The Delectable Mountains

by Michael Malone

  With that hope, she led me by the elbow out the door of the Laundromat. Sightless, my nose nestled in soft sheets, I followed her to the Red Bus.

  Joely drove the old red schoolbus to the airport and returned with Leila. She stood, that hot, sluggish Saturday morning, on the top step of the porch, stood quietly, laden with presents, with recipes from Grandmother Strovokov, with appropriate clothes from Mrs. Stark, with appropriate toys for Maisie and Davy, who tugged at her appropriate dark brown suit and pulled her into the house.

  I walked down to help Joely with the luggage. “How is she?” I asked him.

  “She seems okay. I gather it was pretty rough. The mother sounds catatonic; I doubt she’s been much help. And Bruno seems to be laying a heavy trip on Leila. Jerk. She’s already blamed herself enough as it is. You know, she didn’t even know Bruno had written Mittie he was pulling the money out; I guess he was too scared to tell her, finally admit he’d failed—he’d see it that way. I would have told her if I’d thought he was keeping it from her.” He handed me her suitcase. “Poor kid.”

  “What’s she going to do?”

  “All she said was she wasn’t going to let Stark close Mittie’s place down. At least not this summer. She said she had a plan.”

  Part of Leila’s plan was another present, one that led her mother to conclude that she was so far from grasping the principle of watching your step as to be liable to all sorts of conjectures. The present arrived that afternoon; it was a gift for Nathan Wolfstein, and the gift was Calhoun Grange. It took me a second to recall that Grange was the cowboy star whom Wolfstein had once identified from the magazines as his unknown son. Leila had taken home a son that had been lost. Now she had brought home a son that had been found.

  “I had a friend who worked with him in L.A. That’s how I found him. And so here he is, Nate.”

  The new father was standing by the kitchen table and looking as the mornings always left him—his high thin sheath of bathrobe pulled almost twice around, his hair lank wisps, his feet long and yellow, the toenails curved in. He sat down and frowned at his hand shaking ashes loose from his cigarette.

  Grange stepped into the room like the sun coming up. He looked down at Wolfstein and grinned. Behind all his fringe of eyelashes and leather, I sought out Wolfsteinian similitudes, that irrefutable idiosyncracy, the shared strawberry mark on the left shoulder. I found none. They shared angularity; that was all. For the rest, Grange had a clean, bright glisten; Wolfstein was gray, opaque. Wolfstein was reserved, distant, unapproachable. Grange came straight at you with an amble, then hosed you down in affability while you were still trying to figure out the secret of his shuffle. He talked the way they taught him to talk in Over to Amarillo, and he seemed in general to have lost, if he had ever owned, any distinction between private and public “Grangedom.” Knowing that, you didn’t want to like him, but all of a sudden you did anyhow, the way you may not want to like John Philip Sousa, but your heart thumps when you stand close to a live band.

  “Well, hi, Mr. Wolfstein. Leila tells me you and me should of met,” he beamed.

  Wolfstein, however, was waterproofed against Calhoun’s hose of charm. He had faded since Leila left, browned out, as though a source of current had been cut in two, and the other half been transferred elsewhere by the power company. Now, presented with an old dramatic sawhorse, an Act V Recognition and Reconciliation Scene of the sort he had directed easily for twenty years, he couldn’t stage it, couldn’t see it. Even an impulse of embarrassment over his collapse gave up the struggle toward his brain and oozed back into the daze.

  When Grange stuck out his brown-gold hand, Wolfstein shook it indifferently, then turned and poured himself out a drink of bourbon from the near-empty pint beside him. Grange looked quizzically at Leila for direction. Then, at her nod, he swung a chair around to Wolfstein’s side and saddled it.

  “Well, you see, I got these couple of weeks off, and then I’ll be doing Cat, Brick’s part, you know, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—my first chance at doing something like that. On the road. And so Leila here”—he gave her his grin—“Leila runs into me and she says, Why don’t you just fly on out with me? It’s real pretty country, she says, and you can try Cat out on us, and meet, meet…folks, and all. And…”

  He realized that Wolfstein was not listening, or at least not acknowledging him, so he leaned the chair back and gave us his grin instead. We soon were mesmerized by that rhythmic beacon of perfect teeth. All of us made fans of the flicker, we who were presumably theater people ourselves, but who had never met a star.

