Me and My Shadows: A Family Memoir (21 page)

I thought he was going to have a heart attack.

“Who? Why?” Eventually he calmed down and explained to me what had happened. Back then he’d decided not to tell us who Bridget really was because he didn’t want my mother to know about her. My mom might have known who Mariana Hill was, but “Bridget” was just some nobody, some friend that Mama never saw. He explained that he hadn’t told me before because at eleven, I had a big mouth, and I might have said something to my mother. That, he said, was out of the question. There was no telling what my mom would have done to get back at him. The fact that they were divorced and that Mama was seeing Mark Herron had nothing to do with it as far as Mama was concerned.

Dad’s fears had been justified. I didn’t hear the story at the time, but a couple of years later my dad brought Bridget to a large party that my mother attended. Every time my father tried to dance with Bridget, my mother cut in, and when he finally sat down and refused to dance at all, my mom had the hotel switchboard page him every five minutes so he couldn’t talk to Bridget. If you’d pointed out to my mother that she’d already been through another husband, a couple of fiancés, and was about to marry again by that time, she would have said, “What’s your point?” The fact that she’d divorced my father didn’t mean he wasn’t still hers. Unfortunately for my dad, she was right.

A
few months later my mom asked Joe and me if she should marry Mark. Of course, we said that it was fine with us. We couldn’t very well say no. By then Joe and I would have done nearly anything to keep our mother happy. Mama also asked me if I wanted to change my name to Lorna Herron when she married Mark. I didn’t know what to say, so I asked her, “Do you want me to?” She told me to think about it. Fortunately for me, she never mentioned it again.

Our only real disagreement was when she tried to get us to call Mark “Dad” after they were married. We told her, “But we already have a dad.”

She exploded, shouting, “No, you don’t!” During that period of our lives, our dad existed only if our mother wanted him to. Eventually we ended up calling Mark either “Mark” or “Marko.” Mark was easy to be around, and for a while everything was relatively peaceful. Inevitably, it didn’t last.

That spring of 1965 Mama decided we all needed some family vacation time in Hawaii to relax. We would go together: Mama, Mark, Joey, and me.

Those two weeks in paradise turned out to be the end of my childhood.

Collection of John Fricke

In the pool with Mama at the house on Rockingham, 1965.

L
ike most things with my mother, it started out fine. Mama and Mark decided a vacation in Hawaii would be good for the whole family. They packed up me and Joey and a few dozen of my mother’s outfits, and we all took off for Waikiki.

At first we had a grand time. We rented a house beneath Diamond Head, right on the beach, next door to Steve McQueen and his wife. It was like a scene from
Blue Hawaii.
My mother hired a female assistant for the trip, so Joe and I were free to do whatever we wanted. I got to take surfing lessons with an instructor at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel down the beach from us, which was pretty exciting for a twelve-year-old. Every morning I’d walk down the beach to the bright pink hotel and go surfing with my instructor. In the evenings I’d fall asleep with the tropical breeze blowing gently through the window.

One night a few days after our arrival, I woke up to the sound of angry shouting. Joe and I shared a bedroom next to my mother and Mark’s bedroom, and since the bungalow wasn’t very big, I could hear voices clearly. The noise seemed to be coming from the living room. I heard screaming and cursing, and the sound of things being thrown. When I got out of bed to listen, I heard my mother screaming for help. I was so frightened, I didn’t know what to do.
I crept to the door in my bare feet and peered into the living room to see what was going on.

I’ll never forget the scene before me. There stood my mother and Mark. My mother was wearing her nightclothes. She was deathly white, and one of her eyes was blackened and swollen like an egg. Mark was completely naked. He was very drunk, and my mother was far from sober. Both of them were covered with blood. They were screaming at each other; my mother was shaking with anger. Some of the furniture had been knocked over, and there was blood splattered around the room. I held onto the doorjamb, staring at them in shock. I stood there frozen, unable to move. I don’t know what frightened me more, the blood or the sight of a grown man standing naked in the dim light of the room. Mark’s blood was streaming down from his face and on to his bare white skin. My mother was twitching from anger and whatever she’d taken.

One of them threw something at the other. There was a loud crash; I flinched and pulled back. A moment later I felt Joey come padding up behind me and tug on my nightgown.

“Lorna? What’s wrong?”

Instinctively, I moved to block the scene from his vision with my body, yelling at him to get back to bed. I heard him scurry back under the covers. He was only nine years old. I didn’t want him to see what I was seeing.

Mark must have heard me. Turning to look, he pulled himself together, rushed into the bedroom, grabbed some clothes, and ran out into the night.

Meanwhile, the assistant my mother had hired came into the living room. She forced my mom into a chair; my mother was shaking violently, and the woman had to hold her down. The lady told me to get some ice for my mother’s eye, which was bloody and swollen. She kept trying to make my mom sit still, holding the ice against her face and talking to her. After a while she got Mama to take some pills, and the shaking began to lessen. My mother had
no idea I was in the room. She was still conscious; her good eye was wide open, but mentally she was absent.

As soon as Mama calmed down, the woman turned to me and said, “We can’t let anyone see the room like this. You’ve got to clean it up while I take care of your mother. Get some soap and water and start wiping up the blood.”

