Like most middle-class, white, twelve-year-old girls in the early 1960s, I was in a rush to look grown up. So I lobbied for permission to wear stockings, and was strategic. 

My father was very involved in my clothing, and I have vivid memories of him chasing me into dressing rooms at Saks Fifth Avenue in Millburn, New Jersey, as sedately clad, sternly coiffed saleswomen looked on, frozen, aghast.

I knew he wanted to adjust a hem or a sleeve, and boundaries be damned. He bought his suits off the rack in the men’s department and wars, The Great Depression, and his inner misery had, he believed, given him the right to go where he pleased. True to form, my mother was silent, and as Tillie Olson and others have demonstrated, a woman silenced is a woman warped. My father took his ability to shape what he saw and twisted it to extraordinary extremes.

*

Sam Radin’s bar mitzvah was coming up, and, because Sam’s father was my father’s cousin, and Sam’s mother was one of my father’s closest friends in our extended family, I correctly assumed that my lobbying would pay off because Dad would want a smile on my face all day. 

He chose the dress, a sleeveless, aquamarine shift with quarter-sized white polka dots and a high, ruffled neck. I was pleased to discover that it had a discreet side pocket into which I could sneak lipstick, and that the lightweight fabric would be comfortable in the middle of July in a place where air conditioning was unlikely. 

The morning of the event things got so weird that years later, in 1988, when I wrote the incident that follows into a terrible short story, the friend who read it, a lawyer from a very stable family, put it down and said, “This is too bizarre. Nothing like this happens.”  

Except it did.

“Come here,” Dad called as I reached the front hall at the bottom of the stairs. To my left was a narrow passage that led to my parent’s room. When I entered he was sitting on the edge of the bed, a four-poster monstrosity he’d found God knew where. He wore a navy blue cotton bathrobe and the black leather slippers he often threatened to use on my bottom or on my older brother’s. On his lap he held a cellophane-wrapped pair of stockings.

“Stockings that sag are disgusting,” he declared. “I will show you how to make sure that doesn’t happen.” He opened the package and lifted his right leg as a slipper landed softly on the dove-gray wool carpet he’d chosen. Then he rolled one limp nylon, put his foot in it and deftly slid it up. I stopped looking when his large sturdy hands reached the middle of his calf, and I’m relieved that I don’t remember the rest of his advice. 

The bar mitzvah was held in a Paterson synagogue that was gloomy and old. Norman Mailer, who was Sam’s mother’s cousin, was the first adult male to remove his jacket, revealing a loose, pale-blue, short-sleeved shirt. I thought he was tall and sensible as he said a pleasant “Hello young lady,” when my father introduced us.

The year before the bar mitzvah my father remarked to my mother and some guests—fellow doctors and their wives—that he couldn’t understand how gynecologists did their work, because looking inside a woman was so revolting. When I was in my thirties, I told my mother how devastating that had been to hear. 

“I thought you were too young for it to register,” she said with a sigh that spoke volumes about what it had been like to share a life with such a man.

A few years later she corrected me when I spoke bitterly about my Uncle Walter, assuming he’d prescribed the Appetrol (active ingredient, Dexedrine) to which she became addicted. “Honey,” she said. “It wasn’t Uncle Walter. Daddy prescribed the pills.”

Walter was married to Aunt Norma, my father’s youngest sister, and they had three children. Judy, the girl Norma longed for, was the youngest. I was ten when she was born and every year on my birthday, until Judy was five, I got dresses from Aunt Norma, who consulted with my father on her own apparel and probably sought his shopping advice for Judy and me.

Walter was a notorious gossip, which is why I learned about the heroin habit of the boy my mother hoped I’d marry. It’s also why I learned that Norman Mailer roared about “mutilation” when his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and a mastectomy was recommended.

That was around the time my brother, born a year a half before me, started counting the days until the Sports Illustrated annual swimsuit issue appeared.

Walter adored Norma, which is probably why he kept my father’s secrets and left the outing to Uncle Carroll, my father’s brother. 

My husband and I were having Thanksgiving dinner with Carroll and his wife, Aunt Mona, a tradition that began when their daughters worked abroad. Mona asked my husband to get something in the kitchen and Carroll, whose voice was always soothing, spoke awkwardly about my father’s preference for men. He was honest enough not to hide his mortification, and gracious when I said I wasn’t surprised. Mona, the kindest woman in the family, kept her large brown eyes on me until my husband returned with a gravy boat.

*

I don’t think it’s an accident that my only disastrous sexual encounter was initiated by an Adonis who was obsessed with blonde women. I was his token dark, zaftig conquest and was expected to be grateful. I wasn’t.

