All Happy Families

by Jeanne McCulloch

  On the left-leaning side of Manhattan in the late ’60s and early ’70s when I grew up, the political maelstrom gave birth to the “limousine liberal,” a breed of which my mother was a charter member. When I think of my mother in that era, by day she is disappearing into a hired black limousine, her Hermès scarf tied neatly over her head, off to tutor young children in an East Harlem storefront. My father went about his day, settling into his world of words and ideas and index cards. By night, he gamely donned his tuxedo whenever my mother declared it was time for a party. Which, very often, she did. As a child, I recognized that the smell of Chanel perfume in the hallway leading to the master bedroom meant a night on the town. I would knot my father’s bow tie and help push the ebony studs into his dress shirt. He would pat a cigar into the pocket of his coat. My mother wore long feathered ball gowns with a string of emeralds around her neck, and after she left, my sisters and I would collect the stray feathers that had fallen on the rug. Sometimes as I fell asleep I’d picture my parents waltzing, moving together with such grace and synchronicity it seemed they’d been dancing together forever, as indeed, in my mind, they had.

  In our family, as in many families, we put on black armbands and marched to save the planet, end the war, end poverty; we marched for civil rights and women’s rights; we leafleted, picketed, rode buses to Washington, DC, to scream our heads off, yet when all was said and done, and everyone was off the bus, back in the gilded ballrooms of Manhattan, in true Gatsbyesque fashion, the band played on—the crystal glasses clinked, the candles glowed, and under majestic chandeliers, the hems of elaborate dresses swished along marble dance floors.

  My father bought the house in East Hampton when my sisters and I were young because, he said—despite his endless pilgrimages in search of, say, a Masai tribesman to speak Swahili with or a Kashmiri taxi driver to chat with in Urdu or a Scottish bartender with whom to shoot the shit in Gaelic—he wanted us always to have a family home. So that by shaping sand into castles, spitting watermelon seeds down one another’s shirts, and surf-casting for blues and stripers every Labor Day, we might put down roots.

  So that we would be a family.

  Most summer evenings we children ate a rushed, chaotic dinner early, in an airy avocado-green parlor just off the kitchen, eager to bolt back outside before dark, while the sky was lavender and the sand on the beach still warm from the day’s sun. On the last night of every summer, when we younger ones were invited to eat with the adults, the dark wood table in the dining room would be stretched to full length to seat twenty-six with all the leaves slotted in. The extra-long damask tablecloth used for special occasions would be smoothed down, the best china and goblets set. My mother stood by her chair at the head of the table and seated us one by one around the table. At the meal’s end, she made an annual toast to the “clan,” as she called us, and from her seat at the head of the long table she’d hurl her wineglass over her shoulder so it shattered against the mantel in infinitesimal slivers of crystal, always just narrowly missing the oil painting of the nude woman above. It was a violent, passionate act that made me convinced that amid the finger bowls, the candlelight, against the soundtrack of the crashing waves, and in the tolerant, bemused presence of a uniformed butler named Fred, perhaps we were all slightly, if not totally, mad, and perhaps the cushion that wealth provided had made us so.

  “We live on such a perilous dune,” my mother would say as late-summer storm season approached. She would sit reading the New York Times, her half-glasses on her nose, scrutinizing the weather report as the wind blew in audible moans and the sea bounded up toward the house. She was a Florida girl, my mother, and to her, hurricanes meant you filled all the bathtubs with water, put batteries in the radio and the flashlights, lit candles, opened wine, and ate everything in the freezer. “We live on such a perilous dune,” she’d say. “All of this could just go”—and she’d snap her fingers—“like that.”

  As a child, I was haunted by images of the hurricane of 1938, shaky black-and-white film reels, shown occasionally on the television, of entire families on the roofs of their homes, as thunderous waves came and washed them out to sea. I pictured us all: a giant ark, a floating mansion, drifting helplessly out to sea, scrambling for something to save.

  We live on such a perilous dune. All of this could just go, like that.

