You Can’t Go Home Again

Graduation

Here’s what I knew about the world at seventeen: men could walk on the moon, all good politicians would be assassinated, and people murdered one another for no good reason. Six million Jews, gypsies, gays, Catholics, and anyone who lacked Aryan cred were exterminated. Not just Anne Frank. Hippies were doomed to failure and capable of the utmost hypocrisy. The Beatles would never reform. The Summer of Love was over. Adults were treacherous and selfish. Men blame women for being beautiful. Men didn’t like smart girls. Men didn’t want an uncontrollable woman. I was uncontrollable. We dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My parents got married on the day we bombed Hiroshima. Placing your hands over your head would not protect you from atomic fall out. Cancer was fatal. Heroin was fatal. Love was fatal. I wanted to save everyone I loved from harm. I was powerless to save anyone from anything.

During senior year, my friend Julie started shooting heroin and our headmaster was shot by an irate French teacher whose yearly contract was not renewed. At dinner that night I told my parents a teacher had shot our headmaster. My mother was appalled at the expense of a school that allowed guns. No one asked any questions, no one explained anything. The subject turned to something my father was teaching at Rutgers. The shooting of our headmaster earned a mention in the Town Topics and then we were told to move on.

For my senior project I directed a play by Yeats about fairies and death and volunteered to work as an unpaid slave at the George Street Playhouse where I performed a variety of errands including taking the bus into Manhattan to help actors run lines in a decrepit building directly across from Port Authority. As I walked up the stairs, each floor provided a different drama. The first floor was a gambling den, the second, a shooting gallery, the third, a massage parlor, and the fourth a nearly empty rehearsal studio where the actors were smoking and drinking coffee. I was seventeen and rarely noticed if someone was trying to hit on me. My flirting was automatic and meaningless. I had been taught to please and I was good at it.

But then Viveca Lindfors, a forties movie star was booked into the theatre for a two-week run to perform her one-woman show about surviving the Nazis, several husbands, and Hollywood. She demanded an assistant and since no one was lower than me and she was high maintenance, I was appointed.

From the first day she called me “Polly, Dolly, whatever your name is, little girl.” Although she was tiny, she was terrifying. She called my name constantly from different parts of the theatre asking for her inhaler, lemon water, a cigarette, a pen, a massage, and a different part of her script. She called me an idiot, clumsy, something in German, stupid, and slow. My parents were fascinated to hear about the abuse. Evidently, Viveca had been a big star back in their day. Her show was called I Am Woman, and Eric Krebs, the artistic director of the theater, told me it was important to keep Viveca happy.
“But she keeps yelling at me and calling me stupid in German.”
“She’s a movie star,” Eric said. “Deal with it.”

“I am someone who likes men,” she told me one day as she was applying her makeup. I had never seen anyone apply as much makeup as Viveca, foundation, blush, eyeliner, shadow, mascara, powder and lipstick. She squinted at me as she curled her eyelashes. “What are you?” she asked. “Jewish?”
I shook my head. “Irish.”
She nodded. “You need makeup,” she said. “It protects the skin. How old are you, anyway?”
“Seventeen,” I said. “Eighteen in two months.”
“Oh my god,” she murmured. “How sweet to be young like that.” She glared at me. “Are you happy?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Pshaw,” she said. “Don’t imagine you have any relationship with pain. I had to deal with the Gestapo!”

And I had to deal with Viveca. On the day of her first dress rehearsal, I set fire to her costume with her tea coil, poured honey in her shoe and broke the makeup mirror she used to apply her lipstick. “Idiot!” she screamed. I fled. I told the stage manager I was quitting and drove home relieved to be rid of the movie star. The phone rang the next day and I answered. “Why have you left me,” Viveca murmured, her voice sweet and soft. “I can’t go on stage without my Dolly.” I understood why those men kept marrying her. I returned and she embraced me, hugging me so I inhaled her perfume and felt the powdery softness of her cheek, “Never leave me again,” she murmured. “I have suffered enough.”

