Mr Toppit

by Charles Elton

  Anyway, she had had enough of fathers and their poisonous offspring. It was fathers who did the damage. Look at what Rick had done to Merry. Underneath that perfect exterior of hers, that golden hair and polite smile, God knows what corruption lurked. All summer she had been running some alternative life with Travis and Luke and then got Rachel involved with that drug dealer up in Topanga. It was lucky Wade hadn’t come to the house and murdered them all.

  Rachel was the same as Merry. Just because she sounded like Princess Diana, it didn’t mean that she didn’t have the soul of a slut. And Luke, prissily saying that he wasn’t the boy in the Hayseed books. He was right there. It was a pity Arthur hadn’t used some other name for the main character. Then there would have been no confusion and the boy could have had the life of obscurity he appeared to want. He was quite a dull boy anyway. No spark. He just watched everything with those cold, blue eyes. What had Arthur done to them both to make them like that?

  Arthur: she was losing him and it made her feel frightened and lost. He had been the source of everything, the stream that had once bubbled up through the earth pure and untouched, as clear as anything you could ever imagine. Of course she had known that it would become muddy as it flowed down, nothing could prevent that, but now she wondered how pure it had ever been, whether it hadn’t been tainted from the start.

  All she wanted was the truth, but maybe that was the problem: it didn’t really exist. Everyone seemed to think that if something wasn’t the truth it must be a lie but it wasn’t as simple as that. It couldn’t be. Not that the program people were going to be satisfied with that to counteract the Paul Schiller thing.

  Her mind was going round and round and suddenly it stopped with a jolt. Her heart began to race. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t spotted it earlier—the most significant fact about her dream. The one person who wasn’t at the strange termite party, the one person who wasn’t chewing at the furniture or devouring the walls or watching others doing it was her father.

  She thought about it for a while. What had he done that was so bad? Compared to what the others had done to their children, he seemed almost blameless. Okay, he had stolen some money. So what? Who hadn’t been caught for speeding or shoplifting candy from a store? Laurie wasn’t going to exonerate him, but she wanted to put it in some kind of context. It was wartime. Everything was tight. He had a kid and an alcoholic wife to look after. She probably drank all his wages. He was at the Schiller’s and he saw some money sticking out of a wallet. Maybe it was a moment of madness. God knows everybody else in her life had had enough of them. Why should he be different? Tears came into her eyes. Oh, the shame he must have felt. No wonder nothing was the same after they left Los Alamos.

  She wasn’t a religious person, but she thought of that phrase in the Bible about chasing false Gods. That’s what she had done. She had sought perfection in others, in Rick and Arthur, but it was the flaws that made people what they were, it was the flaws that made them human. She wished now that she hadn’t left her father’s Zippo lighter with Arthur. She would have done anything to have it back now, to hold it in her hands and remember all the things that he had done for her.

  She heard a car door slam outside: Stan, her driver, was here. She was already late. As she pulled herself out of bed her hand brushed the smooth wall and she remembered the hotel room in London. Anaglypta: she rolled the word round in her head, exploring it this way and that, and a surge of hope flooded in, like crystal-clear water. She knew what she must do. She knew now what to say on the show. She could make it all right. She loved her father, and together they could repair the damage everyone else had done, even if it meant that the whole house of cards collapsed. Yes, she thought, I am the Princess Anaglypta and I have come home.

  As she went outside into the dawn light, Stan was waiting by the car holding open the back door for her. Suddenly she felt so buoyant that she kissed him before she got in. Yes, her house was damaged, its walls were full of holes, but the foundations were solid. As they drove away, she could almost see the termites beginning to leave, their wiggling antennae sensing that things were changing here, that there might be danger for them if they stayed even a moment longer in her house.

  Rick

  CHRISTMAS GREETINGS 1990

  It’s that special time of year again when we write to our friends and loved ones. And with some guilt as we missed last year. Somehow it just snuck up on us and before we knew it, it was too late to send the letter. Where have I heard that one before???

  We are both well, and Merry, too. That indeed is always a great blessing, and particularly appreciated as one hears of the problems old friends have had with their children. The past eighteen months have brought quite a change in our lives, mostly for the good, with lots of goings-on and anticipation for the year to come.

  Last year was not a great year. Someone once said that all a man’s troubles begin when he leaves his village. I think the Whitcomb family are the living proof of that statement! But the great thing is you can go back to your village, and when we decided to leave the so-called City of Angels and return to Modesto back in May, I think we made the right decision. Don’t worry—that party I’ve promised is going to happen as soon as I get the garden fixed up and Merry is more like her old self.

  Jerrilee is working full-time as the office manager at Spring Crest Retirement Complex. She is a natural and popular leader, forever fussing about the needs of her staff and patients and working with Ros Detweiler to keep everything running smoothly. The great regret here is that she has not had time to exercise her recognized talents in her favorite arts and crafts situations. Alas, even her marvelous yearly photo albums are two years behind entry. She complains of being overburdened, and rightfully so.

