by Sachi Parker
When Mom showed up, they made a huge fuss over her. She was easily the biggest star there. I realized then what a big deal it was for her to come to this function; I knew it was her way of showing support for my career.
It was a very special night, and I got all teary when I went up to accept my award. I thanked the director, the producer, my fellow cast members, and then I turned to Mom. “I especially want to thank my mom, who’s here with me tonight.” A nice warm round of applause followed.
“I so appreciate her,” I went on. “She’s taught me everything about acting. She’s my role model. And it means so much to me that she’s here to share this moment with me.” I held up the award. “This is for you, Mom. Thanks for everything. I love you!” As the applause swelled, I went back to my seat and gave her a big hug.
About a half hour later, Mom received her award. The applause was tumultuous as she stepped up onstage. She made her thank-yous, and then said a few heartfelt words about the magic of theater. “It all starts with you actors. You are the torchbearers. You make it happen. I salute you all.”
Then I saw her glance toward me. Here it comes, I thought. She’s saving me for the end.
“Of course, what makes this award extra-special is that my daughter is with me, getting her own richly deserved award for her performance in The Lulu Plays. She’s worked so hard to get to this point, and as much as I cherish this award, I cherish even more the opportunity to be here with her on her special night, and watch her following in my footsteps. I could not be prouder of her. Sachi, I love you!”
That’s what I was waiting for her to say.
What she actually said was “Thank you,” then left the stage.
I don’t know why I expected more—it was her speech, she could say what she wanted—but it truly hurt my feelings. Just when I thought I’d raised myself to a certain level of respect in Mom’s eyes, I was made to realize once again that, to her, in an elemental way, I didn’t exist. It would have been a small thing for her to acknowledge me in front of my peers, but that was just the point. Mom didn’t do small things.
• • •
I had my new breasts for three years. Then my husband made me take them out because he didn’t like them.
Frank Murray was a Wall Street broker from Greenwich, Connecticut, who dabbled in producing. I met Frank in North Hollywood, when he produced Independence. He certainly had no objections to my breasts then, but once we got married, his more conservative instincts took over.
I met Frank during the last week of rehearsals, when he came out to check on the progress of the show. I walked onstage wearing a fishnet top that was meant to fit over a T-shirt, but I wasn’t wearing a T-shirt. It was cold in the theater, and my nipples poked out right through the fishnet. This may have been what caught his attention. After rehearsal, he asked me out, and I said no. I had no interest in investment bankers who thought just because I was walking around with erect tits I’d be an easy lay.
That evening, the whole cast went out together for a late dinner, and Frank came along. I was dating a writer from Star Trek: The Next Generation at the time, but I was still very much on the market, so I dressed sexy, in a skimpy, tight-fitting outfit. It was a cold night in L.A., and I was freezing. Frank took off his jacket and put it over my shoulders. It was a very romantic, chivalrous gesture. I thought to myself, Uh-oh, I’m falling.
At dinner, Frank couldn’t have been more gentlemanly. He was polite and attentive, and he talked charmingly about his travels around the world. He reminded me of my father.
When he sent me roses the next day, that sealed the deal. I was head over heels.
To my surprise, Mom really seemed to like Frank, in her contrarian way. She didn’t care for his Republican-ness at all, and he didn’t care for her Democratic bent, but they enjoyed sparring with each other. They would get into impassioned arguments, and at the end of a bloody fight would regard each other with a grudging admiration.
So when, three years later, Frank proposed to me in St. Thomas, I couldn’t wait to spread the good news. “Mom, I’m engaged!”
She took the news in stride. In fact, she sounded highly underwhelmed about the whole thing. “Uh-huh. Okay. All right.”
She seemed to be making a judgment on my level of excitement. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t excited along with me. Was she afraid she was going to lose me? I know that sounds a stretch, but I’d been living near her for the past ten years, and now I was planning to move to the East Coast, and Connecticut. Maybe she’d gotten used to me, and hated to let me go.
