Dream Catcher: A Memoir (71 page)

O
NE NIGHT AS
I
WAS
about to leave for a performance, the stairs were blocked by a new guy moving into the upstairs “bachelor club,” a four-bedroom apartment shared by a bunch of really nice guys, their jukebox, Coca-Cola machine, retro posters, and rock-and-roll paraphernalia. The new guy was a big one, moving a couch up the four flights single-handedly. He saw me in my fancy black-tie symphony wear and with a wide Midwestern grin said, “Well, aren’t you all dressed up. What’s the occasion?”

“I’m singing in Symphony Hall tonight,” I swanned in reply.

“Oh, yeah, that’s right. Simon Rattle is guest conductor. I’d forgotten it was so soon. It should be a good one.”

Folding my wings beneath me, I introduced myself. Larry knew about the concert because he’d sung with the Opera Company of Boston for the past seven years, until it went bankrupt, and was still friends with singers all over town. He comes from a musical family, although he is the only one with classical training. In high school, he had a voice that could be heard across two counties, which is how he wound up in conservatory rather than working for “Generous” Motors as had most of his high school friends and neighbors in his Michigan hometown. What a change in the building! Instead of being serenaded by the likes of Twisted Sister from the jukebox upstairs, strains of
Aida
wafted through my bedroom window on summer evenings. Not too much later we were engaged, and not too long after that, well, reality struck as accurately as Cupid’s arrow, and as the jukebox song goes, “Baby’s feeling sick in the morning, says she’s havin’ trouble gettin’ into her jeans.”

Unfortunately, this babe was sick morning, noon, and night. Hyperemesis, vomiting for six solid months. I started out skinny and lost eight pounds in the first six months. I basically held a snail’s-eye view of the bathroom floor, because the floor felt cool on my face and because it wasn’t worth the bother of moving myself too far from the toilet. Toward the middle of my sixth month I started feeling some relief and
tried singing again. In the middle of a concert, I suddenly began to feel faint. I sat down on the riser and the singers to either side moved over slightly to cover me. My chorus conductor from Harvard had come to see us. She said afterward, “It was strange, suddenly you just weren’t there.” The flu was going around the chorus like wildfire and I was in big trouble.

As I had been feeling better lately, Larry was away on a two-week course for singers and actors. Liza’s brother Sig came and picked me up to take me home with him so he could keep an eye on me. Instead, he took one look at me and drove me to the nearest emergency room. They agreed it was probably the flu and said I could go home, but to keep a close watch in case I got worse. I called Larry and asked him to come back right away. We had a major league fight. Phones slammed, don’t you ever darken my door again if you’re not home by this evening, and so on.

Oh, it appears to be a long, such a long, long time before the dawn.

(Crosby, Stills, and Nash)

F
OLLOWING IN MY PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER’S
footsteps, I became gravely ill in the sixth month of my pregnancy. And like my paternal grandmother before me, I, too, was in danger of losing the baby. The following day, Sig, his fiancée, and a fellow chaplain dragged me semiconscious from bed and took me to the hospital, over my delirious objections that I felt too sick to move. I was hospitalized for acute septicemia and dehydration. If I had been a day later, a doctor scolded, I could well have been dead.

After several weeks in the hospital, I was given permission to go home if I had someone to look after me around the clock for a few days to make sure I didn’t relapse and lose consciousness. My father had married a young nurse a few years ago, and she offered to drive down and look after me for a while. He was on the other line, so I heard every word he said when he blew up. He said, “What does she need a nurse for anyway? You’re just encouraging her invalidism.” She said quietly that she’d have to call me back. Sig, who has known my father since we were twelve years old, was in the room at the hospital visiting me when this call came through and was appalled. I was still crying when she called back twenty minutes later and
said she’d be there first thing tomorrow morning. She hadn’t thought he was going to let her, but she managed to persuade him somehow.

He was
not
happy about it. I thought she was really brave to come. I had seen how he treated her on my visits up there. It was a revelation. I began to understand something that had been a mystery to me for most of my life: how he manages to annihilate the women around him and yet maintain the gentlemanly image of clean hands and correctness.

Colleen, his wife, is nearly fifty years younger than my father. She is pretty in a schoolgirlish way. Soft red hair in a pixie cut, green eyes, and a pretty smile. “Roller-skate skinny,” as Holden described his beloved little sister, Phoebe. Colleen looks terrific in a blue blazer. My father should thank his lucky stars. Perhaps in some moments he does, but what I’ve witnessed is that, instead, he throws stones. He berates her for just those things that make her attractive to him, her age and innocence and simplicity, the same characteristics that allow her to put up with him.

