How to Send Birthday Wishes to Your Toxic, Bipolar Aunt
My aunt Charlotte had an undeniable spark. She loved jazz, and she befriended many of her favorite musicians. Once, in Las Vegas, when she had ringside seats for Frank Sinatra, she told me that she stood up and started crying when the entertainer she adored sang one of her favorite songs. She made eye contact with Sinatra’s drummer, whom she knew. Sinatra noticed. An hour after the show “here comes my friend Tony to the bar in the Sands where I’m standing talking. He says, ‘Sinatra invited you to his suite. He’d like to meet you.’ ”
Charlotte told me that she “panicked — ab-so-lute-ly panicked. I had always wanted to meet him, but do you think I knew how to act? I’d act like a damn fool. So I told Tony, ‘Tell Sinatra he put on such a great show and I know he’s tired.’ (He was no spring chicken then). ‘Tell him it was my pleasure and I’d rather not bother him now.’ And to this day, I’m sorry.”
My mom’s sister, Charlotte, was born on my mother’s sixth birthday, on the 30th of June in 1927. That unfortunate coincidence launched a competition between the two that lasted the rest of their lives. My mother, Isabelle, died in 2002. My aunt, Charlotte, survives, and she’s turning 88 — today.
Charlotte and Isabelle at 8 and 14, 1935
Charlotte and Isabelle at 8 and 14, 1935
My grandmother favored Isabelle. My grandfather favored cute little Charlotte. For the men in the family, Char was The Princess. Isabelle was a witty knockout, but in the family, she was The Clerk — loyal, dependable, the pragmatic and efficient voice of reality.
Charlotte’s erratic behavior became full-blown bipolar disorder when I was a young man. For so long, I have filtered my feelings for Charlotte through my horror at the destruction she wrought on our family when she was manic. Mom’s therapist captured Charlotte’s effect on Isabelle in a single word: toxic.
When she cycled to the wildest poles of her bipolar illness, Char’s behavior alienated everyone who once loved her. She lost her oldest friends, who couldn’t withstand her dismissive rants. She ran off with her nephew; she was arrested for driving on the wrong side of the Interstate headed out of Denver.
I’m writing a memoir, keeping empathy front and center as I reconstruct the lives of my brother Mike, who struggled with schizophrenia, and my mother, who dealt with the sorrow of his tragic life. I realize to my chagrin that I need to pursue the same empathy for Charlotte. As one of Charlotte’s daughters said with dismay when I showed her an early draft of my book, “My mother wasn’t evil, she was sick.”
As these people from my life drift away into memory, I don’t want to lose them. My fragile raconteur of a mother. My kind, fierce scientist father. My stormcloud of a brother. And, yes, even the toxic princess. When she goes, I’ll lose one more link to my past, to my childhood, to my elders.
I can’t wish my mother a happy birthday — and she dearly loved birthdays and presents and dressing to the nines to celebrate. So, I’ll wish her sister well. Charlotte, I wish you had found a way to prevent your illness and unhappiness from overwhelming your best self. I wish that best self had raised your daughters.
I wish you had gone to that suite in the Sands to meet Sinatra.
Stephen Trimble will publish his memoir Leave Me Alone Forever: My Brother’s Madness, My Mother’s Sorrow in the fall of 2015. He has discovered that his long dismissed but once-splendidly chic aunt Charlotte may well be his most vivid character. Steve’s website is: www.stephentrimble.net.
(this picture of Sinatra and Count Basie running under my title is the cover photo from “Sinatra at the Sands,” the classic 1966 album)
