by Gully Wells
AT THIS POINT you may be wondering what had happened to my brilliant career. Or at least what the hell I did all day long while Peter was running the BBC’s American empire from his office in Rockefeller Center. The truth is that I had only one interest in life: to have a baby. Ever since little Nick had been placed in my arms when I was twelve, ever since I had held an unending stream of leaky Haystack babies on my lap, ever since I had fallen in love with Peter, actually ever since I had picked up my first doll, I had wanted to be a mother. The pills were flushed down the toilet in a sea green marble bathroom in Barbados on our honeymoon—but nothing happened.
Doctors were consulted, tests were conducted, sex was scheduled for a few purposeful nights each month, purple dye was injected into my tubes, poor Peter was dragged up to Columbia-Presbyterian on One Hundred Sixty-eighth Street, where he was locked in a Show World Center–type cubicle—with a copy of Playboy, rather than a gyrating Sheri in split-crotch fun panties, for company—and still nothing happened. If Peter was too busy for the three-hour hospital trek, I would make a mercy dash up to the hospital with a glass jar nestled in my armpit (to keep the temperamental creatures warm) where they would be spun around in some contraption and then let loose inside me to swim about. This depressing routine went on for more than three years, driving me and my patient loving husband to the point of madness, until one day in the bathroom of the Cadogan Hotel in London, my pee turned a pregnancy-test strip the most beautiful shade of Tiepolo blue I have ever seen. (Twenty-six years later it remains my favorite color, and the room where I am typing these words now is painted that same magical blue.)
Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen—I had finally been allowed into heaven. All I did was waddle around with no shoes on, cook strange new dishes that I would never have attempted before, lie on the sofa reading Proust, trying to remember what Theodore Zeldin had taught me, and make regular sorties uptown to visit the saintly Dr. Scher. As the months passed, my experiments in the kitchen took off in ever-more-fanciful directions—“Darling, that pig’s ear was delicious, but I just can’t eat any more” (a dimly recalled crunchy snack in a bar in Barcelona had been my inspiration)—the duchesse de Guermantes remained as elegantly elusive as ever, and even Dr. Scher, indulgent though he was, wondered, out loud and frequently, just how much more weight I could possibly pack on. One hundred and ten pounds on day one, I had without any difficulty at all gotten myself up to 165 by the time Peter carted me off, nine months later, shrieking—poor driver—in a cab to Mount Sinai.
When I woke up, Dr. Scher gently explained the situation. Nothing serious, he said holding my hand, but I had an infection, he had prescribed antibiotics, and just as a precaution, the pediatrician was going to put our daughter in an incubator. They were being extra cautious, the cleaners had been on strike for several weeks, the hospital had become a gigantic, bubbling petri dish of bacteria, and several babies had become sick. There was no question of feeding her my milk, on account of the infection, so I needed to pump every few hours to stop my breasts from exploding and get them used to their strange new role in life. There was absolutely nothing to worry about, your daughter is healthy, perfect in every way, and you need to rest. For the next week I shared a room with three other ladies who fed their snuffling babies while Rebecca lay, resplendent in her transparent incubator—like a gigantic doll in a plastic gift box from FAO Schwarz—up in some distant wing of the hospital, and I watched my milk trickle down the drain. Not precisely what I’d had in mind, and sometimes I slid into a self-pitying wallow, but mostly I hung on tight to Dr. Scher’s words and reminded myself that it was only a few more days before we would be back home together, sitting under the wisteria with those lazy, drunken, corpulent bumblebees buzzing around us.
“Hey, we’re here to spring you out of jail. Quick, grab the kid and let’s make a run for it!” My mother was standing at the foot of the bed, smiling; Rebecca was all wrapped up; the papers were signed; my bag was packed, and we could get a cab on Fifth Avenue and be way downtown before they even noticed we’d gone. The taxi skidded and bumped along the potholes, its driver clearly had no notion of the exquisite treasure he had in his backseat—oh, please slow down, we’ll triple the tip!—until we got to Bank Street, where my mother, true to my promise, gave him three crisp twenty-dollar bills.
