A Way of Life, Like Any Other

by Darcy O'Brien

  Maggie and Sterling left about eleven. As he stepped carefully out the door, Sterling said he would bring those avocados by over the weekend.

  Tony fidgeted and poured himself a big Scotch and ginger ale. Mother slumped in a chair, looking unhappy.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Is it worth it? These parties.” Her knees were apart, her sarong falling open.

  “You cook great,” Tony said. “What time you go to bed, kid?” He went over and gave Mother a chivalrous kiss on the top of her head and took a long pull on his drink, replenishing it with Scotch.

  The doorbell rang.

  “Send them away,” Mother said. “I don’t want to see anybody. I’ve done enough entertaining.”

  “Send them away, kid,” Tony said.

  When I saw it was Franz Liszt, cradling a dozen white roses, I knew Mother would want to let him in, so I announced him.

  “Oh wunderbar!” Mother said. She got up, rearranged her sarong, and went to the door on tippytoes to kiss Mr. Liszt on both sunken cheeks. “But Franz, darling, what have you done? How beautiful they are! I’ll put them in water. I want them to last for the rest of my life.”

  “Who is this guy?” Tony said to me.

  “A TV director,” I said. In the business, Mr. Liszt was known as a perfectionist. His dramatic series had won an award. He kept his people working late, but some gas company, his sponsor, believed in him. He always arrived at our house about midnight, looking as though he had walked from Vienna.

  “Franz, this is Mr. Amalfitano,” Mother said. “An old friend.”

  Tony stuck out his hand but Mr. Liszt walked past him over to the mantelpiece and gestured at a vase of carnations.

  “Please to have these removed,” he said. “They remind me of death.”

  Mother told me to throw out the carnations and put Mr. Liszt’s roses in the vase. Mr. Liszt had had a traumatic experience as a youth. His mother had died, and her favorite flower had been carnations. Now he couldn’t be in the same room with them.

  “I have the champagne, Franz dearest,” Mother said. “You know I always keep it for you. And shall I put on the Liszt, the Chopin, or the Mendelssohn?”

  “Tonight the Liszt,” said Mr. Liszt.

  I took care of the flowers and the champagne and Mother put on the Liszt piano concerto with a screech of the needle. Tony refused champagne but helped himself to more Scotch. I could see he was uneasy.

  “How’s business!” I asked him.

  “Who’d you say this creep was!” Tony said.

  “He’s in TV,” I said.

  “He looks like he’s on it,” Tony said.

  “His wife is insane,” I said. “He spends a fortune on mental hospitals.”

  “He ought to join one,” Tony said. “The guy is a nut case, obviously. Look at his clothes. He must of got ’em in queersville. He come around often?”

  “Fairly,” I said. “Mother says he’s very well educated.” She and Mr. Liszt were lost in the music, staring at each other. He smoked a cigarette from an ivory holder.

  Tony had had enough.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. He wanted it to sound like a threat. He drained his drink.

  “Franz has the hands of an artist,” Mother said.

  I opened the door for Tony. As he went out he grabbed the outside handle and tried to give the door a good bang but I held onto the inside, frustrating him. He stumbled on a step and spent some time fumbling for his key. Mother and Mr. Liszt heard him cursing through the music. They came to the window to see him roar off.

  “Why do you admit such a class of person?” Mr. Liszt said. “He is beneath you.”

  “What can I do?” Mother said. And to me: “Do you know any Goethe?”

  “No,” I said, and excused myself.

