“Jenny, for heaven’s sake!” Randy cried. “Don’t drive on the putting green.” Her tone implied: Don’t you know anything? She saved me from making a third mistake by calling, “And stay out of that sand trap!”
I managed to land my cart safely beside theirs, but I didn’t get out.
My father was still at the tee, practicing the swing he’d missed.
“What in the world brings you out here, Jenny?” Randy asked. Not, Jenny, how are you? Or, Jenny, how wonderful to see you! Just, what in the world brings you—of all the unwelcome people—out here?
“It’s an emergency, Randy,” I told her, faking breathlessness. “I came to get Dad; I’ve got to get him back to the clubhouse right away. Can you bring your cart back alone?”
“What emergency? What’s the matter?”
“Dad!”
That ruined another of his swings, but at least I got his full attention. I pressed on the pedal of my little cart and did a quick end run around Miranda. “I’m coming, Dad!”
Behind me, Randy came running, too, yelling, “Wait!”
I put the pedal to the metal and easily outraced her to the tee.
“Sorry, Dad. Get in! There’s an emergency down at the clubhouse. They need you. I’ll take you.”
My father, who in his golf attire looked as handsome as Seve Ballesteres and as distinguished as Jack Nicklaus, said with almost pathetic hopefulness, “Really? They need me? Well, let’s go then!” He called back to the running Randy over his shoulder, “It’s an emergency, dear! Follow us in!”
In the seconds it took for her to race back to their cart, get in, switch it on, and start it moving, my father and I had vanished over the hill separating the fifteenth from the twelfth. I abducted him, wheeling into the woods off the twelfth instead of rolling back to the clubhouse.
What can I say? Dealing with them was, at the best of times, like walking onto the set of a slapstick movie. Unfortunately, it also made me feel like the comedienne dangling from the window ledge by a rope tied to her ankle. Help. Somebody get me out of this.
Dad didn’t protest at any of this, he just went along for the ride, looking dashing as we scooted over hill and dale. As usual, he never paid any attention to where he was going until he got there, and even then you were never sure he had his bearings. Wherever he was, he was. That’s about the most that could be said for him.
Where he was when I finally stopped the cart was at the furthest corner of the golf course, away from city streets and clubhouses, away from prying second wives and helpful golf pros. It was just my daddy and me, alone together under the old sycamore tree, in the brisk breeze of a cool March morning.
I switched off the cart and turned to face him.
“Dad,” I began.
“I feel a bit hungry,” he said. “Is it time for lunch?”
“Dad,” I began again.
He came into focus. “Didn’t you say there was an emergency, Jenny? Something on which they needed my help?”
“They’re going to meet us here,” I told him.
“Here?” His expression seemed to say: Where are we? Mars? Venus? Palm Desert? “What do they want me to do, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know, but it’s important, and they’ll tell you all about it when they get here. Maybe something to do with greens rotting, or gophers digging new holes, or something. Dad?” I made a third try. When he continued to gaze pacifically into the trees, I plunged into my speech. “Dad, I have some questions for you and I really need specific answers. Here’s the first question. Okay, Dad? Why didn’t you tell us that Mom had a hysterectomy?”
He sighed and crossed his arms.
I waited. Nothing.
“Okay,” I said, “then here’s the second question. What happened to Mom after that operation? I mean, did she have pain, was she ill? What happened? Did that operation trigger the mental illness?”
He sighed, more heavily this time, and shook his head as if in silent negation at something in his own thoughts.
I touched his arm. “I know you’re in there, Dad, just as I know you were with her when everything happened. Dad, I’m not trying to be hard on you, I’m not. I have more understanding now of what you must have endured with Mom. I’ve learned about the other bouts of mental illness, after I was born, and Sherry. It must have been awful for you, too.” I wished I could stop talking to him as if he were a child. Short sentences. Easy words. But he was so hard to communicate with that he was like someone who spoke another language, and so I always felt I had to resort to the basics. I wished I could break that insulting habit now, but it was ingrained, and would he understand me any better, even if I did? I cringed at my own tone, which sounded to me like a kindergarten teacher talking to her slowest pupil, “I’m sorry we’ve been kind of hard on you sometimes. If you’ve been happy with Randy, well, then I’m happy for you, too. It’s just that I still need to understand a little more about Mom. Can you tell me anything more, please?”
