by Jill Barnett
Evie took her hand. “She doesn’t understand, Kay.”
“She will soon enough,” Julia said without turning, her voice serrated and burned from too many cigarettes. She opened her purse and pulled out her cigarette case. “You must make her understand, Kathryn. It’s your job as her mother.”
Her job as a mother was not to swallow a handful of Seconal. Her job as a mother was to go on hour by hour and day by day. Her job as a mother was to do what was best for Laurel, at the expense of anything else, because Jimmy wasn’t there.
Julia tapped a cigarette against the back of her hand, then slid it between her red lips and lit it. Smoke drifted around them. “My son was a star.” She looked at Kathryn, at Evie. “You saw the reporters there.” Julia took short drags off her cigarette. “Tomorrow, they’ll play his songs on the radio.”
Kathryn wondered if she would constantly search the radio for his songs. She began to silently cry.
“Don’t, Kathryn.” Julia held up her hand. “Don’t.”
Evie handed her a tissue. “She can cry if she wants to.”
Julia crushed her cigarette in the ashtray. “Laurel? Come see Grandmama.” She patted the seat next to her, but Laurel climbed in her lap instead. Julia began to hum the same song, holding her granddaughter tightly, and soon tears streamed down her slack and chalkish powdered cheeks.
Six long hours later, it was Kathryn who hung on tightly to Laurel as she ran through the waiting reporters at the front doors of their apartment building.
“Kay, I’m sorry,” Evie said. “We should have hired some security.” She blocked the closing elevator doors as a couple of persistent newsmen shouted questions at them.
Thankfully, no one was on the tenth floor while Kathryn waited for Evie to unlock the apartment door. “Look, Evie. Laurel’s sound asleep. I want to be a child, oblivious to that chaos downstairs. I want to wake up and have it be a bad dream.”
Evie quietly closed the door behind them. “Go on. Put her to bed.”
A few minutes later Kathryn walked into the living room.
Evie stood in the corner over a bar cart with an ice bucket and crystal bottles of decanted liquor. “I’m getting us drinks. Strong drinks. God knows I need one.” She studied Kathryn for a second. “What am I saying? I should probably just give you a straw and the whole bottle.”
Kathryn unpinned her hat and tossed it on the coffee table. “Today was bad.”
“Your mother-in-law didn’t make it any easier. Look at me, Kay.” Evie patted her cheeks. “Am I pale? Do you think I have any blood left since leaving Julia’s, or did she suck it all out of me?”
“You’re awful.”
“No, she’s awful. I’m truthful.”
Kathryn unbuttoned her suit jacket, sank into the sofa, and let her head fall back on the pillows. Above her was the hole in the acoustical ceiling left over from a swag lamp. One of those things they’d meant to fix. The iron poker near the wood box was bent from when the movers ran over it. The mirror over the fireplace hung a little crooked. Everything was the same, yet nothing would ever be the same again.
“You’re a sweetheart for putting up with that woman. She’s so critical.” Evie dropped ice cubes into a couple of highball glasses. “What do you want to drink?”
“Anything.”
“I don’t know where you get your patience. Pop used to check his watch every two seconds if anyone kept him waiting, and Mother was just like I am: intolerant of anyone who disagrees with us. You are the saint of the family, Kay.”
“No, I’m no saint. I just loved her son.”
Evie paused, ice tongs in her hand. “It broke my heart when Laurel started to sing.”
“My first urge was to put my hand over her mouth.”
“I can’t think of anyone better to sing a Jimmy Peyton song than his daughter. The only reason you didn’t know what to do was because Julia makes everything so uncomfortable.”
“It’s not Julia. I don’t understand the world anymore. It seems so wrong, Evie, so unfair. I want to shout and shake my fist at God and tell him he made a huge mistake. Jimmy had so much left to give the world. He was going to make it big. I knew it. You saw it.”
“Everyone saw it, Kay.”
“We had such big dreams. The sheer waste of his life makes me want to scream.”
“You can holler the walls down if you want. It is unfair. Do whatever you have to do to get through this horrible thing.”
