Not that she blames them. Much of the time, Carpenter herself finds it hard to believe that in August 1991, with "one bosom gone, one deaf ear, a swollen, arthritic ankle and the weakest bladder in Travis County," she torpedoed her well-laid retirement plans by agreeing to raise three adolescents. "A funny thing happened to me on the way to the nursing home," she jokes today. But there was really nothing funny about the situation, as Carpenter makes clear in her third book, Unplanned Parenthood: The Confessions of a Seventy-something Surrogate Mother (Random House). The kids were the youngest of her beloved brother Thomas Sutherland. And they needed a home as their father lay dying of lung cancer at 79.
When Carpenter's brother made the request from his sickbed, "there was panic in his eyes," she recalls in her book. "He needed to die in peace, and so I assured him I would be there for him, for them." But, Carpenter continues, even after agreeing, "I asked myself the same questions every night: Could I do it? Physically? Mentally? Emotionally?" And, she admits, "I had not been around these kids much at all."
Three weeks before their father died, two of the kids—Tommy, 14, and Mary, 12—moved lock, stock and boom box into Carpenter's seven-room stone house and guest cottage on a hill overlooking the Colorado River. Four months later, "Little Liz," 16, joined them, after trying to make a go of living with the children's emotionally fragile mother, Nancy, 54, who was divorced from Sutherland in 1982. Although Carpenter had been through a lot in her seven decades, including writing presidential speeches and weathering a mastectomy, she was unprepared for the upheaval that would ensue.
Contemporary teenagers, Carpenter rapidly discovered, blast rock music at jackhammer volume, eat voraciously but not at the dinner table, and leave in their wake small explosions of wet towels and dirty laundry. This was a decidedly different breed from the one Carpenter and her husband, Les, a journalist who died in 1974, encountered when they raised their own two children in the early 1960s. (Carpenter's son, Scott, 48, is now the Seattle-based director of a pacifist organization; her daughter, Christy, 44, is an attorney in San Francisco.) "It came as a shock to me that the generation gap was really like the Grand Canyon," says Carpenter in her honeyed drawl. "As Mary reminded me, it has been 60 years since I was a teenager... they don't read Nancy Drew and make fudge anymore."
Carpenter's new charges were even more challenging than most because of her late brother's laissez-faire parenting. A Texas-size eccentric who died with 10 children from two marriages, a collection of more than 100 knives, 19 Arabian horses and friends from the state house to homeless shelters, Sutherland, a retired college English professor, fostered an atmosphere of what Carpenter calls loving chaos. "[His kids] grew up in a household where you couldn't count on your next meal or finding a match to your shoe," observes their cousin Christy.
But Carpenter's problems went beyond questions of style and discipline. She worried about whether her income, largely from speaking engagements, could support her expanded household. Her $25 weekly grocery bill alone-jumped to $150. She was concerned that her health might not hold up. She fretted about her loss of freedom and increasing isolation from her friends. And she faced a variety of crises that had her popping blood-pressure pills like snack food.
For example, Little Liz, now studying cinematography at New York's School of Visual Arts, risked not graduating from high school unless she produced six research papers in four days. Big Liz, her assistant, Paula Stout, and Stout's boyfriend wrote to the rescue. Now Carpenter feels more than a bit guilty—as well as peeved at the C's she got for essays on William Faulkner and George Orwell.
And then there were frequent scares with Mary, the youngest and most rebellious, who was prone to sneaking out to meet her friends at night. At 1:30 one morning, Carpenter was awakened by a call from the police: They had stopped two little girls driving on the wrong side of the road. "I thought, 'They could have killed somebody!' " says Carpenter. "That was the scariest."
Things were also tough for the kids, who had to adjust not only to the death of their father but also to the unaccustomed discipline and rules of a new household, which Carpenter posted in humorous memos on the TV ("Soup is to be seen and not heard.") "After the first few months here, I understood her perfectly, but I don't think she ever understood me or Mary to this day," says Tommy, a talented musician who has just been elected senior class president at St. Stephen's Episcopal School outside Austin. (Indeed, Mary, who tends to get monosyllabic around adults, is none too happy at her life becoming an open book.) Still, Tommy says, the experience hasn't been without benefit. "I was really excited when I found out we were going to live here, because I knew there was a lot of food," he recalls. "And I know she has worked really hard for us, and it has been so hard for her physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially."
Judging from Unplanned Parenthood, Carpenter has managed thus far with liberal doses of humor, grit—and a lot of help from her many friends. Lady Bird Johnson would frequently invite Carpenter and the kids over to dinner. Other friends ran errands and shopped for groceries. "You want to be there for someone who makes you feel so special and useful," says Luci Baines Johnson, 47, who lives in Austin and has known Carpenter for more than three decades. Luci brought over a truckload of outgrown clothes from her own four kids as well as numerous casseroles. "People admire and respect her for doing the kinds of things that most people like to believe they would do but have never had to face," she says.
"A lot of people love my mother and have really dug down in their pockets to help her," says Carpenter's daughter Christy, who is paying for Tommy and Mary to attend boarding school this term so her mother can go on a 28-city publicity tour—and enjoy a well-earned respite. Carpenter hopes that the six-figure advance for her book, plus the royalties, will help finance the rest of the children's education.
Not that life with the three of them has been all headaches. Carpenter credits the kids with making her "more alive and with-it" than many of her friends. She says she has become more sympathetic to the problems today's teenagers face, such as splintered families and rampant drugs, and she has been inspired by the youngsters' potential. "These kids are a lot better people than I thought," Carpenter says. "They are gender-blind and color-blind." And she feels pride at seeing her charges mature and start to think of her home as their own.
"If there is any lesson I have learned, it is to express love; this has gotten, to be such a loveless world," Carpenter reflects. "Every bit of love you can express is casting your bread upon the water—it will come back."
PAM LAMBERT
ANNE MAIER in Austin
- Contributors:
- Anne Maier.
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