The Men in My Life

by Patricia Bosworth

  He didn’t always answer, but I didn’t care. The point was that we were together, if only briefly, and his visitations were as real to me as the traffic outside my window, the rain pelting against my cheeks.

  Part One

  Waking Up

  Chapter One

  DADDY USED TO say, “Our Bart was born with an angel on his shoulder.” That seemed to be true (if you believed in angels). When he was three weeks old, Bart was fast asleep in his bassinet when a fire broke out in our nursery. We were living high in the Berkeley Hills then. Within minutes the room was an inferno of flames, and Daddy rushed in, scooped Bart up in his arms, and ran through the blaze to safety.

  The next time Bart almost died, he was two. We were visiting friends in Napa Valley and he had toddled off by himself. Daddy noticed Bart was gone, ran to the swimming pool, dove in, and with a great splash and a cry, pulled his tiny son up out of the water.

  These stories were part of family lore, like the time I ate rat poison when we were vacationing at Lake Tahoe and Mama noticed I had blue around my mouth and stuck her finger down my throat until I vomited. I was sent to the hospital and Mama was told that I’d ingested enough poison to kill nine men. When we were in our teens, Bart and I loved to tell each other these stories of our near-death experiences. “Mine were worse than yours,” he would say. “I believe I am destined to die many deaths.”

  AS A LITTLE boy, Bart was small and delicate, with tawny skin and huge questioning gray eyes. Shy in the complicated way exceedingly intelligent people are shy, he was also as quiet as a shadow. He didn’t want to speak to anyone but me until he was four, so we created our secret language together. But Bart preferred being alone, curled up with a book (he began reading very early) or looking through his telescope. He was fascinated by the heavens, the stars. Later music and science became his main interests. Eventually he would barricade himself within his eccentric mind while I lived out every reckless desire.

  We spent much of our early childhood in our nursery in Berkeley, a wondrous place of books and toys and a hobbyhorse I rocked back and forth on continuously. I chattered happily to my parents whenever they came to visit. Bart, however, existed in utter silence. His main occupation was bouncing a big blue rubber ball up and down or staring out the window at San Francisco Bay.

  By the age of four he still hadn’t spoken a word. Mama was worried. She enrolled him in Erik Erikson’s special nursery school on the university campus near our home. Erikson (who would become one of the most influential developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts in the country) was studying so-called normal children in long-term play situations. He became interested in Bart because he enjoyed playing by himself (and occasionally mouthing words as he did), but he never played with other children. Erikson had many sessions with my brother and finally he began to talk. But it was only when Daddy began reading to us from some of our favorite books—the Greek myths, Peter Pan, and Mary Poppins—that Bart opened up.

  We were fascinated by the acerbic English nanny who took her charges on flights around London soaring above shingled rooftops, bobbing and dancing through the sky astride her parrot-handled umbrella. And the enchanter Peter Pan, who taught Wendy and John and Michael how to jump into the wind—up, up into the air—though he never taught the children how to stop. And then he’d just disappear to Neverland, a place for adventures and memories.

  One story captured my brother’s fancy. It was the tale of the mythical Icarus, who didn’t know his own limits; who flew so close to the sun that the heat melted the wax that bound his wings and he plunged to his death into the sea. Bart loved that scary image. When we were alone in the nursery, he’d stretch out his little arms and flap them and then run around and around the nursery until he got dizzy and sometimes fell down.

  One day he began building an enormous pair of paper wings. “To fly away on,” he told me excitedly. In the following weeks he would spend hours sitting on the floor of the nursery surrounded by rolls of white shelving paper, nails, bits of wood, string, pots of glue. He had no blueprint, no plan (he seemed to be working from some illustration in his head), but soon, miraculously, the wings began to take shape and spread like some monstrous prehistoric bird half-covering the nursery floor.

  After they were built, he attempted to attach one wing to his little arm; he couldn’t do it himself, so I tried to help, but the wing was so cumbersome we both toppled to the floor. We tried again, but the wings were obviously much too big. As soon as he realized this, Bart methodically began to destroy them, and then he started all over again.

