Mary's Mosaic (3 page)

As I lay crawled up in a fetal position that night, the shock of Mary Meyer’s murder brought back a flood of memories of being at Michael’s house in McLean, Virginia, just a few miles from my own house. One sunny spring day, we had been hunting for copperheads in the backyard forest behind the Meyer house. Brandishing knives like the “young bucks” we thought we were, Michael pulled a long stick out of a hole we’d been investigating. Suddenly, a snapping snake came out right behind it, narrowly missing his face. We pulled back, both screaming, and ran as fast as we could. We finally stopped, both of us shaking with an adrenaline rush and laughing uncontrollably. Regaining a bit of composure, we realized that both of us, out of fear and excitement, had urinated in our pants. Humiliated, a bit defeated, but still giddy from the adventure, we returned to the house. Michael’s mother, Mary, was painting in a small studio just off the patio.

“Mom, a copperhead almost bit me!” Michael announced.

Mary Pinchot Meyer looked up from her canvas. Even then, I distinctly remember feeling that there was something unique about Michael’s mother, beyond her glistening, radiant beauty. She was so unlike any other adult in my world at that time. Calm and still, at peace with herself, she had a presence and demeanor that struck me. Less than a year before, Michael and I had been playing baseball in front of their house when Michael sent one of my pitches zooming off his bat and over the house. I ran around to the back in search of the ball and came upon Mary reading on a blanket. She lay completely naked, her backside to the sun. I was breathless. She hadn’t heard me coming, and I stood there for what seemed to me a very long time, gawking. At the time, I had no words for the vision that I beheld, but I knew that beauty such as hers was something I longed to know better. When Mary finally looked up and saw me, she wasn’t embarrassed or upset, or even startled. She just smiled, letting me know that it was okay; no sin had been committed. I found the ball, ran back to play with Mikey, and felt somehow irrevocably altered, even blessed. But it wasn’t anything I could describe at the time.

I had a similar feeling about Mary the day of the copperhead hunt. Mary’s outer beauty seemed to be a manifestation of her inner freedom and peace. Whatever it was, it made me feel safe, and free. I remember her smiling at us in a prideful way. Here we were—dirty, sweaty, and soaked in piss, to boot—and Mary responded by being tender. She had guessed what must have happened and, laughing, directed us to the laundry room. We slipped out of our soiled clothes, put them in the washing machine, and put on the clean underwear that Mary had given us, along with a pile of clean clothes to wear.

“You two look like little Indians,” she said teasingly. “Where’s your war paint?”

I remembered how Michael’s eyes had lit up with excitement.

“Mom, paint an arrowhead on my face!” he blurted out.

“Go get the watercolors I gave you, and I will!” she said.

We stood in our underwear on the patio under a warm spring sun. Mary made intricate designs that we took to be tribal symbols on our faces and arms while we began emitting loud Indian war cries. While Mary was painting my face, Michael went in search of two Indian headdresses.

Almost immediately, our exuberance erupted. Michael and I made guttural noises, each trying to outdo the other. War paint in place, we danced as we had seen Indians do on television. Flapping our hands over our mouths like trumpeters with plunger mutes, we shrieked louder and louder, jerking our bodies in wild leaps across the room. We strapped our knife sheaths onto makeshift belts, donned the headdresses, and descended into a kind of primal expression of childhood glee and human joy, running barefoot in circles. It was as if Mary’s brushstrokes of “war paint” had transported us into a primal place of wildness that demanded a surrender to the life force itself. In a sudden, simultaneous move that was pure, unbridled innocence, we stepped out of our underwear. Naked now, our playing became even more frenzied. We ran through the woods toward a small barn, chased each other around a riding circle, and back to the patio, waving our knives in flagrant violation of every childhood safety rule known to man. As our excitement subsided, we dropped to the floor, laughing and exhausted from the thrill of what we had just experienced. Peace and serenity returned, but eventually I became self-conscious. Where were my pants? Shouldn’t I have something on? Once again, Mary’s tender gaze delivered me from any embarrassment.

