The Talisman

  When Jack threw open 408, the door to the living room, he called out, "Mom? Mom?"

  The flowers met him, the photographs smiled; there was no answer. "Mom!" The door swung shut behind him. Jack felt his stomach go cold. He rushed through the living room to the large bedroom on the right. "Mom!" Another vase of tall bright flowers. The empty bed looked starched and ironed, so stiff a quarter would bounce off the quilt. On the bedside table stood an assortment of brown bottles containing vitamins and other pills. Jack backed out. His mother's window showed black waves rolling and rolling toward him.

  Two men getting out of a nondescript car, themselves nondescript, reaching for her . . .

  "Mom!" he shouted.

  "I hear you, Jack," came his mother's voice through the bathroom door. "What on earth . . . ?"

  "Oh," he said, and felt all his muscles relax. "Oh, sorry. I just didn't know where you were."

  "Taking a bath," she said. "Getting ready for dinner. Is that still allowed?"

  Jack realized that he no longer had to go to the bathroom. He dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs and closed his eyes in relief. She was still okay--

  Still okay for now, a dark voice whispered, and in his mind he saw that sand funnel open again, whirling.

  5

  Seven or eight miles up the coast road, just outside Hampton Township, they found a restaurant called The Lobster Chateau. Jack had given a very sketchy account of his day--already he was backing away from the terror he had experienced on the beach, letting it diminish in his memory. A waiter in a red jacket printed with the yellow image of a lobster across the back showed them to a table beside a long streaky window.

  "Would Madam care for a drink?" The waiter had a stony-cold off-season New England face, and looking at it, suspecting the resentment of his Ralph Lauren sport coat and his mother's carelessly worn Halston afternoon dress behind those watery blue eyes, Jack felt a more familiar terror needle him--simple homesickness. Mom, if you're not really sick, what the hell are we doing here? The place is empty! It's creepy! Jesus!

  "Bring me an elementary martini," she said.

  The waiter raised his eyebrows. "Madam?"

  "Ice in a glass," she said. "Olive on ice. Tanqueray gin over olive. Then--are you getting this?"

  Mom, for God's sake, can't you see his eyes? You think you're being charming--he thinks you're making fun of him! Can't you see his eyes?

  No. She couldn't. And that failure of empathy, when she had always been so sharp about how other people were feeling, was another stone against his heart. She was withdrawing . . . in all ways.

  "Yes, madam."

  "Then," she said, "you take a bottle of vermouth--any brand--and hold it against the glass. Then you put the vermouth back on the shelf and bring the glass to me. 'Kay?"

  "Yes, madam." Watery-cold New England eyes, staring at his mother with no love at all. We're alone here, Jack thought, really realizing it for the first time. Jeez, are we. "Young sir?"

  "I'd like a Coke," Jack said miserably.

  The waiter left. Lily rummaged in her purse, came up with a package of Herbert Tarrytoons (so she had called them since he had been a baby, as in "Bring me my Tarrytoons from over there on the shelf, Jacky," and so he still thought of them) and lit one. She coughed out smoke in three harsh bursts.

  It was another stone against his heart. Two years ago, his mother had given up smoking entirely. Jack had waited for her to backslide with that queer fatalism which is the flip side of childish credulity and innocence. His mother had always smoked; she would soon smoke again. But she had not . . . not until three months ago, in New York. Carltons. Walking around the living room in the apartment on Central Park West, puffing like a choo-choo, or squatting in front of the record cabinet, pawing through her old rock records or her dead husband's old jazz records.

  "You smoking again, Mom?" he'd asked her.

  "Yeah, I'm smoking cabbage leaves," she'd said.

  "I wish you wouldn't."

  "Why don't you turn on the TV?" she'd responded with uncharacteristic sharpness, turning toward him, her lips pressed tightly together. "Maybe you can find Jimmy Swaggart or Reverend Ike. Get down there in the hallelujah corner with the amen sisters."

  "Sorry," he'd muttered.

  Well--it was only Carltons. Cabbage leaves. But here were the Herbert Tarrytoons--the blue-and-white old-fashioned pack, the mouthpieces that looked like filters but which weren't. He could remember, vaguely, his father telling somebody that he smoked Winstons and his wife smoked Black Lungers.

