Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst

  It seemed like when you made a break from the past, people wanted to be a part of it, often people from your past. After Eileen came Aunt Carol and Uncle Tom, just as we were preparing for Hurricane Belle, our first hurricane, possibly our last if we moved back to St. Louis when the year was up like we were supposed to. Our electricity was already gone. We got one TV channel out of Rhode Island and when that went out we listened to the radio for reports. Our phone went dead sometime during the morning bluster. We filled the bathtubs with water. We lit the tall green candles on the long wood dining table. A hurricane was no impediment to Mom and Dad’s socializing. They got dressed up for Hurricane Belle. My mother put on a multicolored silk, floor-length muumuu—splashy orange, purple and pink, her hair in a short, late ’70s salt-and-pepper perm, lots of jewelry. Dad put on an old top hat and tails of his father, Dagwood’s.

  My uncle Tom (not our real uncle, but our father’s best friend) was dating my aunt Carol (my mother’s half sister). These two couldn’t have been a more unlikely couple. Tom was boozy, prone to break out in song at any moment or suddenly sit down and write a musical. He and my father had written a really funny election musical called GUV! and also a Watergate Christmas carol, and they did, in fact, with a few drinks under their belt, head out with a large group of drunken St. Louis Democrats in 1972, and sing it door-to-door. But one carol no one ever expected Tom to take to the streets with was Aunt Carol. Uncle Tom had been drunk for days.

  It wasn’t just the alcoholics the storm was rattling; the animals were out of sorts as well. Our dog, Jubjub, ate my dad’s nine-foot surf-casting rod, and one of the corgis belonging to the neighbor living in the icehouse next door ran off into the storm.

  The dog’s owner, Eleanor Ward, came by to see if it had taken shelter in our barn. Mom and Dad invited her in for a drink. I loved the way they got someone a drink as the response to any dilemma. So cinematic. Like a social doctor. I couldn’t wait to say to someone who came to me with a serious problem, “My God, Jan, that’s awful. Can I get you a drink?” or even better, “You look like you could use a drink.”

  Eleanor and Kate were sent out to look for the missing corgi. Through the rain and winds they searched the fields and the farm’s dirt roads. When they returned, the little lost dog was inside playing with my sister Julia while Eleanor and Mom and Dad sang songs from Candide blaring on the stereo. Mom and Dad were good together, they looked great together, he was six-one with dark brown hair, she was five feet and blond, they were singy and dancy and funny, and it seemed to me during this storm that love was fun and costumed and gusty and uncertain.

  Then, with a very limited amount of money that would have to last us an entire year in New York and with borrowing from Nonnie being an absolute impossibility, my mother joined the Devon Yacht Club shortly after we arrived. The Devon Yacht Club was the ramshackle alternative to the real country club in East Hampton, the Maidstone Club. Devon was on the sound, Maidstone was on the ocean. The Maidstone was a Tudor manse built in 1891. Devon was a cluster of crumbly old gray-and-white clapboard buildings that needed a paint job so badly that from out on the sound it looked like a coconut cake. The main building had dances every Thursday night. (For which Mom bought four . . . what can only be called gas station attendant jumpsuits—colorful oufits with stripes down the side that had little Pennzoil and Sunoco patches on the arms—for all of us to wear if we needed to pull a sophisticated gas station look together. Everyone got a different color. My gas station jumpsuit was white and blue.)

  This was a signature move of my mother’s, buying four of the same item in four different colors. With four of us being so close in age—my mother had four kids in five years, or two sets of Irish twins with a one-year break—this retail practice seemed reasonable to her. Eleanor was the oldest, then Katharine, then a year off, then Julia and then me.