  “And hell, Lord,” the star went on, “I don’t know why I do any of the fool things I end up doing, but if it feels good, why then I just take off with it. And here I am! Oh, man, is my agent gonna fry my ass.” He rolled a laugh like a cigarette, smoothly, and we all found ourselves laughing too, without knowing why, or at what.

  “Well, if y’all ul excuse me, I guess maybe I oughtta clean up a little bit.” He stretched up, and up, and up, and swung a perfect leg over the chair back. “And just call me Cal,” he added. Fitzgerald and Maisie and Sabby Norah led his processional to the bathroom.

  Yep, evuhbody sure did like Calhoun Grange. His brightness blew into our house, throwing up the black shades of mourning and luring us all outside. Eventually, even Mrs. Thurston had to lash herself to her principles and stuff reputation in her ears to resist him. She would not deny that he was quite engaging, she said, but, of course, that was all the more reason why he was liable to be connected with any tripping and falling Leila was conjectured to have done.

  And everyone was quite happy to have Grange practice his play on us, and so we did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. No one had known whether, with Mittie gone, there would be any more plays. Sabby had told us Leila would think of something, but not even Sabby had predicted a movie star. Sabby was to be Little Mama, Leila was Maggie the Cat, and Mrs. Thurston agreed to portray Big Mama. Wolfstein had been right about her affinity with Tennessee Williams. She really got into the part.

  “Nathan, according to my understanding, this woman has borne the burden of her sorrow with what I believe I would call dig-ni-ty. For she has to face the fact that it is not at all a spastic colon, as she and Big Daddy supposed, but cancer, which is going to kill him. And yet others are attempting to make a fool of her. Now, Nathan, is that your understanding also?”

  “Yes, Amanda,” he would nod, “I think that’s a way of getting into it…”

  And Wolfstein himself had gotten into the play, had charged what little current was left to him so that it could throw a focused beam on the stage, had generated the energy from some inexplicable storage cell in his frame of bones. Maybe it was because Grange was there; maybe he wanted to do it for him. Though if he had embraced Calhoun as his son in some private Ithaca, none of us knew it. They didn’t say. At rehearsals, they called each other “Nate” and “Cal” and were polite. I had pretty much decided that Wolfstein had made up the story just to be telling it, or that maybe he had always wanted a son and dreamed it, or that maybe there really was a script girl in his life and she made up the Calhoun Grange part out of her dreams. Leila believed it, but Grange seemed a lot more interested in her than in Nathan Wolfstein.

  Through those weeks, our lives orbited around this visit from a star. And for his part, Calhoun apparently thought Floren Park “felt good”; at any rate, he took off with it. He appeared at a local rodeo and an Elks-for-Nixon barbeque picnic, had himself pasteled in the Plaza, signed autographs at the dance ball, allowed himself with perfect affability to be endlessly photographed and interviewed, ran up the biggest bill in memory at the biggest hotel, received with grace the grateful offerings of merchants—a fishing rod, a blue suede overcoat, a Tyrol hat, an authenticated totem pole, the memory of pleasures received, the tributes of fluttered hearts.

  So after we sprayed the afternoon streets with posters announcing his coming, the Mit
tie Stark Memorial Players played to full houses each night of our run. As for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, no one seemed to pay much attention to it, except one night standing in the back of the theater, I watched Leila prowling the cave of Maggie’s bedroom for a while, and I felt a terror, like a shame, from a source I couldn’t define. She seemed to burn with an energy that could be either desire or grief. How did she really feel about Mittie’s death? She had never talked to me about it. And so I didn’t ask.

  “That girl is one fine little actress,” Grange told us. “Let me tell you, she is something.”

  But I had been Mrs. Thurston’s fool after all, for people were talking about Leila and Calhoun Grange. Lady Red made a “remark” to Marlin. Ashton, who had been rubbing around Grange like a black cat all week, made insipid jokes in the dressing room about cowboys easing into oiled saddles.