  "See anything weird, Jack?" she asked him now, her overbright eyes fixed on him, the cigarette held in its old, slightly eccentric position between the second and third fingers of the right hand. Daring him to say something. Daring him to say, "Mom, I notice you're smoking Herbert Tarrytoons again--does this mean you figure you don't have anything left to lose?"

  "No," he said. That miserable, bewildered homesickness swept him again, and he felt like weeping. "Except this place. It's a little weird."

  She looked around and grinned. Two other waiters, one fat, one thin, both in red jackets with golden lobsters on the back, stood by the swing doors to the kitchen, talking quietly. A velvet rope hung across the entrance to a huge dining room beyond the alcove where Jack and his mother sat. Chairs were overturned in ziggurat shapes on the tables in this dark cave. At the far end, a huge window-wall looked out on a gothic shorescape that made Jack think of Death's Darling, a movie his mother had been in. She had played a young woman with a lot of money who married a dark and handsome stranger against her parents' wishes. The dark and handsome stranger took her to a big house by the ocean and tried to drive her crazy. Death's Darling had been more or less typical of Lily Cavanaugh's career--she had starred in a lot of black-and-white films in which handsome but forgettable actors drove around in Ford convertibles with their hats on.

  The sign hanging from the velvet rope barring the entrance to this dark cavern was ludicrously understated: THIS SECTION CLOSED.

  "It is a little grim, isn't it?" she said.

  "It's like the Twilight Zone," he replied, and she barked her harsh, infectious, somehow lovely laugh.

  "Yeah, Jacky, Jacky, Jacky," she said, and leaned over to ruffle his too-long hair, smiling.

  He pushed her hand away, also smiling (but oh, her fingers felt like bones, didn't they? She's almost dead, Jack . . . ). "Don't touch-a da moichendise."

  "Off my case."

  "Pretty hip for an old bag."

  "Oh boy, try to get movie money out of me this week."

  "Yeah."

  They smiled at each other, and Jack could not ever remember a need to cry so badly, or remember loving her so much. There was a kind of desperate toughness about her now . . . going back to the Black Lungers was part of that.

  Their drinks came. She tipped her glass toward his. "Us."

  "Okay."

  They drank. The waiter came with menus.

  "Did I pull his string a little hard before, Jacky?"

  "Maybe a little," he said.

  She thought about it, then shrugged it away. "What are you having?"

  "Sole, I guess."

  "Make it two."

  So he ordered for both of them, feeling clumsy and embarrassed but knowing it was what she wanted--and he could see in her eyes when the waiter left that he hadn't done too bad a job. A lot of that was Uncle Tommy's doing. After a trip to Hardee's Uncle Tommy had said: "I think there's hope for you, Jack, if we can just cure this revolting obsession with processed yellow cheese."

  The food came. He wolfed his sole, which was hot and lemony and good. Lily only toyed with hers, ate a few green beans, and then pushed things around on her plate.

  "School started up here two weeks ago," Jack announced halfway through the meal. Seeing the big yellow buses with ARCADIA DISTRICT SCHOOLS written on the sides had made him feel guilty--under the circumstances he thought that was probably absurd, but there it was. He was playing hooky.
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  She looked at him, enquiring. She had ordered and finished a second drink; now the waiter brought a third.

  Jack shrugged. "Just thought I'd mention it."

  "Do you want to go?"

  "Huh? No! Not here!"

  "Good," she said. "Because I don't have your goddam vaccination papers. They won't let you in school without a pedigree, chum."

  "Don't call me chum," Jack said, but Lily didn't crack a smile at the old joke.

  Boy, why ain't you in school?

  He blinked as if the voice had spoken aloud instead of only in his mind.

  "Something?" she asked.

  "No. Well . . . there's a guy at the amusement park. Funworld. Janitor, caretaker, something like that. An old black guy. He asked me why I wasn't in school."

  She leaned forward, no humor in her now, almost frighteningly grim. "What did you tell him?"

