More on Mrs. Dr. Seuss

After I discovered who the author of one of my favorite children's books was, I did a little research on her.

Here's her Wikipedia entry "Helen Palmer Geisel was born in 1899 and died in 1967, 24 years before her husband died." They met at Oxford, and apparently she persuaded him not to become a professor, but to be an artist instead.
She published several other books in addition to A Fish Out of Water, and worked as an actress. And, she committed suicide. Wikipedia attributes her suicide to “a series of illnesses (including cancer) spanning 13 years.”

But a story in The New York Times offers a different, somewhat seedier version. Geisel, it seems, remarried. His second wife was a woman named Audrey Diamond.

To let the Times pick up the tale:

Were you thinking the widow of the country's most beloved children's writer must have been a sentimental and devoted mom, admitting only the most traditional family values?

Sorry.

Audrey Dimond was married with two children when she fell in love with Ted Geisel. Mr. Geisel, 18 years her senior, was also married. In the wake of their affair, Mr. Geisel's wife, Helen, committed suicide, causing, as Mrs. Geisel puts it, ''a rather large ripple in the community of La Jolla.'' Mrs. Dimond divorced her husband to marry Mr. Geisel, 64, and when she did, her daughters, 9 and 14, were sent away to school.

''They wouldn't have been happy with Ted, and Ted wouldn't have been happy with them. He's the man who said of children, 'You have 'em and I'll entertain 'em.' ''

''Ted's a hard man to break down, but this is who he was. He lived his whole life without children and he was very happy without children. I've never been very maternal. There were too many other things I wanted to do. My life with him was what I wanted my life to be.'' ….

Oh, ok.

Might be nice to have some of Helen Palmer's words as well. Here's the first Mrs. Geisel's suicide note to her husband:

As one Dear Ted, What has happened to us? I don't know. I feel myself in a spiral, going down down down, into a black hole from which there is no escape, no brightness. And loud in my ears from every side I hear, 'failure, failure, failure... I love you so much ... I am too old and enmeshed in everything you do and are, that I cannot conceive of life without you ... My going will leave quite a rumor but you can say I was overworked and overwrought. Your reputation with your friends and fans will not be harmed ... Sometimes think of the fun we had all thru the years ..." Source: Judith and Neil Morgan. Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography. pg. 195.

I wonder if I will ever be able to look at that picture book -- or any book by Dr. Seuss -- the same way?

I suppose that's a straw man of a question, though. Can we ever look at things we knew as children in the same way, once we've grown up and our innocence is lost? Adult lives are complicated and often messy. It appears that Seuss's life was just messier than average.

It is possible to be both charmed by the work and disturbed by the life. No different from Tiger Woods, really. Have to love the man's inimitable ability as an athlete. His personal life, not so much.

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A Terrible Faux Pas

This is the story of three gifts.

As I write my memoir, I have been struggling to understand my mother's depression and the seething anger that percolated beneath the surface of our family when I was growing up.

Recently, I called my older sister, hoping she might be able to fill in some of the gaps.

“Do you think dad had an affair?” I asked, not expecting an affirmative answer, but not at all surprised when it came.

"Yes."

“What makes you think so?”

“I saw them kissing.”

“Was it Evelyn?”

“Yes. It was when mom took you to the hospital in Denver.” When I was six or seven that is, when I got my doll, Orangeeta.

I suppose I have always wondered about dad and Evelyn, although I rarely allowed these thoughts to become active. Evelyn was a beautiful blonde in her twenties who lived with her parents across the street. I remember a huge smile and bubbly laugh, tight stirrup pants and sweaters. She and my father would go skiing together – my mother never learned to ski - and my father always seemed younger when she was around. Dad liked to joke and be the life of the party, and Evelyn provided an enthusiastic audience.

Somehow it never occurred to me to consider how mom must have felt about this woman. I naively assumed that Evelyn was equally a friend of my mother. Once, when I was 8 or so, I used my allowance to buy mom a picture frame for her birthday. Mom seemed to like it, but her smile froze when I explained that I had chosen the frame because the model in the cardboard picture looked like Evelyn. I was hurt and puzzled when mom shakily asked why I would give her such a thing.

Now, after having experienced the crushing rejection of my own husband’s affair with a woman he found more attractive, I can begin to understand the source of my mother’s pain and bitterness. Later, Evelyn married and moved to Houston, where she and her husband, a professor, were murdered in their bed by a disgruntled graduate student. How did my father grieve this loss? What looks and unspoken words passed between my parents when they heard this news? Whatever they were, my parents kept them private, their arguments, if not their hostility, buried well beneath the surface.