My father didn’t say anything, but he reached over and took one of my hands. His own was trembling. He had his face turned away from me. When I leaned forward, trying to catch his eye, trying to turn him toward me, I was shocked to see that my father was crying.
“Dad—”
“I did everything wrong, Jennifer,” he murmured, looking not at me, but at the tree to his right. “I’m awfully sorry.”
I sat frozen for a little while, horrified at what I had done. Are you happy now, I asked myself, now that you got your father to apologize for living? I didn’t press him to say more. I couldn’t. Not ever, anymore. I would never, I swore, ask him about those days again. Gently, he withdrew his hand from mine. He pulled out his handkerchief, wiped his eyes and blew his nose.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Mustn’t be,” he said, and patted my hand.
“I love you,” I said.
My father folded his handkerchief back into a neat square and pushed it back down into his back pocket. “Can’t imagine why,” he said, and broke my heart. He cleared his throat and placed his hands on top of his knees, striking a posture of brisk resolve. “Well, I’m really getting very hungry. Do you suppose they’ve started serving lunch yet?”
I started the cart, and drove us back to the clubhouse.
And what excuse would I present to Randy for having kidnapped Dad?
Surprisingly, it was he who saved me.
“Miranda, dear,” he said, climbing down from the cart and smiling sweetly at her, “it’s all taken care of. The sprinkler system wasn’t working correctly on the back nine, it was simply flooding the greens, and they had quite a nasty little swamp out there on the 18th, we would never have been able to play it anyway. I was able to give them the benefit of my experience with California golf course irrigation systems. I do think they quite appreciated it. Shall we go in to lunch, darling?” He turned to me, and, as usual, directed his question to the air over my left shoulder. “Will you join us, dear?”
“No, thank you, Dad.”
Randy, who had been glaring thunderclouds at me, was all smiles now, as it appeared that I had vastly improved Jimmy’s day, and thus, hers, too. I could tell that she had noticed his red-rimmed eyes, but I hoped that she’d attribute that to our wild and windy ride. The assistant golf pro had been listening, and looked baffled, but caught my warning glance, and kept her mouth shut.
When my stepmother walked toward the ladies locker room to freshen up before their lunch, I followed her.
“What was that all about, Jenny?”
“Oh, just as Dad said.”
“Mmm.”
“Randy?” She sat down on a pink tufted stool at a long vanity table, and I took the stool next to hers. “What did you mean the other day at Sherry’s house? When you said that Pete Falwell stole the company from Dad?”
She gave me an undecipherable look in the mirror as she applied fresh mascara, and then she took her time recapping the wand. Finally, she appeared to make up h
er mind about something. “Well, what do you think I meant, Jenny? Do you know where I worked before I went to work for Jimmy?” (I didn’t know. It wasn’t just that I was only seventeen at the time, but also that I had tried to ignore her existence in my father’s life. Our lives.) “Well, I was the receptionist at PFF, that’s where. Now I’m not saying I heard anything specific, I wouldn’t want to accuse anybody of anything and get sued for libel—”
“Slander. Sorry. I’m sorry, please go on.”
“But they wanted Cain Clams so bad they could taste it. Pete Falwell used to say Jimmy was a lousy businessman and he was going to run that company under if somebody didn’t step in and save it. And lo and behold, what an amazing coincidence, doesn’t it just turn out to be PFF who ends up owning everything?”
“Well, I don’t know, Randy—”
“Well, I do know,” she said, throwing the mascara wand into her purse. “Because when I went to work for your dad, they came to me for information—”
“What? Who did?”
“Mr. Peter Falwell and his people did, that’s who. Wanted financial records and all sorts of papers I can’t even remember what, wanted me to copy them or just plain steal them. And I said I wouldn’t do it, you wouldn’t catch me working with that greaseball Greenstreet, not for anything.”