  It took him close to five months to rebuild those wings. When he did, he smiled triumphantly. “Now I can fly out the window,” he told me.

  It was early evening. I ran downstairs to tell my parents (they knew about the building of the wings and they were concerned, because my brother had already told them he wanted more than anything to fly out the window like Mary Poppins, like Icarus). Daddy happened to be home; I remember he kissed me and said, “Oh thank you, baby,” and he raced up to the nursery and knelt beside his little son, who was struggling unsuccessfully to attach one gigantic wing to his arm.

  Daddy raved about the wings. “Goddamn feat of genius—so beautiful,” he told him, but then he added that although Bart’s plan to fly into the clouds was very brave, it would be unwise to try it now. Night had fallen. It was pitch-black out, “not even a moon to light your way,” my father told him intensely. He gently advised him to wait until the sun came up. When it was light they would talk again.

  The next morning came and we all assembled in the nursery: Bart and me, Mama and Daddy, and an engineer from the University of California whose help my father had enlisted. A middle-aged balding man with horn-rimmed glasses, he proceeded to explain to Bart that it was impossible for him to fly properly in those wings. That frankly it just wasn’t safe. Bart listened, a frown on his face. After a while he nodded. He threw the wings away that very morning.

  But he never stopped dreaming about the mysteries of the sky, the firmament. Years later, when we were at our country home in Aptos, California, we would often sleep outside in sleeping bags on the sun deck. Oh, it was beautiful, so clear and dark, millions of stars twinkling above us in the heavens. Every so often we would see a shooting star, and Bart would say, “I wish I knew where it was going.”

  WHILE BART WAS building those wings, our father was becoming one of the most successful and publicized young lawyers in San Francisco. He represented corporations like Hearst and Crown Zellerbach, but he also took on pro bono cases: Chinese immigrants with passport problems, teachers who didn’t want to sign loyalty oaths. By 1940 Daddy started his own firm and he was part of the newly formed National Lawyers Guild, an association of progressive lawyers who supported Roosevelt’s New Deal. There were rumors Daddy might be offered a federal judgeship or might run for Congress or even governor. The FBI began surveilling him after he became president of the guild’s San Francisco chapter.

  At this point Mama was achieving her own bit of celebrity. She’d just had her first novel published, a book called Strumpet Wind, and it was a bestseller. It was based on her experiences as a crime reporter for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin; she’d covered the trial of a sexy mail-order bride who took a lover and then shot her weak rancher husband.

  After Strumpet Wind was published, Mama was on the radio and her picture was in the paper. Then Bette Davis phoned, saying the novel would make a perfect film vehicle for her. They met for drinks. Davis said she’d asked Jack Warner to option the book. Mama was ecstatic.

  But then a month went by, and another, and another. Mama never heard from Davis again. She began suffering from migraines; she took to her bed moaning, but then she pulled herself together and doggedly started writing another novel.

  That’s when I decided to copy her. I’d tiptoe into her bedroom where she’d be typing furiously away and I’d sit on the floor with pad and pencil scribbling words on a page. Mama would eventuall
y look down at me and order, “Write something down. An observation, a detail.” And then she’d go back to her typing.

  I’d try to describe the white rose drooping in a vase on Mama’s bedside table. I loved having the pencil in my hand, loved pressing it down on the paper and seeing a word appear. “The rose has brownish petals.” The act of writing made me feel good.

  For my eleventh birthday Mama gave me a white leather diary with a lock and key, and I began jotting down my thoughts; in time I would keep yearly journals. After I left college I switched to loose-leaf notebooks. Every so often I’d reread some passages. There was a lot of daydreaming in those pages, as well as meandering questions where ambition, luck, desire—not to mention incipient storytelling—played a part. Mama called her journals “a lonely woman’s habit.” My journals seemed to be a record of my painful attempts to think.

