by Jill Zeller
“Connie, Carl, get in here.” Dad’s voice flooded the room, sweeping toward Hank. Hank thought of Susan, the way she flatly told him her brother had been injured. This conversation would be far more entertaining.
With deliberate slowness, Hank set down his barely-touched Coke, rose, and sauntered toward the vestibule arch, where Connie and Carl were having a whispered argument.
When Hank appeared they stopped. Leaning against the archway, folding his arms, Hank said, “Your presence is requested.”
Connie gave him an unhappy smile. Her hair, brightened to a platinum sheen for the current picture, went awry as she pulled off her hat. Fatigue deepened the lines of her heart-shaped face, and she looked even thinner than usual, her dancer’s calves almost masculine for their lack of feminine fat. Carl glanced down at his jacket, wiped some unseen dander from it, and uncurled one of the silk scarves he had lately taken to wearing. His jaw muscles worked tensely, and he rolled his eyes at his brother.
“We come as commanded, Henry,” Carl said, taking Connie by the arm as if to escort her. She flung her arm free.
“Fuck off, Carl.”
“Oh my, we are in a pissy mood tonight.” Carl leaned close to her ear and lowered his voice. “Or is it a pussy mood?”
Connie slammed open her purse and rummaged out a cigarette. “Carl, go dip your head in acid. Hank, you got a light?”
Hank had recently given up cigarettes, but he kept the lighter Susan had lent him when they first met. He snipped it alight under the cigarette in Connie’s shaking hand.
Connie inhaled, eyes crinkling, and gave him a wink. She smelled faintly of gasoline and cigars. “You always were my favorite brother.”
“Gotta have someone do the dirty work,” Carl said as he brushed past them, especially giving a shove to his little brother. Hank rocked back on one foot, but he said nothing, just waited for Connie to breathe deeply before entering the den of their parent.
Following her, Hank stretched onto a chair near French doors leading out to the patio, far away from Dad who was slouched deep in the sofa.
Connie snuggled beside Dad, and Carl now occupied the place Hank had earlier.
“Where’s Mom?”
The three on the couch all looked at Hank. Carl said, “Isn’t she home yet?”
“She said she had a meeting at the studio. That she’d meet us back here.” This from Connie, who shrugged. “She told us to take the car, that she’d either get a ride or a cab.”
Dad stared into his whiskey. Carl and Connie glanced at each other.
Unusual, surely. Mom kept Connie and Carl on a tight leash, supervising their every step, dance step or party step. Making sure they got to bed early to maintain the ruse for their adoring fans that the Cleveland Twins were clean all-American kids.
A thumb of unsettledness pressed under Hank’s ribs. “Joaquin said she was home already.”
This statement had its promised effect, as Hank knew it would. Connie sprang from the couch as if levitated by a cable. “Then it’s time for her to join the fun and listen to the Big Announcement, whatever it is.”
The circus was on. All Hank had to do was be the audience as he so often was for his older brother and sister. Catching Connie’s arm, Carl leaped over the coffee table and they began to dance. Connie’s sapphire blue dress swirled around Carl’s legs.
And the patter. Ah you look lovely tonight, Countess. Oh prince, you make me swoon. If Dad weren’t here, the dialog would be a lot dirtier.
Dad sank into the couch as if he were deflating balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Hank watched him shrivel, fade to gray. Except when he stood at a microphone reading a script, Dad was a dull bird hidden in the shadows behind the cocky brightness of his family.
“Alright, guys. That’s enough.” Hank got to his feet, grabbed Connie’s arm; his hand closed tightly, and Connie gave him an angry look. “Dad has something to tell you morons.”
Connie wrenched her arm away. “High priest Hank, we are here to obey.” Turning to Dad, Connie bent over to rub one of her knees.
“What is it, Dad. What is the Big Announcement.”
When Dad told the twins his father had died, the massive Kenneth Cleveland baritone was oddly broken. Even Carl noticed; his eyebrows came down in suspicious doubt.