  Jack shrugged. "I said I was getting over mono. You remember that time Richard had it? The doctor told Uncle Morgan Richard had to stay out of school for six weeks, but he could walk around outside and everything." Jack smiled a little. "I thought he was lucky."

  Lily relaxed a little. "I don't like you talking to strangers, Jack."

  "Mom, he's just a--"

  "I don't care who he is. I don't want you talking to strangers."

  Jack thought of the black man, his hair gray steel wool, his dark face deeply lined, his odd, light-colored eyes. He had been pushing a broom in the big arcade on the pier--the arcade was the only part of Arcadia Funworld that stayed open the year around, but it had been deserted then except for Jack and the black man and two old men far in the back. The two were playing Skee-Ball in apathetic silence.

  But now, sitting here in this slightly creepy restaurant with his mother, it wasn't the black man who asked the question; it was himself.

  Why aren't I in school?

  It be just like she say, son. Got no vaccination, got no pedigree. You think she come down here with your birth certificate? That what you think? She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. You--

  "Have you heard from Richard?" she broke in, and when she said it, it came to him--no, that was too gentle. It crashed into him. His hands twitched and his glass fell off the table. It shattered on the floor.

  She's almost dead, Jack.

  The voice from the swirling sand-funnel. The one he had heard in his mind.

  It had been Uncle Morgan's voice. Not maybe, not almost, not sorta like. It had been a real voice. The voice of Richard's father.

  6

  Going home in the car, she asked him, "What happened to you in there, Jack?"

  "Nothing. My heart did this funny little Gene Krupa riff." He ran off a quick one on the dashboard to demonstrate. "Threw a PCV, just like on General Hospital."

  "Don't wise off to me, Jacky." In the glow of the dashboard instruments she looked pale and haggard. A cigarette smouldered between the second and third fingers of her right hand. She was driving very slowly--never over forty--as she always drove when she'd had too much to drink. Her seat was pulled all the way forward, her skirt was hiked up so her knees floated, storklike, on either side of the steering column, and her chin seemed to hang over the wheel. For a moment she looked haglike, and Jack quickly looked away.

  "I'm not," he mumbled.

  "What?"

  "I'm not wising off," he said. "It was like a twitch, that's all. I'm sorry."

  "It's okay," she said. "I thought it was something about Richard Sloat."

  "No." His father talked to me out of a hole in the sand down on the beach, that's all. In my head he talked to me, like in a movie where you hear a voice-over. He told me you were almost dead.

  "Do you miss him, Jack?"

  "Who, Richard?"

  "No--Spiro Agnew. Of course Richard."

  "Sometimes." Richard Sloat was now going to school in Illinois--one of those private schools where chapel was compulsory and no one had acne.

  "You'll see him." She ruffled his hair.

  "Mom, are you all right?" The words burst out of him. He could feel his fingers biting into his thighs.

  "Yes," she said, lighting another cigarette (she slowed down to twenty to do it; an old pick-up swept by them, its horn blatting). "Never better."

  "How much weight have you lost?"

  "Jacky, you can never be too thin or too rich." She paused and then smiled at him. It was a tired, hurt smile that told him all the truth he needed to know.

  "Mom--"

  "No more," she said. "All's well. Take my word for it. See if you can find us some be-bop on the FM."

  "But--"

  "Find us some bop, Jacky, and shut up."

  He found some jazz on a Boston station--an alto saxophone elucidating "All the Things You Are." But under it, a steady, senseless counterpoint, was the ocean. And later, he could see the great skeleton of the roller coaster against the sky. And the rambling wings of the Alhambra Inn. If this was home, they were home.

  3

  Speedy Parker

  1

  The next day the sun was back--a hard bright sun that layered itself like paint over the flat beach and the slanting, red-tiled strip of roof Jack could see from his bedroom window. A long low wave far out in the water seemed to harden in the light and sent a spear of brightness straight toward his eyes. To Jack this sunlight felt different from the light in California. It seemed somehow thinner, colder, less nourishing. The wave out in the dark ocean melted away, then hoisted itself up again, and a hard dazzling streak of gold leaped across it. Jack turned away from his window. He had already showered and dressed, and his body's clock told him that it was time to start moving toward the schoolbus stop. Seven-fifteen. But of course he would not go to school today, nothing was normal anymore, and he and his mother would just drift like ghosts through another twelve hours of daytime. No schedule, no responsibilities, no homework . . . no order at all except for that given them by mealtimes.