Although I'm sure mom didn't keep score, in my mind, the other gift offsets the terrible faux pas of presenting my mother with a likeness of her husband's pretty mistress.

This gift is also a picture, a cheesy bas relief of a colonial style kitchen, molded in plastic copper. I seem to remember spending 49 cents on it at the five and dime on Main Street when I was quite young. (Allowances were much smaller in those days.) When mom opened the present, I could tell not only that she liked it, but that she was visibly touched.

Much later, when I was an adult, she told me that this tacky picture was one of her favorite gifts. She said that even when I was a little girl, it showed that I paid attention, that I understood her style, and tastes.

This ticky tacky plastic picture hangs in my kitchen. It doesn't match anything, but it reminds me of my mother and the prized gift she once gave to me. Read more!

Frankie Gets Her Groove Back

My ex-husband didn't share my itchy foot. To him, traveling was a waste...a waste of time, of money, of time he could spend making money. Although I managed to cajole him to take a few trips during our 25-year relationship, my itchy foot went largely unscratched. As did most of my other needs.

I was 40 when we divorced, childless, shell-shocked, completely unsure of myself. (My ex-husband told me I was no longer attractive. Apparently, he couldn't forgive me for not being the same thin babe he met at 16. I've never seen the woman he had the affair with, but evidently she was more his type.)

The end of my marriage meant the beginning of my travels. For my first solo trip, I chose Iceland, Sweden and Norway, countries that seemed unthreatening to a middle-aged woman traveling alone. I loved every delicious, frightening, exhilarating moment. If I wanted to stay a few days longer than planned, or spend a whole day in a museum, or jet off someplace else on the spur of the moment, I could. I didn't have to debate or consult with anyone.

I knew I loved traveling, but I didn't expect to enjoy my own company so much. And the last thing I expected was to get my mojo back.

I was in Olso, standing on the stairs outside the art museum, pondering where to go next. A young Brit asked me what I thought of the art. We chatted about the paintings--Munch's The Scream was more pastel than I expected--then moved on to literature as we strolled to an outdoor cafe. As the sun began to set, we decided to seek out a spot for dinner. Somewhere over dessert, it finally dawned on me that this young man (14 years my junior) was attracted to more than my sparkling wit and knowledge of Huckleberry Finn.

It would be a better story if I told you we ended up in the sack, but in truth, nothing happened. At least not on that trip. We corresponded and talked on the phone, and the following March I found myself in England, where we spent a lovely week in a romantic 17th-century cottage on a lake.

Although we're no longer intimate--one of the attractions was that we lived in different time zones -- I'm very grateful to my British friend. It makes me smile when he calls every so often and asks if I'm still with My True Love Frink. He sighs when I say yes and then fills me in on the young hotties he's dating.

So, you may be wondering, what does all this have to do with the polar bear necklace at the top of this page, the object that all this wisdom is supposed to be about?

Fast-forward to the next year. I was traveling in Iceland and decided to take a day-trip to Greenland. In a tiny store, I bought the polar bear carved from reindeer bone as a memento of my trip. On the small plane back to Iceland, I met a travel writer. He, too, found me more attractive than my ex-husband had. We spent a few invigorating weeks traveling around Greenland together. I have fond memories of this trip, even though I ultimately realized that I was more enthralled by the travel writer's job than the travel writer himself.

Today, when I look at my little polar bear necklace, I see more than a $5 trinket. I see adventure, freedom, and friendship. And most of all, I am reminded of my first solo trips abroad, when this middle-aged broad got her mojo back. Read more!

Stumbling Down Memory Lane

Frink and I spent the weekend road tripping through Oklahoma and Arkansas, putting 1200 miles on the car and doing our part to stimulate the economy. It was a combination tour -- some architecture gawking, some reconnecting with family I haven't seen in years. We spent several hours with my 95-year-old Great Aunt (my grandmother's younger sister.) Her stories confirmed some details of family lore and helped set the record straight on others.

For one thing, the peace pipe I thought was my grandfather's actually belonged to my great-grandfather and is much older than I realized. It was my great-grandfather who loved the American West and traveled all over the frontier in a stagecoach, visiting the area that would become Yellowstone National Park; the Rocky Mountains; and Denver ("Queen City of the Plains"), where he met his future wife. Unfortunately, any letters he may have written from these days are long gone, although my aunt has almost every other object her parents ever owned.

