Oh the Glory of it All - Couverture souple

Wilsey, Sean

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0670916102 ISBN 13 : 9780670916108

Editeur : Viking, 2005

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Prologue

EXCESS!

IN THE BEGINNING we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess.

WE WERE MOM and Dad and I—three palindromes!—and we lived eight hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; an apartment at the top of a building at the top of a hill: full of light, full of voices, full of windows full of water and bridges and hills.

Mom was the center. Mom was irresistible. Whatever she was saying or wearing or smelling of was captivating—all our senses were attuned to her. As soon as I was old enough to walk I tried on her shoes and evening gowns and perfume, admired and wanted to be like her, so much that they had me seeing a shrink by the time I was three. The shrink said I needed to spend more time with my dad. But how? Mom was irresistible.

Mom had published two books—one about throwing parties, one about battling malevolent ghosts—and was working on a third, about her childhood in Texas and Oklahoma.

As far as I could tell Dad's job was to please Mom. He was solicitous and full of care. He gave Mom everything she wanted. He helped her want things she did not know to want.

Early every morning, Mom, Dad, and I took walks around Russian Hill in matching blue jumpsuits with white piping, Royal Tenenbaums–style.

ONE SUNDAY, on a shrink-mandated father-and-son outing, Dad took me across the bay on the ferry, re-creating the commute he made as a boy, before the Golden Gate Bridge was completed, from Catholic school in San Francisco to his home in Marin. Halfway there it started to rain, and we didn't have any umbrellas, so when we arrived we stood in a doorway near the water.

Dad hadn't shaved since Friday morning before work, and he looked rough. Even I could see it. Our matching jumpsuits were sad without Mom. Dad lit a cigarette. We looked out at the water.

A man with a box and an umbrella strode past, glanced at us, stopped fifty feet on, turned, walked back, and handed the box to Dad.

"I can't give you anything else," he said. "But take this."

Dad said, "Thank you," and took the box.

The man looked at me, looked at the ground, walked away.

Dad smoked till the man was out of sight, then he threw his cigarette in the gutter and opened the box.

"He gave us donuts!" I shouted.

Dad looked at me and started chuckling. "That guy thinks we don't have any money." He took a donut, laughed again, and blew powdered sugar out of his mouth.

I ate a glazed, and then a chocolate with sprinkles. Dad ate all the rest, steadily, devouring them with great relish and no preference for jelly over oldfashioned over chocolate or bear claw—only pleasure, and great amusement.

AT HOME I was either left alone, or overwhelmed with attention. Mom and Dad were either oblivious or hyperaware. They disappeared on a trip for seventeen days and left me with the maid. On Mom's return I ignored her when she called my name. She had my ears examined. They were infected. I needed surgery; tubes installed to drain them. I was four. Mom set herself the task of increasing my medical vocabulary, to make the hospital less frightening. (When an orderly rolled me into the operating room I asked him, "Are you the anesthesiologist?") I received books to read during my recovery, and became the kind of kid who spends all his time alone, reading, till Mom noticed my left eye didn't turn all the way to the left; then it was back to the doctor.

I HAD a friend down the hill, in the long shadow of our building, whose mother cooked us meatloaf. When I discovered meatloaf, and that other mothers regularly cooked it for their children, I went home and said, "Other mothers cook.

Why don't you cook?"

Without hesitation Mom said, "Other mothers don't write books."

It was the end of that question for me. And thenceforth, as if to compensate for not cooking the food we were eating, she began reading from her books at the dinner table.

Mom was a captivating reader. She'd won the all-state elocution award in Oklahoma, in the forties, and when she told a story, especially a story about her childhood, Mom made me love words.