“Mom, do we have anything to eat? I’m hungry!” asked Michael. We were putting on the clothes that Mary had given us, while Mary directed us to
cookies and lemonade in the fridge. It seemed like an eternity had passed. A bit disoriented, I was calm—yet also exhilarated by the sense of an unknown powerful life force that had just moved through me. Mary’s quietly spirited presence had made it all possible. It was as if she had extended
her
freedom to me, giving me permission that day to explore and experience my own boyhood wildness like no other adult ever had.

Mary’s persona contrasted sharply with that of Michael’s father, Cord Meyer. Insensitive and dismissive, Cord was arrogantly patronizing and never fun to be around. One day Michael and I went fishing on the Potomac River with Cord and his CIA friend and colleague Jim Angleton, who was also godfather to the three Meyer boys. I always found myself completely inhibited around Cord. Michael and I took turns climbing out onto a set of rocks that jutted out from the shoreline. There, we snagged herring by casting into a huge school of passing fish with a three-pronged snag hook. Cord’s demeanor that day had been as intimidating as it was uncomfortable. He and Angleton spent most of the time criticizing our techniques. Already self-conscious, I had to watch my every move lest I provoke one of Cord’s or Angleton’s withering stares. Truth be told, I never liked Cord. Michael feared his father, inasmuch as telling me so. His dread of his father was such a contrast to the connection he had with his mother.

S
leep, if it came at all that dreadful night before Thanksgiving, was fitful as I wrestled with Mary Meyer’s death. Ominously, one horrid thought was the realization that Quenty and Mark would now have only Cord, their aloof father. In my agitation, I continually tossed and repositioned myself, hugging a second pillow for comfort. At one point I woke up; it was still dark outside. I was soaked in moisture, then realizing that in my sleep, I had been crying for my lost childhood friend Michael, and the memory of what had occurred on December 18, 1956.

Just before Christmas vacation began, our school’s holiday festivities took place—a Nativity play, Christmas caroling in the Georgetown Day School assembly, and painting ornaments in the school’s art studio where Mary Meyer and Ken Noland sometimes taught together. The Meyer family didn’t have television in the mid-1950s—only because Mary was against it. Her prescience regarding the docile passivity that television engendered was remarkable. But it didn’t keep the two older Meyer boys—Quenty and Michael—from stealing away to a friend’s house to engage the technological marvel. The way home to the Meyer farmhouse required crossing a busy thoroughfare known as Route
123. Two years earlier, the family’s beloved golden retriever had been hit by a car and killed crossing that roadway. The two boys were on their way home, rushing to be on time for dinner. In the waning winter solstice light of Tuesday’s evening rush hour, some cars had not yet turned on their headlights. The agile Quenty made his way across first, dodging cars as he ran from one side to the other. His younger brother wasn’t so lucky. Michael was struck by an oncoming car and killed.

The next day, after returning home early from work, my father and mother summoned me from my bedroom, where I had been playing. I joined them in the living room, taking a chair opposite the fireplace. My mother sat on the sofa and my father reclined into his favorite orange Eero Saarinen Womb chair, his legs stretched out on the ottoman before him. He was sipping his usual first martini of the evening. Our house was resplendent with FAO Schwarz Christmas pageantry—holly, mistletoe, a towering spruce pine that twinkled with lights and ornaments, with colorfully wrapped gifts everywhere. It was an idyllic scene, but I sat with the unease of one who hears his name called and wonders what he’s done wrong. I was braced for some kind of reprimand, but not for what came next.

“We have something to tell you,” my mother said, looking in my direction without making eye contact. “Mikey Meyer was hit by a car yesterday. He was killed.”

Her words rocked me to the core. The disturbance was cellular. The hollow silence of loss opened into my world. I couldn’t contain it.

“That’s not true! Tell me it’s not true!” I shouted, before collapsing into tears.

“It’s true,” she said, trying to remain calm. I turned toward my father as though he might have a different version of the story to offer.

“Daddy, tell me it’s not true,
please
tell me it’s not true!” Hysterical, I threatened to throw a heavy ashtray through the living-room picture window. “Tell me it’s not true, or I’ll break the window!” I screamed.

I don’t remember what came next, but I eventually found myself in my father’s arms with my head against his chest. Feeling the thumping of his heart against my head helped calm my sobs. I remembered looking up at his face. For the first time in my life, I saw my father cry.

