The Rothman Scandal

by Stephen Birmingham

  “One of them said it needed rethinking, didn’t he? And didn’t I rethink it—right from the top?”

  “It’s still a lousy play.”

  “I know why you’re saying that!” she cried. “It’s because you don’t want me to have any success! Because you’re a failure! Because you weren’t made a general partner! Because you were passed over in favor of a younger man. Failure!”

  “You know why I was passed over? Because you wrote to Ed Meecham in the home office and asked him for a hundred thousand dollars to produce your play. That was a crazy thing to do, Lois—a really crazy thing to do behind my back.”

  “Failure! Failure-failure-failure-failure!”

  That was when she heard her father hit her, heard her mother scream, and heard her fall back awkwardly against the kitchen table.

  She pressed her pillows against her ears.

  Later, she awoke to the sound of music playing. She tiptoed to her bedroom door, opened it a crack, and saw a strange sight. A Strauss waltz was playing on the record-player, and they were dancing slowly about the living room, dipping, turning. Her father was wearing his tuxedo—it fitted him a little tightly, since he had probably not worn it since his high-school senior prom—and her mother was wearing a long, red, beaded strapless evening gown with a full skirt. She had washed and ironed her long light brown hair, and it swung smoothly against her back in the rhythm of the waltz. The waltz ended, and another record dropped on the turntable, and now their bodies moved together to the languorous, gliding, erotic tempo of the tango.

  In the morning, she found her father sitting on the step of the breezeway. He had got his Toro lawnmower out, but had not started it up.

  “Where’s Mom?” she asked.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  “Are you going to get a divorce, Daddy?” she asked him. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I think perhaps you should.”

  “No, it’s too late for that,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “She’s gone,” he said flatly.

  “Where?” she asked, suddenly panicked.

  “It’s a place called the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Your mother’s had a nervous breakdown, Alexandra.”

  “How long will she be gone?”

  “A few weeks, perhaps. We really don’t know, at this point. They came for her early this morning.” He looked out across his lawn. “Look,” he said, almost absently, and pointed.

  At first she didn’t see what he was pointing at. Then, as she moved out across the grass, she saw them—many livid yellow splotches across the dark green grass. There were more wherever she looked, in ugly, angry shapes and sizes—some large, some small, some in shapes suggesting orbiting planets, others streaked like the tails of comets. There had been a dispute about a neighbor’s collie, who had been prone to relieving himself on Jeffrey Lane’s lawn, leaving brown spots. But it would have taken an army of dogs to create this relentless pattern of yellowed blotches on the grass. “Daddy, what happened to your lawn?” she sobbed.

  He pointed again, and she saw several empty white-and-blue Clorox bottles that had been tossed into the shrubbery.

  “She did this,” he said in a toneless voice. “She did this last night. I was holding her in my arms, trying to calm her. And she suddenly jumped out of bed and ran out naked into the night. And did this.”

  It was then, at that precise moment, she sometimes thought, that she decided that, somehow, she had to get away from that benighted household. The decision thrilled her with its stunning simplicity, its terrifyingness. Oh, seventeen was an awful age, the worst age for a girl who had been betrayed by her mother and who had lost her father to fecklessness and despair. It was a terrible age, and also the perfect age for her to be setting her sights on something huge and bright and dangerous and indefinable and far away. One thought’s impulse later, and it would have been too late.

  “I was born in the wrong century,” her mother said to her once, many years later, when she had gone to visit her mother at one of the series of hospitals and sanatoriums that her mother would go into and out of for the rest of her life. This one was a particularly pretty place. It was set on a hilltop, surrounded by lawns dotted with big old shade trees, live oaks and elms, and there were many graveled walks and tanbark trails winding among the trees. The place had been designed to suggest a small New England college town, and the grounds were called its campus. Even her mother’s room there was pretty, Alex had decided, though it was small and simple—a narrow bed, a comfortable chair, a chest of drawers, and a television set turned resolutely against the wall. Bright floral chintz curtains hung at the single window, and the only other decorative touches were a tall crucifix above her bed, and aquatints of Jesus and the Virgin Mary hung on either side. These were “my family,” she explained to Alex. Since giving up playwriting, Lois had become very religious and, the nurses told Alex, much of her mother’s time was spent alone in her room, kneeling by her bed in prayer, though she occasionally took walks outside, pausing to sit on one or another of the wooden benches that were placed wherever there happened to be a pleasing view.

