One night I awoke to the sound of voices beneath my open window. I got up without turning on the light. The outdoor floods illuminated the pool and the cabanas; with the moon I could see clear over to Pete’s toolshed.
Dudley and Dulcie Mariah were on the gravel path. She was wearing a long, flimsy gown, the outline of her body completely visible through the material. A thin band, like a cigar-store Indian’s, played peekaboo in her hair.
Even in the night, from a story above, she glittered.
“In mah midna-ight con-fes-sion,” she sang at the top of her lungs. Dudley put his hands out, as though he were a conductor signaling pianissimo. She ran ahead, waving him off with the neck of an opened champagne bottle.
He called to her, “Dulcie…Dulcie, for Christ’s sake!”—Dudley Quinn III, kind and dutiful lawyer, the man who would patiently trail after his clients, soothing their fears, calming hysteria. Or was this something more?
He caught up to Mariah and swung her around by the waist. Her laughter was raucous. “In mah…” She tilted the bottle of bubbly until it sprayed, shooting foam down the front of Dudley’s starched white shirt.
“Dulcie…Dulcie, for Christ’s sake!” he said again, more softly.
A couple of weeks later I came upon Dudley sitting all alone in the library. There were dark circles beneath his eyes. He looked exhausted.
“I didn’t know anybody was in here,” I apologized. He said nothing. I turned to the shelves, half-expecting him to tell me to leave.
“What have you been doing with yourself this summer, Garner?” he asked.
Waiting for you, listening to you, doing anything I could to be a part of your life, my mind screamed. I said, “Nothing much.” Then, “How about you?”
He stared for a minute, before summoning a beaten smile. “Oh, you know. Same old, same old.” Leaning back into the wingback chair, he sighed. “I always knew I’d have to find out what it was like to lose one day, but I’ll tell you a secret, just between you and me—” I moved closer. “I didn’t want it to be with this one,” he said.
He got up and walked out of the room without another word. I glanced at the rolled-up newspaper he’d left on the cushion of the seat. The headlines read: OUTCOME BLEAK FOR MARIAH.
No one stayed after that except for the old painter. During Dulcie’s visits he’d eaten with Cilda and me in the kitchen. Later, we continued this routine. The dining room seemed too cavernous and empty.
Newspaper reports remained grave. Witnesses for the prosecution streamed into the courtroom, day in and day out, testifying to Dulcie’s failings as a mother, telling of wild parties, outbursts of temper, erratic behavior. One evening, Cilda put the television set on the kitchen counter and plugged it in. After that, watching the news during meals became a ritual.
I sat quietly, looking down at my plate. I was afraid if I acted too interested, it might be taken away; yet every word registered in my head. Twenty-two more soldiers killed in Vietnam…Vice President Agnew denies impropriety…One hundred arrested at antiwar rally. There was a great big world out there, and they couldn’t keep me away from it forever. When the report on the Mariah trial came on, everyone leaned forward on their stools.
The footage of Dudley shocked me. He looked like a decked-out corpse—manicured, groomed, arrayed just right, but with the lifeblood sucked out of him. He avoided looking directly at the camera when being questioned. Dulcie, on the other hand, appeared to be holding up just fine. Dressed in tapered Edwardian jackets, long skirts, and laced boots, she might have been the heroine in a romantic novel—besieged, but proud. On television you couldn’t tell that her clothes were probably dirty.
“She’s guilty, you know,” the painter said, the stubble on his chin glistening with dribbled gravy.
“Why do you say that?”
He went on, chewing with his mouth open. “Her eyes.”
Something inside me quivered. “What about them?”
“Look.” The old man picked up a piece of china and held it up to my face. “See those highlights? Now to get them on canvas, you take the flat end of a number-two brush, dip it in titanium white, and you dab the eyes, see, to make the light come alive.” He demonstrated, using his fork for a brush. “I once did a portrait of a woman who’d lost a child. There was nothing in her eyes. No light at all. Grief snuffs it out like a candle.”
I watched him mash beets into his potatoes, staining them red. “Now, that Mariah woman.” He took a big mouthful. “Ever notice how her eyes sparkle?”
