay in a state half between dreaming and waking. I slowly became aware of a presence hovering over me. I opened my eyes just partially. It was Cary, standing by the bed, looking at me. I wasn’t completely awake, so it was unsettling. He stood there in his pajamas, illuminated only by the feeble moonlight that slipped in through the porthole.

  “Dyan,” he whispered. I drew a breath. I had no idea what time it was. My eyes were heavy with sleep and I could barely keep them open. “Dyan,” he whispered again.

  “Is everything all right, Cary?”

  “Dyan, I’m truly sorry. I’ve really been awful to you, and there’s no excuse for it.” I sighed sleepily. His words were soothing but somehow haunting at the same time. “I don’t know what’s been wrong with me, but I’m going to be a better husband to you, Dyan. I promise I will.” He bent over and kissed my forehead. I fell back to sleep. In the morning, the episode came back to me like a dream a few minutes after I woke up. I wondered for a moment if it was a dream but assured myself it was real.

  The rest of the cruise was pleasantly uneventful. Cary remained subdued, but for those several days, he wasn’t so quick to criticize or reprimand me. Maybe he really was having a change of heart. I hoped for all of our sakes he was.

  From the eternal summer of Acapulco, we had crossed the Atlantic to find ourselves in the January chill of Europe. We took an overnight boat train from Calais to London, for which Cary booked two sleeping berths, one for the two of us, and one for Jennifer and the nanny. I’ve always liked to sleep in a cool room, and I got hot in my top-bunk sleeper, so I opened the window at the foot of the bed and went back to sleep.

  It was before daybreak when I heard a scream followed by a torrent of Cockney profanity. “Jesus criminy!” Cary howled.

  “What on earth?”

  “My bloody foot! Owwwww! Crikey, who opened the blasted window?”

  I lowered myself fr
om the bunk and then I saw it: the open, frost-blotted window with Cary’s foot . . . frozen fast to the edge, partially encased in ice. I had never seen anything quite like it, and it seemed safe to assume that Cary hadn’t either. I tugged at it fiercely and couldn’t pull it loose. I rushed into the corridor and flagged down the porter, who poked his head in the car to assess the situation. He apparently had never seen anything like it either, but he was a paragon of English resourcefulness. Out of panic, I followed him to the dining car, where he snatched a pot of tea from in front of a dozing colleague, grabbed a towel, and ran back to Cary. The porter soaked the towel with the hot tea, sloshing a good deal of it on Cary, and swaddled the frozen foot in it, finally freeing it. Cary leapt up from the bed and hopped on one foot, turning the air blue with expletives.

  “Will that be all, miss?” the porter asked, not betraying a hint of amusement.

  “Yes, I think so. Thank you so much.”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes! I’d like some crumpets to go with my tea!” Cary howled.

  In Bristol, Maggie and Eric greeted Jennifer with absolute glee. Their humor and goodwill were as infectious as always. Even Cary’s mood lightened. I had the feeling that seeing his cousins’ reaction to the new addition in our lives reminded him he was part of a real family.

  “Isn’t she the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen?” Eric cooed.

  “Oh yes, she’s a real English rose.”

  “We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time, haven’t we?”

  “We haven’t been able to talk about anything else for weeks,” Maggie said.

  Cary beamed at hearing these words of affection from his beloved cousins. He slapped Eric on the back and hugged Maggie. “We’re so happy for you and Dyan, love!” Maggie said.

  Elsie was now eighty-nine, and it occurred to me that she probably had not held a child, let alone an infant, since she was taken away to Fishponds. I wondered what the effect on her would be, and hoped it would be joyful and not unsettling. In a way, it was both. When presented with her granddaughter, Elsie showed a tenderness that I had not seen before. She cooed and cuddled and oohed and aahed, and transformed before my eyes into eighty-seven pounds of pure grandmotherly affection. In that moment, I felt I was seeing the side of Elsie that Cary so adored as a child, the soft and maternal heart that had been for decades now buried in anger. Cary smiled at Elsie with an unguarded affection he’d never shown in her presence. I fought back tears. Finally, I thought, there was healing taking place—healing brought about by the birth of a child. Our child, Elsie’s own grandchild.

  The next day, Cary wanted to show me around Bristol, particularly some of the places that were important to him growing up—including Bristol Cathedral.

  “I was baptized here,” he said. A serene smile crossed his face, and I imagined Cary as an infant, swaddled in white linen, probably crying as the vicar let the baptismal water trickle over his little head, and the thought of it made me smile.

  Cary looked around the church and seemed soothed by its serenity. “You know, Dyan, I thought it would be nice to have Jennifer baptized here, too. Wouldn’t it give her a nice sense of tradition?”

  That took me by surprise and I hesitated. “Oh, Cary, I don’t know how I feel about that,” I told him.

  “Would you mind if we talked to the vicar about it?” he asked. The request was so soft that I couldn’t say no.

  We found the vicar a few minutes later, and Cary inquired about the particulars. The vicar showed us what amounted to a contract that, among other things, stipulated that Jennifer would be raised as an Episcopalian. That’s when I dug in my heels. I asked the vicar if I could speak privately with Cary for a moment.

  “Cary, do you really intend to raise Jennifer as an Episcopalian?”

  “Oh, Dyan, it’s more for the sake of tradition than anything. You know I never attended church.”

