Missing Mom: A Novel

  I looked more confident than I felt. Since high school, I’d learned.

  Inside Szalla’s apartment, the two were still quarreling. I could hear their raised voices. I wondered if I should wait for Szalla to re-emerge: he’d seen me, he’d have figured out who I was. Already this afternoon I’d been given the wrong home address for him by my editor (who fumed and fumed over the “slovenly” fact-gathering of his reporters) so that I’d wasted twenty minutes driving to the far side of town, made a fool of myself breathless and beaming like a girl TV anchor ringing the doorbell of an impressive old-style red-brick colonial on prestigious Ashburn Avenue, being nervously informed by a Guatemalan maid that “Mr. Zal-la” was no longer “resident” at that address even as I distinctly heard, in the background, a woman on the brink of hysteria crying, “Tell her to go away, Nina! Whoever it is, go away! We don’t know where he is.” Several frantic calls on my cell phone later, I was directed across town to Riverview Luxury Apartments, 8A: a ground-floor apartment with a door that opened directly onto a front stoop. This stoop was so littered with old newspapers and flyers, I would have thought no one was home except as I uneasily approached the door I could hear voices inside.

  All this was disheartening! The name Szalla was close to our Chautauqua Valley equivalent to Rockefeller in the larger world. But Riverview Luxury Apartments wasn’t and Wally Szalla, that overweight dad trotting pathetically in the wake of his adolescent son, had the glamour of a well-worn old shoe.

  Szalla! And I’d been hearing he had the reputation of being a “womanizer.”

  Troy came charging back out the door, carrying a black backpack into which he was stuffing a cell phone. He’d jammed a rakish Buffalo Bills cap on his head and his expression was fierce and triumphant. Behind him, Wally Szalla followed in the self-punishing way of a large aging dog trailing a smaller, faster, younger dog. As Troy jogged down the street without a backward glance Szalla paused at the curb cupping his hands to his mouth: “All right! But you call me, Troy! God damn, you use that cell phone at eleven P.M. and call me and if I call you you’d better answer or I’ll have you picked up by state troopers! You hear?” By this time, Troy was out of earshot.

  I’d had plenty of time to study Wally Szalla by now, and wasn’t much impressed. A deflated-looking middle-aged man, staring after his vanished son. Not just he reminded me of an old shoe, he was wearing old shoes: the kind my father had called “moccasins.” Dad had owned a favorite pair of these shoes, meant to resemble deer hide, something Native Americans might have “tanned” and “sewn” in frontier days, now machine-made with floppy little tassels: slipper-shoes so worn, so splayed, Dad had shuffled around the house in them like an elderly invalid, exasperating the rest of us. Mom had tried to dispose of the moccasins but somehow Dad managed to retrieve them from the trash saying in a wounded voice: “Gwen, these shoes fit.”

  Well, Szalla was wearing moccasins. And summer trousers that might have been stylish in another season but were badly worn now, and soiled across the buttocks. His limp damp incongruously formal long-sleeved shirt had pulled out of his trousers at the back, looking like a pajama top. I was embarrassed to see Szalla panting so badly, wiping his eyes on his shirtsleeve.

  Vaguely I was headed for my car. A mud-colored Datsun compact so nondescript I kept forgetting what it looked like, in parking lots. Szalla saw me, and quickly tucked in his shirttails. With unconscious vanity he tried to suck in his stomach. “Excuse me: you must be Nikki from the Beacon?”

  I said yes but we could re-schedule the interview, if he wanted. I could see that this wasn’t an ideal time for him.

  “No, no! I mean, yes. I can’t think of a more ideal time. Please don’t leave.”

  The way Wally Szalla was headed toward me, across a patch of grass near the curb, you’d think the desperate man meant to block my escape.

  Quickly I said, “Mr. Szalla, I think I’d better call your secretary, to reschedule. I know what adolescents can be like, pure hell.”

  “You do? I mean, you do? You’re too young to have a sixteen-year-old.”

  “Not have one, Mr. Szalla: I used to be one. Made my parents anxious over me, it doesn’t seem that long ago.”

  Szalla laughed eagerly. “Rock concerts? Ten thousand screaming fans? ‘Heavy metal’? ‘Ecstasy’?”

  “‘X’ is after my time, Mr. Szalla. If that’s what you mean by ‘Ecstasy.’”

