Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  “So I have. So it will.” She backed out, still clutching the prison shift as if she feared I’d take it from her—as indeed I should have, as it was family property and burning it before her eyes would have taught her a good lesson about respecting Father’s wishes. But I let her go, thinking that giving it to a maid was really the next thing to burning it, anyway.

  Lil Gagni’s footsteps went away, thump-thump. A breeze blew through the open window. It sank in that I was alone, which seemed preposterous. I never had been in my life, you see.

  I went downstairs to the telephone table, and gave the switchboard operator the number I wanted. A couple of visiting cards lay on the salver next to the telephone, and I picked them up, startled to re-read two names that I’d glimpsed mere minutes earlier in the stack of paper on the escritoire. Louise Merskine and Christina Caldwell, two tiresome old biddies who’d been in jail with my mother, had already come to pay their condolences; one had written that she’d been here earlier, and the other that she’d be back soon.

  Irritated both at the cards’ existence and by how long it was taking for my call to go through, I tore them both up. Then I started to idly rearrange the fragments until one configuration stopped me, because it seemed to make a sort of nonsensical, mysterious sense, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why. Here’s what I read:

  TINA ERSKINE

  LOUISE CALDWELL

  Will Be Here Soon

  Annoyed, I dashed the salver to the floor, where it stopped clattering just as my connection went through. The conversation was a brief one. Of course Thurston would be delighted to see me, for any reason or none at all. Hadn’t he always been?

  I stepped outside, where I was nonplussed to see no Daimler. Then I remembered that I didn’t own it, and Cheng—if it was Cheng—wasn’t my chauffeur. Luckily, I soon found a taxi, which pulled up mere minutes later outside Thurston’s dismal Fifth Avenue house. For a moment, I looked up at it, wondering what it was going to be like to spend the rest of my life there. But if I did this today, I knew he’d take care of all the funeral arrangements, so I rang the bell.

  The butler showed me up to the library. Thurston was at the window, peering at birds, or something, through an ugly old telescope. (I would spend years trying to get him to discard it; it finally got “lost” one day.) Straightening up, he rushed forward to greet me with the same silly, euphoric look on his face that had been forcing me to fight back laughter since we were both in dancing school, both hands extended to take mine. But the first words out of his mouth were pure gibberish:

  “It’s because she was in a movie called God’s Little Acre, you see,” he said effusively. “Played some sort of white-trash temptress, I believe, although I’ve never actually seen it. Can’t have, obviously, since the picture won’t come out for another thirty years or so.”

  “Thurston, I can’t make head or tail of what you’re saying—particularly tail. What on earth are you talking about?”

  He looked baffled. “I have no idea. My mind must have been elsewhere—and no surprise in that announcement, I must say! But it seems to be finding its way back to the old noggin. Yes—let’s slay the fatted calf, by gosh. My dear, how can I oblige you?”

  “Thurston, I’m going to marry you,” I said, and mercifully—or otherwise—allowed him a few seconds of dazed bliss before proceeding to the second half of what I had to say. “But you had better know that I don’t feel the least bit lovey-dovey about it.”

  “More of a business arrangement, then—emphasis on the ‘contract’ in the marriage contract,” he said. Gallantly, he was trying to uncork champagne with his voice: “Well, my kind has always been on safer ground there, God knows. And now—now you’ll be too, my dear.”

  That’s why, whenever he calls me “Lovey” in that silly and adoring way, it makes me sad. But I don’t know for who, or is it whom?

  V

  Hello Nurse

  EVERY HE-MAN AND HIS YES-MAN IN HOLLYWOOD ALWAYS WANTED to get his hands on my upside-down heart. That’s how I think of my sequined caboose, since the words convey its hymnable wobble to altogether wooziality-making perfection. When I twitched Old Smokey into Los Angeles, there was no visible wear on it, even though I’d hauled it all the way from Alabam’-don’t-give-a-damn.

  I came from a long line of slatternly women, but none of them had ever had anything to show for it. That’s why Momma understood when I told her I was headed for California. She had tears in her eyes the day I left my childhood home of Jolene, AL (d-g-a-d). Twarn’t just because this was the very first time she’d seen a daughter of hers wearing shoes, either, though that helped.

