by Steven Clark
At the Arch with Saul, I mused that St. Louis was the eye of Missouri. Now I saw my ‘family’ consisted of three blind people, and I had to open their eyes from their bitterness and evasion. Was I up to it? Was anyone? It was turning dark with winter’s approach. Headlights swished back and forth like furtive lanterns. Hands deep in my pockets, I walked home, and, worn out from all the intrigue, ordered Imo’s.
13
Elephants and the Ball
It’s the square beyond compare.
That’s the motto of Imo’s pizza, St. Louis’s own, baked on thin crust and served not as pie slices but small squares. I meditated as I ate, tossing a thick chunk of sausage to Yul, my yowling Siamese. He caught it in midair.
I’d pulled out old photographs of my father. My dad. The handsome Ike Taylor posed by his jet or in uniform, a black and white parent’s world of simple verity. My solid, loving father who died on active duty. For a while, I grew up in an atomic family in the Atomic age. No matter what slings and arrows of outrageous fortune came later, I had a father who was straight and square. Except the adultery, of course. He always reminded me of Lindbergh, who was almost worshiped as a god, our Midwestern Daedalus. As I munched on a square and gazed at Ike, I recalled when St. Louis killed Lindy.
It was the summer of 1981, and city air closed in like a paper bag over my head.
The downtown lunch crowd clustered at Tenth and Chestnut behind wooden barriers, excited as the headache ball revved up. The mood was festive, as befits funeral games. On the wall of a multi-storied garage, Lindbergh’s mural shone in glory. It was a copy of the famous photo of him in his flying helmet, the long flaps curving out like a Greek warrior’s helmet, his dreamy eyes looking up off center.
The portrait was a series of black and white cubes, making Lindy abstract yet iconic, as if you were seeing him in a foggy mosaic. It was called Lindy Squared, an example of seventies mural art seeded downtown to save the city from its stupor.
By the eighties, instead of art, corporate expansion was the next way to rejuvenate downtown. Southwestern Bell bought the garage space to expand a new tower, and Lindy had to go. Jama stood by my side, in a pastel sun dress and large sunglasses, squirming in ten-year-old impatience as she scrunched her mouth.
“When’s he gonna get it? It’s like … forever!”
“Patience child,” I said. “Nothing starts on time. Not even you.” Jama had been the product of a long delivery, my labor pains a foretaste of life to come. We smelled hot dogs from a nearby stand. Cherry and raspberry snow cone flavorings melted on the sidewalk like sugary blood.
Two dancers bopped and twisted to a boom box’s screeching. Jama frowned again. “Hey, they’re doing weirdo disco.”
“It’s the Lindy Hop,” I said, trying to inculcate bits of history into her psyche. The man slid the woman under his arched legs, then tossed her up and gripped her waist. A wave of oooohhhs and aaaaahhhs came from the crowd. “It’s thought to be jitterbug,” I said, “but it’s actually from Harlem. 1920s.”
This arcana was wasted on Jama, but when you got arcana on the brain, what are you gonna do? Pierce would have liked it, but he was away at camp.
She stamped her foot. “When they gonna?”
I tousled her hair. “And who is that behind those Foster Grants?”
Jama grinned at the slogan and struck a celebrity pose. The sunglasses were too big, making her look like a caricature of a movie star. Alas, prophesy fulfilled.
The headache ball hissed and grunted like a monster’s pendulum. Cops tossed away their cigarettes, then moved people back. Cameras clicked to capture Lindy one last time. Jama giggled.
“Now he’s gonna get it! Right between the eyes!”
The crowd hushed as the ball swung. The ball hit Lindy’s schnoz with a thunk! Jama cheered with the crowd. My heart sunk. A second swing made spider webs on Lindy. A third, then the bricks tapped on the pavement.
The headache ball slammed into him like Gibson swinging a homer with bases loaded. An avalanche of bricks toppled on the fenced-off walk to cheers and claps. Jama jumped up and down, her own Lindy Hop.
KA-BOOM!
There was a ragged hole where Lindy had been.
