Graven Images

by Jane Waterhouse

  I pulled my journal out from under the pillow, sat cross-legged on the bed, and divided a blank page into three columns:

  1. MY FATHER IS DEAD.

  2. MY FATHER IS ALIVE.

  3. DUDLEY QUINN III IS MY FATHER.

  Until my conversation with Pete just then, I hadn’t considered that my Real Father might be dead. Under the “DEAD” column I put a question mark.

  I looked at the second column, “MY FATHER IS ALIVE,” and wrote Where? Do I know him? Does he come here? Then I drew a long arrow down the page, ballooning one word. MOTHER.

  Fitting this human trainwreck of a person into The Story was never easy. I thought about the skinny woman Cilda let in the house like a stray cat once a year when Dudley was on another coast, the one who sat in the kitchen gulping tea as if it hurt her throat to swallow until Cilda said, “Kiss your mama goodbye,” and I was forced to produce a cheek, to feel her liquor breath upon it, musty and stale, like a closet where some small rodent had died.

  I leaned back against the headboard, trying to trace the plot back further, to a time when my mother was young and beautiful, the way she looked in the black-and-white photograph Dudley kept locked in the armoire in his bedroom. What had happened to change her? Had Dudley’s coldness forced her to turn elsewhere for affection? Was she swept away in reckless passion by the man who was my Real Father? That would explain why Dudley never mentioned her. Why he acted as though she were dead.

  My eyes wandered back to the top of the page, to the heading, “DUDLEY QUINN III IS MY FATHER.” For a long time I wrote nothing. As long as I could remember, Dudley had acted as though I were a household fixture, something to get done over during growth spurts, the way one reupholsters a chair. No Real Father would treat his daughter the way he treated me.

  If it wasn’t for that one time. My tenth birthday.

  Cilda had made a cake. Geoffrey Nash came with a big teddy bear. At dinner, I’d found a package wrapped up in shiny paper and grosgrain ribbon on the seat of my chair. Inside was a white linen nightgown with hand-crocheted lace around the collar and cuffs. The card read: “Happy Birthday, with love from Simone and Daddy,” at least that’s what I thought at the time, though it might have been “Simone and Dudley”—when I went back to look it had already been thrown out, so I never knew for sure.

  I wore the new gown that night. I remember it was uncommonly warm for May. I pulled aside the comforter and ate the piece of cake with extra roses that Cilda had left on the nightstand, letting the crumbs fall like snowflakes on the clean white sheets. Sometime later I woke, aware that the lamp was still on.

  Dudley was standing over my bed.

  I shut my eyes and stayed very still, the way you would around a wild animal that could be easily startled off. My chest felt funny, just from trying to breathe normally, in and out. He stooped over the bed. Through the curtain of my lashes I could see the outline of his bent shoulders, huge, extinguishing the lamplight. He bent closer. His big hand brushed the hair from my face.

  I thought he might kiss me. He’d never kissed me before, not that I could recall, and the very thought set my heart thumping wildly. Maybe he heard because he suddenly pulled back. I wanted to sit up, to cry out, “Daddy, don’t go!” but something stopped me.

  A tear had fallen from his face onto my forehead.

  I let him switch off the lamp, turn the knob of the door, pull it tight. Down the hall I heard Simone’s glittery blonde tread over the carpet, then the low rumble of Dudley’s voice, and her answering giggle. Only after they moved away did I move, running my fingers over my brow, tasting the salt of his tear on them.

  Since that night, I’d left my lamp on, with the door slightly ajar every night Dudley was at home. At two or three in the morning, when the last guests had stumbled upstairs and I heard his distinctive footfall in the hall, I smoothed my hair over the pillow and waited.

  I thought if he was my Real Father, surely one night he’d look in again. He’d sit at the foot of my bed and whisper all the things he couldn’t tell me when I was awake.

  TWO

  I carried the five-dollar bill around all that day, waiting for Dane Blackmoor. Strangely enough though, instead of me finding him, he found me. It was about three o’clock, much earlier than the Headline Weekend Guests usually arrived, and I’d decided to steal away to the beach for a few minutes. I waded into the water, letting the coldness stun my bare legs and take my breath away, rolling the elastic waistband of my skirt up as I moved seaward—the horizon always drew me—standing farther out than I should have without a bathing suit, the thin material of my blouse wilting in the spray.