  “Not what I mean by ecstasy. No ma’am.”

  Szalla stood close beside me, considering. He was looking less distraught, eyeing the very short very tight white cord skirt and lacy red top that fitted my torso snug as a sausage casing. I felt the powerful swerve of his interest. My heart was beating just a little quickly. And I felt sympathy for the man: I knew the wish not to be left alone as evening came on.

  Thinking, in my naïveté, that Wally Szalla would have to spend any evening of his life alone if that wasn’t his wish.

  Still I felt obliged to say, “Mr. Szalla, it doesn’t seem appropriate. A reporter could take advantage of you, asking pushy questions. You’ve had an upset just now.”

  “‘Mr. Szalla’ is my eighty-two-year-old father, Nikki. Please call me ‘Wally.’”

  “Well. ‘Wally.’”

  I felt my face burn pleasantly. “Wally” was such a comfortable old-shoe kind of name.

  Apologizing profusely for his rudeness in ignoring me and for his son’s rudeness, Wally Szalla escorted me into his apartment. I was conscious of his fingers lightly on my elbow. Szalla was saying of his son Troy that his rudeness wasn’t intentional, it was purely unconscious: “That age, most of life is unconscious. Other people, especially older people, don’t register.”

  I wasn’t sure how true this was. But I saw that a father would want to believe that his son had no conscious wish to defy or wound him.

  “May I get you something, Nikki? Coffee, or a soda, or—?”

  Szalla was wanting to say “something stronger” but decided against it. I declined his offer, setting up my Japanese-manufactured tape recorder near an electrical outlet, on a low, glass-topped table in Szalla’s surprisingly small living room. To find a space for the recorder, we had to push aside layers of clutter—newspapers, magazines, an empty pizza carton, scattered CDs (heavy metal rock, white rapper) that must have belonged to Troy. I could see Szalla hovering over me preparing to ask if I needed help with the machine which, as I paused and fumbled my two-inch polished fingernails and muttered to myself, it appeared that I did. But Szalla decided against interfering, he meant to keep a respectful distance.

  I was grateful for this. A father who knows not to crowd his children. Daddy had crowded Clare and me, sometimes. Not that he showed his impatience but you could feel it, a quivery heat and exasperation lifting from his skin.

  Szalla rubbed his hands vigorously. “You don’t mind if I have a drink, do you, Nikki? Having your heart chewed up by a bratty kid makes a man thirsty.”

  In the kitchen Szalla got himself a cold beer from the refrigerator and, for me, a can of Diet Coke.

  Saccharine, caffeine, and chemicals! Exactly what I craved at this hour of the day when my blood sugar was dipping and it was too early for a serious drink.

  The “luxury” apartment was chilled with air-conditioning but the air smelled of beer and stale pizza and something more intimate: unwashed laundry, sweaty socks. Through the kitchen doorway I could see the kind of casual mess you’d expect of a father and son who’ve been camping out together for a few days.

  Despite the name “Riverview,” there was no view of the Chautauqua River from Wally Szalla’s windows: his apartment faced the street. Venetian blinds on the living room windows were partly drawn, each at a different height. Furnishings looked as if they came with the apartment: stylish but charmless leather sofas in neutral colors, chromed-edged chairs and tables, rugs like wild boar skins strewn casually about. An upscale bachelor’s pad you might see in a Playboy photo feature except this one had been invaded
by a teenager and bore signs of incipient shabbiness, like Riverview Apartments itself, that had opened only a few years before but was beginning to look tacky on the outside. Monthly rentals here were several times what I paid for my funky third-floor brownstone apartment in a less prestigious part of Chautauqua Falls but I didn’t have much envy for the residents.

  “And are you a ‘career’ journalist, Nikki?”

  “What is a ‘career’ journalist?”

  “A very serious, very dedicated journalist. An ambitious young woman on her way out of Chautauqua Falls, using the Beacon as a springboard.”

  Szalla had to be teasing. The Chautauqua Valley Beacon was as springy as cooked spaghetti.

  We laughed together. Szalla sat across from me, sprawled in one of the leather chairs. Where his wrinkled shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, a spidery mass of graying hairs sprang out. There were matching hairs on the backs of his big knuckles. His large splayed feet were bare in the worn old moccasins, as white as the insides of my thighs.

  Awkwardly I began: “Please tell me about your background, Mr. Szalla? You were born in—”

  Szalla lifted a forefinger as if in warning. “‘Wally.’”