Aunt Mary loved reading Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s autobiography to me. We were impressed at Lindbergh’s world travels, meditating that nuclear war was more savage than the natives in Africa and New Guinea he supped with. Although I always hugged Raggedy Ann, one of my favorite toys was a Steve Canyon flying helmet and mask. I’d put it on and imagine Dad and I streaming off together in a T-33 jet trainer. It was, as they said in the fifties, a square thing, wanting to be like your old man. I reveled in it, knowing Dad, like Lindy, was a protector, a god up there.
When I take walks in Tower Grove Park, that oblong square of remembering, once a week sirens go off and a mechanical voice slurs and echoes. It was put in after 9/11 for emergency announcements, and reminds us this is only a test. That voice chills more than it reassures, telling me Lindy and Dad aren’t here to protect me anymore, that such square men in black and white are no longer possible.
All I have left is the square beyond compare.
Imo’s is like that to me. Saul once used it to describe urban politics, its squares of meat, peppers, and cheese parts of an urban chess board he demonstrated to me, Pierce, his very expecting wife Antje, and Jama.
If you’re going to be philosophical in St. Louis, you’d better have lots of tomato, meat, cheese and bake it right. Memories must be fed to us carefully.
You’d think with the leaves gone and trees bare, with the days bleeding light out, that Tower Grove park would be a gloomy place. But it’s not that way at all. There is magic in bleakness.
When I had Pierce and Jama, the park became a world of fantasy. The tree stumps looked like elephant’s legs, and it became Maurice Sendak time. I’d point from trunk to trunk and pretend a Mastodon convention had come to St. Louis. Jama would trumpet like a bull, but it came out more raspberry than mating call. Pierce and I sat amidst musky leaves and discussed the survival mores of such immense beasts. He and I studied trunks and branches, comparing them to spines, Pierce deciding that the Pin oak, with its ramrod straight torso and fan of branches, most resembled the lungs and their roots of veins; much like the Mississippi’s hundred tendrils of water from her spine.
At dusk, Jama thought the branches twisted into tusks. We watched Chinese women gather the fruit of the sweetly stinking ginkgoes in wordless, squatting labor, scooping them up to make the ginkgo seeds into garnish. Intrigued, I’d ask them for the recipe, but they only nodded and whispered in Chinese.
The unintelligible words of the women transported our imaginations to a city near the Yangtze, a pit stop for mastodons on their way to Siberia and permafrost. We tried to warn them: don’t go! You’ll fall into a deep freeze! But mastodons are set in their ways. They lumbered off into the dark like a truck convoy in need of a trim. Jama cupped her hands. “So long, suckers!”
Fantasy is necessary for children, perhaps even more so for children of the Midwest. It’s a rolling land of trees with unremarkably vapid expanses. It lacks the drama of the tropics, the vision of deserts, the magisterial Rockies and Cascades, the vast, enduring waves of the seashore. When I was a girl, I’d look at clouds and pretend they were mountain ridges, the sunset making jagged lines of purple and royal blue so I’d see a shoreline and ocean beyond. We Midwesterners must counter our stable land by seeking visions and dreaming dreams, we the land of baggy trousers, of parents who say yello and shirrr over the telephone.
So, Lindbergh is our Daedalus. The Wizard of Oz made Kansas a Gateway Arch to another world. Isn’t The Great Gatsby but a Midrash on the end of make believe? Even Disney hailed from the Midwest. And once upon a time, I wanted to become Veiled Prophet Queen. Now, decades later, I finally had an invitation to the court of love and beauty.
I took the Metrolink to downtown. That’s our fancy new light rail, a belated answer to other citi
es subways or trolleys. The cars stream past the debris of Midtown and its backside of offices and warehouses. The skeletons of brick and scrap. Old factory boxes once productive, like the lettering of one reading Dixie Cream Donut Flour, now boarded up, its lettering fog-like. UPS trucks surround a brick building next door like messenger hogs at a trough. Gang graffiti borders warehouses with names like Becke Cobbett Steel; the spray paint making jagged splashes of color like a psychedelic seismograph reading. Streaming under the overpasses, I see the decaying highway’s iron rods stick out like exposed bones. It was a relief to submerge, and when I exited, to smell damp rock and oil as I sped to my rendezvous with Saul.
Metropolitan Square is one of our newer towers, only thirty feet lower than the Arch. Its skin of granite and glass skirts modern Gallic origins whose steep roofed gables and angled dormers are supposed to hint at French Renaissance, but they remind me of bat’s ears.