I looked around the room. There was blood everywhere—on the floor, the furniture, everything. The half-darkened room had an overwhelming smell of cigarettes and liquor and blood, all mixed together. I’ll never forget that smell.

I started cleaning. There was no bucket or mop, so I went into the bathroom, soaked some towels and washcloths, and started mopping up the blood. I wiped it off the coffee table, and off the floor. I wiped it off the chairs. I went back into the bathroom over and over, to rinse the cloths and wash the bloody water down the drain. And all the time there was that smell filling my mouth and lungs. When the floor and the furniture at last were clean, I started scrubbing the throw rug. It was one of those woven cotton rugs, with a deep bloodstain I couldn’t get out. I got down on my hands and knees and scrubbed it over and over with soap and water, going back and forth to the bathroom, but I couldn’t get the blood out. Even in the dim light, I could still see dark red color in the carpet fibers. Like a small Lady Macbeth, I desperately scrubbed away at the final reminder of what had happened that night.

I kept trying not to look at my mother, propped listless in a chair nearby. I was terrified she was dying; she looked so white, and her eye was unnaturally wide open. After what seemed like forever, the woman who was taking care of my mother said, “I’ll clean up the rest of it. You go to bed.” My mother was calmer by then. Still conscious, but calmer.

I got to my feet in my damp nightgown and gathered up the last of the cloths. I went back into the bathroom to rinse out the cloths one last time. The bloody water ran down the drain in the graying light. I noticed a bottle of Pepto-Bismol sitting on the sink,
a sickly pink in the yellow bathroom light. I felt so ill. I reached for the Pepto-Bismol, took a sip or two out of the bottle, and sat down on the damp bathroom linoleum to rest. Almost immediately, I began to vomit. I couldn’t purge myself of the images that filled my mind, or rid my nose of the smell of blood. The linoleum hurt my knees as I clung wearily to the toilet bowl. Finally the vomiting stopped. I rested my head on the edge of the toilet for a few moments, and then I pulled myself to my feet.

Still in my bare feet, I crept back down the hall to the bedroom. Joey was still half-awake, huddled in the corner of the bed. As I crawled in next to him, he asked me if everything was all right. I told him to go back to sleep, that everything was okay now. I lay down next to him, my body aching and my feet cold. He closed his eyes and was soon breathing regularly.

Only then did I begin to shake. My body trembled so hard that the bed shook, and I was afraid I’d wake my brother. I tried to control the trembling, telling myself over and over, “You mustn’t wake Joey. You mustn’t wake Joey.” I could feel the ocean breeze through the window as I lay there, blowing gently over our bed. Sometime in the gray hours of morning, I drifted off to sleep.

When I woke up, it was light, and I was a lifetime older.

Joe and I got out of there early the next morning. My mother’s traveling companion had finished straightening up the living room and put my mother to bed. It was quiet in the bungalow. We walked down the sand to the Royal Hawaiian and ordered breakfast, but I couldn’t eat. Joey kept saying, “What do you think is going to happen?” and I kept saying, “I don’t know.”

“Do you think we’re going to go home to L.A.?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you think happened to Mark? Do you think he left? Do you think he’s okay?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t have anyone to ask. My father was thousands of miles away in Los Angeles. We were just children, and no one told us anything. After a while, we got up and walked
back down the beach to the bungalow. I was afraid of what we might see when we got there.

It was at that moment that the gothic family tragedy I’d just witnessed turned into a farce. A black farce, but a farce nonetheless, with my mother writing the script.

I’ll never forget the scene as we walked the last few yards to the beach house. It was a beautiful summer morning, straight out of a movie, with white sand and sparkling blue waters off Diamond Head. Our cottage lay directly in front of us. In front of the cottage sat my mother. But instead of the bruised and bloodied woman I’d seen just a few hours before, there sat Miss Garland herself, sunning her legs in a beach chair (which was amazing in itself, since my mother never went in the sun if she could help it). Mama had on a huge hat and movie star glasses, and she was looking out over the ocean. Behind her, through the open door of our beach house, smoke was billowing into the air. When she noticed our approach, my mother turned to us and said casually, “Don’t go inside. The house is on fire.”

“What?” I said blankly.

“The house is on fire,” Miss Garland repeated calmly. Then she explained, “I’m burning Mark’s clothes,” as if that was the most natural thing in the world. Joey and I looked at each other in disbelief. There she sat, lucid, dressed, and wearing her hat. Not knowing what else to do, we sat down on the sand next to her.

Then right on cue, just when it seemed things couldn’t get any more bizarre, they did. As I mentioned, Steve McQueen had rented the cottage next door, so naturally he saw the smoke. The next thing we knew, Steve McQueen came hurtling over the wall the way he did in
The Towering Inferno.
Steve came running toward us, shouting, “Get some wet towels!” He was all ready to charge inside and start putting out the fire himself.

My mother could not have cared less if he put the fire out. On the contrary, she wanted to make sure all Mark’s things burned. So she languidly replied, “Don’t be a hero, Steve. This isn’t the
movies. Just sit down and wait for the fire department like everyone else.”

I don’t know what in the world Steve must have thought. He looked at me and Joe, and we just shrugged. He didn’t know what to do next, so he asked if everyone was out of the house and if we were all right. Finally he sat down on the sand next to me and Joey and waited for the fire department with us. He was very sweet. It was nice to have the company.