Until then, I hadn’t had much experience of Cousin Lamarr. None of us local boys had. Aunt Lulu had sent him down to boarding school in Wellington from a very early age. Maybe she thought lightning would strike twice and that, like her, Lamarr would eventually grow up and meet some nice rich American heiress — yeah, right. So that day was the first time any of us had ever seen Lamarr close up as it were. I mean he looked like a boy but something was a little off.
Uncle Gardner yelled out to me, ‘Hey! Boy!’ He waved me over. By that time the GI looks had faded and he’d begun to lose his hair, but he was still good-looking. ‘See that kid over there under the trees?’
I shaded my eyes and saw three, well, girls, playing with a toy dinner set. ‘You mean the boy —’ I took a guess, but I knew all along it was Lamarr ‘— in the middle?’
Uncle Gardner nodded. ‘That’s him. I want you to invite Lamarr to play with you young fellers and, every chance you get, you throw the little sonofabitch into a cowpat.’ He proffered me a few coins to sweeten the deal, so I spoke to the other boys and, well, money talks. With their agreement, I went over to the willows, where Lamarr was pouring tea for his sisters.
‘Hello, cousin,’ I said to him. ‘Wanna play ball?’ I couldn’t help the slight sarcasm that crept into my voice. I was sure Lamarr wouldn’t want to dirty his pretty little jumpsuit or whatever it was. Play with dolls maybe but … play ball?
Was I ever wrong! Lamarr looked at me, at the other boys, and he was off to join us like a rocket. When I dumped him in a cowpat he shrieked with glee and ran after me and dumped me! — and I wasn’t even holding the ball.
‘No, cousin, you have to go for the boy — on the other side,’ I added, because he still hadn’t got it. ‘The one who’s got the ball and wants to score a try.’
Well, that did it. Lamarr became the best tackler on the field. So I don’t want you to think that he was afraid of getting hurt, because he wasn’t. In fact he later made the first fifteen at his boarding school. He was a first five-eight, though he had desperately wanted to be a forward. One night when we were hanging out he told me why: ‘I just loved getting in among those hairy thighs and pushing.’ He’d never have done a Hopoate (Lamarr’s standards were too high), but whenever he was in the scrum he was in, well, hog heaven.
Aunt Lulu and I reached Matawai, the Bentley cruising up all those hills like a dream. I was so busy driving that I hadn’t realised the medication or whatever was keeping her, well, normal, was starting to wear off.
She looked at me, as if for the first time, and said, ‘You know I have a nephew who works for the airlines just like you do. You might know him. His name’s William.’
She took another look and her memory shifted again. She leant forward and gave me a sharp rap on the shoulder.
‘And you know, Brown, that I always like you to wear your chauffeur’s cap whenever we’re in the Bentley. I won’t tell you again.’
Uh oh.
Coward that I am, I rummaged in the front compartment and found the cap that had once belonged to Brown — he was Maori and his name was really Brownie.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said as I put it on.
‘That’s better,’ Aunt Lulu said.
FIVE
Silly boy, me, to think that driving Aunt Lulu to Tauranga would be that easy.
And so it was that from Matawai, approaching the long winding road through the Waioeka Gorge, I ceased to be Aunt Lulu’s nephew, William, and became Brown, one of the long line of dogsbody-cum-drivers that Uncle Gardner had employed whenever he was home in New Zealand.
Why the chauffeurs? Well, being American, Uncle Gardner could never get accustomed to driving on the left side of the road. And he never did like the Bentley. ‘What kind of goddamn country is this,’ he would grumble, ‘when an American citizen can’t buy a goddamn Chrysler because the steering wheel’s on the wrong goddamn side?’
I actually didn’t mind that Aunt Lulu assumed I was Brownie. I’d liked him, especially since he would sometimes let me drive the Bentley (I was thirteen the first time I got behind the wheel) when he was sent to the grocery store to get something important like more cigarettes or confectionery. And, after all, playacting had been such an important part of growing up with Lulu and Lamarr: if she wanted to do a Driving Miss Daisy, that was fine by me. I’d do anything to keep her happy.
Sitting in the Bentley, with Aunt Lulu nodding off and then rapping on my shoulder to say, ‘Brown, you’re travelling too slow! What is this, a hearse?’ and the wild bush standing in for Alabama, I couldn’t help but think back on those times when Uncle Gardner, after that first football game, would send Brownie around to pick me up and take me to the house.
My father concurred in what amounted to a game to stop Lamarr from turning from a sissy into something even more horrible and nameless. So the word was put on me: I was to be Lamarr’s daytime playmate and his best friend.
‘Lamarr’s such a girl,’ I complained to Dad.
‘It’s only for a few hours a week,’ he reprimanded me, ‘and you’re whanau, for Chrissake.’
Yeah, Dad, well thank you for putting that number on me. Fat chance, too, that he would sweeten the deal with some cash, like Uncle Gardner. No, this time I’d have to take on Lamarr as if he was some kind of social welfare project.
However, there was a ray of sunshine. I had become a randy teenager and I secretly had the hots for my cousin Viveca, who herself was interested in experimenting with a boy, even if it was her cousin. My seeming reluctance to be her brother’s best friend actually hid a scheming heart.
This was how the involvement in Aunt Lulu and Lamarr’s channelling games began.
‘Don’t take the boy home yet, Brown,’ Aunt Lulu would call from the living room. ‘We need somebody masculine to play the hero.’
Aunt Lulu’s love of American movies had persisted and she’d managed to pass on her passion to Lamarr. To assuage her love, Uncle Gardner had built a huge home cinema in the basement with a huge screen and projector. On would go a movie, 16mm film mostly … I suspect Uncle Gardner was relieved that I would supplant him in the male starring roles he’d had to play, out of love for Aunt Lulu, until I came along. And Aunt Lulu particularly loved either Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind or Bette Davis and Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager or, her particular favourite, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca.
I learnt to smoke at Aunt Lulu’s, trying to light two cigarettes and pass one to Aunt Lulu or Viveca or Yolanda or Lamarr — whoever had won the lottery to play the female part that night — and uttering, between coughs, ‘May I sometimes come here?’ However, I did develop muscles when I had to carry any of them as Scarlett O’Hara, but especially Lamarr, up the stairs where, like Clark Gable, I was supposed to ravish her — or him.
I liked Casablanca much better, especially if I was playing the Humphrey Bogart role as the gruff Rick, owner of the Café Américain. All I had to do was to be madly in love with Ilsa — usually Aunt Lulu, who always insisted on the Ingrid Bergman role — as she came into my place in Nazi-controlled Casablanca, looking beautiful in a simple white gown.