by Maria Flook
Lewis stood squared with Cam. There was no question that Cam was his progeny. Cam introduced everyone, but he didn’t offer his own name or greeting. Lewis complimented Laurence, calling him “a little Freddie Bartholomew.”
Cam squinted for a moment; Margaret saw he probably didn’t know the reference to the child actor. Cam would have known about Mickey Rooney, but then, of course, Laurence didn’t look like Mickey Rooney.
“Of course, you must be Cameron,” Lewis said after long enough.
Cam nodded. Cam’s smile was immediate, warm, but he checked it. His mouth fell even.
“Cameron Goddard,” Lewis said, “Goddard, we share that coat of arms.”
Cam looked at his father. His eyes followed the man’s face from the high forehead, along the smooth terrace of cheekbone, and down the jaw to the well-defined mouth, Cam’s mouth. Margaret saw how Cam avoided looking directly at Lewis’s eyes.
“This is an unusual moment, but probably for the best. It was probably unavoidable,” Lewis said.
Cam was trying very hard to concentrate, to understand if his father’s comment was warm or defensive.
“I thought it was time,” Cam said.
“We might have been ships passing in the night,” Lewis said.
Again, Cam showed some uncertainty about Lewis’s meaning. Margaret saw how he suffered. What a thing to say to your own son, “Ships passing in the night.” Margaret recognized a peculiar sensation, the drilling at the base of the spine as if riveted to this one moment in a previous lifetime. Some people called it déjà vu; scientists say it’s chemically induced, the brain repeats its own thought. It happens in a fraction of a second and someone senses a distant connection, a dream or vision. She felt that bitter tingle.
Laurence was sleepy and Margaret suggested they feed him something soon. Lewis carved an edge of lasagna from an aluminum foil tray of pasta. The lasagna was from the restaurant on the corner. He’d ordered the whole meal—pasta, garlic bread, salads in Styrofoam bowls—and he’d told the restaurant to deliver it to the apartment.
“I thought the child would like lasagna. Spaghetti is sometimes cold by the time it comes,” Lewis told her.
“How nice of you to think of these things,” Margaret said. Laurence ate his dinner and Margaret put him to sleep on an overstuffed chaise longue; its feather upholstery encircled the boy in lovely billows. “It just makes you want to go to sleep,” she told the boy.
When she came back to the dining table, the men were sitting down. Lewis was telling Tracy a chronology of his modeling career, pointing to different drawings and clippings on the walls. “This was my first Collier’s, and that one, that was a full page in the Times. Women wrote letters, a half ton of them, a literal half ton of letters, asking who I was. Dinner invitations, marriage proposals, threats of suicide, real estate opportunities, a half ton of them.”
Tracy was skeptical. “Did they actually weigh these letters at the post office?”
“They can tell the weight of something by figuring the volume alone. A sack of mail is a certain volume, then they figure the weight. So many sacks of mail, love letters you might say, equals so much volume from which they figure the weight. One half ton from a full page in the Times. A record, really,” Lewis said.
“Why didn’t you go into films?” Tracy said.
“Oh, you mean Hollywood? That was Fred March and Brian Donlevy.”
“Fredric March was an Arrow Collar man?” Margaret was impressed.
“Several went into films with some success. I like to think there was a distinction between the two professions.”
“Didn’t you want to be a film star?”
“I liked the modeling. Posing for Leyendecker was a dramatic test in itself. He was demanding.”
“This painter, Leyendecker, wasn’t he a lavender colleague of Norman Rockwell?” Tracy said.
“No, Rockwell came after; Leyendecker was first,” Lewis said. “Very different types. I wouldn’t say exactly lavender for Leyendecker; he deserves a better word, something more particular. His sensitivities were, let’s say, acute. He was often attracted to someone’s bee-stung lips. He had a reputation with that. But I was his subject for work, not his amusement. Critics said that Leyendecker could never paint women with any sympathy. As for Rockwell, he painted children.”
