Fiction Ruined My Family
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
ONE YEAR IN NEW YORK
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BOURGUIGNON
THE CHICKEN SALAD FINANCIAL INDEX
DUMBENTIA
THE TREASURER’S REPORT
LES MISSOURABLES
CRABS AND REHABS
PAINTERS ON BICYCLES
A FAILED DIVORCE
I AM NOT AN IDIOTE!
ELAINE MAYBE
A ROOM WITH A POO
SOBER SCHMOBER
A SALLY OF THE MIND
IT TAKES A WEST VILLAGE
MANIFEST PREGNANCY
MY FATHER’S OB-GYN
NOTE TO SELF
Acknowledgements
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2011 by Jeanne Darst
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Darst, Jeanne.
Fiction ruined my family / Jeanne Darst.
p. cm.
ISBN : 978-1-101-54784-7
1. Darst, Jeanne—Childhood and youth. 2. Darst, Jeanne—Homes and haunts. 3. Novelists, American—21st century—Biography. I. Title.
813’.6—dc22
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For Liz
And, no bout a doubt it, for Dad
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Tennessee Williams said, “Memory is seated predominantly in the heart.” What he meant by this was, fuck off. I like to think I’m considerably less testy than “the Glorious Bird,” so what I’d like to say regarding accounts and versions of the truth that may differ slightly from mine in this book is: I don’t have the greatest memoiry. So, this stuff is true, but I don’t claim any talent as a stenographer. I have also changed the names and identifying characteristics of some people to protect their privacy.
PROLOGUE:
FICTION RUINED MY FAMILY
WRITERS TALK A LOT about how tough they have it—what with the excessive drinking and three-hour workday and philandering and constant borrowing of money from people they’re so much better than. But what about the people married to writers? Their kids? Their friends? Their labradoodles? What happens to them? I’ll tell you what happens to them. They go fucking nuts. Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, after copying War and Peace—1,225 pages—by hand seven times and having thirteen children by him, is rumored to have poisoned him in his eighty-second year; Viv Eliot, institutionalized after being found meandering the streets of London at five a.m. asking if T.S. had been beheaded, died in Northumberland House mental hospital, after one failed escape attempt, at age fifty-eight; William Makepeace Thackeray’s wife, Isabella, threw herself out of a bathroom window on a ship at sea headed for Ireland rather than vacation with him.
One might almost judge writers not by their prose but by the people around them. How nuts are they?
My father is a writer, and so were both his parents. As a kid, I suspected writing might be what was causing my family to implode.
But beyond the actual writing there was a broader kind of storytelling that seemed to define us. The family myth—stories of who we were—informed everything. My father came from an old Missouri family that arrived in Maryland on the Dove in 1634. My great-great-great-grandfather John Paul Darst was the carpenter and contractor on the Old Cathedral in St. Louis in 1830. We were prominent Democrats. My great-uncle Joe Darst was mayor of St. Louis in the late 1940s. My grandmother Katharine Darst had a daily column in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat called “Here and There” and a Sunday column called “The Back Seat Driver.” My grandfather James Darst, a dashing newspaperman whom family members called Dagwood or Dag, wrote pretty awful plays and very good short stories when he wasn’t working for Fox Movietone News. And my father, a reporter, had been an alderman in St. Louis in the ’60s with an eye toward being mayor before he quit politics to write.
My mother’s family, on the other hand, was rich in a thing called money from her father’s ophthalmology practice in St. Louis. Her childhood was one of mass before Catholic school and winning horse shows around the country on weekends, until she and her sister Ruth landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated at ages fourteen and seventeen, respectively, and then zoomed off in T-Birds bought by “Daddy” to debutante balls, a women’s college in the East, and marriage. Wild-rich-girl stuff.
What these stories seemed to be saying to me, growing up, was: things aren’t going that great now, but it’s all about to change, drastically, because Dad’s gonna sell this novel, this is the one, and there’ll be no more scraping by, no more walking home from school in January in a thin jacket and no gloves pretending you’re not cold. Mom will be restored to her former fanciness and will become undepressed and able to drink normally, as happens with literary success, and Dad will have fulfilled his lifelong dream and in doing so will stop driving everyone bananas. It seemed my parents were willing to suffer, make others suffer, and even die to maintain these impossible fantasies—even after my father eventually stopped doing any actual writing at all (not that anyone ever acknowledged this) and the fantasies were all that was left. My parents slowly lost everything and fell apart. As an adult, it’s hard not to wonder how people with their kind of talent, charm, intelligence and privileged backgrounds could wind up like them.
