Roy had a summer cold. Muddy had a cold. Frank Reilly had a cold. Kay, he didn’t want to think about Kay. He had to work something out there. Not a good situation. Charlie Peeko came up on deck with the sandwiches and the Tabs. What were they waiting for? Engine trouble, but soon they’d be pushing off. Fine, said Roy. And picked up a sandwich and peeled back the protein bread. What is this? He plucked a little green caper from the mush. Roy popped it in his mouth, then spit it out. Disgusting! You trying to cover something up?
A change of pace, that’s all.
No changes necessary, Captain. We can forget about changes.
Roy was bored. He had to admit it, and if no one else was coming on this small adventure, it hardly seemed worth doing. You think we should call Kay?
Of course we should call Kay, said Merrill. She raised a small pale hand to shade her eyes. Do I think she’ll want to come sit in this inferno? No, I do not. Merrill frowned at Roy like he’d personally delivered the heat and humidity.
I suppose you’re right. Anyone else?
And that child should be with her mother.
What are you talking about? Kay’s at the hospital day and night.
I mean the other child, Lou-Lou. Why doesn’t Kay just bring her in? I’ll keep her with me and Susie. No trouble.
Make the offer.
You think I haven’t? Merrill leaned back into the white leather, then plucked her forearms up off the seat cushion as if burned. Ouch!
Esther kept her eyes closed. Roy studied her face. His peacemaker. Merrill was a genius on everyone else’s life. Gorgeous, though, you had to give her that.
Esther made a big sleepy yawn.
Ship-to-shore. Great idea. Roy went up to the bridge and started cranking the ship-to-shore radio. Why not just use the phone? said Charlie Peeko. I haven’t even turned on the engines yet.
Mind your own business. Yes! Roy Cohn here, Miss Campanella. Yes. How are you? Get me Will Clemens, would you? I appreciate that. I’m sure that’s important, yes. But it is also important that I speak to him. Bad connection, yes. I’m calling from aboard a ship, the Titanic. No, that’s a joke. Charlie Peeko rolled his eyes. Roy waved him off: Don’t you have a rudder to break somewhere? Charlie ducked under the doorway, six foot four, too tall for everything. Too dark too, that hair looked fake. Yes! Warden Flagmeyer. Roy Cohn here. Fine, sir. Yes sir, and you? Yes, glad to hear it. On shipboard, sir, that’s correct. Yes. I will. Thank you.
The signal faded in and out. How hard could it be to call upstate from the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin? Roy watched Charlie Peeko roll back the tarp on the Boston Whaler. It was the rescue boat that Roy used mostly for waterskiing. Now Charlie was mucking with that engine too. Look at that big dope, the radio waves were probably getting stuck in his thick head. Hello? Hello? Will! Yes, yes, hello. I know. It’s just business. It’ll work. Don’t be angry. You’ll see. What? I can’t hear you. Yes! She’s here in town today. Or last night, yes, I saw her. We said a little prayer together at St. Patrick’s. Ha-ha. You think that’s funny? I think something good happened there. You’ll see. Kay? Kay’s okay. No, she’s not angry. Not really. Just a little. You know what? I’ve got Merrill Mandel on board, looking like a pinup, she’s strutting around, just your regular luncheon distraction. She’s asking for you! That’s why I called. They’re wearing onionskin stationery! Can you hear me? Hello? Hello? Hello? Charlie Peeko smacked his head against the propeller of the outboard. He stood holding his face in his hands. Roy reconnected the handset to the radio. Obviously he wouldn’t get a clear connection today. He had barely heard Will. But it was really a pump-up call, not informational. He could only hope, maybe, that that had already happened. Roy would have to track down Sammy Finlandor and find out.
The next day, Esther Kinder smoothed down the last plaid quilted dirndl on a model, then finally, after nearly forty-five minutes of excruciating discipline, she allowed herself to go to the curtain. The violins were playing “Ode to Joy.” Sixteen first-rate students, stars of their Juilliard class, they were perfect. They sounded like angels out there on her special day, and even better, it sounded like a crowd.
