by Camille Roy
Pearl tried beguiling it out of him but Thomas was stubborn. After awhile Pearl’s voice quivered, bluster melting into hysteria—“How can there be nothing to say about your own father?” Over and over again, Thomas would only respond, “There is nothing to say.”
No way into that matrix. The argument dwindled off. In fact, nothing was ever said about Thomas Senior—his name never crossed my father’s lips.
Thomas told me only one family story that I can remember, and I go fuzzy when I think of it, so I’m not sure how much of my memory is correct. He lifted his head up from the newspaper one night and told me how, when he was fifteen, he’d gotten a call from his aunt. As it happened, before she made the call she had drowned her son in the bathtub. Michael was a little boy with red hair and tender skin. A baby, perhaps? Was it two children that she murdered? I vaguely think that it was, but I’m not sure. In my memory the murders just begin with Michael and then take in, like a cloud of pestilence, whatever other children there were and the husband Jack, and then the murderess herself. I don’t know her name. What went through my father’s head when he hung up the phone? What was said in that conversation and what was implied? At the time, I was so shocked I couldn’t think of any questions. Eventually I went to one of his sisters, and she told me her version of what had happened, which was distinctly different, but which had the feeling of truth. Like a godmother in a fairytale, this aunt is gentle and wholesome. Refreshing. Nonetheless, I’ve forgotten what she said.
This is a story I could get to the bottom of by going to the Chicago Public library and researching through the archives of the Tribune. Murderesses, especially double or triple with a possible suicide thrown in, tend to make the news. But would you want to play Clue with your own family history? Perhaps you would. For me, the prospect is inexplicably irritating.
A friend questioned me on this—what is at stake, he wanted to know. Would the truth undermine the sense of myself I’ve constructed from these family histories? I’d be violating my own cloud of uncertainty, that’s for sure. My self of no sense. Perhaps I like the cloud, and even believe in it. It’s a habit—I have always lived in the castle. It’s expansive, oddly permissive, as a form of identity. The irritating part is the work required to manage it.
Families trail off like the ghosts to whom we are all connected. They don’t have a bottom. And it’s not only ancestors, but other ungraspable relations which shadow me—from my father’s silence to mother’s dreamy milk. That’s a sweet one.
It’s not that Thomas never talked. What he said and didn’t say never failed to surprise me. What he uttered came from a territory of silence. It entered with complete confidence but felt alien.
Once, eavesdropping, I heard Thomas and Pearl talking about a recent neighborhood rape, of a new girl in our neighborhood. Age-wise, I was somewhere in my slow descent through high school, and this girl was not much older. A stranger had broken into the her room, raped her, then he let her leave to do something oddly childish, I think she needed to feed her guinea pig. He let her out on the promise that she would come back and she did, and he raped her again. After a few weeks of mulling this over, she pressed charges. In my neighborhood, being streetwise mattered intensely so I could barely think of this girl as a person. Pearl responded to the story with complete impatience—perhaps she found the girl’s inability to handle her circumstances threatening. Thomas’ opinion was the surprise. He was sympathetic to this mysteriously stupid girl. He thought that perhaps she had come from the country. Sexually innocent, as well as innocent of our local racial politics, of the lacerating hostility that was part of our daily life, she suddenly found herself cluelessly adrift inside that (inside us), and was lost.
Thomas had more than a few such moments of sympathy, but they were as unpredictable as his little fits of irritability. I grew up in his city, in the city his parents had been born in, but there was little context. It was missing, and that was the loaded message. In our deep and disorderly photograph drawer, we had one picture of my father before he became my father. It shows a boy of about nine, wearing shorts and holding a pail. He is standing against a wall and grimacing awkwardly for the camera, as he squints into the sun. No one else is in the photo. It’s just Thomas, but his fixed frightened eyes are on someone standing behind the camera, so that I feel that person—her hysteria. I think I know who it is.