  AFTER THE JAPANESE bombed Pearl Harbor, we moved from Berkeley to San Francisco, to an apartment at the top of a very steep hill overlooking Fisherman’s Wharf; we had to climb sixty-five steps to get there. I was enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, my brother at the Town School.

  I was at my most idealistic, my most malleable. Catholicism was important to me because Daddy was so devout. He took us to Mass and taught us special prayers. I got caught up in the pageantry and imagined I could be a nun like Mother M, my favorite teacher at Sacred Heart. The absolute certainty of her faith carried with it a wonderfully heady sense of freedom and courage.

  MEANWHILE, MAMA’S THIRD novel didn’t sell and she took out her disappointment on us, flying into rages and slamming doors. Daddy finally insisted they go away by themselves for a few days. When they returned, they announced excitedly that they’d bought a country place across the Santa Cruz Mountains in a tiny hamlet called Aptos. For the next four years we spent every weekend there, as well as holidays and summers. We became very attached to our funny shingled house guarded by redwoods and we loved hearing the waves boom and crash on the beach nearby—the Pacific Ocean was less than a mile from our home.

  At first Mama and Daddy spent all their time together at Aptos, cultivating the wild untamed gardens that spread out over the property. They cleared and pruned and planted. Soon there were orchards on the hill and a line of poplars on the driveway, and Daddy built a lathhouse for Mama to grow fuchsias in.

  But Daddy was at his peak as a lawyer then; he had clients all over the state and he was active politically too. He’d disappear to New York or Washington for weeks, and then we’d get word he was coming back to us and Mama would invite friends over for elaborate meals. There was so much expectation, tension, concern—the train would be late or the plane couldn’t land—he’d appear, briefcase bulging, coughing from too many cigarettes. It would take a while for him to relax, calm down, and then he would start telling everybody what he’d been doing: organizing a Fight for Freedom committee with Orson Welles; joining Paul Robeson in his anti-lynching campaign; starting to discuss a possible project with President Roosevelt . . .

  Bart and I decided our father must be very brave, speaking out and trying to make the world a better place. When he was home he was the most lenient of fathers, letting us play the radio loud and eat all the candy we wanted. But we were glad Mama stayed home and created such a beautiful nest, even though she was the disciplinarian—having us tutored in French, standing over us as we practiced piano.

  ALTHOUGH I DIDN’T realize it then, the differences between my parents were very important to my development. I wasn’t taught to think there was any one model I had to follow. This allowed me to make my own synthesis from two very different kinds of minds. I learned from listening to their conversations; it was all vague and dreamy in my head, hearing the two most important adults in my life talking intimately to each other and not to me. Daddy was often placating Mama after his long absences—making excuses, giving her a diamond bracelet, which she threw back in his face.

  “I don’t want this!” she cried angrily. “I want you!”

  He often made grand statements to her like, “You can do anything you want—anything your little heart desires.” Later, he’d repeat that thought to me and I remembered Mama’s response. She would argue, “Life isn’t like that.”

  I felt very close to Mama in those years at Aptos. Physically, emotionally close. We painted our toenails with Revlon’s Fire-Engine Red polish; we wore identical mother-and-daughter Lantz patterned dresses and Bart took a snapshot of us with our Brownie camera. Mama was struggling to write another novel. She’d type for hours on the sun deck and then she’d have a hard time sleeping, so she was up half the night reading Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark (about a woman who gives up everything to become an artist). She’d underline passages in the book; her mind teemed with ideas and opinions, which she didn’t always voice, especially when Daddy was around. He often addressed her as his “child bride.” She behaved accordingly—most of the time.

  Cooking became another obsession for her. She’d graduated from the Cordon Bleu in Paris; she was already a celebrated hostess in San Francisco and now Aptos, where she gave a swirl of brunches, cocktail parties, and suppers. She taught me how to cook. I learned to roast chicken so it’s always tender; I made soups, baked pies.