  My dad wasn’t a country club kind of guy, but rumor had it that George Plimpton, who lived next door to Devon, had a Fourth of July rivalry with the club’s fireworks display every year, which must have sounded fun and New Yorky to the St. Louisan in my dad, and isn’t this why we came to New York? I mean, you can write a book in St. Louis. You cannot, on the other hand, have a gin and tonic with George Plimpton at Busch’s Grove in Ladue. And he probably figured the club would get everybody out of the house during the day so Mom could type up his finished pages and he could write. My father was the most distracted writer working in America. If my sister Katharine and I put together a game of catch in the backyard with some old ratty mitts we’d found, he’d come out within minutes looking for a piece of the action.

  “Give me that ball, Jean-Joe. Do either of you girls know who Dizzy Dean was?” and the game was brought to a standstill with a lively portrait of a Cardinals pitcher in the ’30s. I threw the ball as hard as I could. I did not, nor did any of us girls, push the ball off our shoulders like a shot put or “throw like a girl.” My father taught us curveballs from sliders, fastballs and screwballs. Later, during his boxing phase, we would learn jabs from hooks, how to throw a punch, turning your fist ever so slightly at the end of the extension, and basic footwork.

  My father caught my wild throw. “Jean-Joe, your tactics are a hundred percent Dizzy Dean. ‘The Diz,’ they called him. He and his brother Daffy were part of a team during the Depression called the Gashouse Gang.” He threw the baseball to Katharine. “They were the dirtiest, most low-down bunch of players—just terrific. Now, he first played for the Cards but later for the Browns, God, it must have been 1947—”

  I don’t ever remember him passing up going to the beach with all of us, even though he probably should have been doing some work. That summer my father cleared the beach twice in one week with shark spottings that turned out to be schools of fish. He ran up and down the beach, waving his arms, a maniac in yellow-and-green Lilly Pulitzer trunks, cupping his hands to his mouth to amplify the danger. “Shark! Out of the water! I mean now, God damn it!” he said as if the entire beach were made up of insolent daughters. It was the summer after Jaws came out. He hadn’t seen Jaws, of course, but everyone else had, and that was the problem. It got to the point where if he came down to the kitchen asking who wanted to go ride the waves at the beach, he was teased and made to promise not to save anyone that day.

  Days later you’d hear him on the phone to St. Louis talking about how he couldn’t get any work done.

  “Jesus, Hereford, you wanna know how the novel’s coming? People wanting to play tennis in the middle of the afternoon and throw a ball around every five minutes and there hasn’t been one goddamn night that we haven’t been to somebody’s house for cocktails.”

  At Devon we met Elise. She became Julia’s and my best friend. She was a summer person, not a townie like us. She went to Dalton with Robert Redford’s children. The closest thing we had come to a celebrity was seeing Stan Musial, Stan the Man, St. Louis Cards baseball great from the ’40s and ’50s, in the parking lot of my grandmother’s church after mass. Stan Musial / Robert Redford. Not much of a match. Elise’s father was a lawyer. They had a pool. To Julia and me, Elise was our George Plimpton, our idea of New York; she knew everybody. We weren’t going to meet anyone like her in St. Louis: she was urbane.

  Eleanor and Kate were in Junior Yacht, Julia and I were in Sandpipers, the younger kids at Devon. One day the Sandpipers all headed out on sailboats by ourselves. Elise and I and one other girl, Tracy, kept capsizing and were terrified. The motorboat that was meant to monitor new sailors, The Terror, was nowhere to be seen. Elise and I decided to swim back to shore, even though this meant breaking the cardinal rule of sailing, Never abandon your vessel. Elise and I were kicked out of Devon for abandoning our sailboat. I couldn’t go sailing anymore and I couldn’t go on the camping trip and I was banned from the Thursday dances for the remainder of the summer. I ended up playing a lot of tennis by myself, hitting balls against the old backboard on Stony Hill Farm, and strangely developed an incredible serve.

  Since Elis
e had nothing to do either since getting kicked out, Julia and I spent days and days at Elise’s house, eating all their cold cuts and their fancy ice cream, never once calling our mom and never receiving a single call checking up on us. Mrs. Fleming would explode when we made messes and left wet swimsuits everywhere (we never had suits with us and were always borrowing them). “I will not have it! I will not have it in my house!” she’d yell, storming through rooms, Georgette Klinger cold cream on her face, in her white, feathered slippers, to find the three of us. Inevitably she couldn’t take it anymore and would call our mother to say it was really time for us to go home.

