“You really believe that, Sam.”
I really wanted to believe it, anyway.
“Yeah, I really do. Now why don’t you go help your mother?”
She gave me another one of those exotic erotic fleeting kisses of hers and then hurried toward the grand staircase.
SIXTEEN
THINK WE FOUND A PLACE.
THANKS FOR EVERYTHING.
THERE WAS QUITE A party going on at my place. The cats were sitting up on the couch with their legs crossed watching that new Johnny Carson late night show. They were drinking bourbon and smoking cigars. Tess was wearing a party hat I had left over from last New Year’s Eve. I’d begun to suspect that they had lives very much like ours. But they tried to keep them secret for fear of my inhibiting them. In my fantasy, the cigars and the bourbon had to do with Pamela and Stu moving out. Far out. They knew, as I knew, that that long malaise known as Heartsick About Pamela In Black River Falls, Iowa had ended. I was over her. I hadn’t liked her for many years but I’d loved her. Now I didn’t like her or love her. No wonder the cats were whooping it up. The intruders were gone and they wouldn’t have to listen to any more love-sick mooning on my part.
Law enforcement people say that they’re trained to spot things other people don’t notice. I must’ve been out sick the days they were conducting these courses at the police academy in Des Moines, because I miss things even the blind can see.
Not until I’d gone to the john, checked my service for phone messages, turned up the heat, pulled on a ragged U of Iowa sweatshirt, and sat myself down in my recliner did I notice the imposing round foil-wrapped plate in the center of the table.
I went over and inspected it. Tess was there to help me. She knew, as I did, that it was a plate covered with food. Tess has gone to drama school the past two years. She knows how to look up at you with those large intelligent eyes and make you want to cry. And share. “I’ll tell you what. You can have it all if it’s anything like liver and broccoli. How’s that?” I was thinking that if cats knew how to give you the finger, that’s what she would have been doing just then. Cats are smart. They know all about stuff like liver and broccoli.
It was a white meat chicken sandwich with lettuce, tomato and mayo, a small chilled tin of V-8, several carrot sticks and a good hunk of chocolate cake. There was a tiny card that read From a secret admirer who thinks you’re getting too skinny. Mary. Mrs. Goldman would have let her in. She was one of the many people who thought that Mary and I should’ve gotten married a long time ago.
I had to keep pushing Tess away. “You can have half the carrot sticks.” Oh, yeah; she definitely would’ve given me the finger if she could.
I ate sitting in the recliner. I then polished off the beer, smoked a few cigarettes and thought about Mary. Looks, smarts, tenderness, laughs. That was Mary. But Mary also offered love so strong it was sometimes overwhelming, smothering. Always had, always would. Just her nature. And now Mary offered two kids in tow as well.
I didn’t find the teddy bear until I slid under the covers. A big brown teddy bear wearing a lawman’s badge. A tiny note Scotch-taped to it: Your Secret Admirer. God, it was corny but there in the wind-whipped prairie night it felt good to know that she was out there, thinking of me.
“Who’s this guy?” my dad said at seven-thirty the following morning.
“I don’t know. He claims to be our son. He just showed up here a few minutes ago. Says he lived with us for a long time. But I’m not sure we have a son, do we? If we have, I haven’t seen him in a long, long time.”
“Years and years,” Dad said.
“You have any ID?” Mom said, dishing up the pancakes and the bacon and setting it in front of me. The milk and orange juice and daily vitamin were already in front of me on the kitchen table.
“How come he gets to eat first?” Dad said. “We don’t even know if he belongs to us.”
“Whoever he is, he seems to think he’s real important. Says he’s got a big meeting at nine and has to be ready for it.”
“Yeah, he looks important all right,” Dad said.
“Gee, I’m sure glad Abbott and Costello started making movies again,” I said.
“So how are you, son?”
“Don’t let him off the hook so easily,” Mom said. “We don’t hear from him for nearly a week, he deserves a little razzing.”
Mom and Dad are a matched set. Mom is five-two and most of her hair is still red. Dad is five-six and most of his hair has gone to hair heaven. Toward the end of my high school years, Dad got promoted at the factory where he’d worked since coming back from the war, and for the first time our family moved to a respectable neighborhood, lived in a house and drove a respectable used Ford. My sister Ruth lived in Chicago. She’d moved there after getting pregnant when she was seventeen. Nobody was happy about it but she sure wouldn’t get an abortion, not even in sinful Chicago. Even though I thought that was the best solution, my folks were shocked when I even brought it up. She’d have to give prior notice before she came back here so we could give the most important of the gossips plenty of time to work up their most venomous scorn. Sometimes, as now, I’d look across the table and imagine Ruthie still there, that sweet Mick face of freckles and slightly imperious nose and great gladifying lopsided McCain smile. Granddad wore it even in his coffin. Her life had been peaceful and almost perfect until her pregnancy and since then it had been nothing but travail in Chicago—a mother who worked and left her kid at the YMCA center; a number of hopeless, hapless, unhealthy affairs; a boozy slur in the voice when she called sometimes; and a sense I shared with Mom and Dad that she wasn’t Ruth any more, not the Ruth we’d known, and that she was as sad about it as we were. But none of us had any idea what to do about it. Sometimes I’d think of her and I swear to God I just wanted to die right on the spot, my entire body and mind in pain—take my gun and put it to my temple and just fire it before I had time to back out of it—it was just so hard to think about how much I loved her and was helpless in the face of her grief and sorrow.
But this was a sunny morning and Captain Kangaroo was on TV in the living room—Mom still watched it because Ruth had always watched it in the morning; I suppose it was a way of keeping her with us—and Mom was saying, “I think they could plead insanity and get away with it.”
Around a mouthful of pancake, I said, “Who should plead insanity because they could get away with it?”
“She means Ross Murdoch and those other three. That’s all she’s been talking about. I keep trying to tell her things like that go on all the time.”
“Why, a situation like that is no better than prostitution,” Mom said.
Dad said, “That’s what you can do when you have money.”
Mom said, “You can have your own geisha woman if you have money is what you’re saying? There aren’t any better things to do than that?”
Dad said, “If you have a lot of money you can do that and still do all the other better things, too.”
Mom said, “It’s their wives I feel sorry for. And their children. My Lord, the gossips will have a field day.”
“Already are,” I said. “Everywhere I go people tell me Murdoch jokes.”
“She must’ve had some temper,” Dad said.
“How’s that? And may I have some syrup?”