Dreaming : Hard Luck and Good Times in America (9780307807274)

by See, Carolyn

  My father knew better. He had a high IQ and one failed marriage. He was already putting away a bottle of scotch a day. He was lucky to have a job of any kind in the Depression, but he nourished a keen sense of disappointment even in his professional life. All through his childhood he’d been tabbed the “smart” kid. In a different world, George might have been the fortunate one in this family; the first since the War Between the States to succeed.

  But here’s the other thing that Daddy must have known: he was an orphan. His brother Bob was dead and Nell would die within the year. Nothing stood between him and the relentless requirements of life except two half sisters. (Make that one. Lavinia loathed him, and he returned the compliment.) Only Ada, hard-drinking half sister, was there to protect him from the world. The lovely little lady he was preparing to fall for was an orphan too, with just one hard-drinking half sister to look out for her interests. Really, Kate had no defense at all. And there she was, looking up to him with fanatical love and total vulnerability.

  Suppose you could send someone back to lay a friendly arm across my dad’s shoulder and have that someone say: “George! You’re an orphan, Babes! You had to help scrape your mother’s brains off a bathroom ceiling. Any fool can see that besides being bereft and needy and all that, you can’t be too crazy about women. Your mother left that terrible note: she hated men and you’re a man. Ergo! Therefore!” But George would have shaken the friendly arm off his shoulder even if the friendly presence had gone on to say: “Doesn’t it even bother you that your mother’s name was Kate, and this girl’s name is Kate? Don’t you think there might be a lot of booby traps on this particular road to love?”

  The people who’d heard about Freud by then were not people Kate and George hung out with. Kate and George were starlings getting sucked into the jet airplane of life. Clueless. Besides, George was somewhat swacked. And along with my mother’s winsome, childish, lonely face, she had a twenty-two-inch waist and a thirtyeight-inch chest. She was a knockout. So if he did think about anything, he might have thought: here’s a chance to get some of the love I was so sadly deprived of by my mother, and get some of that terrific sex I’m going to be spending my life looking for. This is the chance of a lifetime!

  But after about six weeks of marriage my mother hated sex. My father lost his job and had to take his pregnant wife out to places like Flagstaff, Arizona, where thunderstorms and tarantulas terrified her. She wept and pleaded to be taken “home” to LA. George took Kate down to El Paso to meet his dying sister, Nell. Kate took one look at her, remembered her own mother dying of TB, and fainted dead away. No one could think of even the lamest excuse, and Nell died a few months later.

  Grandmother Sullivan, who died of TB when my mother was twelve. (But where are the pictures, or even the names, of my greatgrandfather and grandfather?)

  Christmas Eve of 1937, when I was three years old, Kate and George put up a nice tree in their little house. They were dead broke. In spite of that, they’d managed to buy me an enormous doll, Marilyn. You could feed her from a bottle and she’d wet her pants. It—she, Marilyn—was the greatest thing I’d ever had in my life and for a long time I thought of that as my favorite Christmas. Because, what a great doll! But my dad had to go to the hospital on Christmas Eve. When we went to visit him, the nurses made a big deal about Marilyn, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.

  My mother and I stayed an hour or two every day for ten days, and joked around with the private nurse who was always in the room. Daddy was in a great mood, even for him, and he had the nurses in stitches. After a while—I’d say when I was five—mother told me he’d had “a nervous breakdown.” Then she said they’d had the twenty-four-hour nurses to keep him from taking a dive out the window, because he’d had a couple of guns at home and tried to kill himself that Christmas Eve. Then it came out that he’d tried to kill all three of us, but not very hard. He’d ended up with his head in my mother’s lap, sobbing that he couldn’t take it anymore; he had to die.

  After the ten days he was home again, full of jokes, working pretty hard. They both worked as hard as they could—my father spending some Sundays putting together enormously complex Pep Boys ads, pasting up pictures of batteries and floor mats and jumper cables, laying down illustrations with pungent rubber cement, then, if they didn’t fit, unpeeling them again. Mother did laundry and fixed balanced meals. They got smashed every night.

