The planning for her party gave her a new lease on life. After listing the obvious guests—her remaining two sisters, nieces and nephews, and longtime friends like Annie Potters—she began looking up addresses of cousins and cronies who had drifted out of our regular orbit. For the occasion, our friend George Partel built a platform, and on it we placed a wing chair draped in velvet and surrounded by flowers. On her eightieth birthday, we made Mother “Queen for a Day.”
My brother Johnny had a sparkle in his eye that I had not seen for a long time. The baby’s death and then the breakup of his marriage had been devastating for him. He had begun dating a woman named Connie, and I suspected he might be getting serious.
The party started at three in the afternoon because I was sure that Mother and the other old girls would get tired early. I should have known better. Twelve hours later, my contemporaries and I sat limply in the den while Mother and her peers stood around the piano, happily singing “Sweet Molly Malone.”
That night I marveled at Mother. Wearing her best beige lace dress, her silver hair framing her almost unlined face, her blue eyes sparkling, she was obviously having the time of her life. Before that party finally ended, she had cast her cane aside, locked arms with the remaining “Bungalow Girls”—friends from Rockaway Beach, circa 1912—and led a spirited if limited version of the Rockettes chorus line.
She was to live for another year and a half, a period during which her health failed drastically. I was always sorry that God hadn’t called her right after that party. Instead of suffering, she’d have gone out on a high note.
Mother loved to go home to her quiet Bronx apartment for weekends. One Saturday she phoned. “Mary,” she said, “I think John is married. What are we going to do about it?”
“Throw a shower for him?” I suggested.
“Mary, you know what I mean.”
I did. Johnny was dating, but he was divorced and in Mother’s Catholic eyes not free to marry. “Mother, you’ll have no peace unless you call up Johnny and ask him point blank if he’s married,” I said.
Deciding it was the only thing to do, she phoned him. “John,” she began, “I have a question to ask you.”
He told me later that he knew immediately what was coming.
“John, are you married?”
“Yes, Mother, I’m married.”
“Were you married by a priest within the faith?”
“No, Mother, but the judge who married us is very active in the Knights of Columbus.”
Mother’s response was to laugh. “Congratulations. I hope you’ll both be very happy.” She was always a good sport and had long ago learned to accept what couldn’t be changed.
I would go out occasionally on dates. Someone I met at a Mystery Writers meeting began to show interest in me. There had been a short-lived television series in which the main character, named Stanley Beamish, could fly. The kids decided my admirer was a look-alike for Stanley Beamish. When he called, instead of telling me who was on the phone, they would start flapping their arms. He didn’t last as long as the failed TV show.
From time to time, people tried to set me up with their friends. One day someone from town showed up on my doorstep. “Mary,” he demanded, “how old are you?”
I was so surprised I blurted out the exact truth.
Satisfied, he nodded. “That’s what I thought. I have someone I want you to meet. He’s an engineer who works for our company. He makes fourteen thousand a year. There’s just one problem. He’s very cranky.”
“For fifty thousand a year, I’ll look at a crank,” I told this self-made Dolly Levi. “For fourteen thousand, he has to be Smiling Jack.”
I never did meet the engineer.
At work, Frank and I had become a team. I would open up a potential new account, and he would come in to close the deal. We regularly took clients and our celebrity hosts to lunch and sometimes to dinner and the theater. Then we’d have a quick cup of coffee and I’d go home to New Jersey and he to Long Island.
He was very fond of me—I knew that. I also knew that he was terrified of the fact that I had five children. What he never understood was that I had no plans to marry anyone. Nevertheless, he was always on guard about appearing interested in me. The only time his guard slipped was when he was feeling sentimental, usually following a pleasant dinner. After his elderly parents died, he had had his mother’s diamonds inserted into his father’s signet ring. On three or four occasions, in front of clients or friends, he would take off “Dad’s ring,” as we called it, slip it on my finger, and announce to one and all that we were engaged.
