The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son On Life, Love, and Loss (18 page)

I was still wary of my mother, but I took a huge leap and invited her to tea at my apartment. I have to admit it took all the guts I had to concentrate on the momentous event of once again being face-to-face with her.

My heart was pounding as I opened the door to her, but standing there alone in the hall was a stranger: tentative, beautifully
dressed, but hesitant, even fearful. Had we passed on the street, I would not have known who she was or given her a second glance.

Was this my mother?

The person I had feared all my life?

She was suffering from hysterical blindness; no doctor could find anything wrong with her eyes, but her vision came and went. I wondered how she had gotten to my place on her own, but realized someone must have dropped her off downstairs, and the elevator operator brought her into the hallway and rang the doorbell.

Putting my arms around her, I led her into my studio and sat down beside her on the sofa. She asked for a scotch and soda, and I lit her cigarette. I wasn’t sure what to talk with her about. The last time I’d seen her I was twenty-one, and by then I was thirty-six. I took her hand in mine, but she pulled it away to pick up her drink.

I wish I could say we opened up to each other, talking of the past and what we hoped our future would be, but we didn’t. From the day she walked through that door until the day she died, we never discussed the trial or anything about my childhood. Not once. She wasn’t capable of doing so, and I certainly wasn’t ready to. I would be now, but back then it was so complicated, and I was still wary of her in many ways.

We kept our conversation polite and on the surface. Despite
your father’s support and encouragement of my becoming close to her, because of all the things that had happened and the years of separation, there was no way to begin.

How banal and strange to call all that had happened
things.
As I look at it on the computer screen, the word is little, a meaningless abstract squiggle devoid of the fear, sorrow, and deep regret over the loss and the pain it brought to all of us, Naney, Auntie Ger, Dodo, and to me, changing our lives forever.

After your father met my mother for the first time, he said to me, “She doesn’t know one single thing that has ever happened to her.” He was right. She was born beautiful, got married at seventeen, gave birth at eighteen, and was widowed a year and a half later. I cringe in pain imaging how stunned she must have been during the custody case, as if hit by a bus.

During the long years of separation, I had tried to forget her, but she never left. She stuck in my gut like glue.

One night in my dressing room, after I’d appeared in a play, thinking about my mother’s admiration of the anorexic thinness of the actress Constance Bennett, I asked my friend Russell Hurd, “Did I look thin onstage?

“Yes, darling,” he assured me.

“No! No! I mean thin, really,
really
thin?

“Yes! Really, really, really thin!”

“That’ll show the old bitch,” I screamed, to his surprise.

Now here she was, back in my life, sitting by my side. It
drained all my wits and energy to keep a toehold on the tenuous tightrope my unsteady feet were attempting to negotiate. I found myself fighting an avalanche of hostility toward her, realizing just how misguided she had been as a parent, how self-involved and narcissistic.

When I was seventeen and went to visit her, and started dating completely inappropriate men like Errol Flynn and Pat DeCicco, she never warned me about what I was doing. What she wanted was to get me back from Auntie Ger, and she did that by letting me do anything I wanted, no matter how risky.

Several months after we reunited, in the summer of 1961, I visited Los Angeles with Stan and Chris, and I went to see her at the house she still shared with Thelma. I rang the bell, and Wannsie opened the door.

“Oh, Miss Gloria,” she said, welcoming me, “It was all just a terrible misunderstanding.” This was such a mild description of the tumultuous events we had all been through, I couldn’t help but laugh as I hugged her.

Thelma suggested we rent cottages for a week next to each other on the beach in Malibu. I was excited because Stan and Chris would have a chance to spend some time with their grandmother and great-aunt, not to mention my having time with my mother, perhaps even to get to know her a little bit better.

Wyatt joined the family get-together, which was at first
a cautious reunion, but by week’s end a huge success. My mother and Thelma usually slept late but joined us for lunch and dinners.

The first day we settled in, Thelma casually mentioned that Harry Richmond also lived somewhere nearby in Malibu.

