A Ticket to the Circus (32 page)

Their house was right on the water in the east end of town. It had once been part of a group of houses on the very tip of the Cape they’d called Helltown back in the old whaling days. It was mostly a bunch of shacks where sailors had gotten drunk and slept with prostitutes, and thieves had often built fires on the beach to confuse ships, which would then go into shallow waters and founder, so the thieves could rob them. Then, in the nineteenth century, as whaling began to die out and Provincetown proper became the center of things, Helltown was abandoned and the shacks were floated across the bay and situated on the beach as the basis for houses. Norman and Beverly’s house was one of these. The living room was part of the shack, and the ceilings were so low that it made me feel like ducking my head when I walked in. But it was a beautiful house, with four bedrooms upstairs and a huge deck that fronted the bay. The only real problem was that the house was smack on the street. When you walked out the kitchen door, you had to look both ways or you would be run over. I worried about the kids a lot that summer. In fact, one day a little girl was riding by on her bicycle outside our kitchen door, and someone opened the door of their parked car just as she got even with it, and it hit her. She was wearing braces, and her poor little mouth was all cut up. All I could do was put some ice on it and try to comfort her until her parents and the ambulance arrived.

Carol also had rented a little place in Ptown for the summer, and
Adele had an apartment down the beach. We didn’t really socialize, but we’d stop and talk on the beach or see one another at parties. If not exactly one big happy family, it was civil, for the kids. Ptown is heaven for kids in the summer. The sand flats at low tide stretch out for a quarter of a mile or more, and you can let the kids out to run and play without a problem. The beach is full of shells and beach glass, and small creatures like hermit crabs. Every Mailer child at one time or another has offered painted shells for sale on Commercial Street. I was Maggie and Matt’s biggest customer, and still have some of the shells in my treasure box.

Norman and I had never spoken in terms of trying to have a child since I’d had the miscarriage when I’d first come to New York, but we knew that we wanted one. Our lives were so much about the kids, how could we not want one together? I’d been on and off the pill, as it caused me to gain weight, and we were pretty lax about using birth control. We kept taking chances until we finally stopped using anything at all after a while. We just figured if it happened, it happened, and in July that summer it happened—while we were staying in Beverly’s house. Beverly came back home from doing her play in Hartford, we piled all the kids and our stuff into a rented van and the Porsche, and hit the road for Mount Desert Island, Maine. I knew by the time we had been in Maine for a week or two that I was pregnant, but I didn’t want anyone to know. I was worried about what the kids would say, and having lost one before, I wanted to be sure before I told anyone. Norman was thrilled about it, which made me so happy. I hadn’t been sure if he would be, but given his philosophy about sex and love and children, I shouldn’t have been surprised.

The house we rented was called Fortune Rock and was built by Clara Fargo Thomas of the Wells Fargo Fargos. She was an eccentric woman whose lover, George Howe, was the famous architect who designed it. She had passed away three years before, and Norman had been the first renter. The main feature of the house was a forty-foot-long living room that was cantilevered out over the water and had walls of glass panels on three sides. At high tide, the water was eight feet below the deck; at low, it was eighteen, but was still deep enough to jump into. I’d of course heard all the stories of the family ritual of jumping off the deck, and was dreading having to do it, but I was still
pretending to be bolder and more athletic than I was, so when we unpacked, the first thing—the absolute first thing—I did was put on my bathing suit and run and jump off the deck. It was terrifying, and the water in Maine is so cold that it shocks the breath out of you and numbs you in just a few minutes, but I got so many brownie points from Norman that it was worth it.

View from the deck at Fortune Rock.

The house was spooky. Clara had been a painter, and all the walls were made of plywood oak covered in her murals, which were rather primitive, in blue and green, black and white, and browns mostly. Large Picasso-esque eyes were painted above the spigot in our bathtub, which made a nose, and the drain switch made the mouth. These paintings were everywhere. You couldn’t escape them. Danielle and I made fun of them, but Betsy, who was tuned to the spirits more than most people, said, “You two better stop talking about Clara. She will haunt you!”

To get to Norman’s and my room, you had to go down a long hallway that at the end had a life-size photograph of a young beautiful Clara, her hair falling down her back in long waves. The eyes in the picture followed me down the hall, as if she were standing there accusing me,
and I half regretted our little jest about the artwork. The boys, Michael and Stephen, of course totally pooh-poohed the ghost thing. They weren’t scared of anything.

The family in Maine, 1980.

But soon after my conversation with Danielle, I was lying in the bathtub, looking at the eyes staring at me above the faucet, when the hangers in the closet started tinkling against one another. The window was shut and there was no air at all moving in there. The closet was freestanding, and we had stored our suitcases on top of it. As I stared at the hangers, which were slightly moving and making a quiet noise, one of the suitcases came crashing down. It hadn’t been teetering on the edge of the closet. It had been lying flat, and there was no reason for it to fall. I jumped dripping out of the tub and ran into the bedroom and got Norman, but when he came in, the hangers were quiet. He put the suitcase back on top of the closet, and I think he believed me when I said a ghost had moved it.

He said that one time something had tripped Carol, who took a fall for no discernible reason, and she always thought Clara’s ghost had pushed her. It seemed Clara was jealous of Norman’s women. Then a
few days later, I caught Michael with a butter knife, trying to open a locked closet in the living room. No one had ever been in that closet, and I was about to tell him to stop it when the door swung open and… It was almost like music from
The Phantom of the Opera
swelled.… It was full of Clara’s paints and brushes. I felt a woe come over me, and I said to Michael, “Oh, Mikey, you’ve done it now. Clara will get you. She didn’t want us to find her paints!” I was only half kidding.

