Superman
Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100, ed. Gerald R. Lucas and Maggie McKinley (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 46–47; transcribed from the final interior PDF
From Reflections: Norman Mailer at 100 (The Norman Mailer Society, 2023), pp. 46–47.
On special occasions, our father would come early on a Sunday to our apartment in the village and take my sister and me to a museum. On those days we woke our mother from a deep sleep (sometimes a drunken one), and she would curse him, all while dragging her paintings into the living room, hoping for his praise. For our part, we girls would reenact his lesson on housekeeping, and “put all the piles at right angles.”
And then he would arrive, wearing his trademark beige, sand-washed trench coat, hands in pockets, his eyes the blue of a Provincetown sea. He looked so crisp and dashing. So out of place silhouetted against our dusty hallway. We would go to him shyly and encircle him with our arms. In those moments he was there for the taking, just Daddy, the novelist left behind.
He would glance over and see my mother and her artwork and give an appreciative whistle. She would smile, amused to see us three by now settled on the couch, our faces buried in the crook of his arm. I could smell Grandma Fanny’s pot roast clinging to the fabric of his coat. My Mother no doubt would be absentmindedly winding the stray hairs at her temples into perfect Cs, “spit curls,” she called them. What passed between them we could not bear to witness: regret, longing, sadness, love?
The museum was always chilly, and my new penny loafers pinched my feet. We huddled close to our father looking through his blunt fingers as he created a kind of “human viewfinder” to better see the Cezanne before us. “Look, kids,” he would say excitedly, “this is pure genius. He has painted drapery but it could also look like mountains.”
I glanced longingly at the dancing Matisse in the adjoining room and Betsy yawned and slid to the floor. “I have to pee,” she said, giggling. My father, snapping out of his reverie, seemed to remember suddenly we were little girls. “Trader Vics!” he announced. We cheered.
Sleepy and well fed, we were quiet in those cab rides home. Cuddling close, I was aware of a faintly medicinal odor coming off him from the two whiskey sours consumed at lunch. I would remember the time I was five, on a Friday night in Brooklyn, when right before dinner, Daddy held up a fork and said, “Look kids I’m superman,” and snapped it right in half. Speechless — it never occurred to me it was plastic — I believed him for a very long time.
As the cabby pulled up and Dad deposited us by the elevator, my heart ached at having to say goodbye. He was lost to us now in his own thoughts. The novelist had returned. “Daddy,” I would say then, keen to reel him in. “Are you Superman?”
He would stop and chuckle, his voice honeyed and warm. “You bet my pet, you bet.” And then he was mine again, if only for that moment.
Danielle Mailer