Out Came the Sun Read online

  “Quiet,” my mother said, though no one was talking. A man on the screen, carried along by a car, waved and then staggered back. A woman in a hat went to his side. It kept happening, over and over again. Then I started to pick out words I didn’t know: president, assassination, tragedy. My parents were devastated, even though they were Republicans. The phone started to ring; my parents talked in hushed tones to friends and neighbors. My sisters, who were in their teens, came into the room and stood stock-still. They understood the gravity of the situation. When the cake finally emerged, the day didn’t feel like a celebration anymore. Ever since then, I have had a strange relationship with my birthday. It feels both important—it’s the anniversary of the only day on which I came to exist—and dwarfed by history. And because of that, I learned a broader lesson: that an individual is always part of something larger, in both good ways and bad. Whenever I feel like I’m the center of the world, I remember that I’m only ever in orbit, subject to larger forces I can’t control. And whenever I feel like I’m alone, I remember that islands are part of archipelagos.

  * * *

  I FOUND OUT PRETTY EARLY that I was a mistake, that my parents hadn’t sat down and planned out a family that went daughter, daughter, seven-year gap, daughter. But there had been a drunken fishing trip to the Umpqua River in Oregon that had caught my parents careless—and there I was.

  My mother was not young when I appeared, especially by the standards of the day. She had been in her late twenties when my oldest sister was born, and she was almost forty when I came along. “We thought you would be a boy,” my parents said to me, and though they said it in a joking tone, there was a hard truth at the core. After Muffet, my mother had miscarried a baby boy, and the memory of that son who never was hovered over the family. That may have affected Margot, the very next child born who wasn’t that son, and it certainly affected me.

  Being a surprise also meant that I was a wild card, dealt into a game that was already in progress. From fairly early on, I noticed that Muffet and Margot competed for my father’s attention. Or rather, that Muffet had his attention and that Margot was always trying to get it. Muffet’s natural elegance, her ease of being, was complemented by various other talents and abilities. She was amazingly smart. She spoke French wonderfully. She was naturally athletic: give her a tennis racket or a golf club, and within an hour she’d make it look like she was ready for the pro tour.

  Muffet was the apple of my father’s eye, as the cliché goes. But that meant that the other apples started to feel neglected hanging up there on the tree. Margot took it especially hard. In today’s world, where every child is subjected to the most meticulous analysis, Margot would have been assailed by diagnoses: dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity. Back then, she was just considered a problem kid. She was bad at school, disobedient at home, messy, loud, and the source of much of the conflict in the family. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that Margot made herself the source of much of the conflict as a way of getting attention. It was the main way in which she could ensure that she was seen. Sandwiched between a golden girl (Muffet) and a protected baby (me), Margot worked the corners, always doing her best to make enough noise to be noticed.

  Through most of my childhood I was called Marielzy, though sometimes there were variations: Mertels, Mertz, or (courtesy of my father, who loved puns, spoonerisms, and all other kinds of wordplay) Hariel Memingway. Everyone in the family had nicknames. It was as if no one could remember anyone’s real name. Joan was Muffet, of course, and Margot was Marg or Mar-gott, with a heavy Germanic emphasis on the second syllable. My mother had been born Byra Louise Whittlesey, and she had been nicknamed Puck by the Shoshone Indians who used to come into her family’s drugstore, Whittlesey Pharmacy in Pocatello. (Puckinuck meant “little one,” or so we were told, though I’ve never been able to find it in any books about American Indian languages. I hated her nickname from the start because it sounded stout and hard, and my distaste only intensified as I got older and learned how many unfortunate things rhymed with it.) And my father we called Daddy Jack, which was a more palatable version of his full name, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, an unwieldy vehicle for various tributes—Hadley for his mother, Nicanor for a bullfighter friend of my grandfather’s. We also sometimes called him Dr. Hemingstein because he seemed to know everything encyclopedically, or Hemingtrout because of his lifelong love for fishing.