BUT MOM had lots of other people to captivate. The apartment was headquarters for a salon-cum-luncheon—called the Roundtable—where Mom hosted conversation. The guests were notorious strangers. They always came, if for no other reason than to see the view. They were: union leaders; unionized prostitutes; Alex Haley; Native American secessionists; Agnes Moorehead; radical lesbians; Nobel laureates; Joan Baez; Black Panthers; Dear Abby; an astronaut; Eldridge Cleaver; Jessica Mitford; Gloria Steinem; a Catholic priest; a woman who had murdered her husband; Shirley Temple; a lesbian priest; Betty Friedan; welfare mothers; Werner Erhard; a Soviet ballerina; Daniel Ellsberg. And so on.

Jessica Mitford was an old British woman with huge round glasses who proclaimed, "When I die I've given instructions that I want to be buried like this," and then pulled one corner of her mouth up and dragged the other one down, and eyed the other guests (the mayor, a plastic surgeon, Agnes Moorehead, Shirley Temple). "I want to make sure you all check on it. That's the way I want to look." Eldridge Cleaver brought Dad velvet flower-embroidered shorts that had a codpiece hanging down the front. Once I came home from school and no one was in the kitchen. The cook and the housekeeper—in French maid's uniforms— had joined the table for lunch with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. (Said Mom, "They were the perfect people to talk with domestic workers about the difficulty of working in someone else 's home.")

Mom presided over the Roundtable with a silver bell that she rang to get everyone's attention. After ringing the bell Mom directed the conversation by asking questions. And as I went about my only-child activities—searching out a wire stripper to connect a camera battery to a nail and make a laser gun; constructing an orange juice dispenser out of Dad's discarded WaterPik dental hygiene machine (so I could have breakfast in my room); synthesizing an alcohol-free imitation wine; using bendable drink straws to siphon and circulate cold water throughout my bathroom during a heat wave—words found their way into my newly drained ears:

MOM: You were once behind walls, weren't you? In a concentration camp?

WOMAN'S VOICE: I was a refugee. My country is Yugoslavia, and we are the troublemakers of the world, you know.

DAD: Just you?

WOMAN'S VOICE: In 1941, when the Germans took over, these invaders, the Germans and Croats, caught a million Serbs and killed them overnight and sent them down to the river. It's not something to talk about at lunchtime.

MOM: We talk about everything at lunchtime here!

The battery heated the nail until it turned bright orange!

MOM: How do you feel you have changed?

MAN'S VOICE: I was a Marxist. I had rejected spiritual values. But then . . . I saw the design in nature and I was convinced there was a Creator. . . . It was a bad time for me. I wanted to go home to the United States. Friends of mine got into power and I thought they would help me but they didn't. The whole bottom of my world fell out. I went into a deep depression. I felt trapped. I had a wife and two children and my children didn't even speak English. They were going to French schools and becoming little Frenchie fried people. One night on my balcony I just caved in. This is down near Cannes on the Mediterranean coast. A lot of people ask me, like, were you drunk, had you been smoking? I was not high on anything. I was looking at the moon, a full moon, and I saw these shadows on it. I saw myself, my own profile on the moon. I had been thinking of killing myself. I had the pistol. And I wondered if what I was seeing was a sign that death was near. And then my image fell away and on the moon I saw a procession of my heroes: Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels. And then the image of Jesus Christ. That was an unwelcome image because I didn't have anything to do with him. It was like the last straw. I started crying. Just gushing out, real violent. I was trembling and I had the sense that my soul was trembling. I was down on my knees hanging onto the rail. And then I ran inside for a Bible. And it was there, this book I never read. I found the Twenty-Third Psalm, which I had learned as a child. But I didn't know where to find the Lord's Prayer. That's what happened. O.K.?

The WaterPik fired orange juice across the room!

MOM: Has winning the Nobel Prize been helpful in your work?

WOMAN'S VOICE: Oh, yes!

I put the synthetic wine in a wine bottle. Dad drank it with dinner and couldn't tell the difference!

WOMAN'S VOICE: What propels you to get rich?

DAD (in a voice that suggested maybe he was putting everyone on, or maybe he was completely serious): Greed.