  At Elise’s house we played a game called The Weinhausers, in which a poor townie family named the Weinhausers imposed themselves on this wealthy family. The Weinhausers stayed with you and ate all your food and watched your TV and would never leave. They complained a lot about the conditions, too, in their irritating, loud voices. “Your house is too cold!” “You’re out of mayonnaise again!” Until finally the rich family would get fed up and attack the Weinhausers, evicting them from their home.

  “Get outta my house, you lousy Weinhausers!” and Julia would throw me and Elise out the kitchen back door. We’d rap on the windows to come back in.

  “Scram! All of you!” Julia would scream at the window, and we’d run off in case she’d called the police on us. Then we’d switch roles.

  When we got bored with The Weinhausers we began talking about going to bars. Not necessarily because we wanted to drink or meet men, just because it seemed like the next logical thing to do. And not just any bar, we wanted desperately to go to Stephen Talkhouse. Stephen Talkhouse was a local bar; sometimes there was music but mostly just regulars having drinks and finding someone on the Island to have sex with who they hadn’t already screwed fourteen times. Elise’s older sister Sasha said we were too young to go to Stephen Talkhouse but she would take us next year, when we were nine and ten.

  DAD’S NOVEL DIDN’T SELL. It was rejected by two publishers, and that was that. Dad later said, “I didn’t even think of rewriting it. Rewriting was not playing the game like a gentleman.”

  In January, Nonnie died. My father gathered us on the long couch in the barn’s high-ceilinged living room.

  “Nonnie died. In Florida. Neallie is with her,” my father said.

  “Neallie died, too?” Eleanor asked.

  “No, I mean Neallie is with Nonnie right now so she’s not alone.”

  “But Nonnie’s dead, so that means Neallie is alone.” Katharine, future copy editor, said.

  “Neallie is fine. And Mama’s going to be fine, she’s just very sad. We’ll let her be alone for a while so she can call Aunt Ruth and Aunt Carol.”

  Mom cried for at least a whole day and a half, which was really terrifying for us girls. A couple days later we all went to St. Louis for the funeral at Annunziata. Mom was a disaster. At Nonnie’s funeral Mom tried to get in the casket with Nonnie. We stayed at Nonnie’s house for a week and then we all went back to Stony Hill Farm except my mother, who stayed behind to settle Nonnie’s estate.

  Nonnie’s will apparently had a little twist: My mother would get Nonnie’s house only if she moved all of us back to St. Louis and lived in it. She would not be allowed to sell it.

  My grandmother loved puzzles, really any kind accompanied by a big bowl of salty potato chips would do, especially brainteasers and card games. She liked any kind of action. When my sisters and I would get out the Monopoly board, my grandmother would get her German on and get out her long ironing board and iron the money before the game could officially begin. My mother inherited her mother’s love of puzzles in the form of crosswords, and Nonnie’s turned out to be the Sunday New York Times of wills. Mom was furious that some of her inheritance was contingent upon moving back to St. Louis, but it probably also felt like rejoining the workforce. As a retired child equestrian she hadn’t competed in years, but she honed her brain-twisting skills daily, at the kitchen table, with a pencil and an iced coffee.

  Over the next six months Mom was going back and forth to St. Louis, eventually managing to get around a very tight legal document to sell Nonnie’s house and get the rest of her inheritance as well. We were back in shoes and hollandaise sauce, but how this all went down we didn’t know. Mom was an awfully swell-looking lady: doors didn’t so much open for her as they did fall off the hinges. She returned to Long Island in Nonnie’s fur coat, Nonnie’s big blue Oldsmobile Regency. She was happy to have been able to crack at least the house clause of the Germanic will but she was also profoundly changed. Maybe it was guilt that she left her mother and then she died while we were away or a feeling that we had left her mother for a book that didn’t even sell. But something besides my grandmother’s life had ended for my mom, some playfulness, a lightness.

