I Remember Nothing (5 page)

That cleared up one thing: she knew who I was.

I plowed on: I asked her why she’d stopped writing signed profiles. I asked the question cleverly, I thought. Honey dripped from my lips. I said I had loved her long pieces so much and missed reading them and wondered why she had stopped writing them. She replied that she’d stopped writing bylined articles because she believed that too much magazine journalism these days was egotistical and self-promoting.

I had to hand it to her: that was good.

And then Lillian Ross answered the question I hadn’t asked.

“I went to your house once,” she said. “I met your mother.”

“Really?” I said, feigning absolute ignorance.

“Didn’t see much of you though,” she said.

So there it was.

No question.

It had happened.

I have met Lillian Ross many times since that night. She still writes for
The New Yorker
, although
The New Yorker
no longer publishes unsigned pieces. She eventually wrote a first-person confessional about her relationship with Mr. Shawn, so on some level she threw off the veil. I consider her to be as egotistical and self-promoting as the rest of us, and that’s a compliment.

But this is not about Lillian Ross, really. It’s about
my mother. Long before she died, I’d given up on her. But that night with Lillian Ross, I got her back; I got back the mother I’d idolized before it had all gone to hell. I got back the simple version. She’d thrown Lillian Ross out of our house for all the right reasons. The legend was true.

I am sorry to report that I have an Aruba.

You don’t know what an Aruba is, but you’re about to find out.

My Aruba is named after the Caribbean island of Aruba, where the winds are so strong that all the little trees on it are blown sideways in one direction. But my Aruba is not an island. It’s the thing that’s happening with my hair, on the crown of my head, in the back. My cowlicks have won, and they are all blown sideways, leaving a little bare space. It’s not a bald spot exactly. It’s there when I wake up; then I fix my hair and make
it go away; and then, a couple of hours later, it’s back again. A gust of wind, a short walk, a ride on the subway, or life itself—anything at all can make my hair blow sideways, leaving a spot on the back of my head where my scalp is showing through.

And the thing is, I can’t see it.

Even if I catch a glimpse of myself in a window, it’s not visible because it’s in the back.

I look fine from the front.

I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.

But from the back, it looks as if I have either forgotten to comb my hair or as if I am just a little bit bald.

Neither of these things is true, I swear.

But what is true is that I am older than I look, and my Aruba is a sign. I did not have one when I was younger, but now I do.

This is not the worst thing about getting older, but it’s very disheartening. And almost no one tells you you’ve got one at the time.

There are a whole bunch of things no one tells you about and then you come home and discover you’ve been walking around all day with them. I am of course referring to spinach in your teeth, or a tag that’s sticking up the back of your collar, or a fluffy piece of toilet paper on your shoe. I am talking about those little dark flecks that sometimes end up in the corners of your eyes, and mascara that has run. I’m talking about lint.

It’s very sad to look in the bathroom mirror at the end of an evening and realize you’ve spent the last
ninety minutes with spinach on your tooth. Or parsley, which is an even more dangerous thing to eat. And that none of your friends loved you enough to tell you.

This is especially painful because it’s so easy to tell people they have spinach in their teeth. All you have to do is say, “You have spinach in your teeth.”

But what can you say to a person who has an Aruba, especially since, until I wrote this piece, there was no word to describe it?

But now that I have come up with the term, I would appreciate your telling me whenever I have an Aruba. Because then I can fix it. Temporarily, anyway.

I never knew why my mother wasn’t close to her brother Hal. I can guess. It’s possible that he didn’t help out financially with their parents. It’s possible that she didn’t like his wife, Eleanor. It’s possible that she resented forever the fact that her parents found the money to send him to Columbia but made her go to a public college. Who knows? The secret is dead and buried.

