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According to my grandmother, he never stood a chance.
It didn’t matter that she was the child of Brazilian working-class immigrants or that her childhood was a far cry from the posh milieu my father was accustomed to. My mother had something money can’t buy: enchanting beauty.
My grandmother claims my dad was trapped in my mother’s web from the start, and the story that follows could bring Lana Del Rey to her knees. My mother played hard to get at first. My father begged for a chance. Once he was granted the first date, he was so eager to impress, he whisked my mother off to Milan on their second. I was conceived only a few short weeks later. A hasty marriage followed even though my grandmother begged my father to reconsider. There were red flags even then, ups and downs that didn’t seem sustainable. Their relationship was never peaceful, so it wasn’t all that surprising that the addition of a wailing newborn only exacerbated matters. By this point, what was left of their honeymoon phase abruptly ended. Small arguments grew into screaming matches. They butted heads at every opportunity. From what I’ve been told, my mother felt smothered by my father, and her need for freedom only succeeded in triggering him. He sought control. He wanted the three of us to be happy, to live a life he saw fit. After I was born, he bought a house in Boston, and when that didn’t solve their problems, he bought a second house, bigger this time. Still my mother wasn’t happy. More gifts, more furniture, more travel. My father would have done anything to feel deserving of this woman he loved so desperately.
Their fights continued to grow nastier, both sides spitting venom. Once, during a particularly rough patch, my mother left my father and me for two weeks and went to stay with her parents. My grandmother assumed that was it, the end, surely, but they soon reconciled and rekindled their romance right where they left off, seemingly happier than ever. A few months later, it all happened again.
Perhaps there was genuine happiness sprinkled into those beginning years. I have blips in my memory of us together at the zoo, laughing in front of the zebras, my father carrying me up on his shoulders while my mother took our picture. Another time, she let me have a sip of soda, the carbonation made me sneeze, and some of the soda came out of my nose. I remember collapsing into a fit of giggles.
Unfortunately, those fleeting memories don’t sustain me. They can’t eclipse the nightmare of what their relationship eventually devolved into. Cheating, lies, and public scandals—nothing seemed off limits. My mother slept with my father’s best friend for a year before he found out. He didn’t leave her. Next, it was his business partner. My father grew angry and resentful, but still, he didn’t leave. To cope, he started drinking heavily. My grandmother grew more and more concerned, but my parents pushed her away and kept her at arm’s length because it was easier than bringing her into the chaos. My mother knew Fay Davenport hated her, and she didn’t want to be around my grandmother, which meant my father saw very little of his mother during this time as well.
One terrible vice seemed to lead indirectly into another. The drinking and the cheating and the fighting weren’t enough. To win my mother’s affections, to keep her interest, my father would spend outrageously, generating immense debt in pursuit of pleasure. Anything to keep her happy, anything to use as a balm upon the festering wound of dysfunction.
By this point, I was already attending St. John’s as an elementary school student, and when I had holidays, I was with my grandmother. We would travel anywhere we could, tour the Louvre, sunbathe in Fiji, safari in South Africa. Their neglect was really a kindness at the end of the day, she’s quick to remind me. Allowing my grandmother to step in and raise me when they so clearly weren’t up to the task themselves might have been the least selfish thing either of them ever did, and quite frankly, at the time, I didn’t realize anything was amiss, not when I was really young. I thought it was normal to be away from my parents most of the time. Most kids at St. John’s saw their family sparingly at best. Busy people leading busy lives seemed to be the norm within our elite boarding school world.
Things might have continued on like that forever. The endless cycle of madness would have endured had my mother not died in a car crash, an accident caused by one of her lovers racing through a red light.
After her death, my father hit rock bottom, fell into a drunken chasm and never found his way out. The end for him came from the barrel of a gun.
