The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  Best of all, for my father, there were people - a press of aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins of all ages. This was what family life was like in the movies, too: children running up and down the carpeted stairway or congregating in secret conclaves behind the garage; my grandfather and his brothers - Ben, Harry, Dick, and Max "the Irishman," a fireman - gathered around the blazing hearth with their drinks; the women in the kitchen, exchanging recipes and gossip. Who cared that Rose was an indifferent cook who got her cranberry sauce from a can? So what if there was no "staff" to respond to her buzzer? So what if everyone secretly scorned Dick as a blowhard and a bully? For my father, it was still as good as it gets: a crowd, a house, a meal, a happy noise. He recalls waking up in his father's arms late one Thanksgiving night as they walked through the cold, clean air of Great Neck to the railroad station, the crunch of snow underfoot mingling with the soothing wail of a distant fire engine.

  My father had drawn on all these memories when, early in their married life, he and my mother began to host Thanksgivings of their own. It was not the menu he sought to re-create, nor the guest list, but the sense memory and the feelings of safety and wholeness, so fleeting yet so overwhelming in childhood, and so rarely recaptured since. Maybe it never even existed, that feeling, but we insist that it did because we cannot give up the fetish we have made of taking out and polishing its memory on special days. The feeling itself we chase throughout our adult lives, as we might a false image burned into our retinas of an object that has long since vanished and did not in any case resemble the picture we retained of it.

  Prompted by my father, my sisters and I indulge in our own maudlin reminiscence. It takes us back a quarter of a century, to London, 1976. Night falls even earlier there than it does in New York; it is stiller and darker yet. Our dining room, its walls hunter green, its floor carpeted in blue-and-green tartan, has a calming, quieting effect on all who enter. Its one enormous window frames the spotlit tower of Westminster Cathedral. The walls are hung with vintage and contemporary posters. The table is a large hunter's trestle, set with blue Italian pottery and French restaurant flatware in the same pattern that Judy and I would choose for ourselves twenty years later. The food is ready on a marble-topped sideboard: turkey, stuffing, potatoes mashed and roasted, Brussels sprouts, creamed onions, cranberry sauce. The soundtrack to A Chorus Line plays softly in the background.

  Some of the same people are here, too: My father, we children, Norman, Irene, Maggi, and Jennifer. There are close family friends and several young American expatriates, alone and lonely in a foreign city, whom we have adopted for the evening. Only my mother is missing. She is sick, deeply debilitated by an aggressive strain of multiple sclerosis. For almost two years now, she has lived in a nursing home.

  From the vantage of our corner of a New York City loft in 2001, we watch them all. Is it they, forever reenacting their gay, oblivious ritual, or is it we, melancholy, disembodied observers, who are the ghosts? They are much younger than we are; more carefree, perhaps. They do not know what we know; they are strange to us now. Scott is already tipsy on stolen sips of wine; he does not know that my father will make him go to school hungover tomorrow. Nancy is a distracted, coltish teenager; she does not know that she will soon meet the man with whom she will still be in love twenty-five years later. Jenny is a timid, love-hungry child, awed by and mistrustful of the unaccustomed serenity and harmony. My father is youthful and handsome, with a jaunty mustache and a full head of curly brown hair, proud of the distinguished brushstrokes of gray that have recently appeared at his temples. He is exactly as old as I am now.

  Strangest and most distant of all, to me, is the skinny, fifteen-year-old boy in his National Health glasses and bell-bottoms that barely reach his ankles. His hair hangs almost to his shoulders and has not been brushed in many weeks. He is small, four inches shorter than he will be two years later, and uses the fact that he does not look his age to sly advantage. Like his brother, he sips surreptitiously at other people's drinks, but he is more careful; he reserves his serious drinking and antisocial misconduct for other occasions, since he knows how much more he can get away with by maintaining the facade of the sweet little boy. He watches Norman carve the turkey and asks earnest, well-informed questions. He tells cheeky, precocious jokes to the single adults. Understanding that the direct approach from someone as awkward and funny-looking as he is will never work with Maggi, a woman at sixteen, he sends her shy, puppyish glances on the unlikely chance that she will take pity on him. Unprovoked, he says cruel and nasty things to little Jenny when no one is watching.