  1990 was the Year of the Lawyer—for the Whitcomb family anyway! Happily, we’ve had Greg Terpstra in our corner, one of the few gentlemen in that profession, manners being something that those lawyers in LA might learn something about! The case is still continuing so I’m not permitted to talk about it and I’m certainly not going to give a certain person any more publicity than she—drat! I’ve given something away already!—has already had.

  Our argument with that lady is professional. All I will say is this: in my book, a management contract is a legally binding document—that’s why it’s called a contract, dummy!—and you can’t just decide to tear it up with three years more to run on it. Sadly, in the world of show business, certain high-profile people feel they can do anything they like just because they have the resources, but the Whitcombs are fighters—make no mistake about that!—and one thing we’re not going to put up with is the untruths that have been circulated about my abilities in the management field. That lady has already proved she is not totally reliable as regards the truth, if stories in the press are anything to go by.

  Whoever said “The meek shall inherit the earth” must have been drinking snake water. The nerve of that woman is unbelievable! She’s all but accused of lying about her father and she does a whole show about him! In the Whitcomb house we watched with our jaws on the floor, I can tell you. She managed to turn that cheap crook of a father into some kind of a hero. How? By telling people that she had learned to celebrate the flaws that made him human—and they loved it! Seems these days you only have to cry on television and everyone’s on your side. The press coverage was incredible, and the ratings! I don’t know who that lady has made a pact with but I do know that his name must begin with a capital D.

  Our trip to Yosemite in the summer was one of the high points of the year. The scenery there is as magnificent as any you will see in this country and our senses were refreshed. We spent a lot of time loafing and reading and generally recharging the life batteries. Our only sadness was that Merry was unable to join us.

  The one thing I’m going to say about that particular situation is that Jerrilee supports me one hundred percent. If you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, stick with the rock! That’s what that lady’s b
een. One of our plans when all this stuff with Merry is over is to renew our marriage vows. I know that’s kind of corny but, as they say, it’s for better or worse and we’ve had “worse” for too long. We want to celebrate the “better” when it comes along. What we want more than anything is Merry as a bridesmaid, and back to the girl we know as a loving daughter. It’ll be some party!

  Sadly, Merry picked up some of that Los Angeles “darkness,” associating with the wrong people who did not have her best interests at heart, and here I do take some blame. When you work as hard as I was doing you can take your eye off the ball. It’s easy to do, and we just didn’t see the spiral that Merry was going into and that’s a source of regret, I can tell you.

  Now, I’m not one to diss the various “psychos”—analysis and therapy and so forth. I just think the family therapist we saw was not the right one for us. Now, of course I don’t blame him for reporting Merry’s allegations about me—he has codes of conduct in his chosen profession, like we all do—but Jerrilee and I felt it could have been handled in a more contained and private way. After all, a therapist doesn’t know automatically what is true and what isn’t.

  Life’s confusing enough for a girl on the fringe of womanhood. And so are memories. And anyway, this violence she says she remembers from when she was a child, what does that mean? Is a little smack when a kid is naughty called “domestic violence” these days?

  One thing I will say is that the Modesto police could not have been more courteous, particularly Walter Reinheimer who I was at high school with. All I will say is that there never were, still aren’t, and probably won’t be any formal charges. It is simply “under investigation” and my lawyer, Greg Terpstra, tells me everything is proceeding according to plan.

  You’ve probably read about this thing called “recovered-memory syndrome.” (Jerrilee thinks there are enough “syndromes” in our lives already without another one being added!) All I’ll say is this: if you’re a kid playing baseball and the ball goes over the fence into your neighbor’s yard just at the moment the phone rings and you have to go inside to answer it, you might have forgotten what happened to the ball when you get back outside. You think, Hmm … where’s the ball? And then you remember. Of course! It went over the fence! That’s a “recovered memory.” Why? Because it actually happened! That’s what I want to say to the so-called “experts”—how can you “recover” a “memory” that wasn’t there in the first place? It’s what I call “invented-memory syndrome.” There—that’s a new syndrome to add to the textbooks!

  None of this is a critique of Merry who, as you know, is the dearest soul in the world to Jerrilee and me. She came late in our lives and we’ve always regarded her as a miracle from God as it was so unexpected after so many years of the stork not arriving.

  Anyway, our message to Merry is this: we will give you all the love we have in our hearts, we respect you as a person, and we want you back to that girl who baked forty separate muffins and put a candle in each one for Jerrilee’s fortieth birthday. What a day that was!

  The great sadness is that Greg Terpstra has advised that I should have no contact with Merry until this situation is resolved. She has a little apartment downtown and Jerrilee visits her twice a week. She’s keeping herself busy by working part-time at Avian Accessories on J Street. She’s always been great with animals and Jerrilee tells me that the shop is gaining recognition in the bird world as a producer of quality customized perches. Say “hi” if you’re passing by. She needs a lot of support.

  Not everything is bad news! Our big press release is that we’re going to do Mame at the Townsend Opera this coming March. I’d get booking now—it’s going to sell out fast! Jerrilee and I have wanted to do this for years, ever since we saw Angela Lansbury perform it on Broadway. We think it’s Mr. Jerry Herman’s finest show by a long stretch and we can’t wait to get back on that stage. No prizes for guessing which role Jerrilee is going to do! She was born to play the madcap, eccentric Mame Dennis and I’ll be playing Beauregard Burnside, her Southern beau. I’ll have to do a little work on that accent, though!

