by See, Carolyn
They do it by getting together, sometimes several times a day. They can do it by telling stories to pass the time, which everyone knows is the best way to comfort people, because everyone who’s heard a story becomes part of it. They can be born again, in a way that’s not embarrassing. Or not too embarrassing.
It’s AA, of course. But you have to be a drunk or an addict to get in. Doesn’t that frost you? Doesn’t that chap your ass?
I’m stuck, in my own life, believing in a little guy looking at a dark jail wall in upstate New York. Maybe if I believe enough, it will have happened, and Leo Sunshine/Brian Murphy will have met the end he longed for, in a dusty Delhi thoroughfare redolent of spices, the air thick with danger and intrigue in the cosmic haze where art, science, and destiny sometimes meet.
12. FINDING ROSE
Rose
One rainy afternoon in November 1988, I passed the time with domestic chores and then more or less gave up on it, sitting on our flowered couch, watching the rain come down. The phone rang. A woman with a strong Mexican accent sobbed out, “Penny! Penny! Michael’s dead, oh, he’s dead)!” I only knew two Michaels, bright and lively, wonderful kids. But had they been Mexican? I began feverishly thinking of any “Michael” who might be related to the frantic voice on the phone. But after a long moment, I could only say, “I’m sorry, but Michael who?”
“Oh, Penny! How quickly you forget!”
And it dawned on me, only my immediate family calls me Penny.
“Who are you? And who is Michael?”
“Rose’s husband, Michael. Oh, you don’t even remember your own sister!”
But I’d had social workers and even a private detective looking for Rose for years. And given up on it, taken it up again, decided all over it would be best never to find her.
“Wait. Wait! Don’t get off the phone. Tell me about Michael!” I scrambled around for a pencil, some paper. “I … haven’t seen or heard from Rose for years.”
“Oh, really?” The Mexican lady had stopped crying. “Well, Michael was Rose’s husband for about ten years, you know.”
“I’m so sorry about your son. How did he …?”
“Oh, honey, he was swimming in his swimming pool. It was about six o’clock at night, you know? And he got tired and he just died.”
“That’s terrible.”
“Well, it was two years ago. But you know what Rose was doing? She was putting on her mascara. That girl was putting on her mascara! I said, ‘Rose, you should have been out there with him! You know how tired he was getting.’ ”
“You’re Rose’s mother-in-law? Do you still see her?” The address, the phone number I’ve been waiting for, looking for—and avoiding—was a sentence or two away.
“Oh, honey, I’ve seen her a lot in these last two years. She’s gone down, you know. She’s gone down a lot since Michael died. But she’ll always be like a daughter to me. I say that to her. ‘Michael gave you a home. And as long as I’m alive, you have a home with me.’ But she’s real conceited, Rose. But I’ve seen her times when she’s loaded or when she’s drinking [she pronounced it “drinkeen”], that, oh, she looks so bad, and she feels so bad, she really needs somebody, you know? And kid, when she’s drinking, her stomach bloats up, you know? And her face? She just loses all her looks.”
“What happened to her after your son died?”
“She said she would stay in to Oakland because she had some friends up there. But she would get real lonesome and she would call us, and she’d be crying. She’d say, ‘Sylvia, I miss Michael so much! He’s the only one I’m ever going to love. He’s my only husband.’ Because that Hungarian man she was married to, he was really awful, you know? He was always going to jail, and finally he was deported.”
“Ferenç,” I say. “I remember.”
“Well, so she’d cry and say she missed us all. So she came back and stayed with us for a few months, but she was always stealing things from us, and getting loaded, and selling drugs out of the house, and my other sons said, ‘She’s just taking advantage of you,’ and so I finally said, ‘Rose, I love you like a daughter, but you’ve got to go.’ So she went back up north, and she had nothing, you know, no clothes, no anything, and she stayed with a Mexican man, he was married but he was good to her, but you know how she is, and finally he had to kick her out. Right out to the street! And she’s not as young as she was. That life’s not good for her.”
“The drugs,” I say. “I know she was into a lot of drugs.”
“Oh yes, but by then she was using Southern Comfort, because she couldn’t afford anything else. She’d go into a liquor store and take a half pint of Southern Comfort and drink it and go lie down in a park, and get up and do it again. And that’s so dangerous up in Oakland! That’s when we decided to go up and see her. We all got in the car and drove up to Oakland. And the address, where she lived with that married man? The house was boarded up. We got up and got out of the car and walked around the street, and we were shouting, Rose! It was real late at night, but we knew she was around there somewhere. We found her in another man’s house across the street, and she was bad, real bad. So we took her down to the hospital. I thought, how can this be my little Rose? I thought we were going to lose her right then.”
“And what happened?”
“Oh, she got better and we took her home with us again. She was real sweet, she can be real sweet. But then one day she went out, and we got a call, Rose’s lying down in the park, and the cops were driving around the block and they were yelling at her to get up. So I got in the car with my sister and we went to get her, but we went to the wrong park. We went home and then the cops called us and said they’d booked her, and they found all her other tickets and warrants and they said she’s going to have to go north to serve some time in jail. So she went.”
