by Ian Woollen
Mary speculated in a letter to her friend, Breezy, that the sculptures symbolized her father-in-law’s eagerness for his son to rejoin the business after their year away. “Fat Man and Little Boy,” she wrote. “Ward Sr. packed on significant girth while we were gone and my husband has maintained his youthful trim.” Mary confided, “I do hope their relationship can grow, in a professional way, beyond just this weaponry folderol.”
Borrowing from traditional bank lobby design, Ward Sr.’s office occupied the south end of the mezzanine level, directly up and across from the main entrance doors, so customers could see he was on the job. He installed his son in the adjacent glass-walled corner office.
Ward Jr. spent his days studying the newspapers, acquainting himself with the client roster, feeling a constant scrutiny from the tourists milling around the bomb sculptures. Between ten and eleven a.m., broad columns of sunlight beamed diagonally down through the arched front windows and illuminated the bronze behemoths, making them glow with radioactive intensity. Ward Jr. sharpened pencils and waited for his father to get off the phone and take him to lunch at the King Cole Restaurant.
Ward Sr. bantered shamelessly with the King Cole waitresses. “One trick is to pretend to be hard of hearing. They have to lean down and speak into your ear,” he instructed his son.
Ward asserted some independence by ordering his own lunch from the menu, contrary to the Wangert tradition of the paterfamilias ordering for everyone at the table.
“Here’s the deal …” Ward Sr. said. He prefaced everything with that phrase. His father, Roscoe, specialized in having the last word. Ward Sr. prided himself on the inside scoop.
“Here’s the deal … I’m going to have you supervise the third floor conference room expansion. We’ll also get you on the boards of some local organizations. You can start bellying up to some of the movers and shakers. I’m resigning my seat on the Crown Hill Cemetery board. You’ll be appointed to replace me.”
“Give, get, or get off,” Ward stated, “Isn’t that what grandfather used to say about serving on boards?”
“In this case, it’s about cutting your teeth.”
“What does the board of a cemetery do?”
“Oh, you know, decisions about grounds-keeping. Limbs fall from trees. We donate the firewood to charities.”
Although Ward Sr. had not inherited Governor Roscoe’s political acumen, he did maintain a certain personal flair. He cut a figure in his double-breasted suits, and he fluently mouthed the chatter of business, accompanying it with appropriate physical gestures: arm-squeezing, the shooting of cuffs.
After lunch they often visited Ward Sr.’s tailor in the men’s department at L.S. & Ayres. Ward Sr. perceived that his son needed help on sartorial presentation, after ten months of not wearing a proper suit.
“According to the ancestors,” Ward Sr. counseled, “there are three things a man needs to do in life—write a book, sire a son, and tie a full Windsor. You’re pretty much there!”
Ward Jr. had lied about the book to his father. “It’s still undergoing revisions,” he said. And, as for siring a son, that was an even darker secret. It was painful for him to watch Ward Sr. play cheerfully with baby Anthony. All the Wangert bloodline boasting that the baby looked just like Roscoe made Ward feel like a fake. It was hard for him to connect with his newborn, especially because Anthony screamed so much at night. Ward struggled to interpret Mary’s noises of maternal exasperation. When did her groans mean, “Come assist right away” and when did it mean, “Leave me alone with this”? Fortunately, men in this era were not expected to interact with infants.
“Who do you think he looks like?” Mary whispered, peering into the crib.
“I think he looks like himself,” Ward said.
“That big space between his eyes, my dad sort of has a big space between his eyes,” Mary said.
“It doesn’t matter who he looks like,” Ward insisted.
Ward could not seem to convince Mary that it was fine if their rather ugly baby did not resemble him or any of their male relatives.
“And you don’t have to try to make him smile all the time, just because you think that I will like him more that way,” Ward said.
Mary sighed, “Sorry, honey, I get the impression you feel left out.”
“The real obstacle for me,” Ward growled, “is that I’m not as good at sticking my head in the sand as I expected.”