  Tonight, he is untouchable. He is ebullient, in his element. Everyone is here, everyone is together; this is a good family to be a member of on Thanksgiving. There are friends here, candles, music, comforting food, and sophisticated conversation. He is surrounded by merry, attractive adults who laugh knowingly at his jokes, who jostle him with affection, and who, he is sure, trade admiring anecdotes about him and predict his brilliant future as soon as he turns away. If he is good for nothing else, he knows how to perform for an audience. Most especially, he knows how to perform for his father, the wittiest, most sophisticated of them all. Everybody loves his father; tonight, they love the boy and his father can see that. There is safety and simplicity under his father's approving gaze. If the thought of his mother crosses his mind he doesn't acknowledge it, least of all to himself. This feeling - this confidence, this security, this togetherness - the boy wishes it could last forever, though he knows it won't. Tomorrow is not Thanksgiving.

  Later on the night of Thanksgiving 2001, with guests long gone, the dishes washed and put away, and Judy asleep beside me, I lay in bed, exhausted but too overwrought to sleep. Nostalgia, of course, is as powerful a stimulant as pornography, and serves a similar purpose. This was not the first time I had so abused it; as a matter of fact, I had long been aware of the connection between certain unresolved childhood "issues" and my abiding need to serve and please. But tonight, with the help of my sisters and father, I had established the intimacy of that connection with stark and startling clarity. It seemed that I, like my father before me, was something of a tragic scientist: having once accidentally discovered the secret formula for perfect happiness, and then lost it, I had spent the rest of my days vainly trying to re-create the precise conditions of the original experiment. If you looked at it that way, it was perfectly clear that I could never, ever hope to succeed, since the missing ingredient was one that could not be reproduced. If I were Epicurus, I'd have probably figured out by now that I would be better off seeking to abolish the desire than to fulfill it. Inner turmoil and anxiety was all it had and all it would ever bring me; ataraxia was not in the cards.

  With these and similarly uplifting thoughts, I eventually fell asleep. I awoke with a start in the middle of the night. I had been dreaming about Brussels sprouts. Again.

  By the time my mother's illness took a turn for the worse in the early 1970s, my parents were already separated. My father lived in a series of little flats all over London, while we children stayed with our mother. Almost from the beginning she was physically unable to take care of us. Within three years, she lost first the ability to walk without a cane, then to walk without a walker, then to walk at all, and eventually even to rise from bed unassisted. I was barely able to remember what it was like to have a healthy mother, or the person she had been before the disease robbed her of her patience, good humor, and dignity.

  We children were assisted in her care by a variety of woefully unqualified nannies, who often came with their own pressing emotional needs and demands. When we were not helping my mother to dress, bathe, eat, and use the toilet, we were largely left to our own devices. With the exception of little Jenny, who was too young to exercise any meaningful independence, we all took full advantage of our freedom, while doing our best to act responsibly toward our mother and to conceal the chaos of our household from our friends. That, at least, is how I remember it.

  It mus
t have been sometime in 1974 that my brother, sisters, and I were gathered for supper one evening around the Formica pedestal table in the kitchen. My mother had joined us, which by then she was not always in a condition to do. She was still capable of feeding herself at that point, but I imagine that one of us must have cut up her food for her. I do not remember what we ate that night, but it included Brussels sprouts, steamed or boiled whole. It was a relatively normal evening, unusual perhaps in that we were all eating together and speaking civilly. But then the talking stopped and we all turned to watch my mother.