  I had the same middle name as my father and also the same last name. It carried weight from the very start. The Hemingway name was central to American literature. I can’t say that I knew very much about my grandfather’s literary reputation in those very early years. It’s hard to grasp the importance of a famous writer before you can read. But even in those early years, I thought of him as more than just a writer. He was an icon, the kind of person who was never referred to in an ordinary tone of voice. Sometimes his name was whispered, and sometimes it was spoken with a proud ripeness, but it always got a special spin. And Papa, as everyone called him, he was more than just a writer. He was a heavy drinker, legendarily so. He lived that life and he wrote about it and he suffered from it. He was also an adventurer, a man who traveled around the world remaking it in his own image. He went on safaris and took to the sea and sat in the bullfighting arena and watched as matadors delivered the killing thrust to bulls.

  That’s what he was to the world. To me, he was the trunk of my family tree. He had created the man who created me, and because of that he was a source of fascination. Before I was born, before my parents even settled in Mill Valley, they had lived in Cuba near Ernest. Margot would have only been a baby, still in diapers, but Muffet always claimed that she had clear memories of my grandfather and his circle. There’s one particular story she told more than once. She liked to draw, and she was at the pool at the finca with a pencil and a piece of paper. She was working away on a little landscape, and a man came up behind her, appraised her work, and showed her how to draw a flower better. That man? Pablo Picasso. Given Muffet’s penchant for outlandish storytelling, it’s hard to say whether that is true, or even partly true, but I like to believe it.

  There are pictures of my parents in Cuba, a young couple looking alive and excited. My mother and my grandfather got along very well. He was proud of her, he approved of the match his son had made, and she rewarded him by acknowledging his greatness, maybe even flirting with him a little bit in the way that daughters-in-law can. She was conscious of having married into the Hemingway family, and that always turned her toward my father a little bit, even when other forms of unhappiness turned her away.

  What other forms of unhappiness? There were many, and maybe the best wat to present them is to list them now and explain them later, or let them try to account for themselves. There was unhappiness with self. There was unhappiness with situation. There was unhappiness with the mind and its limits. There was unhappiness with the body and its limits. There was unhappiness being placed in close quarters with others who were also unhappy. There was unhappiness that despite those close quarters, the dominant feeling was one of loneliness. There was man-woman unhappiness. There was parent-child unhappiness. There was sibling rivalry and there was solitary pain. I remember one afternoon when I was in my room, making my bed and remaking it so that it would look smooth and almost empty. Margot was sulking because she had argued with my parents. Muffet was out with her friends. My parents were sitting downstairs, about to have guests over for dinner, which meant that they weren’t far away from fighting with each other.

  The family’s problems pressed down upon us all. There’s no question about that. They pushed some people toward the bottle, and others toward irrational anger, and others toward depression, all of which were contributing to the family’s problems in the first place. This was the cycle, and as a result life was extraordinarily stressful in some ways. And yet, in other ways, we were just an ordinary family. The English pediatrician D. W. Winnicott, who was born just a few years before my grandfat
her, popularized the idea of “good enough” parenting, by which he meant that a young mother didn’t need to be perfectly aware of all of her baby’s needs and moods. All she needed to do, in the end, was protect and provide for that child. I think about that idea when I think about my family. There was chaos and there was craziness, and it did some of us in, but others emerged from it largely intact. Does that mean that it was, in some ways, good enough? Should the goal of revisiting my history be to detail the ways in which we were troubled or to highlight the ways in which we were not? When parents make mistakes, should they be condemned or forgiven or understood? When children suffer from those mistakes and make mistakes of their own, should they blame their parents or take responsibility themselves? And does that answer change as those children grow up and become parents themselves? I sometimes felt that I went too easy on my parents, that I accommodated behavior that no one should accommodate. At other times, I felt that I was being too hard on them, that I wasn’t mindful of the challenges they had overcome. Learning to balance those two feelings has produced a third feeling—one of stability and peace and, at length, wisdom. The story of my life, the story of this book, is a story of how unhappiness can bloom like a black flower, and also of how people find ways to prune it back.