In any case, I grew up without meeting my uncle Hal. We lived in Los Angeles, and Hal lived in Washington, D.C., with the aforementioned Eleanor. They
were both government economists, and then, in the fifties, they quit. There were rumors of left-wing affiliations. My parents had never been further to the left than socialism, but these were the blacklist years. They knew a dozen people who had named names, and they also knew at least two of the Hollywood Ten, plus several they claimed would have gone to jail, along with the Ten, had there been Eleven, or Twelve. My parents were worried that rumors of Hal and Eleanor’s left-wing affiliations would reach all the way to California and bite them, and apparently that was exactly what happened, although without any real damage. One day in the early fifties they were called into the office of Spyros Skouras, an old Greek who was then running Twentieth Century Fox. Skouras waved a piece of paper about Hal at my mother and said, “Phoebe, vy you a Communist?” My mother explained to Skouras she was not her brother Hal, and not a Communist, and that was pretty much the end of it, except as an anecdote.

By the time I was in college, Uncle Hal and Aunt Eleanor were no longer anywhere near communism, if they’d ever been: they were in real estate, and they were very, very rich. In 1961, when I was working in Washington on a college political internship, they took me to Duke Zeibert’s for dinner. Hal was a sweet, lovely man, and Eleanor was a pistol. She had a longish, horsy face and blondish hair and she loved a laugh. On weekends I would go stay at their house in Falls Church, a splendid new place they’d just built as part
of a large development. Eleanor and Hal had no children, but they had lots of houses—they bought them and sold them, without looking back. They owned art, and Chinese antiquities, and Persian rugs, and their house was run, nicely, by a housekeeper named Louise. I mention Louise for a reason, as you will see.

My parents were really not into family—I’d never met my father’s brothers or my first cousins—but Hal and Eleanor were in touch with all sorts of people on my mother’s side of things, and that summer in Washington they introduced me to some of my mother’s relatives who were my second or third cousins, depending on how you count. One was Joe Borkin, a well-known Washington lawyer who was an expert in the family antecedents and couldn’t believe I’d grown up with no idea where my maternal grandparents were born; he told me, and, out of loyalty to my mother, who had no interest in such things, I promptly forgot. Another was Morty Plotkin, a doctor with no bedside manner whatsoever who had wisely gone into radiology. He was married to Tedda, whose name I was deeply fond of. Tedda Plotkin. You’ve got to love that name. Years later, when my mother was dying of cirrhosis, Tedda called me out of the blue and yelled at me, as if it were all my fault. Hal and Eleanor also introduced me to Eleanor’s nephew Irwin the dentist, who eventually went into business with Eleanor and Hal. I mention him for a reason too.

After college, I moved to New York, and every so often Hal and Eleanor would come to town and take me
to lunch or dinner. When I married my first husband, they gave us a large antique gilt candelabrum that I vaguely recall they claimed was Louis Quatorze. This cannot be true. After my divorce, Hal called to make sure my husband hadn’t walked off with it.

That candelabrum came with me to my apartment in the East Fifties, and then to my second marriage, where I distinctly remember it sitting, looking idiotic, in the garage in Bridgehampton. Where is it today, I wonder. I would really like to know, because it was fabulous and I’m finally old enough to appreciate it. No doubt it was a casualty of divorce. When you get divorced and you don’t get the house (which I never did), you leave behind all sorts of things you don’t have the sense to know you’ll someday wonder about, or wish you still had, or, worst of all, feel genuinely nostalgic for.

In 1974, Eleanor died. Years passed. I saw Uncle Hal in Washington and New York. My father and he were both widowers, they spoke on the phone from time to time, and afterward my father would call to bring me up to date. My father by then was in the early stages of forgetting things, but one thing he never forgot was a phone number, and in his later years he made at least a hundred phone calls a day, all of them brief. He never said hello and he never said good-bye. He didn’t give anyone a chance to say, “I’m busy” or “Lose my number” or “I don’t have time to talk.” He came right to the point and then, as my sister Delia wrote in her book
Hanging Up
, he hung up.

“I’ve just written my memoirs,” he would say, “and I’m calling them
Me
.”

“Great,” I would say.

He would hang up.

“I just called Kate Hepburn and I told her the name of my memoirs,” he would say. “She loved it.”

