Her Mother's Daughter (79 page)

“Yeah, he was probably afraid we'd ask him where babies came from,” Arden interrupted in a cynical drawl shocking in an eleven-year-old. I almost expected her to cross her legs and light up a cigarette. After I blinked, I pulled my face back into shape and continued.

“Maybe. He's probably embarrassed altogether, you know? He left us, he got another wife, and he probably feels guilty about that….”

The spoons were set down in their bowls. They both peered at me with intense interest.

“But in a way, he isn't responsible, I mean, we left each other, Daddy and I, we stopped loving each other long before he started to see Fern….”

“So, you
can
stop loving somebody you used to love,” Arden concluded, a child again, with a child's hurt firmness.

“Yes, adults. But not your children. You never stop loving your children. Any more than you ever stop loving your parents.”

“No matter how bad they are? No matter how they treat you?”

Dread made my stomach hollow. Were they going to attack me now for leaving them?

“Well, you know, some parents are really terrible to their children—they hit them and punish them for small things, sometimes they're very stern…”

“Like you when you make us go to bed at nine o'clock,” Billy shot in.

“No, not like that. You don't know what stern is!” Why was it I could never stay on track when I was talking to these kids?

“Yeah,” Billy agreed, stirring his melting ice cream, “like Mr. McFee, he hits all of them with his belt. Even the baby.”

“How do you know that?”

He shrugged. “Everybody knows it. He just whips them all, they're really scared of him.”

Arden urged her face at mine. “It's true, Mom. All the kids know. You can hear them yelling sometimes.”

They were looking at me in a fixed intense way. I could see this was a moral quandary for them. And, without thinking, I just burst out, “How horrible!” They glanced hard at each other; something had been resolved.

As I read this over, I search inside the words to see where, how I went wrong, how things came to be the way they are. Did I tell my children that they didn't have to obey their parents? Because it is clear that Arden at some point felt it unnecessary to obey me. Did I undermine my own authority? But what was I supposed to say? Mincing lies about some parents being stricter than others? Shit!

The other thing that comes through as I read what I wrote about the business with Sonders, arguments and discussions with the kids, is how I gradually trained myself not to show my feelings, and because feelings kept in are terribly painful, how I also trained myself not to feel them….

Because I know, yes I do know, that the worst thing about my present life is not the way my kids are, not even my loneliness (oh, are you admitting you are lonely, Anastasia?), or maybe those things are simply reflections of the worst thing about my life—which is the heavy heart I carry through it.

“Anyway,” I continued, “I've known people whose parents did terrible things to them, and who didn't like them or want to see them when they were grown up, but they still love them, it's almost tragic, it can't be helped, the love is there….” I stopped myself, I didn't like the morass I was getting into. I tried to get things back on track. “And I don't know any parent who ever stopped loving their child….”

“What if they didn't love their child to begin with?” Billy asked in a faint voice. Arden looked at him tenderly, then turned a furious glare at me.

“I don't want to talk about this anymore! And I don't know why you
do!
Does it make you feel good to upset him?” She left the table, forgetting the ice cream, mostly melted by now anyway, and went into her room and slammed the door.

“Do you think Daddy doesn't love you?”

Billy moved his head: I couldn't tell whether he was nodding yes, no, or maybe.

I took his hand. It was sticky and small and soft. “Daddy loves you,” I whispered. “I know he does. He doesn't know how to show it is all.”

“He kisses Arden.”

“That's 'cause she's a girl. He doesn't kiss you 'cause you're a boy and…” I caught myself. I couldn't go into
that
now. But I had to finish the sentence. “A lot of men think you shouldn't hug boys. It's silly, but…”

He looked up at me with those eyes which are so much like mine but bluer, greenish blue instead of greenish brown. “Why, Mommy?”

Oh god, then I did it. I launched into a lecture about the way things are; I told him a little about the way Orson Sonders had treated me because he thinks women should wear high heels and makeup, and how Daddy's parents didn't want him to be a musician because they think men should make a lot of money and live in a particular way, the way people have fixed ideas about what girls and boys should be like, I went on and on, stumbling deeper into territory I should have avoided. But if I didn't know when to stop, he did. He took what he could handle, then began to let his eyes close in tiredness and asked if we could go to the carousel in Baldwin. I agreed with relief.