  “Then why don’t we just let her make up her own mind,” I said. “Sure, we’ll guide her. But I’d rather not let any religion make a claim on her before she can decide for herself.”

  To my surprise, Cary smiled and nodded in assent, and we left the church without a single word of disagreement. Maybe at that moment, I thought, he’d taken his own quest for truth into account and realized that leaving it open was something he owed his daughter. And that won out over tradition.

  We went back to the nursing home to say good-bye to Elsie. I gave Jennifer to her to hold. She cuddled Jennifer for a few moments and looked into her eyes, then rather abruptly passed her back to me. “Don’t bring her around too often,” Elsie said wistfully. “I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with her, and it’ll make me too sad when you take her away from me.”

  That just about broke my heart. I took Elsie’s hand and said, “Elsie, come and stay with us in California—for as long as you want. We’d love to have you. Please, won’t you think about it?”

  “Thank you, Betsy,” she said, smiling appreciatively. Oh, well. There were worse things she could call me.

  Later, back at the hotel, Cary became very quiet. I could tell he was upset and asked what it was. “Why wouldn’t you confer with me before you invited my mother to come and stay with us?” He was visibly angry.

  “I just assumed that’s what you’d want! Why wouldn’t you want her to stay with us?”

  He was silent. I went on. “You lost her for all those years. Now that you’ve found her . . . I just don’t understand. You jump through flaming hoops to make her happy. You do everything except what’s obvious, which is to bring her into your life—our lives! Why?”

  Cary regained his cool, as he always did after he’d lost his temper. He exhaled and touched me on the shoulder. “I’ve lived with this situation a lot longer than you have, dear girl.” He said it with such weight that I lost the momentum to challenge him. He went on. “I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t think anyone can.”

  I let the moment breathe for a bit, and then I asked, “Do you love your mother, Cary?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you believe she loves you?”

  There was a pause. A long pause.

  “I think she loved Archie.”

  I went to him, put my arms around him, and held him close for a long moment. Without moving, I whispered, “Give her a break, Cary. Please. Just give her a break.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Husbands and Wives

  When we got back from England, I had a pile of messages from my mother beseeching me to call her the minute I got home. When I called, I could hear the tears in her voice, and considering how strong my mother was, I thought something terrible had happened.

  “Your father,” she sniffled, “is seeing another woman.”

  I had no idea what to say. My dad—the single most monogamous man on the planet, and after thirty-three years of marriage, still gaga over Mom—having an affair? I would’ve had an easier time believing it if she told me she’d been kidnapped by the jellyfish people and taken for a ride in their flying refrigerator.

  “Mom, that’s crazy,” I said. “Dad? Cheating on you? No way!”

  “He’s lying to me, honey. I’ve been married to him since 1934. I know when he’s lying.”

  I asked Mom what Dad was lying about to her. She told me that for the past several months he’d had to be away on business a lot—every ten days or so. Dad always told her where she could reach him when he was away, but he was rarely ever gone long enough for her to ring him. But she needed to talk to him about something on one of his trips, and the hotel he was supposed to be staying at said he wasn’t registered as a guest. And the past two times he was away, same thing.

  “There must be an explanation,” I said.

  “Yes, there is! He’s having an affair.”

  I called my father at work. “What’s going on? Mom thinks you’re having an affair.”

  “Oh no!” he said. “I was afraid of that.”

  “So you are having an affa
ir?”

  “Only with a building contractor. I’m building a weekend house in the woods outside Portland. It’s a surprise for Mom.” The house would be finished in three weeks, and Dad wanted me to plan to fly up for the unveiling. He’d have to make one more trip south to wrap it all up. In the meantime, I covered for Dad, or at least I tried. I told Mom that Dad had been staying with his cousin Jack to save money and there was nothing to worry about. I put her mind at ease enough to get her through his next trip away, but it was tough. She was right; my dad had been lying. She could see right through him. I wondered if that came with time, or if it came with love. I wondered if Cary and I could ever be that close.

  The Las Vegas Strip flashed past the windows of the limo that was shuttling us from the airport to the Sands Hotel, and Jimmy Stewart’s eyes were glued to the view. Neither he nor his wife, Gloria, had been to Vegas before, and it was such fun to see the ever-laconic Jimmy take it all in. “Looks like a mountain range made of costume jewelry,” he said of the blazing lights and blinding glitter.

  We’d come to town at the invitation of Frank Sinatra, who was throwing a party at the Sands. The bash was in honor of the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of the actress Rosalind Russell and her husband, the producer Fred Brisson. Frank flew a big group of us out in a private jet. Cary had been best man at the Brisson wedding, and it was the first social activity that had piqued his interest in a long time. Frank himself was in top form. He’d recently married Mia Farrow, the blooming star, and released another hit album, Sinatra at the Sands, with Count Basie. The whole Rat Pack showed up to celebrate in style.

  The party raged on for three nights, and it was a real bacchanal. I felt energized by it all. There was music and dancing, gambling and drinking, and a lavish buffet every night. On the first night, when Cary had drifted off to chat with Fred Brisson, I found myself dancing one after the other with Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, and Sammy Davis Jr. Not two seconds after my last dance, Frank Sinatra himself took me by the arm and said, “Dyan, I insist that you gamble away some of Cary’s money. He’s got a lot more than he needs.”