She helped me up the steps and then went around to the deli to get us BLTs, lightly toasted white bread, lots of mayo, an extra pickle for me, please, and two Cokes. We sat down together on the terrace and ate our sandwiches, and as she took the plates into the kitchen, she asked if I needed anything else? Not a single thing, thank you. I had everything I had ever wished for. Except for The New York Times, which she brought up to me in bed. “I’ll call tomorrow to make sure you and the critter are okay.” Peter was coming back from Boston that evening, but for the next few hours Rebecca and I were all alone together for the first time in both our lives.
L’Eté Infernal
DESPITE ALL HER PROTESTATIONS about never having liked babies and her insistence that she would never, ever answer to “Granny,” my mother couldn’t fool me—she had fallen in love with the critter. In France that summer, when money had been especially tight, she wrote to Hylan, “I just bought the prettiest little dress for Gully’s little chimp … a ridiculous thing I know, but irresistible. And only 70 francs at the big Flea Market in Le Beausset.”
One of my mother’s more incomprehensible prejudices was her preference for girls over boys. It was totally irrational and she never attempted to explain it, but then again she was never big on explanations when it came to her behavior. Qui s’explique, s’accuse—“Whoever explains himself, accuses himself”—was her motto, and luckily Rebecca and I had had the good sense to be born female. Nick and my son, Alexander, had been less prescient. At any rate there was no keeping her away from this baby girl. Rebecca was dressed up like a pretty dolly in her broderie anglaise christening dress—without any thought of her actually entering a church—toys and more practical garments would be dropped off regularly, and if I needed any shopping done, she would rush off to Balducci’s, returning with wicked indulgences like blinis, red caviar, and sour cream, and we would sit around the kitchen table, sipping ice-cold vodka, pretending we were on a red leather banquette at the Russian Tea Room.
A couple of months after Rebecca’s birth, Peter’s mother, Katherine, whom I had fallen for shortly after I fell for her son, arrived from London to meet her new granddaughter. The two grannies could not have been less alike. My mother-in-law was no pushover, but she certainly didn’t believe in rocking boats until they capsized. She preferred gentle persuasion to confrontation. Dignified, discreet, a listener rather than a talker, she was without a single malicious bone in her tall elegant body. A great beauty, a wife, hostess, and mother who had abandoned her hopes of becoming an actress when she had left Vienna in 1937, to move to London, she had never worked a day in her life. Still, they did have a few traits in common: extreme generosity, intelligence, a natural gift for captivating men, and their love for Rebecca. What more admirable qualities could you wish for in any grandmother?
By the time Katherine returned to London, it had been decided. My mother had offered us the house in France for ten days the following summer so Peter could take a well-deserved vacation there with the ladies in his life—his mother, his wife, and his daughter.
“Are you absolutely sure she won’t be there?”
“Don’t be silly. Weren’t you listening? She didn’t invite us to stay—she’s generously lending us her house. There’s a big difference.”
“Damn right. There’s a huge difference, which is why I think you should check up on her understanding of that word ‘lend.’ ”
“Oh do shut up, you’re being ridiculous.”
“Okay. But you will check, won’t you?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll check.”
And he actually believed I was going to call her and make sure that La Migoua would be delivered to
us without its sitting tenant? Of course I wasn’t. There was no way I could have done that. Much too terrifying, and rather impolite when you came to think of it, so in my desire to please—and placate—both my husband and my mother, I did nothing. We had all heard her say “lend” quite clearly, so that must be what she was going to do.