“Harry Richmond!”
I shouted, almost falling off my chair. When I was eleven, Harry Richmond was a hugely popular singer, as well known as Sinatra was years later. I had collected and treasured his records, playing them over and over at Auntie Ger’s. He performed at the Club Richmond back then, which was close to New York City, just across the East River. My mother, knowing how much I admired him, had wanted to take me to hear him, but she knew Surrogate Foley, who was my legal guardian, would have had a fit.

“Let’s invite him for dinner,” Thelma now said, and sure enough that very night, stepping out of an old Chevy, appeared Harry Richmond in full stage makeup, dressed in a top hat and white tie and tails!

There were big hugs all around, but he was clearly eager to start the show. And what a show it was! His voice was no longer what it had once been, so he lip-synced to his old records, which he had brought with him, gesturing as he slowly moved around the room mouthing the words to “The Night Is Young and You’re So Beautiful,” and other songs I had played in my bedroom in Old Westbury long ago.

It was surreal to be there now with my mother, a family at ease, happy in the moment. An evening never to be forgotten, and not just because I got to meet Harry Richmond at last, but because it brought me close to my mother in a way I had never been before. That week in Malibu, I hadn’t been suspicious of her, not for one minute.

Alas, though she came back into my life, we never really connected. It was too late. In all the times we saw each other after reestablishing contact, the conversation rolled politely along without long silences, but we never broke through to each other’s heart.

I’ve never forgotten an intense conversation between my mother and her older sister Consuelo that I’d unexpectedly interrupted once as a child. My mother’s back was toward me, but Consuelo saw me as I entered the room, and she grabbed my mother’s arm and hissed at her,
“Cuidado, cuidado!”

The word stuck in my mind. I wrote it down and later looked up the English translation: “Be careful! Be careful!”

I knew then that they had been speaking of things they didn’t want me to hear.

Secrets and fear. That is what there had always been between us.

All that is long gone.

How can any of this be of importance or value to you right now? Maybe it will be useful only in the future to assure you
that with age everything, yes, everything, in one way or another, falls into place. You can face your past in a way you never thought possible: confidently, securely, and without fear.

I
t is so sad that you never discussed the trial or anything about what happened between you. Now of course you would be more than capable of doing so, but it also says a lot about her that she didn’t bring up the past, either. It shouldn’t have been all on your shoulders.

How did your mother die?

Five years after we
reconciled, she and Aunt Thelma were planning to stay in our house on Sixty-Seventh Street, to be there when Carter was born, but before they were to come, she fell ill. It turned out to be cancer and she was dying. Within days she was hospitalized in Los Angeles.

I spoke to my mother on the phone a few hours after giving birth. She had hoped for a girl, as had I. “The third Gloria,” I’d promised her. Knowing how ill she was, I nearly lied and told her I’d finally had a girl, but I didn’t.

“Another boy!” she said, “Gloria, you’re going to start a baseball team.”

Those were her last words to me. She died shortly after. She was sixty.

I had to stay in the hospital with Carter, so your father went alone to Los Angeles to attend the funeral. Her death had little reality for me. Who was she, really? Someone I had never known. Someone I had longed for once, a longing that by then felt like it was someone else’s.

For decades after she died, I tormented myself with the fantasy that she lived around the corner from me, close, close as could be, and we could speak daily. I imagined visiting her, or her strolling around the block and stopping by for a cup of tea and a cozy chat, eager to hear about my latest adventures and offer her wise counsel.

In this fantasy she remained as lovely as the image I once had of her in Paris: coming in and going out, her long black tresses marcelled into a beguiling chignon, wearing one of her simple black dresses, the huge Marquise diamond engagement ring presented to her by my father still on her left hand beside the gold wedding band.

She’d sit beside me on the sofa, and it no longer bothered me that it was a light scotch and soda she sipped instead of tea; no longer bothered me that she lit one cigarette after another; the smoke became perfumed incense. In this fantasy, nothing about her bothered me. Instead of the passive, exquisite creature hoping to be Her Serene Highness Princess Hohenlohe, she had metamorphosed into a wise, chatty combination of Dr. Ruth Westheimer and Mother Teresa.

