“Oh, no, she’s a wonderful girl,” Godwin said. “Truly wonderful. I find her a credit to the race. She has a heart, unlike her dreadful mother, and quite a good brain. Every time I venture some little observation about the human condition, I find that she’s far ahead of me. She makes me feel rather shallow, I suppose.”
I found what he said, and the tone in which he said it, quite moving. He was still nervously pacing back and forth across the floor.
“If you thought her mother was so dreadful, why did you try to take her away from me?” I asked.
“Who tried to take her away from you? Not me,” Godwin said, looking horrified. “From the moment I first bonked Sally I thought of nothing but escape.”
“Bonked?” I said. “Bonked? When did we start saying bonked?”
“Oh, well, we can’t very well just continue to say the F word in front of your grandchildren,” he said. “You do recognize the impropriety of that, do you not?”
“I guess,” I said. “I just never expected you, of all people, to help me clean up my language. Anyway, the word bonk reminds me of all those cartoon sound effects I used to write when I worked for Hanna-Barbera. For me it suggests the Flintstones, not a sex act.”
“Hi,” Jesse said, this time in a warning tone. Used thus, I think “Hi” meant that it was time to stop worrying about the F word and start worrying about checkers.
I looked back at the board, but my mind was elsewhere—it had followed T.R. out of the room, but she had outdistanced it. My mind was standing distractedly in the hall, more or less wondering what next.
This was not good enough for Jesse—she promptly threw a checker into the sink, and then another, looking at me coolly all the while.
“If you’re going to play with Jesse, you have to play,” Gladys said. “She don’t care for opponents that just sit there looking dazed.”
I was dazed, though. Godwin had made a moving statement about T.R., moving but troubling—it seemed to suggest that I now had responsibilities that I wasn’t being sensitive to. Before I could organize my thoughts and ask him what he thought I ought to do about T.R., or her drinking, or my responsibilities, Jesse began to throw all the checkers on the floor. It was a deliberate, willful act: how should I, as a grandparent, respond? Should I just smile at her whimsy or deliver a fond but stern statement in which I’d point out that good little girls didn’t knock all their checkers onto the floor just because their grandpa was disheartened for a moment?
It seemed to me that suddenly all eyes were on me: Godwin’s, Gladys’s, Pedro’s, Granny Lin’s, and, of course, Jesse’s. Was this the point at which I was supposed to start Jesse’s moral education, or was flinging checkers around just a normal act for a little girl who wasn’t even two? Not since the days when I had been the emperor of “Al and Sal,” leading my reluctant army into battle every day, had I been the sinecure of so many watchful, not to say judgmental, eyes.
Unfortunately, a quick decision was called for. Jesse, after flinging half a dozen checkers, changed her tactic—now she began to sweep them off the checkerboard with her chubby little arm. In a very short order the checkerboard would be cleared, and I would have missed the great opportunity I felt I was being offered to become a force for moral good in my granddaughter’s life.
The truth is, I missed my opportunity. I felt I should say something; I knew it was wrong, not to mention ridiculous, to let myself be dominated by an eighteen-month-old child, but that’s exactly what happened.
“I guess that’s the end of that checker game,” I said lamely. “I wonder who won.”
The adults in the room, myself included, knew perfectly well who had won, and so did Jesse. She smiled in triumph and held out her arms to Gladys.
“Hi,” she said, as Gladys came to pick her up.
6
That night, worn out by my own indecision, my lack of confidence, my conviction that in my whole life I had never at any critical moment really known what to do, or managed to do what was in retrospect the obvious right thing, I went to bed early; but no sooner had I slipped into a doze than I felt an uneasy pulse in my head. A migraine was sneaking up. Sometimes I thought of it as a Comanche—once lord of these very plains where I lived, or failed to live, the Comanche-migraine hid quietly in the cave of my indecision, my fear, my fragmented conviction, sneaking out to attack whenever it saw its chance. Its approach, in this case, was stealthy, silent, intermittent, and might have gone undetected by anyone less experienced with sneak headaches than me.
