Chapter 10 Fore!
Fore!
But the reason I recall that weekend in Massachusetts most was this conversation.
On Saturday night, we had dinner at the home of a professor there with whom my mother had been friends when she’d been at Smith and he’d been a student at Amherst. He was tall and slender and actually chewed on the earpiece of his tortoiseshell eyeglasses as if he were in an Edward Albee play, and smelled of the same Brylcreem my father used.
His wife was wearing the sort of espadrilles that filled my mother’s shoe racks.
They both knew my story: I had been planning to go to Yale, but after killing a kid with a golf ball had taken a year off and now chosen Smith College instead.
Midway through dinner, the professor started sharing with me which courses he thought I’d enjoy, given what he said my mother had told him about my interests.
(Oh, I imagined asking, you have classes here on golf and quaaludes and girls who fuck older men?
but I merely smiled politely.) With genuine delight, he said that over the next four years I could take such English classes as “Gothic Horror in the Twentieth Century,” “Passion and Pulp,” and “The Soul of the Pratfall.”
“Oh, it has,” agreed the professor’s wife. “You wouldn’t think things like pratfalls can be both comic and, well, soul crushing. But the syllabus is a gem, and you see why humor and sadness are often siblings.”
Which was when the professor forever anchored himself in my memory by saying, “There’s a truism that has been attributed to lots of observers of the human psyche over the centuries, but it’s essentially this: it’s tragedy when it happens to you and it’s comedy when it happens to somebody else.
” He turned to me and added, “Look at that poor caddy: getting whacked by a golf ball? That’s the stuff of comedic legend—unless you’re the one who is hit in the head. ”
Or, I would have added if I were older, you’re the one who hit the golf ball.
Smith, I realized, now that it was my destination, had something else going for it.
No one else from Tallmadge High School was there.
A pair of students from Tallmadge were at Mount Holyoke, another was at Amherst, and a fourth was at Hampshire.
But at Smith, I would have at least a chance at anonymity.
Students might not know my history in high school, and how bad choices and bad luck marked me as much as the colors of my eyes or my hair.
I was going to be deposed a second time because of the revelation about the target.
So, the day before my second deposition, I met once again with my father and Cleon Barker at Barker’s law firm.
My lawyer wanted to prep me for the sorts of questions I was very likely to be asked.
When we finished, a little before five in the afternoon, my father announced that he had about an hour of work left at the office.
My mother, who had come into the city, suggested we go for a drink at one of the bars in Grand Central Station before she and my father took the train back to Tallmadge.
Since I had been living with my aunt and uncle, I rarely saw my parents in person.
Like most younger or youngest children, I was oblivious to whatever they were feeling about having become empty nesters when I left.
I imagined, when I contemplated their lives without me in Tallmadge, that mostly they were relieved to have the source of so much gossip and innuendo and bad behavior out of sight and out of mind.
But, of course, I wasn’t out of mind. How could the kid who had killed Kenny Foster and broken up Theo and Eleanor Catton’s marriage ever be forgotten? Their daughter had left a tornado-like path of destruction in her wake.
And the fact I had learned nothing? The fact I was already a functional hot mess?
The fact I had a coke spoon in my purse worthy of Studio 54 that very moment?
Oh, I’m not proud. Still, as Emily Dickinson taught us, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” And my own slant on my life was that I had earned my badge as a pariah.
My mother and I went to the Oyster Bar, and she ordered a Harvey Wallbanger, and I surprised her by asking for a martini.
I was still anxious from our meeting with my lawyer and wanted a very stiff drink.
(Oh, who am I kidding? Back then I always wanted a very stiff drink.) I also felt quite grown-up amidst the marble walls and the crowds of commuters, much as I did when I was at the magazine or in bed with an NYU professor and established novelist, and that ameliorated my anxiety as much as the booze.
We were close to the hotel that had been Theo’s and my undoing, but all my mother was focused on was her proximity to the train that later that evening would ferry her and my father home.
She didn’t bring up the deposition, and initially asked only innocuous questions about the magazine and whether I was happy living with my aunt and uncle.