  “I should have been born in the nineteenth century, in Paris,” her mother said, as they strolled, arm in arm, along one of the tanbark trails. “I should have been born into the world of Henri Bergson and Massenet, and Ibsen and Strindberg, Tchaikovsky and César Franck. Those were the sort of people who would have understood me. In the little cafés on the Left Bank, La Flore and Brasserie Lipp, or in the Latin Quarter, I would have been a beautiful bohemian, and I would have had many friends. At night, I would have joined the gypsy dancers in Montmartre, and clicked my ivory castanets with the flamencos of Andaluz. A dissolute duke would have made love to me, and praised my silky skin and Roman nose. I would have painted my eyelids with ochre and rouged my lips bright red, and have danced the night away. Then, when my play opened at Le Théâtre Français or L’Odéon—the play no one knew I was secretly writing—and the cries of Auteur, Auteur! rang out through the audience, I would have stepped out into the footlights of center stage, that perfect circle of light, and taken my bow, while the audience tossed roses onto the stage.” She had smiled a small, wry smile. “But instead, I was born in nineteen twenty, and let myself be trapped in a squirrel cage by the banks of the Platte River. It was the river, and all those endless rows of corn, that made me crazy.”

  How had Alex spent her days that summer? Strange as it seemed, she had become a hitchhiker. She never talked much about that period in her life, probably because she didn’t really understand it. On certain days she would leave the house, where there was nothing to do anyway, and walk down Old State Road 27 to where it met the four-lane, stick out her thumb, and hitch a ride to Kansas City. Why Kansas City? Simply because it was the nearest town of any size at all. It never occurred to her that there might be anything dangerous about this. Missouri was considered a safe place. No one had heard of drugs then. The Lanes’ front door was never locked. Sometimes the people who picked her up were neighbors, on their way to the city to do some shopping, but just as often they were strangers. That was how she met Skipper.

  “Hop in,” he said, reaching across the seat of his yellow Corvette to open the door for her. He offered his hand. “Name’s Jim Purdy,” he said easily, “but call me Skipper. Everybody does.”

  For a moment she thought he was the same tall blond man she had seen with her mother in Mr. Standish’s store years ago, grown only a little older. He was certainly tall and blond, with wide and curious blue eyes. Then she decided that he merely bore a strong resemblance to that man who had frightened her mother so, but, just in case, she asked him.

  “Do you know Lois Lane?”

  “No, can’t say as I do,” he said. “Should I?”

  “She’s a playwright in Paradise.”

  “A playwright in Paradise! Boy, that sounds like a nifty job!”

  “Paradise is the name of this little town,” she said. And she added, a l
ittle lamely, “She’s my mother.”

  “Well, I can’t say as I know your mom,” he said. “I’m not from these parts. I’m just in K.C. for a two-week gig. Had the day off, and thought I’d see a bit of the countryside. But I like the sound of that—a playwright in Paradise.” And as he drove along he began to sing. “‘Hold my ha-a-a-and, I’m a playwright in Paradise.…’” He had a pleasant voice, soft and humorous. “Where you headed?”

  “K.C.,” she said, though she did not usually call it that. Local etiquette dictated that it was bad form to refer to Kansas City as K.C., just as it was vulgar to call St. Louis St. Louie.

  “Take you all the way,” he said. “That’s where I’m headed back to. Got a gig tonight.”

  “What do you do, Mr. Purdy?”

  “Call me Skipper, everybody does. I ride the circuit.”

  “The circuit?”

  “The rodeo circuit. Bareback bronco busting, calf roping, steer wrestling—that sort of thing.”

  “You do all those things?”