  3

  WRIGLEY FIELD

  THE RUSSIAN sculptor was only five foot two, but I overheard Maggie say to Mother that he was supposed to be the best lay in Hollywood, much as it was said of a certain actor that he had the biggest dick in Hollywood. I had only an approximate idea of what being the best lay involved, or of what it might involve to Maggie or to Mother, but I knew that Mother considered artists a superior class, on a scale that ran down toward men of independent wealth, Marine colonels, corporation executives, journalists, and retail businessmen, with actors at the bottom. Athletes and manual laborers never entered her mind. I thought her first choice was Mr. Liszt, but she determined he was too devoted to his wife. “Imagine sacrificing your life to a maniac,” she said. “Not me.” The president of Hillcrest Country Club gave her a car, a television set, and an Amana freezer, but his wife had too much money. Tony Amalfitano hung on as long as he could. At the end Mother refused to answer the telephone, and he would call up at all hours to leave messages with me: “Tell your mother her tits are no good any more”; “Tell her I’ve had better fucks from niggers”; “Who’s getting it tonight? I hope she chokes on it.” She got the police after him, and he left the Farmers Market and went back to New Jersey. Mr. Johnny Standfast, whose real name turned out to be Reilly and who had been a handball partner of my father’s at the Hollywood Athletic Club, came to stay for a week, but the old magic didn’t click. He left with a black eye. The man who invented the Hawaiian shirt ran strong for almost a year. He would fly in from Honolulu and take us to expensive restaurants. We were going to live on his yacht. Life would be an endless cruise. Then he began to notice Mother’s drinking, and one morning he had to drive me to school because she couldn’t get up. Mother said she hated the sun anyway. She had had enough of it with my father.

  Maggie brought them together at a party. Mother was to say later that it was love at first sight. Though he was short, the Russian stood out in a crowd, a hundred and eighty-five pounds of east European muscle, a compact rhino of a man. He made his living constructing mock-ups of animals for Disney, that was his way of buying time for serious work. Late on the night of the fateful party, Mother had Maggie telephone me.

  “Your mother says she’ll be home in the morning and not to worry.”

  “Fine.”

  “This is a real bash. Too bad you’re not here. What’re you up to?”

  “Not much.”

  “I’ll bet. Just a minute. I’ll put Sterling on.”

  I listened to the noise, but Sterling never came on, so I hung up.

  The next afternoon Mother told me she had met a great artist. He was fifty-three years old and had led a cruel life, but it was not too late for success. He had been wasting his talent in Hollywood but she was going to try to get him to concentrate on his own work, which had a perfection, a sense of line and proportion to it that was not to be believed. The communists had driven him from his homeland, but he had won a scholarship to an art institute in Brussels. When the money had run out he had no choice but to sign on with a palm oil trading company in the Belgian Congo, where he had spent eight years. The normal tour of duty was four years, after that you were supposed to lose your marbles from the heat and the savages, but he was so tough they renewed his contract. He had an indomitable will to live, that was what she admired most about him. He was an artist, but he was incapable of self-pity. You had the feeling that life could do anything to him and he would not say die. She herself was sick to death of weakness. She was ready for strength and beauty, perhaps beauty most of all. He reminded her of a combination of Michelangelo’s Moses and David, if it was possible for me to understand that. His aspect was almost Biblical, though he was not a Jew, and he saw deep into life and into her with the instinctive wisdom of the European. There was something to be said for the older civilizations.

  Within a month plans were being laid for the wedding. I was flattered and touched that the Russian came to me to ask permission to marry my mother.

  “I haf someding vich it is to ask you. I may spik?”

  “Of course.”

  “How it is I vish to marry your moder, you are de son. In your hands, of course, is it de freedom to make d
is act. I haf never am married. I am in loaf wery much your moder. She is beautiful woman, wery kind, smart. She has de vonderful son, vich it is is you. I never haf a son. I would like try be good fader to you. Of course, I can assure you, I haf respek, de great respek your real fader. He is great man, I see him many times de movies. Bot life is strange. A fool can trow it de stone in de wader, and de ten vise men cannot get it out. So?”

  I granted my permission immediately. I asked him was it an old Russian custom to ask the son whether you could marry his mother. He replied that since divorce was almost unheard of in his homeland, the matter did not come up, although he had not returned for thirty years and the communists had probably changed things. As he said this, he spat, and I was glad we were in the backyard. In the case of widowhood, he didn’t know what the custom was. Asking me had anyway been his own idea.