Maybe that’s why she called Frank on the phone one day, unbeknownst to me, and gave him some interesting advice, which he shared with me afterward:
“Frank, I have to be honest. It breaks my heart to tell you this, because Sachi is my only daughter, and I love her dearly, but just be aware that you can’t count on her. She’s completely unreliable. Probably because she’s so self-absorbed; it’s hard for her to think of anyone but herself. And she’s a liar. You can never trust her. Don’t believe a word she says about me. I don’t think she can help it. It’s pathological.” (I guess she was still hung up on Charters Towers and those missing airplane tickets.) Then she delivered the coup de grace: “It’s probably not a good idea to marry her.”
Mom always had to be different. Instead of telling me that Frank wasn’t good enough for me, as most moms would have, she told Frank that I was the lemon. A novel strategy.
Frank, cleaving to his Republican roots, ignored the Democrat, and we started planning our wedding. It was originally going to be a small ceremony—I wanted to get married under a tree in a California canyon, with just our friends in attendance, and I would be barefoot with flowers in my hair. Very hippy-dippy. Frank came from wealthy stock, though—his great-grandfather was the Hardart of Horn & Hardart, the famous automat food-service company—so his family turned the wedding into a lavish affair in Greenwich: a High Mass in a Catholic church, and the reception at a country club. I didn’t want any of this formal frippery, but Frank did. He wanted a big wedding, and he got it. It was almost as if he were the bride.
Inevitably, the wedding plans grew bigger and bigger—more food, more music, more obscure relatives—and with that came the vital question: Who’s going to pay for all this?
Tradition dictated the bride’s side of the family. I didn’t want to go to Mom; I knew that would be a diamond-hard nut to crack. So I turned to my father. Clearly he wasn’t riding as high as in those glory days when Mom was supporting his playboy image, but I assumed he must have had some kind of nest egg squirreled away.
Dad was affable enough on the phone. “How much do you need, Sach?”
“Not that much, really. Twelve thousand dollars.”
Silence.
“That’s pretty reasonable for a wedding in Greenwich,” I pointed out.
More silence.
“Dad?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he finally replied.
A few days later, I received a check from Dad for three hundred dollars. I bought my wedding dress with it.
Next stop—Mom. I knew I’d never get anywhere with her over the phone, so I drove over to Malibu and confronted her face-to-face.
“What? Twelve thousand? Is that what you said?” She was giving me the Look.
“It’s not really a lot.”
“Not a lot? Twelve thousand? I see.”
As she paced around the house, mulling it over, I followed after her and explained the expenses of the wedding ceremony and the reception in great detail. She needed to know where every penny was going. I didn’t want her to think I would be using the cash to support my thriving crack habit.
She truly didn’t want to give me the money, but I think I shamed her into it. (“If you don’t help us out, what are people going to think?”) There was a downside to her largesse, though. Now that she was springing for the wedding, she figured it was her own private party, and she started inviting all her Holly
wood friends. Then Frank’s family invited their friends, to balance things out, and the next thing you know, we had doubled the price tag.
I called Mom up in Australia, where she was shooting a film. “Mom, it’s going to cost a little more…”
“No, that’s it! That’s it!”
She wouldn’t bend on this. Frank and I had to pay for the rest of the wedding ourselves. Mostly Frank, since I was broke. To his credit, Frank didn’t have a problem with this. He knew that my mother was pretty tight-fisted, and I think he felt a certain pride in handling the freight on his own wedding without any help from the famous Shirley MacLaine.
Still, the situation left me feeling embarrassed and depressed. It would have been one thing if Mom had been a woman of modest means, or if we’d been estranged, or if she were devoted to charitable causes. But she was a rich woman, and she lived in a rich manner—a house in Malibu, a ranch in Santa Fe, a house in Seattle, an apartment in New York—and she’d had no problem sending sixty thousand dollars a month into space and subsidizing a clone.