Her living room is furnished with a pair of elaborately carved ebony chairs that great-grandfather bought at least 100 years ago in San Francisco, straight off the boat that carried them from China, and with the same Victorian furniture that graced her parents' parlor (although the silk upholstery has been recovered more than once in green velvet.) The peace pipe sat on a fireplace mantel in the house my great-grandfather built in 1909. That house, where my great aunt was born and my father spent his childhood, is no longer in family hands and is sadly deteriorated. The leaded glass windows are hidden behind an ugly metal storm door, and the floorboards on the once-elegant, wrap-around porch (a necessity in the hot, sultry South in the days before air conditioning) are sagging and rotted, covered with green outdoor carpet.

The family home was lost, in part, because of my ne'er-do-well grandfather (husband of The Party Grandma.) In addition to the heroin and alcohol addictions, which I knew about, it turns out that he racked up huge gambling debts. The mafia wasn't much inclined to let such debts slide, even for men with wives and young children. He also ran some kind of scam, selling policies for an insurance company, but instead of turning the money in, he gambled it away. Aunt Jackie, who would have been around 13 or 14 at the time, remembers a lot of closed doors and tears. The debts nearly bankrupted both sides of the family. Grandfather's parents paid part of it, leaving town not long after to reestablish themselves in Texas. My great-grandfather, who had pledged surety on the insurance money, scraped together the rest. This was just before the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. He had to close his once-thriving restaurant across from the town's finest hotel, and the family never recovered financially.

My childhood recollections of the Party Grandma proved accurate, at least as reflected through the eyes of her younger sister, who had to clean up after her for most of her life. Lily liked to have a good time, as two bulging albums of filled dance cards attest. This was during the Roaring Twenties, the days of bobbed hair, short spangled dresses, and the Charleston. Lily fell for a rakish young man who shared her enthusiasms for drinking, dancing, and good times. After he lost everything, Grandma left her husband and came home in disgrace, her two toddlers in tow. It was shocking to be a divorced woman in 1929 Bible Belt America, no matter the reason, and most of grandma's friends dropped her cold.

Lily's poor choice of a husband nearly destroyed my aunt's chances of marrying at all. Even in 1935, when Jackie became engaged, the taint of divorce hovered over the family. Aunt Jackie's beau was forbidden to marry a woman whose sister had disgraced the family by divorcing. He defied his parents and married her anyway, moving into her family home to help her care for Jackie's widowed mother, divorced sister, and her sister's children.

Like the heroine in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, grandma was not "a mother woman." It was Aunt Jackie who raised my father and his sister, who ironed and mended their clothes, who walked with them to Sunday School at the church around the corner. It was Aunt Jackie who consoled my teen-aged father when his mother remarried, Aunt Jackie who consoled him again when he washed out of Naval flight-training at 17 due to poor eyesight, Aunt Jackie who consoled his sister, a young wife whose husband was shot down over Germany, where he was a POW for two years, not even knowing he had an infant son.

I hope every family has an Aunt Jackie, the unsung caretakers and consolers, the keepers of heirlooms and lore.
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The Pope Weighs in on My Marriage

When the Pope visited Vienna in 2007, I was excited to join the crowd of 20,000 who gathered in the rain outside Stephansdom Cathedral to watch the Mass on gigantic television screens. I even bought a souvenir, a little Pope flag. I'm not sure why. I'm not Catholic; indeed, although my true-love Frink once considered becoming a priest and his family are devout believers, I can't help feeling a certain antipathy for the church.

And yet, I derive pleasure, and sometimes even peace and joy, standing in a cathedral, absorbing through its cold marble walls and floors the solemn echoes of ritual and time. There is something beautiful and enviable in pure belief.

As I stood outside Stephansdom that day, I felt richer somehow -- richer for sharing the pomp and ceremony, richer for seeing the beautiful, shining smiles of joy on the faces of five nuns from the Phillipines who stood near me in the crowd. People were waving yellow & white flags, yellow handkerchiefs, and a few red and white Austrian flags. Yellow umbrellas here and there indicated priests who were moving through the sea of people giving communion. (It’s a good thing it had stopped raining; I might have had an awkward moment or two, since the umbrella I carried was that precise shade of yellow.) After the mass, the Pope came out and addressed the crowd. His message, in German, was largely lost on me, although I read later that he encouraged people to have more babies and to respect the Sabbath.

