A Way of Life, Like Any Other

by Darcy O'Brien

  “People do terrible things to their lives,” Mother said. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “I’ll bet they do.”

  “I don’t like your tone,” Mother said. “I can see they aren’t teaching you manners in school. I think you should start on the hard sauce, don’t you? It needs to be chilled.”

  I could hear the conversation from the kitchen as I mashed the butter and the sugar together and added the rum, taking a few slugs when I was sure no one was looking. Sterling was upset. An entire grove of his avocados had been wiped out by cinnamon root rot. The trouble was, once the cinnamon root rot struck, you could never grow avocados in the same place again. The rot struck all avocado trees eventually, but this had been a young grove. Property values were up, and he didn’t know how he was going to buy another plot suitable for avocados. I took more rum and conjured millions of arable square miles rot-blighted and billion dollar desert irrigation schemes. Man’s lust for avocados would be satisfied. Linda would be sitting down at Perino’s with her father and Marty. I was under the table with my head between her knees. I mashed away and I began to feel omnipotent and I took more rum. I filled my mouth full, let it trickle down, and stuffed butter and sugar in after. If I could get through this dinner I was going to go out tomorrow and find some sexy bitch who wasn’t hung up on her father and the scion of shoe millions. Linda could fucking well go to hell. My father said Sterling’s story reminded him of Okinawa.

  “Christ spare us Okinawa,” Mother said.

  I liked my mother for the moment. Maybe my father had driven her to drink and other pricks out of boredom. But he couldn’t have been the same then. He was a star. She had ruined him. She had snipped off his balls and eaten them. Who knew or cared? I had my own life. She was as unhappy as he was, wasn’t she? Maybe he could take satisfaction from that some day. If he could survive her he might enjoy watching her lowered.

  When I rejoined the pow-wow Mother said she could always count on me to make the hard sauce at holiday time. No one could say I wasn’t good for something. I was a top-notch first mate, my father said. That was the first I had heard of my promotion and I took another martini to celebrate.

  Raising my glass, “Here’s to Mother,” I said. “May she die in Hollywood.”

  “I’m not sure I appreciate the sentiment,” Mother said. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s a hallowed toast. All the old buggers say it.”

  My father and I carried Sterling to the table. He couldn’t carve sitting down so my father volunteered. He botched it and Mother let him know it.

  “I was thinking of asking you how you felt about living together again but after watching you hack away at that thing I don’t know if I could stand it.”

  My father looked at her not knowing whether to take heart or umbrage. Was this the person living in his mind?

  “The Italian butchers are marvelous,” Mother said. “They’re actually aesthetic about meat. But that’s the way they are about everything. The flowers, the wine. I have never seen an Italian drunk. There was a horrible American drunk on the plane. He ruined the trip for everybody.”

  “You’d know something about that,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “Nothing. Ruined trips. You’ve traveled so widely.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Mother said, “I’m sick of traveling. I want to find a place and settle down for once. That’s what I’ve always wanted.”

  “Have some more white meat,” my father said. “You’d better have some more white meat and some stuffing, too.”

  “Did he vomit?” I asked my mother.

  “What? Who?”

  “Better have some stuffing,” my father said, “there’s plenty cranberry sauce.”

  “The drunk American on the plane. Did he vomit? Did he get to the bag in time?”

  “You’re being disgusting,” Mother said. “You’re embarrassing me in front of Maggie and Sterling.”

  “I just want to get the facts straight. Did he vomit, and if so, did he vomit on you? If not, how did he ruin the trip? I don’t like these vague accusations. Maybe he didn’t ruin the trip at all. Maybe he made the trip a memorable experience for everyone. It can get pretty boring on a plane. I was so bored coming back from Paris that time I had to go into the john to beat off.”

  Mother started to cry. I got up from the table and went outside. I was sweating, my head was swimming, I took deep breaths of the cool air. I picked up a rock and hurled it against a tree. It was a good throw and it calmed me down. I went in and apologized. I felt like stuffing my mother’s head in the turkey.