My bathroom got cooler and I ran downstairs shouting, "Mom, Dad—finally one of my inventions works!"
MOM LOVED her luncheons. Mom loved emotions. "All these strangers, they sobbed like babies," she told me recently. "And they became my dear, dear friends." The apartment was an accelerator for emotions, a controlled environment where they could be witnessed without effect. Neutralized and admired. We were eight hundred feet above it all. Little did I—who had known only happiness or loneliness—know the variety emotion could provide. That pain moved in mysterious ways. That it could fly, swim, tunnel; was amphibious, ambidextrous, aerodynamic; a breeze and a smothering blanket and a storm. That emotions would knock our tower down to the ground, and none of these strangers would help us.

WHEN I WAS five Mom and Dad rented a house in the Napa Valley, and Dad befriended a man called Frenchie Meyers who wore suspenders and owned a junkyard nearby—fifty acres covered in thirty-foot heaps of smashed cars, flattired trailers full of old glass doorknobs, two aircraft hangars (one stuffed full of forklifts, tractors, and power tools and guarded by Sam, a glass-blue-eyed wolf dog, the other converted into a machine shop and guarded by an anvil of a bulldog named Jezebel). Dad let me play in an old school bus parked beneath an ancient willow tree. How old? Centuries old, Dad informed me. I played for hours beneath that green canopy, in that yellow bus, while Dad talked to Frenchie.

Dad made Frenchie an offer to buy it all, said Frenchie could keep on living in his little house on the edge of the junk, rent-free, forever. Frenchie accepted. Dad built a hill—flood protection—and Mom's dream house on the hill. Mom landscaped the junk into trees and lawns and an hourglass-shaped carp pond. The school bus got towed. I built a tree house in the willow. I tried to construct a car out of Frenchie's leftover junk. On the weekends Dad wore a JC Penney work shirt and led a crew of men planting grass, grapes, and flowers, and shoring up the eroding banks of the Napa River, which ran along the property's edge. Perfect happiness started flowing. Mom brought Dad cooling beverages while he worked. We had picnics. I made friends with a Mexican kid down the road, and we hammered nails into the tree house. At night Dad showed us World War I movies on an old projector. Mom's best friend, Dede Traina (pronounced Tryeen- nah), had a place nearby, and she was over all the time. Hundreds of people came to our housewarming party, where a Catholic priest blessed the premises and Benny Goodman played live. This party blended into another and another. The biggest was a Gone with the Wind ball, when Dede upstaged everyone by wearing Scarlett O'Hara's green-and-white hoop dress from the movie, refabricated by the original designer; it was like the willow tree, and I crawled underneath, following her sons, Todd and Trevor. There was a whole world under there!

Mom said, "Sean, get out!"

Dede said, "No, he can stay."

I wanted to spend my whole life there.

MOM'S PREVIOUS best friend had died in a mysterious fire while living in Mom's old apartment, shortly after my parents were married. Dede Traina arrived in Mom's life in the early seventies (around the same time my shrink told Mom to stop spending so much time with me). Dede was new to San Francisco, fifteen years younger than Mom, in her early thirties, unhappily married. Mom liked Dede. Dad liked that Dede came from an old East Coast family. Dede was grateful; every time she visited our house she brought gifts. Once it was a coffeetable book of "history's great beauties."

She climbed up on Mom's bed and they looked at it together. Helen of Troy, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie O.

"You're one of them, Pat," Dede said.

"Oh, Dede, you are making my day," Mom said, beaming.

Before long Dede was the first person Mom would call in the morning, and the last she 'd talk to at the end of the day.

One time, when my parents were out, Dede appeared in my doorway.

"Come with me, Sean," she said. "I've got a surprise for you."

I wondered how she had gotten into our house. But it didn't matter. She was Mom's best friend. I went downstairs, got in her car, and we drove to the supermarket. She took me to the candy aisle.