  “I think it was very nice of you,” I said.

  “So!” he said. “De bargain it is struck?”

  I nodded. He told me to hold out my hand. He slapped it into his, drew me to him, crushed me in an embrace, digging his head into my chest, lifted me over his head like a barbell, and trotted me around the yard in triumph, yelling to my mother that it was time for her to come out. She appeared drink in hand, saying,

  “Oh, Anatol, you will be careful with him, won’t you?”

  He set me down and did a little Georgian dance. Then he had the three of us embrace, and he sang a song, which he said was a sad song about a man who wanders over the globe for many years. At last he returns home. Everyone has died, but he is home, and now he can die in peace. Mother wept.

  It was her idea to break the news to my father at a family gathering. She said she saw no reason why everyone couldn’t be civilized after so many years of bickering and hatred. Anatol wasn’t sure he liked the idea, but he said that when a woman sets her mind to something, to resist it was as foolish as trying to build a wall with your left foot. My father was supposed to take me to a baseball game. When he came to pick me up, Mother would invite him to dinner. I was not to give anything away. When we got back, Anatol would be there.

  The Los Angeles Angels and the Hollywood Stars were locked in a tight pennant race and Wrigley Field was jammed to capacity. They had let the overflow crowd stand about twenty deep in the outfield, roped off, and a ball hit into the crowd was an automatic double. My father and I always sat behind the Angels’ dugout and we had got to know a few of the players, especially Chuck Connors, a .300 hitting first baseman who was starting a career in movie and TV westerns during the off-season. My father would tell Chuck what a wonderful thing it was to be able to hit the long ball and be starting a show business career at the same time, because when your playing days were over you needed that extra insurance to send the kids to college and keep meat on the table. Chuck would tell my father how he used to see his movies every Saturday as a kid in Brooklyn, when the Dodgers were out of town.

  We were talking to Chuck during batting practice.

  “Hey listen, Chuck,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s pretty stupid for the Stars to wear Bermuda shorts?”

  “I wouldn’t be caught dead in them,” he said. “On the diamond.”

  “They get cut up every time they slide,” I said.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Wait a minute.”

  Chuck disappeared down into the dugout and came up carrying a first baseman’s glove. He gave the glove to me and asked whether I could figure out what was written on it. I made out the words “SHAD ROE” and the number “29” but I couldn’t say what this meant. Chuck told me that the glove had been Preacher Roe’s. The Preacher used to fool around at first base and he had given the glove to Chuck several years before, when Chuck had been trying out with the Dodgers during spring training. Now he wanted me to have it.

  “Isn’t that something?” I said to my father, as Chuck went off to take his swings.

  “Just stick with your old Dad,” he said. “Isn’t that right? You can never tell what might turn up.”

  I pounded the glove all through the game.

  During the seventh inning stretch, while we were standing for the Angels and I was estimating how many Hollywood fans had braved the hostile confines of Wrigley Field, my father asked me why I thought my mother had invited him to dinner. I said I didn’t know, but she had said something about wanting everybody to be civilized. He didn’t say anything more, and I felt queer not telling him the whole truth, but the game was so exciting that I quickly forgot home troubles. They were tied up 2 and 2 in the bottom of the ninth. I was stomping on peanut shells to ease the tension. Chuck was up with a man on second and two out. He fouled off a couple pitches, and the count ran to 3 and 2. The pitcher, a reliever, threw a lot of knuckleballs, and he was trying to slip a fast ball past, and Chuck lined it into the overflow crowd in right field. He had waited, and he had got his pitch. Perfect timing. You could tell the game was won with the crack of the bat. The crowd stormed onto the field, and the man who had caught the ball, with more sensitivity than your average baseball fan, gave it to Chuck. I couldn’t believe it when Chuck came over and gave the ball to me. My father had the presence of mind to ask him to autograph it: “To my friend and future ballplayer, with best wishes, Chuck Connors.”