  “Well, not all at once,” he said with a laugh. “But I can do all that stuff. What you do each night depends on the draw.”

  “The draw?”

  “For each act, we draw out of the hat. It’s all in the draw, what each guy gets to do each night, and the draw’s important because some stunts pay better than others—the more dangerous ones. So you hope to get a good draw, but you never know until the draw.”

  “It sounds exciting.”

  “Exciting? Well, it’s hard work, but the pay is good. It better be, because by the time you’re forty you’re a has-been. You ever been to the rodeo?”

  “Never.”

  “Want to come tonight? Bring a friend? I get two free tickets for every show.”

  “I’m expected home for dinner tonight,” she said.

  “Well, if you can ever get your mom, the playwright in Paradise, to let you stay in town late, just call the arena and ask for Skipper Purdy, and I’ll arrange it. We’re here until the fourteenth. Then it’s Wichita.”

  “Thank you—Skipper,” she said. And then, “How did you get the name Skipper?”

  He chuckled. “You really want to know?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, back in ’fifty-six, I was in Pueblo, Colorado, and that night my draw was to wrassle this big old Brahma bull. It was a real good draw, and I’m real happy. So—big bull comes roarin’ out of the gate, see, and he’s already fightin’ mad because they’d gave him a little flick of the switch, see, just to spice things up for the customers. So big bull heads straight for me, see, and I grab him by the horns, see, to try to force his head down between his legs, like I always do. But all at once that big bull brings his head up—hard—under my chest, and that bull tosses me—up—up into the air—and I did a double somersault. Later, a buddy of mine said, ‘That bull skipped you around the arena like he was skippin’ a pebble across a pond.’ That’s where the name came from, and it sort of stuck.”

  “Goodness,” she said. “Were you hurt?”

  “Naw. Couple of busted ribs. Not enough to make me miss the next night’s show, and of course the customers loved it.”

  As they entered the outskirts of the city, he said, “Let me know where you want me to drop you off.”

  “Oh—anywhere.”

  He gave her a quizzical look. “Anywhere?”

  “Yes. It doesn’t matter. I like to walk around. Sometimes I look at the stores. Sometimes I like to walk up on the bluff and look at the place where the two rivers meet.”

  They stopped for a traffic light, and she felt his blue eyes studying her intently, while she kept her gaze straight forward at the road ahead.

  “Don’t you ever get nervous, thumbing rides like this?” he said. “There’s some dangerous characters on the road out here. Dangerous character could pick you up.”

  “Oh, there’re no dangerous characters around here,” she said, even though she knew this was not entirely true. And she did not tell him that she kept an eight-inch hatpin in her purse.

  The car moved forward again. “You don’t look to me like the kind of girl who should be thumbing rides,” he said. And then, “Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  “That would be very nice.”

  Presently he pulled off the road into the parking lot of a Dairy Queen.

  Inside, he ordered a black coffee, and she ordered a Coca-Cola. They sat opposite each other at one of the little tables, and she could still feel the blue eyes studying her over the rim of his coffee cup. “Funny,” he said at last, “but you strike me as a young lady without a plan.”

  “Oh, I have a plan,” she said, though she could not at that point have told him what it was.

  “I have a theory about you,” he said.

  “Oh? What’s that?”

  “I have a theory that something big is on your mind. Something’s holding you down, but you don’t want to be held down. I think you could do with a bit of foxing up.”

  “Foxing up? What does that mean?”

  “It’s an expression we use on the circuit. You know what a mope is? You know what a kneeler is?”

  “No.”

  “Well, a mope is mostly a bronco, and a kneeler is mostly a steer, but a mope can be either a bronco or a steer that won’t perform for you. You know, when a cowboy jumps up on a bronco bareback, you expect him to give you a little action. That’s what the crowd came to see, right—a little action? You may think the crowd’s cheerin’ for the cowboy, but they’re also cheerin’ for that bronco, hopin’ to see that bronco knock that cowboy on his ass, pardon my French. Crowd came to see that bronco give your cowboy a good hard ride. But sometimes that bronco’ll just stand there. We call him a mope. Same thing with a steer. When you’re wrassling a steer, the crowd wants that steer to wrassle you back. When he won’t, he’s a mope, too. Or sometimes the old steer’ll just kneel down in front of you, meek as a lamb. That’s what we call a kneeler. When you’ve got an animal that won’t give the crowd a good show for its money, when he’s a mope or a kneeler, the guy like me has got to do something to give him some get up and go—fox him up, we call it.”

