A Way of Life, Like Any Other

by Darcy O'Brien

  We lunched at Fouquet’s. Mr. Pines ordered escargots, and I had to dig them out for him because his right hand was bandaged. Mother wore dark glasses and you would never have guessed what had happened except that she slumped because her back had been bruised by the wall. We agreed that she had been very lucky that this had happened with family and friend nearby. Now that it was over she could think about a new life. She would be a long time getting over it but the important thing was not to let it get her down. She would have to try to get Anatol out of her mind, now that he was out of her life. He had been very sweet and understanding, really, when she had begun to tell him that Mr. Pines had offered to help her move to Rome and start fresh. She wasn’t sure yet, but she certainly thought her life needed a lift. She had devoted herself totally to Anatol, he knew that, but what had he given her in return? Suffering. He blamed his bad European behavior on the KGB and promised things would be different when they got back to Hollywood. He had been nasty about Mr. Pines, whom he ought to know was only trying to help a dear old friend from better days, but she was able to understand his resentment. They had started talking about 2 A.M. and had sent for some vodka and beer, but she took very little drink because she wanted her judgment to be crystal clear. The more they talked, the more she became convinced that she should move to Rome and soon. She wondered whether there was any reason for her to go back to Hollywood at all, he could send her things on, she had practically nothing left any more anyway. As her decision hardened, he became erratic, weeping, calling her a goddess, threatening suicide, and abusing her turn and turn about. She was an empress of love, she was a no-good slut, she was trying to take me, his son, away from him so she could have me all to herself, she wanted to screw me, there was no one else like her on earth, there were maybe a dozen or a hundred people since the beginning of time with her goodness and capacity to love, she ought to be raped by a company of Cossacks. At dawn he began to see that the game was up. He pitied himself and asked for her pity. Could she not take pity on him one last time? Could she not show him once more that no matter what happened now they had loved each other as no two people had ever loved and had made the most beautiful love together on occasions too numerous to number? He had then had the barbarous impertinence to give himself an erection and to display it to her, straight as a flagpole, as though that of all things would impress her. She happened to have a mouthful of vodka at the moment, and she spat at him, hitting the bulls-eye of his offending member. It was then he drove at her. We knew the rest.

  7

  BRENTWOOD

  WITH MOTHER in Rome I had several choices open to me. Luckily I failed to see any advantage in a Continental adolescence, because Mother wanted to be alone for a while to get her life straightened out. Like any child I preferred living with one parent to living without either, and as my father had become through circumstance something of a stranger to me, I looked forward to getting to know him better. On my return from Paris, I telephoned him and asked whether he would mind my coming to live with him.

  “Mind?” he said. “Son, it’s everything I’ve lived for.”

  This made me feel good. But after a few days at his house, I had sized up the situation and decided it was not for me. The problem was my mother’s mother. Dad was still living with her, as he had since the divorce. This old donkey had had nothing to do since the Red Cross had ceased making bandages after the Second World War, and caring for my father was her life. Understanding better how to tease the poor creature than to please him, she had become a menace to her charge. His own mother could not care for him, because she had her hands full caring for his brother, my uncle, who had been released from Folsom after serving eight years for embezzling the greater part of my father’s fortune. It would not have done to have the two brothers in the same house, they might interfere with one another and fight, though my father was a gentle person who had never done violence to anyone, except in the movies and, if Mother was to be believed, when he had threatened her with a knife over one of her lovers and had struck his fist through a wall behind her head, out of frustration and on account of drink, which he never afterwards took.

  Now, in the diminished circumstances in which my father found himself, his money almost gone, his wife gone altogether, his motion picture career apparently behind him, with newcomers like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and William Boyd already established stars, and the prospect of television bewildering, my mother’s mother was not the perfect nurse for him. She was a tough, unsentimental plainswoman, who had never worked a day in her life, my father having supported her since his marriage, her daughter before that, her late husband before that: and the sight of this big man, past fifty years of age, cuckolded and abandoned, robbed and jobless, lolling about the house dreaming of old and better times, disgusted her.

  She watched him pining and growing fatter and behaving more and more peculiarly. He had fallen into a religious mania, attending mass and taking holy communion every morning, participating in every sort of Church function—novenas, missions, Holy Name Society breakfasts. The Ladies’ Altar Society, which arranged flowers, kept the sacramental bread and wine in stock, and laundered the costumes of the Infant of Prague, had made him an honorary member. He twirled the cage at bingo, he raffled automobiles and turkeys. When the parish sedan was broken down or otherwise in use, he chauffeured the priests on their errands of mercy. He never missed a funeral. Because of his physique and the glamour that still trailed from him, he was in great demand as a pallbearer.

