by John Rechy
That night, Enid stood in the living room of the two-story house in the cul-de-sac of the tree-lined street. Normalyn stared at the “peacock” mosaic around the unlit fireplace. Enid reached down and hugged her. Normalyn felt the woman’s tears and she surrendered gratefully to the embrace. Enid’s hug became a violent clasp. Normalyn tried to wrench from her. Then Enid thrust her away. She stared at Normalyn in angered surprise, as if at a stranger. She said softly, “You’re my daughter and I love you.”
Normalyn screamed at her, “No! You hate me, and I—” She could not finish.
Enid’s hand lashed across Normalyn’s face. Then she walked to the window and stared into the night. “It will soon be time,” Enid said vaguely.
Increasingly there coursed into Enid’s alcoholic recollections intimations of a “strange, great, terrible conspiracy” that involved her and Norma Jeane—“and Monroe—and powerful, powerful people.” She would gasp blurred words of anguished guilt—“I tried, I tried!”—a somber statement, a question to ghosts, harsh hints of vast secrets from a past kept hidden: “I’m the only one who knows . . . perhaps someone else. . . . We were trapped by power that could crush us all! . . . The Kennedys mustn’t know! . . . The truth disguised as a lie so it would be believed! . . . I couldn’t go to her funeral, it was too dangerous!” Her fingers touched her withered lips— “Shhh”—as if figures from the past might still overhear. Then the sighs and whispers of her old memories resumed.
Even in the early years, Normalyn had not been allowed to question. Now she did not want to know more about the intrusive new memories, because they conveyed grave present dangers—or prepared for further entrapment by Enid. “We have to stay protected. We can’t leave Gibson. . . . Mayor Hughes is a good man.”
Deep in the night, Normalyn heard sobs seeping out of Enid’s closed door. She went to her. The door was locked. After that when Normalyn heard the whispery sobs, she pressed her head into her pillow to silence them.
Enid saw only one other person, Mayor Wendell Hughes, who appeared regularly. He was increasingly solemn, especially one recent morning when he brought over what looked like a bank safe-deposit box. He hesitated for moments on his cane, as if he did not want to reach Enid’s room.
“I want to tell you the truth, Normalyn.” Enid appeared at the top of the stairs and called down to Normalyn that night.
In her bedroom suffused in dimming light, Enid sat in her bed and faced Normalyn. Her graceful slenderness had turned into thinness. She did not eat, just drank. Gray hairs invaded the dark head. But in this amber-shadowed faintly glowing room the hints of her former beauty survived.
Enid touched the wounded angel, its bruised wing. Her hands flowed over the artificial lavender flowers. A ghostly smile received kind memories. Then only pieces of familiar recollections poured out: “All those orphanages I was in, Normalyn, never knowing how long, those angry adoptions. . . . Just like Norma Jeane. We invented a game in the home. Did I tell you?”
Normalyn nodded. She resisted touching the frail old woman. The trembling hands might push her away.
“Once my mother made me up to look so pretty, like I did you, Normalyn, remember?”
“When you smeared the makeup on my face?”
Enid’s hands fluttered out, rejecting the harsh memory. “Oh, remember our trips, Normalyn, the songs, the movie games, the celebrations?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Mother . . . please,” Enid coaxed softly.
“Yes, Mother.” Normalyn allowed herself to respond to Enid’s assertion of those happy times.
“Remember how I held you, protected you, cried with you?”
“The time I was attacked by three men? You called me a whore, Mother—and then you cried. You never asked me what happened.”
“I was remembering something else!” Enid turned her face away. “Oh, did I tell you what Norma Jeane said when they brought her into the home? ‘I don’t belong in the orphanage, my parents are movie stars!’”
“You told me you said that.”
“We both did. And I told you about the necklace? It was blue, like dean water, so beautiful. I loved it so. But I gave it back to him. I told you?”
No. Nor about “him.” But Normalyn nodded.