But then she asked whether I was finding nice boys to date in the city, because I hadn’t mentioned anyone whenever we’d spoken on the telephone.
“I think I’m steering clear of romance for the moment,” I lied.
And it was a lie, not merely because I was sleeping with Dennis, but because I was viewing whatever I had with Dennis as something more promising than my involvement with Theo.
I never expected Theo to leave his wife for me.
I never wanted that. (In hindsight, what did I want?
I have never been able to answer that for a therapist. One shrink said to me, “Perhaps the problem was that all you wanted was to please him.” Yeah. That was the problem.)
“But you’re seeing friends,” she said. I replied that I was, but I noticed her eyes were taking in the men at the bar and the men racing for trains.
I knew my mother was a sexual being because I knew she had had an affair with Sam Stetson.
It was entirely possible that she was involved with him still.
Just because her daughter had been outed as a Tallmadge home-wrecker didn’t mean she herself needed to come clean.
Still, as I watched her looking over my shoulder, her eyes alighting briefly on different men like bumblebees on borage, I couldn’t resist asking, “And you?”
“And me?”
“Are you seeing friends?”
“Of course I am. I like people. Why would you ask such a thing?”
“You just asked me.”
“I know you went through a lot. I know you’re going through a lot. I’m worried, sweetheart, that’s all. I’m worried.”
I took a great swallow of my martini, savoring the burn in my chest. “Can I ask you something else?”
“Sure.”
“Are you still having an affair with Mr. Stetson?”
She gazed at me intensely for a long moment, oblivious now to everyone but me in the cavernous netherworld of Grand Central, and crunched down hard on the ice cube she had in her mouth.
“I’m curious: Did you ever tell Spencer?” she asked, and I was hurt that her first reaction was to wonder if my spectacularly perfect older brother knew.
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. So…are you?”
“No,” she said, finally looking down so she could reach for the comfort of her tumbler. She drained all but the ice. “I broke it off.”
“Because I told you I knew?”
“Because I wanted to be able to pay attention to you. To care for you.”
“I’m not living with you.”
“I’m still your mother.”
“Did Mrs. Stetson ever find out?”
“Deirdre? No. At least I don’t think so. I think Sam would have told me if he was going to confess. But why would he? Why risk breaking up his marriage? Why risk breaking up your father’s and my marriage?”
“You never told me why you were sleeping with him.”
She regarded me for a long moment. Then: “Because that’s none of your business.”
“Do you love Dad?” The sound of my voice surprised me: suddenly, it sounded childlike—plaintive and desperate.
I was young enough that I still wanted her to say that she did and she and my father would never divorce.
And yet, I think there was a part of me that would not have been unduly alarmed by whatever she shared.
When you’ve killed someone, even accidentally and even if it wasn’t absolutely your fault, you tend to take things like your mother’s infidelity and the prospect of your parents’ divorce with relative equanimity.
“There are a thousand reasons why people have affairs. Yes, Mira, I love your father.”
“You have no plans to leave him?”
“No.”
“But you only stopped seeing Mr. Stetson because of me. Doesn’t that mean that there’s something lacking in whatever you have with Dad?”
“When you’re older, you’ll understand. When you’re older—”
“Oh, please.”
“When you’re older, you’ll be more comfortable with ambiguity.”
“What does that mean?”
She shrugged and finished her drink. Then she said, “You know your father. He has some exceptional qualities. Some really wonderful qualities.”
“There’s a but coming.”
Instead of answering my question, she said, “Last August was a wake-up call for me. I shouldn’t have been with Sam Stetson, except socially. What you were going through reminded me of my priorities.”
Last August. Two words to summarize the death of Kenny Foster and the fallout that followed. “You’re not answering my question,” I said.
“I love many things,” she replied finally. “Your father is among them. He’s not perfect, but I’m not either.”
“Do you love many things or many men?”
“I don’t love many men. I love one, and he’s your father,” she said, but her voice was lacking in conviction.
“What about Mrs. Catton?” I asked, bringing up Theo’s wife, the woman I had wronged. “Do you ever run into her?”
“No.”
“What would happen if you did?”