We hung out at Goldie’s. It was just one of those west Loop bars. Guys heading home for work stopped for a quick one, listened to the racing results or a late ball game. We used to go after a meeting, Toffee Noble all excited about his basement magazine. He sometimes came with Lulu, who painted outsized canvases of African ritual dances. He also hung out with Edna Deerpath, the tiny black whirlwind who represented the hotel laundry workers in their bloody battles against the Mob.
Toffee never joined in anyone’s battles, just smirked from the sidelines, Mr. Cool, then went home and wrote us all up in stories he cranked out on his basement press. We never knew whether he held one of those pasteboard squares, the pass to the inner circle, or not. Some said he was too chicken to join, others that he was too chicken to admit he traveled all the way.
We were all brothers then, or brothers and sisters, even Gene, my blood brother, although everyone knew he only came to meet girls. We used to tease him, you think you’re the good capitalist? The one who won’t be hanged from the lamppost just because you like Red nookie?
I was the grand old man, being five or six years older than everyone but Lulu, and the only one who’d ever been shot at for being Red-although Edna and Lulu had ducked their share of stones for being black. Goldie herself didn’t care if you were black or white or red as long as your folding paper was green, and she set the tone; everyone at Goldie’s took you as you were, so of course it was a place where rich girls came, because rich girls gravitate to poor men when they want a little kick on the side.
And one of those was Rhona. I’d met plenty of Rhonas before, or thought I had, rich girls with too much money and too little to do. When they’ve tried dope and skiing and race cars, then they dabble a little in politics, a little in Communism because it’s daring and exciting. In the powder room at the Drake the next day, “Oh, darling, I went to this hovel on the West Side, can you believe people live in two rooms, there wasn’t even a closet, I had to hang my Balenciaga on a nail, and a shared bathroom halfway down the hall, and they’re all so earnest, comrade this and that, but Herman fixes me with those black eyes and I feel actually pinned to my chair, a wet puddle, I can’t get up or everyone will know, and it’s all so exciting because the government could raid us at any second. I brought him to Oakdale and Mother never guessed, she would have turned fifteen shades of red herself.” Oakdale. Larchmont Hall, Coverdale Lane. The name seemed deliber ate. I looked at my watch and tried to read faster. Rhona, with her silk teddy and painted nails, became enthusiastic about Communism, but was terrified of being discovered by her family. She would type fliers in Herman’s Kedvale Avenue apartment-wearing nothing but her rose teddy, to Herman’s intense satisfaction, then put on overalls and a blond wig to march on picket lines or to leaflet commuters. She and Herman made love in the afternoons on his unwashed sheets.
The sheets were gray from too little soap. A girl like Rhona, she might type or run a mimeograph machine, but she stood baffled in front of the washing machine in the basement, teased by thirteen-year-old girls who’d been turning a mangle since they were five. I didn’t get to the laundry more than once a month, so the sheets came to smell like Rhona, and like sex, a little joy by Patou, a little joy by Herman.
“Cute,” I muttered, showing the paragraph to Amy. “Couldn’t he operate a mangle himself?”
“Don’t get so exercised. It’s only a novel, and anyway, the guy is dead. And for heaven’s sake, don’t mark on it!”
Shamefaced, I put my pencil down and turned back to Pelletier’s words. I loved leaving my own scent on her. She was too fastidious to wash in the communal bathroom, rich little Communist girl, and when I’d licked
her nipples into red cherries against her whipped cream body, I’d ask what Ken would think when she raced home to undress and bathe. “Won’t he lean over you and wonder who or what he’s smelling over the bath salts.” At first she would laugh it away, but one day she explained the sad truth, that Ken was impotent, that he’d long since stopped leaning over her in the bath or bed or any other place.
It was Dryden who said that pity melts the mind to love, and maybe that’s when I started to love her, when I started to pity her. Maybe if she’d whined about it the first time she unbuttoned her white silk blouse, “I only fuck strange men because my husband’s impotent,” I would have despised her, but it was four months before I learned the truth, and then she never mentioned it again.
And Gene, who never missed anything, saw the pity and the love, and began coming to the apartment, where he pantomimed dismay at the rat droppings in the hall and uncurtained cracked windows in the front room. But it didn’t stop him hanging about after meetings. “I can run Rhona home and come back to finish discussing business with you, Herman. Do you need a buck for the laundry? Those sheets are going to get up and walk off that bed on their own pretty soon.”
Disgust didn’t keep him from lying in those sheets. It was the day after I’d found her there with him, the day I beat her (long red fingers on the whipped cream skin, red fingers from her red lover, red fingers turning to blue, blue blood of the master class, it would rule her in the end) the day she left and didn’t come back, the day I started to die.
The next twenty pages dealt with his dying: “Every man imagines he’s Jesus, or at least Trotsky, important enough for execution. That’s what I thought for the first five years I lay in the ground. Finally, I realized selfpity and booze were what really did me in.” He compared himself to Lulu: “… she was in the same boat as me, unloved, unwanted, but she didn’t turn her face to the wall. Instead she turned her back on all of us, went to Africa, painted her giant canvases whether anyone bought them or not.”
If Pelletier’s works were all-what had been Amy’s phrase? A something of clay-Lulu definitely stood in for Kylie Ballantine. Kylie continued her
work, she went to Gabon, she refused to be bowed down by Taverner’s spite in getting her fired.
And Gene stood for Calvin, the Boy Wonder. And Rhona… and Ken. MacKenzie Graham. He’d been impotent, so Geraldine turned elsewhere for love? Was that what she meant, when she said she and MacKenzie had so little in common?
I drew circles on my notepaper. Edwards Bayard had overheard talk as an adolescent about someone who looked just like his mother, and so didn’t seem to realize who his father was. Adolescent self-absorption, a fantasy yearning for the perfect father, made Edwards assume the neighbors were gossiping about him. And then his hurt and bitterness with Calvin kept him clinging to this adolescent version of events. Funny to see someone with so much education, and with the power of his personal wealth and his position in the Spadona Foundation, unable to let go of his adolescent view of the world.
I listed all the Bayards in one of the circles I’d drawn. In another, I put Darraugh’s family, starting with Laura Taverner Drummond, then Geraldine and MacKenzie, whose father connived with Laura to marry the two wild children. Their daughter Laura, named after the formidable grandmother. Darraugh, born in 1943. Darraugh’s son, young MacKenzie.
I slowly added a line joining the Grahams to the Bayards. Darraugh looked exactly like his mother. Everyone said Geraldine Graham had been a wild young woman. In his current illness, Calvin Bayard wandered to Larchmont in the dark. He had kept a key to the house. He had clutched me, crying, “Deenie.” Geral-deeme. She had spilled coffee all over herself when I reported it. Whatever Pelletier had thought about Calvin, the Boy Wonder, Calvin had loved Geraldine Graham.