Peter was not being churlish. From the beginning, he had always been unfailingly polite and friendly to my mother, but sadly, since he had yet to turn himself into a mulatto Rothschild, the ground still had not been broken on that multimillion-dollar complex for stray cats, and the Nobel committee’s invitation must have got lost in the mail, his mother-in-law remained immune to his charms. Not overtly hostile (although one Christmas she did call him a prick, to which he replied, rather wittily I thought, “Surely, you mean a brick?”) but he got the message, and quite naturally, she never changed her mind. I tried to console Peter by pointing out that her brother-in-law, John, was given the same treatment—“Christ, that fucking fool is building a boat in his backyard, can you believe it?”—but it still hurt. Dear sweet John had the distinction of holding the world record for the number of times (twice) he had been thrown out of La Migoua. Other less tolerant guests tended not to return after their first hasty departure. The boat, by the way, was a thing of great beauty, created entirely with his own hands, that grew bigger and bigger, blocking all light from the living room, until one day it was all grown up and ready to leave home. The problem, which I am sure John had taken into account when he started on this ambitious project, was that the garden was entirely surrounded by a solid wall of extremely tall brick houses. The only solution was to summon a gigantic crane—so heavy that it destroyed the underground sewage pipes running along the street outside—which heaved the boat up over the roof, drove it off to Southampton, where it slipped into the icy water, and repaid its creator with many years of innocent pleasure.
JUST BECAUSE MY MOTHER had decided she’d had quite enough of Freddie certainly didn’t mean that I had. He was as much a part of my life as my real father, and not only did we love each other, but we truly enjoyed each other’s company, to the point that she would sometimes say, in mock exasperation, “You two are just the same. Identical cool, nitpicky, logical minds, both Scorpios—all you ever think about is sex and death.”
Which wasn’t entirely true because neither of us had much interest in the second topic. Still, she was right; we were alike in many ways and the divorce didn’t change a thing. In some odd way it may even have brought us closer together, since Freddie felt that I was one of the few people who could begin to understand what had gone on in their marriage.
Both nonstop talkers, with similar interests and intellects, Freddie and Peter took to each other instantly, and I loved listening to them yacking away, happy that at least part of my family appreciated the man I had married. Drawn together by me, they also had another lady in common, and as poor Freddie became more and more distressed about my mother’s behavior over the divorce, he confided in Peter, knowing they were both up against the same frightening force of nature: “I don’t mind telling you, Peter, that she doesn’t much like me, and she doesn’t like you at all.”
True enough, but at least Peter didn’t have to worry about my mother’s letting her lawyers loose on him.
Just as it is impossible to know what really goes on inside other people’s marriages, so it is probably a mistake to get involved in the minutiae of their divorces, especially when they are your parents. So what follows is Freddie’s story. My mother never talked to me about it in any detail.
In early 1982 Peter received a letter from Freddie that began “I am sorry to foist my troubles on you and I leave it to your discretion how far you involve Gully, but Dee’s behavior is reducing me to despair.… She is employing a sharp lawyer who will obtain a settlement which will be ruinous to me.… In the meantime she wants no further communication between us.”
You have to wonder why Freddie didn’t go shopping for an even sharper lawyer for himself, but he wasn’t an American. He was a man of habit who would never have thought of leaving good old Gerard Shuffle, who had been at Christ Church with him, had shuffled his first divorce through the courts, and was a fellow member of the Garrick Club.
He then moves on to his real concern, his son, Nick, about whom he wrote at the end of his autobiography, “My love for this child has been the dominating factor in my life.” Freddie adored Nick, far more than any of his other children, and I think the certainty of his father’s love gave Nick a bit of extra strength when it came to coping with his more mercurial mother.
“My immediate worry is Nick. There is little doubt that Dee will try to turn him against me and I should be wretched if she succeeded.”