Mom flew in to Connecticut for the wedding, and stayed at the upscale Homestead Inn in Greenwich. We had dinner at the inn the night before the ceremony, just the two of us. After a few drinks, I felt my emotions taking over. I knew I should have escaped to the ladies room, but I couldn’t. I just sat there and started crying.
Mom looked at me with puzzlement. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know, I just—I feel like you don’t love me.”
“Of course I love you.”
“I just don’t understand,” I said. “I’m your only daughter—why is it so difficult for you to help me out?”
Mom had no answer for me. She went back to her dinner. The rest of the meal was real quiet. Maybe I’d hurt her feelings; I couldn’t tell. Maybe she wouldn’t even come to the wedding now.
But she did. The next day, she made her entrance at the reception, flouncing in like Auntie Mame, waving a check in her hand.
“I just want you to know,” she announced to the crowd. “I’m going to pay for the wedding! This is my only daughter, and I’m taking care of her!”
She turned to me now, lowering her voice just enough to make sure that anyone who wanted to listen in could hear. “Sachi, here—I’m giving you a check for twenty thousand dollars. Don’t ever say I didn’t do anything for you!”
I reached for the check, but she yanked it back, extracting a necessary word of tribute. “Who’s the best mother in the world?”
“You are, Mom.”
Mom spent the rest of the cocktail hour making sure that anybody who’d missed it heard the good news that she was paying for the wedding. After that, of course, it became her party. The wedding celebration was entirely secondary. At one point she stopped the band in the middle of the reception to announce that it was Bella Abzug’s birthday, and they rolled out a cake for her. I was upstaged at my own wedding by Bella Abzug.
Yes, Mom did pay for it, and I took it as a sign that we were slowly building a bridge to each other. It might take time—there might be lots of setbacks—but the first bricks were in place, and someday…
• • •
FRANK and I set up house in Greenwich, and so began a long stretch of married life marked by a quiet, unexcited calm. After thirty-seven years of constant movement all over the world, I had found myself settling into the sedate rhythms of comfortable upscale suburbia. It was nice, for a while.
Not that those years were completely uneventful. There was plenty of incident, but most of it was of the ordinary family variety. After three years in Greenwich, for instance, Frank left Wall Street and got a job as the CEO of Amana, the refrigerator appliance company. So we moved to Houston. I was seven months pregnant with our son, Frankie, and while we were down there I got pregnant again, two years later, and had our second child, Arin.
The details of those births were unremarkable, but the emotional effect that they had on me was seismic. I was scared during that first pregnancy, truly anxious about having children, probably because of my ambivalent relationship with my own parents. I was afraid that failure was in my genes, and I felt a great deal of pressure to be a good mother. I was pretty sure I was going to mess it up.
Yet, once I held those babies in my arms, I knew I had nothing to worry about. I was meant to be a mom. The love was immediate, instinctive, and unconditional, just as I’d hoped. I knew exactly what my job was, and I loved doing it. Without making any judgments on my own mom, I was determined to be there for my kids whenever they needed me. My acting career could go on hold for now. I had a new career.
• • •
IT was early 2001, and we had moved back to Greenwich when I got a call from Andy Banks, Yuki’s husband. He thought I should know that my dad was back in Hawaii: he was ill with lung cancer, and he wasn’t going to make it.
I was stunned. I hadn’t seen much of Dad lately—Miki tried to keep us apart as much as possible—but I always thought of him as healthy, robust, a man in his prime. I could picture him sailing boats, hiking mountains, or wending his way elegantly through a jagged path of nightclub tables. True, always with a cigarette in one hand and a scotch in the other, but he was only seventy-nine, a charming, irresistible force of nature. He was too damn clever to die.
I flew out to Hawaii as soon as I could, and brought Frankie and Arin with me. He was four and she was two, and they had never really gotten to know their grandfather. This might be their last chance.