  On Friday afternoon, I had to march in the street pantomime with Suzanne Steinitz, whom I rarely saw now that my desultory slide toward seduction by sneering with her at Broadway and Hollywood had languished. After I shot her with a cap pistol and she shot me and we passed out our last handbill, she said coyly, “Funeral meats and wedding feasts.”

  “What?”

  “Hamlet, stupid.” She smiled by arching her eyebrows. “Guess who I saw at the Valley Druggists yesterday. Our much-loved Mrs. Stark. She evoked quite a study from the pharmacist by handing him a prescription for enough birthcontrol pills to immunize the Rockettes for a year. Right after he offered her his condolences about her husband. There’s an Antigone for you.”

  “Antigone?”

  “Oh, forget it.”

  But perhaps it was all a matter of envy with Suzanne, for she did not deceive me by pretending to be contemptuous of Calhoun Grange, even if his “Method” was wrong. Of course, she wasn’t as infatuated as Sabby Norah, who followed Calhoun around looking like Judy Garland mooning, “You Made Me Love You” to Clark Gable. Grange was as close as Sabby had come yet to the world she worshiped, and she was memorizing him like a poem.

  The next day I tried to tell Verl what Suzanne had said about Leila, but he just grimaced in an annoyed way and muttered, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Devin, Leila hasn’t got the time to do all the stupid things you keep fantasizing about her in that pulpfiction brain of yours.”

  “Well, who are you supposed to believe?” I asked him, annoyed myself. “I mean, do you think people just make things up? Because if it’s true, then Leila’s making a fool of Mittie. Of his memory.”

  “So now you’re worried about poor Mittie’s memory? If I were you, I’d worry a little more about making a fool of yourself and a little less about Leila. You’re so obsessed with this imaginary sex life of Leila’s, I’m beginning to think you must be in love with her.”

  “You’re the one with the pulp-fiction brain. Pop psychology too.”

  “And lo, in conclusion, the Preacher sayeth unto you, t’aint nothing more foolish than faith. Walk me over to the bookstore. I want to buy you a copy of Emma; she thought she knew everything that was going on too.”

  After that night’s performance, I sat in the Red Lagoon Bar to read the book, but when Marlin and Joely came in, I put it away and ordered a drink with them. Soon we heared a murmur wave through the room; it was followed by Calhoun Grange, who swung smoothly into our booth.

  “Lord God,” he smiled. “I am really awful. I am really one rotten actor. Did you see that, when I just popped up and headed over to the window, cool as a bluejay, just clean forgot that Brick’s crippled and can’t move without those damn crutches!” He laughed, slapping the table. “Well, they can wire Paul Newman not to worry. Hey, now, come on,” he pulled Joely’s hand away from his pocket. “Let me get this round.”

  Tourists stared at Grange (and therefore at us, who were incidentally in the frame) with a frank sense of possession. He was theirs, and they watched to see what he would do next, as openly as they might watch a bear or a baby, presuming he was as little bothered by self-consciousness as either of those. And, as a matter of fact, he appeared, by habit, artistry, or nature, really to be effortlessly unaware of his audience. Perhaps all the eyes had finally come to be just the camera’s, and the only shyness left was of solitude.

  I watched the tourists watch him eating peanuts until finally I too saw it framed by a proscenium, the act taking on for me as well a kind of primitive magic and mystery. If you say an ordinary word over and over, sometimes it will lose its ordinary meaning and take on that kind of incantational significance.

  “When are you going to have to leave us?” Marlin Owen asked him unselfishlessly, for his girlfriend, Margery, was one of the few nonsmitten women around.

  “Oh, I guess I’ll head on down to Vegas Monday A.M. Did I tell you? My agent caught up with me yesterday, and you can just believe it that guy sure did rake my tail over the coals.”

  He rolled one of his laughs, and it rippled into tourists’ smiles throughout the bar. “If he can’t get hold of me, sooner or later he just starts to piss in his pants. Well, you know, I was supposed to be seen putting in an appearance at this particular club with some contract broad a couple of days ago. That’s what this game’s about, being seen putting in an appearance. That’s what my agent keeps trying to impress on my head, he tells me. And so now she’s P.O.d, and so he hopped on the studio’s back about it and rode them around a while, and then they hopped on my agent’s back and rode him around. So naturally he spins on around and climbs up on me. Well, you know how it goes in that world.”