  So money, what of it? A long gray shingled house by the sea, a bonfire lighting up the night sky on summer evenings, a softly lit tent where guests danced in late summer—does the postcard beauty of those scenes suggest that beautiful times were more beautiful for my family than for others, or terrible times more terrible? Our lives might have looked pretty because the backdrop looked pretty. Certainly, it might be less inspiring of empathy than of cynicism. It might be all those things, and that’s fair to assume. But like alcoholism, despair is an equal-opportunity condition, and the daily human struggle to escape its grip knows no boundaries of wealth or class. One of my earliest memories is when one of our neighbors left his own beautiful house and swam into the sea because he didn’t love his life despite his beautiful wife and his beautiful kids and his beautiful bank account. As the Coast Guard dragged his body out of the surf in front of our house, in front of our eyes, he wept that he had been saved, then swam out again and again until later that summer he finally swam out for keeps.

  “He was blue,” I heard Laura, the housekeeper, tell Johanna in the kitchen, “when they finally dragged the body out.”

  “It took hours for the body to wash ashore,” Vincent, our gardener, added. The household staff were all congregated in the kitchen discussing it while in the parlor we children sat at dinner, pushing the food around, imagining Mr. Crawford’s dead body rolling in the waves.

  “I saw him,” my cousin Pierre told us as we ate. “He was blue, and, and his belly was bloated out.

  “His eyes were open,” Pierre added. “Like, all bugged out.”

  I imagined Mr. Crawford’s eyes like marbles.

  Early on I understood that a mansion by the sea can just as easily be a jail cell as a dreamscape.

  VI

  The Protocol of the Toast

  “I don’t know why that Ruth Ann Middleton has to put her sticky finger in everything.”

  “You hired her, Ma. Her finger is in everything because you hired it to be.”

  “There is an order to things, and Ruth Ann Middleton isn’t calling this one. I’m calling this one, dearie.”

  The week before my wedding to Dean, my mother was complaining about the protocol of wedding toasts. The rule my mother wanted followed was that toasts are only made the night before the wedding, never at the reception. This ended up not being one of Ruth Ann’s rules. Worse, Ruth Ann went so far as to tell my mother no one in the history of weddings had ever heard of the rule my mother wanted followed. Then she said the one thing that would be guaranteed to set my mother on edge.

  “Pat,” she had explained, “it simply isn’t done.”

  “Ruth Ann doesn’t tell me what is and what isn’t done. I am the mother of the bride. This is my wedding.”

  “Technically, it’s mine.”

  “What’s yours.”

  “The wedding is technically mine. Mine and Dean’s.”

  “It can be yours all you want when you pay for it. Your second wedding can be your wedding, because you’re not getting a second one out of me. This one is mine.” Then she corrected herself, “Daddy’s and mine.”

  This conversation took place a week before the wedding as she stood on the small deck outside her bedroom, deadheading the row of pink geraniums planted in boxes along the perimeter. She worked methodically as she spoke, snapping the dried old flowers off the green stems with her right hand and holding them in her left. “You must be a ruthless gardener to make a beautiful garden,” she always said. She walked back through the French doors into her pink room, clutching the bouquet of dead flowers, and turned to her sister.

  “You never, ever make a wedding to
ast after the wedding. Only the night before,” my mother was saying to her sister. “We know that, don’t we, Sissy?”

  My aunt Jeanne, my beautiful quiet aunt, looked like she was the victim in a hostage crisis. She sat perched on the edge of a silk shantung chaise in the corner of my mother’s bedroom. She had come up from her home in Florida a week before the wedding at my mother’s request. My mother was using her as something of a human shield, insisting she be in place well before the Jacksons and her stepchildren, my half siblings, arrived.

