Читать книгу Failure To Zigzag - Jane Vandenburgh - Страница 7

2

Listening in the Dark

Lionel and Winnie did not so much converse as each deliver the same monologue over and over. The major difference between them and Katrinka, Charlotte had decided, was that when they talked to themselves someone else was usually in the room. One of their favorite topics for ranting was what had gone wrong with Katrinka.

According to Winnie it was when Joe, Jr., died that Katrinka had turned, overnight, from a bright and hopeful girl into a paranoid schizophrenic. This was, Winnie claimed, the form of mental illness that had been clinically proven to be caused by the chemical properties of grief. Then too there was the issue of gumption. Katrinka hadn’t one speck of gumption. If she had any gumption whatsoever she would stop all that ventriloquist business this instant! and go out and find herself a decent job. She should have stayed at the phone company. “Charlotte!” Winnie would cry out at this point, always as if she had just thought of it, “I want you to at least consider the phone company. Now, the phone company employs more women than any other company and it is a stable company, having survived the last depression. And when the next depression hits, people will still undoubtedly be so ill-mannered that they will rely upon the telephone, rather than sitting down to write a civilized note or letter.” Winnie despised the phone for the way it would ring out in her house without her giving it permission. She would not answer it. Instead she would scurry to the bathroom off the service porch and hide until the ringing ceased. If, for some reason, she felt she had to answer it, she approached it furiously, as if she was back in the schoolhouse in Power, Montana, confronting the worst of her impudent boys.

Lionel, on the other hand, was of the opinion that the telephone was another of America’s most magnificent inventions, like the cotton gin, the aeroplane, and Luther Burbank’s hybrids. He went to the phone with a Republican optimism, believing it might be some powerful banker—A. P. Giannini? Lionel’s own father?—who was calling him home. He would always pause then with his hand outstretched, realizing it was probably just Katrinka calling to ruin another of his perfect days.

Since the way Katrinka was was not Winnie’s fault! Winnie would thank Charlotte very much to kindly stop looking at her so balefully. Didn’t Charlotte realize that self-pity of just that sniveling sort was the first step on the road to insanity, that with parents like hers she had better be on the sharp lookout for her own abnormal tendencies? Winnie would frankly tolerate no more of this, which she disdainfully referred to as “the psychological,” no more of the folderol about how insanity was engendered in the deprivation of maternal love. This was exactly the kind of nonsense that was manufactured to fill the pages of women’s magazines. Winnie had no respect whatsoever for women’s magazines—they made her quite cross! The articles were written for slothful girls, those who had nothing better to do than lie around all day staring into mirrors and plucking at their eyebrows! That was the type who had always made Winnie tired at Saint Helen’s Academy; some too were Kappas, living with her in the Kappa house in Missoula. This type of girl was so lazy about taking a tuck in her buttocks that she was likely to end up relying upon a corset or a girdle!

Lionel had his own theory about what had happened to Katrinka: her brain had been pickled by alcohol. This was from drinking beer, beer, beer with the crowd from Pelican in the cellars of Eshleman Hall. That was up at Cal where Katrinka had been a fine student, a leader, an athlete, but had failed to graduate. “Now, Charlotte,” Lionel would always intone at this point, “I am of the opinion that graduation is a very fine thing to achieve—do you understand me?” For emphasis he wrapped the long fingers of one mighty hand around the muscle of her upper arm and squeezed the bicep to the point of pain. He held onto the arm and rocked her slowly, hypnotically. Then he uttered the single word “Drink,” saying it hotly against the skin of the side of her face so his breath made the little hairs move. “Now Pelican may call itself a humor magazine but your grandmother and I have never found anything funny in inebriation.” He rocked her slowly, to let all this sink in.

When the phone rang, it was Lionel who went to answer it. “Hello, Dad,” Katrinka said. “How’s everything? How’s mother?”

“What do you mean, How’s mother? Mother’s asleep is how mother is!” He was shouting, though trying to hold it down to a dull roar. He was standing at the built-in desk in the central hall of the house on Vista del Mar, right next to the bedrooms. He wore his cotton pajamas, worn so thin by laundering that they were nearly transparent. The top was unbuttoned down the front to allow his skin to breathe.

Lionel was staring down at the old, uneven floorboards, one arm held rigidly at his side. From the clenched fist of that hand two fingers extended, pointing straight down, as if holding an imaginary cigarette. The other hand gripped the heavy black receiver so tightly that the muscle of his upper arm had begun to ache and the bones of his knuckles gleamed a yellowish white through the skin. “Wellll,” she was drawling now, “you allllways say Awe-I call only when I need something, so I thought I’d telephone to chawwwwt.”

