“Could something bad still happen?” Coral felt a jolt of fear.
“Oh, I don’t think so. This isn’t 1960. I think he was afraid of something that would never happen now. There’s no reason for you to be afraid.”
“Well, what would have happened?”
“I don’t know. Those were strange times. Maybe he was just worried about his son, his wife. Maybe he was worried about your mother. I don’t know. But he wouldn’t have told me that just to protect himself. He had a reason. I just doubt that it makes any difference now.”
This had frightened Coral enough not to say anything to her sisters, and even now, she wasn’t sure what Althea or Ada or Ray Junior might know. She supposed they believed what she had once believed: that she was a half sister, that she had a different father, that he must have been white, or nearly white, that he certainly wasn’t Ray Senior. They all knew that Augusta had a secret, but which one of them would dare ask her to reveal it? Or did Althea know something none of the rest of them did?
How strange that Coral didn’t know.
As strange as the real story.
16
Marshall was in love. June could see it on his face, flushed. Some of that was wine, but not all of it. Not that giddy smile, that funny laugh. It surprised her. She hadn’t noticed anything special about this girl, who worked in reservations and looked like all of Marshall’s girlfriends: doe-eyed, dark, thin.
She had never seen Marshall in love. At least, not since he was a sophomore in high school and lost his heart to a senior girl who had simply wanted a good-looking date, some easy fun. It hadn’t gone well. Marshall was besotted, but she dropped him three weeks before the spring dance to date someone in her class.
Del had been alive then.
He had tried to talk with Marshall, and June had tried, but their son had sat stony-faced and red. Stayed in his room, playing Lynyrd Skynyrd and eating Butterfinger bars. The candy stuck in her mind; at sixteen, Marshall already looked like a man, but was still a boy.
After that, Marshall figured things out. Waited awhile to date, but had a steady girl all through college and ever since. At first, June had sized up each one, observed their relationship, wondered if this one would be part of their little family. She had liked one in particular: her name was Kari, and she’d been around awhile; stayed at the house for a few school breaks. Now, a decade later, June had stopped paying much attention to who was dating Marshall, to what woman he brought to what opening, or to whether or not she was the same one who had come before.
This could annoy Marshall.
“Mom, you’ve met Sheila before.”
“Oh yes, hi, Sheila. You’re a lawyer, right?”
But no, Sheila wasn’t a lawyer. Marshall would tighten his lips, June would give him a smile. Really, Marshall could play all the games he wanted, and June did not mind, but she wasn’t going to play them with him.
Del had never gotten to see this grown-up, confident Marshall.
He had waved good-bye to his son, driving off in a car packed with skis and a sleeping bag and a bike strapped on top, the extra things that Marshall had decided would fit in his dorm room after all. And they had waved until the car turned the corner, standing in the street, knowing they looked foolish. And June had been just about to say something funny, something about how sentimental they had become, when she saw the tears in Del’s eyes; when she saw how very close he was to losing control.
Had he known?
Had he sensed that he would never see Marshall again? That six weeks later, someone from housekeeping would find him slumped at his desk?
What would they have done differently if they had known?
What would she have done differently, had she known?
There were two ways to look at this question: you could size up your life and yourself, and think that you would not change a thing. After all, the tough spots and the mistakes were as much a part of who you were as anything else. June didn’t disagree. But to say that it all led to where one was struck June as a bit smug, a bit of a punt. What about that second option? To spot the change that would have made the difference. To know the choice that set the rest in motion.
She could have stay married to Walter Kohn. Or she could have divorced him but returned to Clinton Hill and led an entirely different life. She could have moved back to Vegas but resisted Del’s intentions, met someone Jewish, walked a more predictable path. Could she have admitted that she loved Eddie earlier, and gone away with him—before Marshall was born? They could have gone to Cuba.
No Marshall?
And what about Eddie’s women?
Or Cuba?
Should she have grabbed her daughter and run out in the night and returned to New Jersey with a second, more surprising child? This is the fantasy that had played in June’s mind, over and over, until she imagined that it occupied an entire territory of her brain: all the images and dreams and stories she had told herself about her daughter—a daughter who learned to laugh and crawl and talk, who took up dancing and read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and won the seventh-grade spelling bee.
But then always, what about Marshall?
Could she have found a lawyer? Could she have persuaded him to take her case? Could she have fought Del for their son? Eventually she would have won. The world came her way. How many years would it have taken?
Del was not the one who had made the mistake. It was not Del who had risked Marshall’s world. And how far is one obliged to carry the weight of a single mistake?
Because she had been wrong. She had risked Marshall’s world for the love of a man who would not have loved her for life (as Del, in his way, had) but it was the world’s cruelty, its inanity, that had amplified that mistake. It was the world that had put June and Del and Marshall and a little girl in Alabama in a hold they could not break. Or was this the real issue at the heart of everything else in her life? That she could always blame something other than herself?