“There was a man I loved, there was a man I hated.” Enid touched her hair, wisps, as if she must put it in order, the way it had been when she was beautiful. She brushed her lips, lightly, as if to bring color to them. She resumed her recitation of memories: “I told you about when I was living with my aunt and Grace telephoned from the institution she had committed herself to?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Why, they wouldn’t let her out unless family agreed to take her, and I said, Yes! She came and I was so happy for a time. She slept with me in the only bed available. She held me like I held you, Normalyn, and I was sure she loved me. But then she pushed me away and called the institution to take her back.” The frail old woman thrust her hands out as if this memory required physical motion to be spoken. “I told you.”
No, she had not told her the last part.
Enid’s trembling hands fell to her lap. “Only later, Normalyn, did I understand she wasn’t pushing me away. She was trying to separate me from their madness, their darkness.” She said with deep sorrow, “Norma Jeane and I shared even that, the darkness.” She looked up at Normalyn in sudden alertness. “We shared everything!” Then she sank into her bed as if finally the pills were granting her the blessing of peace.
2
Now, still standing within the silenced house left empty by Enid’s death, Normalyn realized how very little she knew about the woman she had lived with for eighteen years; realized, as she tried to gather scattering memories, that although Enid had spoken often about her “many lives,” she had told her only fragments, pieces of the mysterious life of an intimate stranger.
Five
The silence in Enid’s house screamed!
Normalyn’s hand choked her own cry as she stood in the house where, only nights before, Enid had taken pills and killed herself. It was the telephone that was ringing, pulling her out of Enid’s past, into a life without her. She would not answer! But she had to stop the shrieking. She lifted the telephone. “Hello!”
“Normalyn! Why aren’t you crying and your mother just died!” a man’s voice shot at her.
“Because I’m not sad and I’m not afraid!” she yelled back at him—and even more defiantly at the cruel, empty house. She flung down the telephone. She had recognized the voice of the divorced old man next door. She was aware of the yowling wind enclosing the house in silence. The telephone rang again. She would run away from it—outside! She opened the door. The wind thrust dirt and shattered tumbleweeds at her.
In his pickup, Ted Gonzales saw her at the open door, lashed by dust. She was terrified to be alone! He ran out.
She saw him advancing out of ashen wind at the same time that she heard the telephone ringing again.
Ted halted before her on the steps. “Is something wrong!” he yelled over the wind.
The ringing died behind her.
Normalyn was about to push the door shut when the screaming of the telephone—of the house, of her own aloneness—resumed. She covered her ears.
Now at the door, Ted understood the source of her panic. “You want me to answer it?”
“Yes!” She backed away from him as he lifted the telephone.
The man’s harsh questioning extended: “You’re all alone, huh, Normalyn? Maybe if I—”
“She’s not alone, you goddamn son of a bitch! You call again and I’ll find out who the hell you are and I’ll shut your fuckin’ mouth for you! . . . Sorry about the bad words,” he apologized aside to Normalyn. Then he hung up and faced her, hoping she would trust him now.
“You stay away! Remember I have a gun!”
He shook his head, knowing that for her he was just like the man who had telephoned just now—worse, much worse. He walked toward the
door. “See,” he said, “I’ve moved away. I’ll leave . . . if you say so.” He hoped, so much, she wouldn’t.
“Yes, leave!” she said. But when the telephone shouted again, her hand reached out toward him automatically.
Over to the telephone in three gaits of long legs, Ted yelled into it, “You fucked-up bastard! I told you not to call her again. I warn you if— Oh, I’m sorry. . . . Yes, she is, sir.” He covered the mouthpiece. Startled, he said to Normalyn. “It’s Mayor Hughes.”
Normalyn waited for Ted to put the telephone on the table before she took it. Now he would run away, because he’d be afraid she’d tell the Mayor—
But Ted didn’t leave. This might assure his sincerity.
The Mayor’s voice was concerned: “Honey, you all right? Someone botherin’ you on the phone?”