That night, after we had all gone to bed, Michael went into the kitchen to get a drink of water, then yelled and ran down the hall to our room and jumped onto the bed. There was a mirror above the kitchen sink, and he swore when he’d looked in the mirror, there was Clara standing behind him, her long white hair hanging down her back. It took awhile to get him to go back to his room. But the ghost of Clara was with us the whole summer. She might have liked Norman, but she definitely didn’t care for me.

   
ONE OF THE
things we did almost every day was hike some mountain around Mount Desert. My favorite was a route called the beehive that had a few ladders (iron bars driven into the rock that necessitated a vertical climb), but not too many. Another favorite was an easy trail, practically a stroll, that ended at Jordan Pond, where there was a tearoom. We got tea and hot popovers with butter and jam and sat in Adirondack chairs out on a long sloping lawn in the golden sunshine where the smaller kids ran, played, and rolled down the slope to the edge of the pond. Some trails were more challenging than others, obviously, and, as when we were jogging, Betsy and Kate and I were often in the rear.

As strange as it seems, the one thing I did that I didn’t have to pretend too hard to like was rock climbing. We hired a guide to teach us, and Norman, Danielle, Michael, Stephen, and I climbed Otter Cliffs, a vertical climb of about eighty feet, rappelling down first. We had to trust our guide with our lives, because the first step off the edge of the cliff, supported only by a single rope, was a big leap of faith. But once in flight, bouncing down the cliff, the feeling was pretty phenomenal. I could understand for the first time why people engaged in dangerous sports; the adrenaline rush and the feelings of being a superwoman
were intense. For some reason—I suppose it was my long spidery arms and legs—I was pretty good at it, and felt like a real jock when I made it to the top. I wasn’t particularly afraid of the height, being so close to the rock, and I even at one point unhooked my rope for a minute to untangle it. I used to tell my son John that I took him rock climbing when he was in my belly, and that’s why he’s such a good athlete.

Near the end of the summer, the whole family trained every day on the trails around Bar Harbor for our biggest hike, Mount Katahdin, a drive of several hours that required an overnight stay in a motel, which was a treat for the kids. Michael, Stephen, and Matt had a room of their own, which Norman had to visit a few times to calm them down from jumping on the beds and making general mayhem, and the three girls shared a room. Myrtle Bennett, Maggie’s nana, had come with us to Maine at Carol’s request, to take care of Maggie, and she was a godsend that summer, helping with the cleaning, laundry, cooking, and everything else. She was from Honduras and had come to work for Norman and Carol when Maggie was just born. She and Maggie shared a room.

Before the sun rose, we arrived at the bottom of the trail, ready to climb. Even though we had been working all month building our stamina, it was an all-day ordeal, and we were taking Maggie and Matthew, who were six and not quite six. It started off fine. We each carried a backpack with a sandwich, oranges, chocolate, water, a sweater, and whatever else we thought might come in handy on the mountain. Norman didn’t want to be bothered carrying his sweater, so I tied it around my waist. I had been having not exactly morning sickness but a general malaise in the mornings, and I wasn’t feeling as well as I was pretending to. The girls kept glancing at me as I trudged up the mountain, stopping to rest more often than the others, and they were solicitous. They later told me they had been saying all month that they bet I was pregnant, while I’d thought I had them fooled. Once, I
stopped and gacked a bit, and Danielle, Betsy, and Kate looked at one another and nodded their heads wisely, which I picked up on. “Well, I might as well tell you now. I’m pregnant,” I said.

“We knew it! We knew it!” they squealed. I’m sure their feelings about having yet another sibling were mixed, but they never let on if they had any misgivings, and they would all love John like little mothers. At this point we were pretty far behind the others, who had stopped to wait for us, and it was beginning to get colder, so I put Norman’s sweater on over my own. At the next rest stop, Norman asked me for his sweater back, and I selfishly didn’t want to give it to him. “I’ve carried it this whole way because you couldn’t be bothered, and now it’s freezing, and I’m keeping it!” I was so bad about it, I don’t really know why. I can only blame the hormones. He yelled at me for being so greedy, and then stomped off, and I felt like a big jerk. He was freezing in only a shirt, and I had his sweater and mine, too. My better angel won out. I caught up to him, apologized, and tried to give it to him. He said, in a gruff voice, “No, keep it. Not for you. For the little one.” I broke into tears, and he hugged me. I guess I just needed a little attention paid. But I kept the sweater.

We climbed down into and up the notch, which was the next thing to rock climbing without ropes, and started across the knife edge, a sharp edge of rock that in places was as narrow as three feet. It fell sharply off on either side in a forty-five-degree angle, gave us vertigo, and made us feel like we were going to plunge down into eternity any minute, but one way or another we all made it. Then we got to the top, rejoiced, ate our lunch, and had to immediately start the long descent on a trail called the Bubbles, which was a dry creek bed paved with smooth stones, before it started to get dark on us. We still had six hours to go. That Bubbles trail looked easy at first—there were no verticals at all. But in the long run it was the most difficult, because with every step, our feet slid off the smooth round rocks, twisting our ankles, and after a few pounding hours of it, we all were exhausted. A bonus was when we saw a moose sticking its head out of some brush, curious at this noisy band of humans. Matt and Mike and Steve ran ahead like little mountain goats, but Maggie was totally worn out, and the rest of us had to take turns carrying her. I vowed if I ever got off that mountain I would never go back on it again.