“No, but I’ve heard of them in California.”
“Touche. As I was saying.”
“What were you saying?”
“You don’t like me, do you, Mr. Mallory?”
“That isn’t what you were saying.”
“It’s what you’ve been saying.”
“I don’t remember saying much of anything.”
“That’s precisely how you said it.”
“Spare me the California mellow-speak, would you?”
“Is that what you call it in Iowa?”
“Actually, we call it bullshit. I’m just being polite.”
“Ah, yes. Contempt is so often expressed by mock-civility.”
I sipped my Coke. “Go to hell, Jerome.”
Lids half hid the china-blue eyes. “I’m interested. What is it about me you dislike so? My sexual preferences wouldn’t matter much to you, I’m guessing.”
“That’s right.”
“What is it, then?”
I looked for a fast answer; any smart-ass remark to lob the ball back to him. But I couldn’t find one.
And he just sat there staring at me with his father’s eyes coming out of that tan face, the subdued lights in the place catching his droopy gold chain and tossing it at me.
Finally I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know why I don’t like you. You seem decent enough. I think I maybe… resent your lack of appreciation of your father, for who he is… was.”
“Is that all?”
“Well. I think you pose, a little…”
“Don’t you? Don’t you confuse yourself a bit with that sensitive latterday Philip Marlowe you portray in your books?”
“No. I know where fiction ends and reality begins.”
“Oh, really? And where is that?”
“Somewhere east of San Francisco.”
A smile crinkled one corner of his mouth and both his eyes. “Now you sound like a latter-day Gat Garson.”
That made me smile. I’d have to be careful or I’d start liking this guy.
“You’ve read your father’s books?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes, I have. I most certainly have. Very witty. Of their kind, the very best there is. My father was an underrated, underappreciated artist. One day he’ll be rediscovered. Perhaps his death will spark a revival. That would be the only fortunate consequence of his passing.”
Damnit. I was starting to like this guy.
“I’ve even read one of your books,” he said. “I liked it, rather. I can see why my father might be proud of his student.”
“You said you envied me,” I said, a little embarrassed by his flattery, “for being close to your father. I wasn’t. He had a wall up he never quite let me get behind.”
Jerome nodded. “I think that was true even of his wives-with the possible exception of Evelyn the Grotesque.”
When he spoke her name he might have been sucking a lemon. I must’ve shown in my face my surprise at the depth of his bitterness, because he went on to answer a question I never asked.
“Evelyn stole my father from my mother. It’s that simple. To me, she’s a thief, and, in a roundabout way, a murderess. But she understood Roscoe Kane. She could relate to him on his own level-trade off-color, wise-guy cracks with him like a drag queen Gat Garson. And, of course, she drank with him. They were boozers together. That can create an enormous bond, you know. It’s a club you can’t resign from.”
“He eventually left her.”
Jerome shrugged. “They both went on the wagon. They both periodically fell off, in years to come; but for a while there, they were sober. It’s a terrible thing to sober up and look at the person you’ve been married to when that person has simultaneously sobered up and is looking at the person she is married to, too. Neither one recognizes the sober version, and, well, the rest is history.”
“And history is Mae Kane.”
His smile turned up at both corners now. “Bless her greedy little heart. She was my mother’s unintentional avenger. She was Evelyn’s karma come home to roost. Those years of drinking turned pleasantly plump Evelyn into a barrel with legs, remember. And Mae was-and is-an attractive woman, to say the least. You’ve noticed?”
I rubbed my forehead. “I have noticed.”
“Mae stole Evelyn away from my father, just as Evelyn had stolen him from my mother. My father always had a weakness for a bosomy babe, as Gat might say. Perhaps his lechery is what put me off the girls, that and being a momma’s boy… the old cliche about being raised by your mommy, being your mommy’s bestest friend, all of that was true in my case. Till she died.”
“I, uh… never really heard the circumstances of your mother’s death. Roscoe never got into it. That was one of the things he kept behind that wall I couldn’t get back of.”
“Guilt was back there, too,” Jerome said. “Guilt’s another thing he had back of that wall of his. He blamed himself. But I don’t know that he was to blame, much. It was ten years after he left her that she killed herself.”
“Jesus,” I said. “I didn’t know… I’m sorry…”
“Your condolences are noted, and appreciated,” Jerome said, “if a few decades late. My mother, Winifred Kane, killed herself with a gun my father had given her to protect herself with. One of those Gat Garson guns he had half a dozen of.”
I swallowed. “A long-barreled.38.”
“Yes.” Jerome smiled. “The kind my father posed with on his book covers.”
I felt suddenly cold. “That’s a piece of information I could’ve lived without.”
“One might say the same for my mother. Oh, young lady?”
He stopped the barmaid for another Scotch and tonic. I asked for another Coke-but I had her put some bourbon in with it, this time.
“Jerome, I’m sorry to ask this…”
“Ask, ask.”
“Why… why did your mother take her life? Did-did she leave a note…? What had been going on that-”
Jerome shrugged elaborately. “I was a teen-ager, all wrapped up in my own pubescent angst. I had little time to notice my mother’s troubles. Oh, we were close. Very close. But she wore a mask, for me. A mother mask. The woman beneath was never fully revealed to me. What made her tick is a mystery even Gat Garson could not solve. I do know she had what might be euphemistically referred to as ‘mental problems.’ She was diagnosed schizophrenic, and was in and out of institutions where she had countless shock treatments, back while she and my father were married. My father admitted to me that his heavy drinking began in those days. And I can understand why the prospect of, shall we say, joining with the mentally stable Evelyn was an irresistible one. Besides, she had bigger titties than Mother.”
The bitterness under the poised, Noel Coward exterior was cracking through. I’d known he was largely a pose; but I hadn’t understood the nature of the pose. I hadn’t guessed how sad and angry the real man, behind Jerome Kane’s wall, really was.
I sipped the bourbon and Coke. Let the intense moment subside.
Then I said, “You saw your father last night.”
He nodded. “For supper. We ate at an Italian place on the North Side, Augustino’s, a favorite of his. Quite good. But, then, you saw him, too, didn’t you? Right before he died? That’s why I wanted to see you, Mallory. I wanted to ask you about that final meeting with him….”
“I’ll make you a deal. We’ll get to my story after I hear yours.”
“You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine? Why not. We’re all brothers under the skin. I have seen my father rarely these past twenty years. He took me for a month each summer when I was growing up. But when I moved to San Francisco, after dropping out of college, and he began to get a sense of… my lifestyle… our contact became, well, infrequent.”
“Roscoe never could accept that you’re gay, could he?”
Jerome nodded, looking into the smoky-colored drink. “Quite right. Why, exactly, I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps he saw it as a rejection of him. Gat Garson was an idealized version of himself, you know-oh, Gat was a put-on, a spoof, but still… Gat was macho, and in not a wholly satirical way. Gat Garson was a genuine tough guy, just like Mike Hammer or James Bond. And my father was macho himself, a brawler, particularly in the verbal sense. And, like Gat, he was a womanizer. He loved those blondes with the big boobies-or he did in the early days. I’ve sensed, the few times I was with him in recent years, a declining interest in honey-haired darlings, his lechery fading to but a passing mammary. Speaking of which-miss?”