Well, he needn’t have worried. Our mother didn’t try to turn her son against him, and Nick’s loyalty to his father never faltered. He looked after Freddie toward the end of his life, he slept in his room in the hospital, and was there holding his hand when he died. My brother—who looks like Kafka’s sexier and far more handsome younger brother—was lucky enough to inherit his father’s gentleness and his mother’s wit, which, combined with both his parents’ mental acuity and their effortless ability to charm the opposite sex, has kept him supplied with a succession of dazzling ladies over the years. An enviable quality that always made his dear old Dad beam with parental pride and admiration.
In the next part of the letter Freddie turns to the vexed subject of Hylan. “I should never have accepted the humiliating conditions under which I lived in Regents Park Terrace.… I was allowed into my own house only for short periods on sufferance.” (It’s quite true that Hylan moved into the house every Tuesday the minute he set off for Oxford, and was still there, on one or two unfortunate occasions, when Freddie returned on Friday.)
“And I should never have allowed her to walk off with so much spoil—but there comes a point at which the worm turns.” (Apparently my mother was claiming more than half the sale of the house in London, La Migoua, and whatever furniture and pictures she chose to take to New York. He had also agreed to pay her three hundred pounds per month.)
Which brings us to the subject of money. Actually money and Hylan combined, which was twice as vexing. At this point Freddie’s brilliant analytical mind seems to have deserted him completely, and he came up with this ludicrous non sequitur as the only possible explanation for his wife’s desire to bring about his financial downfall: “Either Hylan is a pauper, or he proposes to leave her.”
Sadly, in the end, both propositions turned out to be true. So much for Freddie’s logic.
BY THE TIME WE SET OFF with Peter’s mother for our family holiday at La Migoua, Freddie had married Vanessa and they were living in a house just off Baker Street, where I visited them on the way to France. Immediately I sensed something was horribly wrong. Vanessa was upstairs in bed, Freddie was visibly agitated, swinging his silver chain around, and although he didn’t quite say so, I knew she must be dangerously sick. The curtains were drawn, and Vanessa lay motionless in bed, her face as pale as the sheet covering her body, scarcely whispering as I leaned over to kiss her cheek. I recognized the perfume she had worn that day fifteen years before, when I’d seen her by the porter’s lodge in New College, looking like Nefertiti in a little girl’s party dress, and had directed her toward Freddie’s rooms: Fidji by Guy Laroche. What useless, inconsequential rubbish clutters up one’s head, even at life’s most awful moments; but it was her scent, she never wore anything else, and there beside the bed was a child’s drawing of the bottle, with “You are my Fidji Mummy” written across the top in uncertain capital letters. She was only forty-eight.
I somehow knew my mother would be standing by the front door, underneath the lime tree, ready to welcome her guests into her cool kitchen, where a jug of homemade lemonade stood on the marble table, surrounded by mismatched glasses from the flea market in Le Beausset. Oh God, why hadn’t I screwed up my courage and had the conversation that I lied to Pete
r about, every time he’d asked me if I was quite sure she understood the meaning of the word “lend”? His calm smiling mother was cradling Rebecca in her arms and, looking across the table, I had this feeling—idiot that I was—that the two of them would make everything come right in the end.
“But you promised me that we would be alone.”
Peter wasn’t so much angry—that would come later—as aggrieved that things had turned out exactly as he had predicted. After working like a dog all year in New York, he just wanted a peaceful, relaxing week in Provence—was that too much to ask? Maybe if he calmed down it might be more likely to happen. Maybe I could persuade my mother to stay with some friends for a few days. Maybe we could all just get along and pretend everything was fine. Maybe Vanessa wasn’t dying.
That evening Freddie called our neighbor Francette (we still didn’t have a telephone) and told her Vanessa had been diagnosed with liver cancer; she was in the hospital and the doctors said it would move very quickly now.
Rebecca lay asleep in her basket beside my chair, the warm night breeze rustled the leaves in the lime tree, a flickering candle shone through the bottle of rosé on the table turning it into pink stained glass, the platter of grilled mackerel (the same fish I was cooking the night I had discovered the love letter she had written Freddie lying on top of the garbage) was passed around the table.