by Jill Zeller
He said, “Your father doesn’t want to go to Oklahoma. Bad memories, I think.”
There it was again, the polished certainty of a man who had lived with the Clevelands since before Hank was born.
“I’ll take him to the train on the back of my bike. Think he’ll like that?”
In truth Hank didn’t want to go at all. He didn’t want to miss a moment with Susan, watching her draw or paint or crumple a rejected design and toss it into a pile near the garage door.
And she needed his help more than ever now. She was building a kiln.
Hank had never built anything in his life, and he wondered if Susan understood how it was to be done. She had a set of plans and emphasized how specific it all had to be, which made Hank feel even more inadequate. She purchased the materials, bricks and mortar, a cast iron door, paid a skeptical plumber to lay a gas line to a place near the back fence with Joseph’s last paycheck from the cemetery.
Together they suffered through building the walls, getting the mortar mix all wrong, watching the bricks slide and crack. Hank wondered why Susan didn’t call one of her colleagues from the Potteries to ask for advice, but she refused. Every late morning and afternoon she left for the hospital, stayed the entire time for visiting hours while Hank fussed and considered the kiln and slowly built the thing. It was not quite done by the next Saturday, when he was to drive Dad to the train station.
He considered not showing up to take Dad. Dad could call a taxi. The family had money, but Dad hated spending money on taxis; he liked to ride around in cars or drive himself, and Hank had to admit it was cool to drive the Cadillac. But the kiln was almost done. Susan wasn't home, still at the hospital, as Hank smoothed the layer of slick clay on the interior, set the cast iron rack inside, tightened the vents and tested the fuel over and over.
The day was warm—it hadn’t rained in the past week, and as Hank bicycled home he pulled off his shirt and tied it around his waist. His shoulders and back were already bronzed from the sun while he worked on the kiln.
In spite of the task before him, Hank was in a very good mood. Dad, however, was not in a good mood as Hank swept into the driveway, hopped off his bike, ran into the house for a drink of water. Waiting near the front door, his matching luggage beside him, he pointed at his watch. He carried a heavy gray overcoat, a strange juxtaposition to the heat of the balmy Southern California winter day.
“If I miss this train because of you, I’ll send you back to the gypsies who brought you here.”
Hank shrugged, gave what he hoped was a look of contrition. No, he would never hear the end of it. Both Mom and Dad would devote more words to it than was necessary.
Dad eyed him over his reading glasses, as if, Hank thought, he was seeing his youngest son for the first time. Hank wondered if his new-found life showed somehow, new glaze painted on his skin as if he were a line of figurines of half-naked men, well-muscled and athletic.
But Dad turned away a moment later, as if knowing that to ask the question would get him either a frustrating nothing or more information than he really wanted. Smiling, Hank pulled on his shirt and picked up the two suitcases, neither of them really very heavy, and followed Dad out to the car, already parked in the driveway by Joaquin, who in addition to cooking, also washed the cars.
The drive through downtown LA to Union Station usually took around 40 minutes. Hank was a careful driver—the twins always complained he was too sedate behind the wheel, like an old woman. Dad didn’t seem too agitated, because he preferred that Hank take Sunset the entire way, avoiding the congestion of Wilshire. Hank turned on the radio and found a noisy swing band, the sort of music Dad detested.
The first thing Dad did was roll down his window, push in the lighter, and take a cigar out of his pocket. Mom didn’t allow Dad to smoke cigars in the house.
“You’ve been busy. You got a job or something?”
Hank considered his answer carefully. “Yes, I have a job. I’m helping a friend do some remodeling.”
Giving him a sideways glance, Dad nodded and sucked on his panatela and made no reply, as if that were all that needed to be said. Relief settled deep into Hank’s stomach.
“I want you to keep an eye on your mother.” Dad’s head was turned away, but his voice, the booming, velvet tones, were clear and precise. “I think she’s showing signs of strain. Just—keep an eye on her.”
