by Peter Davis
6
Sunday Could Be Grim
Dear Pammy,
Last night was a revelation. There I was at our mutual master’s mansion having a perfectly decent time when suddenly something happened. You stepped to the piano …
I had decided to write her a letter. Poor Jim Bicker emboldened me. He didn’t seem to care what people thought of him; why should I? When Bicker took his leave—he was going to East Los Angeles to spend the rest of Sunday with Mexicans, helping them become as angry at gringo ways as he was—I filled my Schaffer pen and tried to be neat.
But “mutual master’s mansion”? Clumsily alliterative, its true awfulness was in my presuming to identify myself with her as a fellow employee of Mossy’s. She was not only a light-year from me but also far above him in the firmament, and his success depended far more on her than hers on him.
“Dear Pammy,
“After your impromptu performance last night I heard only choruses of adulation attempting to match your own matchlessness. You were simply and complicatedly superb. I suppose this sounds like nothing so much as another of the countless fan letters you receive weekly, yet I have to say how wonderful you are, what a privilege it is to labor, however humbly, in the same Jubilee vineyards of which you are most deservedly queen. I was having a perfectly decent evening at Mossy’s, mingling with a quorum of the town’s notables, but when you materialized at the piano and put your elegant vocal instrument to work, you captivated us all, raising the party to the level of an unforgettable occasion. Forgive my intrusion, I thought I ought to tell you.
“Devotedly, Owen”
I struggled with “Devotedly,” rejecting “Fondly,” “Sincerely,” and “Admiringly.” As for my name, I considered adding Jant to the sign-off. She was unlikely to think the letter was from Owen Lashley the cutter, or from Owen Hasselbrook the timpanist, though she could conclude it came from Owen Wachtel the Jubilee assistant producer who actually was at the party. The other two weren’t, but Pammy wouldn’t necessarily have known that any more than she may have noticed that I was there. Oh well, be bold, be familiar, live dangerously.
I drove to Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, parking across the street from her house, where I would just slip my letter under her door. Though they’d left Mossy’s party together, I didn’t think she’d be spending Sunday with Marlene Dietrich, convening with the German expatriates who had begun to gather in Hollywood. She’d be with her daughter. Pammy and Millie lived in a columned white house set well back from the street. A chandelier hung over the front porch, above which was a second-floor terrace. A dozen or so fans were collected on the sidewalk. Maps of the stars’ homes had recently been published; on weekends there were always gawkers. Above Sunset Boulevard the homes were defended by great hedges or tree barriers or high walls, but since Pammy lived in the more plebian flats below Sunset, her house was approachable.
Two of the fans, I saw from the window of my Essex, were no fans at all but held a sign that read SINNERS ALWAYS SUFFER LAST. The genuine fans were arguing with the sign holders. “She’s gorgeous, she sings like heaven, she doesn’t hurt a soul, leave her alone,” said the fans. “Palmyra Millevoix is immoral and alien to Christ’s teachings,” said the man and woman with the placard. It wasn’t clear whether they were referring to the roles she played, Millie’s uncertain paternity, rumors about Pammy’s personal life, or expressing general dissatisfaction with permissive popular culture.
I detoured around the demonstrators and headed for the house. Her blue La Salle was not in the driveway, so much the better. “If you have a delivery,” a fan called out, “she’s not here.” “They say she has a place in the country,” said another. “Stay clear of sinners,” one of the anti-fans said helpfully. “Thank you,” I said. I knelt to put my envelope through a mail slot next to the front door when a last-instant thought struck me. Almost every word in the letter was a lie except “Devotedly.” I hadn’t had fun at the party, I hadn’t mixed well with others, I didn’t hear accolades for her because I was dizzy with gin, in fact I’d had a humiliatingly terrible time at the party. Also, she really sang only one song; I’d heard much more of her music when I’d gone to her studio bungalow many months before, and I hadn’t written her a letter after that, only press releases.