The crowd was surprisingly quiet. I didn’t hear a single cell phone ring or anyone speaking much above a whisper, except for one guy with a shaved head and tight blue and white checkered pants. Waving his souvenir flag, he commented loudly to the woman beside him, which elicited many frowns.(A few days before the Papal Mass, I toured Stephansdom. We were inside the gated area in the nave when I noticed a little mustached, Italian man crawling under the ropes that separate the general tourists from those who have paid for a guided tour. He rushed up to a young guy in our group, gesturing and saying something rapidly in a muted hiss as he snatched the black cap from the young man's head. The tour guide, a cherubic-faced fellow, placidly ignored this and kept talking about the lizards and frogs carved along the balustrade of the pulpit).

The press reports that people in Austria have become “apathetic and hostile” to the church, due to recent scandals and a heavy church tax, but from where I stood, I couldn’t see much indication of that. And yet, I understand that perspective all too well.

I bridle against the church's prejudice against women, the certainty that people who share my gender are lesser beings, unfit for the priesthood. I find it hard to ignore the weight of history, from the Crusades to sex scandals involving children. And the sheer wealth of the church is disturbing. I'll never forget standing before an altar of solid gold in a barrio in Mexico City, where just outside children in rags begged in front of tin and cardboard hovels.

And then there is the fact that my own marriage was annulled by the Catholic Church.

We weren't even Catholic, my ex-husband and I. And yet, one day, six or seven years after our divorce, a letter arrived from my ex, telling me that he had become Catholic and was having our marriage annulled. A few weeks later, I received a letter -- all officious with burgundy logos and seals--from the Archdiocese announcing that it was conducting a Tribunal. After taking evidence and testimony from those who deemed themselves qualified to dissect our marriage, it would make its ruling. I declined to participate, save for writing one short paragraph summarizing the reasons for our divorce.

That tribunal, and the inevitable annulment that resulted, was the ultimate betrayal in a marriage rife with lies and deception. To fully understand why, I have to take you back to to the last months of my 25-year marriage. After five miscarriages, I was pregnant again.

By this time, I had learned to wait until the fourth month to tell my family I was expecting again. When I shared the news, my mother sent me a pile of hand-made receiving blankets, decorated with tiny rose buds in blues and yellows. I began turning our guest room into a nursery and sounding out names. A boy would be Michael. A girl (which I longed for), would be named Annie. One day, as we were walking to the car, I shared this name with my ex (who shall be known here as Matt). His response -- an abrupt snap of the head, a piercing look, a mumbled "it sounds childish" -- seemed odd.

I soon learned why. Matt was having an affair with a nurse at work. By cruel coincidence, her name was Annie. And she, too, was pregnant with Matt’s child.

To this day I cannot utter the woman’s name. (In my house, she is known as “The Slut.”) Nor can I remember the exact sequence of events: how far along I was when I learned the news, how long after this I lost my baby. Some scenes, however, are crisp and clear: Matt choking out the words. Me rocking back and forth, sobbing hysterically, hurling questions and accusations. How could a doctor, a doctor of all people, be so careless, so stupid? Matt falling down the stairs, his face a torment as he tried to escape my devastated wrath. Sitting in my OB’s office, cheerfully telling him that this time my baby was going to make it, only to see by his grave expression that I was wrong. Lying on a table as the ultrasound wand pressed into the gel on my belly, the machine beeping and clicking, Matt making the sounds and expressions of a caring husband at my side. Throwing the flannel receiving blankets my mother had made in a garbage bag and shoving them in the back of a closet. Praying that The Slut would lose her baby, too.

Matt said he was not in love with the woman and wanted to save our marriage. Early in our separation, Matt would visit me, the baby seat in his car a cruel reminder of the child that we – that I – would never have. Finally, I stopped seeing him. I needed time alone, to think, to feel my own emotions without having to deal with his. I soon realized that I would never be able to accept this child and his mother into my life. We divorced, and not long after, Matt married the mother of his child.

I won't lie and say it was easy, but after long years in Al-Anon and the hard work of honest self-assessment, I had come to terms with Matt's betrayal -- had even grown grateful to the woman who rescued me from a disastrous, unhappy marriage that I had been too loyal or too frightened to end. Then, out of the blue, that Pronouncement from the Tribunal landed with a slap on my counter. I had been annulled. The Slut's marriage to Matt was now sanctified, now bore the official imprimatur of the Church. And mine had been annulled. The irony was breath-taking.

So I hope that you will understand my mixed emotions when I look at my little Pope flag or visit a cathedral. It's all there -- the awe and the anger, the envy of pure belief and the disdain for officious hypocrisy.

And I hope you will forgive the little taste of schadenfreude I felt when I learned that Matt and The Slut are now divorced and engaged in an ugly court battle. I wonder what it will cost to get this one annulled? Read more!