Later that evening, I overheard my parents talking about going to visit Cord and Mary after I went to bed. I insisted—
demanded
—that they take me with them. I didn’t know why it was so imperative that I accompany them. After some resistance, they relented. During the fifteen-minute drive to Michael’s
house, darkness enshrouded everything, overtaking me. There was no moon or stars in the sky that night. Everything and everywhere was dark.

We entered the front door and walked down an unlit hallway into the Meyers’ living room, where their own postcard-perfect holiday scene—the tree, the wrapped presents—seemed out of place. As my mother embraced Mary, I felt this house, so familiar just days before, was now alien to me. In spite of—or, perhaps, because of—the joy I had once felt in that house, it was almost unbearable to be there now. No longer would it be Michael’s house; nothing would ever be the same again. Mikey had left, and a part of me had gone with him. Emptiness now became my new companion.

I
was facing Michael’s mother, whose gaze was fixed on me. She looked into my eyes, as she had done so many times before, but this time it was her sadness, not her serenity, that moved me. I was overwhelmed by it and wanted to look away, but she drew me into her arms. In that moment, the child-adult distinction evaporated. We were equals in our grief, connected by the loss of someone we both had deeply loved and cherished. As she cried, I felt no need to recoil in any discomfort. Even as a young insecure boy, I gladly stood to embrace and hold her, as she had done for me so many times before. It was a moment of transcendence at a very tender age—an experience of connection unlike any I had known before. And it would be decades before I understood the deeper gift she had bestowed upon me.

Mary walked me up the stairs to Michael’s bedroom. “I want you to have something of Michael’s to take with you,” she said. “Find something you want, anything. Michael would have wanted that, I know.” She left me alone in his room to contemplate, to face yet another level of the reality of my best friend’s departure. I would never again be in that room with the Michael I had known and loved. Unbearably, I had to begin to face the loss that night.

Michael’s funeral was held several days later in Bethlehem Chapel inside the National Cathedral. I was still perhaps too numb to register details of the service, but I will never forget the sight of Ruth Pinchot, Michael’s maternal grandmother, sobbing on the sidewalk as we left the church. There was something so pure and powerful about her explosion of grief, the kind of public display of emotion that was simply “not done” among her set. But in that moment, Ruth didn’t care what anybody thought, or how she might be perceived. Her honesty and courage were so much like her daughter Mary’s.

Michael’s casket was taken to the Pinchot family’s estate, Grey Towers, in Milford, Pennsylvania, and then laid to rest in the Pinchot family plot in the
Milford cemetery. He had always shared with me so much about Grey Towers—its bountiful trout streams, waterfalls, and forests—but it would take me nearly fifty years before I could bring myself to actually visit his grave.

The late 1950s were not an auspicious time to be a grieving nine-year-old. The “in-vogue” thinking at that time was that beyond a certain point, displays of sadness were unbecoming. I was encouraged to accept what had happened and move on. In my attempt to do so, I sometimes stayed overnight with Quenty and Mark at the Meyers’ house, and would wake up crying in the middle of the night. On those occasions, it was always Mary who comforted me. Expressions of sadness were okay with her, even embraced.

Soon, however, everything changed. Quenty revealed that his parents were divorcing, and that everyone was moving to Georgetown. Meanwhile, at my home, my parents were ill-equipped to handle my grief. They sent me to a psychiatrist, who, in true Freudian fashion, kept making a lot of allusions to my penis. During the six years following Michael’s death, I floundered. My selfconfidence eroded. Increasingly, I was impulsive, delinquent, and unruly. Unmoored and untethered, I packed on weight as I turned to sugar in an effort to self-medicate. At fifteen, I left home for boarding school in New Hampshire.

T
he woman who had comforted me in sorrow and reassured me in so many other ways was now gone forever. Like a volcano, the reality of her death had erupted, and reawakened something awful and inescapable. Why had my parents waited until I was home to tell me, I wondered? As I lay in my bed at dawn that Thanksgiving morning in 1964, the apprehension of uneasiness, even dread, engulfed me. There was something foreboding, something terrible—something I couldn’t possibly know or understand at the time. And that feeling would continue to haunt me for more than forty years.