A birth in a family, like a death—as much as one prepares for it—can bring unanticipated reactions. Mary was right. Ward did feel shunted aside by Mary’s powerful maternal instincts.
Her life and their parents’ lives revolved around the wonders of baby Anthony, who lifted some of the grief in the home of Fred and Loretta Stark. The baby crawled among the rows of vegetables in Loretta’s ‘Victory in Korea’ garden and grabbed at his grandmother’s frayed sunhat. Fred played peek-a-boo with Anthony between the cornstalks.
Socially, Ward noticed another kind of left-out. He and Mary received official welcomes at the traditional clubs—the Portfolio Club, the Dramatic Club. But informal invitations from their peers were scarce. On the upper-crust circuit, Mary was regarded as a gold-digger. Mary’s remaining friends from high school—those who survived the war—regarded Ward as a snoot. And nobody understood why they were living at the Hotel Morace.
Ignoring their parents’ warnings about resident gangsters and their friends’ admonitions to build a ranch-style house in Broad Ripple like other young couples, Ward and Mary rented an efficiency apartment on the fifth floor of the Morace. They borrowed furniture from the Wangert attic. They filled bowls with cracked ice and set them in front of ever-spinning table fans. On nights when Anthony’s crying was too much, Ward escaped downstairs to the Morace Bar.
He felt at home in the Morace Bar. It was the kind of cozy establishment that he dreamed of owning. His true calling in life was bartending, Mary joked. Of course, that was impossible. Not that alcohol was a problem for Ward. He liked being among drinkers. He was the relatively sober fellow who everyone relied on for a ride home, or a shoulder, or a well-timed philosophical observation.
The sawdust floors of the Morace Bar smelled like last century’s beer. The clientele included a type of businessman that Ward Sr. did not usually encounter in his boardrooms—young real estate developers and ad-men with prosthetics and Purple Hearts. With the recent founding of the John Birch Society in Indianapolis, it was not unusual to overhear public conversations about the communistic aspects of Social Security and the movement for its repeal.
One evening, Ward eavesdropped on a rant by two flushed chain-smokers. They wore bowling shirts that specifically designated themselves as president and vice-president of ‘Ace Properties.’ Finally, the president of Ace Properties turned to Ward and said, “What do you think, bub?”
Ward slowly lit a cigarette, trying to recall some lectures from his college economics course. He signaled for another round and replied, “Gentlemen, the challenge as I see it … is not to stifle the emerging small investor. If we repealed Social Security, we’d go back to being a strictly savings-based economy. The little guy who might make a hundred extra a month would have to sock that into the bank, rather than invest in a company like Ace Properties.”
The vice-president nodded and said, “Stu, the man has a point.”
“He probably has a name too. What is it?”
Ward handed them his business card.
“Ah, a Wangert.”
They introduced themselves as Stu and Randy Scurvine. Armed with their new ‘in,’ Stu and Randy showed up the next night and pressed Ward for help with their latest project, a shopping center—a new concept in retailing. They needed an anchor tenant to qualify for a bank loan to build a shopping center next to the proposed outer-loop highway. They plied Ward with statistics about housing expansion and the city’s annual increase in car ownership. They invited him out to tour the site, currently occupied by a mountainous trash dump. They invited him t
o shoot rats at the dump.
Ward went along, without informing his father. He saw an opportunity for one of Wangert Public Relations’ oldest clients. Harcourt Jewelers had recently expressed interest in expansion from their original downtown store. The trash dump was a problem. Ward suggested to Randy and Stu that they hire a helicopter, so that prospective tenants wouldn’t experience the stinking dump close up and instead could savor the panorama of the city and appreciate how much the area around the site had grown.
Ward contacted Harcourt Jewelers on the sly. He knew the owner’s son from the Regency School. He tried to set up the excursion as an informal look-see. But the helicopter ride created some intrigue and word got out to the owner, who called Ward Sr. to ask if he would be attending.