  All this my mother’s mother disdained. She was a Methodist of austere stripe and she ridiculed his superstitions, asking did he wish to run for Pope. With childish mischief she would mislay his rosary beads, delighting in his anxiety when he could not finger them. She made coffee with his holy water and, pretending absent-mindedness, told him of it as he drank, making him sick. During the war, he had spent some time in the Navy, hoping to be assigned to John Ford’s photographic unit but ending up teaching running, leaping, jumping, ball throwing, and boxing to the recruits at San Diego, except for excursions to the Aleutians and the Philippines, where he contracted in turn double pneumonia and jungle rot, though in the Aleutians he claimed to have captured the first Japanese prisoner. The Navy and the Church were the twin props of his existence: had it not been for them, his depression would have got the better of him. He would have died of a broken heart. But my mother’s mother was no more sympathetic to the Navy than to the Church.

  When she addressed him as Captain, she did so with contempt. Her malice forbade the respect he desired and deserved. So it is, I philosophized, with our closest relations and friends, that we so rarely receive from them what a stranger would offer, for the moment, freely. Dad repeatedly promoted her in rank, yet for this she neither showed nor felt gratitude. She had begun in his house, as he said, as an enlisted woman. Within a month of Mother’s desertion she was made Chief Petty Officer, and soon afterwards Chief Engineer and First Mate. Yet her climb in status was accompanied by no improvement in her decorum. She flaunted military discipline, rising and retiring in defiance of the Order of the Day; defacing the labels he so painstakingly affixed to every cupboard, closet, and drawer; taking out the garbage on the windward side of the house; refusing to stand watch, causing many a sleepless night for him; battening down the hatch to her compartment so that it was impossible for him to carry out his inspection rounds; countermanding his orders for provisions; stubbing out the cigar he allowed himself in the Ward Room after dinner. She claimed the prerogatives of age, though she was but fifteen years his senior and, as my father explained to me, the rawest blue jacket knows that in any military unit, age is no warrant to authority and that in the business of defeating an enemy, a Lieutenant Commander of fifty may take orders from a Commander of forty. In this the military was an emblem of society at large, for, as the experience of the race had shown, it was fatal to have the cares of the state entrusted to the senile. Nor was Granny, half blind, deaf, and with spittle running down her
chin, the proper judge of what was best for the family.

  Natural human sympathy might have prompted deference to Dad’s rank, but Granny had a hard heart. I often thought that she must have behaved similarly toward my mother, during crucial periods in that misfortunate woman’s infancy and childhood and that, if the discoveries of modern science were to be believed, she must accept blame for her daughter’s adult unhappiness and that, if there were a hell, the crone would cook in it. But I could see no way to put her in her place. I was an intruder and she resented me and was prepared to resist me tooth and nail. It would take me months or years to climb past her on the ladder of promotion. I was coming aboard as a mere boatswain and she could deal with me pretty much as she wished. She would not retire, it was a matter of waiting for her to die.

  Thinking, I confess, more of my own happiness than of what use I might be to my father, I left his house. I was then in my second year of high school, and while I had yet to determine what course I should set for my life, I sensed that something had gone wrong in both my parents’ and that I would have to try an independent approach. I had a friend, Jerry Caliban, son of the famous director, and I had often discussed my family with him. Jerry was of the opinion that my parents were meshuggenah and that I should come to live with him and his mother and father in their large house in Beverly Hills. They had so much money, Jerry assured me, that I would scarcely dent the budget. His mother got an allowance of $25,000 a year just to go to the races.

  Though I departed my father’s house with the possibility of moving in with Jerry in mind, it was several days before I could reach that decision. I took a room in a motel near the high school, and after baseball practice I would come home, turn on the television and try to sort things out. I had not heard from Mother, but I imagined her parading the streets of Rome with her new friends, visiting the churches and museums she loved, maybe working at that dubbing job Mr. Pines had suggested. Some day I would be watching an Anna Magnani movie and hear my mother’s voice. “Be off with you, Carlo. Have I no pride? I am a woman. You are scum.” Jerry had a terrific car, a yellow Mercury in cherry condition with black leather insides. I liked the idea of riding around Beverly Hills with the radio turned up looking for girls. He was a year older and could give me pointers. He had already suggested spending Easter vacation in Palm Springs. All the girls went there to get a start on their tans. We could case the pools and pick out what we liked. You could really tell what you were getting when you could see them lying there in bathing suits. You asked them whether they wanted a little help with their sun tan oil. He had met a chick there who carried her own supply of condoms. One night at the motel an old movie of my father’s came on the television. He was a US Marshall called in to clean up a town in Arizona. The love interest was Virginia Vale, the daughter of a big rancher. When Dad discovers that Virginia Vale’s father is giving protection payments to an outlaw gang, she refuses to believe it and banishes Dad from her life. But her father is shot by the gang, and as he dies he confesses everything. Mortified and remorseful, she seeks out Dad and finds him helping the local minister put a new roof on the church. At first he won’t come down from the roof, but when she shouts that her father has been killed and that she now believes in Dad implicitly, he leaps directly from the roof onto his horse, a stunt that must have entailed great risk to Dad and, indirectly, to me. He shoots down four of the gang personally and escorts the others to the lock-up. Marriage to Miss Vale is implied at the end. I telephoned Dad to tell him I had seen the picture.