  “Oh, yes. ‘W-Wally.’”

  I fumbled my notebook, staring at the questions I’d diligently prepared. Pages of questions! The palms of my hands were moist, I couldn’t believe that I was nervous. Wally Szalla was the least discomforting of men, nothing like the pushy arrogant guys I was always meeting, or who were always meeting me. Guys with names like Dale, Brock, Kevin, Kyle. Guys with names nothing like Wally.

  “Born in Chautauqua Falls, W-Wally, in—”

  “Haven’t you done your homework, Nikki? I bet you have.”

  “Well, but—”

  “You’re checking, are you? To see if what I tell you tallies with what you already know?”

  “Mr. Szalla, no! I just—only—”

  Szalla was laughing at me, but in a kindly way. The only person who ever laughed at me like this, as if my fumbling and blunders were precious to her, was Mom.

  I was feeling mildly high, as if it wasn’t Diet Coke I was drinking in Wally Szalla’s bachelor pad but something much stronger.

  As Szalla settled in to being interviewed, sipping at his bottle of Sierra Lite, he became professional, serious. He spoke slowly and lucidly into the tape recorder. He was reminding me of my most admired university professors, who’d spoken not in breathy snatches of words like the majority of people but in carefully thought-out and articulate paragraphs. Szalla said, “I’ve been misquoted, Nikki, many times in the past. Forgive me if I overcompensate now.”

  I was embarrassed to realize that I’d underestimated Szalla. No one should be judged by the figure he cuts with an adolescent child.

  Of course it was so, I’d tracked down a few facts about Wally Szalla. I knew that, though he looked years older, he was only forty-three. (Only! Forty-three, to me, seemed ancient. About as old as twenty-eight would seem to Szalla’s son.) Wally Szalla hadn’t been an outstanding student at Chautauqua Falls High but he’d been president of the class of 1976 and a popular football player; and beneath his smiling yearbook photo was the quotation I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. After graduating he’d lived in Washington, D.C., for a year, working as an intern for his uncle Joseph Szalla, a Democratic U.S. congressman from our district; he’d taken courses at George Washington University, transferred to the State University of New York at Buffalo, and graduated in 1981 with a degree in business administration and communication arts. In 1982, he’d married his college sweetheart, a TriDelt who’d been Homecoming Queen. The couple had three children of whom the youngest, Troy, was born in 1985. The Szallas of Chautauqua Falls were well-to-do businessmen and civic leaders, mostly aligned with the Democratic party: Szalla’s father Otto had served as mayor of the city for two terms, one of Szalla’s cousins was a state senator, and Szalla himself now served on the County Board of Supervisors, an elected position. In interviews Szalla spoke of himself as an “investor in my home territory”—“an investor in hometown dreams”—and so he had a history of quirky projects: refurbishing the old, baroque Cameo Theater in downtown Chautauqua Falls, remaking an immense bankrupt bowling alley out on Route 33 into an indoor ice rink, introducing a summer jazz festival in Riverside Park, campaigning to bring a film festival to the Chautauqua Valley region. (The Cameo Theater had since been remodeled into a CineMax with eight screens. The ice rink was closed. The jazz festival was “tentatively successful.” The film festival organizers had decided they preferred the more scenic Adirondack Mountains.)

  Two years before, Szalla had purchased a local radio station, WCHF AM-FM, with the intention of “revamping” it. When I’d been in high school, WCHF AM had been the station to tune in to for pop-rock and country-and-western, nonstop except for the interruption of noisy ads, like most AM stations. I’d stopped listening to it years ago, like everyone I knew. Then suddenly Wally Szalla had stepped in to save the station from shutting down, and to rejuvenate it with NPR programming, local news several times a day, and, amid the ubiquitous rock music, interludes of classical jazz, “opera highlights,” American popular music. There was a morning call-in program that dealt with women’s issues called “No Holds Barred,” hosted by a female personality who’d obviously learned a few tips from Oprah Winfrey; there was even, several nights a week from 10 P.M. to midnight, Wally Szalla’s own D.J. program, “Night Train.” Mostly Szalla played jazz CDs, tapes, and old 78s from his private collection, chatting in the way of a mellow old friend who takes for granted that you have time for him and if you don’t, if you switch him off, that’s cool, too. When I happened to be home at that hour, alone—which I tried not to be—I’d gotten into the habit of switching on “Night Train” to hear the D.J.’s rambling voice, cozy and intimate as a voice in my ear. Yet, to tell the truth, I hadn’t even been aware of the D.J.’s name, I listened to the program so haphazardly. Only when my editor at the Beacon pushed this assignment onto me, to interview Szalla, did I realize that I knew the sound of the man’s radio voice.