Where had Roy found this velvet? It smelled like cheese. Esther felt her stomach turn as she pried through the heavy drapes. Nerves, nerves, you just gotta be strong. So there’s never been a fashion show at the Stork Club, so this was the first. And what an event! She could hear it, she could feel it, she could smell it. Not just the Roquefort of the drapes, she could smell the oysters and the champagne. She knew it was all happening. She felt these things in her blood. One eye, just one eye to the break in the drape, that’s all she’d allow herself, then she’d give the signal to the maestro for Swan Lake, and her girls, her models, each a bona fide ballerina, would start the fashion extravaganza. Roy’s idea: fall-collection casual wear on toe shoes, Swan Lake, only the happy parts, oysters (found in bodies of water, though not necessarily lakes per se), and the Stork Club, also a bird, much like the swan in that it’s mostly decorative. Everything’s a theme. You have to tie things together, make a package, and it’s irresistible, who can refuse to buy. Will had taught Roy all about that. And he was right. About this he was right.
Esther let her artist’s eye take the peek. Oh my God, a full house, but who’s that in the front row? Not the movie stars. Not Audrey Hepburn, who Roy had promised, but the Carlitto brothers! There: Lennie, Lou, and Micky, the less successful Carlittos at that. And if their square fat selves weren’t enough, all spread out, legs akimbo, there was Muddy, wearing a dress calculated to make anything Esther could come up with look like a barbecue. This was her debut? Gangsters and a chop to the jugular delivered fresh by fate’s messenger, Dora Cohn. What would ever change? Why had she been so stupid.
Esther was hyperventilating, she was going to faint. She let go of the drape and shimmied down to the rigged runway floor. She sat, fists to her eyes, until one of her ballerinas, en pointe, clomped over to her. The show must go on? the girl asked. A brain the size of a caper, Esther thought. What show? You see who’s out there? The girl stuck her perfect oval face through the crack in the velvet. Umm, she said, cute. Esther blinked up. Cute?
Yeah, I’ll take the one in the middle, the bald guy with the big jewels.
That’s Roy!
Esther jumped up, grabbing the girl by her tiny arm. Oh no, that’s Lennie. Roy’s not bald. All right. All right! She waved to the tallest Juilliard student. “Ode to Joy” soared to a swift conclusion. The first notes of the Swan Lake overture sounded, a dozen ballerinas in black watch banged into position, and when the curtain rose, they bounced to the tips of their toes and began running in place, passing footballs back and forth—Roy’s idea, football: synonymous with fall. But they were klutzes, these ballerinas. The balls slipped through their hands like greased hot dogs and they had to stop their pas de bourrés and squat to pick them up. There was a sickening stillness out there beneath the soaring violins. And then, all at once, a pounding applause. Cameras began snapping. The red-hot bulbs rolled under the seats. The audience clapped in time to the music. The buyers from Saks and Bonwit’s and Bendel’s and Best, Lord & Taylor, and Bergdorf Goodman were writing things down. Scratching out orders on the little swan-shaped pads that Roy’s receptionist, Alice, had carved with an X-Acto knife. Roy’s idea. He was an artist. She had to admit it. The ballerinas finally stopped dropping the footballs and found the beat. Success, success, success. She could feel it, she could see it, she could smell it.
June 8
So complex was Gert Maguire’s daily routine that by eleven o’clock some mornings she crept into her private sewing room and pulled the quilt on the daybed up over her head to block out the buzz of the neighborhood mowers, the ringing telephone, and the vacuum grinding through room after room. Mrs. Mackey came Tuesdays and Thursdays to scour the place, while Gert repaired school clothes. Her boys burst out of their apparel on a regular basis. She mended on the machine she’d once used to sew couturier knockoffs. She co
uld do that—walk into Dior and go home with the dress she liked best in her head. But after the third baby, she lost interest in the engineering secret behind a wasp waist. Now she was into boats, sort of. What she really wanted to do was build houses. She thought about joists and beams and sprung floors. She liked wood. She’d look into that as soon as Nathaniel went to college.
And she was a chef. She made, served, or packed ten separate, complete meals every morning before seven-thirty. All of her sons were athletes, requiring vast proportions and exact ratios of protein to carbohydrate. They had deep preferences on the scales of hot to cold and soft to crunchy. Red was less demanding, but ever since he’d taken up night running, he wanted pancakes. And because his was a sensitive palate, a mix was out of the question. After she fed her boys, she drove them, sometimes before sunrise, to their various sporting commitments. Then she got Red squared away and out the door. Lou-Lou’s was the last lunch to make, the last bus stop to drive to.
On this morning Lou-Lou wandered into the kitchen; her mother called it the grotto because of its fake brick walls. For almost half an hour, from 7:30 to 7:55 every morning, Lou-Lou had Gert all to herself. Gert was leaning over the dishwasher, loading in buttery plates. Lou-Lou often needed a little overhaul in her appearance, a dish sponge to her uniform, a spritz of water to calm down her hair, but today Gert was distracted.
