After the film, Nora said that Ray looked as if she was “on the sharks’ side—even in her sleep.” Nora and I found the subject of my mother, sleeping soundly through a movie, more engrossing than The Old Man and the Sea.
I’ve forgotten where we were—Nora, my mom, and I—when we saw True Grit together. It was the end of the sixties. John Wayne was back in the saddle, where my mother believed he belonged. I guess Hollywood thought John Wayne belonged back in the saddle, too, because they would give Wayne his first and only Oscar for his role as the one-eyed, potbellied marshal.
At the end of True Grit, Little Ray gave Nora and me a glimpse of her seemingly obdurate nationalism. Keep in mind that I was almost thirty and Nora was already in her mid-thirties. Nixon had been elected the year before, the same year as the My Lai massacre; both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been killed; and the protests against the Vietnam War were rising. A year later, the Ohio National Guard would shoot and kill those college students at Kent State. Nora and I weren’t feeling particularly nationalistic.
“You see?” my mom said to Nora and me, in her little-girl way. We were among the moviegoers leaving the theater, at the conclusion of True Grit.
“See what, Ray?” Nora asked.
“John Wayne is old and fat, and he’s lost an eye,” my mother explained, “but he comes off better than he did in Ireland.”
“You don’t like Ireland, Ray?” Nora asked.
“I don’t think about Ireland one way or another,” my mom answered. “I have no desire to go there, or anywhere else that’s foreign. I like staying here, in America. So should John Wayne.” But I knew she loved Austria, home of the Arlberg technique.
“Ray doesn’t like anything foreign,” I explained to Nora. “Except for skiers,” I added. “Ray likes Toni Sailer and Toni Matt and Sepp Ruschp and Hannes Schneider—they’re foreign, but they’re Austrian. I guess foreignness in movies is another matter.” I paused. I looked at Little Ray, to see how she liked listening about herself in the third person, before I spoke to her. “You don’t like foreign films—in particular, the ones with subtitles—do you?” I asked my mother.
“I don’t go to the movies to read, sweetie,” my mom told me.
“You don’t like to read anything!” I pointed out to her.
“I have read and will read everything you write, Adam—everything you show me,” my mother told me, kissing my cheek.
“But, Ray, the movies with subtitles are the ones with good sex,” Nora said.
“I don’t go to the movies to get good sex!” my mom exclaimed; she laughed, kissing Nora on the cheek. Little Ray had to stand on her toes; she needed to put her arms around Nora’s neck to steady herself. On tiptoe, my mother was barely tall enough to kiss Nora’s cheek, and I’m guessing Nora bent down to help her. “My dear, dear Nora,” Little Ray said. “Not everything is about sex!”
At our age, this was a hard concept for Nora and me to grasp. We knew my mom’s aversion to foreignness didn’t signify an aversion to sex. On the contrary, Nora and I knew my mother was very selective about sex—she was very particular about it—but Little Ray wasn’t averse to it. Maybe her aversion to foreignness was more American than sexual, because my mom was decidedly a sexual outlier. Little Ray and Nora struck me as very comfortable in the outlier role.
Once, when I struggled to say all this to Nora, it came out a little tortured. “The first foreign-language films I saw made me like reading a movie,” I told Nora. “They made me love all movies with subtitles. Having to read those films made me feel I was writing them, or that I could write movies. It was as if foreign films were made for me,” was the way I said it to Nora, who was unimpressed.
Nora shrugged. “That’s just who you are, Adam,” my older cousin said. “There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.”
Outliers like going to the movies—we can see in the dark. Outliers are looking for other outliers. If you see an outlier on the screen, it’s exciting. If you can’t find one in the film, it’s exciting in another way. When you leave the theater, you’re even more of an outlier than you knew.
10. NOT TARZAN
Not only did I put off going to Aspen for the longest time, but I almost waited too long. Whatever man my mother met in Aspen in 1941 wasn’t the only mystery in the area of what happened (or didn’t) between my mom and men. Exactly what transpired between my mother and a different man would remain vague, but he became somewhat famous—both famous and infamous—and, at least for a while, everyone knew his name.
An American actor, Lex Barker was best known in North America for playing Tarzan of the Apes. In five years, between 1949 and 1953, Lex Barker starred in five Tarzan movies. Little Ray refused to see them. When I asked her why—I would have been eight—all she said was, “Tarzan is an ape, sweetie.”
Nora and I saw the first one (Tarzan’s Magic Fountain) together. By the time we saw the second one (Tarzan and the Slave Girl), Nora had heard the stories about Lex Barker and my mother. No one had told me anything.
“Tarzan went to Exeter, Adam,” Nora informed me. “You weren’t born, I would have been a toddler, and Henrik was still shitting in his diapers. Tarzan was three years older than your mom. When Ray was thirteen and fourteen, Tarzan was sixteen and seventeen,” Nora said. “You can imagine how my mother and Aunt Martha would have found it ‘completely inappropriate’—namely, that this big gorilla was hitting on Little Ray.”
“How did Tarzan get into Exeter?” I asked Nora.
“The actor, Adam—not the half-naked man swinging on vines, or fooling around with Jane and that chimpanzee. Lex Barker, the actor, went to Exeter—before he was Tarzan,” Nora explained. I must have looked lost. I was eight; the concept of Tarzan hitting on my mom surely went over my head. “I don’t mean they dated, Adam—you know, they never went out. I don’t know if they ever spoke to each other,” Nora said. “But something happened. Maybe Tarzan gave Ray a funny look—he gave her the once-over, in an unwelcome way—or he creeped her out with a certain kind of smile.”
Naturally, I was imagining that Tarzan gave my mother one of his ape calls, or he beat his bare chest. Nora always knew what I was thinking. “Adam: Tarzan wouldn’t have been wearing just the loincloth, not at Exeter,” Nora assured me. “I’m almost certain he had his shirt on when this happened, whatever it was—if anything actually happened. Something about the guy just freaked out your mom. Or the big ape did something that my dumb-fuck mother and Aunt Martha saw, and they were freaked out—probably because they could see that Tarzan had the hots for Ray.”
I could imagine that happening, of course. In the area of appropriateness or suitability, it didn’t take much to freak out Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha. For example, Nora was away at school when Lex Barker’s third and fourth Tarzan movies—Tarzan’s Peril and Tarzan’s Savage Fury—came out. I was nine and ten when those two Tarzan films were playing at the Ioka. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha insisted on seeing them with me; they didn’t think it was suitable for me to see them alone. Henrik came along, too. In those years, Henrik was thirteen and fourteen. With his mother and Aunt Abigail sitting between us, Henrik couldn’t reach around them to punch me in the arm or snap my ear with his fingers, which he was fond of doing.