  I knew the kind of jazz Szalla favored, to my untrained and impatient ear so unemphatic and repetitive it was about as exciting as listening to crickets. I did like brassy-bright Dixieland I could bop around to, to make my body think I might be dancing in a club, effervescent and sexy as hell and whoever I was dancing with didn’t actually need to exist.

  Szalla was a skilled interview subject. If he didn’t care to answer an awkward question (“Mr. Szalla, it’s said that WCHF AM-FM is ‘struggling to survive’—is that so?”) he simply answered another question in its place, smiling and upbeat: “Serious radio programming in the United States is a constant challenge to maintain, it isn’t just TV we compete with but…” (Of course, I wasn’t the kind of aggressive reporter who persisted in unwanted questions. The reader-friendly Beacon was hardly the New York Times.) When I asked Szalla the only pointedly political question of the interview, a question one of my fellow reporters had told me to ask him, about the possible “conflict of interest” in his serving on the County Board of Supervisors when a number of his relatives and associates were involved in developing land in the Chautauqua Valley, Szalla frowned thoughtfully, drained the remainder of his Sierra Lite, and said, fixing his warmly brown, kindly eyes on my face: “As I’ve said, Nikki, I see myself as an investor in ‘home dreams.’ In the Valley, where I was born. Where my great-grandparents settled, in 1899. The role of local business to plow back money into the local economy, hire locally and demonstrate faith in the future of this beautiful region that has suffered economically in recent years like much of upstate New York.” Szalla spoke with a sincere sort of hesitancy as if these words were utterly new to him. I felt the thrill of his old-fashioned idealism. And I liked it that, as if he couldn’t help himself, my interview subject (only my third, since joining the Beacon staff) was staring at my lacy red top with the 1930s shoulder pads, my very short very
tight white cord skirt that had ridden up to mid-thigh, and my long slender legs that a second-to-last lover had described as skinny.

  To conclude the interview, which had already gone beyond the spare forty minutes Szalla’s protective secretary had granted the Beacon, I asked Szalla to describe his personality, and he responded with boyish enthusiasm, as if this was the very question he’d been awaiting. “As a boy, I was fascinated by machines. The way voices came out of the radio, and voices and images out of the TV, and all there was inside was wires, mostly! I loved to dismantle household things like vacuum cleaners, clocks, radios, phonographs, even a TV, once: sometimes I could put the things back together and nobody knew what I’d been up to, but sometimes not. See, a machine is a puzzle. Most people, normal people I’d suppose you might say, just look at it from the outside, as its function. But to someone like me, the machine is also a riddle: how does it work? why does it work? who put it together in this way, and is this the most efficient way? Is there something ‘hidden’ about it? Machines people take for granted are constantly being re-imagined, re-styled. Look at computers, that were once massive. Any machine that’s being manufactured, you can be sure that it’s already being re-styled in someone’s imagination. As a little boy I could spend hours poking around in my mother’s appliances, I remember once I dismantled most of the refrigerator when she was out, it was just the most thrilling thing I’d done yet in my life.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Maybe four.”

  “Four! That doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Trouble is, I couldn’t put the damned thing back together again. I guess looking back at it, I might’ve been slightly autistic, or afflicted with this Asperger’s syndrome, I think it’s called, where a kid, almost always a boy, becomes fixated on something, it could be baseball scores, it could be counting how many airplanes fly overhead, it could be taking machines apart and seeing their insides…I grew out of it, eventually. I really don’t have any talent for engineering or mechanics. So now I’m a radio man, you could say that I’m inside the radio myself—one of those mysterious voices. I tape most of my shows so I can listen to myself ‘over the radio.’ And sometimes I perspire from just thinking as if my brain is all cogs and wheels, a kind of crazy machine except it’s also a flesh-and-blood brain…” Szalla broke off, embarrassed. He’d been thinking aloud as if he had forgotten the tape cassette, and me; as if he’d forgotten his surroundings altogether.