  By early 1945 Daddy was gone again on special missions, first for President Roosevelt, and then for Truman after the former’s death. Mama would remain outside even when it was foggy, overseeing our new gardener, Happy Kanta. A mysterious drifter with a “green thumb,” he could make anything grow. Our gardens bloomed magnificently that year and Mama would stay outside with Happy until it got dark. Then another man appeared at Aptos, a sardonic bearded psychiatrist named Dr. Saul. I’d been introduced to him first in San Francisco, and then at Aptos I saw them kissing in broad daylight on the patio. This upset me very much. Didn’t she love Daddy anymore?

  When Daddy came home he and Mama quarreled about Saul. But months went by then something strange happened. Daddy stopped caring. He’d return from Washington or New York and appear at Aptos—and, though Saul might be there, he didn’t bat an eye. The two men would shake hands. Mama seemed relaxed and loving to them both. She’d mix them drinks and they’d join her in the kitchen to help prepare supper. My brother and I would watch as Saul tossed the salad and Daddy fried the burgers (I’d throw in chopped onions and garlic and toast the buns). Meanwhile Mama and Bart would be setting the table.

  Everybody seemed to be having such a good time, but I grew bewildered and afraid. Afraid that Mama and Daddy would break up, that our family would be no more. I couldn’t bear that idea. I wonder if my confusion about power and powerlessness, authority, obedience, and evasion came from the way our parents operated with each other and us.

  Looking back on it now, I seem to want to remember only the beauty of the gardens at Aptos and watching the fog roll in from the ocean. I’d like to forget Daddy passing out drunk after Saul left us and Mama beginning to scream and cry. Remembering the beauty that was part of my childhood and forgetting the dark stuff—that’s how I survived.

  BESIDES, WHEN YOU’RE a kid you deal with circumstances the way they are. So Bart and I didn’t give our parents too much thought; we had our own lives to lead. Whenever we were at Aptos, we’d sometimes spend entire days with our beloved cousin Elena Bosworth, a rambunctious freckled blonde. We loved exploring the woods behind our property with her.

  Otherwise my brother and I would escape to our hideout, a one-room shack we shared next to the abandoned guesthouse about a quarter of a mile from the main house. We loved our hideout; it was a place where we acted out our fantasies of what we might be when we grew up. In one corner of the room Bart “invented” potions with his chemistry set or studied bugs and dead snakes under his microscope.

  On the other side of the room, which I’d papered with photographs of my favorite movie stars, I’d propped up a big cracked mirror on a dressing table. Mama had given me an elaborate makeup box and a book filled with illustrations of exotic
women. I’d spend hours transforming myself into a clown, painting red dots on my dead-white cheeks, or into a ballerina, with exaggerated eyebrows and fake eyelashes. I loved pretending to be different people.

  When I was eleven, I performed in a musicale at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. It was set in a toy shop and I played a wooden soldier who breaks into song in the middle of the second act. I remember the experience of standing center stage, belting out the number in a loud, clear voice. I could sense the audience was delighted and I received applause before I had even finished singing. At the curtain call, a warm rush of love and approval rolled over me as I took my bow. I heard my father call out, “Brava!”

  Afterward Daddy told me I’d “stopped the show. You have star quality. Think about becoming an actress!” I’d already been dreaming about it (what little girl doesn’t?) and had decided my favorite actresses were Greer Garson and Ingrid Bergman.

  I thought more about acting after Daddy took me to see my first play, Harriet, at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco, with Helen Hayes as Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. My heart pounded in expectation as the curtains parted, revealing a brilliantly lit stage. I’ll never forget Helen Hayes’s entrance. She was a tiny, determined woman who grew in stature as she walked around and around in a circle pontificating about the evils of the Civil War and slavery. What a hold she had on her audience. Everyone sat in rapt attention until the curtain came down.

  For days I pretended I was Harriet, walking around my room in a circle. Then Daddy hired a Shakespearean coach and I learned speeches from The Merchant of Venice. I’d perform them in front of guests and Daddy would beam; I was his “beautiful baby.” My brother stood on the sidelines glowering. I was afraid he might be jealous. I didn’t want him to be, although it was clear that Daddy did favor me. He couldn’t seem to communicate with his son.