Keep an eye on Mom. Talk to Connie. And Hank still didn’t know or want to know what Mom tried to tell him the other night. He should hang out a shingle as the Cleveland’s personal psychiatrist. Or spiritual counselor.
Dad took Hank’s silence as assent, and the rest of the way to the station he flipped through his perpetual script, rehearsing vowels and consonants and inflections. Hank stared through the windows and manned the great car like the captain of a ship through a busy harbor, and wished he were on his way out to sea.
Six
Hank had no choice but to accomplish his assigned family tasks this same weekend.
The Cleveland family attended an innocuous Methodist church in Hollywood. All went, as a group; Bess Cleveland’s assumption that a Sunday at church together was never to be missed was never questioned. The facade was laughable to Hank, and the twins . Dad played his role perfectly, and Mom inevitably relished the autograph-seeking that went on after a service delivered by a young reverend whose looks made him more suitable for Hollywood heartthrob than spiritual advisor.
Tomorrow morning, after the church scene, was usually a time when Hank oiled and tuned the Peugeot and cycled to the shore for a sixty-or-more mile round trip. He’d sacrifice his ride to corner his mother and sister and listen to their voices and give them all the attention they craved and that would be that.
But he easily squirmed out of his obligations when Susan asked him to spend Saturday night with her.
The kiln was finished, the night unseasonably warm. When he cycled back to her house after leaving Dad at the Station, they celebrated with a bottle of wine and the firing of a pig-head cookie jar. Dinner was hamburgers on Susan’s rusty grill. Hank brought out the radio and plugged it in and they danced to Harry James and Duke Ellington. Susan, to Hank’s astonishment, had gotten rid of her phonograph, something about Joseph breaking all her records.
And then they made love, wrestling on the bed, sheets and blankets sliding to the floor, skin to skin, smells of candle wax and cinnamon. Hours after, Hank lay looking at the special geography of Susan’s body as she slept with her back to him, moonlight through the parted curtains providing the back drop to the landscape.
He was thinking of the broken marquis and the crowd of figurines in Susan’s studio. He thought of Grandfather Joel, his son on the way to Oklahoma City, sitting in the lounge car with a cocktail and chatting up pretty girls.
Getting up, he pulled on a robe that Susan lent him, an old flannel plaid thing of Joseph’s, smelling of cedar-lined closets and cigarettes. He walked through the silent house into the yard, across the icy grass to the studio. The kiln was still warm, the piglet jar still inside. Cool-down or something was called for, Susan said. Hank thought of the piglet alone in the kiln, a lonely pet tied outside.
He wondered at his sad mood. He should feel content and pleased with himself, getting his wish like this, a night with Susan. But grief tugged at him. Maybe it was because the grandfather he barely knew had died. Maybe it was because it was January. Maybe because he somehow he knew this was the first and last time he could stay with her.
A pair of hands slipped around him and into the pockets of the robe. Susan’s hair tickled his neck. He turned and kissed her.
She knelt, opened the kiln door, extracted the piglet jar, carried it carefully into the studio and set it on a bench. A little heater on an extension cord—not a safe feature of the studio, but good enough until a wire could be run from the house—kept the place comfortable for the ceramics.
“When my grandfather died, a figurine fell off the mantle.” Hank didn’t
realize he’d said this aloud until he saw Susan looking at him thoughtfully.
“You didn’t tell me your grandfather died.”
Shrugging, Hank stuck his hands into his armpits. His feet were cold.
“I didn’t even know him. But my dad said the figurine fell off the mantle, and then the phone rang. It was Aunt Hope, telling him their father was dead.”
He described the figurine to her, and its companion the marquess. Her eyebrows traveled upward as she listened.
“Meissen figures. Could be the Kaendler period. Your mother is right, worth about $1000. Each. More for the set.” Susan scanned her shelves, prototypes of animals and people in various poses, extras in a movie hoping to be noticed.
She was silent a long while, then, “She died long before, the little marquess. And waited to push him over the edge, waited all those years, because he loved her more than life, and she despised him.”