“CHAT!” he bellowed. “It’s three o’clock in the morning!” He might as well yell—Winnie and Charlotte were both out of their rooms now. Though the night was warm, Charlotte’s teeth were chattering. She wore no robe and stood clutching at her naked arms. Her nightgown, he saw, had suddenly grown too short. Her cheeks were sunken, sucked in, he was irritated to see. She liked to affect this look, he’d noticed recently, that of the starving Armenian.

The two of them were watching him beseechingly. He nodded his head once, then shook it: Yes, it was Katrinka. No, she wasn’t dead yet. Winnie’s own mouth was clamped so tightly shut that the dark of her lips had disappeared. Without her glasses, her eyes blinked huge, black, unfocused, and she seemed suddenly youthful, helpless. He thought of her heavy hair, the weight of it falling onto his hands when he’d unpinned it, when he’d let it down. Her gray hair now was permed into a short and nervous frizz.

“Wellll,” Katrinka was saying, “if you’re going to be la-di-da about it, I’ll be the one to pick the topic of conversation. Let’s be confidential, shall we, Lionel? Let’s talk behind mother’s back. Let’s talk about when you’d quit smoking if I’d quit smoking? Let’s talk about tapering off. You were the one who’d be the boss of the cigarettes, one Lucky each per hour. Remember your strolls after suppertime, uphill under the oaks on El Tovar and how you said the stars did press down so and explode right against your heart? There were thousands of men like you, Lionel, bespectacled, your socks clocked in hunter’s green, still out of work, but still cheerful, still being supported by your wife’s family’s money, still getting a kick out of the Kingfish and Andy Gump. You were the one who was not suicidal, not one of the ones who went off the rooftop feet first after the Crash, one of the ones whose socks didn’t match. The calls drove me boi-ing cuckoo! You and mother too and the way the two of you were together during your last great depression, with the beat-beat-beat of your tom-toms!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about, you lousy fucking hypocrite. I’m talking about your rules for our behavior!”

“I forbid you from speaking to me in that manner!” Lionel told her. “Have you been drinking?” The circulation now having retreated from all extremities, his bare feet and the tip of his nose were suddenly freezing. His blood pressure was building, going up and up. His temples throbbed but the blood could not get through. He would die, he knew, of having this person as his daughter.

“How do you like that?” Katrinka was saying to somebody else, someone behind her in the room. “Awe-I call to be sociable and he gives me that have-you-been-drinking sort of crap.” Hervoice rose. It was now so loud, so shrill, that Winnie and Charlotte could hear it, though they were several feet from where Lionel held the receiver out away from his ear. “HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING?” she screamed. “Remember, Lionel? It was Prohibition. Your black shoes with their new black heels? When you and Uncle Mac chuckled to yourselves, brewing your beer in the bathtub? I could have you arrested for the things you’ve done.”

“You are insane,” he told her coldly.

But now her voice was softening, growing intimate, humorous. “You know, Dad, you used to be sort of sweet when you were all tanked up. That was when you used to like me. Know what? I liked you too. But never mind awwlll that. They’re telling me I have to get off the phone. Give me Harold’s number, will you. Phone numbers are just exactly the sort of information I cannot retain—the seven series of shock treatments, Dad. Dad? You know, when the brain lights up all at once?”

“You may not,” he said, fighting to steady his voice. “I warn you. My brother has been dead for nearly five years, as you know full well. I forbid you from calling Jessie at this hour and upsetting her. Do you hear? Do you understand me?”

“Sure,” Katrinka retorted. “Give me Uncle Lawrence’s number then. I always was his favorite niece. He’s leaving me all his mun-mun, did you know that? Banks too. I’m going to change their name to the First State La-di-da Bank of Katrinka Elmo Ainsworth. If you are very, very nice to me, I might consider giving you a job. I’m going to start you off as a teller, just like your lousy shitty father did. That man was an absolute bastard to you—can’t you realize that, Lionel?—giving you a single bank in a one-horse town like Montrose, California, when Lawrence and Harold got the entire state of Iowa to divide among themselves. So you drive your crappy Naaaassh while Uncle Harold has his Lincoln Continental.”

“Had!” Lionel choked, his face now purplish red, adding: “I drive a Nash because the seats fold down!”

“Give me Lawrence’s number!” she screamed at him. “And be quick about it! I have to get somebody to bail me out of this stinkhole jail!”

“The squalor we have found her in,” Winnie was saying. She stood at the window of the dining room, looking down through the trees into the street, wringing her hands in a dish towel. “Whatever did I do to deserve it?”

