female companion, but the lack of indoor plumbing discouraged all but the most stalwart of girlfriends. Midday on Sunday, back to Chestnut Hill we went. Usually we took the bus, but every once in a while my father drove us, his mood darkening as we crossed the state line into Massachusetts and getting incrementally worse the closer we got to 100 Essex. At the final right-hand turn down the long drive that led to the house, he would eye the odometer and tell us the exact number of miles he’d traveled to take us home.
The prevailing wisdom concerning divorce at the time was that children were resilient creatures who would fare better with happy parents. This was the new paradigm, or at least it was the version of it that our parents embraced and that we helped spin. (Today we understand that what’s best for the parents is not necessarily best for the children.) On top of my mother’s desk, frozen in a 1970s acrylic-cube frame, are six photos of Peter and me taken during this period. In every shot, our eyes look vacant and our expressions radiate worry and loss.
* * *
To this day, I cannot imagine my parents ever having been in love, nor can I fathom what attracted them to each other. Although there are photographs of them together in our baby albums, I have no memories of them as a married couple. My father wrote daily, loved to fish and garden, and was content to live within his means. My mother was insatiable and acquisitive, always striving for a better, more fabulous life. To me, my parents have always seemed like polar opposites.
My mother is well into her eighties now and suffers from dementia, but she remains as grand as her impossibly formidable first name. When asked about its origins, she explained that while she was born in Malabar Hill in Bombay, she was actually named after the fictional Malabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s classic A Passage to India—the literary distinction was important to her. Only she got it wrong; the caves in Forster’s novel are the Marabar Caves. That part of her story remains a mystery to me, but perhaps she related to what the caves represented: the loneliness of human existence.
I imagine her on the first day of kindergarten sitting cross-legged alongside the other five-year-olds as they went around the circle introducing themselves—“Ruth,” “Elizabeth,” “Rachel,” and then, at her turn, that mouthful of a name: “Malabar.” Would she have become the same all-powerful person she did had she been named Betty or Jane? I wonder about this. As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.
Born in Bombay, India, in 1931, Malabar was the only child of Bert and Vivian, two charismatic and narcissistic people whose epic and alcohol-fueled relationship resulted in their being twice married to and twice divorced from each other. A few months after Malabar—“Mabby” to her parents—was born, her mother, desperately sick with a tapeworm, discovered that her compulsively cheating husband was up to his usual tricks. She took her newborn daughter, fled India, and returned to her home in New York City.
My mother’s first memory of her father—her first memory period—was opening the door to her mother’s bedroom one morning when she was about three and seeing his penis. “I’m your father, Mabby,” Bert announced, as if this explained everything—his being in their New York apartment, his erect penis, his existence. Her father, apparently trying to save his marriage, was on leave from India. This was the protocol of his firm: three years abroad, three months home.
The reconciliation didn’t work. Malabar remembers an extended trip with her mother when she was about five, and records confirm that Vivian traveled to California in 1935. From there, Malabar dimly recalls their long drive to Nevada, the only state at the time that offered multiple grounds for divorce and required no waiting period or proof of residency.
But my volatile and charismatic grandparents couldn’t stay away from each other, and their first divorce didn’t stick. In a grand second marriage proposal, Bert got down on bended knee to declare, yet again, his undying love for Vivian, this time at a Christmas dinner party in front of a handful of close friends. He presented her with an extraordinary gift: a necklace of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and other gems that she had seen and coveted on