With my back to the sidewalk I slipped the letter under my shirt so the fans would think I’d delivered it. As I walked to my car a middle-aged man asked if I knew the star well. “Oh, just a bit,” I said, “and she’s as wonderful as they come.” “Then why is the letter poking out of your shirt?” he asked. “I decided to deliver it to her personally,” I said. As I climbed back into my car, the fans joined with the anti-fans in laughing at me.
The rest of Sunday stretched out like the Sahara, and Sunday night was always grim: the weekend was over. When I was a child that meant I’d be leaving my parents the next morning for school. Since we moved as much as we did, it was often a school where I was unsure of myself, wondering if the boys would speak to me, if the girls might notice me, who I’d play with at recess. That was when I first understood there is no such thing as a happy ending. If the weekend had been fun and adventurous, I hated to see it come to a close. If it had been boring and we’d been visiting people without children, the men smoking evil-smelling cigars and talking about the war, the women trading recipes and gossip, Sunday night was miserable in its continuation of my misery.
At home on Sumac Lane, I made myself a lunch of canned chicken noodle soup and two pieces of toast. Removing my bookmark from Swann’s Way, I felt some relief that no one would ever ask me to adapt Proust.
The phone was ringing, but I decided not to answer it.
7
Backstory
My mother was the first Chinese person I ever knew. Odd how random events strike you. You may not suspect a misfortune is on its way, or that anything is going on besides a lost sled when you’re a child, a car running out of gas, a wave bigger than the others. Each may seem a mere curiosity, ominous only if you have a gift for prophecy. The stain, though unsightly, did not upset me at the time.
“Little Owen come with me, Little Owen come to me, Little Owen let us see How we can spend our century.” She crooned to me at bedtime. My father beamed.
Do my three syllables carry the visual resonance of something you may once have noticed, if scarcely, as you would passing a billboard or lonesome scarecrow when you were out for a drive in the country? Well after the stars, before the director. Do the syllables seem to have flashed by? A trivia question? What a fate. Yet the little trio of sounds—oh-when-jant—prove my existence.
By the same author: Gun for Hire; The Scarlet Letter; Bleak House; The Last Train; Low Sun at Durango; Richer Than Mr. Mellon; Holiday in Havana; The Sun Also Rises; Troilus and Cressida; Barchester Towers; Meet Me at the Waldorf; Playing Hooky. Lastly, my collected essays, Articles of Faith, which I hope you have seen.
You will have surmised that up through Barchester Towers I refer to pictures I worked on. Never mind the bastard producers didn’t give me credit on all of them, or got away with an Additional Dialogue By designation that meant nada. The next two after Barchester are misbegotten plays. On the first of these I collaborated with George S. Kaufman while flying solo on Playing Hooky. They lasted a total of ninety-three performances on Broadway, ninety two of which were due to the Kaufman name.
I’ve been a dependent clause long enough, the occupational hazard of screenwriters, supporting players who push the action along, then wait in the wings until needed for some plotty errand.
The famous screenwriter Ben Hecht called himself a child of the century, but his claim was bogus. I was its true offspring. Though it was a decade old when I made my debut, I paralleled the century, taking personally its wins and losses as Ben never did. The Panama Canal was my first triumph, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall my last. In between came all the wars. Did a hundred million die in the most killing century in history? Christians were the champions, creating th
e most dead, but Communists and other religions did their share. In my view, not because I’m more sensitive than anyone else but simply because I have lived so vicariously—voyeuristically when possible, eavesdropping on history the rest of the time—I was killed a hundred million times. All the while amassing credits and debits and discredits. I collect in order to recollect.
Flashing forward, I trotted into the motion picture industry as a derivative option, doomed morally and temperamentally to live in the shadow and on the nourishment of others. Owen the parasite. Always looking to become my own self.