My heels clicked on the polychrome marble veneer that shone like dark ice. Laptop folk slicked past. At the cavernous lobby is a series of murals called Urban Odyssey, rising fifty feet off the surface, depicting the story of Ulysses using St. Louis backgrounds. The Sirens are office girls downtown on a lunch break. Circe holds court at the monkey house in the Zoo, etc. Ulyssees, in collar and tie, is buffeted from one adventure to another; not unlike how Saul sees himself. Colors are shadowed blues and moody greens, a marriage of Thomas Hart Benton and Rod Serling.
I studied the murals and Saul as he spoke to a trio of youngish men in black shirts and jackets with wild ties the color of peach melba. The one in the middle whose five o’clock shadow was going to midnight held a small camera.
“A city should love it’s waterfront,” he said. “Europeans know how to maintain and integrate them into the life of the city, so they are pleasurable and useful. Waterfronts are treasured. Here, we cut ourselves off from them. Highway 70 severs us from the Mississippi. It’s our life, the reason St. Louis became someplace. A strategic position, one of the world’s greatest rivers, but we turn our back on it.”
He looked down, lost in thought, again as I see him, a man gazing at his lost kingdom. “River ways are vital. When the oil runs out, we’re going to need them and damned fast.”
“Sure,” one of the men said, “but then you bitch about the Arch.”
“It’s dead.” Saul shrugged. “An example of funeral sculpture. A necropolis of empty grass and an oversized croquet post.”
“It’s a curve,” joked the other man, “like the Bell Curve.”
“What can I say?” Saul wearily shrugged, “St. Louis is a bell curve kind of city.” The two men laughed as Saul continued.
“St. Louis wants to destroy itself. Most American cities do. There’s no past to them. To Americans, cities are a product of the industrial age, and the jury is still out on what that was all about.” He smiled at the ripple of laughs. “St. Louis, like the rest of the urban gang, has been a constantly expanding place of noisy, smoky, industrial growth that never settles down, because it fills up with one migrating horde of immigrants and arrivistes after another.” Saul looked up at Ulysses. “We’re an idea of a place instead of a real home.” He paused, then one of the men turned off the camera.
“Great,” another man said.
“Yeah,” Saul said, “I can’t wait to raise the suicide rate.”
“No, man,” the third one smiled, “just send us all to the bars. So, on that note, you coming with?”
Saul winked to me. “Raincheck, guys.”
He kissed me lightly on the check as we met beneath the mythic scenery. “Urban junkies in town for a wrap-up on urban planning, and Prestler, the one with the camera, wants a spot from me on his website. Tit for tat. I’m really on the circuit these days. The mad little Einstein and his nutty theories. Everyone wants to have a look. Like they used to when the Zoo had Phil the gorilla.” He kissed my hand, the rad urban planner turned gallant count. “What’s the latest on L’affaire Desouche?”
I filled him in on my meeting with Terri as we stood beneath Ulysses.
“I can’t believe Dan Smatters hunted you down,” said Saul. “Even going into an organic grocery store.”
“He has to be in league with Terri. That’s my theory.”
“Yeah, the ducks are lining up. Smatters with Terri, Pierre and Moot.” He stood under Ulysses as he faced Circe. “And what is Sonia’s stake in this?”
“Corn Mother, apparently.”
“Yeah, great,” he sighed. “Our Lady of Archer Daniels Midland.”
He gestured to the last mural, where Ulysses arrives home to Penelope below the murky clouds of one of our June thunderstorms, Ithaca bearing an uncanny resemblance to Webster Groves. “The witches are circling the cauldron.”
“I have to be impartial. There’s some kind of sadness with this family. Before I take any kind of cut—which I don’t want—I’ve got to find out what’s really going on with them. They are, after all, kin.”
Saul shook his head. “Waste of time. You’re the one with the white hat. Go forth and angel.”
“You’re still going to the ball with me?”
“Sure. It’s for Margot.” He looked up at the mural. “It’s probably her last social event, right?”
“Yes. She’s going downhill.”
“Damn,” he said softly, a curse on tiptoes.
