Yvonne was a mother. She was
only thirty-five, but she had a twenty-year-old son.
Yvonne had been a wild teenager.
For the 1960's she'd been wild, or for the '70's, '80's--or for any decade
imaginable in history, forward or past. Her mother had gone to Vassar and her
father had gone nowhere and never would. The bickering in her house often drove
Yvonne to tears. But it was as rare as a January thaw on Hudson Bay that she
would join in with the arguing. Her passions lay elsewhere, were real passions,
unfrustrated and even orchestrated. Yvonne's wildness didn't entail stomping
feet, flouncing tresses and infant acid remarks. It didn't entail sloppy sex in
cars nor beer-induced adolescent vomit, either.
Yvonne's wildness had to do with
the arts and sciences and humanities. And sex. Yvonne had a lover before she was
fifteen. He was a prominent neurosurgeon. He knew she was young, but he thought
she was of age. They met at an afternoon Brahms concert. For a physician he was
quite learned, she had decided, and therefore suitable all the way around as a
first lover.
Yvonne's wildness
also ran in the direction of politics. She campaigned tirelessly for William
Scranton in 1964. Because he struck her as poetic in appearance with his big
Hammurabi eyes. Goldwater and Johnson were physically drab and politically silly
by comparison, she thought. Also, Yvonne sang "We Shall Overcome" at rallies and
was a paid-up member of the NAACP. Also in 1964, as a high school sophomore, she
got the debate team wrought-up about Vietnam, which in domino effect sent all
the high schools in the district and then the county and then the state
scrambling to the back pages of TIME and NEWSWEEK to gather snippets about the
police action.
At fifteen, Yvonne
was widely read. Kierkegaard she'd read, for one, and she actually understood.
But, of course, she made failing grades in a couple of classes and was put on
probation. This meant she wasn't allowed to act in the high school's winter
play. Plays were her central interest, the business of her life. So she joined
the union that winter of 1965, and became a professional actress. She easily won
the Helen Keller part in The Miracle Worker at a small theater.
Absorption in the Helen Keller
role wasn't what made her deaf to the footsteps that echoed hers that night as
she walked home from rehearsal. She could only hear the Rolling Stones. "I can't
get no satisfaction," her little red transistor radio buzzed loudly into the
below-freezing air just before she was grabbed from behind. "Ah hey hey hey,"
buzzed the radio as it was knocked from her hand and skittered to a silence on
the crust of ice along the curb. And Yvonne was dragged behind a store and
raped. It wasn't the Helen Keller role that made her blind to her assailant.
He'd pulled her knit cap over her face. It wasn't the Helen Keller role that
made her screams inarticulate. Her assailant had stuck a filthy rag into her
mouth. Shoved it in when his hand first reached around from behind.
In 1965, there wasn't a great
availability of abortion. But Yvonne had several offers. Her lover offered her
one. "You do remember I've had a vasectomy?" he asked her, even though she'd
already told him how she had become pregnant. At another point in their meeting,
amidst the clouds of nausea and horror Yvonne fought through, the eminent
physician pointed out, "Rape is actually impossible, you know. I could show you
the research. A woman has to want to be raped. So, I'd be more sympathetic about
the whole thing if you had just come to me and told me you'd had an affair with
someone else instead of coming up with the stock rape story. Really very
unimaginative for you, Yvonne. But, as I said before, I'll help you out and then
we can go on as before." That was the end of that relationship. Except for the
bitter memory of it would ever after recur from time to time.
Her parents offered her an
abortion, as well. Actually, they offered her two. One from a doctor they knew.
This was their second offer which they worked out after having calmed down from
their first offer. The first offer, made upon initially hearing from Yvonne that
she was pregnant, was that they would gladly beat her until she miscarried. They
also refused to believe that she had been raped.
And Yvonne refused to have an
abortion. And she refused to have her baby adopted. She was a bit staggered for
a while when she awoke from the anesthetic after delivery and was handed a Black
infant. But she was resolute. She kept him. Named him Julian.
But she also kept to her plans
for a life in theater. Her father never again spoke to her after the birth of
his Black grandson, and her mother was an arctic ice that never thaws. After
Yvonne graduated from night school and left town to pursue her career, it was an
easy and relief filled departure from her parents' home.
