American Pop

by Snowden Wright

  “My darling love!” yelled Karen as she jumped into Lance’s arms. Her feet were two inches off the platform, strands of her brown hair stuck to his lips. “My Lancelot!”

  “As you live and breathe.”

  “I’m finally here.”

  “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” Lance said as he loosened her arms from his neck. During the time it took a porter to secure her luggage in the trunk, Karen exchanged pleasantries with Houghton Forster, whom Lance had told her “dangerously little about.” Yet, despite her claim to want to know everything about her future father-in-law, it was Karen who, on the ride home, commanded the conversation, talking mostly of how she’d met the “lovely, darling man” to whom she was now engaged.

  “‘Lovely, darling man,’” Houghton said, feigning confusion. “I thought you were engaged to Lance?”

  “Oh, you hush up, Mr. Forster!”

  “Call me Houghton.”

  “Houghton, let me tell you how your lovely, darling son swept me off my feet.”

  An actress by desire more than talent, Karen had been living in Los Angeles for two years, auditioning with little success, when she went to an open call for a creature feature, The Dawn Breaks at Midnight. The film was being produced by Five Olde Entertainment. In the mid-1940s, sensing the possible fall of the studios, Lance had founded the production company, supposedly to diversify his portfolio, though the actual reason was so that he could ruin Arthur Landau, the man who, during his divorce from Ramsey a couple of years earlier, had sent a picture of her kissing Josephine Baker to every major tabloid in the country. The 1948 federal antitrust suit against the Big Five hastened the accomplishment of Lance’s goal. Over the years that followed the verdict, Five Olde set its sights on Vantage Pictures, using the fleetness of its smaller operation to undercut the lumbering studio, producing knockoffs of Vantage’s forthcoming slate of films and then releasing said knockoffs a month before their originals. See You at the Beach took in ticket sales that would have gone to Countdown on D-Day. Oil! Oil! Oil! preempted A Texas Saga. Riviera Rendezvous outstripped My French Summer.

  Lance met Karen at the auditions for Five Olde’s version of the space-alien picture They Came from the Sky. Not wanting to tell her she was as wooden as Howdy Doody, he said, “We can’t have someone pretty as you in a horror flick. Nobody in the audience would ever look at the monster.”

  “Then he asked me out to dinner,” Karen said to Houghton. “Is that not the sweetest thing?”

  “Certainly is.” Houghton nodded at the mansion creeping into view on the horizon, fully aware that was not what she had meant but, nonetheless, enjoying the coincidence. He was surprised at how much he liked the girl. Given Lance’s age—he and Ramsey must be, what, forty-four years old by now?—Houghton and the rest of the family had resigned themselves to his remaining a bachelor for life, dating ingénues and eating takeout, most important not continuing the Forster name with a child. Houghton would have pretended to like the girl even if she had rubbed him wrong. He worried that, when his children were young, he’d been too hard on them, and now, almost in his eighties, he hoped to course-correct any past mistakes. Lord knew he never forgave himself for the frostbite Monty got on his toe the night Houghton sent him to chop firewood in an ice storm. Most of all he regretted the incident with the horse. How could he have forced his own son to shoot Peat?

  Some part of him had always known the answer. Houghton had worked hard throughout his entire life not so his children could live easily but so they could work even harder. He often worried he’d only succeeded in creating a bed of laurels for them to rest on. That worry, coupled with the sense that a tremble in the bloodline can become a tidal wave generations later, pushed him to push them. Houghton wanted his children to know the taste of sweat as well as they knew the taste of PanCola. Unfortunately, he sometimes couldn’t tell when he had breached the line between rigor and cruelty, and he now knew he’d done so with Lance that day in the woods, especially when, on their ride home, he’d answered Lance’s question about whether Peat would go to heaven. “There’s no heaven for horses, son. There isn’t even one for people.”

  * * *

  “Ladybug, where’s your gentlemanbug?” whispered Susannah.

  She was sitting on the back lawn of the main house, the hem of her batik dress billowing around her, the scent of false dragonhead and yucca bells carried on the breeze. Her hand was raised in front of her face. Along her fingers, weaving in and out, crawled a ladybug, which she had named Elizabeth Bennet. The strong-willed Miss Bennet was a fretful mess. Susannah supposed it must be all the preparations that were in order for the ceremonies. Her uncle was getting married this week. Even there in the yard, far enough from the main house to allow for some quiet, she could hear her family greeting the bride, who’d just arrived from the train station. “I think I’m going to get along with her splendidly. Don’t you, Miss Bennet? Yes, I daresay, she’s likely to be an agreeable wife.”