Tracy leaned on the table; he said he had an interest in this, he had come to believe the artist’s studio was much like a casting couch. Was that the case? His curiosity was piqued. “You’re saying Leyendecker was single-minded and painted the male animal expressly; he couldn’t paint women?”
Cam said, “This isn’t Twenty Questions, is it, Tracy? Can you back off?”
Lewis smiled at Tracy and lifted his shoulders as if to say he might have answered his questions or he might not. The matter was derailed. Margaret scratched at a petal of wax on the table cloth. Lewis poured wine from a double-sized bottle. She imagined the four of them drinking the whole amount; that would be several glasses each, and she knew Cam couldn’t survive it after drinking three drinks at the motel. She decided to slice the big square of lasagna so they could eat something along with drinking the wine.
“Did you leave my mother before I was born?” Cam asked Lewis.
“Let’s jump right in,” Tracy told Cam.
Lewis said, “Oh, that’s all right. I expect there’s many things to clear up. You weren’t born. Actually. She kicked me out long before that. I was surprised to hear about you. It was a shock, really.”
“I see.”
“We’re not denying the truth, though,” Lewis said.
“We’re not?” Cam said.
“No, it adds up. I mean it wasn’t impossible; it was just a matter of luck.” Lewis lifted his glass and cupped its bowl without drinking.
“What kind of luck?” Cam said.
“Luck. Just luck, the roll of the dice—you tell me? I don’t have any claim to it.”
Cam said, “This reminds me. Did you send me that five-pound chocolate Easter egg in 1960?”
“Excuse me?” Lewis said.
“I was fifteen. Someone sent me a gigantic, solid chocolate Easter egg with a pair of dice inside.”
Margaret said, “I remember that. I was jealous. Solid chocolate with two gleaming dice inside.”
“I don’t know anything about a chocolate egg,” Lewis said.
Cam said, “I thought you might have sent it to me. No one knew where it came from. You’re so into this idea of luck, I thought maybe it was you. That’s okay. Excuse me. Strike one.”
Tracy said, “Luck is an interesting concept for some. Random chance is an impressive thing, isn’t it? I like throwing the cubes. African golf. Does it fascinate you, I mean, as much as it does me? Did you roll a number and decide to invite us here, to dinner?”
Lewis shook his head. “I had time to think. Bette rang me yesterday. I knew you were coming.”
“You mean Elizabeth? Elizabeth called here? She couldn’t keep out of this?” Cam shoved himself back from the table, but he decided against standing up.
Margaret noticed that Lewis had called Elizabeth by her French pet name, one syllable, “Bette.”
“She wanted me to have a chance to escape,” Lewis said. “She’s afraid of what might happen. The two of us together like this; we could unite in an opinion. All of us here, we could have a quorum.”
Cam drank the wine and smiled. He looked at Tracy to see if Tracy understood what this meant to him. Lewis showed the same sarcastic tolerance of Elizabeth as he himself felt. But Cam’s expression changed quickly; he was reevaluating each notch of feeling as it came to him.
“So tell me what’s new with your mother?” Lewis said.
“She sold her body to science,” Cam told Lewis.
“To science?” Lewis asked.
“I tell the truth,” Cam said.
“My God. I can’t think of Bette in a laboratory. Imagine the experiments even I didn’t try,” Lewis said.
Margaret asked Lewis, “Did you ever know my mother? My mother, Sandra Rice?”
“Sandra? Sandra. The name itself rings a buzzer. The name in itself is delightful, endearing, but I don’t believe I had the pleasure.”
Margaret said, “Of course you knew her. She was Richard’s first wife, Elizabeth’s acquaintance. My mother. You must have met her.”
“I probably did know her. Rest assured I didn’t really know her.”
“You didn’t have the pleasure?” Cam said. The men chuckled in three distinct notes, blending into a rude chord.
Margaret didn’t like this.
“Sandra was the one who died in Granville Sanatorium. Now do you picture her?”
Lewis looked hard at Margaret. “Of course, my dear. I was avoiding the subject. It was terrible, you know, they snuffed her. A feather pillow to end her misery. It was ghastly. Out of pity we can do devil’s work and call it charity.”