  “I don’t know why the Americans have to have turkey,” Mother said, quite recovered. “Nobody else eats it. You wouldn’t find an Italian eating turkey on a holiday. They have more imagination. But their desserts all taste the same, and the bread is lousy. Of course American bread is the worst. It’s why everyone in this country looks so terrible.”

  “Everyone is on a diet,” Maggie said. “It’s all the crap they eat.”

  “I noticed it right away when I got off the plane,” Mother said, and to Dad: “You wouldn’t be so fat if you lived in Italy. If the day ever comes when we live together again, you can be sure I won’t live here. Certainly not in Los Angeles. Maybe New York.”

  “My contacts are here,” my father said. “I can’t let people down.”

  “Oh horseshit,” Mother said. “You never let that bother you.”

  “I guess I’m the heavy,” my father said.

  “Forgive me, but when you’ve lived alone as long as I have, you tend to forget some people can’t stand the truth. Oh my God, I’ve forgotten the plum pudding! You see!”

  She upset her chair and lurched into the kitchen. It was only a canned pudding but she had not put it into boiling water yet. It would be half an hour before I would pour brandy over it, fire it, and carry it in to gasps. Maggie talked about Zanuck. Sterling put his head down to conserve energy. My father got to Okinawa. Mother asked me had I heard about Anatol.

  “It’s too tragic. He had another stroke. He’s completely paralyzed from the neck down. I can’t bear to go see him, not at this stage in my life. They have him strapped to a table. Would you go see him for me, dear?”

  I refused. What had he ever done for me? He was her problem. She berated my cruelty, coldness, and heartlessness. Here was a man who had shown me love. Didn’t I know that he had included me in his will? I was to get the statues of my choice. She was to get the studio and selling it would help get through another year, if she lived that long. She went on. I would have to live with my heartlessness the rest of my life. She appealed to my father. Had he been turning me against her?

  “I’ve never said a word against you,” he said. “You’re the mother of my son.”

  “I don’t know,” Mother said. “You struggle all your life. You try to give love. Certainly I’ve made mistakes. But.”

  A little bell sounded in the kitchen. Mercifully it was pudding time. Mother got up to fetch it and closed the kitchen door behind her so she could get at the rum bottle.

  We heard her rattling around and weeping softly. My father started to get up to go comfort her. He opened the kitchen door and we watched as she removed the can from the boiling water and set it down.

  “Can I help?” my father said.

  “I don’t need any help, thank you.”

  She jabbed the can with an opener and the pudding blew up in her face. She had neglected to put an air hole in the can before she boiled it. The pudding burst like a small bomb and jetted up at her, covering her face with boiling ooze. She screamed and fell writhing and screaming. My father was at her side calling for ice before the rest of us had moved. Sterling woke up and passed out. Maggie brought the ice bucket and my father bathed the blistering face with ice and water. We put her into the DeSoto and I drove to the hospital with my father in the rear cradling his wife.

  We were back in two hours. The doctors pointed out that it had been the US
Navy that had discovered the homeostatic principle of the application of ice to burns. Butter was out. The ice had made all the difference. If it hadn’t been for the war, my mother’s face might have been ruined. She looked pretty awful, patchy with ointment and dying skin, and she was more angry at what had happened than grateful that it could have been worse. Nothing went right for her here. She was going to move to Spain. She was fed up with this country. I had certainly been no help. She didn’t know what I wanted out of life but she hoped that I would get it and that I realized what sort of price I would pay for it. I was not what you would call a lovable child. I scarcely wrote her. I didn’t know what love was and she pitied the girl who got stuck with me. What did I want from her anyway? She would go to Spain to be with her old friend Donna Esmeralda Cordova the famous female bullfighter from the ‘thirties who was married to a duke. They had wonderful doctors in Spain because they had to treat so many bull gorings.