I could not be fooled, though. Even when the migraine, a smart Comanche, crouched behind a bush for half an hour and restrained its torturous pulses, hoping to lull me into a deeper sleep, I wasn’t fooled. I knew that if I allowed myself to be deceived, if I sank too deeply into sleep, the Comanche would pounce, his knife at my scalp.
Tired though I was, I didn’t feel like being knifed by a migraine just then. Two can play the sneaking game, after all. I decided to get up and see if I could sneak past the headache, walk around it, as it were. Sometimes such a tactic worked, sometimes not. I had worn a caftan to bed, so I didn’t have to dress—I just got up and slipped down the hall.
I thought I heard Elvis Presley music coming from the video room, and I was right. Muddy, Buddy, and Gladys were watching Fun in Acapulco—Elvis had just finished a song and was cavorting rather innocently with Ursula Andress. I watched only a minute or two, but seeing the two of them looking so young and innocent made me feel old and sad. Eras end every few years in Hollywood; Fun in Acapulco definitely called back an era that had ended. I had been there and lived through that era; I had seen Elvis a few times and Ursula Andress many times. Ursula was still going strong; but Elvis had not only faded, Elvis had died, and the Hollywood where they made pictures like Fun in Acapulco seemed quainter and more remote now than Belle Époque Paris.
“We’re watching Elvis,” Gladys informed me. Several more Elvis cassettes were scattered around.
“Where’s T.R.?” I asked.
“She’s pissed off,” Muddy said, without explanation.
“Well, enjoy your film festival,” I said.
I found T.R. on the porch after failing to find her in the rest of the house. I had insisted on a little porch—who would want a house without a porch?—much to my architect’s disgust. I loved to sit on the porch on nice summer nights, especially if the moon was full; moonlight made the plains seem timeless, the pale grasslands beautiful. The stars, a show of their own on moonless nights, could not compete with the full lunar power on such nights; they shrank to faint specks.
The porch had immediately become popular with the kids. I had to pick my way through a minefield of toys to get to the couch where T.R. sat. She was still drinking.
From the road in front of the house I heard what sounded like the crackle of a police radio.
“Is that Buddy listening to the radio?” I asked.
“Nope, that’s Gene,” T.R. said. “Buddy’s the day pig, Gene’s the night pig. That’s what Muddy calls them. Muddy hates cops.”
Despite my caution, I sat on a toy—a plastic monster of some kind. Somehow its head snapped off.
“I’m afraid I decapitated a toy,” I said.
T.R. just shrugged.
“Do you mind if I sit and talk?” I asked.
“You ain’t shown me that closet full of presents yet,” she said. “Was you lying about that?”
“No,” I said. “I can show them to you right now, if you’d like.”
She didn’t answer for a bit. Far across the valley we saw the yellow lights of an oil derrick.
“I wonder if there’s any nice roughnecks around here,” T.R. said. “I’ve danced with a few roughnecks, but I ain’t went out with one since high school, and then it was one of them offshore roughnecks. Johnny—I still remember him. Boy, was he sexy.”
“What happened to him?”
“Alaska happened to him,” T.R. said. “He wrote me two letters. We had a hot little time
while it lasted. I was gonna go up and see him—he offered to pay my way—but it was just one of those things that never came about.”
“Did Godwin leave?” I asked, remembering that I had not seen him during my recent house tour.
“Yeah, I bit his head off and he left,” T.R. said. “I don’t know how far he’ll get without no head.
“Don’t call him Godwin, either,” she said. “It gives me the creeps to hear a name like that. Call him L.J., it’s shorter and it’s sort of his initials, anyway.”
“I’ll try to remember,” I promised.
“I’ve known people like him down in Houston,” T.R. said. Her mood seemed to be improving.
“They puzzle me,” she said. “Why would anyone want to fuck an asshole when they could be fucking a pussy? That just don’t make sense.”
I laughed, and T.R. chuckled too, as if it had just dawned on her that her own language might be considered a little inappropriate. I loved her candor, of course, but in this case she seemed a little embarrassed by it.
“Well, it don’t make sense!” she said defiantly. “You think it’s bad to talk about it?”
