Out Came the Sun

by Mariel Hemingway

  I loved being in our hotel, the Cadogan on Sloane Street; our room was beautiful, and we went downstairs for high tea and scones. In a sign of early-actress syndrome, I spoke with an accent while we lifted our teacups and sipped from them. “Lovely,” I said. “Just lovely.” Margot tried an accent too, but she couldn’t keep a straight face, and it was hard for her to hold the hot tea while she was laughing. I thought that I would never see anything as impressive as the hotel until we went out walking one day and ended up at Harrods. It seemed like the biggest store in the world, and it was: there were entire floors dedicated to dolls or to chocolate. I bought a dress for my baby doll, Sylvie, and also fancy red shoes for myself that made me feel like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.

  As magical as London was, it paled in comparison to Paris. My father had been born in Toronto, but he had gone to France while he was still a baby, and he had spent the first years of his life there. My grandfather’s book A Moveable Feast, which wasn’t published until after his death, was a memoir of his life as an expatriate in 1920s Paris, when he and Hadley were young and new in the city. My father is in the book, called by his nickname, Bumby. He often asks questions that move the narrative along, or he is at home, comfortable in his tall cage bed. There’s even a piece devoted exclusively to him: “The Education of Mr. Bumby,” which recounts a conversation between my father and my grandfather in which they discuss everything from the difficulty of the writing life to parental discipline to the tenuous health of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  We stayed at the Ritz, which was even fancier than the Cadogan, and because my grandfather had been there frequently—frequently drinking—they had named a bar and a number of cocktails after him. We were treated like royalty, and the place felt like a palace: everything was gold, from the bathroom faucets to the picture frames. My parents had a huge suite, and Margot and I shared a room that was attached to it. Muffet would visit some mornings. High tea in London had been one thing, but this was something else entirely: the hotel staff woke us up in the morning and opened the curtains, as if they were ushering the sun into the room, and they brought warm croissants and coffee with milk, which I drank, feeling more adult by the minute.

  My father was energized by Paris in ways I hadn’t seen before. He took me to visit places from the book, which were places from his life: crooked streets with their strange small hotels, lavish gardens that had been central to the city since the seventeenth century, the good café on the Place Saint Michel. We went to the zoo. “I came here when my dad needed the place quiet so he could write,” my father said. We went to the Gare de Lyon, the train station in the southern part of the city. “This is where my mother lost my grandfather’s manuscript,” my father said. It’s one of the most unforgettable scenes in A Moveable Feast. Ernest was in Switzerland, writing about the peace conference in Geneva. Hadley was coming to meet him, and she put her bags aboard the train and went to get a drink of water. When she returned, one small bag was missing—it was the bag that contained a manuscript of short stories, pieces about Nick Adams in Michigan. She and the conductor searched the whole train, but it was gone.

  Ernest wrote about greeting my grandmother in Switzerland and how she broke the news to him:

  I had never seen anyone hurt by a thing other than death or unbearable suffering except Hadley when she told me about the things being gone. She had cried and cried and could not tell me. I told her that no matter what the dreadful thing was that had happened nothing could be that bad, and whatever it was, it was all right and not to worry. We could work it out.

  My favorite stop was the Louvre. My father paused in front of a Cézanne canvas, a painting of pears. “My father,” he said, “wanted to write the way these pears are painted, to be simple but somehow give the full picture of something. You don’t need a million details. You just need to show what something truly, purely, is.”

  Most of the memories were like that, nostalgic in the best sense. They kept my father warm. The truth was that he hadn’t really ever had a normal life with his father, not in Paris and not afterward. By the time he had real, thoughtful memories that he could put color to, Ernest was gone, already separated from Hadley and on to his second wife, starting another family, fathering two more sons, raising them somewhere else. There’s another famous quote from my grandfather that speaks to this: “To be a successful father, there is one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don’t look at it for the first two years.” When my father was a little older, he had gone to Cuba to spend time with his dad, but mostly he spent time with the women in Ernest’s life, who orchestrated things so that the great writer could work. Periodically Ernest was kind. Paris was the one place my father remembered being completely connected to his father, and that’s what the city gave me in turn. It also calmed down the rest of our family. Margot and Muffet got along wonderfully, which was rare: Muffet showed Margot the city, took her to all the cafés that she had been to with her boss, wore scarves and flowy skirts that Margot imitated, though it made her look like a cowgirl.