So maybe they shine from drugs or from the inner peace that comes with innocence, I wanted to argue, but I let it go. I didn’t want to think about Dulcie Mariah. I was thinking about Dudley. Seeing his drawn face on the news had reminded me of a tear I’d once tasted, of a soft voice in a darkened library. “What have you been doing with yourself, Garner?”
Dane Blackmoor was gone. Dudley was all that I had. Maybe this time, I told myself, it would be different. Maybe, in failure and despair, he’d look to me.
TEN
“Wake up, girl!” Cilda’s voice roused me from a far-off place. She shuffled to the window, bringing the shade up with a snap so it spun on the roller. The light was weak, but unmistakable.
“W-what time is it?”
“Six o’clock.” Cilda was in the closet now, scraping hangers over the rack.
“Go away,” I protested. “Let me sleep.”
Cilda wagged my best ugly dress in her hand. “What you sleeping for now that this awful ting is finally over?”
“What—?”
“The trial, girl!” she whispered. “The trial!”
I hurled myself back on the pillow. “The trial won’t be over for weeks. They haven’t even presented closing arguments yet.”
“That’s all you know,” Cilda said, huffily. “But while you been sleeping the day away, Mister Benjamin Slater damned ’is soul to ’ell and killed ’imself.” I sat up straight. “And ’e left a letter saying it was ’imself murdered the poor infant, tank the Lord.
“Mister Quinn ’as won.” She grabbed my hand impulsively. “The big man ’as won again!”
The media couldn’t get enough of it.
Rock guitarist and teenage heartthrob Ben Slater had put a gun in his mouth, spattering what was left of his brain cells on the kitchen walls of his Connecticut estate. In an unsigned, handwritten suicide note he confessed to having killed Charlie, saying he’d wanted to ruin Dulcie’s life the way she’d ruined his.
I can’t live with what I’ve done, he wrote, rather unnecessarily; then, Dulcie babe, I’ll see you in hell. An autopsy revealed that Slater had taken a near-lethal mixture of heroin and barbiturates before shooting himself.
There’s a Latin term, deus ex machina—the god from the machine—a device employed by classical playwrights when they need to clean up a lot of messy details fast, and tack a pseudo-happy ending onto what would otherwise have been a sorry state of affairs.
The first time I heard it, I thought of Ben Slater.
From the beginning I always felt there was something tacked on about the way Slater checked out. Years went by, Dulcie died in that plane crash, and still it nagged at me, like a pebble in my shoe. Finally, during the first awful months after my divorce, I went back and dug up all the old records. And that—contrary to what Dudley has publicly stated—was how Rock-a-Bye Baby came to be written.
Out of curiosity. Not revenge.
ELEVEN
The house was suddenly abuzz with people again. Dudley returned, thinner, but the old edge was definitely back.
“Was she surprised?” I asked him. “Did she know it was Ben all along?”
He waved me away. “It’s over, Garner. Can’t you let me have a day’s peace?” Then he resumed conversing with the invited guests about Mariah, and the trial, and how they’d been preparing to tighten the noose around Slater’s neck when news of his suicide came. Everyone listened, fascinated.
I stayed quiet, allowing Dud
ley peace, his way.
The first hint of autumn blew into the air. Tourists had taken over the roads and the beaches; strangers had taken over our house. In three days I would be back at school, with the nuns. I sat on the front porch feeling depressed.
“Hey, Pete.”
“Gotta make like a tree and leave, Garn,” he told me. They were putting up a tent near the pool. There were planters to fill, and day workers trampling the grass. Pete loped off, looking worried.
Et tu, Pete?
The sound of fast tires on gravel made me sit up straight. Dane Blackmoor sped by in the Jag. He beeped the horn once, pulling smoothly into the garage.
He seemed altered somehow, angry, as though he hated himself for coming back. This time, instead of a beautiful woman, he brought with him a large white bird, which he allowed to fly through the house. He never referred to the thing, never called it by name; and he ignored the hubbub that it made by landing on people’s heads or plates with a flurry of white wings.