  I was in the beautimous April of my years. Some blood relatives of ours were putting up a ruined shack in the distance. Only the lonely sun stood changeless and immortal in the placid sky above Jolene. Poppa, bless him whoever he was, was dead. My one souvenir of him was a rusty old church-key can-and-bottle opener that Momma claimed he’d left behind on his last visit, which she had just placed on a ribbon around my neck.

  “Now, lissen, hun,” she said. “Ah know you’re a-gowe be in sum taht spots, an’ hafta make some mahty hard cawls, along thet long an’ wairy road to Awscar naht. But jiss whatevuh yew do, jiss don’ sleep with no coon. Chosen peepul,Ah’ll un’stann’, Ah know how mewvies gits made, but yew promse me on the other’n. Lots folks out there thank an’thang kin happen, on account of they got enuff money to mayke iyt so. Well, yew better see iyt don’t.”

  “Yes, Momma,” I said, all a-tingle in my new high heels.

  “Yew promse me, gal. Not wun. Not e’en thet Sayid-nee Pwa-chay ner ‘at Harry Bilawfawnt, fer all I wun’t blame yew fer wundrin’ hew put the Mahntin Drew in yore undies if eiver of eym strawng brown gawds was ta ast yew in a p’laht way fer a paice of iyt at sum faincy porty in Malibew. But if’n yew’s mah dawter, yew’s steyl a-gonter draw yissef up t’cher full haaht n’ say Much ‘bliged but Naw Thanks Mist’ Pwa-chay raaht afore yew flang yore glass a’ ixpensive waahn in hyez hansum black fayce, kaze we ain’ neve’ dun thet yit. Thass whah we Gumstump wimmen aw ways held our haids up haah, e’en when the nabors was runnin’ us outta tahns they built j iss fo’ thet purpose an’ throwin’ daid cats an’ the cawnints a’ whole truck gawdins at our hypnawtically resaydin’ ruhmps. Even yore sister Sew-zannah wun’t dew thet, an’ yew gnaw whut shey’s laahk. So yew promse. Iss mah daahn’ request.”

  “Are you dyin’, Momma?” I asked.

  “Naw. But Ah will be sumtahm, prolly a’ pure happiness when yew nab thet Awscar ‘n show that kaahk Ellezbeth Taylor where she’n git off the bus. An’ Ah ain’ never ast yew fer an’thang before.”

  “You borried my one and only dress off’a me when I was in seventh grade,” I said, wanting to keep the record straight.

  “Din’ fit. Don’ count. Mah bewbs warn’t big enuff. Yew got iyt back. Ain’chew wearin’ iyt nah? Nah, skewt! ‘Fore Ah hev ta fahr ol’ Uncle Hewzit’s shawtgun achore new shoes t’gitchew mewvin’.”

  “Yes, Momma,” I said, and scooted. She was a crazy, bigoted old cretin who’d have sold me for a baloney sandwich, but I loved her. Leastways I missed her once the Greyhound had deposited my upside-down heart and right-side-up cardboard suitcase in Los Angeles, California, where the road to Oscar night was to prove longer and wearier than Momma ever could have guessed as I waved my final farewell and our last surviving squirrel ran inside between her planted feet in Jolene, Alabam’-don’t-give-a-damn.

  But I didn’t know that yet. Vowing to make Great-Grandma Jolene herself, after whom our town was named, proud of her progeny in this new land, I walked past the bus driver, a fat dyspeptic who had started gnawing his hat like a cheeseburger as I went by, and on out of the Greyhound depot. “Hello there!” I hollered at the first Californian I saw. “Which way to Twentieth Century-Fox?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Twuh, twuh, twuh,” he started saying, staring at the home team coming off the bench for the victory celebration like he was the
Apostle Paul struck blind on the road to Damascus. I think he had switched over to “Fuh, fuh, fuh,” without a great deal more success, before I decided I’d do better trying to locate Mr. Darryl F. Zanuck’s incomparable magic manufactory on my own.

  As I strolled along, the string around my suitcase creaking bouncily in time to my steps—it had been Momma’s very last piece, too—I got my first impression of Los Angeles, which was amazement at how few people here had learned to drive properly. Left and right and front and back of me, cars kept smashing into each other and fire hydrants and plowing into storefronts amid showers of glass, which sparkled like the very dreams I had heard the streets here were paved with. Off in the distance, even the owl eyes in the final syllable of the Hollywood sign seemed to be popping at all the June havoc here below. But then, catching sight of my reflection in a conveniently placed and as yet unbroken plate-glass window, I gathered that some clue to the commotion might lurk in my own not unstartlesome appearance, since at the moment I was verging on nine feet tall and, albeit only partially as a result, wearing a dress that a hamster couldn’t have used for a hankie.

