. . .
“Will you let me help you?” I ask my mother as she tries to navigate herself toward the bedroom. “Will you let me help you?”
“I am trying to remember the names of the hymns. I cannot remember the names of the hymns.”
I sit on the bench and take the piece of yellow legal paper she is holding as if it were currency. There is a list of numbers.
“Number 519,” I read.
“‘Something Beautiful,’” she says.
I write it down.
“Number 451,” I read.
“‘O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee,’” she says.
I write it down.
“Number 324,” I read.
“‘Come Celebrate Jesus.’”
“Number 465.”
“‘In His Time.’”
“Number 256.”
“‘He Is Here.’”
She is trying to hold on.
In Fire Island, I was letting go.
18
The ocean in South Carolina had smooth pebbles on the bottom, and maybe because there had been rain that spring, the water was murky and gray. When my father rose up from it, I noticed his face was the same color. He was in his midseventies. He didn’t look well. I watched him attentively as he chased the birds—terns, gulls, pelicans—though his knees were bad and he rarely moved fast enough to photograph them before they flew away.
Always, on whatever beach we visited, he roamed until he sat reluctantly to see the sun fall, following the birds and their eccentric doings and picking up shells on the sand. He bought cheap plastic buckets in which to bleach his acquisitions, polishing his conchs with a toothbrush as he lay back on the bed with a cocktail balanced on his belly, checking to see if he had gotten them shiny enough to display on his desk at home.
If my father knew how I had been spending my time on the island and elsewhere, he would have been brokenhearted, and that bothered me so much in South Carolina that I couldn’t enjoy myself and was not disappointed when I was called back to New York.
In the 1990s, I worked at Vanity Fair, a magazine so slick that its pages were perfumed. Finished copies tended to send me into sneezing fits. At the office there was always drama, some kind of crisis—a writer in the midst of a breakdown, a must-have piece on an heiress who had axed her in-laws. I left my parents with their disappointed looks in the rented house they had been proud to show me and ran out quickly when the taxi came.
Graydon Carter, the editor in chief, was apologetic about the interruption of my vacation, and as we sat in his office he offered me a Marlboro and told me how much he appreciated my work. Soaking in his flattering words, I noticed—as I always did—how remarkably his hands and thick fingers resembled my father’s, though his were tanned, whatever the season, and always acquired whatever they reached for.
My father’s hands did not.
Graydon was on the rise, and usually had a bespoke suit awaiting pickup in London if a writer happened to be there. At the beginning, he had a way of making me feel brilliant and talented in a way no one had before. I took it all in eagerly; I was a little desperate. With Graydon, I was still just a hungry kid.
. . .
“I don’t like the way you sound,” Betty would say on the phone. “I don’t like the way you sound. Are you all right? Are you all right?”
“I am fine. I am fine. What about Daddy?”
She never answered. She was worried too, but that was the sort of thing she never said out loud. I think she believed that the sound of her voice articulating her concern was enough to provoke the worst to befall us.
. . .
At Vanity Fair, the contributing editors included a roster of killer reporters: an English aristocrat (“Lady Kitty’s daughter”) who had hung in Mustique with The Rolling Stones; a fashion director who muttered imprecations in various languages (Honi soit qui mal y pense!); an assortment of devious Brits; the Marquis de Torregrosa; an elderly Italian doyenne who referred constantly to the preferences of Count Laszlo, whom I believed to be an aristocrat until I discovered that he was actually her aging pug. Before the parties and dinners thrown by Graydon, tears over the suitable position of place cards were not uncommon. The seating of Edie Wasserman or Mrs. Reagan within a mile of the kitchen at Morton’s was an offense worthy of capital punishment.
Every morning I rode up in the elevator at 5 a.m., hoping the day would pass without some disaster in which I would be implicated, and there was always dread before I walked through the doors. People who passed through these halls monitored one another, carefully assessing whose stock with Graydon had risen or fallen, who was in or out. Some left his office with smiles and Prada bags; others exited in tears. Anyone could plummet out of favor.