  “How do you do that, Skipper?”

  “Well, with a mopey pony you can use your spurs. That’ll usually get him going. With a mopey steer—well, that’s a little different story.”

  “What do you do with a steer?”

  He grinned and lowered his eyes. “Well, it’s not exactly the sort of thing I’d tell a nice, well-brought-up young lady,” he said.

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Well, if you think you got a steer who’s gonna be a mope or a kneeler, there’s a thing you can do just before he leaves the holding pen to fox him up. What you do is—” And his look now was humorous, but also sly. “Look,” he said, “there’s only one way to put it. What you do is, just before he leaves the holding pen, you lift up that steer’s tail, and rub his ass with a little turpentine. That makes that steer go just about crazy. That really foxes him up. It’s like a fox bit that old steer in the rear end. Back in the corral, we call a can of turpentine a can of fox. Now tell old Skipper what he can do to fox you up.”

  There was no particular innuendo in that unexpected invitation, and yet, in a way, there was, and she felt her cheeks grow hot and there was a ringing in her ears, and a sudden tingle of apprehension traveled from the back of her throat to the pit of her stomach. It was not quite a thrill of fear, though fear was a part of it. It was also a thrill of excitement, of danger, of somehow entering some new and unmapped territory of the unknown and perhaps unknowable. What does the paddler feel when he hears, just ahead of his kayak on the unexplored river, the first rumble of the approaching rapids? It was like that feeling, or as though she had all at once become lost in a field of tall corn, and must quickly decide which row to follow to find her way out. She took a deep breath, but no words would come out.

  He tilted himself back in his tippy Dairy Queen chair, spread his legs, clasped h
is hands behind his head, and flexed his muscles, smiling at her in a lazy way through half-closed eyes. She stared at him, dumbstruck. He was not handsome in a conventional, movie-star sense, but his face had a kind of rugged, muscular beauty. Tilted back in his chair like that, he was all untamed muscle. His arm muscles swelled the light fabric of his checked cowboy shirt, and his leg muscles stretched the taut denim of his tight Levi’s, and she was acutely aware of the bulge between his legs. Suddenly she was certain she could actually smell his sex—a hot, milky odor—though, looking back, it was probably just the normal odor of the Dairy Queen. Even to this day she could not pass a Dairy Queen without remembering that wild smell, that moment of violent confusion, and the inner shudder of animal arousal. Wasn’t it strange, she sometimes thought, that a whole area of one’s life could be polarized around some small, mundane image. Her first experience with sex would always be connected with that afternoon at the Dairy Queen, where everything seemed to happen at once, though nothing actually happened at all.

  She began talking very rapidly, as though talking could cure the sudden dizziness she felt. She began talking about everything. She told him about Paradise, and the Ladies’ Benevolent Society, and about Annie Merritt and her mother’s sewing machine, and the clothes she designed and that they had made together, and she told him the little rhyme she had composed about Annie’s backwardness. She told him about her father and his zoysia lawn, and about her mother running for the school board and losing, and about the man they had seen at Mr. Standish’s store years ago, who looked in many ways like Skipper himself, though not really, and about her mother and her plays, and about how difficult it had been to find an agent, and about the Lunts of Genesee Depot, Wisconsin, who had returned her mother’s playscript, unopened, just yesterday, with a stamp that said UNSOLICITED MERCHANDISE. She told him about her parents’ quarrels over housekeeping, the play, and money. She told him about everything except the episode with Dale Smith and the hog-pile on the school playground, and the fact that her mother had been taken to a mental hospital in Topeka. And when she had told him everything but those two things, she stopped, out of breath.