The next morning at work, I would give him the ring back and assure him that we weren’t engaged. I knew that he must have awakened shivering with fear that the five kids, Porgy the poodle, and I would arrive at his doorstep. “Dad’s ring” became a long-standing joke among our friends. “Have you given Mary ‘Dad’s ring’ lately, Frank?” was a question that came up from time to time.
We’ve remained devoted friends through the years, and one Christmas Eve he handed me a brown paper bag. “Dad’s ring,” he said, “I want you to have it. No strings attached.”
During that period of my life, one bright interlude that occurred every year and a half or so was that I’d steal a week to go to England and visit my old friend Joan and her husband, Richard. They had moved to the village of Branscombe, in Devon, and were living in a former coast guard station, called “The Lookout,” which they had converted to a magnificent country home. High on a hill overlooking the English Channel and situated on five hundred acres, it was balm to my soul to visit there.
Joan, who had been afraid of horses when she was young, had become a superb horsewoman. Richard kept a stable and rode every morning, and she wisely had thrown herself into sharing his passion, becoming an expert jumper when they rode to hounds. I’d taken a few lessons along the way, and riding was something I’d always wanted to do. Over there, I was assigned one of the gentle horses and would go out with them. Cantering on the British countryside beside the English Channel, I felt a long way from the Bronx.
I remember the time I urged them to come over and spend Thanksgiving with us. “You don’t have Thanksgiving here, Richard,” I reminded him.
“Oh, but we do, Mary,” he said. “You must remember, your Fourth of July is our Thanksgiving.”
In 1968, after three years of getting up to write at 5:00 A.M., I finished my book on George and Martha Washington. I entitled it Aspire to the Heavens because that had been the family motto of Mary Ball Washington, George’s mother. It is, of course, one of the truly terrible titles of all time. When it was published a year later, the few bookstores it slithered into placed it in the “spiritual” section, between the Bible and Norman Vincent Peale. The clerks thought it was a prayer book.
But it was published, and that’s what mattered most. I had written a book, and I have to say I thought it was good. Alas, not only the title conspired to make sure that it remained one of the great secrets of 1969, the publishing house was sold just as the book came out, and as a result there was not one iota of publicity to help enlighten the world that my first book was available. For some reason, though, it did manage to find its way into a bookstore near our office. One day, three or four of us passed that bookstore on the way to lunch.
I stopped, staring in shock: a copy of Aspire to the Heavens was in the window. I pointed it out to my fellow Tavistockites. “Front and center,” I boasted.
When we returned from lunch, the book was missing from the window. “Snapped up!” I said.
At five o’clock the same group again passed the bookstore window. A copy of Aspire to the Heavens was again in place.
“Whoever bought it returned it,” one of the guys suggested.
I had received a total of fifteen hundred dollars less 10 percent commission for three years’ work. I had no way of knowing that over three decades later the book would be discovered by a descendant of the Washington family and go on
the bestseller list under its new and more appropriate title, Mount Vernon Love Story.
I did know that I considered the book a triumph. And I also knew that I had what it took to actually write a book. Now I wanted to try to write a book that would sell. Marilyn was a freshman at Catholic University. Warren was about to graduate from high school and was enrolled in Villanova University. I needed to make more money.
I have a hot tip I offer people who say to me, “I know I can write. I’m sure I can write. I just don’t know what to write.” I tell them to turn around and look at their bookshelves. What do they like to read? Oh sure, we are all to some degree eclectic readers, but what do we grab when we’re running for a plane or train? What do we curl up with when we’re tired at the end of the day and want to just lose ourselves in a book? Is it a classic, a biography, mystery/suspense, science fiction or romance? Whatever your favorite reading is may well indicate where your literary pot of gold is waiting.
I looked at my bookshelves and realized that, from the time I was six years old, I’d loved to read suspense. The Judy Bolton and Nancy Drew series, then Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Charlotte Armstrong, MignonG. Eberhart, Rex Stout, John D. MacDonald—the list went on and on.
