by Unknown
In the meantime he was working continually. In demand, he told us, by many of the top stars, some of whom would not appear in front of a camera unless Matthew Perdu were on the set. Most recently, though, he’d disappointed a number of these talents by signing an exclusive contract with an actor named Lon Chaney.
“When he plays,” Chaney told the studio bosses, “I see the whole movie all at once.”
We only heard from him intermittently after that. Mostly postcards encouraging us to go see this movie or that. After 1927 we didn’t hear from him again. He disappeared.
Liberty and I never went to movies after that either.
That was the year a movie called The Jazz Singer came out.
WHERE THERE’S A WILL…
ROBERT MASELLO
MICHAEL GOT THE message from one of his three housemates, scrawled on a Post-It note. “4 o’clock. Your mom called—your dad died. Come home.” It was stuck on the door of his room.
Michael rented what used to be the dining room of the house, and he had crammed every inch of it with movie scripts, books on writing movies, magazines on the art of screenwriting (Michael felt that he had mastered the craft, but that he still needed to work on the art part), a computer on which to compose his own scripts, a photocopying machine on which to make copies of them. The copy machine had been his one extravagance, but after he’d calculated what he was spending to produce enough copies of each of his scripts to blanket the agents, producers, and studio execs all over town, he figured it was a smart investment.
Now he’d have to come up with the money for a plane ticket home. He’d put aside a few hundred dollars for the next Robert McKee screenwriting seminar, and although he hated to use it up, he really didn’t have a choice. If he had to ask his mother, or worse his brother, to send him a ticket, they’d know he wasn’t quite the Hollywood success story he’d been claiming to be. And that would be about the only thing that could make this whole situation even more depressing than it already was.
The door to his room swung open a crack—it was, after all, a dining room door—and Kevin poked his head in. “You got my note?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, well, I’m really sorry.”
“Thanks.” Michael waited for him to leave, but the head remained.
“So, are you going back to Chicago?”
“Looks like it.”
“ ’Cause I’ve got some friends coming in from out of town,” Kevin said. “Okay if they crash in your room while you’re gone?”
Michael knew that even if he said no, Kevin would go ahead and do it, anyway. “As long as they don’t touch my computer or the copy machine.”
“Cool,” Kevin said, rapping his hand on the door. And then he was gone.
The next morning, Michael caught a flight out of Burbank airport; blissfully, the seat next to him was empty, and he was able to just stare out the window and think about what lay ahead of him. None of it was pretty. His older brother, Richard, would be lording it over one and all, and his mother would be disconsolate and lost. When he’d spoken to her on the phone, she’d sounded like she was a million miles away. Michael wondered what the funeral arrangements would be, and how long he’d really have to stay. Even though he’d grown up there, Chicago had always given him the willies.
As had his father.
The old man was one of those larger-than-life figures, a big man with a loud voice and large hands and a way of greeting everyone, even his worst enemies, with “how goes it, my friend?” He’d clap people on the shoulders, grip their hands between both of his, and smile down at them like he just couldn’t look at them long enough or hard enough. But Michael had his number—he was just reeling them in, making a sale, and he couldn’t have cared less whether they lived or died. His heart was as hard as the imported stone—marble, granite, limestone, slate—that he sold, and his will was pretty much unstoppable; Randolph J. Mountjoy always got what he wanted.
Their house, in fact, was something he’d designed himself, and to Michael it had always resembled a mausoleum—it was grand and vast and, of course, made of more quarried stone than any building outside of Washington, D.C. When the cab pulled up outside the gateposts—ponderous columns with recumbent lions on top—Michael took a long breath before pressing the buzzer. His brother’s voice came over the intercom, and after Michael had identified himself, the front gate unlocked. His brother was waiting in the open door at the top of the stone steps.
“Mom said you wouldn’t be here till later,” he said.
“I got the first flight.”
