by Jill Zeller
“Thanks for the help, Hank.”
A little stunned, but knowing the reasons, Hank stepped back. He glanced through the doorway to the dining room, the living room beyond. Joseph had not followed.
“See you Saturday,” he whispered, half-expecting her to say no, to shove him even further away, out the door and into the lawn, maybe into the kiln.
But she nodded quickly, turned away to the cupboard to take down cups and saucers and set them on a tray—just two, Hank saw.
“The nurse will be here any minute,” she said for explanation. Her hands quivered as she moved the cups. Susan giving an excuse for anything was a new thing.
Without a word Hank left, but he looked through the back door window and saw her standing motionless at the stove, watching the coffee.
Getting on his bike soothed him, with the cold rush of the wind, the occasional spatter of water from the trees as he went down the driveway felt as soft and glorifying as Susan’s hair. It had fortunately stopped raining. As he flowed out into the street, a taxi cab pulled up in front of Susan’s house. The nurse apparently had arrived, but he didn’t wait to see if this was Charles Atlas or the battle-axe.
Nine
Dad wired that he would be home the next weekend and Hank again was designated to pick him up at the station. He was due to meet Susan Saturday afternoon at the Lady Windermere Hotel in Santa Monica, where a friend of Connie’s had an apartment he wasn’t using, but they would have to postpone the date for a later time, dinner time, which Susan didn’t like, as she preferred to eat with Joseph. But now Hank was floating at the prospect for taking Susan out to dinner even though there was a chance they might run into someone they knew. Hank had few friends who hung out in Santa Monica, and the only ones who might recognize him were Connie’s or Carl’s friends, and they wouldn’t give a hoot to know what the twins’ little brother was up to.
As for Susan, she didn’t seem to have many friends either. She rarely talked about Sam or the others at the Potteries. When she did talk, it was about her work, the figurines, glazes and clay, as if she was happier in the company of ceramics than people.
Hank didn’t even know if she was happier in his company, either. But he tried not to care, eager for the hours she let him have, hungry for more, but knowing better than to ask for seconds.
But he did ask for money, from Mom, who refused, giving him the lecture about college versus getting a job. Connie slyly gave him twenty bucks, pulled from a stocking hanging in her closet stuffed with bills—her savings account. Carl too contributed, not even asking what it was for, assuming a big date, and gave him advice about the process of seduction for a good twenty minutes before Hank could make an excuse to get away.
When Saturday came, Dad was quiet the entire drive home from the station. A rain squall, rumbling from the Pacific toward the east, astonished everyone in LA with thunder and lightning. Making its appearance next, the sun became the star of the show, introduced by the grumbling storm. In the seat between Dad and Hank was a white box with a black ribbon: Grandfather Joel’s ashes, Dad said in an embarrassed, almost off-hand way.
As Hank pulled into the driveway, Dad at last began to talk. “Wait a minute, don’t go in yet.”
Perplexed, Hank sat with his hands on the wheel, turned off the motor. The car smelled of Dad’s last cigar, a crushed corsage left in the backseat after one of Connie’s many dates, and motor oil. Hank inhaled familiar notes, and something else, a tang he couldn’t quite place.
Placing one knee on the car seat, Dad turned to face Hank. “How is everyone? How is your mother?”
Not having seen much of anyone lately, Hank wondered what he should say. “Mom seems a bit run down, maybe. Working too hard, you know.”
Dad nodded. He scratched an eyebrow. To Hank’s observant eye, he looked well rested and well-fed. Aunt Hope and the relatives must have been cooking a lot out there on the farm.
“I wish I could get her to take a vacation. I’ve been thinking about Havana, or Rio. Gambling. I think Bess would love that.”
Hank thought Mom would like it too, if she could be pried away from her twins. As far as he knew, Mom hadn’t ever set foot in a casino. He nodded in agreement.
“I’d better do it soon,” Dad said, nodding, lips sticking out. His silver voice was almost wistful.
“She’ll fight it. The twins are thinking of splitting up the act, did you know that?”
Dad’s eyes widened in shock, followed by his eyebrows moving in opposite directions in anxiety.