That spring I was accepted at two colleges, Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin.
“Daddy will be very hurt if you don’t go to Rutgers,” my mother said after I announced my intention to go to the University of Wisconsin. “It’s a much better school. And they accept women now.”
“You said it was up to me.” Rutgers was located in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a city that lacked nearly anything that suggested culture or a college experience. I wanted to live in Madison where I had once visited my sister and went to eat fresh doughnuts at three o’clock in the morning, stoned as a newt.
“Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “If you don’t go to Rutgers, you’ll break his heart.”
Break his heart. My father’s heart had been broken by his alcoholic father, the orphanage and the sadistic nuns, his crazy brother, his angry sister who never spoke to us, indifferent publishers, my sister’s drug taking and now by me. It was unbearable. I wanted him to be happy. I wanted him to stop drinking and to be proud of me.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go to Rutgers. But I won’t live in a dorm. I want my own apartment and a car and I’m spending the summer in Ireland.”
“Of course,” my mother said. You are such a good girl.”

I blackmailed them and my terms were accepted. Not exactly a tragedy although no one should believe they could destroy their father by picking door number one. My dreams of finding my mother dead in a coffin were replaced by a dream that I was sitting in the morning assembly at Princeton Day School and terrorists broke into the auditorium and called my name, kidnapping me at gunpoint. I’m not sure if this was some remnant of the Patty Hearst story or another variation of the recurring fantasy I had of being in a coma and no one being allowed to enter my hospital room. The link was isolation, a lack of conscious decision-making, and a disappearance from my family.

Missing a terrorist connection, I drank. Every party, every situation that offered an opportunity to get drunk, I took. When no one was home, I watered down my parent’s whiskey and drank alone. I sat in my attic bedroom and stared out at the fields where we grew up. This house contained my happy/miserable childhood. I had become obsessed with a social anthropologist called Oscar Lewis who wrote a book called The Children of Sanchez and was fully aware of my childhood of privilege and opportunity, of new shoes and haircuts and braces and books would never compare with the deprivation, trauma, or tragedy of those Mexican children.

And yet, somehow, I could relate. I began to feel coldness around my heart. It reminded me of the story of the Snow Queen and how Kay, the boy with the splinter of the evil mirror in his eye, no longer saw beauty in anything. “Little Kay was quite blue, yes nearly black with cold; but he did not observe it, for she had kissed away all feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was a lump of ice.”

My heart was a lump of ice. It seemed like a very bad idea to care about anything because most things turned out to be false. The Snow Queen tells Kay she can’t keep kissing him because he will freeze to death and die. Somehow I saw myself as the killer and the victim both; the destroyer and the innocent bystander. The only time I felt better was when I was writing or drinking.

We didn’t know who to ask for help; our parents were burned out by the sixties and seventies; their parents had survived a war beyond anything anyone could imagine. All around us people were breaking down and breaking up but it was still a world of silence and denial. When I told my mother I was afraid of being alive she yelled at me and told me I needed to stop thinking so much. In my mother’s world happiness was something you created from the material in front of you. When my father was a professor at Amherst and she was pregnant with my sister, she had a friend who taught her to make blocks from sanded wood pieces, to bake bread, lay tile, strip furniture, sew dresses, spackle, and create beauty. Her daughters should not prove so difficult. If we were in pain there had to be a practical solution. We could be fixed, renovated, made stronger and silenced.

We commenced, graduated, matriculated, crossed the stage, girls in white dresses, boys in ties and jackets. Nice skin, braced teeth, thick, shiny hair. I never knew that wealth meant you were guaranteed at least a modicum of physical attractiveness, whatever money could buy. 98% of us were going to college, 85% were stoned or drunk, most of us had no idea of the future, but we were following directions unlike our older siblings. We had been warned: anarchy leads to mass tragedy. Freedom’s just another word for unemployment. Too many drugs and too much sex will send you flying off the Golden Gate Bridge believing you are a beautiful bird, breaking all your bones before you land. I ended my graduation night with a sad boy who put his head in my lap and told me he loved me. In my white dress sewn by my mother, stained with red wine, I looked down at him and thought if he knew who I really was he would change his mind.