  Not that I wasn’t otherwise striking, even by Alabam’-don’t-give-a-damn’s high standards. If amber and rubies could burn, my hair would have been eternal fire. My bazooms were like a dual edition of the Hindenburg, with two cherry lollipops with red Jujubes stuck on them in charge of the navigating. My hips could have started the Timex folks weeping. In a bon-voyage view, my upside-down heart would have made King Kong jump off the Empire State Building, tossing poor Fay Wray like a candy wrapper, to follow me wherever I was headed, meanwhile obliging Lady Liberty to cast aside the torch that she secretly carries for him and dive into the bay in shame and self-abnegation. In fact, from my oncoming lollipops to my caboosial fare-thee-well on a good day, which they all were in my beautimous youth, I could have raised our sacred Confederate dead dicks first, turned that statue of the Thinker into something you’d use for doughnut-tossing practice, and given Our Lord Jesus Christ a king-of-kings-sized woody on the cross, its wrathful shadow forcing the centurions to back away in fear and awe and go nail up some other Canaanite instead.

  As for whoever’s making all this up about me, well—you go on and enjoy yourself, just like Jesus and our sacred Confederate dead. Have a good old time. Sure would appreciate if you restored me to my natural five eight, though, and not just because I don’t want the model airplane I saw at rest on your closet shelf beside the jigsaw puzzle of the fifty states you hide me under, in forlorn memento mori Amsterdam of a previous kind of dreaming, to get itself tangled in the eternal fire of my hair. Before we’re done, I’ve got to get through the door of none other than Mr. Frank Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs, California Desert, U.S.A., and would prefer not to have to stoop upon entering his foyer like some hulking freak in a disingenuously compassionate Diane Arbus snapshot.

  For me?

  Thank you.

  Believe me, Sprout, I’m used to this. The others aren’t, which is why they never spotted you—although Lovey did come closer than she knew one time. Anyway, it don’t bother me none, as we used to say in Jolene. For all I know, I’m dead by now, in which case I’m flattered by the spasmoosive immortality you bestow and ask you to imagine my two-dimensional ghost turning to make a small ectomorphic curtsy from the screen. Oh, no—I’m in a magazine this time, aren’t I? Drat Gagilnil’s old photographs! Not to be crass, Sprout, but I sure hope you’ve got some Kleenex handy. Don’t make your momma wash those Elmer-ized sheets on top of everything else, she probably has to work real hard to keep things going and you know she’s been feeling pretty low herself since your daddy passed away, which is why you should try to remember that she didn’t know you were there. To tell the truth, he sounds to me like ninety-nine-point-eight percent pure son of a bitch in an cast-iron T-shirt, but never really having had one to call my own does put me at some disadvantage in determining where that puts him on the Dad-and-Husband-O-Meter.

  But to resume. Charging out to find Darryl Zanuck, whose name I agree is intrinsically funny for reasons no one has ever been able to explain, I was beguiled by an index card tacked up in the lobby of the Poil du Chien Arms, the hotel in which I had parked suitcase and caboose at the corner of Yucca Street and Cahuenga Boulevard. That was just two blocks from Hollywood and be-still-my-soul Vine, so I was sure I must be right near several major studios and producers’ personal mansions. To my easily widened Alabam’-don’t-give-a-damn eyes, the Poil was a pure humdinger of an establishment, featuring carpeting and doors that had real knobs instead of latches. The divine Carole Lombard had probably been here before me, though not for long. This index card looked classy, too: MODELS NEEDED $5 PER PRINTED POSE NO ANIMALS, it said, in what I soon learned was pen, not pencil.

  Five dollars! Although Momma had disputed this so violently that bits of gummed corn flew from all three of her teeth as she did so, I had heard from a perambulatory sewing-machine agent name of Ratliff that the U.S. government actually did engrave and print a bill in that debominination. The prospect of laying eyes on one of these rarities, and thereby proving to myself that there was indeed a Santy Claus, sped my heels through a milk bath of Hollywood sunshine to the address on the card. This proved to be on a nearby street in a building whose rooftop sign declared that it was always time for some more Maxwell House, leading me to gather that they planned to erect an annex to it in the near future.