Between scripts I dipped my quill in thicker ink with essays on the passing scene, the motion picture business, its politics, and an occasional portrait of an obsessed filmmaker or producing tycoon. After teaching a course on writing at San Quentin during a slow period, I produced a little corsage for the Threepenny Review called Prose and Cons. Although a couple of the portraits found their way, as grievously abbreviated Talk pieces, into The New Yorker, most of my writing was for the little known Contempo Reader, a now-vanished quarterly that devoted itself to fiction and essays from or about the Left. When there was barely any Left left, after the blacklists of the Fifties, Contempo Reader began to trumpet the Thirties. I was a natural for them. I profiled some of the old Lefties—the usual suspects: McGurney Harris, Hy Soifer, Evelyn Wilberg deForest, Ripley Link, Jeremy Mah Silberman—and finally did one on Ring Lardner, Jr. for Esquire. This last came to the attention of an editor at the also now-defunct Summit Books, and before you knew it out came my collection, Articles of Faith.
I left off essays—having loved journalism a while, if only adulterously—when David Begelman hired me to do a script on the narcotics trade. Early Seventies. I knew nothing about it, went downtown to East L.A. and found some pretty strung-out kids, Cal and June. They told me they were on speed when they met. “Stopped for a week so we could ball,” June said. Then they went back on. “After a bit we found horse,” Cal said, “or horse found us.” When they told me about this, I was curious: was the sex so inferior to the drugs that ruined them that they actually preferred the narcotics? “You don’t get it,” June said, “the sex was the drug and the drug was the drug but the drug was the better drug.” I scratched my head and went home to work on this, and then Panic in Needle Park came out. Begelman dropped me as if he’d been toting a boulder.
But my childhood. When did I notice the stain, coffee or ink? It meant nothing.
“Why does the sun go to bed in one corner of the sky and get up in another?” “Mind your owen business, chuff chuff,” the gruff one said out of his mustache with a twinkle when asked a question while he was busy. “Oh no, blink blink,” said the gentler one. “He is his owen curious self and owenly seven years old.” Nauseatingly precious, but they believed themselves lastingly blessed. My mother would call me her little magpie, tell me it was time to stop chattering and wash for supper. To which my father would gruffly reply, “I didn’t think we needed a magpie around here. I thought we were rearing an eagle.”
My childhood was as full of trains as other people’s is of relatives, as full of trains as Poor Jim Bicker’s nomadic Depression would be.
I came of age enjoying things, American bred and born, a child of western Ohio, which gave us cash registers and aviation. Cyclones of paint, congenial yet dizzying, inevitable as loose teeth in a five-year-old, lifted me off my hinges every few months, depositing me in a new spot where I’d be treated well but in essence left, as my parents said, to my owen self. We were always moving on, six or seven places every couple of years.
If my parents had been animals, my father was an amiable moose. “Chuff chuff, every boy should climb a mountain, shoot a gun, memorize the presidents, read the classics, know how to fish.” While my mother leaped into and out of interests with the excited, nervous grace of a deer. Syrilla and Barnett. “Blink blink, it’s time for a new city, blink blink, why don’t we see what Indians are really like, surely their humble abodes need a coat or two, Barney.” “Whoever heard of educating a boy, chuff chuff, without some experience of the Continent?” Syrilla, née Stedman, and Barnett Jant. With a blink and a chuff, they said in unison, “We’ll try Paris as soon as the Armistice comes.”
No one who was rich would have called us rich.
No one who was poor would have called us anything but rich.
Yet we didn’t fit snugly in the middle either because we moved so much more than the people who came home from jobs to sit in their chain-hung rockers, swinging on their porches as they watched their generation mount the offensive called the twentieth century. The moose wasn’t leisured; he was in paints, a middleman, not a manufacturer. Wherever we went people were building offices, homes, schools, bowling alleys, dance halls. When they finished building, they needed color. He gave them that. In his three-piece suit with his gold watch fob and polka-dotted bow tie and the monocle he affected, he marched over to construction sites. He’d go up to contractors in Saginaw, Omaha, Wichita, and he’d offer them colors for what they were putting up. “Here, Mr. Kenniston, chuff chuff, let me show you samples, that’s the line I’m really in, the showing business, I’ll show you how you can beautify this handsome structure.” “Mrs. Midgley, wouldn’t you like to try a muted peach in your parlor?”