“Are you kidding? Break up the Cleveland Twins? Now when they got their first big break in a movie?”
Hank was sorry he’d said it. No one had confirmed to him one way or the other, but he could tell something was in the air by Connie’s breezy and forced manner, the amount of time Carl spent out, and Mom’s diminishing weight and increased smoking.
Dad shook his head, back and forth. Hank thought Dad had actually come out of his world of voicings and scripts for a moment to think about his wife and children. Worry about them even, something he sometimes did not seemed capable of.
Sighing, Dad opened the car door. A wave of relief swept through Hank as he realized he would get away from all this angst and spend the early evening with Susan. He might, after Susan went home, spend the night in the apartment, walk Santa Monica beach after dark, and try to cadge a drink in the old Speakeasy. But all that would be so much more fun with Susan along. He made up his mind to break rule number one and beg her to stay with him.
Now traffic and Dad’s lonely musings were making him late. He had planned to cycle out there—it was less far than Susan’s bungalow—get there early and shower and dress, but now he gave thought to hiring a car, wondering if his meager amount of cash was enough for that and dinner too. And flowers.
Following Dad inside, he found the place in an uproar. Everyone was home as if they were all waiting for Dad. Connie, sweaty and flushed in a tennis outfit, Carl with not a hair out of place or a wrinkle in his knit golf shirt, and Mom in a forest green suit and a big yellow corsage, just in the act of taking off her hat.
If it had been staged, it couldn’t have been better. There was something in the air, and as Dad walked into the foyer carrying the white box, everyone struck a pose as if the clapboard had been struck.
Hank didn’t wait; dashing up the stairs he pulled together everything he had already planned to bring to the apartment, stuffed it into a small satchel and ran back down. Skirting the stairs and heading toward the kitchen where only his partner in crime Joaquin might make a remark, he hoped he wouldn’t be noticed, but there was to be no such luck today.
“Hank!” Connie’s best theatre voice, booming loudly through the house, stabbed him in the back.
“You have to help us. The driver from the studio is sick—this flu or whatever that’s going around. Someone has to take us to the cocktail party at Cedric’s.”
A slow angry boil started somewhere deep in Hank’s gut. Folding his arms, he leaned against the staircase.
“I have plans,” he said slowly.
Mom separated herself from the twins and walked toward Hank. Behind her, Dad disappeared through the living room arch with the white box. A searching look came over Connie’s face as she gazed at Hank. Carl hung back, watching the entire exchange with an amused expression.
Smelling of Chanel and smoke, Mom stood before him. In her heels, she was as nearly as tall as Hank.
She said in a low voice, “If you will drive them, I will let you borrow the car for your ‘plans’. I’m sure they can arrange rides home.”
This was a tempting offer. Driving the twins into Beverly Hills to the Sigfried mansion would take time, but he could make it up by driving out to Santa Monica instead of cycling.
Connie had already bounded up the stairs like a mountain goat, and Hank could hear the water running for her bath.
Nodding, Hank tried to keep a smile off his face. Mom scanned his eyes, then turning away, clip
-clopped along the tile floor toward the kitchen where Joaquin was already fomenting a volcano of interesting smells.
Carl twirled his sunglasses. “We should get you a little chauffeur’s cap, with a patent leather visor. You would look great. Everyone likes a good-looking chauffeur.”
“And with your new sunglasses, my look would be complete,” Hank said, folding his arms. The angry broil still burned inside him, subdued by the promise of the Cadillac.
“Here. Catch” Carl flung the glasses. Catching them, he put them on, and Carl smirked. “They look better on you. Besides, I have a dozen more upstairs somewhere.”
Oddly, as Hank walked toward the living room, he was disappointed not to be riding his bike out to Santa Monica. His body itched with lassitude, almost achy, and he was eager to push the bike to its limits. He hadn’t taken the Peugeot out for a spin in a while. And Connie wouldn’t be ready for the party for an hour.
But first he phoned Susan to tell her the change of plans. A feminine voice answered, young-sounding, barely accented with Spanish. She told him to wait while she called Susan to the phone.
Not a battle-axe or Charles Atlas. Hank wondered how things were going with Susan and Joseph and the nurse. She sounded professional and cool.