More than that, from the time I’d been little, I’d always tried to keep up with the author. Suspense writing is not unlike the Hansel and Gretel story. One of the versions of that fable is that Hansel dropped smooth stones and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs. The birds ate the breadcrumbs. The mystery/suspense writer is dropping both smooth stones and breadcrumbs. The smooth stones are ambiguous statements, never cheating the reader, but sometimes leading them astray. The breadcrumbs are the real clues to the perpetrator of the crime and the solution of the plot.
I was good at picking up the real clues. I knew why the authors such as the ones I just listed wrote such satisfying mysteries, while other books fell flat at the end. I reasoned that I liked mystery/suspense; I understood it; the first two short stories I sold, “Stowaway” and “Milk Run,” were suspense stories. I was going to give the suspense field a try.
“Take a true situation, one that intrigues you, that stays in your mind, ask yourself two questions, ‘Suppose’ and ‘What if,’ and turn them into fiction.”
Professor Mowery’s advice had never failed me. A sensational murder case in New York had captured everyone’s attention. Alice Crimmins, a twenty-six-year-old mother, had been accused of the murder of her two children, a five-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl. She hadn’t been accused of criminal neglect, like leaving them unattended and having the house burn down, but of deliberate, coldblooded murder.
It seemed inconceivable to most of us that any woman could do that to her children. And then I thought: Suppose an innocent young mother is convicted of the deliberate murder of her two children; suppose she gets out of prison on a technicality; and then suppose seven years to the day, on her thirty-second birthday, the children of her second marriage disappear?
I liked the premise and decided I’d try to write it. I didn’t realize it then, but Where Are the Children?, my first bestseller, was in gestation.
My first book, Aspire to the Heavens, 1969.
Fourteen
Mother died on June 3, 1969, four months after Aspire to the Heavens was published. Paradoxically, she may have sped her own end by electing to go into a nursing home for a few weeks’ rest. After all, she pointed out, she was spending three dollars a month for Medicare and getting nothing out of it. As soon as she began to take it easy, everything in her body slowed up. Her heartbeat became more and more uncertain. I knew it would soon be over when one day, just coming out of sleep, she said drowsily, “Mary, I had the children down to the beach, and Carol wandered off. I couldn’t find her. I just don’t think I can take care of them anymore.” She could no longer take care of others, and she didn’t want anyone to have to take care of her.
On June 6, Father Joe Ryan, who had concelebrated her funeral Mass that morning, wrote a note to me. It read, in part:
She was, as I’m sure you realize, one of my favorite people—one of the really beautiful people I’ve ever known…. Someone once said of a friend who had died, “Dying was the first thing he ever did that caused his friends pain.”…I thought this morning how incongruous it is to be praying for her. If she didn’t go straight in, who ever will? It’s nice to know that we have an influential friend where it matters most.
P.S. Do you think that the air in heaven is as good as in the Bronx? And if it is, do you think she’ll admit it?
Mother had a total of seventeen hundred dollars in insurance from nickel and dime policies she’d paid on for years. They were tied together in an old brown envelope. There was a note to Johnny and me with them. It said, “Don’t waste more than a thousand dollars on the funeral. Give one hundred dollars to each of my grandchildren.” She didn’t realize that she’d already given us all a priceless legacy—her constant devotion and unfailing love.
A month after she died, I wrote in my diary,
And it gets worse. What a year. Tavistock and I on phone a good hour. He said that I’m a historical buff in the space age. My kind of writing was all wrong for his programs. There was tension between us.
And on and on and on.
I feel degraded, battered, aching, stripped, robbed, deflated, had. Surely these downward steps won’t continue forever.
