Beautiful People: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints (24 page)

I
had my first encounter with Death one summer evening in the 1950s.

On this particular occasion my grandmother Narg was having one of her lucid interludes. When these occurred she would ramble through the minutiae of her prelobotomy days, recalling strings of mundane facts about her life as a cook and about her two husbands.

I was interested in hearing more about Terry’s father. He was a professional astrologer, specializing in mail-order horoscopes.
Nostradamus Doonan was by all accounts a highly strung young man, who unbeknownst to me at the time, had died by his own hand.

“Where is Grandpa now?” I asked, thinking that Narg should really go and live with him tout de suite. Shouldn’t she be cooking his meals and looking after him? She only really needed to visit us once every five years at most.

“He is . . . no longer with us,” replied the unpredictable and mighty Narg, padding on flat feet toward her bedroom.

“He’s dead.”

She paused for dramatic effect in her doorway, looking a bit like a badly preserved version of Mrs. Danvers in the movie
Rebecca.

“We’ll all be dead one day,” she intoned, “even you.”

With that, she vanished into the stygian gloom of her bedroom.

Dead! Up to this point I had been laboring under the happy illusion that Death was something which happened to other people. Good old Narg. She had a real knack for yanking back the curtain on life’s fluffy illusions and relieving all within earshot of their most comforting misconceptions.

I was petrified. I had no desire to be, as she put it,
no longer with us.
Apart from anything, it sounded so unnecessarily exclusionary, like being omitted from an invitation list or shut out of a favorite school yard game by vindictive playmates.

I went up to bed feeling chilly in my extremities. My room was hot and stuffy, and in contrast to Narg’s murky lair on the other side of the house, it was flooded with sunlight. But I still felt cold.

The absolute worst thing about childhood, worse than measles and chicken pox and being sent to an orphanage and psychotic relatives, must surely be having to go to bed with the sun blazing onto one’s drapes. Outside the traffic roars, people are laughing and chatting in the street, dogs are barking. Upstairs a five-year-old child lies on his horrid little bed, thinking about Death.

On this particular night I felt as if I were being buried alive.

I tried to imagine what would happen to me when I was
no longer with us
. Was heaven real? Or was it, as with Santa, merely another pathetic illusion about to be exposed by Narg? I ransacked my imagination for visions of heavenly cupids and lyre-twanging angels. Nothing. Only a black abyss.

There was no question that Death must be horrible. I could tell from the way people acted when the subject came up. Nobody wanted to be
no longer with us.
When people sensed that the time had come for them to be
no longer with us,
they never would say, “Oh! great. My turn. Hand me the lip gloss, would you, luv? Ready! Sayonara, everyone!”

Suddenly I understood the full horror of Death. Nobody wants to go. Everybody goes to his or her Death kicking and screaming.

I clutched my teddy bear and thought about how and when I would meet my end. Overhead I could hear Aunt Phyllis bumping into furniture in her attic room and talking to Lassie, her aging guide dog. “Who is the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world? Who is it?”

Animals were not exempt. Phyllis had a box containing snaps of her deceased companions, the loyal furry friends who
were
no longer with us.
She treasured these images as if she could see them and wept whenever she spoke their names.

I crawled into bed and stared at the large poster which Uncle Ken had recently brought back from Spain. Ken was going through “a good period.” He had managed to hold down his job at the local swimming pool long enough to earn a bit of paid vacation. He promptly availed himself of a well-priced package tour to Spain. One week later he returned, sunburnt, slightly dehydrated, and festooned with improbably well-chosen souvenirs: a bag of mangled grapes for the winemakers Betty and Terry, a swashbuckling goat’s hide water canteen with a shoulder strap for my tomboy sister, and a splashy bullfighting poster of the gorgeous El Cordobés for me.

Every night I went to sleep staring at this poster. There was El Cordobés, the handsome postwar bullfighting legend, his manly physique straining inside a pair of fetching skintight yellow britches and matching spangled jacket. Normally this image elicited a warm, tingly feeling in my confused young loins. Not tonight. Tonight El Cordobés, my boyfriend, is about to be gored to death. He would die and I would die and then we would be
no longer with us.

I began to thrash my head from side to side with my eyes open. El Cordobés seesawed up and down like a violently rocking fairground ride.

At first I became nauseous. Gradually this rocking motion proved oddly soothing. Eventually, still rocking, I somehow drifted off to sleep. Ditto the following evening. In fact, this is how I went to sleep for years. Every night I thrashed myself to sleep and tried desperately not to think about what it would be like when I was
no longer with us.

Death was a constant threat. One could be snatched at any time.

One of my sister’s classmates was dying of leukemia. She was ten years old. We visited her and tried to cheer her up. She died soon after.

After her death, my focus shifted. I stopped speculating about what it would be like to be
no longer with us.
I came to terms with the great unknowability of Death. My obsessive thoughts now centered on what might cause me to be
no longer with us.
What dreadful disease or freak accident would be my undoing? If I could figure this out, then maybe I could take preventative action.

Somehow, I managed to elude Death for another year or so. And then it happened. I contracted syphilis. I was ten.

It started one day during a highly unriveting history lesson. We were plodding through Tudor England.

