In Pieces Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2018 by Sally Field

  Cover design by Anne Twomey. Cover photograph by Harry Langdon. Cover copyright © 2018 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  grandcentralpublishing.com

  twitter.com/grandcentralpub

  First Edition: September 2018

  Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Additional copyright information is here.

  Print book interior design by Marie Mundaca.

  Library of Congress Cataloging Number: 2018946762

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-6302-5 (hardcover), 978-1-5387-6304-9 (ebook), 978-1-5387-1469-0 (large print), 978-1-5387-6431-2 (B&N Black Friday signed edition), 978-1-5387-6430-5 (B&N.com signed edition), 978-1-5387-6429-9 (signed edition)

  E3-20180816-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1. My Grandmother’s Daughter

  2. Dick

  3. Jocko

  4. Libbit

  5. What Goes Up

  6. That Summer

  PART TWO

  7. Gidget

  8. Get Thee to a Nunnery

  9. Wired

  10. Together

  11. Second Season

  12. Peter

  PART THREE

  13. Transition

  14. Culpable

  15. Hungry

  16. Sybil

  17. The Bandit

  18. Treading Water

  19. Norma

  20. The End of the Beginning

  21. Me, My Mother, and Mary Todd

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Additional Copyright Acknowledgments

  Newsletters

  For Peter, Eli, and Sam

  And all of theirs

  My mother and me.

  Prologue

  THERE WAS NO proscenium arch, no curtains or lights to create an illusion, no proper stage at all. It was just a classroom with all the chairs and their seventh-grade occupants pushed aside in disorganized clumps.

  It wasn’t even a real classroom. The entire school had originally been part of an army hospital built at the end of World War II, specializing in central nervous system injuries, syphilis, and psychiatry. It had once even included a small compound for prisoners of war—a building now stuffed with classrooms and students held captive until the sound of the bell. This particular room was long and narrow, each side lined with windows, which made it look exactly like a hospital ward and nothing like a junior high school drama class. But on that day, through my twelve-year-old eyes, I saw only the faint interior of a swank apartment.

  I remember watching my feet as they stomped across the worn wooden floor, and for one instant the feet weren’t mine anymore. Then I was back in the classroom again, wondering what to do with my hands, my armpits sweating so much I dripped. I stopped at the door (a wobbly contraption hinged to a freestanding frame made by the boys in wood shop), took hold of the handle, then turned back toward the thirteen-year-old playing my uncouth gangster boyfriend. With one clammy hand gripping the knob, and my whole body twisted around to face the actor—my arm awkwardly wrapped in front of me—I stood listening to the boy deliver his dialogue. When he had finished spraying words through his braces, I paused a beat, then yelled, “Drop dead, Harry,” and exited in an indignant huff, slamming the door behind me. That was it, my first moments as an actor, a scene from Born Yesterday and my pubescent version of the brassy Brooklyn bombshell Billie Dawn.

  I wasn’t good. I knew I wasn’t. It was like Heidi, the little goat girl, had taken a stab at Hedda Gabler. But it didn’t matter. A new sensation had brushed past me and for one moment, I felt free. My body moved—maybe not gracefully but all on its own—without me telling it where to go, tiny flashes when it didn’t belong to me at all, and I was watching from far away with no anxious sense of time. In those cracks of light, the pressure of what people thought of me or didn’t think of me, who they wanted me to be or didn’t want me to be, completely stopped. A bell had rung, everything focused and sharpened. I could hear myself. Then it was gone again.

  In the eighth grade—a year later—I had my first performance night in the school auditorium. For the first time I walked on a stage in front of an audience of parents and friends, there to watch, among other things, my Juliet—not the whole play, just two scenes: the potion scene and the death scene. My mother drove me home afterward, and I clearly remember sitting in that dark car beside her. I desperately wanted to know what she thought but was afraid to ask, so I just watched her drive. Sometimes the headlights of an oncoming car would light up the whole interior, making it seem even darker after it passed. But when her face was bright with light she looked at me, and as if we were hiding from someone, she whispered, “You were magical.”

  I whispered back, “I was?” Then everything was dark again and I could barely see her at all.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “Just that.” Another flash of headlights lit up the front seat and I could see her mouth edging toward a smile, the light bleaching her beautiful face white, then slowly fading to black.

  PART ONE

  There is a pain—so utter—

  It swallows substance up—

  Then covers the Abyss with Trance—

  So Memory can step

  Around—across—upon it—

  As one within a Swoon—

  Goes safely—where an open eye—

  Would drop Him—Bone by Bone.

  —Emily Dickinson

  Little Ricky and Sally in 1948.

  My beautiful mother with all three of her children.

  1

  My Grandmother’s Daughter

  I WAIT FOR my mother to haunt me as she promised she would; long to wake in the night with the familiar sight of her sitting at the end of my bed, to talk to her one more time, to feel that all the pieces have been put into place, the puzzle is solved, and I can rest.