“Cecil Greenstreet? What do you mean—”
“I mean he was their man! Brought into this town by Pete Falwell, sent to apply for the job of vice president of Cain Clams, sent to sabotage your father’s business, that’s what I mean! And I was supposed to report to him, get paid by him—” She broke off, and shivered violently.
“But Randy, if you knew all this, and you didn’t like it and didn’t want to be any part of it, why didn’t you tell Dad?”
She pressed her lips together and took several deep breaths through her nose, as if trying to get herself back under control. Then she turned to look directly at me, with what I could only interpret as affectionate scorn, with the emphasis on the latter. “Jenny,” she said, patiently, slowly, “have you ever tried to tell your father anything he doesn’t want to hear? He liked Pete Falwell. He still does. Pete Falwell was his… ‘friend.’ Cecil Greenstreet was a fine, upstanding businessman, according to your father. And, frankly, I was only a receptionist, and his—”
“Lover.”
She flushed. “Yes.”
I took a deep breath of my own. “Randy? Knowing how my father is, why in the world did you ever marry him?”
Her mouth curled. “You’re not assuming it was the money? Well, you’re wrong, the money helped to convince me. Sure, it did, I was young, and he was rich and gorgeous. But I’ll tell you something that you don’t have to believe, neither you nor your sister. It wasn’t exactly that I loved him. It was that, God, he needed somebody to protect him! I couldn’t save him from going bankrupt, he was determined to let his friends make a fool of him, and he never has admitted what they did to him, but I thought maybe I could save his… I don’t know, his peace of mind and his… happiness.”
She flushed again, and turned away toward the mirror, not meeting my eyes. I crossed my arms on the top of the vanity and rested my head on them, face down, eyes closed. In a little while, about the time I heard Randy running a comb through her hair, I sat up again.
I got up from the little tufted pink stool.
I leaned over, and kissed her cheek.
And then I left my stepmother alone to finish making herself beautiful for her Jimmy, and I walked off to pick up Sherry at the clubhouse.
In the space of one morning, everything had changed in my family and nothing had changed. I understood them better, I loved them more, I even liked them a little better. But my sister wasn’t suddenly going to turn into my best friend, and my father and stepmother weren’t going to change overnight into generous, witty, articulate people who were a joy to be around; they were all going to continue to be as aggravating as they’d always been.
But something sure felt different.
Maybe it was me.
Sure enough, when I told Sherry what Randy had confided to me, my sister brushed it off, saying, “Oh, come on, Jenny, that woman would say anything to make herself look better.” Of course, to be fair, Sherry was plenty cranky by that time, having already fielded too many stares at her bruised cheek and black eye.
* * *
Geof was waiting for us at Sherry’s house. I half expected him to give me hell for leaving without him, but he seemed distracted, and didn’t scold. He was so distracted, in fact, that he didn’t appear to notice that Sherry kept her sunglasses on inside the house or that I ran upstairs, came back down with an armload of my own clothes, and went home dressed in Sherry’s jogging suit. I had to point out to him the “evidence” of our battle; and even then he barely reacted to the latest chapter in my family’s continuing soap opera.
Finally I said, “You’ve been to the police station, right?”
He muttered something noncommittal.
“Are you in trouble because of me, Geof?”
He looked up sharply at that and grinned. “Almost always.”
“Come on, what’s going on with you?”
Geof shrugged. “I’m hungry and I want to go home.”
I wanted to push, to get him to tell me what was bothering him, but I’d learned long before that the man would talk when he was ready to talk. Until then I might as well change partners and dance. Short of that, I changed the subject.
“You know, with my excursion this morning, I may have proved that you were right about the fact that nobody is trying to get me. At least, not in any premeditated sort of way. Maybe life can return to normal, whatever that is, some day soon.”
He was about as convinced of that as Sherry was about Randy.