  Was today even a schoolday? Jack stopped short beside his bed, feeling a little flicker of panic that his world had become so formless . . . he didn't think this was a Saturday. Jack counted back to the first absolutely identifiable day his memory could find, which was the previous Sunday. Counting forward made it Thursday. On Thursdays he had computer class with Mr. Balgo and an early sports period. At least that was what he'd had when his life had been normal, a time that now seemed--though it had come to an end only months ago--irretrievably lost.

  He wandered out of his bedroom into the living room. When he tugged at the drawstring for the curtains the hard bright light flooded into the room, bleaching the furniture. Then he punched the button on the television set and dropped himself onto the stiff couch. His mother would not be up for at least another fifteen minutes. Maybe longer, considering that she'd had three drinks with dinner the night before.

  Jack glanced toward the door to his mother's room.

  Twenty minutes later he rapped softly at her door. "Mom?" A thick mumble answered him. Jack pushed the door open a crack and looked in. She was lifting her head off the pillow and peering back through half-closed eyes.

  "Jacky. Morning. What time?"

  "Around eight."

  "God. You starving?" She sat up and pressed the palms of her hands to her eyes.

  "Kind of. I'm sort of sick of sitting in here. I just wondered if you were getting up soon."

  "Not if I can help it. You mind? Go down to the dining room, get some breakfast. Mess around on the beach, okay? You'll have a much better mother today if you give her another hour in bed."

  "Sure," he said. "Okay. See you later."

  Her head had already dropped back down on the pillow.

  Jack switched off the television and let himself out of the room after making sure his key was in the pocket of his jeans.

  The elevator smelled of camphor and ammonia--a maid had tipped a bottle off a cart. The doors opened, and the gray desk clerk frowned at him and ostentatiously turned away. Being a movie star
's brat doesn't make you anything special around here, sonny . . . and why aren't you in school? Jack turned into the panelled entrance to the dining room--The Saddle of Lamb--and saw rows of empty tables in a shadowy vastness. Perhaps six had been set up. A waitress in a white blouse and red ruffled skirt looked at him, then looked away. Two exhausted-looking old people sat across a table from each other at the other end of the room. There were no other breakfasters. As Jack looked on, the old man leaned over the table and unselfconsciously cut his wife's fried egg into four-inch square sections.

  "Table for one?" The woman in charge of The Saddle of Lamb during the day had materialized beside him, and was already plucking a menu off a stack beside the reservation book.

  "Changed my mind, sorry." Jack escaped.

  The Alhambra's coffee shop, The Beachcomber Lounge, lay all the way across the lobby and down a long bleak corridor lined with empty display cases. His hunger died at the thought of sitting by himself at the counter and watching the bored cook slap down strips of bacon on the crusty grill. He would wait until his mother got up: or, better yet, he would go out and see if he could get a doughnut and a little carton of milk at one of the shops up the street on the way into town.

  He pushed open the tall heavy front door of the hotel and went out into the sunlight. For a moment the sudden brightness stung his eyes--the world was a flat glaring dazzle. Jack squinted, wishing he had remembered to bring his sunglasses downstairs. He went across the apron of red brick and down the four curving steps to the main pathway through the gardens at the front of the hotel.

  What happened if she died?

  What happened to him--where would he go, who would take care of him, if the worst thing in the world actually took place and she died, for good and all died, up in that hotel room?

  He shook his head, trying to send the terrible thought away before a lurking panic could rush up out of the Alhambra's well-ordered gardens and blast him apart. He would not cry, he would not let that happen to him--and he would not let himself think about the Tarrytoons and the weight she had lost, the feeling that he sometimes had that she was too helpless and without direction. He was walking very quickly now, and he shoved his hands into his pockets as he jumped down off the curving path through the gardens onto the hotel's drive. She on the run, son, and you on the run with her. On the run, but from whom? And to where? Here--just to here, this deserted resort?