  Suddenly, and this is hard to explain, I had the sense of being pulled by two tides—the undertow of the waves in front of me, and something else, just behind, on the shore. I turned, falling into Dane Blackmoor’s eyes.

  “Hello, Gabrielle’s daughter,” he said, swirling my mother’s name around his tongue a little, as though he were tasting the first sip of a fine old wine.

  A lapping wave stung the back of my calves. I took several long steps out of the water, nearly stumbling. “I’m G-Garner,” I stammered.

  Blackmoor held out his hand, very solemnly. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. I stared after him as he continued walking along the packed ribbon of sand parallel to the ocean, his shirt billowing like a sail. Under the rolled-up jeans, his legs were hard and brown as lucky stones.

  He was already at least twenty feet away when he looked over his shoulder. I realized he’d meant me to follow. “I’d just gotten out of art school,” he said when I caught up to him. “I went to a party, and there she was, your mother.”

  He picked up a shell and moved into the water, washing off the sand. We stood together in the first rim of waves. My skirt was soaking, the pleats plastered to my knees. “This must’ve been after she gave up modeling. She was already married to…” His voice trailed off, as though the impatient mouth couldn’t be bothered. What was he going to say? Married to Dudley? Married to your father?

  “She was sitting in a corner, all by herself. She had on a hat. A hat!” Blackmoor sounded as though he wanted to laugh, but couldn’t remember how. “I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She came to pose for me a few times. I still have the studies. Never went further with them. Just torsos.

  “I never wrapped her face.” He handed me the shell. “Even I’m not that arrogant.” His eyes seemed to dare me to say that I hadn’t supposed he was.

  I couldn’t lie, so I looked away.

  Later, as we walked back, I cut a quick sideways glance at him, at the sunken places on his cheeks where it looked as though the skin had been chipped away with a chisel. He was older than I’d expected him to be, close to thirty probably. Old enough to be my—

  I trained my eyes on the sand in front of me, replaying his words in my head. “I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” Next time my mother visited, I would be nicer, I decided. Next time, we would talk, girl-to-girl. I didn’t know then that there would be no next time.

  At the house, with me still clutching the shell that would remain next to my bed all that long summer, Dane Blackmoor said, “See you around, Garnish.”

  “It’s Garner,” I told him, seriously, all at once hating the hard edges of my name.

  He took my chin in his hand, turning it this way and that, inspecting my face from all angles, then releasing it abruptly. “You have her eyes,” Blackmoor said. He started up the front steps. Stopped.

  “And it is Garnish,” he called down to me, softly, “a little something good enough to eat.” He went inside without saying goodbye.

  My heart raced. I wanted to follow him, but just then I heard the man calling at the gate. “Psst! Psst! Girlie!” He was jacketless today, his shirt and slacks a dark brown, as though he were trying to blend in with dirt, or the bark of a tree. I walked toward him.

  “That was Blackmoor, wasn’t it?” The camera was unsheathed;
he was fiddling with one of the lenses. “Look, honey, all’s I need is to stake out a little place over there—” He pointed to the garage, visibly excited, hopping from foot to foot as though there were hot coals on the pavement, or he had to go to the bathroom.

  I took the crumpled five-dollar bill from my skirt pocket. “Forget it,” I told him, watching old Honest Abe sail toward his cupped hands. I started back toward the house, turning once to yell in my most annoying smartass voice, “And if I see you hanging around here again, I’ll call the cops!”

  I’d planned to use the money to buy a halter top like Cathy’s. I might have lost a chance to get something decent to wear, but I’d found something much more important.

  I finally had a leading man for The Story.

  THREE

  If Dudley, Dane Blackmoor, and Dulcie Mariah’s trial shared the spotlight on weekends, weekdays belonged to the supporting cast in the kitchen. Because this was also the summer that I learned about sex, with some help from Webster’s Dictionary, an underlined copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Cathy and her boyfriend Jimmy, a bellboy at the Essex-Sussex Hotel.