  She had raised a Brussels sprout to her mouth with a fork, but had neglected to spear it. This was a mistake, as her hands trembled badly at all times. Still, it looked as if she was going to make it, but at the last minute, the sprout, hobbling at the tip of the fork, bounced off and into her face. She managed to wedge it against her cheek with the ball of her thumb but was unable to grasp it. Her lips strained and twisted to the side in an effort to rendezvous with the sprout as she pushed it toward her mouth. Instead, the sprout rolled in the opposite direction, down the narrow channel between her cheek and her forearm. In order to keep the sprout within striking distance, she had to continually raise her arm as it rolled, until it had rolled down the entire length of her forearm and bicep and came to a halt near her armpit, in which she now buried her face to retrieve it. We watched, enthralled and horror-stricken. This was some sort of gladiatorial combat for her, a fight to the death; she had clearly invested her entire will in victory and, having come so far, would settle for nothing less. But it was not to be. A moment later, she and we watched helplessly as the Brussels sprout broke free, skittered down the front of her muumuu and disappeared in the gap between the cushion and the armrest of her wheelchair.

  I don't know who started laughing first, but soon the four of us were purple-faced with suppressed snickering. My mother brushed a stray wisp of her mousy hair off her forehead and her eyes filled with tears. Here in England, three thousand miles from home, there was no one in the world who could stop her children from laughing at her infirmity. "It's not funny," she said in the half-whisper that had lately become her normal speaking voice. We knew only too well how not funny it was, maybe even more than she did, so we laughed harder. "It's not FUNNY!" she screamed, strangling on her outrage. She unlocked the brakes of her chair, wheeled around, and rolled from the room.

  It must have been soon after this incident that the decision was made that she could no longer be looked after at home. I remember very little about those dark times, but her removal, and my father's immediate return home, surely came as a terrible relief and release. She entered the first of several nursing homes, each abysmal in its own way, and went into a steep decline. She suffered from bedsores and recurring pneumonia that left her febrile and incoherent for weeks on end. She was in her early forties, but she looked sixty. When she was able, she continued to smoke, inhaling through a long rubber tube attached to a cigarette holder soldered to the arm of her wheelchair. The chair was always parked bedside, but was now of little use, since her garret room was at the end of a long, dimly lit corridor at the top of a series of narrow, dog-legged stairways, and there was no elevator.

  Although it was only a ten-minute walk from school, I found every excuse to avoid visiting her, and because Jenny was reliant on me, mostly, to take her there, they, too, saw little of one another. Once a week, for half an hour or forty-five minutes, was about all I could manage, but even that schedule was subject to the other priorities on my busy agenda. Sometimes I went two weeks without dropping in, and I counted myself lucky that I was allowed to get away with it.

  She died of pneumonia on Monday, December 13,1976 - two weeks after Thanksgiving. Marion Claire Browner.

  I look back at those hallucinatory years, and I shake my head in amazement. I ask myself: Is it possible - is it even conceivable - that we had been celebrating our family togetherness on that Thanksgiving Day while she lay dying, alone and frightened? Had there really been all that laughter, and good food, and wine, and music, and tender feeling? From my dark bed in New York City, 2001,1 take another look at those ghosts of 1976, and they look even more remote than before. Yes, there they all were, laughing and stuffing their faces. There had been no mistake. And there I was, baby-faced imposter, fawning for attention, ingratiating myself with all and sundry, hungry for love and praise. And eating Brussels sprouts.

  And who am I - forty-year-old ghost of 2001, family man, father of two, Lord of Strangers - to judge those long-vanished revelers? Objectively, it is not all that difficult to understand, if not to justify, why I behaved the way I did. It is only natural, after all, to seek relief from one's troubles wherever one can find it, especially at the age of fifteen. I'm hardly in a position to deny that I would do exactly the same in similar circumstances. Is it so terrible, after all, that we honored the hospitality of Thanksgiving so intensely not in spite of my mother's imminent death, but because of it? Although it may feel to me now that one was committed, it is not a crime to celebrate life in the face of death. Surely, celebration trumps commemoration?