  And other psycho-social observations. I would have to go on listening. Everyone would, everyone always did. I wanted to say no, I will not listen any more, you ought to be put in a cage and shipped off to New Guinea to be eaten. I had to face it, she had failed to live up to my assumptions, and there was some doubt that I would ever forgive her for that. It was better to assume nothing. This wreck my mother, how did I know what had gone into her that I had come out of her? I didn’t look anything like him, I was probably prop man’s spawn, bastard sprout of her vegetable cook, or had Don Enrique given it to her good, floor of the tack room, bedding of saddle blankets smelling of mare’s lather, old man’s seed tequila-watery, bang, boom, miracle of life, timing is everything, ladies and gentlemen, the secret of comic delivery, a star is born. Why was my father standing solicitous listening, patient gelding, spur accepting, animal faithful? More ointment, dear, I think a little more ointment will do the trick. Make her take a spoonful of ointment every hour, that’ll do the trick. The scars still on her wrists, there was a failure of nerve we will pay for forever, there was a chance for salvation missed. Greatest act of self-sacrifice since Christ, heaven rolls out red carpet. Think of it, a bribed coroner, a box office funeral, premature passing mourned, known to family and intimates she had been ill for some time, leaves ex-husband, ex-son, and memories too numerous. In lieu of flowers donations plea se to the Motion Picture Relief Fund. A new life then, Dad back on the boards, Anatol happy with his whores. No, no, this was not my mother, this was what was left of her. You could still see the other mother, she had all her teeth, she kept her nails almond-perfect. Look hard, I told myself, what you see is suffering, will yourself to pity. She means no harm. She is finished, that’s definite, felled by a pudding.

  17

  MULHOLLAND DRIVE

  I DECIDED I was becoming more self-reliant. I had a record player now and a few jazz records, and I would shut myself up in my room and play them for hours. I had a tin whistle too. I would play along with the music trying to make my tin whistle sound like an alto saxophone. Sometimes I would get carried away by the music and dance like crazy in my room, and if my father was out I would sing and shout, leaping around, springing from the bed and pushing off from the ceiling. There was pure exultation in soaring sound, the celebration of daring sound dancing. The sound was in me but also just before me, leading me out. The sound told me I could dance and sing, and the sound told me to write poetry. When I wrote the poems and read them over and over they were terrible, never as real and free as the music, but I went on writing them for a while and playing the music. It would stay in my head and lighten my day.

  Oh I had a future. It was 1955 and I had a future. The girls, the women I was to meet were nowhere within sight but I had a future. There would be one girl, I knew it, the music told me it, my heart told me it, whom I would love like the beach and the ocean in the far off days of ease. And wouldn’t I go to a fine university? That would change things, that would make all the difference. I got a great kick filling out the applications. I was filling out my future. Harvard asked for an account of a typical week. What a week I wrote of! When I wasn’t in school I was reading Dostoevsky, playing chess or baseball or going to mass or fulfilling my duties as president of the boys’ honor society. Harvard wanted a list of the books I had read in the last year, too. Such a list, such powers of invention did I discover within myself, that list was a work of art. For Princeton I wrote of my most memorable experience. I did a draft on my grandmother’s funeral, with appropriate quotations on death, but rejected it for my reactions to American Legion Boys’ State. They had bedded us down in cattle stalls at the Sacramento Fair Grounds. A future farmer had been elected governor, and we had toured the capitol and seen a million dollars in cash. I had hated it, but I wrote of how wonderful it had been and how I couldn’t wait to vote. A smash essay. But Jerry Caliban’s was even better. For him I wrote how seeing Olivier’s Hamlet had made him read all of Shakespeare twice. He took me out to dinner for it. He was as anxious to get away to college as I was. Mrs. Caliban was in an institution now.

  I had been nearly two years caring for my father and had some reason to be pleased with my work. His habits were again cleanly, his house and its treasures were in order, his spirits were level, except for the periodic fit of gloom, which he often tried to conceal from me. Behind the door of his room he would pace, sigh, and say prayers to himself. I would try to cheer him up with jokes or by preparing a good meal, though like sheep, who are very subject to the rot if their pasture is too succulent, he thrived on the simplest fare. Thinking of my future made it easier to carry out my responsibilities, and I cooked also out of selfishness, because he was eccentric in the kitchen, and like many who have suffered a reverse of fortune, he was too concerned with economy. Left to himself, he would buy the cheapest cut of meat, apply a chemical tenderizer to it and broil it the next day, when it was mush. He would cover the mush with cottage cheese and canned pineapple and offer it as Steak Oahu: Duke Kahanamoko had confided the recipe to him after a heavy day of surfing. A fellow needed plenty of protein to manage the seventy pound redwood boards they used in the old days.