  After Paris, we stayed in a village called Pérouges, near Lyon. It was so small that no cars could drive into it at all. The whole time we were in Perouges, it was stormy and cold, and our rooms felt like something from a dollhouse, with small fireplaces and high-canopied beds. When you returned from a chilly walk, the hotel staff would greet you with hot chocolate made with real milk and melted chocolate. Perouges was like a fairyland from a book, and while my parents fought, they were far less contentious than they were back in Idaho—when either of them reached a breaking point, they would just read the newspaper or take a nap. Muffet was with us in Perouges, and we three girls enjoyed the glorious room service. Margot and I stuffed as many croissants as we could into our mouths. I think I fit four in there. I ran to my parents’ room to show them, and when I got back, I saw Margot sticking her finger down her throat and throwing up the breakfast we had just eaten. I hid out, not making a sound, because the scene felt awful and wrong. Why would anyone want to throw up their food?

  * * *

  THOUGH SKIING was part of our life in Idaho—it was part of most people’s lives in Idaho—getting my mother onto the slopes was always a challenge. “I’m not good at this,” she said, and she was mostly right—she wasn’t a natural athlete, and she never really had confidence on the snow. When the rest of us went on to intermediate and expert trails, she stayed on beginner runs.

  One bright afternoon when I was eleven, we left my mother on the easy part of the mountain and went to take the ski lift up the mountain. The next time we saw her was in the hospital. She had crossed too closely in front of an equally uncertain skier, and they collided hard. The accident shattered her leg. For months she was in a full cast from toe to hip.

  At first, under the influence of painkillers, she was uncharacteristically pleasant. We all drew on her cast. Margot painted a Picasso-like self-portrait. Daddy drew some fishing flies. She smiled and traced the lines with her fingers. But when the pain pills wore off, so did her pleasant mood. She needed help with nearly everything, and she wasn’t shy about saying so: “I want a glass of water,” “I need to go to the kitchen,” “Can someone bring me the mail?” Since my father was spending more and more of his time in the basement—it was almost like a separate apartment down there—the job of helping my mother fell to me. I was only eleven, but I essentially took on a full-time job. I cleaned. I organized. I cooked. I fetched whatever needed fetching. And slowly but surely, I started to inhabit the caretaker role. It had an immediate effect on the house. I saw that my mother was less likely to snap at me than she was at my father. I saw that my father was happier keeping his distance. Caretaking was an extreme version of what I had been doing for years: creating artificial order so that the house didn’t descend into chaos. Mostly, I remember being exhausted. At night, my mother needed help limping to the bathroom. While she was in there, I would fall asleep in her closet, sprawled on top of her shoes, and she would nudge me with a slipper to let m
e know she was ready to go back to bed.

  After four months, the big cast came off, and she got a little one that only extended just above her ankle. She could cook again and get up and down the stairs more confidently. My father bought her a recliner, and she took her meals in the chair, legs stretched out. That’s when we stopped eating dinner at the dining table and switched over to meals in front of the TV. They weren’t TV dinners—they were as gourmet as before—but they were served on trays after Wine Time.

  * * *

  “DON’T HAVE TOO BIG A SNACK, GIRLS,” Kelly’s mom said. “We’re going to stop for dinner soon.”

  “Can we have a little one?” Kelly said.

  “Sure,” her mom said, beaming.

  It was the perfect American family in the perfect American vehicle taking the perfect American trip. I was with Kelly and her parents, and the four of us were driving down to San Onofre, California, in their camper. Kelly and her parents talked excitedly the whole way, pointing out the windows at interesting buildings, cool cars, herds of cows.