Margaret was standing up. She couldn’t find her voice and whispered, “Pillow? What pillow? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“Mercy killing, no kidding?” Tracy said.
“Sit down, honey,” Lewis told her.
“She had cancer. This pillow idea—are you mad?” Margaret said.
“Just a metaphor, my dear,” Lewis told Margaret. “I didn’t mean she was actually asphyxiated. Your father running around with Elizabeth must have killed her off a lot faster. You know, Sandra was a poor invalid unable to do her duty. Then, here comes Elizabeth with her love calisthenics, her feats of exceptional endurance.”
“Elizabeth?” Tracy asked. “She was athletic in the sack?”
Margaret looked at Cam to see if he was going to put up with this. Cam was scraping a knife over the faded gold rim on a china saucer; it was coming away like a piece of old cellophane. He didn’t have an opinion.
Lewis apologized to Margaret once more. He told her she shouldn’t cling to morbid thoughts. He reached across the table and took her hand. He forced Margaret to meet his eyes. She tried not to return his look, even as she studied his onyx pupils; his eyes looked hard as glass, as if she couldn’t scratch them with a pin. She tugged her fingers, but he wouldn’t release her hand. He started to recite some lines of poetry—
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
Lewis seemed pleased with the little stanza, its immensity. He pulled it off. The other men were impressed. It was an eye-opener for Tracy. Verse might be a new angle for him. Margaret tried to look at Cam, but Lewis kept her; she was tethered by his gaze. She felt her spine curl and tighten, an imperceptible response, yet Lewis seemed to know it. Margaret licked her finger and touched it to the red ellipses along her nicked ankle. “Do you have Band-Aids?” she asked Lewis. Her voice was flat.
There were some first-aid supplies in the bathroom cabinet. She went in there, glad to be out of hearing. In the narrow bathroom there was a skylight window. The skylight could be propped open by pushing a lever. When Margaret pushed the lever to open the window, a good ration of soot studded with the shiny husks of flies fell down upon her. She saw the veil of insects and black granules in her hair and was repulsed; she had to grip the sink and take her breath carefully. In a few moments Tracy came in to find her. She was trying to wash the floor with a triangle of sponge. “Cam will kill me if he sees this mess.”
“What is that all over you?” Tracy said.
“It’s filth from out of nowhere! Crap from the stratosphere.”
“It’s hard going for Cam,” Tracy said.
“Cam had to come out here to see it was true,” Margaret said. Lewis was coldhearted. He displayed such a chilly amorality, or maybe he was just crazy. How long could Cam hold up in front of them? Margaret thought of a sword swallower. A sword sinks in inch by inch, past the vocal cords, into the gullet. When is it deep enough to impress an audience? Deep enough to meet one’s own test of strength? Tracy would remind her that the blade collapses; it’s a simple trick.
When they returned to the table, it was empty. They found Cam and Lewis in the bedroom. Lewis pulled a shirt from a drawer, an old-fashioned shirt without a collar. The shirt was yellowed but Margaret could see it was finely tailored, its front bib still crisp, the pleats sharp, each tuck an even line. “We’re the same size,” Lewis said, “and I have so many. I thought I could give Cameron—Cam, something as a memento of our extraordinary meeting tonight.”
Lewis’s bedroom was dark and narrow. The wardrobe looked frightening, like a locker in a mausoleum. He jerked some clothes loose from tight layers on the shelves; he struggled with overburdened drawers. He said he had often kept the shirts that he modeled; they were a bonus. It was the suits he had to return. They wouldn’t have suits altered for the models; the suits were pinned and tucked with tape, and then he had to return them. He tried to walk away in overcoats; sometimes it worked out.
Cam didn’t seem comfortable with the idea of a shirt. These shirts were thirty or forty years old! The room smelled of the pressed linens and Pima cottons; it was an ancient scorched smell coupled with a trace of liniment. There was something ugly about the transaction. Cam didn’t want to wear his father’s clothes. Lewis sensed this, and he went to the wardrobe and pulled a jacket from a wooden hanger.