Back East, he had connections with the Standard Varnish Works. “We have a painter already,” the contractors would say. “Fine, let me see him.” No matter where we were, Barnett Jant was able to get more paint at lower prices than the local suppliers. “It’ll come right out on the same train that brought me here, be in town by Monday,” and so it was that on the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, or the Santa Fe, the paint would flow in rivers out across the country to wherever my father found customers.
He wasn’t interested in building a paint empire, only in leading the life he and my mother charted. “You can hear the air, smell the light out here,” my mother said in South Dakota. A life on the move, a life of planting ourselves in a teeming little metropolis followed by transplanting out across the loamy plowland to another temporary center, a life of exploration. The moose himself hailed from Chicago while the deer started out in New York. They met at a travel agent’s exhibit in Madison Square Garden.
An early mind’s-eye mezzotint when we visited the deer’s deer, in New York, probably around 1912, has my maternal grandmother, Ursula Stedman, herself blinking and telling my mother she was the luckiest mother alive as they bathed and powdered me. Looking down late the other afternoon at the sun striking my creased pantleg and Church’s wingtip I was reminded of my paternal grandfather, Fielding Jant, the moose’s moose removed from England to Chicago and to northern California by the time we visited him in 1915 or 1916. The smell of his pipe tobacco mixed with the heavy scents from his capacious box elder, which shaded us as my father and his father spoke of the war. My father said, “Do you think we should go in?” My grandfather said, “You’ll have to but it’s rubbish. America thinks it’s under this box elder. It’ll see soon.” “See what, Pater?” “We’re all cannibals and always will be.” While my father drowsed in the garden chair I sat on my grandfather’s lap and asked him to tell me anything. The sun through the box elder sprinkled us with dots of itself. Can it be the same sun on my pantleg?
“Say hello to Albuquerque, Owen, and as soon as your father fetches our things from the baggage car we’ll get him to take us out to a pueblo like the one we read about.”
It didn’t last long. Though it is with me now in the way time has of becoming still, collapsing in defeat, admitting it is only an artifice we impose to bring form to the disorderly tumble of things that happen. Time and I have made a separate peace.
Here is the unhappy ending to my happy childhood. We were at the white wooden marvel on the beach, palatially presiding over surf and sand, my mother and I, when she went to bed early one evening with the complaint of a sharp headache. I always watched her brush her long toffee-colored hair at night, but now she couldn’t stand to
touch the brush to her head. My father was somewhere in the northwest with his color samples, coming to join us the next day. Disappointed at not being able to play backgammon with Mama, I wandered alone those wide corridors with their paneling and portraits of dignitaries, descending the stairs while patting the balustrade as if I owned it, seeing myself a prince entering an awaiting ballroom.
It was the prince’s birthday and his young attendants and courtiers would all have to bring him presents, pricey little tributes to his highness. Midway on the staircase, as I spotted the bejeweled guests in the spacious lobby, the fantasy shifted and I became a buccaneer. The Pirate Prince del Coronado prepared the speech that would begin, “Hand over all your valuables, don’t resist, and none of the ladies will be harmed.”
At the foot of the stairs, though shorter than everyone in the lobby, I preened, fancying the hotel guests as my subjects. “Master Jant,” said a servile concierge to me, so resplendent in white tie and green swallowtail that I welcomed him into my masquerade. “Sirrah,” I said. “A wire has arrived for your mother. I shall send it right up.”
Blasted from reverie, I told the man my mother was already sleeping and that I’d give her the wire at the first light of day. Tucking the telegram into the front of my herringbone jacket while regretting it wasn’t brocade or at least velvet, I wheeled and made for the beach. A star-filled moonless night greeted me as I patrolled the strand. Thirsty for every star, I was proud of protecting my mother and of the telegram burning a hole in my herringbone. Cassiopeia’s Chair greeted me, and the friendly Dipper, Polaris, Castor and Pollux, and my new favorite, Jupiter. As far as I was concerned, the sky was eight years old, like me, newly mapped for me by my father, expected the next evening.