  Just about every Monday morning I saw a further installment in the backstairs melodrama revolving around whether Cathy was pregnant, or whether she had a “bad ting in the innards,” as Cilda believed. And every Monday morning I would be there, effecting the look of jaded ennui I’d practiced in the mirror, as Cathy, her long legs stretched taut across two kitchen stools, pushed a lit cigarette around the saucer she used for an ashtray and talked about doing it on the beach, and in the backseat of Jimmy-the-bellboy’s Firebird.

  Cathy—who seemed to assume that I had a fuller appreciation of making love than was actually the case—helped me piece together the sexual act as an intricate dance with a highly irregular beat. My mind raced with the implications of a whole new set of technical terms—skipped periods…rhythm method…pulling out…I had only a vague idea of their meanings (Webster being frustratingly unforthcoming), but something about the sound of them depressed me.

  It seemed a bad joke that I, who the great Dudley Quinn had once called hopelessly clumsy, should one day be called upon to engage in an act where timing and coordination were obviously so critical.

  “Of course, my situation is tougher than most,” Cathy sighed, applying a smear of lipgloss from a clear pot that smelled like bubble gum, “with Jimmy having multiple orgasms and all.”

  At such times I had to actively suppress the urge to run to my room in search of the dictionary. While the kitchen conversation meandered in other directions, I would whisper over and over to myself so I wouldn’t forget, orgasm…orgasm…orgasm, waiting for the moment when Cilda shooed me upstairs to change for dinner when I found it, right smack in the middle of organize and orgeat, a definition more promising than the usual. My imagination reeling, I vowed to find a way to get one of the Adults-in-Charge to walk me into the lobby of the Essex-Sussex so I could get a glimpse of this bellboy Jimmy, this freak of sexual stamina, this roll-in-the-hay Hercules.

  It crossed my mind that Dane Blackmoor might have experienced multiple orgasms with my mother, but I tried not to dwell on such thoughts. When it came to your parents, I didn’t think you were supposed to focus on the mechanics of sex; although if your Real Father happened to be a famous man, a man who lived surrounded by art and passion, a little censored fantasizing was probably only natural.

  Even if I’d tried, there was no getting away from it. This was the world in which they all moved—Dudley and his blondes; Cathy and Jimmy; Geoffrey Nash; even Cilda, who had a husband and kids back on the island of Jamaica.

  “When you go home to visit,” I’d once asked her, “where do you sleep?”

  “In bed with me ’usband. Where else should I sleep?” Cilda had answered, as though I were silly in the head.

  Even Cilda.

  And then, of course, there was Dulcie Mariah, the rock star accused of killing her son, Charlie; and Mr. C. J. Stratten, her rich husband; and Ben Slater, the guitarist in Dulcie’s band. I knew for a fact what the newspapers only hinted at—Dulcie had been having an affair with Mr. Slater. I’d overheard Dudley talking about it, or maybe not even overheard it, because he actually seemed aware I was in the room when he said it.

  This was big news, enough to boggle the imagination: married women, women way over thirty, didn’t necessarily just do It with their husbands. I thought about Dulcie having sex with Ben Slater and Mr. Stratten on the same day. I wondered if it made you feel funny, or guilty, or sick even, like having too much ice cream, or sneaking a bag of cookies and then having to eat dinner that night as though you were still hungry.

  When it came down to it, all of them, except me, had been… initiated.

  Yet this summer, the most exciting of my life, they’d dropped the pretense of lowering their voices, of cutting off conversation when I entered a room. They were letting me listen. And that, I decided, was like being told that, in this grown-up game of May I? I could take two baby steps into the bedroom world they inhabited after dark.

  FOUR

  “What’s the story, morning glory?” Pete called.

  “Nothing.” I kicked off my canvas Mary Janes and put on the flip-flops I’d bought with money I was supposed to use for nylons.

  “Goin’ to the beach?” Pete asked, as he pruned a rosebush.

  “Depends on who’s asking.” I shrugged.