  We didn’t, but we nodded anyhow. I was wondering how I could ask him about Wolfstein.

  “Well,” Joely summed up for Floren Park, “it won’t be the same here without you.”

  “Well, thank you. Hell, I think this is a nice little place. People are real friendly. And natural. I’ve been kind of enjoying myself and feeling pretty free. ’Course it was a crazy-ass thing to do, taking off like my agent says. I’m one dumb bastard. Lord knows what gets into me.”

  He invited us to grin with him at the puzzling mystery of his own motivations. We did.

  From a lingering waitress who took his smile like an unexpectedly large tip, Grange ordered another beer. She gave his empty can to a teenage girl standing beside the jukebox. The girl wrapped it in a napkin and put it in her cloth handbag. I noticed she had one of the handbills with, “Yours, Calhoun Grange,” sprawled across the front that Fitzgerald was selling in the lobby for five dollars.

  He popped the can open and smoothly brimmed his glass. “But I tell you,” he said, “I really took to that Leila of yours.”

  We did not know what he meant by “ours,” or more to the immediate point, “took to.” Sitting a bit more stiffly, I tried to look at once both comprehending and nonchalant.

  “You know, she’s a pretty weird broad in a lot of ways. I mean, she’s not what you’d exactly call easy to figure. But pals, you can believe it, she is one fine woman. After losing her husband that way! Listen, she has got guts! Keeping the show going! ’Course I’m not telling you something you don’t already know. Yes, sir, I liked her right off the bat. So when she busts her way onto the set like that, good Lord, just right past the bosses, and tells me this guy working with her out in Colorado is my old man and I oughtta go meet him, I say, why hell, why not? See what I mean?”

  We said yes and waited.

  He noticed what we were waiting for, so maybe Suzanne Steinitz had underestimated his Method.

  “’Course I never really figured I was going to actually run into my old man out here. Lord, that’s just a little too much to believe.

  “Besides, my mom’s told me for fifteen years how he died from his liver in the V.A. hospital in San Diego. But, still, who knows, you know?”

  We waited.

  “Hell, Nate’s okay. But I could see that first morning there wasn’t anything between us. Tell you the truth, I can’t see much re
semblance, can you?”

  “But,” I asked, “is your mother the woman Wolfstein knew?”

  “Well, yeah. I guess he knew her. I asked him and he said he did. Far as I could tell, he didn’t act like he ’specially wanted to go into it. And so what’s the point anyhow? Lots of people know lots of people.”

  He finished his beer and we left. In front of the bar, he signed his name across the cast on a young boy’s arm and rumpled his hair. The parents beamed.

  Outside in the parking lot, an old familiar strain slapped at us across the summer night. “Pile of dung! Sarcophagus! Junkshit! Junkshit! Junkshit! JUNKSHIT! JUNKSHIT!”

  “Oh, no,” Joely said.

  And indeed it was Spurgeon Debson howling in the moonlight as he rhythmically kicked in the headlights of an old black Chrysler. For whatever rolled from the assembly lines of Detroit violated and terrorized Debson’s soul as the unstoppable breeding of the Chinese does the John Birch Society.

  “Hello, Spur, what’s going on?” Joely asked. You had to ask the regular questions, though the regular answers were never forthcoming.

  Spur looked around, perhaps placed us as figures dim in some insignificant slot of his memory. He flipped the car’s hood open with a right uppercut that split the skin on his knuckles.

  “There!” he slammed his bleeding hand into the engine. “THERE is the heart of America. That worthless package, metal DUNG! That WOMB of mediocrity!” He stared, infuriated, at the engine. “FASCIST!” he screamed at the carburetor.

  “What’s eating that guy?” Calhoun wondered.

  “The war in Vietnam,” I chose at random.

  “Yeah, I guess I know what you mean,” Calhoun nodded. “It’s pretty hard for some folks to figure what’s right. Was he drafted?”