I look around my darkening living room. Over the telephone, I heard Sylvia sigh.
“Sylvia? Do you know where she is now? Can you give me an address? Is she in jail or what?”
“Oh, I think she’s out. And she’s probably on that same street between that married guy and that black guy. She goes back and forth between them. I think I have their numbers some place.” And after a long pause she read off two numbers but only gave me one name. The black guy was Charles. The married man, Al, was sensitive about his name getting out. He wants to keep his wife.
Then there really wasn’t anything more to say.
“Why’d you call me today, Sylvia? When you had my number all this time?”
“I don’t know. I guess because it was raining, and I got sad.”
—
Twice during the last twenty years, my mother had tuned up to die. During both these medical crises, the question of trying to find Rose had come up. If my mother was checking out, shouldn’t she have the opportunity to say good-bye to her younger daughter?
But the truth was, she couldn’t stand her younger daughter, and she didn’t like the rest of us, either. My idealized vision of finding Rose faded.
Until this phone call from the mysterious Sylvia. She had left me with two phone numbers: the day after the phone call, I called both.
Al almost perished when he found out who I was. He told me never to call that number, and gave me another number, and then called back later in the day to tell me never to call him at the second number, and gave me a third one. “I haven’t seen Rose in weeks,” he said, not very reassuringly, “but I know she’s out there on the streets. I’ll ask around. But don’t call unless you have to. I’ll call you, OK?”
Charles was a different breed of cat. He was drunk and overwhelmingly genial: “You Rose’s sister? You Rose’s sister? I know Rose for a long time. I didn’t know she had a sister. No, I did know that. I did know that. So, you Rose’s sister!”
Was there a place where I could find her?
“Do I know where Rose is? My house is open to her. I don’t have much. The Lord knows I don’t have much.” He started to weep energetically. “But whatev
er I have goes out to Rose. I have esteem for that girl. I have respect for that girl.” He thought about it. “Even though she steal me blind every time she come here.”
“Well … Charles? Does she come over to your house a lot? Is there any other place I could find her?”
“She come here when she need something. She come here when she sick. She come around and steal from poor old Charles. She sleep in Charles’s bed when she don’t got another one. That what she do.”
“But …”
“You’re her sister, right? Oh, she speak to me often about her sister. She say, ‘I got a sister, Charles. You never going to meet my sister.’ But here I am, Rose, talking to your sister. Oh, you never think of that, Rose!”
Old Charles was pretty far gone.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” I said. “I’m going to give you my phone number. And you’re going to write it down. The next time you see Rose, you tell her I’m looking for her, and give her my number.”
“What if she don’t want your number?” He pronounced it yoah numbah. “She don’t like her sister very much.”
“That can’t be right,” I told him. “She doesn’t like her mother.”
During the next two months, Charles called once or twice a day, once or twice a night.
“I seen Rose today,” he’d say. “Oh, she in terrible shape.”
“Did you give her my number?”
“Oh, you don’t want to see her. She in terrible shape.”
“What did she say, Charles?”
“Oh, I didn’t talk to her. You can’t talk to that girl! You try talking to Rose. You see how far it get you!”
“You didn’t even give her my message?”
“She five, six blocks away. I ain’t going to run five or six blocks just to talk to Rose. I got a life to live, I got my dream, you live down in LA?”
“Huh?”
“Doan give me none of your sass. You heard what Charles said. You live down in LA or not? I got to know before I go forward.”
Pretty soon it got so Charles would just call up to say hi. “Hi, it’s Charles, how you doin?”
Every time he would call, he’d call collect. Every time the operator would tell me Charles was calling, I’d think he’d found Rose. Sometimes he wanted to talk about what he was watching on television, or about the nature of love. “Does it work better if the man love the woman too much, or if the woman love the man too much? You tell me!”
When I suggested that John and I come up to Oakland to look for Rose, Charles said no. “People like you be killed on these mean streets.”
Finally, at 3:30 one morning, I was jangled out of sleep by Charles. The operator said it was urgent. When Charles came on the line, he was irate. “I can’t stand it any more. You be jivin me, Carol! You been trodding on Charles. I can’t stand it.”
My daughter Clara stormed into the room.
“Give the goddamned phone to me,” she shouted, and yelled into it as loud as she knew how. “Goddamn it, Charles! You may stay up all night drinking and God knows what else, but there are people in this house who HAVE TO WORK FOR A LIVING! We’re HONEST PEOPLE! And don’t call us at all if you can’t find Rose. GOT THAT?”
She stormed back into her room, slamming the door so hard that dust whirled around in the lamplight.
We didn’t hear from Charles again for a few weeks, and when he called this time, he was businesslike. “Have you heard from Al?”
“No.”
“He gonna call you soon. Stay by the phone. Don’t leave now!”
Less than an hour later, Al did call. “I’ve got her here.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“She’s in pretty bad shape.”
“We’ll be right up.”
“I can’t keep her here.”
I thought of Rose at seventeen, wearing a feather boa, proclaiming to one and all that she was going on “The True Diet.” I wished my dad was alive, even though he wasn’t her dad. He’d know what to do.