  “Where are you, son?”

  “Staying with friends. I’ll let you know the address in a few days. I have to sort things out.”

  “It’s your life,” he said. “But I want you to know there’s always a bunk for you here and all the chow you can eat.”

  “Thanks. Listen, were you really in love with Virginia Vale or just in the picture?”

  “Your mother is the only woman I ever loved and I still love her. You do a lot of things when you’re an actor. Is she still in Rome?”

  “I think so. Did you ever fall in love at all when you kissed girls in pictures?”

  “Sometimes I had to turn my leading ladies over my knee. They were pretty headstrong. A filly can sometimes be more trouble than she’s worth. Your grandmother wants to speak to you.”

  “I have to get off. Tell her hello.”

  I made my decision after the initiation ceremony of the boys’ honor society. Jerry was president and he administered the oath with a Bible. I swore to uphold the traditions of the society, not to smoke or drink, and to lead in all ways a life that would set a good example for my fellow students who were not fortunate enough to be chosen members of the society. The sponsor of the society was an old chemistry teacher we called Doc who was notorious for upsetting the girls in his class by making salacious remarks. Doc had recently been a big hit as a contestant on Groucho Marx’s television quiz show, and he had signed a contract to do his own show on a local channel. We thought it was great having a celebrity as our sponsor. Doc took me aside and told me confidentially that he was especially glad to have me as a member. He had been a fan of my father’s and he could see I was growing into as fine a man as my father. And there was another reason he was glad I had been chosen.

  “There are too many Jews in here,” Doc said.

  “Is that so?” I said.

  “Just look around. Count ’em. There must be eighty per cent Jews. Of course the way this high school has gone the past few years you’d expect that. But I’m glad you’re in. We need more balance and leadership. You’re Catholic?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all right. I’m Presbyterian myself. But we can stick together. I’ll help you all I can. I want you to be president some day.”

  Jerry took me out for a hamburger later. We talked about how funny Doc was. There was the time he compared the interaction of molecules to a freshman girl on a date with a football star. Jerry wanted to know what Doc had said to me. I told Jerry Doc had said he wanted me to be president some day.

  “So do I,” Jerry said. “I want you to succeed me. Come on, I’ll drop you home.”

  When Jerry found out I was staying at the motel, he insisted I come home with him. We got my things and Jerry paid the bill. I was grateful because I had no money.

  8

  BEVERLY HILLS

  THE CALIBANS made me one of their family, and to them, family meant everything. For the first time since Casa Fiesta I knew the warmth and joy of people living together in harmony and trust, and I could hardly believe it when Mr. Caliban gave me my own checking account.

  “You’re gonna live here, you can’t come crawling for every nickel,” he said. “I didn’t make it in this business for nothing. I started out sleeping in the back of a shop. Any friend of Jerry’s is a friend of mine.”

  Sam Caliban ran his house the way he shot his pictures: personally. It was an enormous new house, built to his exact specifications. You entered through double oak doors with brass knockers in the shape of slaves’ heads. The living room, which was never used, had velvet furniture in pastel shades and rugs that were gifts from the Shah of Iran. “The Shah loves my pictures,” Mr. Caliban said. “Nobody knows that. I send him the prints and he sends me the rugs. I could make it as a rug merchant.” The walls were bare except that over the six foot fireplace hung a huge oil portrait of Mrs. Caliban dressed the way she was when Sam had discovered her singing ballads in Chicago twenty years before. But the real sitting room was in the back, overlooking the pool, and it was designed strictly for comfort and relaxation. “I bust my balls all day,” Mr. Caliban said, “I got this to come home to. In fifteen minutes I’m a new man. See that? That’s my new Picasso. Don’t touch it. The paint’s still wet.” There were two other Picassos, a Rouault Christ, two Chagalls, and a Modigliani. Mr. Caliban said that looking at the paintings relaxed him and that if people stopped going to his movies he could send Jerry to Harvard on the Rouault alone. Art was even b
etter than real estate that way. Around the room were six contour chairs that you could stretch out in and adjust to fit your position. They were battery operated so you didn’t wear yourself out getting them just right and they had a vibrating mechanism called Magic Fingers and a rocking-rolling mechanism that simulated shipboard travel. “Everybody sleeps like a baby on a ship,” Mr. Caliban said, “but with these you don’t get sick.” There was a bar that was a scaled-down reproduction of the bar in the nightclub where the Calibans had met and beside it a set of weights and pulleys, so that if you felt you were putting on too much weight from the booze, you could sweat it out without having to leave the room.