But this fairy tale is always replaced by the memory of another trip to Los Angeles after we reconciled. I flew there hoping to see her right away, wanting to talk with her, and perhaps finally open up about all that had passed between us.

I called her from the airport. “Mummy, I’m here,” I said, my voice nearly breaking. She could tell I was upset.

“Oh, darling,” she said. “I’d love to see you, do please call me when you’re feeling better.”

It wasn’t malicious. She was simply incapable of expressing real emotion and felt no motherly connection to me. I visited her later during that trip, and she pretended as though I had never called upset, and I made no mention of it, either.

There are times when I am overcome with sadness, feeling as if my mother were present with me here in my room. Is it because I am wearing a white wool sweater she knit for me once long ago? After she gave it to me I put it away and didn’t take it out until recently, so many years after her death.

Lately I find myself wearing the sweater a lot. The wool is soft, and because it has no buttons, I can easily wrap it around myself for warmth if it is chilly. It works well as a bed jacket, for when I sit up at night reading before I turn out the light. It fits just right, blending into my body, warm and cozy. I imagine her hands once holding the skeins of wool that now encircle my body, touching the needles knitting intricate
patterns as she and Aunt Thelma sit in their house in Beverly Hills talking of this and that.

I am sad for her, no matter if she loved me or not. Sad that her life took the path it did and that she knew so little happiness. Sad that as I sit here writing and wearing this sweater, I feel closer to her than I ever did when she was alive. But let’s not end on a sad note. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

D
o you think you are like your mother at all?

Am I like her?
I never knew her well enough to say, but perhaps I may be more like her twin, my aunt Thelma, who was much more outgoing, with an appetite for life and, I suspect, a rage to live. By contrast, my mother was passive, remote, and out of reach.

W
hat about Dodo? We haven’t talked about what happened to her after the court decided she was not a good influence on you. You said that she attended your wedding to Pat DeCicco. How did you reconnect with her?

I was not permitted
to see or speak to her by phone from the time I was ten until I was seventeen. I assuaged
the aching grief of the loss by writing to her at the home of friends where she was staying, a Mr. and Mrs. Schiller in Freeport, Long Island. No one ever told me I couldn’t write her, and Naney gave me the address.

Dodo changed her name after the publicity brought by the custody trial, so my letters were addressed not to Miss Emma Sullivan Keislich, which was her real name, but to Mrs. Emily Prescott. What matter Emma or Emily? To me, she was my adored Dodo.

This is how we stayed in contact with each other until I was seventeen. Planning to visit my mother for the disastrous trip to Beverly Hills, Auntie Ger said I could go see Dodo. For some reason the court order no longer seemed to apply.

Freddy drove me to the Schillers’ tiny home on a long street with houses on each side, every one looking like the one beside it.

And there she was waiting at the door. A line from an old song she used to sing to me popped into my head: “You and I together, love / Never mind the weather, love.”

Her arms once again around me, I knew I was home. She led me up to her room, on the second floor of the Schillers’ house, where a tray on a bureau held hot chocolate, whipped cream, and cookies studded with sugar that sparkled like diamonds. Sunlight filtered into the room through an oak tree planted in the sidewalk below. Her single bed took up
most of the room, but there was space enough for us to sit side by side.

I cried out, “Never leave me again! Never, never, never again leave me!”

Of course it was a silent scream from inside that no one heard but me. I knew from that day on that I would die if I were ever to be parted from her again.

In the years that followed, Dodo became part of every facet of my life. She lived with me in Junction City, Kansas, during the two years Pat DeCicco was at Fort Riley, and during my marriage to Leopold Stokowski, she often spent weeks with me while he was touring. Each month I gave her a hefty amount of money in cash.

Later, when Leopold and I bought the apartment in New York at 10 Gracie Square, Dodo moved into her own suite connected to it. She was there when Stan and Chris were born. As an adult, I found it calming just to be in a room sitting with her.