“Henry the Eighth had a massive, weeping sore on his leg caused by syphilis!” yelled our bombastic headmaster.

One by one, he scrutinized our faces for some kind of reaction. He stopped at me.

“Doonan! Stop flinching! Venereal disease does not discriminate. Even monarchs get the pox, you know!”

This was the kind of alarming tidbit which the teachers and radio broadcasters of yore kept up their sleeves to enliven the dryness of history. They were no fools. These educators knew that, without the occasional bonbon of scandal, their lessons were nothing more than sleep induction devices. As a result, everyone in England knows all kinds of appalling things about the European monarchs.

Every schoolchild knows that James I died after his tormentors
shoved a hot poker up his bottie, and that Catherine the Great regularly succumbed to unsavory interspecies cravings involving geese. And Louis XIV suffered from anal fistulas, and last, Henry VIII rotted away from syphilis.

I was fascinated and appalled by this mysterious and shameful ailment. I read anything and everything about the symptoms and the dreadful things which happened if syphilis went untreated. There were sores and pustules in horrible, inopportune places, and then the nerves in your feet rotted and you started to walk like Herman Munster. And more often than not your nose rotted and caved in. By this time your willie would also have dropped off. Then, when you could no longer walk and your nose and your willie were in a medical-waste Dumpster at the far end of the hospital car park, madness would set in. This was followed by a horrible, lingering death, after which you were
no longer with us.

I inhaled all these details, little knowing that I was already afflicted.

*  *  *

The Saturday morning of my diagnosis was no different from any other. There I was, curled up on the floor in front of the fire, flicking petulantly through a ladies’ magazine while the rain pounded on the windows. I was irate because, yet again, I was wearing my school uniform on the weekend. I had recently become aware that not every child wore a school uniform seven days a week. Some children—
most children!
—had
clothes
! My parents—even my vain and stylish mother—seemed oblivious to the concept of sportswear or leisure wear for kids, and I, with my burgeoning interest in fashion, had had enough of my green and gray uniform.

I tired of looking at the fashions and turned to the horoscope page.

I should explain that, despite the astrological branch in our family tree, my parents never set much store by horoscopes, deeming them to be “a load of cobblers.” They practiced no formal religion. Like the Existentialists, whose philosophy was so madly au courant at the time, Betty and Terry saw life as a chaotic, random experience. They were, if you will, the Jean-Paul and Simone of our neighborhood.

So there I was reading my own horoscope in my gray flannel shorts and strangling necktie, and wondering why people actually believed in such things. My star sign, Scorpio, contained the usual cliché advice about “matters of the heart” and vague chidings about the optimal times for undertaking journeys and home improvements.

Then, out of the blue, came a surprisingly sinister warning.

Scorpios, so said this particular astrologer, must be vigilant about their health. They were prone to die from ailments which afflicted the bowels and genitals.

Bingo!

Suddenly everything fell into place. I was a Scorpio. I had bowels and genitals. Syphilis was a disease which afflicted those nether regions. Voilà!

I understood that sex was a key factor in the transmission of syphilis. I was no fool. Not like my Irish grandpa.

“For God’s sakes, whatever you do, don’t be wearin’ other people’s shoes. You’ll catch the pox, sure ya will!”

Poor old bloke! He actually thought you could catch it from wearing other people’s shoes. Even back then, I knew this was silly. Anybody could see that, at the very least, one
would have to have sex with another person’s shoes in order to catch their pox. It was clearly not
just
about wearing them.

Regarding Sex. I was already an enthusiast, albeit of the frustrated variety. I was dying to kiss and cuddle with somebody, anybody, but preferably one of the cowboys on
Laramie.
I was also willing to be on intimate terms with Illya Kuryakin on
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,
Dick Van Dyke, Sean Connery, and James Dean.

I would also have kissed any of the blokes on
77 Sunset Strip
(including the father), the elder brother in
Flipper,
ditto
My Three Sons.
I was ten and hormone-riddled and would have happily gone on dates with any of the above. I even fancied Chester, the limping sheriff on
Gunsmoke.

Various boring legal, logistical, and geographical stumbling blocks prevented these liaisons from ever taking place. As a result I had no outlet for my desires. All that libidinal energy roiled and boiled inside my green braid-trimmed school blazer. Here it accumulated and festered, aided by a growing sense that my particular brand of love was taboo. Gradually my transgressive longings morphed into some horrible sense that I had already committed an appalling sin of some kind. I had somehow done something nasty with someone who was also quite nasty.

And this unknown incubus had given me a raging case of the pox.

I was already displaying symptoms. There were spots on my willie. They were very faint, but I was convinced I could see them. Any mention of venereal disease on radio or TV
would send me scampering to the toilet to examine my blighted regions. The subject seemed to come up with amazing and inconvenient frequency. I was constantly in the bathroom examining my various areas. Compulsive hand washing ensued.

I couldn’t tell anyone about my affliction. I knew enough to understand that my fall from grace would bring shame on the whole family. I would probably be sent away like the poor teenage girls in our town who got themselves knocked up and then had to go and live with relatives in other towns and spend the rest of their lives pretending to be the elder sisters of their own children.