  Seven years old, a native of California who came to Mississippi but rarely, Susannah Forster had been raised a fan of Jane Austen by accident. From the time she was a baby her mother had read to her from Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma, always planning to switch to more traditional fare as soon as the child could understand the words. Her mother, Ramsey, realized she had postponed the switch too long when Susannah began to say, “More, pwease!” at the end of story time. Soon it became apparent she had created a monster: a young girl in tune to and obsessed with courtship, who used “dear” as an adjective and for whom walks were nearly a sport.

  Years later, Ramsey would refer to the man her daughter was seeing in secret as “Mr. Darcy,” and after the prop plane he was piloting with Susannah as his passenger experienced sudden engine failure on a flight to Los Angeles in good weather, it was noted among certain friends and family that “books sold the poor girl out.”

  “Your mother told me to tell you not to get your dress dirty,” Nicholas said to Susannah, purposefully giving his voice the tone of boredom. He livened up on noticing the dot of red crawling on her hand. “Want me to show you how to catch a doodlebug?”

  “A whatle bug?”

  “Doodle.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  Susannah squinted at her cousin Nicholas. He was tall for an eleven-year-old. His blond, side-parted hair held a natural wave, like a still shot of a pennant in a light offshore breeze. Since her arrival at the house, Susannah had noticed that everyone acted different around Nicholas, treating him, it seemed, like the reincarnation of his father, whose death Susannah knew about from her mother. People acted as if saying anything harsh in front of the boy would make him disappear in a puff of smoke.

  “Just watch,” said Nicholas. He walked in an expanding circle around her, staring at the ground, until he found a bald patch of dirt that seemed to satisfy him. He motioned for her to come look. “See the tiny little hole right there? That’s where a tiger beetle laid an egg.” After plucking a long, sturdy blade of grass, Nicholas spit on the end of it and then slowly lowered the blade into the hole, inch by inch, making sure Susannah was watching the procedure closely. He let go of the grass when there was only the length of a finger still above ground. Situating his legs Indian-style, he said to her, “Tell me when you see it move.”

  “Move how?”

  As though on command the finger’s length of grass began to twitch. Surgically, being careful not to move too fast, Nicholas took hold of the grass and began to pull it from the ground, stopping on occasion and then restarting even slower. Dangling at the end of the blade when it emerged was a tiny white grub with a brown head and three pairs of legs, its wriggling body splotched with dirt.

  “Susannah, you can keep playing out there for another ten minutes,” her mother called from a door to the house. “Then you have to come back in here and pretend you’re having a good time.”

  Ramsey closed the door behind her, walked back th
rough the kitchen, and reentered the crowded living room. Despite what she had said to her daughter, she wasn’t pretending to have a good time but, surprisingly, having an actual one. She hadn’t expected much from her brother’s fiancée. The surprising part was that she liked the girl. Lighthearted, funny, self-deprecating, and genuine, Karen seemed just what was needed among the Forsters, someone who hadn’t been raised under the scrutiny of the world. Just yesterday, Ramsey had read a profile of her family in the Chicago Tribune that began, “The Forsters aren’t the type of people who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. They are the type of people who don’t even bother to ask permission.” How could you not feel self-important with statements like that floating around?

  In the living room, another round of cocktails was being served, tumblers glinting with perspiration, their contents mostly liquor and ice and, despite how the family product was often used, little to no amount of mixers. A wedding wasn’t a time for watering things down. “No, thank you,” Ramsey said to the house servant who offered her one.

  “Still on that kick?” asked Annabelle.

  “Not drinking isn’t a kick, Mother. I don’t need alcohol in my life.”

  “What you need is a man.”

  Ramsey said, “Get some new material already.”

  The absolute truth was Ramsey sometimes worried her mother was right about the need for a man in her life, not for her sake, but so that Susannah could have a father figure. Over the past seven years, Susannah hadn’t seemed to mind not having one around, let alone not knowing who her father even was—Ramsey already had a heartfelt speech on love and “the timing was just wrong for us” ready in the hopper—nor did Susannah seem bothered by her mother’s social life. Ramsey still dated. The people she went out with, though, be they men or women, old or young, working in pictures or not, had trouble getting over either her past marriage to a notoriously vicious studio head, the fact she was in her forties and had a daughter, or the rumors, confirmed by a famous photograph, of the actual person with whom the timing had been wrong.

  Ramsey took a seat near an open window, getting some azalea-laced air as she looked on the happy couple. She had seen Josephine only once since the war. In 1951, visiting her book publisher in New York to discuss merchandising rights, Ramsey was having dinner at the Stork Club when someone calling herself “Gracie Walker” was refused service because of her skin color. Ramsey immediately recognized Josephine, and throughout the rest of the night, after paying off the maître d’ to let Josephine’s party dine at her table, she did her best to tolerate Josephine’s girlfriend, as gut-wrenchingly young as she was gut-wrenchingly beautiful.