When we arrived at the hospital, we found Dad in the rehab pool, working out with a big beach ball. They’d removed one of his lungs already, and you could see that he was very weak. Still, he worked out every day, throwing the beach ball back and forth, determined to get his health back. It was inspiring and moving to watch him, especially since at some level we knew his situation was hopeless.
At some point Dad left the hospital and joined us at the hotel, where he stayed for a couple of nights. He really enjoyed getting to know my Arin. He thought she was cute as a button. She was the same age I was when I joined Dad in Japan in 1959.
We talked of many things: our ice-fishing trips in the Japan Alps, the cruises on Happy Pappy, and Molokai, the site of the former leper colony. Since childhood, Dad had been telling me stories about this beautiful island in the middle of the Hawaiian archipelago; and about Father Damien, who tended to the lepers there; and about the high, sheer cliffs of Kaluapapa that kept the lepers exiled from the rest of society. I always wanted to visit there, and we talked about going now. “I really want to take you there, just you and me,” Dad said. “I want to show you the cliffs.”
He then discussed his will in detail. “You know my chalet in Italy? I want you to have it. You and the kids. And I have land back in Japan…the Nasu property. It’s worth millions.”
I didn’t want to go in this direction. “No, that’s yours, Dad. You’ll be back there soon.”
Dad laughed weakly. He knew bullshit when he heard it. “No, it’s for you. It’s all taken care of.”
There was one more matter I needed to discuss with him, just to get it straight in my head:
“So, Dad,” I said at one point, leaning forward and stroking his arm gently, “you really did make up that whole story about being cloned, didn’t you? You know, so you could get Mom’s money? And the telegrams, and the government spying on her, and the Pleiades…That was all you, right?”
Dad breathed heavily a few times. After a long moment of reflection, he quietly said, “Yeah.”
When I finally heard it confirmed from his own lips, I was astounded. Even though I knew it was true, there had been enough of the purely incredible about it to always leave a slight doubt in my mind. I had assumed he would hide in that shadow of doubt right to the end. To admit it so easily, to finally tell me the truth—I never expected that. The effect was instantaneous: with one word, all the lies disappeared, all the cobwebs were swept away. I was finally seeing my real father.
•
• •
THREE weeks later, Frank and I were back in America, building a new house in Greenwich and living in a rental nearby. One evening, Frank went over to check on the progress of the house. When he returned, his face was sheet white.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I saw your father in the kitchen,” he said.
Over at the new house, he’d seen what he called “a shadow” of my dad standing in the unfinished kitchen. “When I walked in, he saw me and ran into the pantry, and the room became very cold. It was your dad.”
“I think you’re losing your marbles,” I told him. “Dad’s in Hawaii.” An hour later came the call from Miki. My dad had passed, six hours earlier—but, apparently, he’d stopped by Greenwich on his way out to pay a visit.
We booked a flight for Honolulu the next day, but before I left, I had to go over to the new house to check out the ghostly emanation. I made Frank go with me, and together we wandered through the house. We visited the kitchen—a fitting place for my dad, a gourmet enthusiast, to frequent—but there were no manifestations, no cold spots. Then we went into the living room area. I was sitting on a coffee table, Frank was in a chair opposite me, and as we chatted about our memories of Dad, I felt a sudden beautiful warmth, starting in my shoulder and traveling down the left side of my back. It was a flowing heat of love and forgiveness, and I just let the feeling run through me.
Frank, across from me, turned white again. “Oh my God. Sach, your dad is standing right next to you with his hand on your left shoulder. He’s apologizing to you, he’s saying he’s sorry, and he loves you.”
The funeral service was held at the Halekulani Hotel, where Dad had spent so many happy days, and where I’d served as a bus-girl and fallen under the spell of Luke Garrett. Before the service, Miki gave me a stuffed toy monkey that had belonged to Dad. She said he would have wanted me to have it. I was born in the Year of the Monkey, so it had a special resonance.