“Let me get back to you,” Ward Sr. answered. “I need to speak with my boy first.”
Ward Sr. banged on the glass wall and summoned Ward Jr. into his office.
“You negotiated with these hoodlums while shooting rats at a dump? Do you realize they’re just using you to gain credibility? Why didn’t you talk to me?”
Ward thought a moment and answered, “Actually, I’m using them. I wanted to prove to you I could do it.”
Ward Sr. puffed his cheeks and said, “I understand, yes, but we have certain standards to maintain.”
“What’s the difference between shooting rats at the dump and you and Ernesto shooting pigeons from downtown office buildings?”
“The pigeon shoot is an established tradition.”
“Here’s the deal,” Ward explained. “The shopping center is a fresh concept. Think of it as a giant department store. They’re calling it Sunny Dale Mall. Acres of new houses are going in, along with a highway intersection next door. The Harcourt people are very interested.”
Ward Sr. winced and massaged his forehead. He swiveled his chair to stare out at the statue of Governor Roscoe on the Statehouse grounds.
Ward waited patiently for a response. His father, thankfully, seemed to recognize the underlying challenge.
Ward Sr. spun back around to face his son. “The governor says … don’t screw it up.”
Chapter 12
Rusalka Jones
The Morace bar featured the latest in vending machines. To celebrate their bank loan, Stu and Randy bought out the machines and showered candy and cigarettes on the regular patrons. They ordered up a bottle of champagne to impress a new figure at a corner table, an attractive foreigner trying too hard to disguise herself as a trench-coated American. She was having none of the champagne bit. She rebuffed Stu and Randy’s advances all evening, but after they left, she summoned Ward and asked him to light her cigarette.
“Please excuse my colleagues,” Ward said. “All they really want is to see if they can get a pretty woman to talk to them.”
Uttering deftly mangled English that in the future she would do nothing to improve, Rusalka Jones introduced herself and claimed to be a relative of the late Madame Marlovsky. She came to town with her American husband a couple years ago to clear up some aspects of her great-aunt’s estate. Her husband, a researcher, had recently taken a job with Dow Chemical that required him to travel “too much-ly.”
“Your great aunt left some unsold jewelry perhaps?” Ward quipped, sipping a whisky and noticing a large diamond on her finger. Upstairs, baby Anthony was having a bad night and Ward had fled the apartment hours ago. He laughed at his own joke and should have noticed that Rusalka Jones did not appear to get it.
“I’m told that Madame Marlovsky is much beloved, yes, by little ballerinas and their mothers,” Rusalka said.
“Got that right,” Ward said. “She satisfied our Midwestern need for a something exotic in our midst. If you stick around, you could do the same. Where are you from?”
“Originally?” Rusalka sighed. “I, oh, forget. A refugee child of refugees. Vienna, Paris, London, New York.”
“Your accent sounds—”
“Russian,” she said.
“Russian? You’re a real, live Russian?” Ward exclaimed. He saw a chance to regain some cachet with Mary. “Stay right there! I’m going upstairs to get my wife. She lived in Moscow. She’ll want to meet you. Don’t move!”
Mary and baby Anthony were usually asleep by the time Ward came upstairs. He never got to witness the full effects of her struggles with a screaming baby. Tonight, he saw the ravages that belied her daytime happy-mother face. Tear streaks. A bedraggled frown. She violently shushed him as he barged through the door.
“For Pete’s sake, don’t make so much noise! The baby just went down. We’ve been getting complaints from the neighbors.”
Ward whispered, “There’s a Russian lady downstairs at the bar. She’d like to meet you. I said you’d want to talk with her.”
A strange look came over Mary’s face. Ward, veering into tipsiness, teased, “Maybe it’s a friend from the KGB.”
Mary let out an irritated sigh. “Do I look like I’m in any condition to socialize in public? What makes you think I’d want to speak to this woman just because she’s Russian?”
Ward said, “I guess … I assumed … it still mattered.”
“What still mattered?” Mary asked.
