When Shockula informed me of Lively’s impending arrival, I expected some form of retribution. I warned him, “Count Shockula, if Lively’s expecting me to apologize for our incident, he’s going to be waiting ’til Godot finishes brunch.”
On a sweltering late July afternoon, I swooshed outside wearing a salmon-colored sundress and big-brimmed white cotton hat with peacock feathers hung from its back brim. I sat on a white marble seat at a round table. Shockula came over with Lively and then walked off to the side and spoke with another Collier Layne vacationer. Lively coiled himself in the seat across from me. He seemed rather nervous, his body less domineering, hidden under a loose-fitting pin-striped blue suit that looked like he picked it off the spy rack at the CIA mall. His eyes covered by his unintentionally fashionable FBI ’60s-style drugstore sunglasses.
“Is Nathaniel okay?” I feared something had happened to him, and that was the reason Lively came to visit.
“I have not seen him.”
“Is he still getting out in September?”
“I have no news contradicting that.” Lively dabbed at the sweat forming on his temples and forehead with a white handkerchief.
“Are you checking up on me for Hilda?”
“I have neither seen nor spoken to her.” He rat-a-tatted the table with his gnarly knuckles and gaudy ring. “What do you know about your biological father?”
“Nothing. Hilda and Gus claimed they were never told who he is. The one time I met Greta, she was more than elliptical. My personal research says that he must have been an artist.” I quickly covered myself. Lively would never accept my genetic travels as anything but the hallucinations of a madwoman. “It’s fact that Greta was friends with many artists when she arrived in New York.”
Lively scratched at his cheek but said nothing.
“You have more than an idea, don’t you?”
“Unhmm.”
“Lively, I’m listening.”
“First, in regard to Hilda, I have my qualms about your abilities to keep a secret.”
“I don’t ever purposefully hurt her.”
“That is exactly my fear. Your lack of purpose.” He tilted his head toward the sky, then leaned forward over the marble table and gave a smidge of a nod toward Shockula. “Your father was Gus Savant.”
“Oh, please!” I sputtered. “It took you almost two years to come up with that twinkle-twinkle-nursery-rhyme explanation?”
“Accept it or not. It’s a fact.” He paused, letting the needle he’d slipped into my consciousness evacuate its message. “I’m sorry he was not an artist. From what little contact we had — my meetings with Gus were fleeting — he impressed me as a most decent man.”
“He was better than decent. I loved him. I’d be proud to be his offspring.” I sat pensively for a moment. Never had I connected Gus’s chromosomes to me. “He would never have done that to Hilda.”
“Salome, even good men falter. Gus was adamantly, and rightly, opposed to an abortion. No one wanted to risk a public explosion. It would have guaranteed ruining Miss Garbo’s image, and your father’s marriage. Gus and Hilda got their child.”
“Lively, what do you want from me?”
“Nothing. I’m trying to do right.” He took off his sunglasses, placed them on the table, and without wiping the sweaty curlicues forming on his cheeks, aimed his Shiva the Obliterator eyes onto me. “I have no reason to lie. I’d have more reason to lie if it weren’t true. Hilda was never told of Gus’s paternity and he never wanted her to hear about his lapse. That is why you best have the sense not to tell her.”
“Who told you? And why should I trust you? Why didn’t you tell me that day in Billy Jr.’s apartment?”
“As I said then, William Bickley felt honor bound to keep his word to Gus. At the time, I felt honor bound not to act against his wishes. Still, I am not under his jurisdiction or hogtied by any legal agreements.”
“When did they meet? How?”
“That is not relevant.”
“To me it is. Give me proof. Were they in love?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. As far as proof, my proof is my word.”
The man was so taken with his own benevolent hubris he brought out the violence in me. I wanted to dig my nails into his gorillalike sideburns and scream, “You’re fucking with my life!” but I stayed seated and sipped my water before asking my next unanswerable question. “Was Greta a spy?”
Lively’s incisors ground into each other to maintain his posture of gentlemanly formality. We sat silently. I had sensated correctly. “Of course she was. She worked for you and Bicks Sr.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Not exactly.”
“What would you say?”
“Let me propose that she was sympathetic to us.”
“And Gus, he was a spy, too?”
“No, he was not.” Lively stood up, towering over me. “Despite your previous attempt to injure me, I bear you no ill will.” As always, he made me feel as if his blandest statements were a lethal threat.
“Since you are in a giving mood, think you have the resources to dig up whether my mother and Marcel Duchamp ever had an affair?”
He tugged at the perspiring chicken skin around his massive Adam’s apple, suddenly perplexed. “You mean the French fella who is the mime?”
I started giggling. “Forget it.”
He shrugged. He bent over and put on his sunglasses. I should have thanked him. But I couldn’t be that phony.
I called Hilda a few nights later. “I was looking at an old picture of Dad from when he was in the navy that I have here in my room. What did he do during the war?”
“You heard these stories when you were a child. Have you forgotten?”
“The doctors told you. Some of my memories are scrambled from the treatment.”
She tried to answer jokingly, “Some of them were scrambled before.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“Let’s not fight.”
“I’m not fighting, I’m asking a question.”
“Gus had done two years in the navy when he was nineteen, before we started dating. He reenlisted right after Pearl Harbor. We were married by then. After serving about a year at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he was reassigned back to Greenport, where he became the liaison between the navy and the Picket Patrol, the group of civilians from the North Fork who sailed out to scout for Nazi submarines. Why do to want to know?”
“Because I miss him.”
“I do, too.” And she did. She never suspected that Gus betrayed her, if indeed he did. Never did I find Dad within me. I could only commune with Greta’s mitochondria and they, like she, never revealed the secret of my father.
25 THE MOSES CHRONICLES (2001)
Toilet Humor
Alchemy came by the hospital three days after he and Jay spoke in the Jag. Jay remained purposely absent. He relaxed in a burnt orange plastic reclining chair beside Moses’s bed, both of them half watching the TV talking heads yammering, when Alchemy asked, his voice oddly muffled by the medical mask, “How come you guys decided not to have kids?”
Moses muted the sound on the TV. “At first, selfishness and vacillation. We traveled a lot in my time off. We enjoyed our freedom. I had no grand desire to subject a kid to this world or relive my childhood by proxy through my progeny.” Moses did not volunteer that Jay’s mother’s dolorous descent into a waking coma, then her father’s cavalier behavior, kept her ambivalent. At least, at first. “Just before my diagnosis, Jay, well, we reconsidered. We were going to try. Then I got sick …” His voice trailed off.
“Maybe there’ll still be time after this. Mose, you’d be a cool dad.”