That night, I had my usual closet battle deciding what to wear to the Ball, any Ball. Sky complained about women’s fickleness in pondering their wardrobes, as if our patron saint was Imelda Marcos. He’d just grab a shirt, smell the underarms, and if they didn’t stink, it won the prize. Ah, the sexes. I thought of going strapless, did a flesh check and decided my arms had one more year before they went flabby. That meant the electric green. Yul kept howling as I tramped about. Across the hall came toodling from my neighbor’s saxophone.
Kenyatta Holmes, a reclusive semi-artist who could give the Grinch pointers in churlishness, has a running gun battle with me because he claims Yul’s cries screws up his music. I began to do my makeup as the door thumped.
I frowned, pulled on my robe, and opened the door, grabbing my recalcitrant cat before he could make a break.
We confronted Kenyatta. His shock of white hair and poker face not the sight you want outside the door. He was a Bill Cosby of sulk, goatee bristling, holding the sax like a shiny Tommy gun. “You know,” he growled, “I’d like to try this riff in C major … without the cat.”
“I’m sorry. Yul gets like this.”
“Yeah, he gets like it a lot.”
“Hey, Ken, back off. The cat’s excited. Anyway, you’re making more noise.”
“What, you gonna report me for that? You the one that’s been reporting me?”
I closed my grip on a struggling Yul. “Me? No. I like a good sax, but not the paranoia. I’ll make Yul chill, okay?”
Ken scowled and lowered the glasses that perched on his crown. “Like that kid of yours. Didn’t do so well telling her to chill, did it?”
I pursed my lips. “Have a nice day.”
The one guy in the neighborhood Jama scammed for three hundred had to be my across-the-hall neighbor; he who has groceries delivered and has probably only been seen outdoors twice in three years. I looked at the cat, and plopped him on the couch.
Back in front of the mirror, I held lipstick in hand, deciding how much to beautify, how much to conceal. Grace Kelly said one of the reasons she got out of acting (besides becoming a fairy tale princess, which is a very good gig), was the five o’clock call. On the set, her make-up call was at eight. The older an actress got, the earlier the call. At the five o’clock call, Grace warned, it was time to get out of the business. I looked hard into the mirror. Chin cushy, bags, crow’s feet, frown lines. Six thirty. Okay, six twenty-five. Thus assuaged, I turned to the mirror as the sax started up again.
The Hotel Plangent sparkles on Fourth Street with a bustle of cars and limos at its shiny brass doors. Its granite face was once an old offic
e building, now redesigned so the newer hotel balloons out in back. Saul told me this is facading, where the old remains, but only facially.
He met me in the lobby and led me past jolly lettering: Do Your Pageant at the Plangent!
The Veiled Prophet Ball was up the escalators and waiting for us, so my childhood fantasy finally took place in one of our fair city’s newest crash pads, not venerable, nor truly St. Louis like the old Kiel Auditorium or the Chase; for the Plangent sprouts throughout the sunbelt and claws into the Midwest, a Starbucks of hotels.
Saul nudged me.
“So how do you feel, Ms. Bridger? Living your fantasy?”
We went up the stairs. The hotel’s marble trimmings shone as if Midas did the interior touching. Bell boys in jackets whose frogging looked like it belonged on the shoulders of Civil War soldiers, bowed to all.
“Somewhat nervous.”
“Of what?”
“What they say. ‘The anticipation always exceeds the actual event.’”
“Who said that? Wilde?”
“Snoopy.”
Waves of gowns, jewels, and men of wealth, both bulky and svelte, undulated before us. At the entrance to the ballroom, a covey of ladies-in-waiting clustered. I still expected the white deb gowns of my childhood TV fantasy, but colors shone in resplendent variety, from blood red to lime, canary and shades of white covering the gamut from ivory to milk.
I waved to Margot, who leaned on her cane as she conversed with other ladies, her silver gown a Milky Way of sequins, wearing a satin Spencer. She and I embraced.
“Lee,” she said, “you look so divine tonight. Saul, you’re quite the dish.”
“Hopefully low-cal but filling.”
“I want you to meet someone.”
Her face was full of color. Margot had been pale the last three days, and we discussed increasing her dosage because of pain. Now she was vibrant, the cane less leaned on.
I scanned the Veiled Prophet’s court: men wore purple ribands around their necks denoting membership in the Society. Bengal Lancers stood guard in colorful red coats and turbans.