  And yet, try as I might, I cannot entirely shake the feeling that, if their hospitality was based on a lie, then mine - which deliberately seeks to recall and revive it — must be too. Try as I might, I can't quite allay the suspicion that the authentic symbol of Thanksgiving is not a magnificent, twenty-five-pound turkey, brined, herbed, and roasted to golden perfection, but a humble Brussels sprout, peeled of its tough outer leaves and steamed al dente. And I have grown to enjoy it more and more, in all its virtuous simplicity, with every passing year.

  There is only so much bad news about himself that one person can absorb. He tires of it all, even when he knows it to be true. The truth is always exhausting, and cloying, which is why we tend to prefer it in small doses. We yearn to be let off the hook, to find religion, but the antidote to truth is not falsehood, any more than the antidote to overeating is vomiting. The antidote to truth is forgetfulness.

  We live to forget: our lonely childhood, our idyllic childhood, our loneliness, our former happiness, our hunger, our humiliation at the hands of our own desires, our strangulating covetousness, our cruelties, our pathetic mortalities, our identities. With every step forward we build a wall between ourselves and the place we had stood a moment before. What wouldn't we choose to forget, given half the chance? Forgetfulness is a survival mechanism, as necessary as claws, as adrenaline, as the gag reflex. Whatever it is, it is not a moral issue. Where my father commemorates to remember, I commemorate to forget.

  Of what good are our intellect, our passion, our reason, our compassion to us here? How few of us know what we want and, not knowing, are able to reach for it! And yet, useless as most of us are at succeeding in the least exercise of any importance - such as the pursuit of happiness - we have been very inventive in the myriad ways we have found to console ourselves. We can take pride in our achievements - art, religion, love, philosophy - when we are otherwise unable to express our simplest thought or desire.

  And among these, our highest accomplishments, we cannot forget to rank hospitality. Hospitality provides one of the few settings in life where we can get exactly what we want from each other without having to ask for it. In other words, in which we can forget that we live in a world where this is otherwise, and tragically, entirely impossible.

  When I am a good host, I can order the world precisely as I believe it ought to be. It is a world that I have created in my mind and in my own image, and it gladdens me profoundly to see it unfold without original sin, without expulsions and floods and disobedience and illness. When I am a good guest, I have returned to Eden, where everything I need is provided for me, including companionship and a benevolent deity at my shoulder, serving me and protecting me. The concept of paradise may be backward-looking, but the concept of heaven is anticipatory. Perhaps this is what heaven will be like? A great table of oak worn smooth with age and candle wax; a dimly lit room, a quartet of angel
s playing Sarah Vaughan in the corner; this blissful throb of quiet, intelligent conversation; bubbling pots and aromatic stews that no one seems to have worked to prepare; and you - you have nothing to worry about, not now, not here, not for all eternity. Leave it all behind at the threshold, forget everything, for here, in heaven, you are my guest.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For her love, generosity, and patience, I thank Judy Clain first of all.

  For their support and friendship, I also wish to thank Gail Hochman, Karen Rinaldi, and Gillian Blake; my father, Richard Browner, and siblings, Jenny, Nancy, and Scott Browner; my poker buddies Guy Yarden, Jim Browne, Eduardo Kaplan, Chris Skutch, Sam Sarowitz, and Eric Anderson; David Oestreicher; as well as Charlott Card, Hertzie Clain, Nick Clements, Edward Schneider, and Shelley Sonenberg.

  I also thank Rebecca Saletan and Rick Kott for their invaluable advice early in this project.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I am not a professional historian. I have tried, wherever possible, to stick to primary source material, which I have read with the eye of a novelist, seeking out character and story. Very little of this book's contents represents original research, and most of my sources will be familiar to anyone with a motivated interest in any particular subject. I have therefore prepared this bibliography in the spirit of offering a list of recommended further reading, rather than an academic resource.