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH I SOMETIMES WOKE to the sound of drunken voices raised in anger or saw venomous looks pass between my parents, I didn’t have a clear sense of whether their marriage was functioning properly or was desperately damaged. I was a child. I had no emotional experience, no basis for assessing adult relationships.

  At first, in fact, I think it’s fair to say that I didn’t care about my parents’ relationship with each other. Children assess the world only in terms of how much it provides for them and protects them, and I was no different. What was important to me was that each of them had a relationship with me. I was too preoccupied with noticing how my mother held me (or didn’t), the way she praised me when I did a good job (or withheld praise when she observed something that displeased her). I remember stroking my mother’s bony hand and thinking that I loved her more than I would ever love anyone in the world, even if I was the only one who saw how perfect she could be. As for my father, he was affectionate and playful and wonderful except for those moments when he wasn’t, when drink would take hold of him and drag him into what I only faintly understood as a world of adult anxieties and preoccupations. I remember the smell of dinner wafting through the house and interpreting it as a kind of code. If the food had an American smell, like fried chicken or lamb chops, it meant that my father probably wouldn’t be home for dinner. If it had a more exotic bouquet, French or Italian or Japanese, then it meant he’d be there at the table—he thought of himself as a man of worldly refinement, and international cuisines were one way of expressing that sophistication.

  I was also fully engaged in the process of watching my older sisters. There was enough of an age difference between us that I was still at tadpole stage while they were hopping around the pond. Each of my sisters provided a highly specific example of how to move through life. Muffet was a shining beacon to me, someone I idolized beyond reason. Everything she did was perfect. She had bright eyes and what I thought of, at that age, as good breeding: she said the right things and held herself properly and never seemed crass or unkind. Negotiating my way around Margot required a bit more care and strategy—she could be unpredictable, even mean. Each of them had a specific way of dealing with me, but I was most interested watching them interact with each other. When they fought, which was fairly often, Margot would yell angry things at Muffet, things I was sure that she didn’t mean, and Muffet would pretend she was a princess who was above the fray, who couldn’t hear a thing that was being shouted at her, and she would dance away.

  In Mill Valley, I shared a room with Margot, where each of us had a twin bed. I tried to keep mine looking like I had never been in it. The sheets were pulled tight, and the blankets pulled even tighter over the sheets, and at night when I went to sleep, I tried to get in the bed without disrupting any of it. I wanted to be visible only to the fairies I was sure whizzed around in the high corners of the room. Why did I do that? Some of the reason had to come from Margot, in the sense that she was the opposite, a whirlwind that needed to toss and tumble everything. She was a world-class slob who never put away clothes or toys or anything. She just dropped them when she was done with them and left them where they fell. She moved around restlessly all night and sometimes even got up out of her messy bed and thundered around in the room. This disorder, this need to disarrange, struck me as something unacceptable, something dangerous. It was like sharing a room with a monster. In my terror, I sometimes ran down the hall to my parents’ room, where I slipped into bed without waking them. One night my dad, still sleeping, shifted and accidentally knocked me out of bed onto the floor. I didn’t cry. I just lay there still, breathing hard, trying not to breathe at all.

  It wasn’t like my father to push anyone. He didn’t like conflict or confrontation. He had grown up in a family in which his father, Ernest, always held him at arm’s length, sometimes showing love but more often demanding a certain reserve. My grandfather had rigid ideas about how a boy should become a man. You sent that boy out into the world to find his inner bravery. If there was hunting, you sent him to hunt. If there was fishing, you sent him fish. A little while later, you sent him to a bordello to learn about women, and then suddenly you had a son who was no longer a boy. My father never had much training on how to communicate, ironic for a writer’s son, and he carried that mix of frozen emotion and active engagement with the world into his adult life, into marriage and fatherhood. When he was bothered by tension in our house, which was often, he escaped to hike or fish or hunt. He was more comfortable in the larger world than in the small world of his home, where faces and voices at close range overmastered him quickly. This put him at odds with my mother, who was immensely judgmental and critical and always spoiling for a fight. She wanted to talk about why things were bad and how she feared they would never get better, while he didn’t want to talk at all.