“Nothing,” Charlotte said, automatically. She too was watching the Nash back out of the garage. The dust on the leaded glass windows and the thick clutch in which the oaks held the house made it hard to see the car, but she could feel the vibrations of the motor coming up through the floor from the stone garage. Now she saw the glint of chrome and heard the sound of the engine change as it backed up, then turned around and started forward. The Nash crossed the culvert and went on up the little slope leading out of the gully, before it disappeared under the canopy of trees standing at the back of the lot across the street, the grounds of a large estate. There, nearly a block away, lived the Ainsworths’ closest neighbor. The little road crossing the stream washed out every year during the rainy season. Still, the city of Glendale hadn’t gotten around to paving it. Winnie blamed this on the wealthy old woman who owned that land, imagining she had a profound influence with city hall Winnie had been unable herself to amass. The rich neighbor had no need to have the roadbed paved because her house fronted on Montecito, and she probably considered the Ainsworths’ street just a dusty country road.

“What kind of God would give a person a child like that?” Winnie was asking. Charlotte didn’t answer. The question was imponderable, and she was thinking of something else, of how the oak leaves looked like black lace against the silvering of the early morning sky.

“She does this on purpose, you know? She does it just to shame me. She could stop it this instant! if she chose to.” Charlotte weighed this thought: she too liked to believe that Katrinka really could turn it off, that Space Radio was something she’d invented to pay Lionel and Winnie back for what Katrinka called being so lousy crappy shitty. “It is me she blames,” Winnie was saying. “She doesn’t blame him.”

“No one blames you,” Charlotte told her, automatically.

Winnie hissed. She hated to be contradicted. “Of course they do,” she snapped. “Her doctors all blame me and so do you!”

Charlotte turned to look at her grandmother, staring from beneath the shadow of her brow. The two of them had the same bluish eyes, but Charlotte’s right eye was also marked by a colored patch shaped like a pie piece, radiating out from the iris, the color of which was golden in some lights, or turned greenish, changing as Katrinka’s own eye color did. It was this mark, this patch, Charlotte was inclined to believe, that had always allowed her, while not yet thoroughly crazy, to participate in her mother’s point of view. It was as if she was able to witness things at once through her mother’s as well as her very own eyes.

Winnie was right: Charlotte did blame her. She blamed her blackly, thickly, so heatedly that her heart was sometimes hurt by the pain of it, as if her hatred had inflamed the very sac in which the heart muscle needed to beat. Still, as their eyes now caught, locked, and Winnie’s widened, and then as her face began to grow shiny under her granddaughter’s hot look, Charlotte was herself surprised to understand that the fact was so purely obvious that even Winnie could distinguish it.

“I am the one she hates,” Winnie sniffed, as she looked away. She was lifting the sharp angle of her nose somewhat pridefully, her voice beginning now to twist and yank. Charlotte hoped she wouldn’t start crying. Whenever Winnie cried, she ran to the bathroom and began packing up her painting supplies; then she took the car and went off to the Mojave Desert for a few days, leaving Lionel and Charlotte alone to cope without a car. The Ainsworths always bought their cars from American Motors—the Nashes, then Nash Ramblers, then their Rambler American—because of the one feature they did so prize, that the front seats folded all the way down for Winnie’s sleeping bag on her flights from home out into the desert.

“No, she doesn’t,” Charlotte said. “She loves us,” she said. She listened to the distant sound of her own voice saying this: it was breathy, wistful, lifted. “She just has a different way of showing it,” Charlotte went on. “You know? Because of the way she is?”

Winnie snorted contemptuously and turned to finish clearing the breakfast dishes. In spite of his daughter’s being in jail, Lionel had gone for his regular walk, starting out when it was still pitch dark. When he came in, he had to give up the pleasure of sitting awhile in his red leather banker’s chair where he allowed his skin to breathe. Instead he went right on to showering, shaving, then sat down to his regular bowl of mush. As always, he spent nearly an hour over it, stirring milk into the cereal until it was again entirely liquified and it dribbled extravagantly from the flattened silver soupspoon. He could somehow manage to chew mush though it was completely lumpless, completely wet with milk. He made the mush himself every morning: it was part Roman Meal, part Malt O’Meal, part wheat germ. On this morning, as on all others, he stirred, dribbled, and chewed, intent on his pleasure, his mouth and tongue whitening, utterly mindless of the calls from the Montrose police station encouraging him to take Katrinka back up to Camarillo.

As on any other morning, the Ainsworths were discussing that same thick past. This morning, it was another schoolteacher back in Power, how she’d suddenly burst into tears and had clattered from the room when Winnie showed up at school wearing Lionel’s diamond. “Oh, that was Bessie,” Lionel said. “She had such a crush on me!” He smacked and dribbled.

“It wasn’t you!” Winnie cried. “I was the one Bessie loved!” Then Winnie whirled with her cat’s face poised to catch Charlotte gawking and screeched triumphantly: “But there was nothing filthy in it, as there is nowadays, so don’t get your hopes up!”