  When my proud but breathless bazooms led their owner’s way into the room marked GagilnilArt Photos and Fine Reproductions, one of Momma’s Chosen people, or so I strongly suspected, and from chin’s droop to paunch’s billow a mighty sorry physical specimen to boot, was maneuvering a box camera on a tripod in front of a painted ocean sky, before which stood a depressed-looking sofa and a plastic palm tree with one frond. “Well, here I am!” I told his plump, damp back. “And I didn’t bring so much as a parakeet with me, fond as I am of the lil’ devils.”

  With a groan of despair, Mr. Gagilnil—for I assumed that this could only be he—bashed at the snout of his camera, which folded back into the box part in hurt and surprise. Hands to hips that had loved potato chips not wisely but too well, knew Ruffles not only had ridges but gave them, and had long lost the bet about eating just one, he stared at the contraption, fuming. I had a distinct impression of having stepped off with the wrong bazoom, so to speak.

  “Did I say the wrong thing a minute ago?” I asked.

  “No, it’s all right. When the sign’s on the roof, I can’t see it; that’s why I moved in here. What do I call you, Miss?”

  I told him, but when I got to “Gumst-,” he stopped me. “Am I the telephone directory?” he said. “Just a first name’11 do fine—or should I say a Christian one, as I eye you from beneath my beetling brows and my head swims at the doxy-from-Dixie boy-oh-goyishness of it all?”

  “Golly,” I said. “Are you really a Jew?”

  “Golly, are you anti-Semitic?”

  “Golly! So you are a Jew,” I said, clapping my hands.

  “Gumdrops! So you are anti-Semitic,” he said, trying to clap his. He missed. I couldn’t wait to see what kind of pictures he took.

  “Not so far as I know,” I explained, “although as it happens a lot of my mature attitude on the subject rests in your furry butterfingers, Mr. Gagilnil, since I’ve never actually seen one of you before—except for that fella who does all the double-talk on Your Show of Shows, and in Westerns playing unexpectedly large-nosed and thoughtful Apaches and such.”

  “A tribe’s a tribe, lady. A genocide’s a genocide. From Buchenwald to Plymouth Rock, it’s all in a day’s work hereabouts, and even though I’m not a busy man I do toss my whimpering vanity the occasional moldy dog biscuit by pretending otherwise here in my lonely six-pointed wigwam, so let’s see what you keep in the ruggage rack.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The skimpy but nevertheless obstructing Daisy Mae blouse, discard,” he explained, all with vigorous hand mo
tions to match. “The oversized shiksa hello-nurses, make birthday-suit ta-dah with. The seedy Yid photographer on Ivar Street whose grainy, sordid, yet mysteriously wistful black-and-white nudies’ very existence you will deny if all goes better for you in Tinseltown than this seasoned observer honestly expects, impress. Or not, as the case may be.”

  “Jesus!” I said, undoing my polka-dotted top and reaching around to unhook Mount Rushmore. “Can’t you at least buy me a Baby Ruth or maybe a box of Crackeijacks first, or anyway wait to play please-don’t-squeeze-the-Charmin with my Goodyears till after the newsreel if not the Woody Woodpecker cartoon?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Miss. In more ways than you know, I see a lot of boobs in my line of work, and by now they might as well be—oy, the humanity,” he said softly, as the gates to the Double-D Ranch for Wayward Boys fell open before his eyes.

  When I returned to the Maxwell House the next morning for my first glamor-photography session, Mr. Gagilnil had somebody for me to meet. One high heel a-dandle on the toes of an upraised and bestockinged foot, she was reading a movie magazine on a fake tiger rug on the floor, dressed in black undergarments that seemed to wrinkle and shift awry on her as if their material was perpetually astonished to find itself in actual contact with her skin, and feared hurting it. Looking up from under heavy auburn bangs that fell almost to her eyes, she gave me a lipsticky and lopsided smile as she jumped to her feet in welcome. She struck me as an innocent, and as I had begun to suspect that by most standards I was one myself, that she had this effect on me filled me with a trepidative apprehensileness for her sake.

  “This is Bettie,” Mr. Gagilnil said. “And you may yet go as far in this business as she has if you just keep an eye peeled along with everything else, because she’s the best that ever was.”