Читать книгу Ethel Merman, Mother Teresa...and Me - Tony Cointreau - Страница 12

“MOTHER ONLY LOVES YOU WHEN YOU’RE PERFECT”

“Mother only loves you when you’re perfect!” was a constant refrain in our house when I was growing up.

Although Richard and I knew our parents loved us, our contact with them was limited. At five o’clock every day, our Swiss nurse, Lucy, bathed us, combed every hair into place, dressed us in clean pajamas and robes, and nervously paraded us into Mother’s elegant pink bedroom for a visit. Lucy knew if we had so much as one hair out of place, she would be in danger of losing her job.

Mother would be sitting at her dressing table, making herself even more beautiful for whatever social engagement she and my father had planned for the evening, and would always offer Richard and me each a cheek to kiss gently so as not to disturb her makeup.

From an early age, I engaged in an exhausting pursuit of perfection that was focused on my mother. I worshiped my mother but she had little interest in children’s games or jabber. Sometimes, though, she could be childishly playful and so loving that my father would joke about our “adoration perpétuelle” or our seemingly endless affection for each other. Those were my happiest moments.

Other times she would be irritable and impatient. I thought if I could act like a perfect grownup, she would never notice that I was locked in a child’s body. That way I could be as perfect as I thought she wanted me to be.

Several times a day I geared myself into believing that from that moment on everything about me would be perfect—my looks, my clothes, my conversation—everything—thus ensuring my mother’s undying interest and affection. After a short while, though, I would notice that my clothing was slightly wrinkled, or one single hair on my head was not in place, or maybe it was that I opened my mouth and something that sounded childish came out. Something always had to be fixed before I could start again.

One afternoon when I was in the first grade, Lucy was walking me home from school. As we reached the corner of 62nd Street and Madison Avenue, we saw an elegant, impeccably groomed woman coming towards us. It was my mother! I was so proud. She reached down and showered me with hugs and kisses. After she left us, I was floating on air until I noticed the scuffmarks on my little leather jacket—a stark contrast to her perfection—and I hoped she hadn’t noticed. I wondered how I could avoid ever wearing the jacket again.

I never felt the need to be perfect for my father the way I did for my mother. Father was a gentle, distant man whose only interaction with his children was to pat us on the head when he came home from the office. Only once, when I was little, do I remember having the audacity to climb onto his lap. We were at the seashore in New Jersey, and the Fourth of July fireworks had frightened me. While trying to run away from the noise, I found Father in the hotel bar, smoking a cigar and drinking brandy with his friends. His arms felt so comforting, but within moments I heard him call for my nurse to take me away.

Despite his disinterest in small children, I thought of him as a god whose word was infallible. When I was three or four, old enough to fear the terrors of World War II, I overheard him say to his guests that the Allies would win and we would soon be safe. I believed him implicitly and never worried about it again.

My older brother, Richard, instead of trying to please our parents and be a perfect little person the way I did, put on a tough veneer and rebelled. This was his main form of expression, the best way he knew to make himself noticed.

Throughout my childhood, Richard was also verbally and physically abusive towards me—a situation that everyone else, including Lucy, chose to ignore. I’ll never know the reason for his resentment. Maybe he blamed my birth for having taken away what little attention he had had from our parents for the first two years of his life. I grew up not having any idea that his degree of bullying was not normal behavior for an older sibling.

When I entered the first grade at the Browning School for Boys, I longed for a new mahogany desk that I had seen in a store. I had outgrown the tiny table with baby-sized chairs I had previously used for writing or drawing pictures, and the mahogany desk would be perfect for doing my homework. My parents gave it to me for Christmas—it was my main Christmas present that year—and I cherished it. I loved looking at it, touching it, sitting in front of it, and even the way books and paper and a yellow pencil contrasted with its surface. In less than twenty-four hours, my brother had carved my name across it with a knife. I was heartsick. As usual, our parents said nothing.

And I said nothing more about it; I knew it was futile for me to say anything. By then I had learned that I would simply have to endure whatever hostile acts he invented as retribution for my having been born.

But as I grew older, his abuse became more dangerous to my physical self.

I can never forget the morning he shot me. I got out of bed at six a.m. to go to the bathroom. As I walked away from my bed, which was only a few feet away from Richard’s, he pulled out a BB gun that he kept within reach of his bed. While my back was turned, he took aim, without getting up, and shot a BB into my left buttock.

My screams of pain brought a furious Mother running into the room. Rather than comfort me, she berated me for waking her up, and then she dug in to extricate the BB. Although I had no doubt that she loved me, she had little patience for any disruption in her life.

I was eight years old then, and it took me until the age of eighteen to realize that Richard was never going to be my best friend and buddy. It was time for me to declare my independence and no longer accede to his demands that I be his slave. It was then that he made a move that would be a red flag for any psychiatrist.

After coming home from school one afternoon, I decided to take a leisurely bath. While I was soaking in the warm water on that cold winter day, my brother casually walked into my bathroom, unzipped his pants and urinated on me. I was livid, but my parents, who were having a cocktail in the library, barely responded to my fury at this final insult.

Not long after that, my brother informed me, “You’re the only person I ever wanted to kill!”

It took years after that, during which time we went our separate ways, for both of us to come to terms with our relationship and become real brothers.

But my need to be perfect to please my mother was something that would affect me for the rest of my life. It is something that you can come to terms with, be aware of, and even think you are free of it, but at some level it never really leaves you, and it will pop up again when you least expect it.