  We’re looking forward to a good 1991, and thinking how fast it will be that we are entering into a new century. A time for all of us to reflect on the past and the future that is coming toward us with multiple problems and opportunity.

  We wish that all of you are well, and also very much wish you and yours the best for the holiday season.

  Love and best wishes to all,

  Rick and Jerrilee Whitcomb

  Luke

  It was a song that always seemed to be around that summer, one of those infectious tunes with jangling acoustic guitars and harmonies, and a slight reggae beat. You heard it in the background, on transistor radios and ghetto blasters in the park, and it was somehow already inside your head without you ever being conscious of how it had got there.

  At university I hadn’t listened to much music and wasn’t part of the crowd who swapped records, went to gigs, and had posters of very cool singers on their walls, so my receptors were pretty unresponsive, and it was a while before I concentrated on it enough to register the words. Even then, only half listening, I didn’t make the connections. I even sort of knew that the song was by Travis Buckley but I still hadn’t put two and two together. First, I’m not sure I even knew his last name, and second, LA was a long time ago and I’d done enough thinking about it at the time.

  Still, there must have been a moment when I suddenly saw it—heard it—clearly, like one of those optical illusions that look like two profiles in silhouette until you see them again and realize they’re actually a vase or something. What I do remember is going to a record store on the way back from work and looking under B in Rock/Pop. There were two albums by him and the sleeves both had the same idea: the first was a photograph of a road sign, which gave the album its name, Slow—Children, and the second, a different road sign, Ped X-ing. His next album would probably be called Beware—Landslides. There were photographs of Travis on the back and they made me smile for no other reason than that they were unmistakably like him, even five years since I’d last seen him.

  When I got back to the flat I shared with Adam and listened to the second album properly, the one with the song on it, I realized he had changed two things. He had tinkered with the chorus, and instead of “I watch you through my eyes/Until the summer ends,” it was now “I’m dazzled by your eyes/Until the summer ends/I know how hard you’ve tried/To force the pain to mend.” It made me laugh to think he had taken to heart Erica’s point about who else’s eyes he could be seeing her through. I don’t suppose there are many other hit songs with a lyrical contribution from Erica Hauer. And, of course, she was wrong: it had been better as it was before.

  The other thing was the title: while he never actually told us the title when he was talking about it that evening in Los Angeles, he had said he was writing a song about Merry. Now it was called “Song For Rachel.” Maybe he felt she fitted more naturally into Erica’s “special person” category, or maybe it was simply that he was trying to write a song about a girl in some kind of pain, and when he met Rachel he had realized Merry was an amateur in comparison.

  After Los Angeles, after Wade, there were the years of drift. People thought that that was when she started to unravel, but that wasn’t how I saw it. People talked of her as being “different” but I don’t know what she was meant to be different from. She was always the same to me, or maybe it was simply that I knew the unraveling had started much earlier and was used to it. I knew, in Laurie’s incredibly irritating stream-to-river analogy, where and when the first bubbling trickle had broken through the soil.

  She had money, which was either the problem or not, depending on how you looked at it. Because of some tax-planning thing, the benefit of a portion of the copyrights had been passed to Rachel and me, not by Martha—I should think she did everything she could to prevent it—but by Toppit Holdings AG, the Swiss corporation created to hold and exploit the copy
right in Arthur’s books. Don’t ask me. I didn’t use any of it.

  What she did with the money was to travel, with Claude at the beginning, but later, always on her own. When he died, when the AIDS became full-blown, she was in Nova Scotia. It was often islands she went to. She liked Cozumel. She liked Sri Lanka. She liked Mount Desert Island off the coast of Maine. She quite liked Menorca, but only in the winter. She had a bad experience on the Florida Keys so she only went there once. You can see the attraction of islands: contained, womb-like, elemental, safer somehow. Maybe she felt that, on an island, the access points to threat or danger might be more clearly identifiable.

  Of course she wasn’t away all the time. Of course she came home sometimes, either to Linton or to the flat Martha kept in London. Her visits were often preceded by a variable but consistent set of signals that were as unmistakable to me as the equivalent signals (the dog off his food, unusual activity in the wasps’ nest, a certain cloud formation at sunset) would be to an earthquake diviner. There would be a postcard from an unlikely place. Although cryptic and characteristically vague, it would contain one unequivocal statement, which was that, sad though it would be for both of us, there was no possibility of a reunion in the foreseeable future. “Because of the palaver over the boat, it doesn’t look as if I’ll be able to extract myself until the New Year. Damn and blast!” ran one such postcard from Crete. Or from Cuba: “Talk about voodoo! I had my cards read and the old girl said that home was full of dark forces, so I’m staying put for the time being.”

  They were always relentlessly breezy and littered with exclamation marks. As only one card ever came from each place, I guessed they were sent when the time had come for her to go, when her bluff had been called or the game was up or some disaster had happened, and the sending of a card indicating such a firm plan to stay made her feel her departure was a sudden whim rather than the necessity it had clearly become.