He found himself telling Susan he would pick her up at six, two hours later than planned, and she was silent for a moment, digesting this change of plans, Hank thought.
“What do you mean, ‘pick me up?’”
He told her about the car. He pushed further, telling her she could eat with Joseph early, then have a late supper with him at the hotel. Stopping there, he didn’t push his luck at implying she should stay overnight.
She was silent; Hank thought he heard a voice in the background, Joseph speaking impatiently to the nurse, or to Susan. He waited, not saying anything, listening to her breathe.
“OK,” she said, and the line went dead.
Ten
“Oh my God what is that?” Carl’s voice floated in an exaggerated way through the living room archway. Hank followed its echo, followed by Dad’s best Ten Commandments voice as he proclaimed, “That, my son, is the sarcophagus of Joel Aloysius Cleveland, scion of the Oklahoma wheat fields.”
Entering the room, Hank found Dad and Carl standing before the mantle looking at a garish blue and red urn, emblazoned with the image of Grandfather Joel in the frame of a gilt medallion.
“Hope chose it. By the time I got there, of course, the deed had been done. Pop cremated and the ashes divided between the two of us in matching urns.” Stalking over to the drinks cart, Dad waved his arms, pitched down three glasses, splashed them liberally with scotch, and carried one first to Carl, and then to Hank, who took it, astonished.
“To the old man. May he come back as an ass.” Dad threw back his scotch, and so did Carl, but not before turning a curious glance on Hank, who returned it, equally confused by Dad’s sudden change in personality. Hank sipped the whiskey; it tasted brown and spicy and faintly of gasoline.
“Will it have to stay on the mantle?” Carl tipped his head, looking the urn over. “Will we have Grandfather Joel perpetually observing us from up there?”
Re-filling his glass—Hank didn’t remember seeing his father drink this way—Dad flopped back on the sofa and toasted his father’s visage again.
“For now. Just a reminder that even the most obstinate man on earth can lose his hold on life.”
Exchanging another puzzled glance with Carl, Hank finished his glass of scotch. Carl shuffled ice into his glass, poured more, offered to Hank, who wanted it, but shook his head.
Carl said, “I didn’t know you hated him.”
“I don’t hate him.” Dad undid his tie, flung it down on the floor. “I loved him. I just spent my entire life trying not to be him.”
Hank thought wisely that Dad had succeeded at that, but he wondered what Grandfather Joel thought of it all. Dad certainly had not involved his father in his life in Southern California. The two seemed to be living in separate neighboring countries, lives bordering each other, but neither spoke the other’s language.
Approaching the urn, Hank looked at the photograph etched in it. He wondered how it was done, and by whom. He had never seen this photograph of his grandfather before; indeed, he had seen so few photographs of the old man, just the handful in the box up in his room. Aunt Hope must have the rest of them.
“Don’t touch that,” Dad said, “we don’t want another accident.”
Irritation swung through Hank. People were always telling him not to touch things, as if he was an ungainly klutz. But he noticed something, reminded now of the shattered marquis. Dad had placed the urn in the marquis’ old place. The little marquess faced away, holding up her skirts as if she were stepping in something unpleasant. Turning, Hank glanced at Dad, who was staring into his empty glass.
Carl approached, and seeming to comprehend the irony, turned the marquess so that she had to look at the urn.
“She doesn’t look happy, does she?”
Setting down his glass, Hank stretched. “I’m going for a ride.”
Looking at him with one eyebrow raised, Carl said, “Don’t get lost. You have to drive your sweet little familia to the great lord’s castle so he can have his ass licked by the prettiest women he can assemble into one room.”
“Carl, don’t talk that way,” Dad murmured. His head was back and his eyes closed.
The sun was in Hank’s eyes as he followed the switch-backing road to Griffith Park. His breath blew in his ears and his thighs burned as he stood on the pedals, keeping his cadence steady. Cars brushed past, barely missing him, some with pretty girls who stuck their heads out the windows to watch him.
Once in the park he followed winding drives, going hard, keeping up a good speed. But as he circled and prepared to return home, fatigue laced his muscles and he ached with weariness. As he coasted along Sunset, he wondered if he had pushed himself too hard, pressured by having to be back home at a certain time.