Appropriate murmurings of “That’s too bad,” and “Poor old guy” went around the room at the news of Grandfather Joel’s demise. Hank could see that Connie and Carl had even less concern for the loss of another grandparent than himself. As he considered this, another memory shot past, this having to do with his grandfather.
It was that same visit to the farm at Oklahoma City when Hank was nine. The old man, who walked with a pronounced limp, whose hands were the gnarled roots of arthritis, had motioned Hank to follow him to his bedroom. The room held a big four-poster with a dip in one side where grandfather slept, an oak dresser and wardrobe that looked as if they were never opened, and a chair with overalls and flannel shirts piled and pressed by the housekeeper. Grandfather sat on the bed, Hank near the foot, fingering one of the posts, holding on to it like he would the mast of a ship in a heavy sea.
“Your dad says you are a fast runner. I want to show you something.”
He had taken out a creased and used-up paper book, removed some photographs tucked inside and showed them to Hank. These were pictures of men racing on bicycles. Hank especially liked one of a man coming straight on, bowed on the handlebars, his feet in black shoes and the calves of his legs wider than grandfather’s thighs.
“I told your dad he should get you a bicycle. I used to have one, and I raced it a little, but I was never as good as these guys, going through France before the war.” He shuffled the photos, and Hank looked at them, not sure what this conversation was supposed to be about.
“If I still had that cycle I’d give it to you.” Grandfather’s eyes were blue like Dad’s and they scanned Hank’s face. “You’re going to need something, kid, with a family like the one you got.”
When Hank thought about it now, turning sideways in his chair, gazing through the French doors to a distant splash of neon, he realized his grandfather had done him a great favor that day and Hank had never thanked him.
Three
Hank saw Mom first. Bess Cleveland stood in the dining hall archway, in an immaculate Navy suit, white corsage, white heels. She leaned against the doorpost, a cigarette in one hand, her other hand caressing her elbow. One minute Hank was remembering the moldy smell of Grandpa Joel’s 100 year-old farmhouse, something he had long forgotten. The next he was staring at his mother, and she was staring back at him.
Silent. Standing. Not pacing and talking. As if pacing and talking could not be separated.
She’s a ghost. Not really there. Only there for me because for the first time ever she has come into a room without saying anything.
A quirky thing about the Cleveland living room was that the sofa was set with its back to the dining room. An artifice, Hank always thought, so that whomever was seated on the sofa could appreciate the entrance of whomever came through the hallway archway.
“It was so strange,” Dad was saying as Bess Cleveland stood silently behind him, “But I as I walked in here the phone rang, and the same time the marquis fell off the mantle and smashed to smithereens.”
Dad and Carl each leaned forward to pick up a shard where they lay on the coffee table, Dad a blue-glazed arm and Carl the head.
“That thing was worth a lot of money. Now the set is ruined.” Mom inhaled deeply of her cigarette, lifted her chin to Hank and made her entrance.
The three on the couch turned as one to watch her as she crossed the room, stood before them, stared down at the pieces. Turning, she stubbed out her cigarette on the mantle ashtray as if she were squashing a fly.
Hank had always been curious about Mom’s concern for the ugly things. She never had paid any attention to them other than to comment on their worth.
“The cleaning
lady obviously didn’t put it back properly,” Carl said, looking through the hollow neck into the fractured head, as if he expected to find a brain inside. “Can it be repaired?”
Mom snorted and lit another cigarette. Hank noticed her fingers flicking as she smoked. She looked as nervous as a tightrope walker strolling above Times Square.
Dad worked the buttons on his shirt. “I have to go there. Hope says she needs me there.”
“Oh great. Why can’t she deal with it?” Mom paced across the front of the mantle and back. “She’s a grown woman and her husband is a doctor, isn’t he? Aren’t doctors supposed to be smart?”
Dad shrugged. He said nothing. Mom opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again.
“Oh Daddy, don’t go.” Kicking off her shoes, Connie curled up next to him. “I promised that you would come to the set and read for the crew, like the Ten Commandments, or something.”