The second time the police called, it was Charlotte, with heart frozen, who’d gone to answer it. She could hear Ogamer in the background, singing the “Marseillaise.” Katrinka was assaultive, the beleaguered sergeant mentioned. She was verbally abusive. Her voices were keeping all the other drunks up.

“May I help?” Charlotte now asked Winnie at the table, knowing she wouldn’t be allowed to. Lionel could tolerate no one aside from Winnie touching the dishes that touched his food. Charlotte hated helping, hated the utter futility of all housework, the way dusting was never finished and dishes and laundry were done and done only to be done again. This attitude toward housework was pure Katrinka, Charlotte knew, like the patch of greenish eye and the tint of her reddish hair. Attitudes descended. They came down just as actual insanity did. Charlotte thought of insanity as a thing in motion, like the abstract nude in one of Winnie’s artbooks. Winnie was at the top of the steps, Katrinka at the bottom, with the merging ghosts strung between. It was called Madness Descending a Staircase.

“You should stick to the practical side of things,” Winnie was now advising her. “I’d like you to go to work for the phone company or to become a nurse. Or you might do well to major in domestic science. There are so many new and wonderful things to learn about in that field, what with the new drip-dry fabrics that pack so well! You will want to marry someone willing to help you care for your mother. She will be your burden when Lionel and I are gone. Now, you’ll want to marry someone quite different from yourself: not someone artistic, no one high-IQ-and-no-common-sense. If you first get a degree in Home Ec, you can always teach in the high school when your husband dies. I always did despise teaching, the way the children called me ‘mama’ and their eyes clung to my face and their soiled hands smudged the articles of my clothing. I would like you to learn to be more modest in your person, Charlotte, than you show signs of becoming. I want you not to dress in a way that encourages boys to look at you, or to drive past our house. I want you to keep a clean house and to learn to behave normally, do you hear me? Your mother has always surrounded herself with abnormality and she therefore gets no encouragement at all to live in a decent way. Oh, it was terrible, terrible! to live in a small town like Power where everyone knew our business! When I was pregnant with your mother, I could see the curtains in the parlor windows moving as I walked down the street. They were observing the shape of my person, telling one another just what it was that the town banker and the schoolmarm had done!”

Charlotte wasn’t listening. She was staring out the window at the gully where the dirt road crossed the culvert. The dust the Nash kicked up was only now settling back down onto the roadbed. In the first low shaft of direct morning light, it looked, to her, like gold.

Lionel worried about germs in his food and hair in his food. Winnie worried about her own as-yet-undetected cancer of the colon. What Charlotte worried about was ending up crazy. She knew that being crazy was caused either by heredity or environment, though the experts couldn’t say which. Either way seemed to make no difference. It was in her genes, obviously, like the color of the mark on her iris, and there she was in the same dusty house, being raised by the same people who raised her mother and in the same lousy way.

Winnie worried about cancer because her sister Trudy had died of it. Winnie believed cancer was caused by worry, and given the sort of daughter she’d been allotted, she knew there was no one in the world who worried more. The family doctor, Dr. Greenley, a devout Seventh Day Adventist and vegetarian, had advised Winnie to try to calm down the slightest bit. He favored the nutritional approach.

“Just try not to worry so much,” Charlotte reminded her. “He said to eat a little less meat, remember? And a few more Loma Linda Vegeburgers, and to try not to take it all to heart.” What Dr. Greenley, a man of science, had actually said was that Katrinka’s fate was in the hands of God. Charlotte didn’t mention this. She couldn’t say the words or even think about them for any length of time without being silenced by her own great heaving sobs.

“How dare you be impertinent to me?” Winnie cried out. “Speaking to me of vegeburgers! Are you trying to be funny at my expense? That’s one of your mother’s tricks, you realize? Lionel, will you speak to her? Will you remind Charlotte that she is to attempt to act normally? Will you also remind her that I am not a well woman?”

“Your grandmother is not a well woman,” Lionel said.

Charlotte lowered her face, biting hard at her lips and cheeks, trying to hide what probably showed anyway, that she did think there was something deeply funny in it, not only in the very sound of the word “vegeburgers” but in the way Lionel did so sternly intone on cue: “Your grandmother is not a well woman!”

“Look at her!” Winnie cried out. “She’s beginning to look more like her mother with every passing day!” Winnie hated to be reminded not to worry. She needed to worry. She imbued the act of worrying with the power of prayer. It was only her worrying about a thing ahead of time that kept it from happening. The trouble with Katrinka was that she was always working herself up into some new and unforeseeable calamity. Now, how, when Winnie was a girl at Saint Helen’s Academy, was she ever supposed to have imagined herself old and unwell? And with the burden of a child to raise, and the daughter, too, still to care for, a daughter who would not take her medication, would not get better, who was not only alcoholic but schizophrenic and who was bound and determined to act up in the most public way imaginable, in roadshows and on network television, before Ed Sullivan’s home audience of millions!