“Of course it’s not bad to talk about it,” I said. “It’s not bad to talk about anything.”
“Maybe not with somebody, but what about if it’s with your daddy?” she said. “I never thought I’d be talking about pussies and stuff with my daddy. I don’t know if that’s too proper.”
“Do you want to be proper, T.R.?” I asked.
“I might if I knew what it was, for sure,” T.R. said. “Back when I was a teen-ager I wanted to be proper so much it hurt. I thought if I could just learn to be proper life would be perfect.”
“I used to think that too,” I said. “My metaphor for proper was a nice kitchen with a nice woman in it. I knew a very nice woman once, and she spent most of her life in her kitchen. I thought that if I could just marry someone like her and live in a kitchen something like hers, that would mean I was proper at last. And from then on, life would be perfect.”
“What was her name?”
“Her name was Emma,” I said.
T.R. looked at me a little sadly. I don’t think she approved of my caftan, but she refrained from comment.
“Maybe you can still try,” she said.
“I can’t try,” I said. “Emma’s dead.”
T.R. was silent for a bit, thinking over the tormenting issue of propriety, or its lack.
“For me, it was just getting asked to one of the dances over at the country club, in Tyler,” she said. “I wanted to dress up and go to one of them fancy dances so bad I could taste it.”
“Did you ever get to?”
“I finally got to,” she said. “A stupid little rich boy finally got up his nerve and asked me, even though his parents didn’t approve. He took me but then he got ashamed of me and never came near me the whole night. One or two old sots danced with me, and some of the college boys.
“It was real boring,” she said. “Just a big flop. I wouldn’t even kiss my date when he took me home. He was real pissed.
“It was just a big flop,” she said again. “It was the one thing I really wanted, and then when I got it I hated it. Right after that I quit school and left home. I guess I figured out that I was never gonna be proper as long as I lived. I figured I might as well just quit dreaming and throw in with the criminals.”
Suddenly she threw her glass off the porch, then threw the vodka bottle after it and burst into tears, her face in her hands.
I waited a bit and scooted over toward her so I could put my arms around her. T.R. didn’t resist.
“That’s one trouble with life,” I said. “Frequently when you do get something you want a lot, then you find out it wasn’t worth wanting after all.”
She took her wet face out of her hands.
“Is that how you feel about the woman’s kitchen?” she asked.
“No, that’s another problem,” I said. “She was worth wanting, all right. The problem there is that I wouldn’t have been able to live in that kitchen, even if I’d got to try. I wouldn’t have been any good at it. It’s not a way I could live.”
T.R. watched me—she was sniffling, but her cry was over, basically.
“Why not?” she asked. “If she loved you and she wanted you to, why not?”
“I’m not sure I can answer that very clearly,” I said. There was a hard throb in my temples as my headache gained a few yards. “I’ve been thinking about it for twenty years and I don’t really have a good answer. I just doubt it would have worked out.
“I may just be a loner,” I added, after a bit.
T.R. snorted. “If that’s it, you’re in trouble,” she said. “You sure ain’t alone now. You’re looking at a crowded future unless you kick us all out.”
“I won’t be kicking you out,” I assured her.
I wasn’t alone now, and that was fine, but T.R.’s haunting desire to be proper enough to go to East Texas country club dances set off troubling reactions; it jarred with the view of her life I had been imagining for so many years. In my imagination T.R.’s life had always been proper, and this was not merely the wishful thinking of a sadly neglectful parent. Neglectful though I certainly had been, I had never entirely lost track of the fact that I had a child in the world. Many regrets haunted me as I fumbled through life—regrets about women won, lost, or just missed; regrets about art that got botched or never made at all—but nothing had haunted me so constantly as the fact of my missing child; I had long ago hired a detective and instructed him to make a discreet investigation. The detective had filed a convincing and reassuring report; I still had it. The one thing that seemed unarguable from the report was that T.R.—in the report she’s called Rosemary—was enjoying an impeccably proper childhood. I had pictures of her on her bicycle, at about age nine; of the very normal-looking school she went to; of the proper two-story frame house where she lived; of her twirling a baton with other little girls on a well-kept lawn. From the report, it appeared clear that she was growing up as a member of the small-town East Texas gentry. The yard had huge trees in it and a picket fence around it. Any girl growing up in such a house in a small Texas town would automatically have been proper. She would have been quite welcome at country-club dances, would never have had to yearn for such a puny token of her acceptability.