Though she didn't relinquish
technical custody of him, Julian spent the first four years of his life bouncing
from foster home to foster home. For the first two years she followed him from
place to place, visiting as many hours every week as she could manage between
school work and a full-time job clerking in a department store. But when she
left the state, there were two years of his life, the second two, when he only
saw his mother in the flesh twice. Toward the end of those two years, he saw her
dozens of times on TV, in commercials during the soap operas his foster mother
watched.
At the end of those
years, when Julian was four, when Yvonne could at last gather him into her life,
she had steady employment in commercials and magazine ads as a model. Her love
was the theater, though, and she was building a résumé there. She had already
had several major parts in minor productions, and one minor part in a major
production. She'd immersed herself for years in lessons. Voice, ballet, acting.
She felt guilty about the money these lessons cost because she could have
retrieved Julian a year earlier if she had had that money in the bank. And she
couldn't sing or dance worth a damn, but the discipline was essential. Any actor
needs the lessons, but Yvonne also needed to know how actors were tormented by
their regimen because her ultimate goal was to be a director.
Yvonne's goal was to put together
ethereals. To compose productions of plays out of all the airy nothings. What
fascinated her was the wit and vision it took to direct a play. To force or to
allow or to entice all the components and systems to hang together as an
integrated piece. To work the live and breathing, in the form of cast and crew
and producers, etc.; to manage the verbal, in the form of contracts,
discussions, gossip, bitchings, meetings, publicity, advertising, and, most of
all, the rehearsals and the playbook itself; and, to handle the material, in the
form of theaters, costumes, scenery, lights and props--to take all of these and
forge them into a complex, attractive, single, large thing. To fuse all the
little vanities and wrinkles and myriads of imperfections into a couple of
golden hours of airy and/or dark art was what compelled Yvonne. The thrill of
creating a perfect NOW was what held Yvonne to theater through all the Hollywood
temptations, through all the bits in bad plays and the bits in good or great
plays that were badly cast, directed or produced. But it was a long time after
Julian came to live with Yvonne before she directed an important play.
Both because of the long wait for
what she wanted professionally, despite getting off to a rapid, solid start in
the business, and because of difficulties with motherhood, the first decade with
her son was an epic strain. Yvonne loved Julian. But she hated him, too. Her
love for him was not motherly. He was a distant prince. They both were forever
deprived of the early bonding phenomenon. Yvonne's attachment to Julian was one
of duty and pride. Her love for him was an aesthetic matter. He was from the
moment of his birth an extraordinarily beautiful child. The first thing she had
noticed in the hospital when he was handed to her was that he was gorgeous; then
she noticed he was part Black.
His beauty had spared him from normal sorts of foster child neuroses. He wasn't
lost for an identity. He had lots of attention. But it wasn't often cooing,
petting, playing or teaching attention. Julian was never cute. He was handsome.
He broke the heart and lifted the spirits of even the most brutish glancers.
Julian's identity was formed by the time he was four in the strange circumstance
that even the least bright and most harried and nastiest of foster mothers would
take time out often to study him. Sometimes for half an hour at a time. And
rather than making Julian uncomfortable, making him think he was being stared at
because there was something wrong, he merely learned he had power. He also
noticed that people spoke to him in slower cadences and in more hushed tones
than they used for other children. At some point, each of his eight foster
mothers had told him, "I wish your mother'd give you up. I'd adopt you."
It was county policy that a child
should remain no longer than six months in a foster home so that no foster would
grow attached to the child, and vice versa. As each foster parent had to turn
Julian over to the welfare department for new placement, they took long looks
back at him. Like pawners of diamonds who in the end look back not with
sentiment or greed, grieving, but look back because the diamond is exquisite.
The result of all of this was
that Julian bore himself like a prince. He had very good manners, was eerily
quiet for a child, and his arrogance was so thorough, so evenly distributed and
uncontested that it was invisible. Part and parcel of the beast. At home Yvonne
sometimes called him Sir Galahad. The pure-but-bastard knight who was allowed to
see God.
