Fiction Ruined My Family

by Jeanne Darst

  HE NEVER GOT ANOTHER regular job despite my mother’s pleading, despite her feeling that he could get a teaching job—college, presumably, my father wouldn’t go any lower than that. But teaching, on any level, it seemed, was completely out of the question as far as my dad was concerned.

  When he wasn’t at the Bronxville library he was up in his office on the third floor, a stuffy garret that my six-foot, oneinch father had to stoop over to enter. It wasn’t a room, it was an unheated attic most of which served as stole storage, but after passing the Doris Gissy Museum of Ridiculous Fancy Childhoods, you entered a small open space that he had made into an office. There was nothing hanging on the walls, no carpet, no material comforts of any kind—just a giant desk, a giant desk chair, huge filing cabinets, his gray metal lamp with the ON button that you had to hold down until the long fluorescent bulb flickered like lightning as it came to life, pieces of paper with notes on them taped to walls, his microcassette recorder always within reach (“Note to self: Ah, reread Kempton’s latest New York Review of Books piece, terrific, just terrific”), a heavy magnifying glass, dictionaries everywhere that seemed to be mating and spawning baby dictionaries. It was appealing, if not entirely clear to me what went on in there. His gray filing cabinets, about the same height as me, were filled with his files, his writing, his ideas, notes on pieces to write, and also four files on each of us girls filled with report cards, pictures, notes we had written him or drawings we had made him. He seemed to be enjoying himself very much in his office even as other people seemed to be very, very angry with him. I saw my dad as a wanted man, a right-brain outlaw, with the authorities closing in on him.

  HE WAS NOT JUST AROUND, he was available. Constantly. Positively up for chitchat, lots of it. With anyone.

  “I was talking to the checkout girl at the A&P. Turns out her grandfather was in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel. Probably knew Dagwood.”

  “The checkout girl? How’d you get on that subject?” my mother asked.

  “Oh, we were just chatting, you know. Hell of a nice gal.”

  After picking me up from Teen Center on a Friday night in the Death Mobile he would turn to the backseat and bellow to my friend, “Now, Shannon, who would you say, and I know it’s tough to name just one, but if someone had a gun to your head, who would you say is your favorite essayist?”

  Any transaction at all was a big one. Even answering the door on Halloween, a fairly mechanical interaction after a while, was alive with conversational possibilities.

  “Well now, Charlie Chaplin, what have you got?”

  “Dad, they don’t have anything, just give them some candy,” I would plead.

  “Oh, come now. You’ve got to do something for this Baby Ruth! Do you think I’m going to simply unhand this chocolate bar for looks alone? Now, what about a poem? A joke? A song? Some verse?”

  The kids would sheepishly start back down our walkway, mumbling to themselves.

  “Jabberwocky? How about Who’s on First?” my father would call at their backs.

  AS FAR AS EMPLOYMENT, my mother, a woman who grew up with live-in horse trainers and kept a copy of the Social Register handy on our living room shelves should someone want to know who in the hell we were, wasn’t about to go out and be somebody’s receptionist at a dental office in town. (Which is just what she ended up doing.) She was increasingly pissed about supporting us, not something women who went to Manhattanville in 1959 routinely did. “I didn’t sign up for this, sweetheart,” she’d say to me as she warmed up for her nightly weepathon. The first mother I saw like mine was Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie, going into reveries about her suitors. There was Rodney, the man my mother should have married, she could have had lunch every day at the St. Louis Country Club. He was presumably a bore and a penny loafer guy. And was named Rodney. Or Chip Boulard, whose family owned the biggest lead company in the world. She could have had the fanciest pencils in all the world, I guess, which, when you’re a crossword fanatic as she was, might be no small thing. She talked about how her father never said he loved her, how he worked all the time, how she never saw him, how her parents had a loveless marriage. She told stories of her structured childhood and her academic drive. I spoke French in preschool and now look at me, she seemed to say on a nightly basis.

  WHILE MY FATHER’S PARENTS were pretty darn sparkly in their heyday, writing for newspapers and hosting radio shows, Katharine in particular being a well-known St. Louis columnist with a searing wit, they were not immune to the difficulties of the writing life, the ups and downs, the financial bumpiness, and when Dagwood died, Katharine’s Chicken Salad Financial Index plummeted. Her driver, Edward, came up with the idea of picking her up at the paper, driving her home, opening the car door for her and then, as she made her way up the front walk, transforming superhero style into the butler. As Katharine approached the front door, Edward would dash around to the side door, throw off his chauffeur jacket, throw on a white coat for serving, and rush through the interior of the house to answer the front door for her, as if he were now an entirely different person, and ask her if she wanted her usual martini. Much later, in her seventies, she got by with small writing gigs people gave her. “Crazy Kate,” as her five kids called her, lived out the remainder of her life rather meagerly in a crummy apartment building in St. Louis, with no comforts or financial security, until she went totally mad and lived until her death with my aunt Betty and her eight kids in Betty’s turn-of-the-century mansion—which had a working elevator but a nonworking front door, so for years people entered through a gigantic first-floor window.