He barely spoke to me. “Blackmoor’s different, isn’t he?” I asked Cathy in the kitchen.
She raised a carefully drawn eyebrow. “He’s on a real bender.”
“What’s a bender?”
Cathy mimed throwing back a drink.
I considered this. My Real Father was obviously a man plagued by personal demons. It made him even more perfect. Dane Blackmoor needed me in a way that Dudley never would. That’s why he had come back. I resolved then and there not to let him go away again without telling me the truth.
By Labor Day weekend the house was filled with laughter and music. Hot and cold running buffets had been set up out by the pool, where Dulcie Mariah songs blared over a rented stereo system. Dane Blackmoor appeared in the middle of a crowd, or not at all. On Sunday night I watched for a while as he did card tricks for a group of admirers. For some reason, the sight of his fast, graceful hands made my chest ache. I was tired of summer, tired of hanging around the periphery of the crowd, acting as though I belonged. I walked back to the house.
The downstairs looked like a cyclone had hit. Still, it was quiet, the noise from outside muffled by thick paneling and drapery. I took a sweater from the hall closet and headed for the porch. The grizzled artist was standing in the foyer. “Keep up that work,” he said, holding out a palsied hand for me to shake.
“You’re leaving?” I asked, surprised at the disappointment in my voice.
He adjusted the filthy canvas sack over his back. “All good things come to an end. Just wanted to thank the woman of the house—” He peeked into the drawing room. Cilda sat, sound asleep on the sofa, amidst a littering of empty cups and discarded plates. Putting a finger to his lips, he winked. “Tell her I said goodbye.”
I followed him out to the front porch. “What work?” I asked. “What work should I keep up?”
“The watching,” the painter said, cryptically. Then he limped down the drive.
I sat on the steps. All around me, on the wicker tables, wax candles burned with the spent brilliance of small, erupted volcanoes. Crickets chirped, signaling the demise of summer to each other in their own private Morse code. I felt alone, at the end of the world.
From the bushes came a wild thwapping, a swoosh of white. Blackmoor’s cockatoo landed on the porch railing in front of me, screeching. “Hihowareya, hihowareya!”
“Stay away,” I warned. The bird cocked its head, so that one glassy eye looked heavenward, the other at my leg. “Gottalight?” I shooed it with my skirt.
“He won’t hurt you.” Blackmoor stepped out from the garden, quiet as an Indian.
“I’m afraid of birds,” I said.
Dane snapped his fingers and the cockatoo hopped off the railing onto the back of his hand as though it were stepping onto a bus. “She doesn’t trust us,” he told the bird. It squawked again, surveying the porch, walleyed. He opened the front door and flicked the bird off his hand. It flew upstairs, probably to crap on somebody’s bedpost.
Blackmoor sat in a wicker chair, near one of the tables with the burning candles, playing with a wad of soft melted wax, rolling it in his palm, shaping it with his fingers. A shriek came from out back. Somebody had been thrown into the pool. The music was mellower now, though, quieter than the crickets.
“When you were here last time”—I didn’t look at him—“you said you wanted to talk to me about something.”
“I did?” He appeared totally engrossed in the ball of wax.
“Yes.” Don’t you remember? You must remember.
For a long while Blackmoor said nothing; then he handed his wax creation over to me in the darkness. He had fashioned it into the shape of my head. My profile. My unruly mess of long hair. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
I told him so.
He stared levelly into my eyes. “There are people in Third World countries who would say that now I have your soul.”
I wanted to say something clever back to him, but I couldn’t even frame a simple declarative sentence. Frustrated, I burst out, “I don’t even—I don’t even know what to call you…”
Blackmoor didn’t break his gaze. “What do you want to call me?” he asked.
Father, I screamed inwardly, I want to call you Father. Out loud I said, “I don’t know. I just feel like there’s—some kind of connection—between us.”
He looked at me for what seemed to be a long time. If it hadn’t been so totally out of character for him, I might have thought he looked confused. Finally he said, “Yes,” and then, “Yes, I suppose it’s inevitable you would feel that.” The hard lines of his face softened. This is it, I thought, he’s going to tell me.