It was a horrible thing. Everything was changing and out of her control. Her skin hurt; it felt too small for her body, like the changes to her were happening in a matter of days. She glanced at the crooked mirror above the fireplace to see the ravages of sudden widowhood right there on her face.
Evie clattered through the bottles on the cart. “Where are those silver things that go on the bottle necks to tell you which liquor is which?”
“Laurel thought they were necklaces. She put them on her storybook dolls.” Kathryn dropped her hands away from her strained face. “It drove Jimmy nuts, but he didn’t have the heart to take them away from her.”
Evie held up two of the bottles. “I wonder which one is the scotch.”
“The brown one.”
“Funny.” Her sister sniffed one of the bottles. “Bourbon.”
“I’ll take bourbon and Coke.”
Evie dumped bourbon into the glass and splashed a small bit of Coke over it.
“One night Laurel made me tell her what each necklace said. She named her dolls Bourbon, Scotch, Rum, Gin, and Vodka. Jimmy and I laughed about it.” Strange how his laughter was still fresh in Kathryn’s mind, and for just the briefest of moments, she didn’t feel locked in some dark, parallel dimension made for those left behind.
“Here.” Evie handed her a drink and sat down, folding her legs under her. They didn’t speak.
Her years with Jimmy filed through Kathryn’s mind like frames in a documentary. His laughter, his fears, his tears of excitement when he first saw their daughter in her arms, squalling and hungry. She could hear him singing the songs he had written to her, and for her. She heard the first thing he ever said to her—and the last: Just one more night on the road, babe. I’ll be home tomorrow.
Her sister set her glass down. “Lord, that tastes good. Maybe a few drinks will wash away the bitterness of Julia’s tongue.”
“Do you think what she said was true?”
“I doubt it,” Evie answered. “But which tidbit of your mother-in-law’s viperlike wisdom are we talking about?”
“That society treats women without men as nonentities.”
“Oh.” Evie laughed bitterly. “The idea that widows should be strong because it makes people uncomfortable to see someone’s grief.”
“Well, she is a widow. She should know.”
“She’s a black widow. They eat their mates. She deals with her grief by denying yours. She also said single, independent women have their life preferences questioned.” Evie raised her chin and mimicked Julia’s husky voice: “You are a divorcée, Evie dear, and marrying a divorced woman is like going to the track and betting all your money on a lame horse. Divorcees are only fair game for men who want to get them into the bedroom but would never consider marrying them.’”
“You shouldn’t let her get to you.”
“You’ve had more practice dealing with her than I have, Kay.”
“I might be getting a lot more practice.” Kathryn rested her glass on her knee and stared into it. “Julia wants me to give up this place and move in with her.”
Evie turned sideways on the couch, facing her. “You cannot live in the same house with that judgmental woman who will suck every bit of life from you. Half the time, I want to muzzle her. Even now, when I should feel terribly sorry for her, she can say something that makes me just want to pop her.”
“Underneath, Julia is as fragile as I feel. You saw her in the car. She needs Laurel, and with Mom and Pop gone, Laurel needs to know her only grandparent.”<
br />
“The woman is an emotional vacuum.”
“She’s never that way with Laurel. It’s sad, really, the way she was talking today about her son the star, as if all she had left of him would be those few minutes when some radio station played one of his songs. I have Laurel. Maybe Jimmy’s mother should, too.”
“You’re Jimmy’s wife. She should treat you better.”
“He used to say it wasn’t me. She couldn’t let go of him. I look at Laurel and I’m so scared about what kind of parent I’ll be. What if I cling to her? How do I do this alone? How do I know what’s right and wrong, and how do I protect her?”
“The same way you did when Jimmy was alive. You can’t completely protect her from everything.”
“Laurel doesn’t have Jimmy anymore, but if we move in with Julia, at least she would have his mother. This apartment isn’t the same. All the colors look so faded. Nothing is sharp or clear. It feels empty. I don’t know if I can stay.”
“You can stay with me, Kay. It’s wonderful on Catalina. The island is small and safe. The house is small, too, but we all can fit. There’s room in back to build a small studio for your kiln and wheel.”
“You said you were going to plant a garden there.”