  The only issue I had was food. We were near the coast often, and they liked stopping for seafood. Seafood wasn’t something I was ready for: I was still obsessed with controlling my food, which meant knowing exactly where it came from, and imagining my way into the murky depths of the ocean was beyond me. I was positive that if I ate anything from the sea, I would end up bent over a toilet for hours. “No thanks,” I said to shrimp and lobster and fish that was probably delicious beyond my dreams.

  When we got to the beach, the trip was perfect. We drove the camper out to the ocean and swam, and Kelly, who was a year older, flirted a little bit with a local surfer boy: blond hair, blue eyes, dark skin. I flirted a little with a friend of his, though with less success. “Hi,” he said, and I turned away, blushing and giggling.

  About a week after we got there, Kelly and I were on our stomachs tanning when something blotted out the sun. It was her parents, standing over us. They were stiff as statues, and I knew that something was wrong. Finally, her father’s face cracked. “You have to leave,” he said. I must have looked horrified. Had I done something wrong? An apology rose in my throat. He rushed to clarify. “It’s your mom,” he said. “She’s not feeling well. You have to go visit her.”

  “Back to Ketchum?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Your parents are in Portland, where your mom is in the hospital.” He explained: She had been feeling weak ever since her broken leg, and the doctors in Ketchum were concerned enough to send her to Portland for more tests. “They discovered something,” he said.

  “What?” I said.

  “They’re not sure,” he said. “But you need to get on the plane immediately.” We packed up the camper and drove to the nearest airport.

  It was the smallest plane I had ever seen, more like a chair lift on a ski slope, and two men who weren’t dressed like the pilots I was used to flew me up the coast. The plane shook and shuddered the whole way. I counted the minutes and sipped the air so that I wouldn’t throw up.

  When I got to Portland, my father met me. “Hi,” he said, but there wasn’t any bounce in his voice. We drove to the hospital, where the two of us sat in his car in the parking lot and he tried to tell me what was happening. “Your mother…” he said. “Your mother…” Then he started to cry, which stopped him talking, and then he started to talk again and said we needed to go inside to meet his friend Dan. I was cold and also numb, and he put his jacket around me to warm me up.

  We went upstairs to a sparse room that held only a couch and dresser and coffeemaker. Dan came in and sat with us, and after a little while my father was able to talk. “The doctors had to knock her out,” he said. “They needed to cut into the space above her chest and remove a tumor.”

  “So they removed it?”

  “They couldn’t. It had already spread into other parts of her body.” That meant that she was sicker than they had expected. “She might not have been feeling well for a while. It might have had something to do with why she broke her leg, or why she stayed in the hotel room most days in London.”

  As he talked, I noticed that he was wearing a khaki fishing shirt, and that Dan was too. Had they gone fishing while the tumor spread through my mother? I was suddenly furious with them. Couldn’t they see that she needed us? The shirt filled my field of vision. It was a symptom but more than a symptom. It was a symbol. It stood in for all the loneliness in our family, all the attempts at escape, all the anger that couldn’t be expressed. I couldn’t express mine either. “Can I see her?” I asked. “Now?” My voice was small, not hard-edged like I wanted it to be.

  They led me down the hallway, which smelled like the senior home where my grandmother lived. I couldn’t bear any of it: not the tumor, not the smell, not the cold rain in the parking lot or the way my flip-flops were squeaking on the floor. Just before we got to my mother’s door, my father reached over and laced our fingers together. I knew what this meant. I had seen it before. It meant that he was sad and scared himself, and that he didn’t know what to do. I forgave him the fishing shirt.

  My mother was on the bed, sleeping. She looked beautiful even with the oxygen mask that was lying on her chest. Mary Kay, Don’s wife, was with her. “Puck,” my father said. “Marielzy is here.”

  My mother opened her eyes. “Hi, baby girl,” she said. She held out her hand—with its prominent knuckles and pink nail polish and a hospital band that was too big for her wrist—and I took it between mine.

  “You look pretty, Mommy.” I said. “Not sick at all. You did your hair.”

  “Mary Kay helped me fix it up this morning,” she said.