4. The House of Ethel
Ethel. For me the word conveys a fine-tuned state of paranoia and high dudgeon. She was unbeautiful, despite her elegant figure. Her nose was a little beak, and her chin was awkwardly receded. But she had style. Observing Ethel ordering a cab over the phone was an electrifying experience. “I am …” She spit and hissed every syllable of her long married name into the phone as if… as if—what? Vengeance, power, money, style were all at stake. And yet there was an impossible sheen to her speech, a melody. It was brutal, really, just the way she said her name. Had there been a time when random cab company dispatchers knew Ethel by name? Who am I to say, but probably. In any case, Joan Crawford’s accent and style, in fact the vocal style of that generation of actresses, was a whole-cloth imitation of women like Ethel, for whom it was bred in the bone.
Ethel was always ready to meet the cruelty of the contest. I’m glad I didn’t know her better. What I did know came from afternoons, maybe once a year, when Thomas and Pearl would load me into the car and drive with mysterious urgency to her north side apartment on Astor Street. The prospect of being five minutes late to Ethel’s made Thomas tight and crabby. We had to arrive on the dot. I felt breathless.
Her building had a doorman. Her apartment was like its own climate—tones of soft, saturated beige, imported from the fifties like that was a foreign country. Snowy white wallto-wall. Stacks of Vogues, in Italian, French, and German. The afternoons always followed the same pattern. Our coats were dispatched to an enormous closet. Then we were led to the living room, where we sat around an inlaid mahogany table on round upholstered chairs with no arms but odd little skirts, while Ethel reclined upon her divan, tiny feet crossed. She was inordinately proud of her small feet—size 4 1/2 before marriage, and five afterwards. From a mirrored cabinet, drinks for everyone (mine with the maraschino, ginger ale, and grenadine) and then, a round of cheddar cheese puffs, served on a silver tray by a maid who endured. Delores. Ethel took a martini, and smoked one Kent after another, in a long ebony and ivory cigarette holder.
These afternoons were conducted like interviews, in which each person sitting on an armless chair would have to describe, in a manner amusing to Ethel, what they were up to. The goal was to raise a dry, appreciative laugh from Ethel; at stake was social humiliation of a degree so peculiar and yet severe, it was utterly mysterious. Each eroding second, every witty remark was part of the burnished display of her total control of social intercourse. Yet her eyes sparkled with pure fear. Ethel was a breath of terror inside the artifact of personality. One afternoon she asked me about my tennis, and I told her that I didn’t know how to play tennis, then she said, but tennis is the best way to get bows, and by the way did I have any bows, and in distress I murmured WHAT? and she said BOWS and I cried out HUH and she said BOWS again, and this went on, with increasing agitation, until finally Thomas broke in and said Mother, that is not a word people use anymore, and Camille, it means admirers.
I didn’t get it. I never did. Around Ethel I turned into a sloppy version of nice, which was obviously fake, and in any case, Ethel didn’t appreciate sloppy. I assumed the guise of stupidity, which was protective, even if inaccurate. Dumbness can be sweeter. Stumbling down her halls, lined with photographs of grandchildren in tennis whites posing on their private courts or in country clubs, I never noticed there was no photo of me, or Pearl, or even Thomas.
The stupidity was feigned, but my cluelessness was deep and pure. I sailed through childhood sustained, on the one hand, by a combination of maternal fable and paternal missing links, and on the other by a strange belief that everything told to
me by an adult was an un-truth. I believed in a sort of principle of opposites. The statements of adults were a kind of signpost, indicating that the reality I should act on was the opposite of whatever it was I had just been told. This boiled down to I’ll do whatever the fuck I want. It took six years for the public school system to beat this out of my behavior (using the usual tools of suspension, flunking, etcetera), although of course it lingers in my beliefs today.
Let’s get to the basics. When we speak of rules we are referencing contested territory. That includes not only injunctions on student behavior enforced by obscenely poor public school systems, but all the unwritten codes, the ones relating to unspeakable divisions and unbridgeable gaps. When they’re violated, it’s like invisible writing that appears when you hold the paper over a flame. There they are, the codes which describe intelligible experience. Since no one ever talked about them, I thought maybe they didn’t exist. Hah. Break them and an a transformation happens. As the rules become intelligible, finally specified and visible, the person who violated them becomes unintelligible, slides off the map towards strange.