  Sometimes I think I’ve seen something out of the corner of my eye and I stop still in the middle of my Pacific Palisades kitchen, looking for the flutter of a sign; or I’m walking in the West Village, headed to my New York apartment, loaded down with groceries, when I hear her laugh ring out. I turn in circles, looking for her. Where are you, Mom? Why won’t you come?

  This isn’t new, this longing I have for her. It’s the same ache I had when I was five, sitting on the bench outside the nurse’s office at school, feeling embarrassed and ashamed because I had once again panicked for no apparent reason. I waited and waited, counted to ten hundreds of times, knowing that if I could see her eyes I’d be safe. Then suddenly, as if I’d conjured her out of wanting, there she was. My throat would lock as I watched her coming toward me, hugging her purse to her stomach like a hot-water bottle, and when she go
t close enough, I’d jump to my feet, hiding my face in her legs.

  I still don’t know why grammar school was so agonizing for me. Still can’t figure out whether the agony was waiting for me in the school or I brought it in with me. Either way, it didn’t matter because nothing and no one could distract or engage me enough to lessen the dread I felt. I don’t remember having any friends or playdates—basically, in those days no one had playdates, or they weren’t called playdates. But whatever they were called, I didn’t have any. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I hated all the games at recess. “Red Rover, Red Rover,” for instance, which was not only terrifying but, let’s face it, a truly mean, totally stupid game. A group of kids would lock their arms together, then call the other students, one at a time, to run full blast into their wall of arms. If the runner was successful, the wall opened, and that runner was allowed to join the barricade. I hated this no-win situation of a game. I was the smallest one, and even if they did call my name, I couldn’t break through, only bounced off and had to return to the land of the losers. But there was always the chance that they wouldn’t call my name, and I’d have to stand there as everyone else broke through, joining the line one at a time, until they were all holding hands and looking at me, alone.

  I guess you’d have to say that in my early school days—at five and six—I was a problem. A little stress case with a brand-new family and a constant stomachache that no one could explain. I remember my mother’s concern, but I certainly couldn’t tell her how to help me because I didn’t have a clue why I felt so anxious, why I wanted to hide from everyone and couldn’t act like the rest of the kids. Maybe I needed a good hard push toward socialization, and maybe my loving mother was too consumed with her own evolving life to realize that. But I’ll tell you right now, if she had tried to organize a little “get-together” for me with one of those five-year-old strangers, I would have had a conniption fit, and my mother was not a battler. So as I watched everyone picking their friends, forming clusters of companions, I felt the hill to friendship getting steeper.

  Then again, maybe it wasn’t about that at all. Maybe I just needed my mother.

  I have a memory of clinging to her, a vision so dimly lit that it slips from my grasp like a dream after waking. Barely out of toddlerhood, I have blond-brown bangs hanging in my eyes and one very chapped thumb tucked into my mouth. With the other hand, I’m gripping her robe at the neck, snugly hooked onto her hip as she stands, slowly stirring a pot on the old gas range. Behind us, my brother, Ricky—who is two and a half years older—sits on the hollow wooden box of a bench, rhythmically banging his feet while holding a tiny metal cowboy in one hand and a matching Indian in the other, hopping them around the oilcloth-covered table. My mother’s eyes are focused on a book lying open atop the crowded butcher-block counter, and after a moment, she turns her head as if to look out the window, then speaks in a deep, loud, slightly false voice. Ricky looks up at her, then out the window to see who’s there, while I watch for my brother’s reaction. But when she stops abruptly, shakes her head, and looks back down at the book, we relax again into her cocoon.

  I still have that book. All those books of hers I now own, hardcover Modern Library editions of Ibsen, Odets, and Chekhov, her barely faded notes jotted on the pages… the same copy she was using to memorize Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in that envelope of a kitchen.

  Margaret Morlan had eyes the color of dark chocolate, laced with feathery black lashes, and was clearly drop-your-jaw beautiful. She resembled Jennifer Jones, except she had a cleft in her chin and a kind of lit-up giggle in her face that left Ms. Jones standing in the shadows, as far as I was concerned. When she looked at me, it was never through me, but into me, lifting me off the ground in an invisible embrace. I wonder if everyone felt that way. If they did, I don’t think she was aware of it, of her power. I never felt that she leaned on her looks in any way, though maybe she did before I knew her, before she was my mother. I wish I’d known her then, wish I had known what hopes and dreams she might have had.

  Margaret in 1945.

  I do know that in 1942 she was a twenty-year-old sophomore at Pasadena City College, where she’d been studying literature. Then when she met a soldier and married him three months later, her education came to a screeching halt. And maybe that’s what she’d been hoping for, to marry someone and to travel with him, to immediately move to Camp Barkeley in Texas. And when he was shipped overseas a year later, promising to write as often as he could, she waited for his return back in her California home, lovesick and pregnant. Maybe that’s exactly what she wanted to be: a wife and mother. But one fortuitous night, when her husband was far away in the war and my brother was barely a year old, when the world was caught in a tremendous struggle, something reached out of nowhere and changed my mother’s life.