We’ve got to get a move on, she said. Gert was all dressed up with white lace stockings. Lou-Lou knew from her mother that these were articles of clothing grown women wore at their peril. Gert’s legs were thicker than Lou-Lou’s mother’s, and bigger certainly than Mrs. Westerfield’s. But Lou-Lou thought Gert looked nice, like a big Heidi, and she said so.
You look nice too, carrot. Gert often called Lou-Lou the name of a vegetable when she was feeling affectionate. But now Gert had her attention elsewhere, she couldn’t see her. Lou-Lou had chalk on her uniform, chocolate on her sleeve, her hair hadn’t been combed in two days.
You ready? said Gert.
It was only 7:35. Lou-Lou just stared. What had she done? Chop-chop, soldier. She was standing by the door. Gert was mistaking Lou-Lou for one of her boys. In the driveway, Lou-Lou slid into the passenger seat of the Volkswagen bug, tucked her lunch into her book bag. She was hungry. Gert hadn’t mentioned breakfast, but she never did, for Lou-Lou the cereals were there for the taking. Lou-Lou looked at Gert’s profile. Tight curls pressed down on Gert’s head like springs on the whirlicopter ejectors her boys rigged to launch gravel.
Lou-Lou was the only child who traveled from this bus stop to Holy Cross. It was right on the town border, the last stop in the afternoon, the first in the morning. Smitty Sutphin, the bus driver, always had a joke for her, the same joke, said she was the early bird and that she should cut back on the worms. Sleep in there once in a while, kid. Smitty would choke himself laughing so hard, then he’d catch Lou-Lou’s eye, like he was asking her a question: Eh? Eh? When Lou-Lou nodded, just out of politeness, he could release himself, laugh all over again, and repeat the punch line a few more times: Good worm-hunting season, spring’ll do it to you, gotta cut back. But then the challenges of the road would catch his attention, always some new asshole out there reinventing the rules, and he’d forget about Lou-Lou for a while.
Gert dropped her off. Sorry not to sit today, chum. After Lou-Lou was out of the car, Gert leaned over and rolled down the window so Lou-Lou could see her bright eyes. Bye-bye. Lou-Lou watched the VW take the corner like a roadster in a race, then she squatted down on the curb. The cement was cool on her legs, the lawn still dewy. The road smelled like oranges and clam chowder. A small gray spider flattened itself into the crack in the curb. It wasn’t even eight o’clock. Smitty wouldn’t be here to get her for a while, so Lou-Lou unlatched her book bag. Her folded untouched homework was near the top, she reached deeper to her lunch now on the bottom. She started working backward from dessert. When she was done with the ham sandwich, Smitty still wasn’t anywhere close. Lou-Lou brushed the crumbs off her navy blue jumper, left the lunch bag crumpled on the curb, she didn’t need it. She took one last look for Smitty, then gave up, she started to walk. She knew a shortcut. She’d be home in no time.
The whole town was on Gert’s schedule, busy, inside somewhere. Barely a car had passed and she’d been walking a while, twenty minutes or so. She was on Conover Lane, a little curving road of brand-new houses, split-levels and ranches, some with naked lawns, only a few blades of grass here and there. The rain last night left skinny rivers between the anthills. Lou-Lou stopped to watch fat black ants wriggle up the Ruddys’ front walk. The Ruddys had a boat in their slip bigger than their house. And across the water, about five houses down, she could see her own house, and the porch where her mother would be sitting if she was home. Ruddy was the one name she knew on Conover Lane, Gert had told her it was a house of woe.
Later she found out what Gert meant from Gert’s oldest loudmouth son, Andrew. The Ruddys’ only child, Stella, a girl Lou-Lou’s own age, had been born with a hole in her heart. She couldn’t go to school and she couldn’t go out to play because the exertion would kill her right away. Lou-Lou stood in front of the Ruddy house, where black ants congregated and scattered. She looked to the closed windows with white blinds swiveled tight, even on this hot gray day. Lou-Lou stared for a while until she figured out where Stella might be, based on her experience in her own house, and in Gert’s. Lou-Lou gave that window her full attention. She put her hands on her chest, trying to feel if perhaps her own heart had a hole in it and that was why she had this feeling about Stella. Lou-Lou stared and stared. Finally she thought she saw a tiny crack in the blinds. Stella was seeing her, communicating, and in that precise second, Lou-Lou felt a pounding ache in her chest. For a moment she thought she would die instantly, then the sun broke through the clouds, the whole street lit up: the Ruddys’ house, the anthills, the wet dirt, even her own house far away, everything was swamped with light, then the light closed, disappeared, and the pain was gone.
