I couldn’t possibly go to Havana.
There was a revolution in Havana.
In fact there was: it was December 1958, Fidel Castro would enter Havana within days. I mentioned this.
“There’s always a revolution in Havana,” the Vogue doctor said.
A day later I started to bleed, and cried all night.
I thought I was regretting having missed this interesting moment in Havana but it turned out the surge had hit and what I was regretting was not having the baby, the still unmet baby, the baby I would eventually bring home from St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. What if you hadn’t been home, what if you couldn’t meet Dr. Watson at the hospital, what if there’d been an accident on the freeway, what would happen to me then. Not long ago, when I read the fragment of the novel written just to show us, the scrap in which the protagonist thinks she might be pregnant and elects to address the situation by consulting her pediatrician, I remembered that morning on East Sixty-seventh Street. Now, they didn’t even care any more.
17
There are certain moments in those first years with her that I remember very clearly.
These very clear moments stand out, recur, speak directly to me, on some levels flood me with pleasure and on others still break my heart.
I remember very clearly for example that her earliest transactions involved what she called “sundries.” She invested this word, which she used as a synonym for “possessions” but seemed to derive from the “sundries shops” in the many hotels to which she had already been taken, with considerable importance, dizzying alternations of infancy and sophistication. One day after she had asked me for a Magic Marker I found her marking off an empty box into “drawers,” or areas meant for specific of these “sundries.” The “drawers” she designated were these: “Cash,” “Passport,” “My IRA,” “Jewelry,” and, finally — I find myself hardly able to tell you this—“Little Toys.”
Again, the careful printing.
The printing alone I cannot forget.
The printing alone breaks my heart.
Another moment, not, on examination, dissimilar: I remember very clearly the Christmas night at her grandmother’s house in West Hartford when John and I came in from a movie to find her huddled alone on the stairs to the second floor. The Christmas lights were off, her grandmother was asleep, everyone in the house was asleep, and she was patiently waiting for us to come home and address what she called “the new problem.” We asked what the new problem was. “I just noticed I have cancer,” she said, and pulled back her hair to show us what she had construed to be a growth on her scalp. In fact it was chicken pox, obviously contracted before she left nursery school in Malibu and just now surfacing, but had it been cancer, she had prepared her mind to be ready for cancer.
A question occurs to me:
Did she emphasize “new” when she mentioned “the new problem”?
Was she suggesting that there were also “old” problems, undetailed, problems with which she was for the moment opting not to burden us?
A third example: I remember very clearly the doll’s house she constructed on the bookshelves of her bedroom at the beach. She had worked on it for several days, after studying a similar improvisation in an old copy of House & Garden (“Muffet Hemingway’s doll’s house” was how she identified the prototype, taking her cue from the House & Garden headline), but this was its first unveiling. Here was the living room, she explained, and here was the dining room, and here was the kitchen, and here was the bedroom.
I asked about an undecorated and apparently unallocated shelf.
That, she said, would be the projection room.
The projection room.
I tried to assimilate this.
Some people we knew in Los Angeles did in fact live in houses with projection rooms but to the best of my knowledge she had never seen one. These people who lived in houses with projection rooms belonged to our “working” life. She, I had imagined, belonged to our “private” life. Our “private” life, I had also imagined, was separate, sweet, inviolate.
I set this distinction to one side and asked how she planned to furnish the projection room.
There would need to be a table for the telephone to the projectionist, she said, then stopped to consider the empty shelf.
“And whatever I’ll need for Dolby Sound,” she added then.
As I describe these very clear memories I am struck by what they have in common: each involves her trying to handle adult life, trying to be a convincing grown-up person at an age when she was still entitled to be a small child. She could talk about “My IRA” and she could talk about “Dolby Sound” and she could talk about “just noticing” she had cancer, she could call Camarillo to find out what she needed to do if she was going crazy and she could call Twentieth Century — Fox to find out what she needed to do to be a star, but she was not actually prepared to act on whatever answers she got. “Little Toys” could still assume equal importance. She could still consult her pediatrician.
Was this confusion about where she stood in the chronological scheme of things our doing?
Did we demand that she be an adult?
Did we ask her to assume responsibility before she had any way of doing so?
Did our expectations prevent her from responding as a child?
I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra. On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she had liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.”
In other words, despite having just been told what had seemed to me as I watched it a truly harrowing story, a story that placed both parents and children in unthinkable peril — a peril to children more unthinkable still because its very source lay in the bad luck of having been born to these particular parents — she had resorted without hesitation to the local default response, which was an instant assessment of audience potential. Similarly, a few years later, taken to Oxnard to see Jaws, she had watched in horror, then, while I was still unloading the car in Malibu, skipped down to the beach and dove into the surf. About certain threats I considered real she remained in fact fearless. When she was eight or nine and enrolled in Junior Lifeguard, a program run by the Los Angeles County lifeguards that entailed being repeatedly taken out beyond the Zuma Beach breakers on a lifeguard boat and swimming back in, John and I arrived to pick her up and found the beach empty. Finally we saw her, alone, huddled in a towel behind a dune. The lifeguards, it seemed, were insisting, “for absolutely no reason,” on taking everyone home. I said there must be a reason. “Only the sharks,” she said. I looked at her. She was clearly disappointed, even a little disgusted, impatient with the turn the morning had taken. She shrugged. “They were just blues,” she said then.
When I remember the “sundries” I am forced to remember the hotels in which she had stayed before she was five or six or seven. I say “forced to remember” because my images of her in these hotels are tricky. On the one hand those images survive as my truest memories of the paradox she was — of the child trying not to appear as a child, of the strenuousness with which she tried to present the face of a convincing adult. On the other hand it is just such images — the same images — that encourage a view of her as “privileged,” somehow deprived of a “normal” childhood.