And then I became a writer, too. An alcoholic, broke, occasionally irresistible, destructive, quasi-adult—one who believed that writing was at least partly what was causing my life to fall apart but also that it was what would redeem it in the end. Another generation of the stories, fantasies and delusions. Ultimately, I sobered up and began actually writing instead of just talking about it, ever so narrowly avoiding repeating the exact—and I mean exact—mistakes of my mother and father. I became very much like them without becoming exactly like them. This was possible, I believe, through no moral superiority of mine and certainly no more talent than my father, b
ut through the odd fortune of being able to see the truth and, having done that, use it to move forward. I have managed to become an artist and not lose my mind or cause others to lose theirs. I work in stories but I live in reality. Or at least, that’s the tale I now tell myself.
ONE YEAR IN NEW YORK
JUNE 1976. We were moving from St. Louis to Amagansett for a year so my dad could write his novel, Caesar’s Things, about a senator who has a nervous breakdown after being involved in a love triangle with a debutante and his own father, which comes to light years later when he is campaigning for president.
My mother’s mother didn’t want us to go and tried to haggle with my dad for my oldest sister, Eleanor, as we were leaving. The four of us girls were staking out our turf in the car, laying out candy we had just bought at the Rexall on Clayton Road to determine the order of consumption for the thousand-mile drive, when Nonnie walked over to the car, adjusted her big tortoiseshell frames as if getting ready to start a press conference, and said to my father, “Eleanor does not want to go to New York. Eleanor should stay with me. She’ll have a better life here with me, food at regular hours, not at midnight and whatnot, and she’ll go to mass regularly and attend the Annunziata school, and she’ll be bathed properly, and she likes to watch Johnny Carson with us here on Friday nights.” I thought my dad should take her up on it, I mean, why not? Eleanor loved watching Johnny Carson with Nonnie and her sister Neallie on Nonnie’s big bed and having Jell-O boats at Stix, Baer & Fuller after some shopping. This was maybe not the profile of someone who wanted to head off into a year of “getting the novel together” on some remote farm halfway across the country. Now, I was up for New York, I was up for the ocean and living on a farm, which I would quickly discover had more New Yorker writers on it than cows or chickens, but I was ready to go and if Eleanor couldn’t cut it, well, we’d see her in a year, now let’s get going. St. Louis sucks, especially in the airless, way back of our station wagon.
My dad said he was taking all his kids with him, thank you, Mrs. Gissy, and “Let’s not get so damn dramatic, everybody,” we would all be back next spring. “It’s one year in New York.” My mother was crying, not because she didn’t want to go to New York; she did. She just had a light cry going most of the time, one that didn’t require a hanky, just a smooth stroke across her cheek to keep moving through the day. Like Seattlers who as a point of pride don’t use umbrellas in their eternally drippy town, my mother hissed if you offered up a Kleenex, the tool of tourists.
My grandmother walked around to the back of the car, leaned in the back window and said in full voice, “Anyone who wants to come back to St. Louis can come back and have their own room in my house, no questions asked. You’ve all memorized my phone number, so just call collect. Don’t worry, girls.”
It was easy to tell that my grandmother didn’t see this as a worthy adventure. I don’t remember any books in her house at all, other than the children’s books in the playroom she kept for her twelve grandchildren and the medical books my deceased grandfather left behind in the office where she paid bills and cut checks to charities like the St. Louis Society for the Blind. I never saw her read anything except Reader’s Digest. Seeing a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in her living room would have been like spotting a dead falcon on her coffee table. Maybe if my father were writing a novel in Braille, Nonnie would have seen some value in it, but as it was, he was ruining my mother’s life, taking her away from everything that meant anything—her. Nonnie looked at my father. She blew a kiss into the backseat.
“I’ll see you girls very soon.”
“Bye, Nonnie,” we said brightly, and waved, her words leading us to believe we were heading off on some kind of scavenger hunt, a yearlong one that would wind up with us watching a rousing game of bridge in her living room with her best pal, Monsignor Hartnett, and her do-gooding friends from Annunziata Church, smoking Carltons and having a Tom Collins or two.
“Good-bye, Mother,” my mother sighed. Although she was psychologically duct-taped to her mother, I never saw them physically touch. (I, on the other hand, was fine with symbolic behavior. By this age, seven, I had only recently stopped sucking on my mother’s neck at night while we all watched television.)
“Verena,” my father said, a verbal tip of the hat, and hit the gas as if we had the kind of car that could perform in a peel-out.
Our green, wood-paneled Ford Torino wagon reached the East End of Long Island in early summer. The local white corn, tomatoes, and gin and tonics would soon be coming up. A friend of my father’s from St. Louis, a preposterously tan writer named Berton Roueché, had arranged a house for us. It was a small, two-story converted horse barn on Stony Hill Farm in Amagansett. The farm was surrounded by potato fields. There was a handwritten wooden sign nailed to a tree at the entrance that read STONY HILL FARM. A woman named Penny Potter owned the place. (My dad would later tell Penny Potter to go fuck herself, when she didn’t invite my parents to cocktails until three months after we had arrived from St. Louis. In my father’s opinion, “Go fuck yourself” was the only civilized response to bad manners.)