  She had a complex relationship with my aunt Jeanne. My aunt, three years older, lived in Coconut Grove, the same leafy section of Miami where they’d grown up. Aunt Jeanne had married a boy from upstate New York after graduating from Vassar, and settled back in Miami to raise five children. Aunt Jeanne walked on her tiptoes in bare feet. This was from years of wearing heels, but I felt it was also indicative of her demure character. Whereas my mother strode, my aunt tiptoed. Her house was always slightly rumpled and chaotic, but as the ceiling fans blew a soft breeze, she and her husband, my uncle Jooge, held hands and looked at each other like they had just met and fallen in love. This no doubt drove my mother crazy. The sisters had grown up in Miami back in the ’20s and ’30s, when it was a grove of grapefruit trees and shaded streets, the branches of the trees grown toward one another over the years to form a graceful canopy along the main residential road. In the 1920s, the adults took wood-sided boats into Biscayne Bay to have “chowder parties”—weekend outings that involved booze and soup. They dressed in white cotton suits and long lacy dresses and set off from the Key Biscayne Yacht Club with picnic hampers. The women carried delicate cotton parasols to protect against the Florida sun. My grandfather Simon Pierre Robineau was a Frenchman who had migrated to the area with his wife after attending Harvard Law School. An injury in World War I to his lung required a move to a warm climate, and at the time Miami was an area of vast opportunity for young lawyers. In photographs, his swooping black mustache and sallow features gave him a Proustian look of Gallic melancholy despite his robust American patriotism. I was named for my aunt Jeanne, and I had the impression early on I was somehow supposed to make up for what my mother saw as a lifetime of lost battles in sibling rivalry. “Our mother always liked Sissy better,” my mother would say, adding as evidence, “She left all the family silver to Sissy.” But she never stopped just there. In the next breath, it would be “Sissy inherited everything,” and following that, “Sissy was the favorite child,” and then, “Everyone liked Sissy best,” spiraling finally into “No one cared about me.” When she spoke like this, I pictured my mother as a little girl. Despite the foreign accents she employed to her use, it became clear to me early on that my mother’s true voice, the voice deep inside her, was that of a hurt child. It was as if there was a hole in her soul, not in her heart but in her very soul, that no amount of grand gestures, family silver, Lilly Pulitzers and ball gowns, or the endless dappled vistas of our life was ever going to fill. In one more of her ongoing attempts at belated parity, she was making my aunt Jeanne give all the Robineau family silver to me, not to her own daughter but to me, as a wedding present—an exercise that made my aunt wistful and me abashed, and seemed to have put my mother temporarily at peace. She was like that, my aunt Jeanne; she gave in to my mother’s dramatic demands, either out of guilt, perhaps, or because, her life being content, annoyingly content in my mother’s mind, she gave my mother whatever would appease her for the moment. The two sisters spoke every day. Sunday evenings, the two finished the New York Times crossword puzzle together over the phone—my mother in her nightgown with her feet up on the coffee table, my aunt down in Miami on her veranda under the ceiling fan.

  The toast conversation in my mother’s bedroom took place while I was at the house for the weekend for a final run-through of the wedding to-do list with her. Downstairs in the sunroom, my father was bent over a yellow legal pad, a pencil in hand. As always, his glasses slid down his nose, and it being evening, he wore a maroon smoking jacket over a white button-down shirt, the shirt pulling slightly across his belly in between the buttons. I was returning to New York for a few days before the wedding, and went into the sunroom in the evening to find him there.

  He looked at me over his reading glasses, the lenses thick and smudged. Though it was a gentle August evening, he was in his heavy smoking jacket. “I’m writing a toast for your wedding,” he said. His hand shook, and the spider crawl of letters, always difficult to read, now seemed like rickety skeletons limping across the page. Some words were jagged and trailed off in places, as if he’d been writing fast in the back of a racing van in the dark.

  “It’s not much. But it’s the best I can manage right now.”

  “The best I can manage right now” was often as modest a statement as “summoning up my best” French or German or Swahili or Yoruba or whatever, though this time he followed it with this, “After I give the toast, I’m going to drink. That’s fair.”