  Writing seemed to get rather rough in your later years. This was the side I was aware of as a kid—the curse of the writing life, the way it seemed to leave you in a tough spot in your old age. I didn’t see lawyers suffering like this in their later years. And I worried that my dad might be headed down the same road as his mother. When I read Death of a Salesman, I saw my father so clearly in Willy Loman, clinging just a little too tightly to some importance he had known in St. Louis to keep himself going, peddling graphs no one wanted. Knowing that we had no health insurance, let alone life insurance to cash out like Willy, helped me sleep at night. My father’s slipping grip on his dream showed itself in various ways. He insisted you look at him while he talked. If you dropped your fork at dinner and your eyes dropped to locate it while he was theorizing on “The Waste Land,” he’d bark, “Look at me while I’m talking to you, God damn it.” You’d find yourself groping for your bread and trying to butter it like a blind person never taking your eyes off him lest his ego catch you taking five. But Willy Loman was suicidal. My dad doesn’t have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this can’t be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldn’t mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad.

  WHEN HE WASN’T IN his office, my dad hung around the kitchen, talking about Fitzgerald and reading aloud to my mother from a book of poetry by Keats, pointing out what Fitzgerald had stolen from Keats. I really think it was this kind of undergraduate behavior, lolling about reading poetry aloud and listening to Don Giovanni during lunch, that drove my mother into the arms of people like Barbara Taylor Bradford. She wanted to be left alone to flip through Jacques Pépin cookbooks and smoke and nap. My dad u
sed to lament his predicament to me. “Jean-Joe, if I could do anything else I would. In a second.” He was letting me know the deal with writing and by extension, my lunch money. And maybe his relationship with Mom, his marriage. You didn’t write because you wanted to, you wrote because you had to. Mom was “livid, absolutely livid” six days out of seven. She had been supportive when they had four babies on a reporter’s income, when he moved us all to New York to write a novel, when the job at CBS ended and he didn’t get another one but started a second novel. She was running out of encouragement. I would worry about it at night, trying to fall asleep. “What the hell is going to happen to Dad?”

  DUMBENTIA

  MOM’S SUMMA CUM LAUDE routine got a little old after a few hundred mentions, and she’d never really had a job. Dad was a really good writer but he hadn’t written the Great American Novel. The stories about who we were, who they were, didn’t seem to match anything I saw. If we’re such longtime Catholics, if our ancestors built cathedrals, why do we go to church only twice a year, bombed out of our minds? If writers are so goddamn fascinating, why do they monopolize conversations and talk about their “projects” until you’re about ready to throw your sandwich at their heads? Dad’s artistic struggle, our financial high-wire act, meant that we were, I was, building character. Whatever the fuck that was. Their marriage seemed blighted. But they expected a hell of a lot from us. My mother was a stay-in-bed mom and my father was a stay-at-home writer, so I couldn’t help thinking, Why do I have to work so hard when you people sit around and drink coffee all day and pretend to do things?

  These two layabouts demanded top performance in school, and socially we were supposed to be charming, entertaining, and “presentable.” If I had it right, I was supposed to have the manners of Tracy Lord from The Philadelphia Story and the mind of Murray Kempton. You couldn’t let your mouth hang open otherwise you’d look apish; a straight back was crucial, no gum chewing, but smoking cigs was well, there were worse things a teenager could do. Manners were everything, unless some investment banker at a cocktail party, some Solomon Brothers jackass, glanced at his watch as you talked about your novel outline, in which case it was okay to call him a horse’s ass, and definitely not out of line to throw a drink in his face. Growing up, I thought throwing a drink in someone’s face was the most natural thing in the world. You like someone? Ask him what you can get him to drink. Dislike someone? Throw a drink in his face. And yet our table manners—using the right fork, knowing the right way to cut meat, the right way to lean the fork at the top of the plate when you were finished—were constantly scrutinized. Now, if you wanted to stab someone in the temple with that fork during dinner, that was fine, just for heaven’s sake know where to place the bloody fork on your plate when you were through.

  WHAT MY FATHER PRESSED upon me even more than his family being an old St. Louis family was the fact that we were also, as far as he could trace our ancestral beginnings, not math people. I remember my mother reading aloud from the New York Times science section about right-brain/left-brain theories. She loved to identify with right brainers, to distance herself from “lefties” (engineers, lawyers, people who could add 7 plus 6 and come up with 13) as much as possible. It seemed to me growing up that my mother used the number forty-five so often (“I’ve asked you forty-five times to pick up your room,” “That dog has pooped under the dining room table forty-five times this week”) simply because it was one of the few numbers she knew. If there was one area of their marriage that was quite strong it was their mutual disapproval of math. They did the best they could to keep math out of our house and it may have been, for us, the subject non grata even more than God. They were more than happy to discuss and many times actually do my schoolwork for me if they found the subject matter lively enough. When I studied Greek and Roman history in Mr. Shaw’s sixth-grade class my dad built me a Trojan horse and my mom had painstakingly fashioned a gorgeous clay Julius Caesar figurine with a knife sticking out of his chest and twenty-three plops of Heinz ketchup around his body on the steps of the Senate building indicating the twenty-three times Caesar was stabbed. My dad wrote plenty of papers for me. He showed real promise on a ten-pager about Saint Thomas Aquinas, but usually he got terrible grades at Bronxville High School, where his obscure and plentiful high literary references—from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to a Voltaire pun to the thick of Faulkner—usually lost teachers. That, or they couldn’t pass my father’s lack of a decent five-paragraph funnel essay. But I was still expected to pass math class.