Once she had been the girl smoking on the high school track; once she had let Leon Kronenberg touch her breast; once she had run away to Vegas; once she had opened a casino; once she had believed that the world could become new again, that the right people in the right place could make up any rules they wanted. And none of that was true. They had all paid the price. And, really, where was the moment that should have happened differently? Which was the choice that had set all the others in motion? And would a different choice have been the right one?
June and Del had been good partners at the El Capitan. She and Marshall were good partners there now. They made a lot of money; Del had been right about the opportunities he saw. But how long would it last? For all the millions they had spent, for all that it seemed there had always been something under construction, something being added, some area being renovated, the El Capitan was tired and small and old now. The Strip was moving south, the El Capitan was at the edge of being in the wrong part of town, closer to Circus Circus and the Stratosphere than to the empty land that would surely be the grand casinos—the carpet joints—of the next century. If there had been a niche to carve out for the El Capitan three decades ago, it was not clear that there would still be one for three more.
Already, she was fighting to hold on to their cash cow: to the entertainment that drew everyone in. She had stuck with the formula that she and Del had initiated. Four months after he died, she had signed a brother-and-sister magician act from Belarus, paying them twice what anyone else would have offered. And once again, her instinct for talent had been true. The act grew into that salary and past it, and the pair lured the gamblers, the drinkers, the players, the shoppers, the eaters, the lookers. Casinos were all about people and how many hours you could keep them in your joint. What they did there really didn’t matter, because sooner or later you always made money from them. All you had to do was get them in the door and keep them too distracted to walk back out.
And she owed her life to this challenge, she supposed. To this simple trick tha
t was not simple at all: how to keep people coming in, how to make them stay, how to keep up in a town that raced and bucked and reared and roared, ever forward, ever faster. You had better be ready for the ride, because Vegas wasn’t for the weak and it wasn’t for the cowardly; if you really wanted to win, you had better take off your hat, wave it to the crowd, and smile like an idiot. You had to make it look fun. Would any other life have sucked her up, taken her in, kept her going, held her fast? Would an easier life have kept June Stein Dibb alive?
Could she have climbed up on any other steed and survived the moment when Del walked out with a basket trailing a soft pink blanket and weighted with six pounds of her soul?
It had not been easy. She had fallen off again and again.
For weeks after Del had taken the baby, June had refused to see anyone. For years, she had stumbled through her days, death-eyed with pills, with gin, with crazed antics that had finally forced Del to sell the house and buy on the other side of the Strip. There was the time the man next door called Del to say his wife was naked on the street; the time she had terrified the newspaper boy with a pair of kitchen shears; the time when Cora, in her eighties by then and already sick with cancer, had run from house to house, from the park to the school to the wash, trying to find Marshall, who had wandered out on his own, looking for help with his mom, who was passed out on the stairs.
She didn’t remember Marshall’s first day of school. She might not have been there. She didn’t remember him learning to ride a bike, or catching his first baseball, or sounding out words in a book. Those years were gone for June. Del had done it all: run the El Capitan; taken care of Marshall; hired the sitters; managed his grandmother; held a sobbing, vomiting June; and found the center that she had finally agreed to try—where she had gone for the spring that Marshall was in the first grade, and where she had finally, finally, come back to herself.
She had come out of rehab just in time for summer.
Every day, she and Marshall would swim in the early morning and in the evening. He wouldn’t leave her those first months; didn’t want to play with friends, didn’t want friends coming over. So they canceled day camp, and they ignored the phone, and they spent those months—that hot, blistering summer—together. Seven years old, and he drank his mother’s nearness like a wilted plant sucks water. Del came home often, running in for an hour in the middle of the day, and leaving work early most nights. He made Marshall laugh by jumping in the pool in his dress pants and tie, by wearing his shoes with his swimming trunks, by banging off the low diving board and cannonballing in to swamp June when she was trying to keep her hair dry.
If there had been three years of misery, there were then three months of joy. And after, it was true, there were years and years of a good life. They had been to hell, but they had come back. You could say what you wanted about what they each did, about the choices they made—she and Del and Eddie—but in the end, her little family had been happy.
Still, when Del died, the first thing June did after calling Marshall and arranging a way for him to come home, was to go to her husband’s office and dig through the one cabinet that he kept locked from her. She didn’t want Mack or Leo or his attorney to get there first. But there was nothing about the baby. There were some papers about Hugh, which she knew would be there. There were receipts; she didn’t look at the ones for hotels in other places. There were cards, and quite a few letters from someone named Charles; she looked at one of those because she saw Eddie’s name on it, but it didn’t say anything more than that they had met, not long before Eddie left. There were records having to do with Augusta Jackson and her children. Del had stayed true to his word and taken care of Ray’s family. But there was nothing from Alabama, no record of those receipts, nothing from Eddie, no birth certificate, nothing about a school, nothing about expenses, nothing personal, nothing official.
How could that be?
