Gail, widow and the mother of a very young daughter, did not accept right away. But Frank persisted and, slightly more than two years after the death of her husband, Gail became Mrs. Frank Calloway. Within months after that, Amanda was legally adopted.
“I don’t think that Mom was ever in love with Frank. Not like she’d been in love with my real father, anyway. Read the letters and you’ll see the kind of passion they had for each other. That’s pretty rare.” Amanda allowed a reflective, cynical beat before adding, “These days, in fact, it’s almost nonexistent. But I think my mom’s a realist. She knew how tough it’d be raising me on her own, and I think she came to feel real affection for Frank. She certainly came to be dependent on him. She looked to Frank for everything. Financial security, emotional approval, the whole works. With some men, I think they’d rather have that than love.”
“It sounds like you’re not a big fan of your stepfather.”
“He’s not my stepfather anymore. He’s my mother’s ex-husband.” “You don’t like him.”
“I respect Frank. At times I even find him likable and entertaining. But he never pretended to be my real father. No, with Frank and me, it was… it was more like a business arrangement. I think we both knew we had to accept each other or risk hurting my mother. Even when I was very little I can remember thinking that. It was the only way to keep my mom happy, and we both loved my mother very much.” She paused for a moment, remembering how it was, before she added, “You said my dad, my real dad, had a picture of me. Did he ever show you a picture of my mom?”
I nodded. He had. Yes, he certainly had.
Bobby had carried a couple of photos of Gail. One, I couldn’t remember much about… a busty teenage Latina girl in shorts and a T-shirt? Yeah… posed in front of some kind of fast car. A GTO, maybe or a 442. One of the popular muscle cars of the day. Essence of the American male from that period: dream car, dream girl, a bank loan and marital obligations implied.
But the picture of Gail I remembered best was a glamour shot apparently taken by a professional photographer: haunting eyes, high cheekbones that created their own shadows in tricky lighting, long black hair with auburn overtones brushed as bright and smooth as a candle’s flame. It was the face of a starlet; one of the classic beauties from the forties. Imagine Rita Hayworth, but with Veronica Lake’s sleepy, secretive eyes, and you’d come pretty close to Gail Richardson.
Bobby had called it his “‘Twelfth of Never’ photograph.” Which made no sense until one night, as I boiled coffee over a can of Sterno, tropic rain drumming down, he explained: “It’s because of the way she looks. Her face, her hair, the way her eyes look right into mine. It reminds me of the song ‘The Twelfth of Never.’ It’s our song, Gail’s and mine.”
I said, “Huh?”
“What‘a’ya mean, ‘huh?’”
“I mean ‘The Twelfth of Never.’ I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
At first, he thought I was kidding. Then he realized that I wasn’t. “Doc, you’re telling me you’ve never heard it? Not even on the radio? The Johnny Mathis song, for Christ’s sake!”
“Nope. But it’s been a couple of years since I’ve been back to the States. Nearly four years, actually.”
His expression was pained. “You’d have to live on the frigging moon not to have heard that song.”
I was boiling the coffee, listening to the rain, looking at the blue flame of my miniature chemical fire: Sterno in the jungle. “The moon,” I said. “For the last few years, yeah. The moon, that pretty nearly describes the places I’ve been.”
He said, “You’re serious. You’re really serious. Okay… you want to know what the song’s like? Look at my wife. The way her face is, that’s exactly what the song sounds like. Too beautiful even to describe. A thousand years ago, she coulda been an Aztec princess or she could be Miss Latin America today. You know what you can’t tell from that photograph? Her eyes; Gail’s got the most unusual eyes you’ve ever seen. Her right eye’s bright blue. Powder blue like those stones the Navaho Indians wear. Those stones… turquoise, that’s what they call it. But her left eye is green. Really deep green, jungle green. I look at her eyes and I know that there’ll never be anyone else for me but Gail. Like until the twelfth of never, get it? I mean forever.”
Later, much later, when I finally heard the song, Bobby had been dead for, what, six months? Maybe a year. But listening to it, I’d thought about how right the man was. In his life, there had been only one true love. Gail. One blue eye, one green eye. And probably his toddler daughter, as well. Another girl with unusual eyes.
Back then, I’d thought of them as Bobby’s girls.
The only loves he would ever have. Just like he’d said: forever.
To Amanda, I now said, “I never met your mother, but I remember the photos. She was a very beautiful woman.”
“She still is. She’s in her forties, but the men-when she walks into a room? — men still stop what they’re doing and stare. She has that
… I don’t know what you’d call it. That grace or something, it’s almost like an odor. When the two of us go into a restaurant or a lounge, she’s the one who gets the attention. But if I try to joke about it, like, Hey, Mom, they think I’m your younger plain-Jane sister, she gets this really hurt look in her eyes. Because she loves me, understand, and I think she’s always felt bad that she’s so much prettier than I am.”
When I started to speak, Amanda held up her palm, shushing me. “I’m not fishing for compliments here, so you don’t need to offer any. I’m trying to make you see how it was with Frank and my mom. He wanted to possess her, and that’s exactly what he did. He possessed her, treated her like some kind of treasure. Which sounds great until you realize that treasure is nothing more than property with a specific value. There’s a Hindu saying that a woman’s face is shaped by her heart. My mother’s face is soft and kind and caring, but it’s not very strong. She let it happen, which isn’t uncommon for women of her generation. But she’s still the one who allowed herself to become completely dependent on Frank. And that’s why she was so unprepared for what happened last year.”
What happened, according to Amanda, was a woman named Capricia and then a man named Jackie Merlot.
4
In terms of male behavior, the story of the Calloways is so unfortunately commonplace that you have to wonder about the validity of the human male as a lifetime mate. When Frank gave up his psychology practice, his land syndicate business blossomed, then it boomed. He kept his old secretary, a woman named Betty Marsh, and hired a second secretary to handle the growing workload. She was a twenty-seven-year-old former art student by the name of Capricia Worthington, “Cappy” for short, which Frank allowed a nautical interpretation, and so his name of endearment for her became Skipper.
“I don’t know when the affair started,” Amanda told me. “I didn’t see much of Mom and Frank before the split up because my job keeps me so busy. I’m district manager for Vita Tech, a medical supply company. We’re based outside Pompano Beach, just south of Deerfield, and I’m almost always on the road. That, plus I share a condo with a girlfriend-a pretty nice place north of Lauderdale called Sea Ranch Lakes-so it’s not like I got by their house much.
“But I remember this one time I was over there for dinner and Frank had this moony, distracted look. Like he had to really force himself to pay attention to what my mom or me said. Something else is, he gave Mom a couple of very pointed, well-disguised cuts about weight she’d gained and something about the way her skin looked, wrinkles, I think. My mom loves to lay out in the sun.
“He’s very good at stuff like that, making criticism sound like it’s some harmless observation or a joke, but he really means it, and he knows how to make it hurt, too.”