The obvious thing to do
with Julian, other than wait on him and put him in a good preschool, was to put
him in commercials. But Yvonne hesitated for a while for all the reasons parents
hesitate about such matters. But all issues concerning a normal childhood for
Julian were already dispensed with by his history and his person. So Yvonne took
him with her to her modeling agency one day six months after he'd come to live
with her. The Creep, as she called her manager in her thoughts, walked her to
the reception area of the agency after they had had a strategy session about her
career in his office. There Julian waited patiently. Yvonne introduced the two.
The Creep, of course, knew that
Yvonne was only twenty. He hadn't known she had a son at all, let alone a
five-year-old! And Black! So as not to betray his shock, the Creep got down in
the patronizing squat in front of the boy.
It was then that he was knocked
out by Julian's looks. Even before Yvonne had lead him to the boy, the Creep had
noticed Julian and envied the fortunes of whatever agent in the office the boy
was waiting to see. But up close the kid was overwhelming. Julian had cocoa
brown eyes with occasional, distinct china blue rays through the irises. His
hair and eyebrows were the same shade of cocoa as in his eyes, and the hair on
his head was ringlets like a Greek statue. His skin was an incomparable shade,
the color all skin of all people would be if there could be such an ideal.
Julian's gentle jaw, high cheek bones, half-inch black eyelashes, baby
doll-perfect ears, Cary Grant-cleft chin, and all the rest of his perfection
were rounded by such a dignity that the Creep dispensed with the coochie-coo
burble he had had in mind. He wasn't thinking of the money with what he did say
to Julian. He was offering the best way he knew to do honor to Julian's
appearance. He said, "Hello, Julian. Would you like to be in commercials?"
Julian crossed his lanky legs,
folded his hands in his lap, and gazed at his mother over the Creep's head.
"Yvonne?" he asked. He called his mother by her name always. Yvonne was what he
used 99% of the time. It meant "mother." Nine-tenths of the remaining percent he
called her Eve. Which meant "mom." The remaining one-tenth of a percent was the
extreme moments. Rare moments when he was ill or terrified of the night. Then he
would call her Evie. This meant "mommie." Or she surmised these were the
translations.
"It'd be a good
idea," she told Julian. "Any time you don't like it, we can stop."
It was as simple as that. She'd
known that the scenario would go as it had. And scenario it was. It was her
flair for directing that had made her do it that way. She could have just
marched Julian in and signed him up and he would have been modeling as soon as
he was. But she wanted impromptu confirmation of Julian's potential from the
Creep. And, besides, she wanted to manipulate the Creep into commitment without
asking for it. She also anticipated Julian's success and his easy grasp of
everything involved in being a model.
What she failed to anticipate was
her jealousy and sense of competitiveness.
At least for the first years when
they were both child starts, she felt the self-contrived pain of comparison.
Julian did ads in state-of-the-art rompers. And posed with high-tech toys. And
munched organic cereals for the cameras. Yvonne was one of those people who can
pass for twenty at sixteen, but who can then pass for sixteen for five years
after turning twenty-one. So Yvonne did detergent/toothpaste/frozen pizza
commercials playing the spoiled, whiney teenager well into her twenties. But
Julian had more offers than Yvonne had for modeling. In the 1970's, there
developed a demand for the Black child model. Especially, at least at first,
WASPish looking Black children. So Julian was "in." But his beauty and his
mannerisms made him "it." Photographers loved to work with him because they got
what they wanted on film invariably and almost always with unusual speed and
ease. The consumers loved him because he was a beauty for all time.
Yvonne, on the other hand, felt
unsuccessful. And she wasn't pretty. She was, in fact, plain. She knew, however,
that she would become beautiful about the time she turned thirty. She did. But
in the meantime, she had to work exceedingly hard at her looks. Though it was
astonishing how she had taken the world by storm--or, at least, by a good
incontrovertible squall in certain precincts of the ad world and some sectors of
the theater world--she could never muster Julian's ease. The mastery, but not
the ease. But for all her mastery, she wasn't getting out of the business what
she wanted. To direct plays. It took a long time. Everything came to Yvonne, but
everything came hard.