“What I could do,” Al said, “is try to get her into a rehab program. She usually says no. But I think I could do it. She hasn’t got anything else right now.”
That evening, he called back. “We did it. We got her into a place.”
“We’re coming up, then. We’re going to see her.”
“You can do that. You can check into the Oakland Hyatt.”
“What’s the name of the place you put her in?”
“I don’t remember. But you wait at the hotel. I’ll be in the lobby tomorrow at noon. I remember the way to the place. You can follow me over there.”
“How will we know you?”
“I’ll know you. I’ll give you a signal.”
The next morning we flew to Oakland, rented a car, stopped and started our way across slums where, because of the recent earthquake, two-story frame houses from the turn of the century had been tipped off their foundations. House after house sported “condemned” signs, but people were living in them anyway, Blacks who looked curiously cheerful and carefree. The ground where the double-decker freeway had squashed all those drivers had been scraped absolutely clean.
We checked into the Hyatt, sat on the bed, looked at each other. It was about eleven A.M. We hadn’t thought too much about this. For instance, how would Al know us? Rose and I hadn’t seen each other, except for occasional glimpses, in twenty years. And she’d never seen John. How could she have told Al what to look for, who to look for?
We spent a silly three or four hours in which John and I took turns staying in the lobby or staying upstairs by the phone, or leaning in the hotel doorway. I went up to every vaguely Latino guy I saw and whispered, Al? As we waited, the lobby filled up with African-American families. Huge groups came streaming in, mothers and grandmoms and a zillion young men in expensive sports clothes and uncles and dads, all of them earnest and harried, carrying every kind of luggage. The girls (or their moms) hauled what looked like big wads of fluff in plastic garment bags.
Finally, I was paged in the lobby. It was John, calling from our room. “He’s phoned. He doesn’t want to see us, and he doesn’t want us to see him. But he drove over to the halfway house this morning. He gave us directions.”
We hauled out the car and chugged up to Berkeley. A quarter of a block from the university campus, we found the house. Vines covered the front wall. Wrought-iron latticework stood patiently under tangled honeysuckle vines. Inside, the place gave way to the look of a bare and scary institution, filled with haggard, blank-eyed dope fiends.
Half an hour later, I’d gotten the word. Yes, a Rose had been remanded to them, just that morning. But didn’t I know that they never let their clients see, write, or talk to their family for at least six months, probably a year? If I’d cared about her so much, why hadn’t I thought to take care of her during all the years she’d been outside? I asked if I could at least leave her a note, to tell her I’d been to see her. The man in charge said yes. Then, as I reached the door of his office, he threw the note in his wastebasket and gave me a big smile.
That night, John and I ate in the sandwich bar of the Oakland Hyatt, which jutted out from a mezzanine on the south side of a two-story space. The north side of the space was taken up with escalators that zoomed up and down from another whole mezzanine that connected to the hotel rooms. A grand ballroom abutted the lobby.
Tonight, hundreds of black debutantes were coming out in Oakland. John and I ordered salads. He ordered Perrier and I drank white wine as we watched an enormous and wonderful party begin to take shape.
A zillion little kids, dressed in hotshot evening clothes, raced around the mezzanine balcony, then swung on over on the down escalator, just so they could zoom back on the up escalator. Every five minutes or so, a stately grandma sheathed in a wonderful corset and a gown of bronze or steel-gray bugle beads would step on the escalator and sail downward.
On the north mezzanine, handsome men shot their cuffs, leaned their elbows on the fretwork, joked, kept
watchful eyes out for their womenfolk.
They came soon enough, the mothers slim and elegant in bright sequined reds and blues, bedecked with jewels and flowers and peachy makeup. Each mom or aunt or cousin seemed to have her hands plunged into the twinkling tulle of a beautiful young girl—smoothing net, yanking up a luminous white bodice. Once the female groomers finished, the families came down; father first, debutante daughter next, beautiful beyond words, coffee-colored shoulders catching the light against perfect white gown, and then, proudly, just behind, slender, bright aunts, cousins, moms.
The escorts waited for the debs at the foot of the escalator. They took the arms of the beautiful girls and turned them left, where they walked down the hall and over to the Grand Ballroom, where the music had already started.
Everyone knew each other, it went without saying. Everyone was having the best possible time.
After we finished dinner we went upstairs, got undressed, turned on the television. John went right to sleep. I figured what the hell, and called up room service for another glass of white wine.
—
Almost a year went by until John and I flew north again and this time we protected ourselves with a cover story—I had a reading at Black Oak Books in Berkeley for an anthology, Sex, Death and God in LA. We would try to visit, and then I would read. We didn’t know if we’d be able to see her.
Rose had been having love troubles, baby troubles. She was clean and sober, living with someone named Carl, a house painter she’d met in rehab. He was sixteen years her junior, a devout Catholic, and wanted a “family.” Rose had gotten pregnant, been ecstatically happy, and had a miscarriage at Carl’s mother’s house. They had baptized the fetus under the kitchen tap. Then Rose was pregnant again, and lost that one too.
As I talked to her on the phone, I heard sadness in her voice. They had found an apartment on the island of Alameda in San Francisco Bay, and lived across the street from a nursery school.