“Who needs a garden? My faculty meetings are always in the mornings. I could watch Laurel in the afternoons and evenings while you work. Please. Think about it.”
“I love you for offering, but it would be a disaster. Besides the fact that you just bought the place, you have one bathroom. You know we’d be on top of each other.”
Evie took her hand. “I wish you would.”
“I know you do.” Kathryn looked around. “Maybe I’m being silly and I should stay here.”
“Oh, hell, Kay, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what to do. I worry about you both living with that woman.” The doorbell rang.
“Ignore it. They’ll go away.” Kathryn took a drink. The bell kept ringing and ringing.
Evie shifted. “I can’t stand it. I’ll get it.”
“No. No.” Kathryn stood. “I’ll do it.” When she opened the front door, a flashbulb went off and everything was suddenly white.
“Star magazine, here. We’d like an interview, now that you’re Jimmy Peyton’s widow.”
“Leave her alone!” Evie was suddenly standing behind her, a hand on Kathryn’s shoulder. “Go away!” Evie reached around her and slammed the door, swearing.
Kathryn buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Mama?” Laurel was standing in the dark recesses of the hallway, a stuffed duck Jimmy had given her tucked under one arm.
Kathryn rushed to pick her up. “Are you okay, angel?”
Laurel nodded, hugging the duck, but she kept staring curiously at the front door.
“That kind of thing wouldn’t happen at Julia’s.” Kathryn looked pointedly at her sister. “She has the front gates and hired help.”
Evie nodded.
First and foremost, Kathryn knew she had to protect her daughter. Today people had said the stupidest things: It’ll get better with time. God needed Jimmy more. You’re young, dear, you’ll marry again. She could only imagine how Laurel might interpret any one of those comments. And how long would it be before the newspaper people finally left them alone?
“Mama?” Laurel framed Kathryn’s cheeks with her small hands and brought her face very close, the way she did whenever she wanted someone’s sole attention. “Those people at the door want to view you because you’re Daddy’s window?”
The words took a moment to register. Kathryn turned to Evie. “I’m a window.”
Her sister looked as if she were trying not to laugh.
“I’m a window,” Kathryn repeated—it was all so ludicrous—then laughter poured out of her, uncontrolled, like water running over. She couldn’t stop. It was just laughter, she told herself a silly emotion, really, and panic edged it—a sound that was closer to shattering glass—and she knew then her laughter was anything but natural.
3
Orange County, California
On that long stretch of land between LA and San Diego, towns grew quickly and sprawled all over one another. Amusement parks with gravity rooms and wild toad rides replaced boysenberry fields and orange groves where people could pick all the fruit they wanted for a fifty-cent piece. Tracts of shake-shingled homes with attached garages sold out before the houses were even built, and traffic signals sprang up on street corners suddenly too busy for stop signs.
Public transportation? It was an afterthought. Cars were necessary in Southern California, and oil was big business. Hammer-shaped oil pumps lined the coast highway all along Huntington Beach, where tar spotted long stretches of sand and stuck like gum to broken seashells, litter, and the murky green kelp that washed ashore. The locals called it Tin Can Beach—it looked like a dump, so everyone just used it as one.
If tar was the automobile driver’s grim trade-off for pumping oil up from the ground, so were the skeletal black oil towers on Signal Hill and the churning refineries off Sepulveda Boulevard, with their tall, cigar-shaped towers that spit white smoke and all those acrid smells into the sweet California air. A popular joke regularly ran through the LA nightclubs that Southern Californians paid the prices for their automobiles in dollars and cents.
But the truth was, people spent money on cars for mobility and freedom, so they could be in control of where they went and when. They bought homes because they liked to think they owned a piece of a place where the sun shined most of the time and movie stars lived large and died tragically.
The coastal resort town of Newport Beach was all prime property. The ocean was clean, the sand fine as sugar, and there was no litter anywhere. Pristine white yachts pulled into private docks along the isles, where sprawling California-style homes carried addresses as distinctive as those in Beverly Hills. Whenever the Santa Ana winds blew in, the scent from the eucalyptus trees above Highway 1 cleared the sinuses better than Bano-Rub, a petroleum-jelly-and-camphor mixture that helped launch Banning Oil into the petroleum by-products industry and gave Victor Gaylord Banning enough money to buy up a chunk of Newport’s exclusive Lido Isle with hardly a dent in his bank accounts.