But T.R. had yearned, yearned so much that she still couldn’t talk about it in a steady voice. Something was wrong, and my knowledge of it wasn’t likely to slow the advance of my migraine. A dark gap suddenly yawned between the life I had imagined T.R. having and the life she might actually have had.
I felt a tremendous need to close the gap at once.
“T.R., please don’t get mad if I ask you questions,” I said. She had settled back into my arms.
“You better ask them nice, then,” she said tiredly.
“How come you weren’t considered proper?” I asked.
“Why would I be?” she said. “I grew up with Big Pa and Big Ma.”
“But I thought your grandfather had a successful car dealership,” I said. “I thought your grandmother was the county clerk of the county you lived in. I was told that your mother worked in the bank.”
“What made you think so?” T.R. asked, surprised. “Momma never worked in any bank. Big Pa didn’t own no car dealership, either, unless you mean a stolen car dealership, and Big Ma wasn’t no county clerk. She worked in the courthouse for a while, but that was just so she could steal old documents and stuff. Big Ma was in jail half the time. Big Pa always worked it so she was the one who had to go to jail when they got caught, and Big Ma was so simpleminded she let him get away with it. They had her in jail four times for stuff Big Pa actually stole.”
“Is that true?” I asked, in shock. Inside me a long-held vision was collapsing, crumbling like an ill-built house at the first shaking of an earthquake.
The ill-built house, of course, was my belief that T.R. had had an irreproachably upper-middle-c
lass American girlhood, complete with a proper house, respectable, hardworking grandparents, a normal school, and proms at the country club, at which she was by far the most popular girl.
“What made you think stuff like that?” she asked again.
“I wanted to be sure you were all right,” I said. “I hired a detective to come to Texas and find you. I didn’t have much money then, but I thought he was a competent detective. I still have the report. He took pictures of the house you lived in and the school you went to. It all looked pretty nice.”
“Show me,” T.R. said. “It sounds to me like you got took.”
Finding the file wasn’t easy—what I fancifully called my study was the least-used room in a house where most of the rooms were rarely entered, much less used. My professional life, such as it was, had been compressed into one large filing cabinet, almost all of it crammed with contracts from the “Al and Sal” years. On a bookshelf beside the cabinet I had the scripts of the one hundred ninety-eight episodes, all bound in modest morocco.
For a moment, looking through the masses of “Al and Sal” contracts, some of them the size of a phone book, I felt panicky. Maybe I didn’t still have the detective’s report, in which case T.R. would think I’d been lying and had never tried to look for her at all.
Finally, in the bottom drawer, I found a few scraps from my own professional prehistory, years before “Al and Sal.” There were my Hanna-Barbera contracts, as well as contracts for the two or three novels I’d started but never finished. Among them was the report from the A-Triple-AAA Detective Agency, the first one, as it happened, in the Los Angeles phone book. I well remembered the detective, a neat, middle-aged Hispanic named Jose Guerra—his secretary, an aging white woman, not so neat, referred to him as Jose Cuervo.
Jose had borne no resemblance to the gumshoes of myth, the Sam Spades, Philip Marlowes, Lew Archers. Jose had been an accountant in the office of a prominent L.A. divorce lawyer; the lawyer had even handled one of Nema’s divorces, as I remembered. In fact, it was the lawyer who had referred me to Jose; at that time Jose dressed with all the sobriety of a submanagement-level accountant. At first I had some hesitation about sending a Hispanic to East Texas, but after a meeting or two I concluded that Jose Guerra really belonged to the nation of accountancy, not the nation of Mexico. It was all I could do to notice him even when I was sitting across the desk from him; he blended in so well that he was almost invisible.