But it was Charlotte Winnie was really worried about these days, because she was showing the same signs: the poor posture, the smirking and other facial antics, and the boys! Why, boys were calling on the phone, then falling silent when Winnie answered. It was at just this age, when Katrinka had grown her bosoms, that she had begun to show the interest in boys. They should have sent her away right then to boarding school as Winnie’s own mother and stepfather had done. If Lionel and Winnie had, she might not have ever started smoking and become so very involved in stage crew!

Boys were driving by the house now with their windows rolled down, their radios blaring, all in their souped-up cars! Why, they were going by to race up the fire trails, to park, to neck, to drink beer and to throw down their trash! This was all for Charlotte’s benefit. Teenagers, Winnie had observed, were like animals when it came to sex: they were drawn to it wheresoever they could smell it.

When Winnie had said “bosoms,” Charlotte had mentally gone off somewhere else, so by the time the words “smell it” came along, she was nowhere at all around. She was, by then, in the laboratory, observing very clinically within the pink and neatly boxed shape of her grandmother’s large intestine the whitish mass of an inoperable malignancy. Charlotte saw it vividly, as if in a kind of technicolored X-ray, with the parts all lit up, moving and pulsing in just the way the bones of her own living feet had been demonstrated to her to be, once when she’d wiggled her toes to check the fit under the shoe-store’s fluoroscope.

With Winnie now dying, and now finally dead, Charlotte could lift her face at last, imagining how it would be to ride with boys in cars. Her long hair was loose and flying. The air was perfumed with vinyl from the brand-new tuck’n’roll, fragrant too with sage and the stink of distant skunk, and of boys’ sweat and hair goop and of lint and the other things they kept buried deep in their woolen pockets. Their breath was hot and sweet, heavy with the taste of beer. She had a book now, a paperback, called The Amboy Dukes. It was about boys in gangs. It had rape in it.

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that kind of junk with me, Winnie,” she told her grandmother, automatically. She said this out loud, to make a joke of all of it. “Nobody ever calls me up anyway, you know. And even if somebody did call me up it wouldn’t be anybody to ask me out to ride on fire trails, but would just be some dumb crud a year or two younger than me with arms about this big around calling me up to tell me I’m flat as a board.” She was holding up a zero, the circle made of one forefinger, one thumb, intended to demonstrate the circumference of this crud-type boy’s upper arm, when Winnie let out a banshee shriek.

“Younger than me!” Winnie screamed. “Crud!” she asked, turning toward Lionel, with her face contorted. “Flat as a board!” Wasn’t this just the type of talk Katrinka had so frequently resorted to after stage crew, the type of talk Winnie had no intention of tolerating? Why just last week Charlotte had allowed another child in the high school to write on her blue canvas binder: “Flunk now—avoid the June rush!” “Flunk!” Winnie was screaming blindly, out toward the treetops, “as everyone knows full well is just one more way of saying that other word, the one her mother has always been so fond of, the one which is the most vile word in the entire English language!”

“You mean fuck,” Charlotte enunciated mentally.

Why boarding school was the only place for girls like this, girls with bosoms! who spoke in such a slovenly way! who by their scent alone could draw boys up and onto the fire trails!

“Driving by in sets of threes?” Charlotte asked her mother, talking to Katrinka who was not there, via Space Radio, via E.S.P. Charlotte closed her eyes, concentrated, saw Katrinka there in the mists. Katrinka smiled and tipped her chin up, whispering back: “Threes,” she agreed. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette.

It was to the Marlborough School in Los Angeles that the daughters of many important people went, Winnie was saying. Why, Walt Disney had himself sent his daughter Diane there! Charlotte, opening her eyes, saw that her grandfather was intrigued. He was not eating just then, still he smacked his lips and moved his mouth around, as if practicing for the next day’s mush. Yes, indeedy! he was saying. Why, Walt and Diane Disney—Oh, to shake such a fine man’s hand! Why, Walt and Lionel might take long walks together up Big Tujunga Canyon, remarking on the depth of the water table, on the state of the Auto Club, on Annette Funicello. He chuckled to himself, congratulating Walt on Disneyland. Why, Lionel and Walt might sit together on the Marlborough School Board of Trustees!

He was of the opinion that Charlotte might attend the Marlborough School but he saw no need for her to go there as a boarder. The school was just downtown, a short ride on the freeway, just the way he and Charlotte always drove when they went off to take Winnie’s paintings to the framemaker. He would drive her, then pick her up. He moved his lips around the deliciousness of it: he was busy adding bumping into Walt to the sum of his perfect day.

