«Absolutely,» Piers would add. «Abso lute ly.» Piers's stomach was taut as a snare drum, and he encouraged Doris to tap it with her fingers while he talked. «So anyway, Marie-Hélène spent her days devising schemes to escape, but her family was onto her. They hired extra guards and mortared broken glass onto the top of the brick wall. But then one day she was walking through the many halls of the family's mansion, despairing, when she passed an old oil painting of a forest scene with a hunter, and something about it caught her eye.»
«What did she see? Tell me again.»
«When Marie-Hélène looked at the young hunter, a strapping lad, she saw him wink at her. And then he spoke to her. He said, “Marie-Hélène, come in here — come here inside this painting with me — this is your escape route — through this painting.” Marie-Hélène was frightened. She asked the hunter, “How can I come live in a painting? What will we eat?” This made the hunter laugh, and he said, “We'll have everything we'll ever need in here. It's not like your world. In paintings, you can go visit other paintings. We'll go visit the feast paintings the Dutch did in the 1700s. We'll go have coffee inside an Edward Hopper diner. Please — come on in. I'm so lonely.”
«Marie-Hélène said she needed to think about it, but the next day she came back to the painting, dressed in hiking clothes, ready for the forest. The hunter asked her, “Marie-Hélène, will you come into the painting and join me?” and she said, “Yes, I will.” »
Piers wore Eau de Cédrat, a French citrus concoction that Doris said made him smell like Charles de Gaulle. His already sexy cigarette smoke would mix with his cologne like a spring fog alerting the bulbs beneath the soil to sprout. Piers would say, «The hunter then stuck out his arm and he pulled Marie-Hélène into the painting, into the forest, and slowly the two came together and Marie-Hélène planted a kiss on his lips. She pulled something out of her pockets, and the hunter asked her what it was, but she didn't reply. It was a book of matches and a bottle of her father's lighter fluid. She squirted the fluid out onto the floor of the mansion and lit a match and threw it onto the fluid. The house caught fire and Marie-Hélène said to the hunter, “Come on, let's go now. Don't look back.” So off they walked, away from the flames, and away from the world where Marie-Hélène could never return.»
«The catch fights back!» Doris would say.
Doris and Piers married against her family's wishes in a Manhattan civil ceremony. («Dor-Dor, he has no family — none. Life just doesn't work that way. Johnson — what sort of name is that?») The two traveled the world and then moved to Panama, where Piers had stud farm connections, and Doris became pregnant. One afternoon in her eighth month, Doris was taking an ikebana flower—arranging class in the living room of the wife of a Nestlé executive in Miraflores Locks. Without warning, she fell to the floor in labor pains, screaming like a gorgon, taking with her a zinc bucket full of untrimmed ginger stems. John's birth was so powerful and fast and hot — the air-conditioning had been broken and the room so sweltering — that for decades afterward Doris was unable to tolerate heat or anything that smacked of the tropics, living her life from one air-conditioned space to the next. John was born on the mahogany floor surrounded by tropical flowers and perplexed executive wives. At the time of the birth, Piers was checking out horses in the Canary Islands. His twin-prop plane was lost in a squall, and he vanished.
Her family tsk-tsked and I-told-you-so'd. Her father assigned her to a small family-owned apartment on the Upper East Side, doled out a child-support allowance for young John, plus limited expense accounts at a few grocers and clothiers. Her days of waxy Chianti bottles, Japanese paper lanterns and peacoats were over before they'd even fully begun. She was to become a New York matron. She was to play the part of rich — she was bred to be rich — but she wasn't rich, and this powerless position defined her life. Yet she cherished her lovely memory of Piers in this red roast beef of a baby who wailed like the thrashed clutch of a Chevrolet.
Thirty-seven years later, when John met former child star Susan Colgate, he skipped many pages of the family's story. John was a member of Delaware's Lodge clan — pesticides originally, and then all forms of agrochemicals, plastics and pharmaceuticals, eventually forming a monster that spat out everything from mousetraps to orange juice to nuclear weapons components. The firm was largely privately owned, and headed by Doris's uncle Raitt, who reigned from the family Tara in rural Delaware.
The family had decided, though not in these exact words, that Doris was a flaky financial drain who had willfully strayed outside the clan's unspoken bounds. She was grudgingly tolerated at annual family events, and she often arrived alone, because young John was a sick child. John was home more than he was at school, frequently in the hospital with infected ears or sinuses or other microbial lapses, which Doris handled with a genial calmness.
«Come along, John, I need to ferry you off to your quack for a checkup.»
«Let me finish my breakfast first.»
«What is that orangey glop you're drinking there?» She picked up the bottle of drink powder John had begged her to buy the previous week and read the label. « “Tang” — brilliant. I'll try some with Bombay gin tonight.»
«It's for astronauts.»
«Really? Then I must have a sip immediately because this afternoon I'll be off to see Raitt at the St. Moritz, and it'll take an extraterrestrial amount of energy to go and pry him away from the charms of Sixth Avenue long enough to discuss raising my allowance just slightly.» She sipped it. «Bravo! Now off we go.»
John was an imaginative child, but his curiosity was often limited by illness to the confines of the apartment. When Doris was out, John would sneak into her room and go through her treasure box. It contained the shell of a baby turtle she'd eaten for breakfast with Piers in Kyoto in 1961 («I felt it wriggling down by my voice box, the little dickens»); before-and-after cosmetic surgery photos of saddlebag removal («Saddlebags are the Lodge family curse, Johnsy. Oh, to be a boy !»); the handwritten menu from her wedding dinner catered by an Andalusian chef recommended to her by Gala Dalí — unborn lamb in a mint coulis («Lambryos, darling, and don't go knocking it until you've tried it, and don't go giving me that Mutual-of-Omaha's-Wild-Kingdom face»). There was one of John's baby shoes (gilded, not bronzed), some seashells and a stack of girlhood horse-jumping ribbons. There was also a photo of Doris water-skiing with Christina Ford, one of Piers on his prized Chesapeake mare, Honeymoon, as well as a faded black-and-white shot, reverently framed and somehow out of synch with the other photos. It was seemingly taken near a stable — Piers was talking with somebody in the background — and showed Doris standing with Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, with Marie-Hélène lighting Doris's cigarette, a wicked grin on Doris's face.
John didn't think it abnormal that his mother spent her days neither learning skills to make her employable nor making thrusts at wisdom. Rather, Doris preferred spending her time pursuing rich men, which she had been raised to do, with the uncritical instinct of terns who migrate from continent to continent each year. John found this fascinating.
«Mom, why do you always go everywhere in a plane?»
«What do you mean, darling?»
«Like today. You went up the Hudson Valley and you could easily have taken a car, but you flew.»
Doris preferred flying — even to nearby locales like the Hudson Valley or the Hamptons. «Darling, if there's one thing a man will never admit to a woman, it's that he is unwilling to pay for a plane ticket or charter a craft for the day. A man would sooner eat ketchup soup for a month than to not hire a helicopter to hop to Connecticut with a lady. Easiest just to order the plane and then tell him to pay once you're at the other end.» This was not a cynical statement from Doris. She had been taught this on her mother's knee.