  It happened when a man named Milton Lewis approached her while she was sitting in the audience of the Pasadena Playhouse, waiting for the curtain to go up. “Excuse me,” he said. “I love how you look. Would you like to come to Paramount Pictures tomorrow for a meeting?”—or something to that effect. He then handed her his card, verifying that he was indeed a talent scout for Paramount. The next day, she traveled to Hollywood, where she met with Lord knows who and said God knows what (and as I picture her in my mind, with her soft shy demeanor, only now does it dawn on me how much gumption that must have taken on her part). She was immediately put under a three-year contract. Suddenly, without looking for it, my twenty-three-year-old mother had a career.

  No one in her family had ever had a career. The men worked to earn money as best as they could: Her father had been a piano salesman, her brother a bank manager, and the whole time my mother was married to my father, he was in the army. They had jobs, but nothing anyone would call a career. Certainly, none of the women had ever dreamed of such a thing. But now, my not-yet-mother had one. Leaving her baby son in the arms of her own mother, my grandmother, she would take a bus from Pasadena to Hollywood, then transfer to a streetcar that took her within walking distance of Paramount Studios, where she was given movement classes and elocution lessons, all in an effort to help her walk and talk like Jean Arthur or her look-alike, Jennifer Jones.

  Most important, my mother was also given the chance to study acting with the brilliant Charles Laughton, eventually becoming a member of his acting company, the Charles Laughton Players, performing Chekhov and Shakespeare in a small theater on Beverly Boulevard, on the outskirts of Hollywood. Not only did she find herself onstage with Mr. Laughton, but she had the amazing good fortune to be directed by him as well. These moments stayed alive in her always.

  Much of this change and challenge happened before the war was over, before my father had returned, and before I was born. My memories begin here, with the book, memorizing words, and the comforting smell of noodle soup… all connected to this world where my mother grew up, this world of women, and to the house where my grandmother lived as long as I knew her.

  Located in Altadena, nestled in the foothills above Pasadena, her cottage was a uniquely Californian two-bedroom wooden bungalow, trimmed in gray river rock. It had a back porch converted into a third bedroom and a front porch elevated by five big wooden stairs, where a green canvas glider always stood, waiting for us kids to give it some action. It wasn’t a big place, I know that, but to a child it seemed huge, a trusted member of the family that crackled and groaned when you walked from room to room, a comforting murmur that added to the soft chatter of female voices or the occasional pop of freshly washed clothes right off the line, snapped in the air before being folded into a pile.

  My mother had spent her late adolescence and early adulthood in this house, living with her parents and older brother. It was where she had stayed when she was the lonely wife of a soldier expecting their first child, and where her beloved father had suffered a fatal heart attack—a loss that jolted her into early labor, delivering my brother six weeks premature. Then in 1949, when my mother decided to pack up her
two small children and leave her marriage not quite four years after her husband’s return, this is where we came to live: my grandmother’s house.

  When I look for that house in my mind, I have a blurry vision of my great-aunt Gladys standing in the dining room cutting flat rubber padding into tiny circles to paste onto her sore feet. Behind her I can see my grandmother sitting at the sewing machine by the big window, guiding a swatch of fabric under the foot, pumping the wide flat pedal back and forth. There’s a rocking chair beside the mesh-curtained fireplace where my seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother sits under a halo of white hair, her hands dancing around two thin knitting needles with a steady stream of twine-like yarn flowing from the paisley bag resting on the floor. I remember that chair, how it chirped like a cricket when my great-grandmother would rock me, quietly patting my back the whole time.

  These are the women who raised my mother, whose influence had been ingrained in her. My grandmother and her sister Gladys, and their mother, Mimmie or Mama, as they called her. The two sisters lived in the house together since both of their husbands had passed away several years before, one right after the other. My great-grandmother didn’t have a permanent home of her own but moved around from daughter to daughter, sometimes making her way to South Carolina to visit Mae, the only one of her four daughters who’d stayed in the Deep South. The youngest sister, Perle, lived in nearby Glendale but was in and out of the house constantly. She was the only one whose husband was still alive, yet I don’t remember seeing Uncle Chet very often, and never for any other reason than to pop in and fix something. My mother’s brother would drop by, but I can’t remember him pausing to sit down, and even though my father must have entered the house at some point, I have no memory of it. It was a kind of no-man’s-land. A world filled with women who would straighten up if a man walked in, who would set aside the triviality of their own work and quickly move everything out of the way. But the men, whoever they were, never stayed long, and when the door slammed behind them, the house seemed to breathe a sigh of relief.