Lou-Lou saw a vision of Stella frolicking in the yard. She had transparent hair with light streaking out like Christmas-tree tinsel. She was throwing legless Barbies at the ants to bomb them. And Lou-Lou knew she had healed Stella, was certain of it, by concentrating all of her attention, just as Mrs. Westerfield said, attention and intention, she had done it. Lou-Lou was a saint, what a discovery. At last she was good at something.
After a decent interval, Lou-Lou moved on. She had to break the news to Gert first. She knew Gert would be pleased, and besides, Lou-Lou wouldn’t have to go to school anymore, which would ease up Gert’s schedule. It started to rain a little. Lou-Lou closed her eyes, bowed her head, and said a special prayer turning the rain into holy water that would fix up the bad grass on Conover Lane.
Lou-Lou wanted to get home now. She took the shortcut through McKim’s farm, through the orchard. Mr. McKim was in his kitchen. Lou-Lou could see him through the wide old-fashioned window. His house was the oldest in the neighborhood. Conover Lane had been built on his farmland. He hated children and sometimes chased them with a squirrel gun. She knew this from Andrew also. He was bitter, Andrew said, because Mrs. McKim had died at a young and beautiful age. Lou-Lou crept through the orchard from tree trunk to tree trunk, hiding behind each skinny tree. On such a glum day as this, her dark uniform should help her melt right in, but she knew her body flopped out on either side, and if Mr. McKim saw her, she’d be a Christian martyr before anyone knew she was a saint.
Lou-Lou was halfway through the orchard when the back door opened and Mr. McKim stepped out onto the porch. He unzipped his fly and pulled a dark ribbon out and started to pee. Lou-Lou quit hiding and took off at a dead run. Hey! Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Get back here, you little monster. I see you. I know who you are. Lou-Lou was wheezing when she burst through the hedge that cut up her arms and face. She was out of bounds here, off his property, but maybe he’d hunt her down anyway with his gun. Cars whirled by on the big road. Bu
t she ran across, horns screeching at her, tires skidding. She ran into her own street, breathless and hurt.
Lou-Lou dragged her book bag down the street to Gert’s driveway. She tried the garage door first, then all the rest. The house was completely locked up. This was unusual in Lou-Lou’s experience, but then she’d never been home from school unannounced before. Lou-Lou walked the whole way around the house again. All the lights were out and she didn’t see any movement. A dark red pickup rumbled down the lane. A farm truck! Lou-Lou dove into Gert’s ornamental holly. The truck slowed down, almost to a halt. She couldn’t see the driver from the ground. She’d make a break for her own house. Hurling herself out of the holly, she scrambled across the lawns, through the pine trees, to the back porch where her mother always sat.
Just like Gert’s house, the door was locked. All the windows looked sealed. Standing now in the driveway, she could hear the low rev of the engine coming closer, and then the gravel began to pop. She spotted a seam of air beneath one of the garage doors. Lou-Lou yanked on the pull but couldn’t budge it. She lay down on the cement apron and pushed up as hard as she could. It gave about a foot and she rolled under just as the truck pulled around the back. She hid behind the lawn mower and the red truck ground to a stop. Someone slammed a hollow-sounding door. She saw muddy boots standing at the garage door; the wearer pulled on the handle. Shit, he said. And walked away. She heard two loud thumps and then the engine exploding like bullets. A plume of smoke burst out the back end and sifted into the garage, a streaky blue poison, with the smell of an Easter egg boiled overtime. The truck rumbled away. Lou-Lou stood on the seat of the lawn mower to see out the high oblong windows. Two new rubber garbage pails lay tipped over in the white gravel.
It was hot in the garage, but not as hot as outside. Lou-Lou went into the Deepfreeze and pulled out a couple of Fudgsicles. She applied one medicinally to the scratch on her cheek from Mr. McKim’s bushes. She dragged her book bag over to the filing cabinets, where she could get a purchase on the bottom drawers and get up to the old billiard table stored in the rafters. The legs hung down below. Lou-Lou wriggled onto the knobbed table and squeezed down into the darkest corner. She curled up there, her legs tucked in. She pulled her uniform tight around the backs of her thighs. She sucked as slowly as possible on the Fudgsicles. This would be her shrine. She would have many visions here. She’d have to stay a while. When the pops were done, she twisted the wrappers around the sticks like flowers, then rubbed her cheek into the dusty green baize and fell asleep.
Wavemaker II Page 6