Penny had been married to a writer named Jeffrey Potter. Writer Peter Matthiessen and his wife had lived in what was now our house. The hill house was the storied spot where Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe spent the summer of 1957, arriving by helicopter on the front field. When people came from St. Louis to visit, my dad gave them the dead-artistsand-writers tour, driving them to the Green River Cemetery, where A. J. Liebling and Jackson Pollock and Stuart Davis were buried, highlighting the curve on Fireplace Road where Pollock cracked up.
My mother wasn’t thrilled about leaving her mother for a year, but she was up for a place with more scope and more glamour. Both my parents wanted a bigger game, and New York was it. And Dad was about to be it. He had been selling pieces to Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and the New York Times Magazine, and the great literary novel was the next obvious step. She believed in him.
Besides the Rouechés, the other friends my parents spent time with were more writers, like Mike Mooney, Willie Morris, Martin Quigley and Eloise Spaeth, an industrialist’s widow and art collector whom my parents also knew from St. Louis. Mrs. Spaeth and her late husband had been huge figures in the New York art world in the ’50s and ’60s, involved in promoting artists like Picasso, Calder, and Willem de Kooning. Mrs. Spaeth was a big deal at the Whitney, and she lived in a modern house that had art and sculpture everywhere, like the Picasso birdbath out by the pool. She was respected for her impeccable taste and vision, and I thought it must mean Dad was really up-and-coming if she was friends with him.
Everyone was “interesting”: “Hell of an interesting gal, very bright, has a piece in The New Yorker, is researching something terrific, was friendly with so-and-so, working on a collection of stories.” It seemed there was no shortage of little stories about the writers and artists who lived around us. “Quigs [my father’s friend Martin Quigley] said he used to ride the train with Pollock. ‘Jack and I used to drink together in the bar car of the Montauk Cannonball.’” They called it that because it was the slowest train of all time. Big, black, slow.
“Saul Steinberg, who lives down the road from Quigs, calls Martin’s wood-burning stove ‘the black cat,’” my father would tell his old friend Hereford on the phone.
My parents had a cocktail party one night, and my dad pulled me aside and said, “Now, Jean, there’s a woman coming over tonight and I want you to pay attention to her, to what she’s like, because you’ll read Tender Is the Night someday and the couple in it, the Divers, were based on her parents, Sara and Gerald Murphy. She’s the living continuation of the American social novel.” This was just a normal direction from my father, like “Don’t slouch at the dinner table.” I want you to pay attention to this woman tonight because she is the living continuation of THE American social novel. Okay, Dad. “Dorothy Parker was her nanny. Played on the beach in Antibes with Picasso.” All right, all right. I heard ya.<
br />
In addition to socializing with the local literati, my parents also hosted a number of friends from St. Louis that summer—ironic since the reason we’d come here in the first place was to escape the old routines. One of the first people to visit was my father’s old friend Eileen Ellsworth, a divorcée with a six-year-old son, who came, too. Physically, Eileen was the exact opposite of my mother. Tall, brunette, olive-complected, leathery-looking. Like my mother, Eileen was a depressive. I never imagine tall people as prone to depression but she was that, a tall depressive. She was quick and theoretically funny. Her voice was deep and theatrical and I hated her. There wasn’t a story my father could tell too many times as far as Eileen was concerned. “Oh, that is wonderful, Steve,” she’d say, drying her eyes and fluffing her mane.
Even at seven I understood that my mother was fighting this woman for my father, one beguiling depressive battling it out with another for the affection of a novelist. Classic stuff, been going on since the beginning of time. I had no idea why a woman who threatened my mother so completely, a woman I was sure was his mistress, had come to the East End of Long Island to stay with us. But, as always, manners were important; you wouldn’t want to offend your husband’s lover by insinuating she wasn’t welcome in your home.
At cocktail hour the night Eileen Ellsworth arrived, my mother was in a T-shirt and dungarees, as she called them, sitting with my father in the living room. Eileen came down the stairs in a silky blouse and slacks. My mother said something about getting cleaned up and a few minutes later came down the stairs in a sexy shirt and a denim skirt, little heels. Eileen then said something about realizing it was too humid for a silk shirt and a few minutes later came down once again, trying to be nonchalant, in a dress and heels and lipstick. My father simply complimented every entrance with equal weight. “Eileen, you’re absolutely right. Let’s celebrate your arrival and get dressed up. Doris, che bella!” My mother laughed and went back up and descended the stairs again and she might as well have been carrying a gun the fight was so over. She busted out her Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress, heels, coral lipstick, a little blue eye shadow. She had a sexy gap between her two front teeth, and she stuck out in all the right places, which seems even more impressive at five feet tall. Eileen Ellsworth and her son, Davey, went back to St. Louis a few days later. I never saw her again.