“Don’t blaspheme, Petey. You always get irreverent when you’ve had a nip too many.”
“I’ve got nothing against God. Or the church, for that matter. It’s men who — who did this to me. You — you — you talk about women telling other women what it is they ought to be doing.” The priest lowered his voice. “But my problem is with men. It’s men who put me here. It’s the men of my faith who s-say I’m not allowed to worship God while seeking a different kind of Heaven in the arms of a beautiful woman. What r-right have they to tell me this, Herman? What right?” Pete Mullavey grew silent, thoughtful, yearning, then mournful. Herman held his vigil beside the door. He could hear the opening music of the 1968 Miss America Pageant starring Bert Parks and fifty-one of the finest examples of American womanhood. “There she is…” There they were.
“I’ll call you in when Miss Illinois climbs up on her trampoline, Petey. Go easy on the booze. I don’t want you to fall down and break your crown and wind up in the Kansas River.”
Peter Mullavey nodded. He sighed. He leaned back in the stationary rocker and closed his eyes. He saw Mrs. Davies sitting in the front pew of his parish church, smiling supportively through his slightly stammered homilies. He imagined the curves of Mrs. Davies in her house frock, standing with her back to him in the early morning light, frying up his sausage and eggs. Sometimes he pretended that they were married — happily married like his friends Herman and Jelena.
Peter Mullavey and his oldest friend and fellow altar boy Herman Klar and Herman’s opinionated, longsuffering, long-loving wife Jelena inaugurated a new annual ritual that year. On a particular Saturday every year in early September, the three popped popcorn and poured Schnapps and Scotch whiskey, and watched Miss America together. In fact, it was during the 1976 broadcast that Father Mullavey suffered the stroke that incapacitated him for the next year and a half and resulted ultimately in his retirement from active ministry. The causal arterial embolism occurred while Bert Parks, backed up by three young bobble-headed male dancers in tuxedos, sang the pop hit by Paul McCartney, “Let ’Em In.”
Mrs. Davies was there at Pete’s bedside at the hospital and then every day at the rectory to assist him in his daily rehabilitation therapy. Every morning she was up early to fry his sausage and eggs. One morning he reached up as she was setting the plate in front of him, reached up and touched her cheek with the fingertips of his right hand — the good hand — touched her soft, warm cheek sweetly, achingly, ever so briefly.
1969 PARENTAL IN ARIZONA
The first year it was a Spartan, and Yellowstone and the Tetons; the next year a Vagabond, and the Badlands and the Four Faces. Last year we bought a used Airway Zephyr and flew like the wind up and down the California and Oregon coastline. This year we went to Bryce and Zion and the Grand Canyon. I don’t know why it took us so long to get to the Grand Canyon. There’s simply no way to describe it — like nothing we’ve seen in all of our four years of vacationing out west. Especially when you’re vacationing in luxury in a brand-new Avion thirty-one-foot, two-and-a-half-ton Imperial. As the name implies, it’s the biggest travel trailer the Avion company makes.
My husband has, over the last several years, become a master rig hauler. He’s a man of many talents, that’s for certain, and I never doubted that he would get so good at “travelcading.” Although Clint inherited quite a bit of money from his father, he didn’t simply plop himself down upon his family windfall and proceed to a life of self-indulgence. We have taken a good deal of the Dinkman’s Pastries fortune and given it to a number of charities and organizations whose causes we believe in. (Only a small portion of the inheritance actually finances our extensive summer travels through the Great American West.)
Clint has learned to play the violin and he’s writing a book about General Custer. I am a gourmet chef. You wouldn’t believe the meals I can whip up for my husband and our two hungry road puppies using that Avion butane range with bifold top and broiler. I should have mentioned our road puppies sooner. Robert Joseph — known as R.J. (he’s eleven) — and Lisha (she’s nearing ten) couldn’t wait to get out of school and hit the road for two and a half glorious months of scenic adventure with Mom and Dad. From day one we were like one of those families in the 1950s travelogues, waving and mugging at the camera as they insert their car through the hollowed-out trunk of that Wawona giant sequoia in Yosemite — something that we would have liked someday to do (unhitched, of course) had a heavy snowfall not toppled that majestic Old Man of the Forest just last winter.
Clint and I have a good life, which is made even better by our annual ten-week road adventures with the kids, who are usually game for anything their nutty trailer-touring parents want to do. No, we have never surmounted Pike’s Peak with any of our various rigs in tow, but we have crossed the Continental Divide several times, rig intact, and never burned out a single automobile engine.
No one has ever questioned our taking the kids along — even though it removes from them the opportunity to enjoy the kinds of summer activities usually associated with children their age. Well, no one questioned us, that is, until we paid a visit to Clint’s two half-sisters in Flagstaff last August.
It was inevitable that we would see them after our visit to Grand Canyon National Park. Clint hadn’t been in communication with either of them for almost ten years. Gabby and Gertrude, twelve and fourteen years older than him, respectively, were never close to Clint. In addition to the age difference, there was also the fact that it wasn’t the phenomenally successful prune danish and chocolate bear claw magnate, Overell Dinkman, whom they shared as a parent, but Dinkman’s second wife, Alfreda, who came into the marriage with two daughters in whom stepdad Dinkman could not have been any less interested.
It also made sense for reason of proximity. Flagstaff is simply too close to the south rim of the Grand Canyon for Clint to have avoided a visit with his spinster sisters. And that was that.
I really wish we hadn’t gone.
We’d spent three weeks at the Grand Canyon, making sure to keep the hiking to a minimum for several reasons, not the least of which was the oppressive summer heat. Still, R.J. got enough of a taste of the place to say that he was seriously considering becoming a park ranger when he grew up. Lisha, who loved horses, spent a lot of her time volunteering as a girl-groom at the stables. She worked very hard, and some days she returned to the trailer more tired than others, but overall she amazed us with her stamina and little girl vitality.
It had probably been our best summer trip, and R.J. and Lisha and I fought back tears as we stood watching Clint turn off the butane tanks, disengage the lines, unblock the wheels, fold the jacks, and then open the backseat door to our red-on-red grin-grilled workhorse of a rig hauler — our 1964 Cadillac Deville convertible 429—so that the kids could climb in and we could hit the road. I could tell from their long faces that they were reluctant to leave the trailer park, which had been their happy home for twenty-one blissful days and nights.
“What do you say to your father and me for bringing you here, children?” I asked, with a catch in my voice.
“Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad,” said the two in cheerless unison.
I could not simply leave it at that. I reached into the car and smothered each of my road puppies with maternal hugs and kisses. “You’re most welcome,” I said between snuggling smooches.