“They’re five-dollar gold pieces, vintage eighteen eighty. A gift from somebody I used to know. Go on—tell me about you and Howard.”
She slumped with memory. “I had a fantastic pathetic terrible crush on him. I was in school—you know. In my freshman pleated skirt and saddle shoes. But I was never one of those apple-pie country girls. There was a little group of us. We were determined to be as sophisticated as Noel Coward and as witty as Dorothy Parker. My dorm came to be known as Villa Cirrhosis and our little crowd was known all over campus as The Vicious Circle. You know how it is. Kids.”
She made a face. “I was very forward and I suppose quite good-looking in an unformed way. After I got rid of the braces on my teeth. Anyhow I had all kinds of gentlemen admirers and most of them had acne and fruity drawls, I couldn’t stand it. I met Howard and formed a towering crush instantly. My God, I was eighteen, Howard was nearly thirty. Do you know how girls mistake quietness in men for maturity?”
“I guess.”
“He was good-looking. Although actually he’s much better looking now than he was then. It took him years to get the baby fat out of his cheeks.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.”
“You’d like him, Mort. He’d like you. He’s easy to get along with—he’s got all the social graces, he’s up on current events with that engagingly impressive manner of somebody who knows all the inside dirt about anything you’d care to mention. He doesn’t drop names; he drops facts. He can tell you the real inside story behind the Rhodesian troubles or the making of King Kong, anything. I was thoroughly impressed, and madly flattered by his noticing me. I remember how surprised I was by how hot his face looked the first time he asked me out for a date.” The memory provoked her wry chuckle.
“So you were married and lived unhappily ever after.”
“We had a good year or two,” she said in a muted way.
“What went wrong?”
“Everything dried up at once. Robert was born just before Christmas in nineteen fifty-five and I think that was supposed to occupy my complete attention while Howard was off solving affairs of earth-shaking importance in his office. I hated every minute of it. The little snotling wasn’t my cup of tea. I was still too damn young—I missed the freedoms I’d had.” She felt the tears coming. “You can’t believe how quickly our marriage degenerated into one of those ‘You already owe me three back-rubs’ things.” She plucked at a ragged fingernail. “I find it fascinating to realize that the first time I met Howard I believed him to be a man so smooth you could skate on him. How the polish wore off. It’s inconceivable I could have misled myself so completely.”
“We’re none of us immune to that,” Mort said. “I’ve been married three times.”
“A typical Hollywood success story.”
He prompted her. “And then you got divorced.”
“That was the most humiliating part of it. He left me, you know. Not the other way round. Does that surprise you?”
“Some, yes.”
“I guess I’d decided to make the best of the bad bargain for Robert’s sake. Trying to force myself to grow up and behave like a responsible adult. I was working in documentary films then, in Washington for one of the TV stations. It gave me outside contacts with the world and I was willing to settle for that. At least I had part of a life. Then Howard found a little blonde somewhere. For a little while he persuaded himself he couldn’t live without her. It was only an excuse to screw up the courage to leave me. He left one day while I was at work. I didn’t know where the hell he was for three days. I had the cops searching, I called everybody at the State Department, I was distraught—not because I missed him but just because I was so completely in the dark. I feel the same way right now about Robert but I’m older and I suppose it doesn’t show so much, except for this silly talking jag. Then I got his letter in the mail. I suppose it was easier for him to say that kind of thing in a letter. It was a twelve-page single-spaced diatribe, typed. Meticulously listing all my faults.”
“He sounds like a real bastard.”
“Not really. Together we were bad—we were terrible for each other, we brought out the absolute worst. We made each other into wretched creatures. I used to think I hated him, of course. Now I’m not sure. Maybe I made him into the thing that I hated.… Am I coming to pieces, Mort? Christ, I feel as if somebody somewhere is sticking pins in a wax effigy.”
“You’re jittery. It’ll pass—you’ll settle down. You’re strong.”
“Strong. In the sense that a skunk is a strong animal.”
“Oh, come off it, darling.”
“There you go again. Didn’t I warn you about that?”
“I most humbly beg your forgiveness.” He showed her his grin. “You started out to tell me about your son.”
“Do you know what I think of when you ask me about Robert? A picture he pinned up in his bathroom. A photograph of General Patton pissing in the Rhine. It was so Robert, so quintessentially Robert. He’s so greedy for life and at the same time so alienated by it. He went through a wild period in college, much wilder than mine was. One time I went down to the University of Arizona to visit him, a surprise visit, and got to Tucson fairly late at night. I stopped in front of a fraternity house that looked like the right one and asked a kid if Robert Lundquist lived there. The kid was sitting on the porch reading under a light. He looked out into the darkness at my car and said in a bored voice, ‘Yeah, he lives here. Bring him in.’ I think he stayed drunk two whole semesters and spent another year or two high on grass. But you know he turned out all right in spite of everything his parents could do to screw him up.”
Her voice broke. “So greedy for life.”
“How’d he get into the Peace Corps?”
“Howard wanted him to go to law school. Robert didn’t want that. He still hasn’t got any idea what he wants to do with himself. He told me a few years ago he thought it was ridiculous to have to make those decisions at nineteen. When you’re fifty years old, why should you have to spend your life in libraries and courtrooms because some kid decided thirty years earlier that you ought to be a lawyer? And you know he was absolutely right. So he volunteered for the Peace Corps. It was something worthwhile to do while he was making up his mind about the future. That’s all—nothing peculiar. But he’s got a great deal of dedication. One of the facts he keeps harping on—he’s a computer-bank of random facts—is that the governments of the world spend the same amount of money on children every year that they spend on deadly weapons every two hours. Once I asked him why he hadn’t joined radical protest groups, and do you know what he said? He said he didn’t believe in protests because in order to be a protester you had to take an inferior position to the people with whom you were pleading. When he went off to Mexico he said he was doing his bit to try and help the children win out over the cannons. So if you’re asking me if I love my son, the answer’s yes. How could anybody not love a kid like that?”
But just then she was thinking about the hope she’d had, and never articulated aloud to a living soul, that perhaps one day Robert would come and live near her. She’d tried to stand back and convince herself that she was making a mistake to count on Robert, even just in those fantasies, to fill the role of strong man in her life. But she didn’t really care. All she knew was that she wanted him near.
Mort covered her hand with his own; he scowled earnestly. “He’ll get out of it, darling. I know he will.”
“I hope he does it before I fly to pieces,” she replied.
Chapter 2
At eight that night she couldn’t stand it any more. She backed the car out viciously against the mailbox post and drove away leaving bits of red glass in the street.
She walked into the lobby in high dudgeon, browbeat the clerk into revealing the room number and went up in the elevator with a tourist couple and a bellboy. The Iowans were talking about Knott’s Berry Farm. She had to curb her tongue to keep from screaming at them to shut up.