  Each one of them, lonely as the loneliest Eskimo at the very top of the North Pole, went on with it. The little house in Eagle Rock was the cleanest possible house. My father went on working. There was no question of them having another kid. When World War II came, my mother signed on as an air raid warden and my dad joined the bomb squad. We enlisted our dog Mike in the dog army, where he was promptly “killed in action.” We tore up sheets and practiced bandaging each other at night. I was happy, but what did I know? We didn’t see the insides of many other houses.

  My father went into the mail-order business—Betty Co-Ed—selling “V-for-Victory jumpers” to factory girls who’d never had money to spend before. He laughed about orders from “Rose and Tuberose Wong,” and someone who wrote: “Dear Betty Co-Ed, Please worry about this order.” When he decided he was going to write some short stories and put a desk in their bedroom, my mother went into her fiercest mode: she sat up in their double bed with me by her side and said, “Look at Mr. Big Man! Mr. Big Man’s going to write now!” She thought he was getting too smart for her and he was.

  Meanwhile, he planted a victory garden. Mother bought Fostoria and pretty flatware. Daddy bought a beautiful square piano that took up half the living room. Daddy played golf on the weekends. Mother played golf on the weekdays. Again, if a friendly presence had moseyed in and asked the eight-year-old how things were going—as she poured out staggering half-and-half highballs for the yelling journalists in the dining room and the poker chips rolled, and some woman always ended up sobbing—the little girl would have answered: everything’s fine. My dad loves me so much he even wrote me a letter pretending he was Snow White—because I liked that movie so much. My mother can take me or leave me alone. She locks me outside when Daddy’s not home, but I can take it. I’ve got some friends at school whose mothers can’t stand them either. Big Deal!

  The birthmark on my cheek temporarily ceased to be an issue. My mother found me a thick gooey compound to spread over it called Lydia O’Leary’s Covermark Cream. It made such an uncompromising statement people must have been afraid to ask about my cheek. And the Breakdown went into the memory- (the non-memory) file where my grandmother’s shattered head lived.

  Maybe forty years later I asked my mother if she hadn’t been scared that Christmas Eve when Daddy was waving his gun around and crying, and she’d called the cops and then the hospital. “Nah,” she said scornfully, “that wasn’t anything! He’d had too much to drink, that’s all!”

  2. A HARD LIFE

  My mother, Kate Sullivan Laws Daly

  Sometime in the summer of 1944, at an extended poker party up by Big Bear Lake a hundred miles from LA, four journalists (my dad among them) and their devoted wives took to discussing what they would do with their lives—if they could actually do what they wanted. One yearned to journey to the south of France to study Provençal. One craved to be right there in Berlin when Germany fell. My dad knew he could write the Great American Novel. Another wanted to travel around the world. (They were all saved from these lofty goals by the women and children in their collective domestic entourage.) The wives, perhaps sensing this, tactfully said that they had everything they wanted: just to take care of their wonderful husbands and bring up their kids to be healthy and happy.

  George Laws as a hardboiled journalist. What a charmer!

  But when my mother’s turn came, she was dealing, and she didn’t even look up.

  “I want to drink and play cards,” she said.

  My father took a look at his wife through the clouds of cigarette smoke and the noisy banter of a
twelve-hour poker game. Although Kate was still very beautiful, he found her wanting.

  George had already moved that big newspaperman’s desk into the back bedroom of our little home. He began to write Westerns for the pulps.

  My mother still drank and had terrible hangovers. My father still drank and held his liquor.

  Then the man who owned our house in Eagle Rock decided to sell it. A friend of my father’s had a Spanish-style house with a picture window in Silver Lake on the Micheltorena Hill he wanted to sell; my dad decided to go for it. And while I just want to stick to the facts, I have to ask, what relationship did this simple-seeming move have to do with the chain reaction of stuff all through the country—even as the atomic bomb went blooie in another part of the world—that would cause our family to begin to blow, and blow, and blow, and not begin to settle itself back down again for another forty, fifty years?