There had been times, in those first terrible years, when June had doubled over with the fear that her daughter was not alive. In the middle of the night, strung out, it was possible to imagine that Del had done something insane. And June could not stop the thought from slipping in then, as she stood in Del’s office hours after he had died, the long-watched key in her hand, and all those files, all that paper, with nothing, nothing. But it was unimaginable. This Del could not have done. He was capable of dismaying acts; his life was not simple, and she knew it. But she had heard him singing to that baby; she had known who he was with Marshall. He had promised that her baby was alive and that she was safe. He had promised over and over. But never, in the great cruelness that was somehow also possible for Del, had he told her where she was.
Of course, she had written to Eddie despite Del’s ultimatum.
She had mailed the letter at the post office herself.
He had not replied.
She had written again, several times, in the years when it was still possible to send mail to Cuba. She had asked about his brother in Alabama, she had begged him to send her word. And Eddie had never replied.
He was gone now too.
Died in a fight or in an alley—the stories were not clear. One newspaper had said it was a love affair gone bad. Another mentioned a husband. A third said gambling debts. She had showed the articles to Del, and he had said he knew about it. He also said that Eddie never could get past his own history; never could take the success the world wanted so much to give him.
“I’m sorry, June.”
“I’m sorry.”
And they had held each other then, and she had cried, and he had cried, and later they had even played some of Eddie’s records: the song he had made famous at the El Capitan, and the album that must have made him very rich after. Eddie’s music played all the time in Vegas, and mostly it had lost its power to bring June and Del back to any other moment. But that night, curled up on the sofa, listening to his debut album—with its scratch on the third track that made the word cheer repeat, repeat, repeat—his voice took them back to how it had been when they were newly married, when they first heard him sing at the Town Tavern, when they used to eat dinner and share drinks in the private lounge behind the Midnight Room.
Months after Del died, after she’d signed the magicians from Minsk and after Marshall returned to college, June had traveled to Alabama on her own. She had not told anyone where she was going or why. She flew to Mobile, and rented a car, and drove to the tiny town where Eddie Knox, the singer, had been born. There was a hardware store, two bars, a record store, kept in business, she supposed, by tourists; there were three intersections but no stop signs.
She asked at the hardware store first, but the greasy-haired kid sorting nails said he didn’t know anything about Eddie Knox’s family, and she stepped away from the record store when she heard one of Eddie’s songs on the loudspeaker. That left the bars, so she chose the closest one: a dilapidated shed that looked like it might have been standing there a long time.
“I’m looking for information about Eddie Knox.”
“Yeah? You buying a drink?” The bartender wasn’t much past fifty, but he looked older, lined and sallow with ropey veins on the backs of his hands.
“I’ll buy that bottle. The scotch.”
“A whole bottle? You got a lot of questions?”
“A few. But I don’t drink. You can share it with the house.”
He nodded. Looked around the almost empty room, at the one customer seated in the corner, apparently asleep. Then he set the bottle aside and leaned on the counter, looking at her.
“I’m looking for his family,” June said.
“Yeah. Not much left. Around here anyway.”
“Who is here?”
“Well, his brother. Jacob.”
“Jacob?”
“Yeah, that’s Eddie’s brother. I think he had a sister too, but she’s long gone.”
“I thought he had four brothers?”
“Eddie? Yeah. He told that story sometimes. But Jacob’s his only bro
ther. I lived here my whole life. I knew the Knox family. The sister was a lot older. But Eddie and Jacob, they were pretty close in age. About the same as me.”
“Did you go to school with them?”
He looked at her without speaking.
Of course: he was white. They would not have gone to school together.
“So where’s Jacob? Do you know his kids?”
“Jacob’s kids? Jacob hasn’t got any kids. Not that he knows of anyway.”
“He doesn’t have kids?”
“No. He’s a drunk. Always has been. He lives in a shack pretty close to the old property. Course they lost it. They say Eddie tried to give him money, tried to buy him a house, but Jacob can’t hang on to money.”
June felt dizzy. She was going to be sick. She bolted up suddenly, left a fifty on the counter for the bottle—three times what it was worth—and got outside before she started to heave.
She made it back to the rental car, sat there stunned and dismayed and thinking about a drink for a few hours at least. But she did not take a drink. She did not go back to the bar. When it started to get dark, she turned the key in the ignition and drove all the way back to Mobile.
There wasn’t anyone she could tell about what she had learned. There wasn’t anyone to ask. Del was dead. Eddie was dead. Marshall had never known. Whomever Del had told, whoever had helped Del, was probably alive. But who was it? Leo? Mack? If they knew, and as much as they loved her, they wouldn’t let on. Not if Del had told them no. Not even now. How would she ever know? She had never felt more alone.
June flew to Vegas that night. Went straight to the El Capitan from the airport. She had always thought she would know someday. But Del had taken care of that. Why? Would he ever have told her?
Somewhere a sixteen-year-old girl did not know how long her mother had been looking for her, how much she wanted to find her, how hard she had tried. Somewhere, a sixteen-year-old girl could not know that her mother’s heart was still broken.
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