  When summer school in algebra became a distinct possibility, my parents hired the Harvard-bound daughter of their only friends, the other Democrats in Bronxville, Bill and Suzanna Dean, to tutor me. Bill and Suzanna would come over and have drinks in the kitchen with my parents while April and I sat upstairs at my desk, directly above the kitchen, going over parabolas for the fiftieth time. I didn’t understand a thing April said but I responded with phrases like “Isn’t that interesting?” and “Ah! I see. I didn’t get that before,” as I was the host and didn’t want my guest to feel awkward. In addition to April I also had my algebra teacher, Mrs. Peterson, tutoring me a couple times a week after school. I just didn’t get the shit. When I came home after school one day and told them I had indeed failed algebra and would need to go to Scarsdale summer school, my mother asked me if I had been nice to Mrs. Peterson.

  “You catch more bees with honey than you do with vinegar,” my mother said as I cried on her bed. My mother had gone to Villa Duchesne, a Catholic school in St. Louis where the chaste young girls strolled the verdant campus wearing sweaters with “VD” emblazoned on the chest and where apparently a good shampoo would do just as well as a pencil in solving fractions. “Honestly, with that dirty hair the nuns wouldn’t have passed me, either,” she told me.

  From her point of view, math was a social problem that could be solved with a few well-placed compliments and clean hair. “We’re not mathematicians, dolly. But you can pass a class. You just don’t care.”

  I had timed it so I could tell my mom while Eleanor, Katharine and Julia were out. Failure had two parts: the part between you and your fuck-up and the part between your three sisters and your fuck-up. There would not be a scene of feminine compassion and empathy. (Don’t worry, Jean. You’ll make a good life for yourself somewhere where decent people can’t add or subtract.) No, there’d be a lot of “What? You FAILED algebra?” and “What’s wrong with you?” And then one of them would say, in John Merrick’s voice, “I am not an id-i-ote!” Eleanor was no Rhodes scholar but she wasn’t aiming to be, she was a theater person. Katharine was a very good student and cared about grades and getting into a good college, so she thought I was just a reckless individual. Academics weren’t the passion of Julia’s life—her two interests were “cruising” with her friends and cruising with her boyfriend J.J.—but she was a solid B student.

  WITH THIS F, I was now officially on “double probation,” which meant that I could not participate in any sports after school, which was fine by me. If I was too lazy to open a book, why in the world would I want to spend my afternoons running down a field in a hideous tartan skirt with a supersized boomerang in my hand, trying to hit a small ball into another girl’s overdeveloped calves?

  By junior year, although I showed absolutely no interest, I was being prepped for college and I found myself on interviews at schools I would never get into.

  “What are three adjectives other people would use to describe you as a person?” the interviewer at the University of Vermont asked, looking up at me from a manila folder on the desk.

  Three seems awfully limited as far as seventeen years of living goes—can we really be expected to have accumulated only three self-describing adjectives? What about faults and weaknesses? Everyone has those, so should I include those in the three? I’m smart, attractive and gassy? I’m clear-complected, a good eater, and violent when drunk? Also, which people describing us are we talking about? Are we talking about my
parents? Because they might say I’m a naturally good speller, articulate and don’t live up to my potential. Teachers, on the other hand, might say I’m foul-mouthed, lazy and unscrupulous. My sisters could very well opt for: ham-handed, moochy, and dragon-breathed. If the question was posed to my boyfriend, he’d probably lean toward flat-chested, thoughtless and pretty. My friends would go for daring! hilarious! and INSANE! Sit me in that admissions director’s assistant’s intern’s office chair today and I might choose wrinkleless, goal-free and alcoholic in describing my teenage self.

  My parents had contracted a bad case of Bronxville’s ivyleague fever.

  “I’ll give Lattie Coor a call,” my father said when I got home from my interview in Burlington. I told him I didn’t really do so well and he came up with the idea of calling the president of UVM, Lattie Coor, someone he knew from St. Louis, to “call in a favor.” My father always knows someone, someone who can get the job done, get you into that college; he knows editors of magazines, people who run theaters, and famous philanthropists, but not one deal has ever been closed on account of these connections, ever. These calls he makes are about as effective and insidery as chain letters. “We drove up together with a WU student to Wisconsin, La Crosse, to campaign for McCarthy—Lattie was provost at the time and trying to stay close to the kids. I’ll give him a call after dinner.”

  I didn’t mention to my dad that I had been totally hungover after doing blow and beer bongs all night at a frat party, that I’d been exhausted after employing my Jackie Chan maneuvers (my tendency to get all ass-kicky when drinking) to fight off trust-fund rapists, and could barely answer the questions I’d been asked at the interview. That stuff seemed like, well, a given.