“Cashmere,” he told Cam.
Everyone reached to touch the sleeve. The fabric was soft, like the short velvety hide of a hamster.
“Very nice,” Tracy said.
“Try it,” Lewis told him.
“I’d like to,” Tracy said.
The jacket looked good on Tracy, the lapels too wide, but the overall effect was pleasing. Lewis said the jacket had been made for him in London. It was a gift years ago, and look how it had held up.
“Do you want it?” Lewis asked Cam.
“No, I don’t want the jacket.”
“I understand,” Lewis said.
Again, they went back to the table. The food was cold. Margaret tried to stab a cherry tomato in her salad, but the plastic bowl wobbled each time she poked the tiny sphere. Cam kept drinking the wine, but Tracy declined a refill.
Lewis was telling Cam, yes, he had loved his mother, Elizabeth. He thought so anyway. He would have loved her, but he wasn’t the Master of Love. Love was a dictator, he told them. He explained how he suffered if he saw an attractive woman. “Just the turn of an ankle, the flare of the calf can be like a hot poker to the eye! I wasn’t responsible for utter reflex,” Lewis said. He told them he suffered for months, for years at a time.
“A leg man,” Tracy said. “What about you, Cam?”
“Tracy, shut up,” Margaret said. As the men talked, Margaret studied the photographs. It was less a gallery documenting someone’s vanity than a tribute to youth itself. All the pictures were more than thirty years old; there was nothing that documented that Lewis continued to exist after a certain decade. Margaret noticed that not all the images were professional. There were some small snapshots, society clippings, but it all stopped at the same time, somewhere in the mid-forties. Then she saw it. The little catboat with Elizabeth. Margaret got up from the table and went over to the sideboard. The candelabra flickered, increasing the yellow tones of the photographs. “This is Elizabeth on Lake Michigan, am I right?”
“That’s correct, I liked that one,” Lewis said. “I kept it as a record. You’ll notice that she’s not alone up there; there are several ladies.”
Margaret looked at the faces of th
e women in different snapshots. They were all pretty, but Elizabeth was the most appealing. Not one of them added up to Elizabeth’s perfection. Elizabeth reigned. She would love to know that, Margaret thought.
“She has her own copy of this snapshot, I saw it,” Margaret told him, but she suddenly felt she might have betrayed her stepmother to tell him that.
Then Cam shouted to her just as she, herself, saw it. Her hair caught fire, the flame lifted over her head, pulling the blond strands upward. The burning hair condensed, crackled at her ear. Cam was beside her, tugging the rope of flame and slapping her cheek until the fire was out. She screamed and Laurence woke up. They went into the kitchen, and Cam shoved her head under the tap. He rinsed her hair, separating the blackened debris from the rest. She hadn’t lost too much hair, but her cheek was sore and they couldn’t tell if she was burned or if it was red where Cam had slapped her to put the fire out.
“You don’t stand over candles with shoulder-length hair,” Tracy was scolding her.
“As if I need this.”
“You’re okay. It will grow back.”
“It stinks,” she said. She recognized the smell of charred protein from the time she watched a farmer poke a branding iron against a steer’s flank. It was the same when a farrier placed a red-hot horseshoe against a hoof to measure it; the smell is everlasting.
Her hair was frizzy, curled at the temple. “We’ll trim it,” Tracy said. They stood in the bright kitchenette, relieved to be out of the dark parlor. Cam was looking at a stack of mail on the kitchen counter. Government checks of some kind. Social Security checks, disability, and various military pension checks. There were almost twenty envelopes.
“They’ve passed on,” Lewis told Cam.
“These checks passed?” Cam asked, trying to follow what Lewis was saying.
“These folks are deceased. They didn’t have offspring, no one waiting in the wings. It’s a small existence really.”
“You mean you can cash these checks?” Cam was grinning.
“For a fee. I can have them cashed for a fee, let’s put it that way.”
“You’re telling me, you cash these dead people’s checks?”