I went to Scandinavia. I was a little disappointed that my first European trip wasn't to Paris, Rome, London, or Florence, but Scandinavia was a good introduction to travel on your own—even then, many people spoke English, and since it was summer, daylight lasting until midnight, everyone was joyous too. I spent time in the capitals, but also went to the countryside, up the fjords in Norway and all the way to Tromsø at its northern tip, into Jutland in Denmark, and around the southern part of Sweden—landing at Malmö after a swift boat trip from Denmark, and driving to Göteborg, a college town. I made friends everywhere; one guy took me flying at night toward the North Pole, so I could see the northern lights; a group of journalists took me bathing on little islands that dot the coasts of those countries. I'd take a quick swim, then lie out on a rock under the sun. I went walking through the old castle at Elsinore, wondering if in fact Shakespeare had seen it. People took me to the opera, the theater, the ballet, to dinners; I even ate once at the Operakallern, one of the world's great restaurants, on some man's expense account. I traveled by train, plane, and boat, and even by cart.

I took wonderful pictures. From the deck of a ship cruising the fjords, I took panoramas with my new telephoto lens. The water—opaque, silvery, calm—blended with the sky, which was the same color and just as opaque. Huge bare stone mountains rose up all around, one silence speaking to another. I had fun, I played with my camera—shooting the mountains reflected in the water instead of the actual mountains. Occasionally we'd pass a village curled in the crook of a mountain arm, houses made of what looked like yellowed old stucco, all orange-roofed; stone streets, and the masts of sailboats swaying gently at the pier that was lapped quietly by the still fjord water. The masts moved me, they were beautiful but they were also necessary, people could always look out from their windows to make sure their lifeline was still there.

I shot Tromsø, a frontier town with windbeaten wooden buildings and wooden sidewalks to protect you from the mud that was the main sign of summer. (Years later, visiting Siberia, which suffered from the same problem—permafrost—but which didn't have wooden sidewalks, I remembered Tromsø. As I sloshed in the mud of Irkutsk searching vainly for orange juice, tomato juice—anything with citrus in it, since I couldn't find fresh fruit anywhere—I figured the Norwegians couldn't be smarter than the Russians, and there were certainly plenty of trees around, so why didn't they have wooden sidewalks? I decided that the Russians devoted all their resources to making weapons, to keep up with us. But that was later.)

In Tromsø, even in June, people preferred to spend most of their time indoors. The wind was still fierce, and the sun lacked warmth. In the cafés an aromatic fire always burned in the hearths, and people climbed wooden staircases noisily, laughing, and settled themselves on wooden banquettes that lined the walls, around long wooden tables covered with blue checked cloths, and called for beer. Conversation was loud and lively, political and intelligent. Everyone seemed to be worried about the world situation. I was unused to such concern, people at home did not talk about politics or morals.

I took my share of festival pictures—people in traditional costumes, dances, flowers heaped on carts—and cityscapes, although I felt that these cities were really built for winter, especially Stockholm, massive, grey, stony, its buildings presenting to the grey cold river a facade of equally ominous impermeability. I used black and white for the cities, the cobblestoned roads, and an occasional small farmhouse standing in utter isolation on an island surrounded by grey mountains. I took pictures of people—wonderful faces, especially the old, who have character no longer found in America. American faces are the faces of children who have somehow aged.

I found friends everywhere. Of course there were journalists and photographers, built-in “contacts” who were supposed to help show me around. But there were professors and publishers, doctors, lawyers, radio personalities as well, people who were friends of my “contacts.” And lots of students, whom I liked best—I felt they were closest to my age, although that wasn't literally true. There were formal dinner parties with members of the government that ended with people down on their hands and knees pretending to be bears in games of charades; and quiet evenings sitting in austerely furnished farmhouses around a kerosene lamp, drinking aquavit. The silence of the countryside was amazing—no trees to break the wind, only the house itself and its barns and outbuildings, nothing really grows in the north, even in June. The wind, the quiet water, people breathing: that was all. A creak in the house shocked like a thunderclap. I would lie in a featherbed, a puffy duvet around me as if I were lying in a nest, and think that I could get used to that silence, that in it I might hear myself again. At home I put on the radio as soon as I walk in the door.

