Jane veered into the curb and he came to the car, bright-eyed, innocent, his triumph still unbelievable. Conlon clambered into the back seat. He kissed Jane on the mouth, oblivious of Conlon's presence. Simply a piece of human luggage, a tall pug-nosed Irish kid with a face only childless parents would claim. He finally acknowledged her presence.
“Sorry I missed the turkey and stuff, but we was jammed. Don't any of these kids have a home?”
Sonny rode with them to Gramercy Park. Limp, leafless old New York trees reinforced by wooden staves teetered in the square. He pleaded exhaustion, gave Jane a squinting signal to indicate that much as he'd like to, it would be awkward with Conlon in possession of the living-room sofa. His helpless delicacy always surprised Jane, who took it as a sign of untapped depth—or was it just embarrassment?
“Was he going to come up?” Conlon asked. As a visitor she had no rights; an accusation of interfering would terminate her stay before she'd even unpacked.
“I was with him this afternoon.”
Jane brought out some of Mrs. Burke's prize linen, Orchard Street specials, and set up the sofa, which appeared at first to be something turned out by Castro craftsmen but had no lower deck and nothing to pull, just surface, three squarish foam-rubber pillows.
“Don't you stay with him?”
“Off and on. He's got a boy and he usually likes to get home. I don't sleep there—too tricky.”
“The kid won't say anything, will he?”
“Sonny likes to maintain appearances. He doesn't want Junior to grow up twisted, so we do things the All-American way. I come over for cornflakes and bananas on weekends and with bags of goodies from F. A. O. Schwartz, which they think is—oh, it's gorgeous—a Jewish candy store on the East Side that specializes in games.” She slipped off her dress and put on Sonny's favorite peignoir. “He doesn't know much about me.”
“Or your money?”
“I want to keep it quiet.” She sighed, wrapped a blanket around the cushions to keep them in place, and said, “He nags me about getting a job. I guess he's afraid that he might have to support me and he only makes ends meet.”
“And you can't tell him you don't have to work?”
“I'd rather not. Do you want to work?”
“I haven't thought about it,” Conlon said. “It might be fun for a while. But not as something regular that I didn't have any choice about.”
“That's exactly how I feel.”
“Maybe we'll look around tomorrow. Good night, Con.” She put an arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek. “What's the matter?”
“Jane, I'm scared.”
At nine o'clock, still wiping the crumbs of sleep from her eyes, Conlon lightly tapped Jane's shoulder to wake her.
“I just signed for this. Could be important.” She handed Jane a telegram.
She opened the yellow envelope a bit nervously. The abrupt waking up and the thought that she'd been found out unsettled her.
your mother taken into rhinebeck clinic tuesday night stop flying up from palm beach today stop meet me at clinic please
father
“Are you going?”
“I have to. For all I know she could have swallowed glass. Nothing would surprise me. The last time I saw her—oh, forget it.”
Conlon was coming along, no stopping her, although Jane made a faint-hearted effort to persuade her that the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade would be more entertaining, and football watching with Sonny, quarterbacking from his post in the leather chair, certainly more edifying. But Conlon was frozen in a state of ambivalence which was made up of loyalty to Jane, New York without Mel, a family she didn't want to see until a wedding or death were announced, and simple human curiosity.
Almost a year since the Siddleys had been together as a unit, and Jane realized that her father wouldn't have cut short his stay if the situation weren't serious. Luckmunn's face floated eerily through her mind, coupled with her mother's, the two on some futile treasure hunt. Why blame Luckmunn for rejecting what a score of others had also abandoned through the years? The last of her lovers, he was in a sense the least culpable. The thought of facing her parents together—in one room—without being high on grass made her quake. High, at least, she could pretend to cope with them. They were driving west, heading for the George Washington Bridge, when Jane turned off.
“There are a couple of prostitutes in Sonny's building. Maybe I can scrounge some pot from them.”
“You're getting paranoid, Jane.”
“Don't lecture me, will you.”