I left for Ireland on the Port Authority bus, my backpack and bike stowed in its luggage compartment. My parents were at a party in New York and I was meeting my father at the party and he would drive me to Kennedy Airport. The money I earned during the summers in Maine had been carefully banked along with other babysitting money. I told my parents right after graduation I was leaving and would return in time to attend Rutgers in the fall. My father volunteered to find me a place to live in New Brunswick since I refused to consider a dormitory.

“Maybe you should try one for freshman year,” my mother said. I shook my head. “I want my own apartment,” I said. “I don’t want to live with a bunch of strangers.”
“But you’ll be so isolated,” she said. “Your sisters…“
“My sisters were allowed to choose their own schools,” I said, my voice level. “You’re making me go to Rutgers so I want to live in my own place.”
She looked crushed. “Oh, honey, come on! Your father is thrilled you’ll be there.”
That was the end of the conversation. It was a terrible decision to live in an apartment. I was only eighteen and had no idea of keeping a house. I was going to a place where I knew no one and living off-campus.

The party was on the Upper East Side. I don’t know how I managed to get the bike and the backpack on the subway but I did and when I appeared in the living room my father greeted me and stood up. “I’m driving her to Kennedy,” he told the hostess. “She’s riding her bicycle around Ireland.”
“All alone?” someone asked.
I shrugged. 

I had no idea where I was going except I had a round-trip ticket to London and enough money for the ferry to Ireland. Maybe I’d never come back, I thought as I stared out the window of the airplane, my bicycle stowed in a bike box in the luggage compartment, maybe I would simply step off the edge and disappear.

The Gales lived in Swansea where George had opened a pub in their backyard, which made it possible to avoid the early closing of British pubs. George was a far-right wing commentator who wrote a popular column for the Daily Mail. When I was eleven and we lived in St. John’s Wood we often visited the Gales over the weekend. The parents would disappear, frequently with other people, Louis Claiborne, Liz Claiborne’s writing brother, Kingsley and Hilly Amis, and other famous literary people and their kids would be allowed to run amuck eating three times a day, the infamous beans on toast. My best friend in that family was the youngest boy named James.

I arrived at the Gales’ mansion to be greeted by Pat Gale who was getting into a taxi but she paused to hug and kiss me and say the following: “Oh my god, darling, it’s little Mollser! You’re such a little bugger aren’t you and so beautiful. Such a dirty old fairy and now such a little tramp! No, darling you’re gorgeous and I’m so glad you’re here because my poor little James is just devastated, devastated because his fiancée drowned.”

She was speaking so rapidly and with such an amazing British accent and my jet lag was terrible. “She did what?”
“Drowned, darling. The poor little bugger. Had epilepsy and no one knew and she had a fit in the bathtub. He’s shattered darling, just absolutely shattered and now you’re here and that will be lovely. I’m going to Venice to be with my lover and poor old Morris is here of course but this is someone else.” Pat got into the taxi and called the driver “Darling” and then stuck her head out the window. “I’m so glad you’re here. Just take a nice room, make sweet Mark show you. And be good to my poor little James.” Her face softened. “He always loved his little Mollser, you know.”

And then the taxi roared away leaving me in a cloud of Opium perfume, holding my ten-speed bike, wearing a backpack, wondering what in hell’s name I was meant to do. Finally, I went inside and found the kitchen empty. I walked upstairs and after opening a few doors discovered a room with a made-up bed and clean looking sheets and dumped my stuff in there. The Gale’s house was a mansion with lots of beaten-up antique furniture and a feeling that no one actually lived a normal life there but instead attended a succession of huge parties in-between existing on chips and beans on toast. The tub was enormous and relatively clean.  Finding some bath salts, I dumped them in, went back into my room and took off all my clothes and got into the tub. I think I fell asleep because when I woke up the water was tepid and I heard voices. Wrapping myself in a towel, I went down the hall and saw the door to my room was now closed. I tried it and it was locked. There were noises coming from inside that sounded like people having energetic, drunken sex. I knocked.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, fuck off you fucking fuck!”
“You’re in my room!”
“Fuck off!” So, I fucked off. I found a fur coat hanging on a hook and put it on, went downstairs and made a cup of tea which I was drinking when James and Mark walked in looking mildly tipsy.