  Mom and Dad were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with bohemian rural life; in those days no one lived out in the Hamptons during the winter if their ancestors weren’t born there. No one from St. Louis came to visit Long Island in February, Elise’s family stopped coming after Thanksgiving, everyone stopped coming out to Long Island after Thanksgiving.

  The barn was drafty, the nearest hospital was Southampton, which was a half-hour’s drive on Route 27, and I almost died of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. The way Mom told the story was that I was delirious and dying on the couch while Dad was reading the New York Times. He came across an article about Rocky Mountain spotted fever and my symptoms matched up, so Mom found a clinic nearby that she could take me to and ran me down there and the doctor said I had the highest fever they’d ever recorded and reassured my mother that if she had waited another two hours to bring me in I would have died. From this near-death experience I gleaned that reading the New York Times will save your life. Doctors, well, who knows how effective they are, but newspapers, newspapers can save your goddamn life. “Thank God your father was reading the Times this morning. You might have died.”

  My parents may have finally realized it was time to get out of the East End, though, when, the second year there, I was moved up to fourth grade halfway through third grade due to apparent intelligence. If the schools were so bad as to be skipping me ahead grades, we needed to get out of town and quick.

  One year in New York turned into the Thomas Wolfe quote. We had now been in New York for two years with no plans to go home again to St. Louis anytime soon.

  We did not crawl back to St. Louis penniless, on our hands and knees, as Nonnie had predicted. We did not see Nonnie “very soon,” as she had said that day at the car. We did not return to St. Louis and live in her house when she died, as was her will. Mom was thinking about a job for Dad. We were moving to Westchester.

  GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BOURGUIGNON

  BRONXVILLE, NEW YORK, is a squalid little square mile in lower Westchester, twenty-eight minutes to midtown on the Metro-North, with a seedy downtown of Tudor flower shops and stores where pink corduroys for fathers can be purchased. Up near our house was a wasteland of country clubs and manses where lowlifes like the Kennedys once lived. As my dad put it, “People had some dough.” But we were in our own little financial microclimate in the bullish Bronxville. We survived on the interest of the writer-proof trust fund that Nonnie had set up. (A mis-trust fund?) The interest we got every four months wasn’t enough for a family of six people without eating disorders to live on. But this didn’t seem to faze Mom and Dad. They bought a five-bedroom house, a shell our mother called it, in one of the most expensive towns in Westchester. Nothing was in tip-top condition—if rats bother you it might not suit your tastes—but everybody had her own room and it was in a new town where Dad hadn’t told anyone to fuck off yet. Bronxville was chosen for its good public school, and my parents figured they could ignore the anti-Carter bumper stickers in exchange for this. The plan was that Dad was going to get a job, a real job, and he did.

  His brief stint in the world of the Manhattan-bound 8:02 was as a speechwriter for William Paley, founder and chai
rman of CBS, for six months. My dad had an office at the CBS Black Rock building and worked regular hours. He got a little yellow Puch moped that he rode to the train station in his Brooks Brothers suits in the morning and left at the station to ride home at night, until one day some kids stole it and set it on fire.

  When he was working for Paley he was boxing a night or two a week at Gleason’s Gym near Madison Square Garden. He took lessons from this old trainer named Sammy Morgan who had trained a lot of good boxers, like welterweight Stanley “Baby” Sims in the ’40s, and a Capuchin priest, and Miles Davis, who apparently was also a good boxer. My dad would bring Sammy back to Bronxville, surprising my mom with this old trainer with his gigantic beat-up boxer’s nose and his smelly dogs. After dinner Dad would interview Sammy for a piece on boxing he was going to send to The New Yorker. My mother was happy during the yellow-moped year. Or the yellow-moped six months. It was the first time since my dad was a reporter at the St. Louis Review that he was out of the house.