“What happens if Sonny happens to be visiting them?” Conlon asked with calculated naïveté.
“There's no end to your friendship, is there, Conlon?”
“I just don't want you to be let down again.”
“Christ, I promised Junior I'd take him to the Macy's parade.”
She rushed from the car, instructed Conlon to sit behind the wheel and keep the engine running in case she was forced to sprint; there was never any telling. She reappeared fifteen minutes later, and Conlon's neck hurt from craning it behind her to watch the entranceway. Her lip dripped with perspiration. Every man who passed was an undercover agent trying to get his name in the Daily News with a major bust. A black man rushed past Jane and Conlon almost swallowed her tongue. Jane waved to him.
“I thought he was going to arrest you.”
“That's James X. He's in charge of the guns and ammunition and he was running up to the roof to check the arsenal. Last week a bunch of kids broke in and started firing M-sixteens at the super, who's also a Panther, and James caught hell.”
“Do you want me to drive?”
“Fine, I'll roll,” Jane said, licking the Zig-Zag papers.
“What took you so long?”
“We got into an origin discussion. Whether Acapulco Gold was better than hash and whether Panama Red was better than both. Gloria was watching the parade stoned and she wanted to talk. We've got Panama. Con, can you smoke and drive?”
“I don't know but I'm going to try.” She switched on the radio and they heard yet another tribute to Otis Redding. “Jane, it's impossible to pinpoint, but since you've been in New York you've really grown. You've got vision.”
“Oh, sure. I move serenely from fuck-up to disaster.”
Jane had been up to the clinic some years before, when it had first opened and her mother had been one of the founding guests. A sudden attack of the DT's had overcome her in Jamaica and she had been brought back shivering, ranting obscenities, locked in the arms of a middle-aged man who spent his life playing polo. Neither the sportsman nor her father, nor indeed the doctor who met the plane, could do anything to relieve the condition, so she was spirited away in the back of a Lincoln to the Rhinebeck clinic for a period of drying out, mud baths, and whirlpool, guarded by nurses who uniformly resembled a squad of recently released SS personalities. Jane had been fourteen, frightened and struggling to come to terms with alarming pubescent feelings, happily pimpleless, but hotter than a firecracker.
“She may be weary, women do get weary...” Otis sang, his voice rasping as if linked to the level of Kaddish by a mournfulness transcending death.
Jane now accepted the fact that she'd lost her mother, had never really had her. Four visits in six years, or once every eighteen months, which wasn't truly alcoholic as alcoholics went; but certainly with a bottle in her hand, Nancy was someone to be reckoned with. Nurses passed through the house with the regularity of bowel movements, and communication revolved around the amount of glucose that had been pumped into Nancy for the day. Never infected by fantasy, Jane watched, made a small mental adjustment; her mind like a watch worn by a jeweler geared to minutely observing her mother's moods, so that she could detect—the household's early warning system—in a moment Nancy's plans for escape. A family decision was taken, against all logic, to remove Jane from Brinsley, a private school where she maintained passing marks, skirted cliques, and found the first two friends of her life. Nanc
y needed companionship, a sense of maternal responsibility to maintain her delicate balance, and Jim found a constructive solution: Jane would be the object of his wife's recovery.
“Can we stop and look at the view?” Conlon dreamily asked outside of Fishkill. “And I've got to pee.”
They found a clearing off the road. Jane, dazed, stared at the partially frozen blue-gray expanse of the Hudson, which like a painter's palette picked up and reflected the early afternoon's molten yellow light. Conlon went off to a clump of bushes, and Jane smoked another joint. Her cheeks were inflamed by the sharp fresh Hudson wind spiraling down the valley.
“Would you like half a dark bar?” she asked Conlon.
“It gets in my teeth. Are you hungry?”
“No, but thirsty.”
They passed several dark, grimy roadhouses whose signs celebrated the twin ecstasies of pizza and Hero sandwiches, but were closed for Thanksgiving.
“There's a hotel in Rhinebeck and we can stop there. It's another twenty—thirty minutes.”