Neither one of them knew whether to shake hands, embrace, or revert to form and pretty much ignore each other. Richard was two years older, and he’d been everything Michael was not—tall, strong, a star athlete, president of his jock-filled fraternity, and for many years his father’s right hand in the business. It was called “Mountjoy & Sons Stone and Building Supplies,” but Michael had never worked there for anything more than the occasional summer, and even then unhappily. The stone was heavy and hard, and he was forever hurting himself—barking his shins, fouling up orders, getting on the wrong side of the foreman—and his father had never let him forget it.
“Mom’s sleeping,” Richard said. “I gave her some Valium.”
The entry hall was as cold and unwelcoming as Michael remembered it, except that now there were some flowers and wreaths laid around.
“She was sort of out of it when I called,” Michael said. “But she said he had a heart attack?”
“Massive,” Richard said. “Dropped like an ox, right on the loading dock.”
Not a terrible surprise—he’d had two minor “coronary events” in the past year, and Michael had known another could happen at any time. “Were you there?”
“I was out with a client. By the time I got to the hospital, they’d already done everything they could.”
Well, Michael thought, at least he went just like he’d have wanted to. And then he thought, What a cliché. Is everything I think or say this week going to be a cliché? He told himself to take some notes—if he happened to think of anything original over the next few days, there might be some good screenplay material in it.
“Is Sissy here yet?”
“She’s driving down from Milwaukee after work.” Sissy—or Cyndie, as she vainly insisted on being called by her brothers—was a year younger than Michael, and worked as a dental hygienist for a married man they all knew she’d been sleeping with for years. Like their father, he was a big, overbearing son of a bitch, and Michael always found it hard to believe she’d gone out of her way to replicate the old man.
“You can use your old room,” Richard said, and Michael nodded, then started trudging up the winding stairs with his duffel bag.
“I’ll fill you in on the funeral details later,” Richard called up at him. “I’ve got to go back to the office now.”
“Okay, see you later. Thanks for handling all this.” Richard had always been the handler, even when Michael had wished he wasn’t.
“No problem, my friend,” Richard replied. “Who else was gonna do it?”
Michael couldn’t help but notice now—his first note for the screenplay—his brother’s instinctual use of his father’s catchphrase, “my friend.” How long had that been going on?
At the top of the stairs, he turned into his old room, which looked out onto a wooded side yard. This had been his sanctum, and his mother had kept it like a shrine, with everything exactly where he’d left it. His old Oberlin banners still adorned the wall, his theater awards still shone in their glass case, his old clothes still hung in the closet. He moved a few hangers aside to make room for his funeral suit, put his other things in the top drawer of the dresser, then sat on the edge of the bed, next to the wide window. Outside it was another of those cold, bleak Chicago days, with bare black tree limbs etched against a slate gray sky. Michael felt like he was thirteen again.
He was napping when he heard a soft rap on his door
, and his mother’s voice. She came in looking ten years older than when he’d seen her the summer before. Her face was pale and haggard, her blue eyes were going gray, her hair—normally coiffed and expensively tinted—was in disarray. Even the silk robe she was wearing was uncharacteristically rumpled.
“You should have told me you were here,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed and putting one palm—cool and dry—against his cheek. It reminded him of when she’d feel for a fever when he was a kid; sometimes, even when he was faking it in order to miss a test, she’d claim he felt hot and let him stay home anyway. He knew she knew, but they had a bond—two sensitive souls, trapped in a cold, hard place, turning to each other for warmth and understanding.
He sat up and hugged her—her bones felt fragile through the robe—and for a few minutes they talked about his work in Hollywood. Michael assured her his agent had lined up several promising projects, before they circled back to the grim matters more at hand. “Richard is making all the arrangements,” she said, “and I don’t know what I’d do without him. I do know the services will be at noon, tomorrow, at the Covington Funeral Home.”
The fancy place, Michael thought, where all the best families went.
“And the interment will be at Lakeview Park, in the family mausoleum.”
But this was news. “The family mausoleum?”