Charlotte and Winnie watched him, each from under the shadow of her brow. Each was silenced by the sight of her own doomed future flying toward her through the Nash’s windshield. Winnie wanted this teenagedness gone from her house, not brought back home every night by freeway—she wanted it stuck off and away in boarding school where it rightfully belonged! Charlotte, on the other hand, knew that Lionel, with his rapidly dimming vision, could no longer safely drive the car.

By acting up so publicly, Katrinka had always made certain there was never anything hidden about her mental illness. It was Charlotte’s father, the war hero, who was not to be discussed, though he seemed to have died in such a normal, though drastic, way. Lionel wouldn’t speak his name, nor suffer himself to hear it.

Lionel liked to sit like the sphinx in his red leather banker’s chair at certain prescribed times throughout the day, with an arm on either armrest and his mouth shaped into a hard circle, breathing slowly in, then slowly out. If, as he sat cooling down after his six-mile walk, the name was casually mentioned, he would rise angrily and stride stiff-legged down the hall to the back of the house, with the sweaty shapes of upper legs, twin buttocks, and lower back all left there, clinging, shining and indignant, to mark the wreckage of the day.

It was Winnie who told Charlotte privately what there was to tell, that the Indianapolis was Joe, Jr.’s, first assignment, that the ship went down in the deepest waters in the world, that because of secrecy of the cargo the ship had been sailing under radio silence and was never missed. The Indianapolis was sunk just two weeks before the Japanese surrender. The families were not immediately notified that the ship was missing. It sank in twelve minutes. No SOS went out. There was no escort. The survivors were in the waters of the mid-Pacific for four days before the oil slick was sighted, quite by accident, by a single American flier who happened to be off course. It took another day and a half to mount the rescue, by which time three-quarters of the 1153 men on board had perished. Men died in war, Winnie said. It was normal, natural. Children lost their fathers. Charlotte wasn’t to feel sorry for herself, nor to count herself so special.

Charlotte wasn’t all that special. Why, Winnie had herself lost her own beloved father when she was only three. Louis Rutherford had been a great man, a banker, like Lionel, but good at it. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Rutherford had had a wide and poetic brow. (Winnie invariably thumped this brow in the sepia-tinted photograph she always pulled out to illustrate this point in the story.) Winnie’s father had died alone in Hawaii where he’d gone to cure his TB. He died because of an old man at the bank, a clerk who’d coughed all over the books as they were being reconciled, which was the reason Winnie had always detested sick old men. Louis died at twenty-eight; Charlotte’s father at twenty-six. Louis had had a lovely singing voice and had played a three-quarter-sized Washburn guitar, the one shipped back to Winnie and her mother on the mainland on the same sailing vessel that brought back Louis’body for the burial.

It was Winnie who had suffered, with losing her father like that, then ending up with a daughter so abnormally bizarre she had insisted upon changing her given name when she went away to college. She’d said it was because the registrar had told her there was another girl named Katherine Ainsworth at Cal, but Winnie had never believed that tale for one single second since Charlotte’s mother had always been the type to make up peculiar stories, and was so odd, always, that she’d been the one and only girl on stage crew. Winnie didn’t see why she hadn’t picked “Kitty” for short, rather than going so far as to change it to “Katrinka Lionel Ainsworth!” And why the name Katrinka, a name that clinked and rattled like junk clanking in the wagon of a gypsy tinker?

“I haven’t had a REAL vacation in forty years!” These words would erupt from Winnie suddenly, and always as if the enormity of the injustice had only then dawned on her. Since she hadn’t had a job to go to since leaving the classroom in Power, Montana, to marry Lionel all those years before, Charlotte was always tempted to yell right back at her: “Vacation from what, Winnie?” though she never did. She didn’t ask it as it was just that type of question that was liable to provoke the great sloshes, either the blue-tinted turp or the turkey gravy Winnie’d also been known to throw.

Winnie had as little use for Joe, Jr., as she had for her own daughter. Why had he been so hell-bent on marrying Katrinka when she was only one or two courses short of graduation? If she’d only graduated, Katrinka might have gotten by teaching art in the public school rather than having to resort to ventriloquism. Winnie also bitterly resented a comment Charlotte’s father once made about the shape of Louis Rutherford’s eyebrows. Winnie never mentioned just what this insult was. Still, Joseph Black, Jr., all these long years dead, had never been forgiven for it.