But for the next year it kept getting steadily “worser and worser,” as one of the kids used to say. There was no pleasing the guy, or at least I couldn’t please him. He was still tooting around the country, looking for the right place to settle. Vermont turned out to be full of hippies. Arizona was full of snakes. Wherever he was, he would stop his mobile home at a roadside phone at precisely four o’clock and phone the office.
We all had to be there. Even if you were on a sales call, like Cinderella rushing from the ball at the stroke of midnight, you had to be in place at your desk at precisely 4:00 P.M. each day. And everyone would be in a cold sweat, waiting to see whose head would be on the block that day.
The phone would ring. Laurence, in his capacity as office manager would pick it up. “Hello, G.R.” Then he’d call to all of us. “Pick up your phones.”
A shout from the other end would send our ear drums vibrating. “IDENTIFY YOURSELVES.”
“Hello, Mr. Tavistock. Mary here.”
Frank, Don, Barry, Ben…etc., etc., etc.
“THE SALES CAMPAIGN IS ALL BITS AND PIECES. IT’S blah, blah, blah…” He’d suddenly interrupt his tirade. “HOLD IT A MINUTE.”
We waited, knowing the pause meant that he was peeing in the bushes. He had weak kidneys. A moment later we’d hear the sound of the phone being picked up again. “THE SALES CAMPAIGN IS FALLING APART. I DON’T NEED THIS AGGRAVATION. I KEEP THIS BUSINESS OPEN FOR YOU KIDS. THAT’S ALL. I KEEP IT OPEN SO THAT YOU’LL HAVE A FINE PLACE TO WORK…WAIT A MINUTE.”
Back to the bushes.
At the end of the daily castigation, he would sometimes order one or the other of us to pick up the phone in a private office. That person would be his protem new confidante. “I can trust you to know that I’m losing faith in…” It was inevitable that whoever he was losing faith in would soon be applying for unemployment insurance.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for all of us was his decision that we would hold one-day meetings in a nearby hotel and tape-record them. Laurence was to express the tape to him overnight, wherever he happened to be. The problem was that if upon listening Tavistock felt that one or the other person was not sufficiently zealous about ideas and plans for the company, that person was on the banana peel express out of there.
We were all off-balance. By then I was forty-one years old, had worked for Tavistock for five years, and from day to day never knew whether or not I’d be out on my ear with my only skill the rather specialized one of writing his radio programs. I told the others that we were all being intimidated by a guy over a thousand miles away
who was making us suspicious of each other every time one of us was told to go into the private room. I said that next time I was ordered to go in there, I wanted everyone else to come in, too. Soon after that, I got my marching orders.
“Mary, go into the private room.”
“Certainly, Mr. Tavistock.”
I went in, the other five or six of my co-workers at my heels.
“Is the door closed?”
“Yes, it is, Mr. Tavistock.”
And it was. The others crowded around me.
“We’ve got a problem with Laurence,” he boomed. “An apple does not look the same from the front as from the back.”
I don’t know what that statement had to do with Laurence, but it was clear it was his turn in the barrel. At least now Laurence knew what to expect and was able to learn his sins of omission in advance and, to a degree, cover his backside.
I never thought G.R. was stupid. In fact he was a very smart man and very creative. If he hadn’t pushed us into out-and-out mutiny, the break might not have come. He sensed something was going wrong in the office and rushed back to New York on the train—he never flew. As he put it, “Jeez, look what happened to Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart.” Pause. “And Will Rogers.” But one way or the other, he arrived. Frank and Don and I had had lunch together that day. When we came back to the office, he was sitting at my desk.
I almost fainted, but he smiled benignly. “I admire you, Mary. I admire all of you. You’ve got spirit. You’ve got guts. That’s what I like. That’s what the Gordon R. Tavistock Corporation needs. Now I want you to tell me your problems, and we’ll solve them.”
I laid out mine: “I’ve worked for you for five years. I have no sense that I have job security. You’ve just rearranged the commission basis on the shows I’ve sold, which means I get a lot less money, and that’s after I sold them.”
Kitchen Privileges Page 14