"Let's pretend it's Halloween," Dede said. "And we can have as much candy as we want."

I was tentative. Yeah? Was this possible?

Dede started grabbing bags off the shelves, opening them, and handing me Reese 's Peanut Butter Cups and mini Hershey bars. She was like a kid with the power of an adult. She told me I could eat them right there in the aisles, demonstrated, and nobody stopped her. It was as though she owned the store. Maybe she did own the store! I started eating. We filled a cart with candy. I was flying on sugar. In the checkout line I chewed a Starburst and drank a Coke. Dede drank a Pepsi Lite and ate hunks of something called almond roca.

IN SAN FRANCISCO Dede and John Traina lived in Pacific Heights, a neighborhood of mansions not far from Russian Hill but stodgy by comparison. During the week she came over to our house by herself. Dede became a member of the family, part my big sister, part Mom's little sister, part something else. Dede was kooky, like family, too.

One day, after lunch, she told Mom and Dad and me how full she was, and asked, "Do you want to see how I get into my really tight jeans? I have to lie down, like this." She lay down, unzipped—pink underwear stood out against the kelly green of her jeans—"and then wriggle in." She pulled the waist down to demonstrate, and then started yanking it back up as she swiveled her hips side to side on the carpet.

Very difficult, I thought.

WHEN I WAS nine I asked Dad about sex. He drove me to the Fairmont Hotel, on nearby Nob Hill, parked across the street in a loading zone, and told me to wait in the car.

Then he crossed the semicircular drive of the hotel, held the door for a woman, exchanged a pleasant word, smiled (lips closed to hide his stained teeth), and disappeared into the building. I looked around Nob Hill: gray Grace Cathedral (where I'd be going to school soon); red-brick Pacific Union Club (an institution Dad reviled—though later joined—because "somebody blackballed me for being married to a J...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

"In the beginning we were happy. And we were always excessive. So in the beginning we were happy to excess." With these opening lines Sean Wilsey takes us on an exhilarating tour of life in the strangest, wealthiest, and most grandiose of families.

Sean's blond-bombshell mother (one of the thinly veiled characters in Armistead Maupin's bestselling Tales of the City) is a 1980s society-page staple, regularly entertaining Black Panthers and movie stars in her marble and glass penthouse, "eight hundred feet in the air above San Francisco; an apartment at the top of a building at the top of a hill: full of light, full of voices, full of windows full of water and bridges and hills." His enigmatic father uses a jet helicopter to drop Sean off at the video arcade and lectures his son on proper hygiene in public restrooms, "You should wash your hands first, before you use the urinal. Not after. Your penis isn't dirty. But your hands are."

When Sean, "the kind of child who sings songs to sick flowers," turns nine years old, his father divorces his mother and marries her best friend. Sean's life blows apart. His mother first invites him to commit suicide with her, then has a "vision" of salvation that requires packing her Louis Vuitton luggage and traveling the globe, a retinue of multiracial children in tow. Her goal: peace on earth (and a Nobel Prize). Sean meets Indira Gandhi, Helmut Kohl, Menachem Begin, and the pope, hoping each one might come back to San Francisco and persuade his father to rejoin the family. Instead, Sean is pushed out of San Francisco and sent spiraling through five high schools, till he finally lands at an unorthodox reform school cum "therapeutic community," in Italy.

With its multiplicity of settings and kaleidoscopic mix of preoccupations-sex, Russia, jet helicopters, seismic upheaval, boarding schools, Middle Earth, skinheads, home improvement, suicide, skateboarding, Sovietology, public transportation, massage, Christian fundamentalism, dogs, Texas, global thermonuclear war, truth, evil, masturbation, hope, Bethlehem, CT, eventual salvation (abridged list)—Oh the Glory of It All is memoir as bildungsroman as explosion.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Viking
• Date d'édition: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0670916102
• ISBN 13: 9780670916108
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 496