  One thing about families. When secrets come out, they lie like long gray shadows over entire sections of life. My sisters, my aunt, and Dean and I knew what nobody else did, which was that before my father died, my mother had left him. Or at least kicked him to the side with an ultimatum, designed to jar him into realizing he could not keep up his drinking and stay married.

  As he got older, my father’s drinking affected more and more of his day, and with all her children out of the nest, my mother saw his increasing unreliability, often incoherence, as a weight she could no longer bear.

  “I’m not abandoning him,” she would say. “He abandoned me. A long time ago. Look at him.”

  Even as he sat beside her, he was no longer coherently there.

  “You all abandoned me,” she would go on to say to us, as if with an empty nest, our leaving her alone with a man in a stupor was a betrayal on some level.

  They were selling our childhood apartment and moving to a smaller one up the street in September, following my wedding to Dean.

  In early July, she lodged my father in the Carlton House on Madison Avenue, a residential hotel “where all the divorcés and widowers stay,” she said, and ignoring her wedding planning and everyone involved a month before the date, she flew to a rented villa in Portugal with a few peripheral friends, leaving my father and Ruth Ann and the caterers and Dean and me and everyone else in limbo. To me it felt like she was trying to run for her life, or perhaps more accurately it was from her life that she was running. Judging from the speed and spontaneity of her departure, both appeared to be the case.

  My father’s apartment at the Carlton House when he got there in early July was just what I imagined a little apartment of his would look like: stacks of books and index cards all over the living room and front hall; bottles and bottles of Mylanta, aspirin, hair tonic, and toothpaste lining the bathroom sink and behind the toilet; his half-unpacked suitcases—dusty, mottled with decades of peeling luggage stickers—all over the bedroom floor. “They’re building me bookshelves in September,” he would say when we dropped by to visit, stepping through the mess.

  Bookshelves in September meant something. It was a statement that had nothing to do with construction but with resolve. He had decided to drink. My mother had told him if he was sober, he could move back home, yet he was having the Carlton House build him bookshelves in September. He was choosing bookshelves over sobriety.

  He never filled his kitchen because he never learned how to cook. It remained the one clean, untouched place in his apartment. Everything else was sprawl and muddle, but the kitchen always looked as though no one had ever moved in. When we visited, he’d order up cheese and crackers from room service, and we’d pick at it while we tried to fix things up: poking tentatively through old notebooks and papers to make piles, folding socks into tight balls, hanging pictures on the walls. In the bedroom, we put old family photographs: my parents on a road trip when they were courting, him up on the curb and her on the sidewalk so it appeared that he was
taller, she in a gray suit, her hair curled up in a flip at her shoulders. We had others, the three of us after school sprawled on the couch watching television with him, one or the other of us having talked him into taking out his comb. In the photos, his hair stands on top of his head, our four faces lightly illuminated by the television’s glow. In others, we’re in matching dresses flanking our father in a park. In those days, my father was still thin and his smile still broad and radiant as he held our hands.

  When my father looked at our pictures, we waited for him to say something big, something with a sigh, but he didn’t. He’d turn and say, “Who in this room is for going out to dinner?” By the end of our evenings together, when we were all drowsy from summer humidity and wine, he often spoke of our mother, calling her “your mother,” as though she were already a distant speck in his mind.

  It was one of the last days of July, when it’s like moving through cushions, the streets of New York close and thick, that I saw him on the street. Well, glimpsed, really. I was riding a bus up Madison Avenue in the dusk. The bus stopped at a light near the Carlton House, and out the window I saw him walking slowly down the sidewalk. He was dressed in his usual suit and blue tie, and I wondered how despite his disorientation he managed to dress himself up and stay true to his belief that in New York City, it was important to always wear a suit outdoors. Aged pale as milk, he moved in small steps with his fists up in knots, his head bowed low to the pavement. I thought to get out, to ask him if I could take him home, to ask him how I could help. But instead I listened to the offhand mumble and chat of the bus passengers and the blare of the street. Then the light changed and my bus took off, leaving him walking down 63rd Street. I knew then that no matter what else ever happened, I’d see my father making his way down that side street forever.