Ward closed his eyes. “Our story,” he growled.
“Oh, please,” Mary spouted. They both stood with eyes closed, afraid the spell had broken and that when they opened their eyes, the other person would be unrecognizable.
Ward said, “What’s happening to us?”
“In case you haven’t noticed,” Mary interrupted, “I’ve been dealing with a colicky baby.”
Ward said, “It seems like it’s starting to wear you down.”
Mary opened one eye and snarled glumly, “Starting to wear me down? It’s about time you figured that out. I am starting to fear it’s more than colic.”
“Tell you what … let’s write a letter to Doctor Stone,” Ward said. “Meanwhile, you could use a break. I’ll stay up here with the baby. You go downstairs for an hour or so, as long as you want.”
Mary shrugged her agreement. She combed her hair and pulled on a cardigan.
“What if the baby wakes up?” Ward asked.
“Throw him out the window,” Mary muttered.
Mary stopped in the lobby ladies’ room to wash her face before shuffling morosely into the bar. The dashing Russian woman stood up, adjusted her head scarf, and approached. “Oh, darling, you are picture of weariness. Our stupid husbands. Always thinking we want to talk about Mother Russia. No, what we most is forget. Just forget, that’s the ticket, write our return address as ‘oblivion.’ ”
Mary blinked in speechless surprise.
“Sweet oblivion.” Rusalka smiled. “Would you like drink with me?”
They sat together at the bar. The mirror behind the bartender reflected an image of two boxers circling the ring on a television set in the corner. Mary and Rusalka Jones talked about nothing in particular. Or, Mary thought they were talking about nothing, until she heard herself revealing to this stranger that her favorite childhood toy was a set of Russian nesting dolls.
“I love, yes, mine too,” Rusalka said.
“I drew faces on the inside ones, the hidden ones,” Mary confided. “Not pretty faces. Ugly and angry. In fact, the smallest one, in the very middle, sported a set of fangs. This probably says something awful about me, psychologically.”
“Not at all. I have set of fangs too. All across the globe, we girls taught very early that we must hide our fangs.”
“How old are you?” Mary inquired. “If I may ask.”
“Ageless,” Rusalka said. “How about drink another?”
Mary sensed that it would take more than a second drink and a change of clothes to stay in the ring with this apparition. She said, “I would, but I’m so exhausted. Can I take a rain check?”
“Rain check? What is rain check?”
“It means, I’d love to talk with you another time when I’m feeling better. In fact, how about an invita
tion to one of the Wangert Public Relations parties?”
Rusalka beamed. “Perfect, yes.”
Chapter 13
Bomb Shelter Cocktails
Complaints about the screaming baby increased to the point that Mary and Ward were evicted from the Hotel Morace. It was a low point. One morning the manager phoned up and told Mary to be out by noon. She tried to negotiate for more time and he hung up. Ward was unreachable, stuck in a meeting with Harcourt Jewelers.
Mary called her mother-in-law. Constance Wangert rose to the occasion and ordered an immediate decampment to the east wing of the Wangert house.
They enlisted Loretta Stark and her truck to help with the sudden relocation. She drove a Ford pickup that was used for hauling mulch. Loretta was not happy with decision to move in with the Wangerts. Her sunken cheeks, tinged with a faintly jaundiced hue, trembled with tension. She expressed displeasure that her daughter did not consider moving home to the Stark’s tidy brick Tudor. “Is our place not good enough for you?” she said.
Behold the abstruse intimacies of mothers and daughters: Loretta and Mary glaring at each other in the cab of the old Ford. “How could we, mother?” Mary said, “The only room big enough is Robert’s. And you’ve made that into a shrine. Daddy keeps it locked, for heaven’s sake.”
“Don’t be disrespectful to your brother,” Loretta said.
“He never gave me that much in the way of respect,” Mary said, “Remember when I discovered all my stuffed animals hanging by nooses outside in the buckeye tree?”
“We took away his allowance for two weeks,” Loretta said.