Charlotte imagined that what had happened was this: that her father, who’d married into the Ainsworth family rather than been raised in it, hadn’t properly understood what it was he was supposed to have shouted when Winnie got out the sepia-tinted photo and began then to thump it in front of his nose. “Oh, my God!” he should have said. “Look at that wide and poetic brow! Why, Winnie, your father looks exactly like Robert Louis Stevenson!” He may have mentioned something instead about how Winnie inherited Louis’ eyebrows, which were slightly bushy and were perfectly level, running above either eye without the pronounced arch that Katrinka’s had, the arch she used to give her ironic words an even more exaggerated inflection. Charlotte, like her great-grandfather Louis, like Winnie herself, had ended up with the straight ones, the ones from under which Charlotte would peer out, trying usually to keep her face as plain, as deadpan, as Buster Keaton’s.

What Winnie always said, finally, about Charlotte’s parents was that they were too much alike. They were just alike! and they both made Winnie tired, and so did their artistic Berkeley friends. These friends had had funny names, which had served to encourage Katrinka in her own abnormality. Some had had three names—there was an Alec Something Something—and one of them had gone by his initials only. They had been artistic and they were funny-looking. They’d had drunken soirees and had talked their filthy language. What was wrong with Charlotte’s parents was that they’d both had high IQs and no common sense! This was the type that had always given Winnie the absolute pip. She’d known some like that at the university at Missoula, but had never imagined her own child would turn out that way. She had never thought to worry, and, by not worrying, this very thing had come to be.

Although Lionel and Winnie pleaded with her doctors to keep her, Katrinka was always released from the hospital. One morning she’d been put onto a Greyhound bus at Ventura with a ticket for Glendale. Lionel had spent all the afternoon and on into the evening at the bus station waiting but she had not arrived. The last bus had come without her being on it, so now he was home again, and they were waiting for the phone to ring. Each lay awake in bed in the hot, dark, and ticking house, each listening for disaster.

Though willed to so do, the phone would not now ring. If it did now ring it might be the police, or it might be Sugarman saying Katrinka had found her way to the carnival and so was there safe with him. Or it might be Katrinka herself saying she was near Pershing Square, staying with a very close dear and personal friend of hers, a Negro, a Negro mental patient, a male Negro mental patient, someone she’d met in board and care. “Oh, he may be a little cuckoo,” she’d tell Lionel, “but he’s not as cuckoo as you,” adding: “In the words, Dad, of Johnny Mercer.” If the phone hadn’t rung by morning, Lionel would go for his walk, shower, shave, slop his interminable mush, then begin to notify the authorities. He was very good at notifying the authorities, his voice becoming deeper, more authoritative with each of the calls he made.

Now as the three of them lay in bed, each was listening to the Dodger game to pass the time. Lionel had recently given Charlotte his own Sony portable radio. She’d washed the flesh-colored earplug with soap and water, then had rinsed it with alcohol, but within the plastic she still could detect the smell of his earwax. She now heard the game in three places: from within the scented plug guarded from touching the inside of her ear by the sheath she’d made of Kleenex; from the front bedroom where Winnie was listening on her big radio that had many bands, some that picked up police calls, some calls from ship to shore; and from Lionel’s old Philco console, which stood in the study next to the daybed upon which he always slept. The Philco was imprecisely tuned. At Winnie’s insistence, all the doors within the house were standing open. Since the house had come to contain someone who was so determinedly teenaged these days, Winnie was increasingly suspicious of the kinds of things that might occur behind closed doors.

Charlotte listened but could not concentrate on the events of the game. She listened only to hear the soothing voices of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett announcing the plays. She loved the modulation of their intertwining voices, the way they did not yell except in joy, how they did not interrupt. She loved the way they were so kindly, so forgiving, even to the opposing players. She loved their intelligence, their godlike apprehension of baseball statistics. She had once loved baseball, too, but had now stopped. She had stopped at the same time she’d stopped loving her grandfather. She had once loved Lionel ardently, to the soles of his feet, loved him as she’d never loved her grandmother. This love had been based, it now seemed, on his good humor and his reason, on the rules of building trashfires and the game of chess, on the sound of his voice reading aloud from the complete works of Charles Dickens. She had loved him but did no longer and she could not really remember why. She thought it might be for the way he smelled after lunch, like coffee and peanut butter, or because of the look of food ever whitening on his working tongue.

Suddenly the crowd roared. On this night, Frank Howard had suddenly hit a homer so far up into the stands of center field that it may well be the longest home run ever. The crowd in L.A. Memorial Coliseum was wild. “Lionel!” Winnie called out excitedly from the front toward the back of the darkened house, “will you listen to that?”

What Charlotte could never stand about the Ainsworths was that they ranted and raved about Katrinka and what she’d done to them but were unable to concentrate on the simplest facts of grief. Their daughter was lost out in the night someplace. She was not safe, was never safe. They called to one another back and forth about the Dodger game, exclaiming over how fine and tall Frank Howard was. Charlotte moved the dial away from the voices of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett, stopping at any bump of noise that might be the rock and roll on KFWB.