He gave Connie a hug and a smile. “I don’t have to go tomorrow. I can leave on the weekend.” They discussed trains and times and who would drive whom to the station, while Hank swung his feet where they dangled over the arm of the chair.
As if some faucet of his brain was leaking, another memory dripped down.
Hank was in his bedroom with a girl. The door was open, Joaquin in the house, everything above board in terms of propriety. The girl, a friend from high school, more than a friend, had dug out a box of old photographs and gazed a long time at one of Hank’s Grandpa Joel and Grandma Annette.
She tapped the photograph with one well-manicured finger, her hair, the color of night woven with the Northern Lights, falling down to hide her face. Hank remembered admiring the swell of her breasts under her sweater, the curve of her butt under her plaid shirt as she lay on his bed, feet in the air. She had grown silent, staring at the photo for so long that he crawled across the floor from his desk chair to tease her about being rude.
“No,” she said, her voice only slightly accented with Spanish. “This,” she tapped it again, “is important. A message from the past.”
Hank sat next to her on the bed. His arm brushed hers but she didn’t seem to notice. He looked at the photo, recognized old Grandpa Joel and Grandma Annette, a woman in a flowery hat.
A fist turned under Hank’s heart, causing him to sit up, grab a sharp breath, remembering the girl and the photo.
“This,” she had said, eyes wide with pleasure and confidence, “Look at what is behind them, on the mantle. The little man and woman. The man is thinking, I hope I don’t outlive her, and the woman is thinking, I hope I outlive him. But it wasn’t to be.”
He wanted to search for more memories, but a door clanged shut somewhere in his mind.
“Hank, I’m talking to you. I wish you would pay attention.”
Bess Cleveland’s voice flowed from the girl’s as Hank tried to remember what happened after she told him the truth of the photo.
He looked at Mom, who was standing in front of him. “I want you to drive your dad to the train. If you don’t get your act together, Henry, I’ll make you go with him.”
Mom’s pupils dilated as she pulled on her cigarette. She fumbled the words if you don’t, an unusual and glaring mistake in one so careful but she was either nervous about something to do with the twins’ contracts or she was drunk and it was probably both. But Hank wasn’t doing anything wrong. He never did anything wrong. Or if he did, his parents never knew about it because they never paid attention.
And then his mother jerked her gaze toward the hallway, a sign that she wanted to talk to him alone without making a fuss in front of the others.
“Time to take off my shoes,” she said rather too gaily, but no one seemed to be listening. Carl’s feet were on the coffee table as he stretched out reading the paper, Connie tapped her fingers along the back of the couch and hummed a song Hank had never heard before, reciting phrases and jerking her body around as if she were dancing in place. Dad had a script in front of him and his mouth moved as he murmured the words.
So much for Grandpa Joel. More words were spent on the broken figurine.
Mom led Hank upstairs. A cold pit yawned inside him, eating up and swallowing the intriguing hint of pleasure in remembering his afternoon with The Girl.
Mom led him to his small, serviceable and private bedroom in the back of the house, overlooking palms and city. He didn’t spend much time in it any more, except to sleep and dress, and he kept it neat. Clothes folded and put away, closet door shut, bicycle magazines and books in an orderly row in the book case. His desk held a pad of paper, pencils lined up, a battered typewriter he hadn’t touched in two years.
Sitting on his desk chair, Mom kicked off her shoes and hunched over as if the stiff rod of cool correctness in her back had broken. Hank hopped onto his bed, fingering Susan’s lighter in his pocket.
Leaning back on his elbows Hank waited for the inevitable speech, delivered in proper lawyerly fashion, about how he had to be more supportive of the twins at this difficult time. Having heard the speech many times in different modes throughout his life, he could have recited it by heart.
Instead silence ticked away between them, while Hank waited and watched his mother make squares and rectangles of the pencils on his desk. After a few moments of this, Mom turned toward him, undid the buttons of her jacket, and stretched out her legs.