Clasping control, Normalyn assured him—twice—that she was all right. Even now she could not speak about the horror by the river, and she did not want to arouse the Mayor’s concern, nor be moved again by his desolate expressions of loss at Enid’s death, not now when she had to remain calm.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not alone. That fellow Gonzales sounded like he aimed to protect you! You know I’m aware of everything that goes on in Gibson, and someone called me, said you were sittin’ in the plaza in this damn wind with that young fellow. Bright young man, maybe a little radical, hadn’t known you knew him that well. . . . Now, honey, I want you to have lunch with me and Clarinda here at the hotel tomorrow. I’ll have Lottie open the main dining room just for you, like I used to for you and Enid. We’ll have us a long talk,” he promised. “Some things I need to tell you.”
About the letter! He would clarify everything! But now Normalyn felt relief more than anything else because suddenly there was something to do tomorrow. Lunch! A goal!
The Mayor’s voice was lowered, “I loved that mother of yours, honey. I will miss her with all my heart.”
Normalyn’s hands clenched the telephone. She looked up into the knotted darkness outside Enid’s room. And inside, Enid was still commanding with the papers left behind.
“Now you call me if anyone bothers you again.” The Mayor forced a more cheerful tone. “And, honey, you go ahead and bring that Gonzales fellow to lunch if you want to.”
The extended invitation confused Normalyn. Did the Mayor want to avoid questions? Was he testing her own intention to ask?
Ted Gonzales was uncomfortable in the house of the dead woman. He had seen her walking along the streets, demanding attention, getting it. Yesterday his mother put down the morning paper and announced, “The movie star in Gibson is dead. Wonder how Wendell’s taking it.” Ted’s mother often made references to a “secret relationship” between the Mayor and the “movie star in Gibson”: “Of course, they’re the only ones who think it’s secret!” This morning she had added, “Now that odd daughter will be all alone.” It was then that Ted decided he’d come into Gibson to find Normalyn. He drove the sixty miles from Langsdon, a “more sophisticated city” of almost fifty thousand.
When Normalyn put down the telephone, Ted was bold: “If it makes you feel safe, go ahead and get your gun, Normalyn. I promise you won’t need it.” It annoyed him to hear a trace of the Texas drawl he now disliked, tried to conquer. “Just please let me stay with you awhile.” She looked so pretty! He was ashamed to think that at this tense time. At Langsdon College, there were a few very pretty “Latino” girls in the new liberal arts department. But Ted did not desire them. He was still attracted only to “Anglo” girls. That troubled him, because he was intent on shedding all the despised attitudes he had once wanted to adopt. Recently he had caught another harsh view of himself when an “Anglo” girl he went out with told him it made her feel “sleazy in a sexy way” to be with a “brown white man.”
In Enid’s house, night had thickened at the dusty windows. Normalyn stared at Ted. She was less frightened of him than of the house, the telephone, of being alone. She considered pretending to go get a gun, but that would only prove she had none. Tired, so tired. Still expecting the telephone to erupt with renewed terror, she leaned against the steps and faced that she didn’t want to be alone. For a moment she glimpsed him as she had the very first time, across the schoolyard, “the gypsy cowboy.” But that person had existed only in her imagination and in the books she had loved and banished forever!
Ted had to seize these subdued moments to prove he was someone else, present evidence he was no longer the man she had seen at the river. He piled words nervously: “After what happened that ugly time, I saw myself so damn clearly. I tried to imagine what it would be like, to have someone come at you like that.” And he had tried. “But I couldn’t, couldn’t even imagine it, that’s how awful I knew it was.” That had driven him into a night of rage, which had ended when he smashed his fist against the windshield of his pickup, to hurt himself. He looked at the jagged scar on his hand, a reminder of that time. “You know what it was like the night when I—?” He stopped quickly. She had looked sharply at him.
“What it was like for you?”