His mother took a shredded tissue from the pocket of the robe, dabbed at her nose, then said, “Yes. Your father had been building it for the past six months. Of course no one knew it would be needed so soon. Didn’t Richard tell you about it?”
“Not a word.”
“Well, you’ll see it tomorrow. It’s at the highest point in the cemetery, surrounded by trees, overlooking the lake.”
A family tomb? Michael had to suppress a shudder. What was this, some Edgar Allan Poe story? (Another note for his screenplay that he dutifully filed away.) But he shouldn’t have been surprised at this, either—his father had supplied the stone for more mausoleums and tombstones than anyone in the Midwest.
At dinner that night, they ate take-out from an old Italian place their father had always liked. No one wanted to cook, and only Richard seemed to want to eat. Sissy, true to form, was “watching her figure.” She had her mother’s pretty features, but she’d inherited from her dad a large frame and a tendency to put on weight. Over the years, she’d held a lot of jobs, gone adrift at times, and officially declared bankruptcy twice. But this hygienist gig was apparently going to stick, so everyone was more than willing to overlook her little indiscretions with Dr. Schmidt.
“I keep telling my friends at work that my brother writes for the movies, but they always ask me what movies,” she said, carefully scraping the breading off a chicken cutlet with the side of her knife. “Is there anything I can tell them to go see?”
“Maybe next winter,” Michael said. “You know, movies take a long time to get made.”
“But what are you doing for money in the meantime?”
Starbucks was the word that immediately came to mind: Michael worked the morning shift six days a week. “The thing about the movie business is, a lot of times you do rewrites, but you don’t get a screen credit.”
He didn’t have to glance over at Richard, who had assumed his father’s seat at the head of the table, to know that he wore a skeptical expression.
“Have you seen Vacation in Hell?” Michael asked.
“Not yet, but I’ve seen the commercials. Did you work on that?” she asked, eagerly.
Michael tilted his head, modestly; as long as he didn’t actually say he’d written something he hadn’t, he didn’t consider it an outright lie. And he did know the guy who’d written the movie—he always ordered an Espresso Macchiato and a molasses scone.
After dinner, Richard retired to his father’s office—did he ever go home to his own place, Michael wondered, a sleek bachelor pad on Lake Shore Drive?—and Michael sat up with Sissy and his mom in what was called “the great room.” Michael’s private joke had always been, What’s so great about it? It was big all right, but soulless, and over the stone hearth (with a gas-fed flame), there was a huge family photo portrait. His father, of course, occupied pride of place, in a dark suit and a bright red tie bearing the sign of the Masonic Lodge he belonged to—“Whoever heard of a stone salesman who’s not a Mason?” he’d said more than once. “That’s a no-brainer, my friend.” Everyone else in the picture stood uneasily in his shadow. Michael was off on the lower left, and as he had often noted, his image was the only one that did not actually touch or impinge upon anyone else in the picture. Depending on his moods, he had thought that stance to be proudly self-sufficient, or unbearably sad.
His mom kept looking at him with the most mournful expression, and twice got up and squeezed his hand as if she were wringing the last drops of water out of a sponge. Sissy prattled on about the wonders of Milwaukee and something called “fish fry Friday”—“I don’t eat all day Thursday, just so I can go out and have some real fun the next night”—and occasionally dropped some hints about how hard it was to get by on her meager salary. Michael knew that his father had been supplementing her income for years, and it was a source of pride that he had never asked him to do the same for him.
Privately, he had also feared that he’d be turned down.
When he went back upstairs, he took his Zoloft for depression, his Ambien to help him sleep, and then put on his headphones—he liked to drift off to Lucinda Williams or Tracy Chapman—but tonight it wasn’t working. There was too much to sort through, from the general anxiety he felt whenever he was back in the ancestral home to his conflicted feelings about the death of his own father. Weren’t you supposed to be shattered? Or at least shaken up pretty bad? All Michael felt was a vague sense of numbness, a suspension of sorts in the pit of his stomach, like you’d eaten something that you weren’t sure was going to agree with you later on that night.