“That’s great, Dad.”

He would hang up.

I always hoped that he would show some interest in my kids, Max and Jacob, but he didn’t even remember their names. One day Jacob answered the phone and my father said: “Is this Abraham or the other one?” I consider it a testament to Jacob that at the age of seven, he knew it was funny. Still, it made me sad. You always think that a bolt of lightning is going to strike and your parents will magically change into the people you wish they were, or back into the people they used to be. But they’re never going to. And even though you know they’re never going to, you still hope they will.

My father’s bulletins about my uncle Hal were never about Hal himself but about Hal’s vast estate, which, according to my father, was being left entirely to my three sisters and me.

“I talked to Hal and you’re in the will,” he would say.

“You’re still in the will,” he would say.

“Four-way split among you four girls,” he would say.

“Big bucks,” he would say.

My father had minimal credibility at that point in my life, so it never crossed my mind to think that he was telling the truth, that I was going to be the recipient
of inherited wealth. And Uncle Hal was in fine health. But then, one summer day in 1987, as I sat at my desk struggling with a screenplay I was writing in order to pay the bills, the phone rang; it was an administrator at a Washington, D.C., hospital, calling to say that Hal was dying of pneumonia and I should, as his next of kin, be prepared to make an end-of-life decision. I hung up, stunned. The phone rang again. It was Tedda Plotkin, wife of the radiologist, calling me, for the second time in my life, to say that Hal’s apartment in Washington was full of extremely valuable rugs and art and I should have it padlocked immediately or else Louise the housekeeper might run off with everything in it. I told Tedda that I seriously doubted Louise would do anything of the kind, but that she’d worked for Hal and Eleanor for most of her adult life and she was welcome to run off with anything she wanted. The phone rang again. It was the hospital. Hal had died.

I called my sister Delia. “Prepare to be an heiress,” I said.

Neither Delia nor I had the slightest idea of what Hal’s estate was worth. There were profits from the houses he and Eleanor had flipped, and from large developments they had built in McLean and Falls Church, block after block of upscale suburban dream homes with indoor pools and rec rooms and breakfast nooks and the like. And there was also the Famous Puerto Rican Thing. Hal and Eleanor had bought a huge parcel of land somewhere in Puerto Rico and had begun a development there, in partnership with Irwin
the dentist. Every so often I would ask Hal about it, and Hal would reply that it was coming along great, that he’d just been to Puerto Rico, that they were meeting with the architect, that the plans were terrific, that they’d seen the models, that they were looking for more investors.

It seemed to me he had to have been worth at least $3 million. Which was a lot of money at the time. Divided by four it came out to $750,000 for each of us. I couldn’t believe it. It was a fortune. It would change everything. Okay, maybe it was only $2 million. That would still be a half million each. On the other hand, perhaps it was four. A million dollars each. A million dollars each! I kept estimating, and dividing by four, and mentally spending the money. My husband and I had recently bought a house on Long Island, and the renovation had cost much more than we’d ever dreamed. There was nothing left for landscaping. I went outside and walked around the house. I mentally planted several trees. I ripped out the scraggly lawn and imagined the huge trucks of sod I would now be able to pay for. I considered a trip to the nursery to look at hydrangeas. My heart was racing. I pulled my husband away from his work and we had a conversation about what kind of trees we wanted. A dogwood, definitely. A great big dogwood. It would cost a small fortune, and now we were about to have one.

I went upstairs and looked at the script I’d been writing. I would never have to work on it again. I was just doing it for the money and, let’s face it, it was
never going to get made, and besides, it was really hard. I shut down the computer. I lay down on the bed to think about other ways to spend Uncle Hal’s money. It crossed my mind that we needed a new headboard.

Thus, in fifteen minutes, did I pass through the first two stages of inherited wealth: Glee and Sloth.

The phone rang.

It was my father. “Hal died,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“He was leaving his money to the four of you,” my father went on, “but I told him to cut you out of the will because you already have enough money.”

“What?” I said.

He hung up.