  World War II.

  More money than usual.

  A generation still pridefully “lost” from the last war.

  People moving up, through the middle class.

  People moving around, because of money and the war.

  The bottle in the cupboard.

  The bottle in the cupboard.

  —

  My mother hated our new house with a passion I couldn’t figure out. Even though it had a picture window and a view so magnificent you could see a glittering ribbon of the Pacific thirty miles away, she wept every time she picked up a broom—quiet, bitter tears. They only had one party there that I remember, and my father, mean drunk for once, chided a journalist who had become more successful than he.

  We lived on this big hill, and there didn’t seem a way to meet neighbors. Silver Lake, then, was sort of in downtown, sort of out. There was no community that you could see. They hated the new church. They didn’t belong to clubs. Then there was a vacation over Labor Day weekend, just three weeks after the Bomb dropped; my mom and I stayed alone in a sad little cabin at Balboa Beach. My father came down on Sunday afternoon. They talked inside as I sat outside on the steps. When he left that day he walked right over me without saying good-bye.

  Back in those days, 50 percent of marriages didn’t end in divorce. Edward Teller hadn’t even begun to think about the unthinkable.

  The next night, when dinner was ready and my mother gloomily banged away at pots and pans in the kitchen of this unloved house, the phone rang. It was my father, who told me to relay the message to my mother that he wouldn’t be coming home anymore, and no thank you, he didn’t want to speak to her, I could just relay that message to her, and he’d be calling me later.

  —

  Kate was a woman in her middle thirties, who hadn’t held a job since she was eighteen, who had only a high school education, whose husband would “give her the house”—which meant she had to keep up the payments. He would pay child support to the tune of fifty dollars a month. Sometimes these checks, made out to my mother, were signed by women’s names—Sara Kaplan, Wynn Corum—members of his platoon of girlfriends who were willing to pay his wife for the pure pleasure of his company.

  My father took his revenge on the woman who’d called him Mr. Big Man when he’d tried to write, and had his revenge, as well, on the highstrung woman back in Dallas who’d blown her head all over the bathroom ceiling.

  My mother cried quietly for the first three weeks. Those twenty-one days were unbearably painful. I would come home alone from the seventh grade in a huge public school where I knew no one, climb the Micheltorena Hill with dread, come in through the back door, and walk down the long “Spanish” hall to my own room, where my mother would be lying in my bed. She couldn’t bear to go into the room she’d shared with George. She would have spent the day crying.

  When things got worse, they actually got a little better. Mother had the beds changed around, so that my twin beds went in her room, and I moved in there, so she wouldn’t have to spend the nights alone. She went to business school for ninety days and got a job working for an insurance broker, whom she loathed. She took a look around this house she hated and assessed what her fourteen years of marriage had left her. A kid with a birthmark.

  Which is when she began to really shout, “Get that look off your face!” Which is when she began to say, “If you don’t like it around here, why don’t you go live with your father!” Which is when she began to scream, usually whirling freshly laundered bedsheets around her head, “You’ve got to take shit, take shit, take shit!” Which is when I stopped getting any sleep for about four years, because once she saw I was asleep, she’d begin to scream, and scream, and scream all night, and smash so many pieces of costume jewelry it’s amazing she had anything left (except I still have one gold locket of hers). Which is also when she came home with a bottle of bourbon a night, and walked straight to the kitchen sink, poured off a full jelly glass and flung it down in one chugalug, gasped, made her signature horrible face, held the glass under the faucet for a water chaser, gulped it, poured off another jelly glass of bourbon, and did the same thing again. She fell asleep, by six-thirty if I was lucky, so that I could cook a dinner for myself, get my homework done and my clothes ironed for the next day. That way, I might be up and out of the house in the morning before my mother. But about nine or ten every night she’d wake up, sizzling with a terrible energy. It was like living with an earthquake, watching books and wristwatches and hairbrushes and occasional stockings swirling and crashing around the bedroom we shared, but it was reassuring too. She screamed and howled and raked her nails across her face, but she was coming back, beginning to resemble the woman I knew.