Exposure to reality wasn't necessarily ignoble or dangerous, Jane reasoned, but what did create something of a compound fracture of the sensibility, especially during the green-shoot period at Fairfield, pivoted on the fact that she was nursemaid to a chronic drinker and at the same time heiress to a fortune. Bills got paid magically; Ferraris, Masseratis, Rolls Royces, and Aston Martins came and went whimsically, and along with them, plane trips, holidays in Europe and the Caribbean with never any mention of money, so it became for Jane the one true incorruptible fantasy of her life. The people were real, sour, and on view, but somehow she never made the connection between bank balance and freedom—at least, freedom of choice. At eighteen her trust fund, the small one, suddenly made an appearance and she couldn't take it seriously because it seemed irrelevant. Saranac and new faces were the reality.
Looming up ahead, a gray caries like the back molars of a German shepherd, stood the Rhinebeck Inn, and cutting across the Hudson just ahead of it a razor slash of a bridge. The clinic was just east through the decaying town—which was charmless, and abandoned except for a population of weekenders who bought houses no one else wanted, dragged their friends up for company, and swore that it was quieter than Connecticut. No question of this: it was cheaper.
A small turnout, the noncooking ladies and their families, were in the dining room, so Jane and Conlon took high uncomfortable stools at the bar.
“What's the thermos for?” Conlon asked. “Do these nuthouses have football games?”
“My mother's bound to ask me to get her drink, so I'll be a good little St. Bernard.”
Conlon got her Tom Collins and Jane a badly mixed Bloody Mary. Apparently the bartender was accustomed to complying with the strange requests of Rhinebeck inhabitants and loaded the equivalent of seven dry martinis into the thermos.
“Seven, always a lucky number,” Jane said.
“I don't understand you—you're starting to sound mean.”
“It's temporary. Actually I feel pretty good. The dutiful daughter.” She switched to a Coke. “You know, my respect for Alan went from zero to about three percent. For a minute he actually persuaded me that he was in love with me. But he has no balls.”
“Breaking in on you took something, didn't it?”
“I'm not sure what, but it wasn't balls. Christ, I've got to get myself together.” She took out a brush constructed of plastic spikes and ran it through her hair, put on invisible lipstick number four, the suntan special which she now used all year round, and regarded her unblemished complexion in the compact mirror. “I guess it'll have to do.”
“I should have those problems. How you stay up all night, get yourself screwed silly, and smoke three joints and still look so good—well, tell me how?”
“I don't know how to worry. It's a character defect,” Jane said.
A soft gray haze drifted up from the river and hung over the town, veiling the landscape. Jane took a turning off the highway and came onto an unmarked dirt road twisting like a paranoid's mind and signposted, every so often, sound horn—which might have been for the benefit of other cars or escapees tuned in to different stations.
“It's, well ... pretty,” Conlon said. “I didn't expect it to look sort of late Van Rensselaer.”
“Don't let the period architecture fool you, it's for drunks.”
A guard came out of a small gatehouse and approached the car. He leaned down and asked who they wanted to see.
“Nancy Teller Siddley. I'm her daughter.”
He went to the hut, picked up a phone, and Jane watched him through the window, providing his standard nods and okays, the dialogue of discipline.
“You can go in. Park your car behind the main house where it says visitors.”
“Nice speaking voice,” Conlon said.
What struck them both, circling the grounds, was the absence of people. The main house, wood-framed and painted white, had a porch which swung around the front and resembled a dislocated jaw. There were no chairs or rockers on it. Four turrets masked in black tar jutted up from the roof, and a weather vane that didn't move, permanently pointing north, perhaps for mariners’ use, loomed romantically above them. The visitors’ lot had quite a turnout, four cars, and behind it a row of one-story wooden barracks painted a uniform sunflower yellow. The architect seemed to be heavily influenced by Fort Dix. The only thing missing was a PX, but maybe they had one in the main building. Before checking in, they shared another joint, and Jane put a couple in her bag just in case. The stash was secreted under the rubber mat in the trunk, and Jane—lightheaded, spangled rhombuses dancing before her eyes—managed to overcome her depression.