In my twenties I wrote a short, incoherent screed dedicated to “Bellow, Roth, Mailer & Co,” inspired by a crush who liked to call his mother Sophie after a character in Portnoy’s Complaint. Bellow’s tedious self-indulgence and Mailer’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe were also my targets. Bellow and Mailer were painful examples of the common phenomenon of enormous talent serving as an excuse to abuse those nearest to them and to codify stereotypes. My father did the same, caught in the trap of his need to control what he saw, and blind to a reality of distortion.  

My Jewish mother was five feet 5 inches tall, with long legs, blonde hair and large, gray eyes. Unlike the blondes Norman wrote about, she had a degree from Vassar, and I have sometimes asked myself if Norman wondered how Dad snagged Mom. Most of what I’ve heard doesn’t add up.

*

The second time I met Norman, in 1984 or 1985, he was a guest at a PEN event at the National Cathedral. He was drunk, but sobered up instantly when I introduced myself.

“Joe’s little girl,” he said. Then he listed a number of relatives, adding short, punchy, descriptions, and saving for last a question about my father’s middle sister. “Jean,” he whispered. “Jean still beautiful?” (He did not say, “IS Jean still beautiful?” His spoken sentences were often short. It was part of his performance.)

He staggered back into the crowd after I nodded my head, leaving me to muse about Jean’s delicate features, generous bosom, and summer afternoons at yet another relative’s oceanfront hotel, long before I was born. 

The next time I met Norman he was speaking at the Commonwealth Club of California. It was 2003, and his thoughts about his wife and fighting were painfully retrograde. By then I was married to an environmental lawyer I’d met in San Francisco. We decided to have the wedding at my parent’s house at the Jersey Shore on their 40th anniversary because we knew my mother would want a party and my father wouldn’t. 

My mother refused to fly west to help me find an outfit because, she said, my father’s health was too fragile and he needed her.

“Bullshit,” I hissed before I hung up the phone. “You’re afraid Dad will blame you if he doesn’t like the dress.”

I found a white linen skirt and matching jacket on sale at an elegant shop, and when I called my parents to tell them what I’d bought, and how much under budget I was, my mother answered the phone. “Oh sweetie,” she said with relief. “Daddy was just saying how nice you’d look in a little white suit. “

My brother and I often discussed our parents’ unnerving behavior, but as we got older, certain rules became clear. My brother stopped speaking to me for six months after I said something mildly critical of our father. My inexcusable error had been to speak the truth in front of two of my brother’s best friends.

The worst thing I said to my brother: “You’re everything Dad was, without the poetry.” 

The worst thing he said to me: “You have to stop writing.” He said that in 1982 when my poem “Say No” appeared in an issue of The Village Voice that Norman Mailer surely saw. He was a founder of and booster of the publication, and the poem was in a special issue on nuclear disarmament.

*

The last time I saw Mailer, shortly before he died, he was on a book tour, and after a talk that included lacerating comments about George W. Bush, I dutifully got in line so that he could sign Harlot’s Ghost. 

Again I introduced myself, and he said something quick and sad about our dead relatives as I looked down, struck by the delicacy of his small hands. I wanted to ask what he knew about my father’s sexuality, but he seemed weary, his schlepper was hovering, and there were a lot of people behind me. 

During a visit to Aunt Jean in the 1990s, she volunteered that my father had a decorating business that failed before he went to medical school. That was not a major reveal because I’d spent hours with him at fabric shops while he lovingly caressed contenders for slipcovers and drapes. He died in 1990, and in less than a month my mother rearranged paintings and reupholstered his beloved Queen Anne reproduction chairs, with turquoise Naugahyde. 

I’m pretty certain that Mailer never crossed the threshold of that house, though his best and worst novels were on the bookshelves. 

My father loved a good story, and I no longer feel confined by memories of his warped, domineering ways. “Tincture of time,” is a phrase I’ve come to be increasingly grateful for. A gifted therapist said that to me in the 1990s. Robert Hass, in Time and Materials, paints a devastating scene of his mother’s alcoholism. It’s in the voice of a young boy, written by a man who wants the reader to feel what an adult’s addiction can do to children. It gave me the courage to write and publish a piece about my own mother’s Dexedrine dependence.

Norman Mailer wrote dazzling sentences and some of his narrative structures are brilliantly original. None of this excuses the damage he inflicted on men and women. He and my father abused their gifts, and their examples caused other men to behave just as badly, if less creatively. It will take generations to undo what they and less flamboyant men have done, yet I hope my words contribute to the ethic of saying no to damage, and yes to naming, surviving and thriving.