  My mother took in a boarder for companionship, some ditsy lady she’d met at the bottom of the hill on Sunset Boulevard in a friendly dive called the SOS Bar. Jackie Lary lived downstairs, in my father’s old study, with nothing but a mattress and a huge picture of herself, a portrait, very flattering. She washed her wooden coat hangers in the kitchen sink, to my mother’s disgust. She made Kraft Dinner with onions in it. She wore no underwear, preferring airy “ventilation.” She brought around a distracting set of boyfriends, one with the startling name of Jonah Pimper. Jackie threw a party once, and one person, one person, came. So if I’d ever entertained the hopeful idea that we three females were not alone in the world, that was put to rest once and for all as I watched all the radish flowers I’d made and all the pickles I’d sliced just sit there, while the one man who’d blundered in plotted desperately to get out of this living death house while there was still time.

  —

  I knew that school was the only way out. I practiced smiling in front of a mirror. My mother had brought me that Lydia O’Leary’s Covermark Cream. My dad, always the class act, took me down to Perc Westmore, who made up Hollywood beauties for a living and advised me kindly that sometimes the most gorgeous women were the least memorable. (He mentioned someone, a great beauty, and he must have been right, because I can’t remember her name today.)

  Every night I wrote down a list of ten people, five boys, five girls, that I was going to force myself to say hello to the next day. “Hi!!” I’d blurt in the halls of Thomas Starr King Junior High, and they, startled, often answered back, “Hi!” In the seventh grade I made two real friends. One, Margie, had a bookie for a dad, who went to jail. Her mother was a raving drunk, worse than mine. And a girl named Georgia, who cut off our friendship with a devastating phone call: “Do you have any idea at all how much people hate you? How much they laugh behind your back at that pathetic smile you have?”

  Well, of course I had an idea! I might have been pathetic but I wasn’t dumb. “What course of action,” I might have asked bitchy little Georgia Brown, “do you suggest I take? I’m eleven years old and friendless, entirely alone in the world. The one person I depend upon hates me worse than snakes. The one person I love is gone. We’re very poor now, so I can’t buy friendship. So what do you suggest, Georgia? I’ve got my list of ten people in my hand. I’m going to pretend that things are cool, Georgia! I
’m going to say hi to Kenny Smallwood and Bruce Willock and Jimmy Johnston and Morgan Morgan and even Marc Marcus if I get up the nerve. Then I’m going to say hi there to Beryl Towbin and Joan Wilheim and Nancy Stone and Jackie Joseph and even Donnetta Dehan if I get up the nerve. And if they hate me, Georgia, well, it can’t be worse than the flying costume jewelry that zooms across the bedroom I share with my mother here at home, or the sound of retching late at night, or the pitiable single women who hang around this house now, the aging typist with the tapeworm, or the lady who only owns a mattress and a portrait of herself, or the single men—rootless bar bats who end up in this house crying and shouting and swearing and vomiting from dusk to dawn. I’ll tell you something, deceitful, vicious Georgia Brown! I don’t know what I want out of life, I’m only eleven, but THIS IS NOT IT!”

  —

  Then, thank God, my mother’s looks and “you-bother-me” ways did her some good down at the SOS Bar. She snagged a well-meaning contractor who was making a living putting up badly built tract houses south of what was then LA. Charlie Lentz had a broken nose from playing college football, tremendous biceps and triceps from pitching in to help his laborers, and a bottle-a-day scotch habit. He came up every night for almost four years, with a bottle of scotch and a bottle of bourbon in his arms. Sometimes he took us out to dinner to flossy places—one particularly fancy Hollywood hangout where Esther Williams sat on one side of the room, and on the other an irate wife picked up her entrée and hurled it at her husband, who sat in quiet dignity as waiters wiped his face with the finest linen napkins. He was clearly a victim of demon rum.