Outside, within the wired glass dome of the porch light next to Lionel’s study door, a fat moth was dying, as the men in the water had died, slowly, over time. Each of the awful sounds the moth made was amplified by the hollow shape of the dome. She heard the thud of the body as it flung itself against the heat—the bumping made the moth sound huge, at least fist-sized. She heard, too, the airy flutter of the dusty wings being ripped apart on the wires. To escape, it needed to fly up past the white and mesmerizing glow of the bulb and out into the cool soft dark, but it never would. This was one of the things she, born to a dead father, had always known: that death, like life, did also exert its own sure pull. She heard the moth fall heavily against the hot glass, heard too the nothing of its waiting.

Charlotte waited too, hoping it was dead at last, but then the thumping started. She wanted it to quit, to die, DIE! to burn up, sizzle, expire! Death she could live with: she had seen the face of it on the brick mason lying on his back on a lawn on Montecito one morning on her way to school. Death she could stand, but not this other—the moth, the man on the cross, the ones in the water, her mother out there in the dark being drawn ever back toward the shock that lit up every cell of her brain. In electroshock all the synapses were caused to shoot off at once. Then there was the rest to fall back into, the velvety darkness, the clean slate.

The mason had lain on a bright green lawn within a swirl of leaves. The sky was low, gray, darkening. The press of clouds enlivened the hues of earth: the fallen leaves were peach-colored, golden, scarlet, russet. She’d stood on the sidewalk and had looked at him: he looked as if he’d been pitched from sleep into a more terrible dream. He had died, they’d thought, of a heart attack but he looked rammed, bashed, his arms flung up and out, his mouth agape. Someone came forward and used the mason’s own dropcloth to cover him. The canvas was smudged with marks of dirty red. Still, the body showed from under it, the feet splayed wide apart, the hollow of each boot, between toe and heel, clotted with whitening clay. It was to hide his shame, Charlotte felt, at being caught dead like that, that they’d covered up his face.

It was torture to think that Katrinka was not safe. She was never safe, not on Ward G-1, where her brain was showered with the waves of sudden light, not here on Vista del Mar sleeping in the other twin in this very same room with Charlotte. Try as they might Charlotte and her mother couldn’t keep one another safe from the other two, those two, the ones calling from room to room.

She pulled the pillow over her head and tried to imagine something her heart might bear. She thought of Bob Davidson, of the smoky smell of his Pendleton, of the way he held her to him on the dance floor. They rocked in one place, as if dazed, stupefied. She was wrapped in the heat of him, in the smell of cigarettes, her face pressed to the scratchiness of the wool. She thought of his thin and cynical lips, of his narrowed eyes, of the way he watched in class but would not volunteer. He was not like Charlotte, who said, always said, who was forever speaking out, just as her mother did, each one talking as if to save her very life. Lionel had already warned her about boys like Bob Davidson, hoods, having pointed out a low rider once from the Nash. “That, Charlotte, is a bean-oh. Now under no circumstances are you ever to associate with a boy of that type.”

“You mean ‘beaner,’” Charlotte corrected him. His right ear though was currently his deafer ear, so Lionel no longer heard anything over the motor’s roar.

She thought of sneaking out her open window, of riding up the fire trail in Bob Davidson’s car, of throwing beer cans from the switchbacks down onto the wooden shakes of her grandparents’ house in a wide and sparkling arc. The colors of the cans—red, silver, golden—would explode out of the night like embers popping out of a brushfire. Whenever there were fires in the hills, whether along their own crest or way over in Bel Air, Lionel sat on the peak of the roof wetting the shakes with the garden hose, just to be sure. She was thinking of Bob Davidson, of his hard thin lips, of what it would take to get inside a mouth like that, of the way his weight might feel lying atop her on the new tuck’n’roll, when she heard the real weight of her grandfather moving along the creaking floorboards past the telephone desk in the central hall. That was the house at dead center. That was where, during the next hundred years or so, the house would finally implode, if she or her mother had not yet set it on fire.

Though his only daughter was lost in the dark, Lionel came along now on his stiff legs, laughing to himself over the feat of Frank Howard. He was chuckling, literally going: “Ho, ho, ho.” Charlotte could see him striding up to Frank Howard, one large fine man approaching another, extending the fingers of his fine, long-boned hand.

Charlotte heard him go into the bathroom, heard the water hitting water through the door, which had not been definitively closed. She thought of the shape of Lionel’s fingers, of those long fingers holding the shape of his large man’s penis, of the weight of his balls dangling in their sacks. She thought of each of her grandparents quite diagnostically, as under the fluoroscope, seeing the pale masses of their various malignancies and the large and throbbing shadows of each of their still quite vital glands.