  Alcohol, which was as much a part of the family as any of us, inflamed all aspects of the problem. It made my father more distant and my mother more combative. There were many complicating factors having to do with nearly everything else that adults feel as a form of pressure—money, sex, health, broader issues of parenting and mortality and philosophy regarding the place of human beings in the world. But the fights, rooted in choices that happened long before I was born, accelerated by drinking, often came down to an unbridgeable gap. On the one hand, there was a woman who desired a certain kind of emotional intimacy but who couldn’t restrain herself from looking judgmentally at the people in her life. On the other, there was a man whose discomfort with that glare blinded him to any intellectual sense he had that it might save his marriage.

  When you fight as husband and wife, you also fight as parents. I remember my mother as a hard woman, partly because of the way she looked—bony, severe—and partly because of her tone, which was clipped and critical and rarely without some moral point. “Ladies don’t act that way,” she would say. “We’re not that kind of family,” she would say. She had unpleasant things to say about people who were different than we were, whether they were different as a result of religion or race or culture, and she wasn’t especially supportive of people under her own roof. My mother loved me. I knew she did, but it wasn’t easy for her to show it. There were only a handful of times when she held me close, and I remember them all. She was better at making her affection known through her actions than through her words. She was in the kitchen often, not just on my second birthday—she had studied cooking with Julia Child in Paris when my parents were first married—and I remember her baking bread. I can recall the smell of the bread, which was also her smell.

  But then in the evenings, that smell shifted. The scent of bread disappeared, and in its place was whiskey or wine. Voices were raised, alo
ng with objections. My parents retreated to different sides of the living room. Accusations crossed and recrossed the space between them, picking up momentum. They traveled slowly at first but, in the end, went quickly enough to pierce whatever was in their path.

  * * *

  I WAS WATCHING AN OLD MOVIE recently about a miserable marriage. The wife paced around the living room. Finally, she wheeled around, hands on hips, her eyes wild. “I feel like I can’t get out of here!” said the (over)actress. For me, as a kid, escaping the pressure cooker of the house was easy enough. I just walked out the front door.

  From the time I was little, I was always out in the yard or the neighborhood, exploring groves of trees, skirting the edges of neighbors’ lawns, looking closely at bugs or lizards. I ran away when I was four years old, hoping that someone would come and get me. I waited for a while and eventually turned to make the long journey back home—I was probably only halfway down the block—only to reenter a house filled with cocktails and tension. I’m not even sure they knew I was gone.

  I wouldn’t say that my parents didn’t worry about me, but a melodramatic decampment by a four-year-old couldn’t really compare to the demands of a middle child who was putting up a fight at eleven, or for that matter an older one who was venturing out into the world at fifteen. They had their hands full with Margot—and then, suddenly, unexpectedly, with Muffet.

  When I was young, Muffet had been my beacon. When I was a little older, she only shone more brightly. I loved her for her fashion sense: She had one long black velvet jacket that could look purple in the right light. She wore tall black kneesocks that were just the right mix of demure and provocative. Even when days were drab, she lit up the family. If I was too quiet at times and Margot was too loud at times, Muffet was perfectly modulated. She knew when to have fun and when to buckle down and do work. She knew when to affect maturity, joining my parents for a glass of wine, and when to act more like a kid. Part of the reason I idealized her came from the distance in our ages. When I started going to elementary school, she served as a kind of surrogate parent. She made sandwiches for my lunches, tuna with the crusts cut off.