  “Bizball, I don’t understand,” said Anatol. “De soccer is much faster game. Run run run, all de time. Bizball very slow, I am falling asleep.”

  “Soccer is a far superior game,” said Mother. “Please stop tossing that ball, dear, it makes me nervous. I know how pleased you must be.”

  What I really wanted to do was to find a friend and go play over-the-line, but I figured I had better stick around for the big announcement. On the way home from the ballpark my father had said that he hoped maybe my mother had begun to realize what a mistake she had made breaking up the family. They were still married in the eyes of the Church. People made mistakes. The thing was to be able to see your mistakes and not be too proud to confess them. He had made a lot of mistakes in his life, but one thing he had been careful about, he had waited until his thirties to find the woman he wanted to be the mother of his children. A lot of girls had tried to get him to marry them, but he had waited for the right one. Well, you could never predict what would happen in life, but you had to be able to roll with the punches. He wished they had had more children, a big family was the best kind. His mother had eight brothers, so she played shortstop. One of her brothers had gone to sea, another was a doctor, another a priest, they were all successful, and his mother had married his father. He had wanted our family to be like that. He had given my mother everything she wanted. But you couldn’t tell about women. My father drove very slowly. It must have taken us an hour and a half to get home. He got lost once, driving up into the Baldwin Hills, but when I told him we were going the wrong way, he said the driving was in his department. I could go anywhere I wanted when I was old enough to drive.

  Nothing had been said. Mother kept going into the kitchen to check on the chicken. Anatol was drinking a lot of straight vodka with beer chasers. My father nursed a coke. Conversation dragged.

  “Dîner est servi,” Mother said.

  She was putting food on the plates, slopping bits onto the table, and as she handed my father his portion, she said, very cheerfully,

  “Anatol and I are going to be married.”

  Absolute silence. Mother finished serving and sat down.

  “Well,” she said, “isn’t anybody going to propose a toast?”

  Nobody did. Mother started eating, and everyone followed her. Then my father reached over and shook Anatol’s hand.

  “Congratulations, Anatol,” he said.

  My father ate a few more bites. Then he got up from the table, left the room, and went out the front door without a word. I went after him.

  He was sitting in his car, his hand over his face.

  “I’m sorry, Dad,” I said, “I should have told you. I know I should have. Mother told me not to. It didn’t work out.”


  He pulled himself together, told me that he loved me, and said I shouldn’t have to go through these things. But a man was tested sometimes, and the true test of a man was whether he could get off the floor and still be a champion. I had seen old Chuck out there today. He’d gone 0 for 3, hadn’t he? But when the chips were down.

  “You going to mass in the morning?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll pick you up,” he said, and he drove off.

  The wine was finished and Anatol was struggling with another bottle. Mother was in tears.

  “That son of a bitch,” she said. “He had to go and ruin it, didn’t he. He had to make the grand exit. He ruined my life.”

  4

  HOLLYWOOD

  I GAVE MY mother away in a Russian Orthodox ceremony. The priest held little crowns over their heads and they were man and wife. Maggie and Sterling were there but they were the only guests, because Mother said she was starting a new life and didn’t want all the old assholes around to spoil it.

  We moved into Anatol’s studio in the Hollywood Hills. There was only one bedroom, so Anatol made me a bed just my size that fit into a corner next to a statue of Syrinx performing fellatio on Pan. He had spent two years on it but had never been able to sell it. My father had wanted me to live with him, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it because he was living with her mother. At fourteen I would reach the age of reason under California law and be able to choose between parents, but at thirteen I was happy in my mother’s company, content to benefit from her closeness and from such intangible riches as might accrue to me from living in an artistic atmosphere. Also, I knew little of the history, language, and culture of the Russian race; not having the means to travel, I was satisfied that by living in the Russian’s house, I could observe first-hand his habits, customs, and rituals, and perhaps prevail on him to instruct me in the rudiments of his tongue. I would gain the fruits of a voyage to a distant land, without incurring the cost or inconvenience of transportation.