A cold hand swept over Hank, and he looked at Susan, wondering what in her mind had made her say that. He knew nothing about her past, just that she and Joseph had grown up in this house, inherited it, lived in it after the war. She was a WAC or WAVE in the war, worked for somebody. She would not say her parents were dead and she would not say if they were alive. She would not say anything about that. Nor if she had been married before, or even had children. She didn’t want him to ask and he had never asked, and the idea of her telling him all this frightened him anyway. He might fall out of love with her if he knew too much about her.
And it was so like what the Girl had said, the girl who sat on his bed and looked at the photograph of his grandparents.
Susan knew about Hank’s brother and sister, his cycling mania, where he was born. But she didn’t seem interested in more, and even when he told her these things, her gaze wandered and she seemed to go somewhere else in her head.
But she had relayed to him knowledge of a story about his grandparents that he knew had to be true. Maybe she knew this because she had worked with small clay models of people and animals all her life. She had gone to some fancy design school, he knew, having seen a certificate and diploma in her bedroom. But there was no evidence of early artwork. Her house was vacant of the things she had made over the years.
But there was more, that made him sway and turn, so she wouldn’t see his disequilibrium. The broken memory of the Girl saying the same thing. The only memory of the Girl he could summon, and the effort to remember more hammered in his head, deafening him.
Susan was saying, “This is greenware, what we call clay figures or dishes that have not been glazed.”
She was looking at the pig head. Hank thought of the broken head of the marquis, how Carl had been peering inside it. Only the top of this pig’s head was sitting on the bench beside it. The pig now an empty bowl ready to receive, and then give up, whatever was put in there.
“I’ll think about what colors to use tomorrow.” Yawning, she turned and walked out of the garage, her hips moving from side to side in her chenille robe.
When Hank woke up Sunday morning he turned to find Susan gone. It was late, sun well over the horizon casting a long shadow of the front palm onto Susan’s lawn and the next one and the next. Disappointed with himself, Hank had hoped to be the first to arise, but his sojourn in the middle of the night, and it taking him quite a while to get back to sleep, had caused him to doze far longer than he planned.
And by now of course, his absence from home would be noticed. He didn’t want to think about that.
The kitchen was silent and cold. Coffee on the stove was lukewarm. It was as if Susan had been up for hours. For a jittering moment, Hank worried that she had already left for the hospital.
He found her in the studio. She had begun to paint the piglet head, cans of mixed glazes surrounding her, including several of a powdery substance; the talc from Death Valley she was always talking about,.
Ignoring him as he entered, she painted dull shades, which she said would give the little pig’s jowls a healthy blush in the fire. Hank propped himself on a stool and watched.
After a long silence, broken only by the creaking of her chair as she worked and the chattering of sparrows in the grass outside, she finally spoke.
“Joseph is coming home three days early.”
Hank sagged as if he had been punched in the stomach. “When?”
Glancing at him between two strands of hair loose from the scarf she had wrapped around her head, her look warned him.
“Tuesday.”
Sighing, Hank got up, began picking random things off the shelves: a heavy brush, a jar labeled “slip”, a page of stencils. His chest squeezed him, making his face hot and his eyes dry. Why couldn’t she just leave Joseph there, make the VA hospital take care of him until he was normal again, then get him an apartment and a job and a wife?
“Now don’t pout.” Susan’s voice was firm, short, different from the wonderment of her pronouncement about the figurines last night. “There’s more. I have to get a nurse. I can’t take care of him by myself when I go back to work. She’ll be a nursing student, a live-in. The doctor is finding one for me.”
Now Hank stared at her, unbelieving. The coldness in her voice. But also the acceptance. Of course she would take Joseph home again. Of course she would rearrange her life around Joseph. Hank’s mind whirled with hurt.