  He sat down on the porch steps, wiping the sweat off his forehead with a dirty handkerchief. “Aw, they’ll be too busy to notice on a Friday,” he said, “with Mr. Quinn coming in and all.”

  “Yeah.” I tucked the Mary Janes into a canvas tote, next to today’s paper and the bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil. “But in case Cilda asks, you haven’t seen me.”

  “Gotcha,” Pete promised. “In a while, crocodile.” Poor Pete, I thought as I walked away. He was probably hurt that I didn’t hang around with him the way I used to. The summer before, I’d spent all of my time out in the yard, bringing him lemonade, puttering in the shed, singing along with the music that always blared on his portable radio.

  The thought of that radio made me stop in my tracks. A radio was just what I needed this afternoon. A radio would make the time fly. Tossing a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw Pete digging among the impatiens. I doubled back toward the rear grounds of the house.

  It was there, exactly where I knew it would be. I spun the volume control to check out the batteries before dropping it into the tote. Pete won’t mind, I told myself. Why, I’d been like a daughter to him. He’d said so himself. And, for several months, I’d taken him quite literally.

  Of course, things were different this year. I wasn’t a child anymore. And then there was Dane Blackmoor. He’d be coming again tonight. Maybe this would be the weekend he’d admit to the secret—who he really was. I imagined Dudley’s face when I told him I knew. Or would we keep it a secret? Just mine, and my dad’s. I’d have to work on that—in fact, there was a lot to think about, so many plots to picture in my mind, before tonight.

  I stepped out of the shed, barely missing Pete as he dragged a curled line of hose toward the front. Before he could look up, I made a dash for the avenue. Cilda didn’t like me to go to the public beach. “What you want to go mixing wit that riffraff,” she asked, “when you got a big pool right in the back?” She sniffed. But mixing with the riffraff was exactly what I wanted to do.

  The beach wasn’t crowded, a hazy cloudcover having scared off all but the diehards. Later, when the wind pushed this sky out to sea and replaced it with an empty blue one, they’d come—the weekenders with their summer passes, their towels, their uneven tans. I removed the rolled-up blanket from my tote, shimmying it the way Cathy always did to catch the direct rays of the sun. Without a decent bathing suit to wear, I was forced to hike up my sundress all the way to my underpants, so I could baby-oil every inch of my legs. Baby oil gave you color quicker than tanning lotion, Cathy said. I rubbed it into my calves, marvel
ing at their new smoothness.

  Another thing Cilda didn’t believe in was girls of my age shaving their legs. At the beginning of the summer I’d taken matters into my own hands with a manicure scissor. This was a long and ultimately unsuccessful process, leaving me with stubbly patches in places I couldn’t reach. Then last week when Cathy was cleaning my bathroom, I’d caught her mooning over some scented soaps.

  “Paris,” Cathy read, turning over the cellophaned package and breathing it in like she did her cigarettes. “Cost at least ten bucks, I bet.”

  Seized with sudden inspiration, I shoved them into her hands. “Take ’em,” I said.

  “I couldn’t.” She shook her head. “Stuff from the mall, that’s okay. But I don’t ever lift things from people I know.”

  “It wouldn’t be stealing,” I insisted. “It would be a trade.”

  “What kind of trade?” she asked me, dubiously.

  And that was how I’d ended up with the small, pink plastic bottle of Nair depilatory.

  I dialed the local rock station on the portable and stretched out on the blanket. The sun danced on the surface of my eyelids, hitting my well-oiled legs like grease on a pan. I could almost feel them sizzling.

  So much better to be here than in the big house, with Cilda telling me to mind not messing anything up, the whole staff in a tizzy because Mr. Quinn was coming in. Better not to care whether Dudley would acknowledge my presence; whether he’d pass me by, as he would a chair or a lamp—not expecting anything from it except that it should be there, polished to a shine, inoffensive to the beholder.

  The sun fried on my greased legs, thrumming like a bass guitar. I willed myself into sleep. When I woke, the first thing I heard was the song on the radio—one of life’s little ironies—“Do you believe in magic?” The rays were at a different angle. Someone was casting a shadow. A shiver traveled from the soles of my feet.