A nurse picked them up in the small lobby and brought them to Dr. Hunter's office. Conlon decided to wait outside in the plush leathery waiting room. No Blue Cross check had ever passed through the cashier's portal, she knew.
“Maybe I'll get picked up,” she said.
Dr. Hunter gave Jane a friendly handshake, sat on the edge of his desk so he wouldn't block the view of his diplomas and endorsements—even one from General Hershey “with warm personal regards”—and immediately launched into his sermonette.
“Look at a human being as a tire.”
“I'll try.”
“Constant wear over highways, bad roads, during all kinds of weather wears the tread down. Sometimes the tires get bald and the driver has an accident.”
She objected to the fatuousness of his approach, assuming that he had spent too much time with indifferent relatives and needed some pat speech.
“Well, the point is this. We can't manufacture tires, we've got to work with what we get. So all we can provide is retreads in a sense. Sometimes they can go for thousands of miles without a problem, sometimes not. Every now and then, the tire needs a new retread job. How long it lasts depends on the driver and the roads used.” He paused, brushed back a shank of long gray hair which obscured his vision, and offered her a Cloret from a new roll.
“In other words, my mother came in drunk, and you had to restrain her.”
He spoke a hesitant yes, not given to facile statement.
“She was intoxicated and blacked out.”
“DT's?”
“No, an imbalance of the blood sugar, which we've regulated with medication.”
“How is she now?”
“Deceptively well. But let's not forget that she's been up here several times before, and in spite of her recoveries she has this recurring problem. This time we're going to keep her longer and try to get at the root of it.”
“I think one of the roots of the problem is that she just likes to drink. She likes the taste, the effect, and unless you can get her to switch to Ovaltine or something like that, she's always going to drink,” Jane said lucidly, surprising herself because she was stoned.
“She's a lonely woman. But I expect you know that.”
“Look, Dr. Hunter, she's got the mind of a spoiled twelve-year-old. She's had more men than
you've had hot dinners and enough booze to sink an aircraft carrier, so retread or not, all you're going to be able to do is space out the binges.”
He chewed on that for a minute, cracked his Cloret, and Jane caught a glimpse of a green tongue, which highlighted his sallow face.
“You're pretty hard.”
“Why? The woman's had everything she could want and responded to two things—gin and vodka. She never liked the taste of whiskey and someone who can become an alcoholic on those terms hasn't had it too hard.”
“Does your father share your view?”
She hesitated, unwilling to condemn Jim but unable to mount a defense.
“I think you ought to discuss it with him. I'm only...”
He abandoned the conversation and made arrangements for Jane to be taken to B-4, Nancy's place of confinement. A woman in white appeared after a buzz. She had arms like ham hocks and a face devoid of expression.
“We're having a late Thanksgiving lunch at four o'clock. Perhaps you'd like to join your mother. I'm sure she'd enjoy your company,” he said.
“Okay,” Jane said wearily. “I won't upset her, so don't worry.”
Jane located Conlon outside. She was thumbing through the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
“Terrific article on Hamlet as a fag.”
“We'll be cutting into rest period,” nurse explained.
“Isn't it all rest period here?” Jane asked.
Nurse wasn't to be baited, she'd met too many smart-ass relatives from New York.
B-4 turned out to be quite a suite on the fourth floor of the main building—no Siddley had ever suffered in an annex anywhere. The sitting room had the advantage of a double-exposure corner view, and through the assortment of bare maples and horse chestnuts lay the slow-moving swell of the Hudson.
“What a great place for a dirty weekend,” Conlon said, sizing up the baby-blue three-piece furniture set and the chaise lounge in beige velveteen.
“It was a hotel before the clinic took over,” Nurse said mysteriously, conjuring up visions of seventy-four-year-old men with mink rugs draped over their knees, moving stiffly out of vintage Rollses with towering Copa showgirls from Kentucky tempting fate and coronaries.
Making Love Page 18