One example is the rule about what happens when the asphalt play lot of your elementary school erupts into a gang melee, ten-year-old girls imagining themselves to be representatives of Chicago’s illegitimate armies, swinging at one another in a seething mass. The rule was that all the girls fighting were Black, and all the girls watching were white. But it looked like fun, so Camille broke that rule, jumping into the pool of flailing arms & fists. Then everyone acted embarrassed, so she got out. There was another rule about double-dutch, a great jump rope game that came up from the south with the Black migration to Chicago. The rule was that only Black girls played this game, but Camille discovered that if she slunk around in the background long enough, her participation became tolerable. It was as easy as two-four, sixeight, ten-twelve, fourteen-sixteen, twenty-two-thirty-two… Once Camille was established, the other white girls wanted to play too, but (being pussies every single one) they only wanted to play with Camille.
We were different. The family, I mean. Being of the left, we were somehow outside the necessity of following all these stupid rules. We were made out of broken ones. Yet breaking rules brought a kind of shame, because in truth there was no outside. I, at least, never got there. What I found was a kind of defeat in my own sadness, when the first girl I loved moved away from me, deeper into the ghetto, unavailable.
Getting a clue meant being indoctrinated into social pain. What I learned was how to walk down a South Side street. The task of pleasing my grandmother, or even the basic chore of washing regularly, remained inscrutable—in fact invisible. I was a dirty, scraggly, skinny child, which I now recall with a dash of regret, because it leads inevitably to the reflection—that perhaps, if only—I had been different, there would have been a place for me (in Ethel’s will).
5. Stefan and Charlotte
Chicago’s ruling class was larded with unrecognizable relatives, but who knew. (At least, no one was talking.) Stefan was the one who enlightened me. In our neighborhood of mostly Blacks and Jewish Communists, we were neither. He was the son of a Polish leader in the United Steelworkers Union. Stefan had none of his father’s gruff confidence. Already, he was the male half of one of those odd couples, composed of a gay man and a straight woman, although Stefan was in his early teens, and Charlotte was forty-four. Stefan had that indefinable homosexual quality of languor. By twelve, he possessed an exhausted worldliness.
In fact, languor was the characteristic Charlotte and Stefan shared. They relaxed well together. Charlotte maintained hers by living in darkened rooms, eating only chocolates, and drinking only coffee. She was very slim and pale, with a wedge of shiny black hair that hung to her shoulders. Both Charlotte and Stefan were soft, with the kind of white skin which seemed a bit vaporous, as though if you bumped it you might enter them. Charlotte was the girlfriend of Stefan’s father, who had become a very lapsed Catholic after his wife left him. He was a beloved big bear of a political figure. People were forever knocking on Stefan’s door, needing his father to help them with something or other.
Stefan managed to escape Chicago for his last year of high school, choosing an ‘alternative’ boarding school in San Francisco where each student cared for their own chicken. I visited him there, staying in the tiny room which he claimed he never left. He confided, I don’t do anything here except listen to Billie Holiday fourteen hours a day. Draped over his bed, purring irony and detachment, he whispered huskily, San Francisco is Sodom and Gomorrah unleashed.
I recall Charlotte and Stefan in a living room, probably her living room. Why was Camille in Charlotte’s living room? My memory is foggy on that point, but it seems to have been a place I spent significant time. Charlotte was stretched out on her sofa, with her slender ankles crossed just like Ethel, but Charlotte was tranquil to the point of murmuring torpor. As always, there was an open box of chocolates by Charlotte’s side (she ate them slowly), and a cup of black coffee. The room was dim but very warm. Stefan drifted slowly from the turntable, to the window, to the chair, to a book. And as he sidled this way and that, he told me the story of my father’s family.
He started out with his usual tone of ironic boredom, but as he went on Stefan perked up. Since I quickly fell into incredulity & speechlessness, the momentum of the conversation depended entirely on Stefan, and he did not flag.