It was a Thursday afternoon, maybe three o’clock, and Victor was home in the middle of the day, facing a wall of windows—all that stood between him and the civilized edges of the wide blue Pacific. He stared at his reflection in the glass, seeing only the physiognomy of the one person he vowed he would never become. His father had been weak, unable to succeed in anything except failure.
Victor grew up in a house of discontent, with only his sister, Aletta, as champion against a mother whose elusive approval he could never capture, because she saw in Victor only his father standing there in miniature, a constant reminder of her bad choices. It was Aletta who paid the biggest price for their father’s failures. She died a useless death when there was no money to save her, and Victor was abandoned by the one person he depended upon.
For his mother, Aletta’s death was complete devastation. She couldn’t bear to look at the only child left, so she would lock him in the closet for hours. Eventually she saw suicide as the only release from her agony. She didn’t want to live in a world with only her weak husband and his look-alike son, who, try as he might, would never be a substitute for the girl child she truly loved. To Victor’s complete dismay, he cried for days after his mother killed herself, unable to control his emotions. The Banning legacy was jagged and sharp and part of him, no matter how he tried to prove otherwise.
Today, his cheeks and eyes were proof that sleep escaped him. He hadn’t shaved since yesterday, when he went to identify the bodies of his son and daughter-in-law, filed in long stainless steel cabinets at the LA morgue. Until a few days ago, he hadn’t seen or spoken to his son, Rudy, in almost ten years. His only source about anything in Rudy’s life had been Rachel. What Victor was feeling at that very moment—had he allowed it inside—
would have brought him to his knees. Grief was crippling. Allowed in, it made the strong weak.
At the sound of his Town Car pulling in, he moved to a narrow window where he could see the driveway through the waxy leaves of a fat camellia bush. Next to his Lincoln the boys stood side by side, wearing similar striped T-shirts and stiff new jeans cuffed up. Although four years apart, they looked like Bannings: blond hair, square jaws, and wide mouths, all inherited from his own grandfather. Their skin was pale, their expressions thinly serious, and they had their mother’s thick, dark eyebrows. Cale, the younger, took hold of Jud’s hand. They looked like bookends that didn’t quite match.
Victor saw only their vulnerability, as they clung to each other like scared little girls. They would never be able to stand on their own. Rachel had ruined them. He’d seen enough and walked away, wondering exactly what he would have to do to turn them from pussy little boys into the men they needed to be to make it in his world.
Soon he heard the hushed voices of the help, and the hurried steps in the entry hall of children he had never spoken to. His driver came into the room, his chauffeur’s cap in his hands. “Your grandsons are here.” Harlan wasn’t a huge man, but he was stronger than an ox and looked a little like one. He was an ex-middleweight boxer with a flat, broken nose and porcelain front teeth Victor had paid for. “Do you want me to take the boys upstairs?”
“No. I’ll be out in a minute. They didn’t give you any trouble?”
Harlan shook his head. “They sat in the backseat whispering about riding in the limousine. Thought it was pretty special.”
“Is the MG back from the paint shop?” Victor asked.
“Yes sir.”
“Check the paint job on the running boards and the hood.”
“I checked it this morning.”
“Good.” His son had loved the MG, but that had been back in the days before Rudy threw the car keys at him and walked away from everything Banning. “Let the boys wait in the entry for now,” Victor said evenly. “I’ll be out soon.”
Harlan left, and Victor poured a scotch, wanting to be somewhere else—a sweeter time—the few in his life he could count on one hand. Under his feet, the wood floor creaked, and he looked down at the hairpin edges of a trapdoor to the fallout shelter, something his architect insisted he needed. But it was a useless hole in the floor that did nothing to protect him from the real fallout of his life: his son had died hating him. A scotch didn’t help. Mistakes wouldn’t dissolve in alcohol—although Rudy had certainly tried. So Victor remained there, his feet on the cracks of the trapdoor, a useless drink in his hand, facing the largest ocean in the world and the worst of his sins.