But the deep-carved faces full of character, that I saw in these places, did not recommend silence to me. Maybe what you hear when you hear yourself is not altogether cheering. And I did so want to be cheerful.

Many nights my friends and I went pub crawling, drinking into the morning. We'd go from place to place, running under the trees along city streets as bright as early morning, singing, cracking jokes. We talked completely impersonally, but once in a while, someone would, without preamble, confess some deeply intimate fact. I have heard confessions of marital infidelity, bisexuality, homosexuality, impotence, incest…But painful as these often were, they were not the most painful. No, the worst confessions to come in the early hours of morning, whispered across a table—sometimes the speaker would stare at me as if in my face he read his destiny, and sometimes he would not look at me at all—the announcements that were like moments of sudden intelligence that turned the face and knuckles white and cracked the voice were: “I hate my father!” Or: “My father hates me.” Then, often, tears, helpless, inconsolable. Or sometimes, a furious disquisition on papa.

My friends were almost entirely men; it wasn't easy to meet women, there were almost no women in journalism then, they were all home with the kids or working in jobs so low-level that a relation between them and me, an honored professional visitor, would not be considered appropriate, by them or me. Yes, I was like that.

I met a few men who hated their mothers, or felt their mothers hated them, but this knowledge didn't devastate them. Men who hate their mothers, I have found, generally feel perfectly right in doing so. Hating your mother is acceptable, but hating your father is not, it seemed. They uttered their hate explosively, like something retched up, something that should be hidden even from the self. That they hated their fathers, or felt their fathers hated them, was a ravaging new knowledge, discovered, perhaps, that very night.

It was not until years later, when I began to know more women, that I heard similar utterances from them, although it was hatred of their
mothers
that ravaged them. And women tell their tales differently—with drooping faces and sad voices, or expressionless faces and brittle voices. The main difference is that women are never surprised by their knowledge. They recite the cruelties visited upon them by their mothers in simple language, like my mother saying, “When I was nine years old, my father died,” as if they were telling old stories, known forever. Some make jokes. Women do not tell these stories late at night, drunk, startled by a sudden awareness. They tell them casually, on beaches, or sitting comfortably on wicker sofas in summer rooms gazing out at the water, or in the plush luxury of a flowered armchair in a hotel lobby surrounded by the clatter of tea being served, piano music drifting in from the cocktail lounge, oblivious to the luxury around them, oblivious to anything outside, encompassed by memories they are used to, bitter knowledge they have lived with forever.

Sometimes a night of drinking would end with my having company in bed. Drink usually created a maximum of desire with a minimum of capacity, but there were many good nights in bed after lingering dinners with guys with shining faces, shining eyes, and what passed for uncontrollable passion. I liked to screw men who adored me, who were outside themselves, ecstatic. I loved making love, even though I rarely had orgasms. I didn't care about that: I loved being there with them, being who I was, loved the rolling, transient feel of it, the freedom, the exhilaration. I loved feeling like a high-spirited, smart, energetic, sexy, brilliant photographer, always on top of everything, utterly understanding and compassionate, but still gay, still in control: Stacey Stevens, the Rosalind Russell of real life.

Even disasters—there are always disasters when you travel—can be turned into adventures. You miss a plane—so you have to charter your own; or you charm someone who owns his own and get him to fly you into the very field where the event you have come to shoot is being held. An airport closing down because of bad weather—something that happens often enough in Scandinavia—can lead to the adventure of searching faces for a new companion who will invite you to dinner, and perhaps a bed for the night; cars breaking down in the middle of wilderness mean hitchhiking with a new acquaintance, the joys of exchange and new knowledge, or maybe tramping together for miles over barren land until you spot a farmhouse, knock on a strange door, eat strange food, and sleep in a strange bed. I joined forces with people I would, in the normal course of life, never have met—a French couple, backpackers with weak English, who shared my chartered plane, watched the ceremony on the castle grounds, and afterward took me to dinner; Japanese businessmen (all of course with cameras hanging from the shoulders, fascinated by mine) with whom I spent an evening talking in the Göteborg airport, and who later sent me a wonderful Japanese telephoto lens; people of all ages and kinds with whom I became friends on no more basis than that we were together in trouble. And of course, anything that happened could be an opening to photograph, a chance for a special picture….