She went to a college in the South where she is from and was a cheerleader. She was also on the bowling team. She is just the sort of pleasant, helpful person one wants at one’s sickbed. A bit cheery for my taste, but I can’t completely divorce myself from my grumpy heritage. She is by no means unintelligent; she is simply neither interested nor trained in things literary. She is an avid quilt maker and usually sweeps up the blue ribbons at the Cornish Fair, which she helps organize each year.

On a recent tour of the house, my father and Colleen showed me how they’d made over his old study-bedroom, the one with the safes, into a sewing room. I looked at some of her quilting work in progress, and having flunked home economics rather spectacularly myself, I searched for a compliment. Of course I said it was pretty, but I also said I admired the patience and skill it must take to make all those tiny stitches. I said that I’ve always made such a mess of it when I’ve tried to do anything that requires that kind of concentration. My father, interrupting my less than elegant attempt, said, “It’s been my experience that people who excel at that kind of work never possess a really fine mind.” He said it without a trace of rancor in his voice, as if he were simply sharing an objective piece of wisdom he’d attained. It’s hard to explain this, but if I’d said, “How can you say such an insulting thing in front of Colleen?” he would have been shocked and incensed at my suggestion
that he had said anything insulting to or about Colleen. And furious that I’d accused him of making anything other than a “purely objective” observation; and then he would have gone on to berate women for being such babies and always taking things personally.
⁴
He is so clever, so facile with words, that the person he has insulted not only feels insulted, but feels stupid and ashamed for feeling insulted.

What I find most maddening is that I often don’t even realize I’ve been insulted until days or sometimes years later. Then I feel stupid when I think of all the things I
should
have said. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been driving back to Boston from a visit with my father that seemed to go quite pleasantly when suddenly something he said to me sinks in and I’m left saying to my dashboard, “Hey, that wasn’t nice.”

His comment in the sewing room seemed to sail right past her. All the same, it wasn’t nice.

A
LTHOUGH DADDY CLAIMED
to be terribly concerned when I got out of the hospital, he never came to visit. He called three or four times every single day for the entire week or so that Colleen was with me, asking when she was coming home. I’d hear her side of long conversations about salad bowls and where is such and such in the kitchen and what he ate for lunch, on and on. I remember thinking it sounded more like a conversation between a traveling mother and her two-year-old at home—
some
body wants his mummy and wants her
now.
He spoke to me exactly once. Although he had always been difficult about illness, nothing had prepared me for what was to happen.

He attacked me with the impersonal viciousness of an earthquake. He asked me if I’d given any thought to how I was going to support my child. Thinking this was a preamble to an offer of help, I admitted that I worried about it daily. He said I had no right to bring a child into this “lousy” world that I couldn’t support, and he hoped I was considering an abortion.

Nothing he had ever done in the past had prepared me for the unspeakable. I said that I didn’t believe in abortion for myself, at thirty-seven, though I had no intention of telling others what to do, and that it was a hell of a thing to say, to suggest that I kill my baby.

He said,
“Kill, kill,
what a silly, dramatic word. I’m only saying what
any
parent of a child in your situation would say.”

I don’t know where I found the courage—perhaps because I was a mother whose child was being attacked—but I’m proud to say that, for the first time in my life, I let him have it, straight from the gut, unedited. I said, “No, Daddy, any
normal
parent would offer support. All you offer is criticism.”

He said, “I’ve never criticized you. When have I ever criticized you? I’ve always been there for you when you needed it.”

I was totally shocked. I could not believe what I was hearing. I said, “That’s absolute crap. You’ve never once inconvenienced yourself for your children. You’ve never interrupted your precious work. You’ve always done exactly what you wanted, when you wanted.”

“What about the time I took you guys to England? I didn’t have to do that, did I?”

What can you say to a man who thinks the sacrifice of parenthood is a two-week trip to the U.K. when I was twelve?

I said, “That’s it? That’s all you can come up with? A trip to England where half the reason we went was so you could hook up with a romantic pen pal.”

“Christ, you’re sounding just like every other woman in my life, my sister, my ex-wives. They all accuse me of neglecting them.”

I interrupted, “Well, if the shoe fits, wear it!”

“I can be accused of a certain detachment, that’s all. Never neglect. You just need someone to hate. You always did. First it was your brother, then it was your mother, now it’s me. You’re still seeing a psychiatrist, aren’t you?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You
are,
aren’t you. You’re never happy with anything. You’re nothing but a neurotic malcontent.”

At this point, the level of his denial was beginning to sink in. I had always thought he justified his neglect because of how important his work was to him. I thought he was at least a little ashamed of himself.
Even when, during this conversation, I confronted him with evidence such as his allowing us to stay with a woman whom he believed had set fire to the house with us in it, he was totally unshaken in his view of himself.