photo by Anthony Fomin

“Hallo!” said Mark, red haired and freckled, as he was when we were younger. “Who are you?”
“And why are you wearing our mum’s fur coat?” asked James who had dark looks, both gorgeous and ugly at the same time. Catnip.
“Because” I said, “some awful person is having sex in my bed and all my clothes are in there. I was taking a bath. I’m Molly. I have jet lag.”
“Molly Moynahan?” Mark’s kind face softened. “Oh, that’s lovely!” James looked less pleased. “That sodding cow’s having a bonk in your bed? It’s because the sheets are clean and her own room is a fucking pig sty, that stupid cunt.”
I’d forgotten how much less of a bad word cunt was considered in Britain. Still, the Gales loved to swear. “Who is it?”
“Sally Amis. Remember her? She’s working in the pub if you can call it that. She’s completely bonkers. Mum took her in.” Mark shook his head. “She’s always leaving her filthy knickers about. Anyway, you want something to eat?”
I wiped my eyes and nodded. “Beans on toast?” I asked, smiling. “How’d you know?” James asked gruffly. “Because that’s all we ever have?”
I shrugged. “I remember when we were here before. I loved it. I mean, the chaos.”
James nodded. “It’s bloody chaos all right.” We could hear Mark pounding on the door upstairs, shouting Sally’s name.
“Remember Sally?” James asked. “She’s in bad shape. Mum took her in because she had nowhere else to go.”
I hadn’t seen Sally Amis in years. I could only remember white, blonde hair and crooked teeth and that she smoked all the time.
“Hallo!” Sally suddenly appeared looking none the worse for wear. “Sorry, I didn’t realize the room was occupied.”
She was talking in a very posh way, the way I used to talk when I was three and went to a private nursery school in London and called my mother “Mummy.”
“Why are you bloody talking like that you fucking slag?” James asked. “You stole her fucking room.”
Sally removed her cigarette and speaking so fast I could barely understand her, the accent gutter London, she essentially told James to bite her fucking ass and get himself an enema and something else I didn’t understand. Then she slammed out the door.
“You can have your room back,” Mark said, smiling. “I put new sheets on the bed.” “Are you naked under that mink,” James asked leaning over me, his face so close I could feel his cheek against mine.
“Completely,” I said, flashing my leg to the thigh as I stood up.

Sally Amis scared the shit out of me. I avoided her like the plague but I watched her very, very closely. Youngest child of a great literary figure, little sister of rising star, Martin, lost daughter, drunken slut, she did not have my parents or she might have survived. Sally died and I didn’t because she wasn’t able to get sober. I would never judge anyone’s character based on that fact. When I met her in 1975 I was about to stagger along the same path but education, my parents, my oldest sister, my friends and hope gave me a second chance. I doubt Sally Amis longed to end up alone, sick and dying in a bedsit. A post-mortem article about her discussed the effect of her father’s bad behavior and the time she was born into.

“Whichever way you look at it, Sally's is a sad story of lovelessness and disappointment, of loneliness and despair — and this in a family where literary success gave them such early promise and advantages. Kingsley's great friend, the poet Philip Larkin, even wrote a poem, Born Yesterday, for Sally when she was born two days after publication of Lucky Jim — Amis’s first novel that brought him instant success in 1954. Larkin's theme was not to wish her 'The usual stuff/ About being beautiful' but to point out that even if she were not so lucky and even 'dull,' this ought not prevent the 'catching of happiness.' And for the first years of her life, it looked as though Larkin would be right. Not that Sally was dull: she was petite and pretty, and despite moving from school to school as her father, an English lecturer, moved up the academic ladder from Swansea to Princeton and then Cambridge, she was, says her mother, 'a lovely child.' She was good at English, enjoyed swimming and singing in the school choir, and had a remarkable talent for mimicry that made her consider a career on the stage.”

“But someone told her she wasn’t good enough,” Hilly said, someone told her she “moved badly.” That someone was the woman for whom her father left her mother, a woman who appeared in magazine ads for electric cookers as an example of gracious living. In our circles no one ever stood clapping as we performed, tears streaming down their faces with pride. As the children of the gods of literature, we were badly reviewed by our brilliant parents.

—Molly Moynihan