Free Lies My Mother Never Told Me by Kaylie Jones Page B

later, I met Herbert Mitgang at the poet William Jay Smith’s apartment on East End Avenue in New York. I was holding a vodka on the rocks, and the impulse to throw the drink in Mr. Mitgang’s face was so strong my hand started to tremble. He looked questioningly into my eyes as he shook my other hand, and I stared back at him with all the pent-up rage I’d bottled up over the years.
    I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it because I didn’t want to embarrass my kind host, nor his son Greg, who was a good friend of mine.
    I got blind drunk that night and then went home and cried, because I hadn’t had the courage to defend my father.

“And for God’s Sake Don’t Fuck Frank Sinatra”
    Here is the only humorous anecdote surrounding my father’s death my mother ever told.
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    My mother adored Lauren Bacall, known as Betty to her close friends, and they had been good friends for many years. Gloria thought Betty Bacall was the most beautiful woman she’d ever met, and she admired Betty because Betty was completely down-to-earth and suffered no flattery from sycophants.
    For several days after my father died, my mother, lying with a bottle of scotch on the couch in the living room, refused to budge. Someone called Betty Bacall, who arrived like the cavalry. Taking the situation in hand, she said to Gloria, “All right, Moss. You don’t have to get up now, but you will soon. I went through it with Bogie and I know exactly how you feel. Here’s what you do: nothing. No impulsive decisions, no rash moves. Don’t start giving stuff away that you’ll regret later. Don’t sell the house. Don’t do anything stupid and for God’s sake, don’t fuck Frank Sinatra.”
    Betty was of course referring to her own disastrous rebound relationship with Sinatra in the wake of Humphrey Bogart’s death. Gloria started to laugh. She laughed so hard she had to sit up to avoid choking, and from there, she finally got up and had something to eat.
    Two days later the phone rang. Gloria picked up.
    â€œHi, Moss, it’s Frank.”
    â€œFrank who?” she said.
    â€œFrank who the hell do you think? Sinatra.” They had been friends for many years, but it seemed absurd to her that he’d automatically assume there were no other Franks of importance in her life.
    After a pause, he said, “I called to say I’m so sorry about Jim. Do you need me to come out there?”
    â€œUh…”
    To his great astonishment, she started to giggle, and couldn’t stop.

CHAPTER FIVE
Birth of a Writer
    A S A CHILD AND TEENAGER , I wanted to be an actor, and my father had been all for it, but he urged me to get an education first. He believed that knowledge was the greatest weapon against hypocrisy and cruelty. The problem was, the older I got and the more I learned, the more hypocrisy and cruelty I saw, and the less protected I felt, for he, my father, had always shielded me from hypocrisy and cruelty, and now he was gone.
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    I have a framed, yellowing copy of my first published oeuvre, a poem called “Fresh Fruit of Autumn Leaves,” which at five years old I had composed for my mother while we were having a bath. I was standing in her sunken tub, covered in bubbles. The idea came to me from the bubbles dropping slowly from my outstretched hands like leaves falling from a tree. My mother jumped out of the tub, grabbed a pen and paper, and asked me to repeat what I’d said. I was just learning to read and couldn’t write yet. My father, so moved by this effort, sent my poem to the Carolina Israelite —why this publication, I’ll never know—and they published it. Even at age five, I was not so easily fooled; the poem is no doubt a fine effort for a five-year-old. But I knew it never would have gotten published if my father hadn’t been James Jones.
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    My eighth-grade English teacher at the École Active Bilingue,