  She pulled me close to her. I had to hop up onto the metal bar of the hospital bed. The back of her hand was cool on my cheek. “Daddy says you’re sick,” I said, and the rest came in a rush: “You can’t die. I love you. I’ll pray, and you have to promise that you’ll pray too. You have to.” I had already started negotiating with God, or whatever my understanding of God was—I figured there had to be some power that could turn things around.

  “You’re blonder,” she said, “and nice and tan too.” Then she laughed, louder than she should have, which scared me. It was the kind of laugh she laughed when she was watching a TV show and something surprising happened. She wiped tears from under my lashes. “Okay,” she said. “I promise. I will be okay for you.” I put my head on her stomach. I was scared to get too close to her chest or her throat. If I pressed down on the tumor, would it leak more poison into her? The cold rain was still coming down outside, and I watched it through the wires in the window, feeling her breathing underneath me.

  We stayed an extra week in Salem at Dan and Mary Kay’s house. I slept by myself in the attic room, but it wasn’t the same. I couldn’t give the dolls my full attention. I thought only about my mother, which was a way of not thinking about the possibility of a world without her. Every day, we trekked back to Portland, to the hospital, as Mommy got stronger and Daddy met with the doctors to decide what to do when we got home. They decided that she would start chemotherapy and radiation in Boise. The treatments would be weekly. Daddy would drive her. When he couldn’t, I would. He had already taught me to drive, because I had to make trips to the market when Mommy had her broken leg the year before.

  * * *

  MY FATHER TOLD ME LATER that my mother was only given a few months to live. She made it though those months and hundreds more, but her cancer shifted the entire dynamic of the house yet again.

  We all had problems, some more than others. Muffet had her mental issues. Margot struggled with her disorganization and insecurity. My father had suffered a heart attack. I was obsessive and worried too much about my stomach. But whatever we were dealing with, it paled in comparison to the cancer. That was something we all understood. My mother, by falling ill, became the undisputed center of attention. One thing the cancer did, immediately, was eliminate any remaining chance of divorce. If my parents had discussed it at time
s after my father’s heart attack, it was taken off the table after my mother’s diagnosis. Splitting up was no longer an option.

  The main result of my mother’s cancer was that I became her full-time caretaker. The jobs that had fallen to me when she broke her leg remained, and they were extended and expanded. I needed to bring her meals, help around the house, pick out clothes, make sure she made it to her appointments on time. Like my dad’s affair with the nurse, this repeated a family pattern: my grandmother, Hadley, had spent her twenties caring for her mother, who came down with, and eventually succumbed to, Bright’s disease. But for me, at the time, in Ketchum in the early seventies, becoming my mother’s caretaker was a singular event, the end of my carefree childhood. It isolated me in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated—from classmates, neighborhood friends, kids I would see on television. What was that girl in the movie doing playing in the yard? Wasn’t there an ailing relative in her family who needed everything? Caring for an sick parent is rewarding, but it’s also hard, and it’s especially difficult at that age, when I probably needed all the things I wasn’t getting: a sense of self, a sense of separation.

  People sometimes ask why I didn’t get angry. The first few times I heard the question, it sounded like nonsense. Get angry? That wasn’t even on the menu of possible outcomes. My reaction was to make myself invisible, almost like a servant of the house. I didn’t rebel. I didn’t subvert. I didn’t make a scene. What I did was to slowly and subtly learn to manipulate a tense and treacherous set of emotional circumstances. I learned to pick my way through the minefield of ailments and alienation.

  Soon enough, it became second nature. I would learn when it worked to my advantage to cozy up to my mom a little bit, spend more time with her than she was asking, and when it made more sense to go down to the basement and spend time with my father. I operated the home like a machine whose purpose was to produce the least amount of tension possible. That was the beginning of a habit that would last for years and even decades: do whatever possible to engineer an easier life in the short term, even if it relied on evasion and caused blockage. My family made it easy for me, in the sense that no one openly confronted any problems or issues. We moved along, locked together, locked in place.