And apart from his mother, who seemed expectedly devastated, he hadn’t gotten the impression that Richard or Sissy was exactly reeling. Richard, he knew, would relish the perks—sitting in his dad’s office, having his own secretary, driving, no doubt, his father’s prized Bentley—but then he’d also have to run the business, and he was nothing if not incompetent. The only times he’d been nice to Michael when they were kids was when he needed help with his homework; even though Michael was two years younger, he was still able to master the algebra or geometry that stumped his brother much faster than his brother could, and he did the homework just to buy some peace for awhile.
Sissy, on the other hand, would be chiefly concerned about the loss of her monthly subsidy. She got along okay with her mother, but she had always been Daddy’s little girl. Michael wondered what his father would have thought if he could have seen her tonight, scarfing down a cannoli—she’d saved the calories, she announced, by not eating any of the breading or pasta—with him not even in his grave.
Or mausoleum, to be precise.
Sometime after midnight, Michael got up to take another half of an Ambien, and thought he heard voices coming up the stairs. He put his ear to the door. His mom was crying, softly, and Richard was saying, “Either it works, or it doesn’t. No harm done either way.”
“But it’s so…” She never finished the sentence.
“The greater good,” Richard said, in a low voice, “think of the greater good.”
What on earth could they be discussing? Signing the whole company over to Richard? The one who couldn’t figure out a ten percent tip at a restaurant?
He heard his mother’s bedroom door opening, and Richard saying, “Just get a good night’s sleep. It’s a long day tomorrow.”
Her door closed, and Michael held his breath; he could tell that his brother had walked over to his own door now, and was standing right outside it. He could see the shadow of his feet under the door, and he could hear him take a long breath. Was he going to knock? Michael was riveted in place, then saw the door handle jiggle, a
lmost imperceptibly. From force of habit growing up, Michael had always locked his door, and he was very glad he’d done so now. The handle turned slightly, then stopped, and Richard let it return to its normal position. Michael heard him sigh—in sadness? frustration? weariness?—then walk down the hall in the direction of the guest room. Michael exhaled, and padded back to his bed.
The next morning, Michael woke up late—the Ambien had finally caught up with him—and by the time he’d made some quick notes for his screenplay and gone downstairs, things were already underway. In fact, passing through the great room he saw some empty glasses and snack remnants, as if there’d been a late-night conference to which he had not been invited. His mother was in the kitchen, wearing a black jacket over a long black skirt, instructing a couple of Hispanic women on what to straighten up, what to serve when the guests came back from the funeral, what to put where on the buffet table in the dining room. Sissy was holed up in his father’s home office with Richard, poring over some papers. What was that all about? Michael wondered. Was she coming into the business, too, now?
“You still on Hollywood time?” Richard said when he saw him in the doorway. The papers were openly, but swiftly slipped into the top desk drawer.
‘There’s some crullers in the kitchen,” Sissy said. “And coffee.”
“But eat fast.” Richard glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner. “We’ve got to get going soon.”
Michael was already in his own dark suit—a lightweight cotton, suitable for California but not up to Chicago standards—and he took some breakfast up to his room, just to get out of everyone’s way. His mother had a weird, hectic flush on her face, ineffectually disguised by too much makeup, and she didn’t seem able to look him in the eye. Another note to make. When Richard bellowed for him from the front entry hall, Michael closed his notebook, put on his old parka that still hung in the closet, and went back downstairs. That vintage black Bentley, his father’s most cherished possession, stood gleaming in the front drive. His mom got into the front passenger seat, and Michael climbed into the back with Sissy. Richard plopped into the driver’s seat with a satisfied grunt, and Michael studied the back of his head. His dark hair was perfectly cut, straight across, as if with a razor, and the velvet collar of his topcoat lay smoothly across his broad shoulders. But the sight was nonetheless jarring; Michael had never seen anyone but his father in that seat. Even at the country club, no valet was ever allowed to sit there; his father parked the car himself, in his own reserved spot.