Susan glanced at him again, then at her silly pig. She gently chewed the end of her brush. A fingerprint of pink dotted her chin. Hank waited for the pronouncement about him: that he couldn’t come over any more, they were breaking up. Susan didn’t have time for him. And besides, how could he come for his afternoon trysts with a nurse and Joseph in the house?
“We will have to find another place to meet.” Susan’s words dug into his heart, turned it around. “Actually, I might have a little more freedom with the nurse here.”
“I’ll look into some places,” he said before he could stop himself. Maybe Susan had some place already in mind.
A smirk pulled at the corner of her mouth, as if to say it was funny that a nineteen-year old boy would know of places where lovers could meet.
He shrugged. “My family knows a lot of people. People with cottages they don’t use. Something could be worked out.”
Giving this statement a short nod of approval, Susan went back to her painting. Relief poured through Hank, just as if he had been doused with warm water. No more nights over, like this, but he thought maybe that was a good thing. Familiarity breeds contempt, wasn’t that the old sobriquet?
To hide his joy, he turned and picked up a paper bag the size of peanuts bought at a carnival. Inside was gray powder; more talc, he assumed. He stuck his finger in it.
“Don’t touch that,” Susan said sharply. She squinted at him, the morning sun coming in through the garage window, making her face glow like a lightbulb behind a clear mask.
“The oils from your fingers,” she added, in a tone more kindly. “It can affect the quality of the glaze.”
She let him stay with her until it was time to go to the hospital to visit Joseph. She even asked him to come with her to pick Joseph up on Tuesday, if the nurse wasn’t available. Hank rode home on tires of silk, the wind licking his face and tasting of Susan’s hair.
He got home about midday, his head spinning with how to ask Carl or Connie if they knew who had an apartment or house they weren’t using. After seeing to the Raleigh and lovingly apologizing to the Peugeot for missing their ride this morning, he entered the house to find his mother sitting stiffly in the living room, reading a paper, and looking at him over the edge as if she were a lioness in wait.
Now would come the unpleasantness, but Hank thought he could take it because he was made of light and air and Susan’s lips on his cheek.
Going to his chair by the French doors, opened to fill the room with air scented with eucalyptus, Hank sat in what he hoped would be an obedient pose to accept his punishment for being out all night and missing church.
Mom was in
her bathrobe. Maybe she had come home for a swim on this weirdly warm January day. But something wasn’t quite right. Her hair hung in ragged shanks, and she wore no make-up at all. The last time Hank had seen her look this way, she was home from the hospital after having her appendix out.
“I don’t care that you didn’t come home last night, but it would have been nice if you’d shown up for church.” she said crisply, crumpling the newspaper into her lap. Cigarette butts overflowed the ash tray and the tumbler beside it was half-filled with whiskey and chunks of half-melted ice.
“And thank you for taking your father to the train. But I do care that you ignored my wishes to indulge your own selfish little whims.”
There were odd little catches in her voice, as if she had been speaking in court all day. She didn’t argue cases any more, and she didn’t do half the speechifying she used to, but her voice was ragged and unsure. Her mouth and lips jerked to one side and she touched her throat, swallowing.
Hank tried to remember what Mom’s wishes were this time, besides taking up his role in the pew as the Cleveland’s youngest son. He did take Dad to the station and he did remember Dad asking him to ‘keep an eye on Mom’. But he didn’t dare ask her what she was so pissed about that he didn’t do. Instead, he tried to look chagrinned.
“Sorry, mom.”
“Sorry won’t do it this time, soldier,” Mom said, trying to fold up the paper. She folded it and creased it and thrust it at him.
Little scandals had often come to light for the Clevelands. It was the risk the dancing-singing-orating clan ran in the their rush to infamy. Rising, Hank took the paper from his mother’s hand and read the title of the article folded for his viewing.
Love nest! Cedric Sigfried’s got one in the bush.
The routine hyperbole of the sensation rags filled in the data. The producer’s rumored casting couch claimed another victim, this one thirty years younger than he. She got the part but hints of stalking have arisen now that she had been ‘cast’ away for another ‘casting’ catch.