Selfish! At this time he wanted her to understand what he had felt when she had been the one cruelly hurt. His resolve grew, to be with her now, when she was most alone. Would it help to tell her how much he had wanted to ask her out when he first saw her near her school, but he didn’t know how she felt about “Mexicans,” even if he was half Irish? No, telling her that might make it all worse now. Would it help to tell her he had figured out that part of what had gone wrong that ugly day was goddamned big Texas with its confusions of power and violence everywhere? No, then it would seem that he was evading blaming himself. He did seriously consider telling her his Mexican father had come back soon after that hated afternoon after years away in Dallas—a separation his mother acknowledged only sometimes when she called her husband “that damn Mexican I married.” Now Ted had discovered he liked his father and his father liked him, maybe a lot, and that the Gonzales family was— . . . Could he tell her any of this? Not now. Maybe some time. And he would even acknowledge that there had been desire, violent desire. There was still desire, but not violent, never again, he knew. “If you—”
Suddenly harsh lights flashed in through the wide living-room window of Enid’s house. Engine gunned loudly over the diminishing wind, a car was aiming its headlights inside. Feeling trapped in their glare, which steadied for long seconds, Normalyn pushed her body against the wall. The car sped away.
“Just some driver lost in the windstorm,” Ted tried to assuage. Even that had frightened her.
Was it just a car in the windstorm? Yes! That was all! She wouldn’t allow Enid’s letter and those strange papers to distort everything by seeming to verify new intimations of danger. “I’m not scared!” she said aloud firmly. She drew the drapes across the window. To warm away the sudden chill of fear, she walked to the artificial fireplace, lit it, and leaned over its clean blue flames.
Tinted by the golden glow, she looked even prettier, Ted saw. “It’s a beautiful fireplace,” he said. “Is it a peacock?”
Normalyn touched Enid’s precious peacock mosaic. “Yes. It’s like Valentino’s, at Falcon’s Lair,” she spoke Enid’s words aloud. And with them, suddenly, came one single memory, not of trips or songs or birthday cakes, but of Enid’s delight in her creation as she placed the colored tiles in her exact design, to fashion something beautiful of her own; and it was that one memory that released Normalyn’s tears, tears forced back for days, for years; and she asked aloud now the questions withheld from that deadly morning: “Why did you stop loving me, Mother? Why did you kill yourself?”
Jesus Christ! Her mother had committed suicide. Ted wanted to hold the shivering girl—the girl he had tried to rape—wanted to soothe the hurt pouring out at last. But he dared not risk touching her. He left his scarred hand extended for her to take if she wanted. If she could.
Normalyn looked at him, startled: She had spoken those intimate words to this man she hated
. Guilt overwhelmed her instantly, and she had to explain away her judgment: “I disappointed her; I was always so ugly and she was so beautiful.”
Then that was why, that afternoon, she had screamed “I’m sorry!” at him and the others attacking her—because her mother had already made her feel ugly, guilty for just living. Would he have gone through with it if the others had not called him a “spic”? Had he heard and been moved by her words, first? He had to believe that.
She removed her glasses, wiping away her tears, determined to force back her control.
Ted saw now that she was even prettier than he had seen, much prettier—almost as if the ghost of a very beautiful woman hovered, waiting to take over. He said, “Don’t let your mother hurt you any more, and if—”
Her anger stopped more words: “What the hell do you know about her? Don’t think I trust you! Now get out or I’ll—”
He said firmly, “I’m going to stay out here on the couch. I know you don’t want to be alone. You can lock your door, even keep your gun beside you.”
No, she didn’t want to be alone. “I’ll goddamn use the gun, I swear.” She toughened her voice.
He nodded, yes. But he knew she had no gun. He said, “I feel filthy for having hurt you.”
He seemed about to cry! She saw, again, the “gypsy cowboy” she had once envisioned walking with her along the moors, the river. The river where he had tried to rape her! The image shattered. But the fear of aloneness remained. “I will keep my gun at my side,” she asserted before she walked away.
Allowing him to stay only because there was no one else in the whole goddamn world, Ted knew.
In her room, Normalyn made loud sounds to convey she was locking the door, barricading it, looking for her “gun.” She knew she was no longer in danger from him, but she would never forgive him, nor allow him to believe she would. He had contributed to the isolation Enid had sealed. She leaned against the door and closed her eyes. Suddenly she was aware of a sense of turbulent darkness. She opened her eyes quickly. Tomorrow through Mayor Hughes she would discover the truth—the lies—of Enid’s letter.