The front door swung open. Cilda’s dark silhouette loomed over us. I waited for the word “Ga’ner!” to crack like a mean Jamaican whip, but it never came. Her silence was more ominous. Dane Blackmoor rose to his feet.
“Good evening, Mrs. Fields,” he said politely.
Cilda glowered. “That bird flying all over some lady by the pool, and ’er screamin’ to wake the dead.”
“I’ll take care of it.” Blackmoor strode to the door.
“You know, Mrs. Fields,” he said, coming to a stop next to her, “you have an extraordinary face.” He went inside without saying goodnight.
“Past time you’re in bed.” When I stood at once, she added crossly, “What you tink you’re looking at?”
“Nothing,” I replied. But I was looking at something. I was looking at Cilda through Blackmoor’s eyes, astonished to find that someone that old, someone way up in their twenties could still be, as he said, quite extraordinary.
The festivities continued early the next day. For Cilda, Margaret, Pete, and the rest of the staff, it was the final push. Tomorrow the outsiders would be gone. They’d pick up the mess, and, by the end of the week, things would be back to normal.
Back to normal for me meant exchanging frumpy sundresses for frumpy school uniforms. It meant listening to the nuns, going to Mass, and coming back to eat dinner with Cilda, alone—no more houseguests, no more excitement, no more Dudley. Most important of all, no more Dane Blackmoor. It had to be today. Somehow, some way, I’d find out the truth about Dane and my mother.
From the bedroom window, I could already see several women stretched out on chaise lounges by the pool, well-oiled bodies begging the sun to ravish them. I studied the style of their bathing suits, and the way they fit into them, then I went over to my bed, sliding my hand under the mattress where the snowy-white Maidenform bra with the pink satin ribbon was hidden. I put it on.
After all it had taken to buy the thing without Cilda knowing, the final results were disappointing. I stuffed some tissue inside, putting the palms of my hands against the outside of the cups and squeezing as tightly as I could. A thrilling swell of cleavage appeared.
Outside, a woman shrieked with laughter. I hid behind the folds of the frilly lace curtain, watching as a man chased her around the pool, zapping her behind with a wet towel.
&
nbsp; Later on, there would be fireworks and dancing. Dudley had hired a band. I had a feeling it was going to be the most important night of my life. An occasion that demanded more than new underwear. I had things to do.
TWELVE
The music started at nine. I waited in my room for Cathy’s knock—one-two-one-two-three—before opening the door, self-consciously.
“Absolutely positively outtasight,” she told me, adjusting the scarf around my hips, blousing Dudley’s V-neck undershirt until it was several inches above my knees. “Here.” She dabbed some gloss on my lips. “Now go like this.” She made a sound like white gloves clapping.
“Look at you!” she cried, shoving me in front of the mirror. The white of the T-shirt made my light tan appear darker. I’d sewn the little satin ribbon from the training bra onto the front, where it dipped into a vee. My hair was the only failure. Cathy had rolled it with Campbell’s soup cans, but instead of coming out straight, I was left with long, sausage-shaped spirals.
“I don’t look dumb?”
“No,” she assured me, not bothering to mask the surprise in her voice. “But you better hurry before old Cildo the Dildo gets a load.” I took a deep breath, and walked to the door. “Knock ’im dead, whoever he is,” she called.
There was no time to explain that he was my father; and that I didn’t want to knock him dead. I wanted to make him proud of me.
I wove my way through the clusters of people on the lawn. An older woman, a friend of Geoffrey’s, stopped me—Wait! Now turn around…Well, aren’t you quite the thing! As I walked away, I moved more confidently.
Dudley was holding court out at the pool. I felt sure he saw me, that he even looked twice before turning back to his guests. I couldn’t find Blackmoor. His bird was sitting high up in the tent. Every so often it swooped down and picked something off a discarded plate. Geoffrey Nash came dancing by, very drunk. “Garner, my sweet,” he cried, “come dance with me!” Ignoring my protests that I couldn’t, I didn’t know how, he pulled me onto the crowded patio dance floor.
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