  My father had taken to watering the milk in the interests of economy, but the practice did nothing to improve the flavor. I had never actually observed him doing this, but the milk had become unpalatable, and the O-So-Cool kept it lukewarm. One evening, after he had asked me for the sixth time why I was not drinking my milk, with attendant remarks on the role of calcium in the building of bones, I explained that I preferred the drink in its natural state, with only such adulterations as were required by law for the prevention of disease.

  “Salty, sometimes I think you read too many books.”

  “I don’t care for milk with water in it,” I said. “Some drinks benefit from the addition of water, but milk isn’t one of them. Why don’t we leave the water for coffee and tea?”

  “Drink it,” he said. “On the double. Stop lolly-gagging.” I shook my head.

  “I’m giving you an order, mister. This is an order from your Commander-in-Chief!”

  I drained the glass and effortlessly brought the liquid up again, covering the table. My father was around to my chair in a second, lifting me out by the seat of my pants. I weighed at the time about a hundred and fifty pounds, but he held me aloft by one hand, shaking me and shouting into my face:

  “You are the most ungrateful snot-nosed little bastard I ever saw!”

  This was for him strong language, and I quaked, dangling. He told me that if I had any guts, I would step outside and fight him like a man. The folly of that course was obvious. He would have destroyed me. Though in all my life he had never lifted a hand against me, I saw that his frenzy called for guile.

  “Let’s go, sailor,” he said. “We’re having it out.” He propelled me towards the backyard.

  “Stop!” I said, a wriggling puppet come to life. “I’ll call the newspapers! So help me, I will, I’ll call the newspapers! That would look great, wouldn’t it? ACTOR BEATS SON TO PULP.”

&n
bsp; Immediately I uttered these words I regretted them because he could have used the publicity. I recalled how actors profited by notoriety, how legends were born of violence, bankruptcy, indecent exposure. Americans, moreover, were in revolt against permissive child rearing. Juvenile crime was up, dope addiction spreading, long hair around the corner. By making an example of me, Dad would be a hero to millions. Why did you beat your son to a pulp? I’m worried about this country. (Cheers, applause.) I was perplexed. I would rehabilitate my father and be crippled for life.

  But he dropped me. I hurried to my room, where I remained some hours, until he came quietly to me, requesting a man-to-man talk. He discoursed on the chain of command, how vital it was to any operation, in business, in religion, in war; how some things were in my department, some in his; how he had seen young men, many of them still in their ‘teens, some of them Catholics, mowed down by enemy fire, simply because they had disobeyed their commanding officer, trying to take a beach before the signal was given and the heavy Navy guns could be trained on Jap emplacements; how his own father, a policeman, had taught him the lesson early on, knocking him cold under the stove when he had stepped out of line. I told my father that I saw his point and that he had greater experience of life than I.

  “I can save you so many scars, Salty,” he said, “if you’ll just listen to me. Listen to the old man. He’s been around.”

  He put his arms around me and hugged me.

  “You may not think much of me now,” he said, “but we had a hell of a life, your Ma and me, I’m not kidding. Look at those scrapbooks. See us at the Riviera. See us here and there. See us in Panama. I came back from the war. A lot of guys didn’t come back. A lot of them were dead, sure, but you know about the missing in actions. MIAs. I tell you, a lot of those guys just disappeared because they didn’t want to come back. They had family problems, wife trouble. I met a character out in China, he said to me, why should I leave? Why should I go back to that? Look, I’m fed up to here with that broad. These people are nice to me. Ding-how. Poco-poco. See what I mean?”