I went home, stood by his bed in the hospital, listened to the doctor talk, but his words were so carefully chosen and so buried in detail that I wasn’t sure my father was definitely dying, and it wasn’t like I could ask him if he had heard what I heard. He acted like nothing had happened.
My mother was waiting for us to come back from the hospital. She didn’t ask me what the doctor said. She didn’t seem able to take in what I was trying to tell her, didn’t want to find out what she suddenly realized she couldn’t quite handle: losing him.
“I’ll be all right, Betty, I’m okay,” he told her. We were all fine—fine, fine, fine.
I felt like there was something I should say to my father and every time we spoke, I tried to, attempted to let him know that I loved him in some way that didn’t feel like some kind of parting gesture that would be too hard for us to manage.
I kept waiting for him to reach out to me too, to say something, to let me know that I was okay, that I was all right as far as he was concerned, but there was nothing in the end like that. I guess he had stopped trying, or maybe he had seen enough of who I had become to just go quiet.
He had looked up the Fire Island Pines on the map or read about it in some kind of magazine or tour book. “I know what goes on in that place,” he said to me on the phone. “I wouldn’t think of you there.”
My father’s hands were letting go of me.
. . .
Late one afternoon at Vanity Fair, the phone rang and I heard my mother’s voice, excited, in a kind of unusual, keyed-up way. At a Christmas luncheon, she had met a woman with a piece of jewelry unlike any other she had seen, a bracelet purchased in Istanbul. She had to have one too. It was essential. Oxygen. She was racing, too driven, too wound up.
She wouldn’t talk about my father. I could tell she was on the extension in her bedroom. She didn’t want him to hear.
I was editing a piece centered on an interview with the mistress of a national political leader. Her quotes were mainly one-syllable words. It was a challenging effort to make it all seem revelatory.
It was not long before Christmas; Graydon had gone to dine with a writer whose daughter—Graydon’s assistant—would, in the not too distant future, set the Dior-draped fashion closet partly ablaze while sneaking a cigarette.
All day long, the company mail conveyance, which looked like a train in a children’s zoo, had delivered gift after gift to Graydon’s office. A photo by Annie Leibowitz of his family was propped up by his office, displaying the cherubic children in Santa hats and holiday pajamas, et cetera. So perfect and adorable were they that I would have gladly drawn a mustache just above the baby’s smile.
Betty had convinced the bracelet’s owner to take a photo of the jewelry, which she was sending. Betty had decided that she would mail the picture to the American embassy in Istanbul and ask someone there to “run out” and get her a copy of it. It was all a little crazy. My mother seemed to feel that the State Department owed her some sort of favor. I guess she needed a little something; the bracelet appeared, something to hope for, something to change the way she was feeling.
She never went out of the house anymore. She was scared to leave my father. She was caged.
My job? To find the address of the embassy and help word the letter. “That’s what you do,” she said, “you write. I never ask you to do anything.”
She didn’t. I had to beg her to let me do anything for her. She was too proud.
I said I was going nuts. I told Betty about the deadline. She wanted the bracelet. I told her about the mistress. “How,” she asked, “did you get mixed up with that?”
Finally, I managed to get her off the phone. I was so busy; she was not one to chat, but this time she wanted to hang on. Was it really the bracelet she wanted? Did she want me to say that this was not our family’s last Christmas together, that my father was not so sick as she was finally letting herself see?
For a solid month I had been shut up in the East Side apartment of the author of the piece, Tessa Neely—a famous reporter with a reputation for destroying lives, personal assistants, and editors. For many days I had desperately begged and cajoled her to actually write, while she, ignoring my pleas, worked out with her trainer and attended Christmas gatherings.
Finally, we had a draft of what seemed hundreds of pages. Graydon, bored with it all weeks ago, had approved the piece but ordered it cut by thousands of words. Tessa was peeved, hissing.