They weren’t big, it turned out, they were gigantic. How many monuments in the city? Most Large Monuments. One in particular commemorated a labor riot in which more than a handful of workers were shot in the back by company goons. And of course, hall after hall in the museums bore names which I suddenly realized were the same as one of my father’s names. I couldn’t keep track of the businesses founded, even whole industries. And since Chicago has a second city complex, a tendency to build the biggest whatever in the world has resulted in some edifices so fantastically enormous you, reader, probably have heard of them. Perhaps you have even been inside them.
I know Stefan was getting off on his story, because he didn’t just throw me one dry bone, but a whole pile. I suspect that leads to the expectation that I’ll dump the truth here, in one of those enactments of life’s mysterious parallels. But I don’t want to. I won’t tell which family monument you are most likely to have been enclosed by. It’s that irritation again. I just can’t make myself do it.
6. Princess Me
How did Camille take these revelations? By mumbling, Wow, that is so weird, over and over. I think that’s what she said. It was a shock. Her greasy dreadlocks quivered. She was just coming out of her schoolyard fighter years, and all other forms of human interaction pretty much floored her. She thought her hair had to form big oily clumps—years would pass before she learned to wash regularly. But here was Stefan, offering Camille the possibility that she was a princess in disguise.
She began to look around her city with a new appreciation for the solidity of its monuments. They seemed to carry a for-your-eyes-only message, pointing secretively to a castle in the sky, the one which was completely inaccessible, but which had her name on it. Being an unknown princess in a city of hog-butchers was a melt-in-your-mouth sort of secret—delicious, private, and oddly sanitary. Nothing actually showed.
The fantasy had no connective tissue. It was as impersonal as Disney. But that didn’t cancel it, just like communism didn’t. It only thrust those theatrics of class onto a series of tiny, almost invisible stages. One year, a scary but glamorous relative surprised everyone by sending Camille a Christmas present. When she opened it, Pearl snatched the gift and held it to her bosom, inhaling, exhaling… Oh, but this is an elegant brand, she exclaimed. It wasn’t. It was just another cheap new cologne that had been getting some recent hype. In fact (Pearl was too thrilled to notice), the bottle was half-empty.
Rescue me. Isn’t that what adoration of ruling class style is really about? And they are so not interested—otherwise they wouldn’t be ruling class.
What I’m attentive to is the desires that get stirred up. That’s the rustle in the grass, that little snake. All those shiny spreads in magazines, jewels and silks, they’re the froth of a basic craving—not for stuff. Forget stuff. The craving is for recognition, pathetic hope of every masochist. And, elegance is refusal, the only smart thing Diana Vreeland ever said.
I speak with authority because I’ve been mixed up all my life… those incompatible elements. Nonetheless, the mix remained surreal to me until the day I was prowling for luxury goods with Thomas through Ethel’s apartment. She had died, finally. The excruciating but hilarious reading of the will had just taken place. A cousin had found the old photo albums, and we paged through them together. I, at least, was shocked. The photo I remember best showed my father in a tuxedo and his sisters in white satin full-length gowns, snapped as they were emerging from a limousine. Depression-era America never looked so stylish, curvaceous, limber. The white satin on those girls was as thick and luscious as Niagara Falls. You could get lost in it. Their smiles were warm. At sixteen, my father, leaning against the big curvy Packard, was terrifically elegant in spite of himself, and sneering. I felt a pang—envy? disappointment?
And what does the ruling class want from everybody else? What’s the emotional hook? The same relatives who would call Thomas up to relay Ethel’s suggestion that he leave Pearl at home, would then leave Pearl befuddled by their confidences. Pearl would come up to me with a dazzled look after a dinner encounter, and tell me some horrible secret. She’s probably forgotten them, but I remember every single one. Don’t you think it’s best to keep some ammo in reserve? They seemed to think Pearl, the most elusive person I have ever known, was safe, familiar, even, in some way, ‘earthy.’