But he believed me absolutely when I said, “Cecil Greenstreet isn’t going anywhere. Boston can wait until tomorrow. I’ve had enough for one day, thank you.”
It will probably come as a surprise to no one to learn that he drove me back home and that I went directly to bed and took a nice long nap.
He, however, didn’t waste the day, but spent it tracking the whereabouts of several people who had reasons to resent my continued existence on earth. There was a former museum director who might have liked to hang me on a wall; there was a murderous realtor who used to be a friend of ours, but wasn’t any longer; there was a funeral director who might have enjoyed burying me; but they were all safely tucked away in prisons, or at least they were on the night someone shut me in the garage. Geof also checked on the whereabouts of enemies of his, criminals who could have been waiting to see him that night, but who might have viewed me as their opportunity for a route to revenge. As is frequently the case with such efforts, it took a lot of time—more than usual, even, because he had to think of devious ways to get around the fact that this wasn’t a police inquiry into the “incident” and he wasn’t even supposed to be asking—and he didn’t come up with much.
“Actually, I didn’t come up with anything,” he confessed over a dinner of lobster casserole in our kitchen that evening. “It’s goddamn frustrating. Here we sit, glancing right and left, looking over our shoulders, checking the bushes and the shadows. Boo!” I jumped, startled, and then laughed at my own jumpiness. He viciously stabbed a chunk of lobster meat, and said, “Hell, what’s the use of being paranoid if you can’t find any enemies?”
“Maybe we’ll find one in Boston tomorrow,” I suggested.
Later, as he stroked linament into the bruises from my fight with my sister, he couldn’t resist observing, “Who needs enemies when you’ve got a family like yours?”
“They’re all right,” I said defensively, surprising myself even more than him. A little embarrassed, not quite accustomed yet to this new, warmer feeling toward them, I quickly altered my tone to a joking swagger: “If you think I look bad, ya oughta see da other guy.”
Because of my nap, I didn’t fall asleep as easily as Geof did that night, so I
got out of bed and got my little notebook out of my purse. I sat in the bay window of our bedroom for a long time, wrapped in a blanket, watching the clouds pass over the moon. Finally, I wrote in the notebook:
Because she had a history of mental illness, my mother couldn’t bear the heavy emotional and psychological burdens brought on by the unusual constellation of her illness, the business failure, and her husband’s affair. It was all too much, all at one time. And so, she descended into her final mental illness, from which she never returned.
When I returned to bed, I felt as if I finally had my answer. If there wasn’t any joy in it, at least there was a little peace.
20
SATURDAY WAS ANOTHER LOVELY DAY TO GO TO BOSTON, AT least by Geof’s standards. We took the BMW and he drove. God knows I couldn’t have managed the physical coordination it took to shift, steer, and clutch at the same time. I hurt from the fight with Sherry. And I felt as if I were emotionally hung over from… everything.
Geof chose the scenic route. For the first half of the drive, he put cassettes into the tape player and let the music and the beauty of backroad Massachusetts roll over and by us, as if he understood that I wasn’t up to conversation. The first tape he put on was travelin’ music—the soundtrack from the movie The Electric Horseman. It fit the weather, somehow, and it suited my sense of temporarily escaping, as the cowboy of the title had escaped from his past and from Las Vegas.
As for the weather, it was New England gray, Geof’s favorite kind of driving weather. He hated to squint for miles and miles, preferring to eschew the pleasure of sun glinting off maple leaves for the bleaker beauty of a gray road blending into gray fences merging into a gray ocean melting into gray clouds. I sighed, leaned back, and let my body feel as one with the car as it snaked around the windy roads, over narrow lanes, and through seaside villages where the lights were turned on inside the houses to ward away the gloom.
It was two days later, and I still had not said a word to him about my conversation with Francie about my mother. I wanted to tell him. And sometime soon, I would. But I had to live with it inside of me for a while, first, sharing it only with the two other people I knew who had known her best: my dad and my sister. I had to find a place of acceptance for it in my heart, before I could lay it out in the open for somebody who hadn’t known her—even if that was my husband—to probe and poke and question.