“I want you to talk to your sister. She is going through something and I can’t get it out of her. It’s always excuses and don’t worry and leave me alone.” Mom’s voice quivered, from fatigue maybe? She never showed anyone how the life she had chosen was eating away at her.
“It’s not easy being a mother and a business manager at the same time. Although I suppose running a home is like running a business. Just that most women don’t have the training I have had.”
This was certainly true, Hank was thinking. Mom fell silent again, turned back to the desk, formed the pencils into a row and ran her fingers over them, rolling them back and forth.
Hank’s warning-system turned up a notch. When Mom started fiddling with things, her buttons, her earrings, her nylons, she was getting ready to reveal something bad.
“There’s something else.” Mom didn’t look at Hank. She watched her pencil game instead, lids blinking mascara-brushed lashes over her blue eyes, a strand of golden hair free from the hairspray to hang dreamily along her chin line.
“I haven’t told anyone this and I don’t want you to either, especially not your father, not until I say so.”
As Hank sat up, his gut tightened. Mom shifted in her chair, and looked at him, stabbed him with a look he had never seen before. Fear? no—terror?
But the look was gone a second later, an imagining of Hank’s mind and heart. And the moment was thoroughly gone when they heard Connie shouting, running up the steps, along the hall into her room and slamming the door.
Hank watched as his mother collected herself, rearranged her face into her courtroom mask; professional, cool. Getting up, she picked up her shoes, approached, touched Hank’s shoulder. “Later. I have to deal with this. You understand.”
It was never a question but an assumption that Hank understood Constance and Carlisle Cleveland were driving the Cleveland family, a precision engine of finer quality than that of a Rolls or Porsche. And that Mom had given up her rarified career as a trial lawyer to manage the twins’ lives as they climbed the starry ladder of entertainment success.
Hank watched his mother leave, heard her knock on Connie’s door, go in, listened to sounds of sobs and cursing. He decided that whatever emotion he had seen on his mother’s face had never been there. It was easier that way. It was the way Mom would have wanted it. But it stuck there, like a sliver, and he couldn’t quite pull it out.
Stretching back on his bed, Hank waited, wondering if Susan were still at the hospital. Below he could hear the clanking of china as Joaquin set the table for dinner.
A movement at his open door caught his eye and Carl leaned there, chin low
ered, scanning Hank’s room.
“Must be that time of month.”
Hank nodded. Connie’s rages did seem to occur routinely every twenty-eight days.
“This room looks like a monk’s cell.” Carl stuck his hands in his pockets. “Everything so neat it gives me the creeps.”
Shrugging, Hank waited for Carl to get bored and go away.
Pulling out the scarf he had worn earlier, silk paisley, Carl wound it around his hand. “She’s been even crazier lately, though. I don’t know what’s the matter with her.”
Monk’s cell. Everyone comes to Padre Hank with their problems. Hank never had to do or say anything except drive people around and carry their baggage. Nobody wanted him to talk. They did all the talking and he just waited.
Used to Hank’s silences, Carl continued. “I don’t get it. She seems healthy, you know—her dancing is unbelievable. The studio is noticing. Maybe it’s the pressure.” A frown pulled down those beautiful lips. “I think she’s thinking about splitting up the act.”
Sitting up, Hank couldn’t tell if Carl were talking about Mom or Connie. If this were true the Cleveland family was about to undergo another upheaval. Maybe that was what Mom was going to tell him.
Seeing Hank’s quizzical look, Carl sneered. “Yeah, I hope she does. It’s making me think I am having rag rages, working with two women all the time. I’d like to dance with a man.” He twirled, executed a neat tap dance, and bowed. Then let his wrist drift down limply.
This was funny. Carl was no more a fag than Dad was a matinee idol. A snort escaped Hank’s lips, and seeing that he’d gotten a reaction from him, Carl bowed, and his continual haughty smirk had returned. “Thank you Father Hank. Three Hail Mary’s for my confession?”
“Twenty-four, and self-flagellation.”
Carl’s right eyebrow worked up and down. Hank had seen Carl practicing in front of a mirror for hours to get his eyebrows to do that.