He could, right now, follow Sunset all the way to the shore and buzz south to the Lady Windemere where Susan would be waiting or about to arrive. But he was to pick Susan up at a certain time; he obeyed, today, the rules of the grown-ups, and despite his need to escape his mother’s worn uneasiness, his sister’s careless egotism and his grandfather’s ashes on the mantle, he had to get back to the house.
Connie, annoyed that he had gone for a bike ride, stormed around upstairs, bemoaning lost articles of make-up, whining about her clothes, and tap-dancing, at one point, in the hall just as Hank came up the stairs.
In nothing but white silk panties, she grinned at him as he stopped at the top of the stairs. Wiggling white, pink-nippled breasts at him, she twirled and vanished back into her bedroom.
“I have to get out of this nuthouse,” Hank whispered to himself. If he got a job he could move out, get a room in Venice near Susan. Maybe the Potteries would have him, hire him to sweep up shards of broken piglet cookie jars and dump them into the trash.
Not bothering to shower, just to annoy Connie, Hank waited in the hallway in a white shirt without a tie, corduroy trousers and the sunglasses Carl had given him. Carl waited with him, wearing the same clean golf shirt and slacks, but now with a tan dinner jacket. They waited for Connie so she could make her entrance.
And she did, coming down the stairs in a flared black dress of rustling silk, black gloves, black handbag, and a red heart-shaped pin over her right breast. The neck line plunged and picked up her boobs nicely, and she had little poufy sleeves. The dress was a far more subtle and attractive version than the one she had impulsively shown to Hank. She was smashing.
But Hank said nothing, allowing Carl to sweep forward and take her hand, just as they did in countless dancing scenes in countless rehearsals. Her hair flowed across her shoulders ala Veronica Lake, and she wore tomato-red lipstick.
“You are a dear for driving us, favorite brother. And you look so devil-may-care—wait a minute, did
you take a shower?” She sniffed him, wrinkling her nose.
Hank made no reply, turned and walked toward the door, Connie grizzling to Carl about the general untidiness of baby brothers. The sun hung near the horizon, showering attendant cloudlets with gold and pink; girl clouds, Connie used to say when they were little and she would take Hank for an enforced march around the neighborhood, let’s go find some girl clouds.
A cool breeze swept up the canyon bringing with it the hint of sea and mud. Throwing his valise in the front seat, Hank opened the door for the Cleveland Twins, bowing with a flourish.
“Don’t you dare do that when we get there,” Connie hissed as she crawled in.
Maybe it was the scotch whiskey. Maybe it was the euphoria he always felt after a long ride, but Hank felt buoyant and perfect, and it was really because he was going to see Susan. He was going to dance with her, he was going to see her dance naked in their room and then he was going to fuck her.
From Sunset they descended into Beverly Hills. Carl gave apt directions to Cedric Sigfried’s mansion, which supposedly once belonged to Charlie Chaplin. Hank eased the Cadillac into a line of cars pulling up the drive and stopped near the door, not right at the door reserved for the truly famous, but close enough for Connie to feel appeased.
Without a word, he hopped out, ran around the car, opened the door, and bowed with a flourish. Connie slapped his hand as she got out. Murmuring and careful laughter filtered to Hank’s ears as he dashed around the car and opened the driver door. People in furs and tailored sport coats glanced his way, stopped to look. With one more wave, he slid into the car, watching for a moment, while Connie and Carl were swept into the line of people heading for the main entrance, Connie smiling and mewing, Carl happily absorbed into a clutch of beautiful women.
As soon as the way cleared, Hank got out of there.
By the time he got to Santa Monica his entire body ached, but it was a good ache. The only hitch to it all was a nagging headache, brought on, he supposed, by Carl’s dark glasses. Throwing them onto the dashboard, he left the car in the apartment owner’s parking space and rode the elevator to room 818, top right, overlooking a panorama of Pacific, palms and beach safely hidden behind a veil of night. Except for the sweet salt smell and the thump of the waves, he could be looking through the window of a rocket into the lost reaches of space.