  According to the conversation that evening, the two had worked together during the war, Josephine as an “honorable correspondent” for the Deuxieme Bureau, her girlfriend as a covert operative for the OSS. “Love is an elastic sort of art,” concluded the former in a way that sounded rehearsed, a suspicion confirmed when the latter responded, “Same goes for espionage.” Despite how much it hurt to see her past lover, Ramsey was so elated to be in her company again that, at the end of the night, she repeated the first of three things Josephine had said to her the last time they were together.

  “Don’t drink too much.”

  Josephine smiled. “Sleep a lot.”

  “Work evenly over time.”

  At home for the wedding Ramsey wanted to give her brother Lance the same pieces of advice. He was clearly drinking too much. Not that the other Forsters were so different. Thus far, even though it was still early in the evening, most everybody in the house was on the fourth or fifth round of whatever flavor suited them, such that they were now starting to dance. Over by the plantation desk, Imogene and Nicholas and Susannah were clapping to the beat coming from the Capehart, some fast-paced number, while Lance and Karen flung each other around, bobbing side to side with grins, all of which was watched over by Houghton and Annabelle, whispering near the china closet. To Ramsey the entire scene looked like a delightful if tame Rabbit’s Foot Minstrel. She forgot what had been on her mind.

  “Sister-in-law!” Karen said as she and Lance swung close to Ramsey. “You’re next!” On turning loose her intended, she grabbed her not-yet sister-in-law’s forearm, hauling her onto the makeshift dance floor. They began to twirl about the room. Karen pulled Ramsey close and whispered, “I never had a sister. Always wanted one.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I just know we’re going to be close. You wouldn’t believe how much Lance cares about you.”

  “Really?”

  “And here I always heard twins could read each other’s minds.”

  The next song was slower paced. In a corner of the room, watching Karen and Ramsey dance, Lance turned to see Nicholas and Susannah, seated on the couch, deep in an adorably grown-up-looking conversation. “Mind if I cut in, buddy row?” he asked his nephew.

  “Ew! Think I’d dance with her!”

  Lance held out his hand to Susannah. “Well, then I will.”

  She let him guide her into the middle of the room, where, instead of simply beginning to dance, she curtsied as if they were in a novel of manners. Lance bowed in return. The factory of his emotions not yet demolished, he took Susannah’s perfect little hands into his own and waltzed her around an imaginary ballroom, the faces of their family, Ramsey and Nicholas, Houghton and Annabelle—did Karen count yet? Lance wondered—becoming images from a shadow lamp thrown against the wall.

  Currently in his forties, he had figured any more children were no longer an option for him, but now, about to wed a woman in her late twenties, he thought he could not allow himself to die without a child to call his own, though he would. Karen was too afraid to tell him about her thyroid disorder.

  At the end of the song, Susannah said, “Thank you ever so kindly, sir,” and curtsied once again. Lance told her not to be silly. She didn’t have to call her uncle “sir.”

  * * *

  Dinner finished and the dishes cleared, nightcaps served, drunk, refilled, and drunk again, Houghton sat in his study taking a cigar, listening to the sounds from upstairs of people settling into bed. He went up himself when everything was quiet. In front of the door to his bedroom, he stopped for a moment to look across the hall at the door to his wife’s bedroom, wondering if she was still awake.

  She wasn’t, but Lance was. In his bedroom, he stood by the door and, after hearing the creak of floorboards outside in the hall, paused with his hand on the knob. Somebody was out there. He waited, listening for any further movement.

  Having to sneak around this way made him feel like a fool. Lance wasn’t a teenager anymore. If he wanted to sleep with his fiancée, he should damn well be allowed to, propriety shmopriety, no matter if his parents insisted he and Karen couldn’t stay in the same room until after they were married. He slowly opened the door, centimeter by excruciating centimeter, until he just managed to fit.

  While sliding through the ten-inch berth, he heard a strange sound coming from the hallway, something animalistic and definitely unkind. He turned his head to see Cotton, the family’s white Labrador, growling with hackles raised. Dogs had never liked Lance. He closed the door, went back to bed, and stared at the ceiling.

  Ramsey couldn’t sleep either. In the room next to Lance’s, she lay in her bed worrying about her daughter, who’d insisted she spend the night on the sleeping porch, surrounded by moon vine and the berceuse of crickets, the very possibility of which was wholly exotic to a girl unfamiliar with country living. Did she really need a father figure? That was the question worrying Ramsey. Then again, she thought, maybe that wasn’t it at all. What if she, Ramsey, were just lonely, raising Susannah by herself? Best not to worry about it right now. Methodically, almost by habit, she lifted her arm from the bed, slid it under the covers, and helped herself fall asleep.

  * * *

  In the South, males are “boys” until death. Only after their funerals, whether at eighteen or eighty-five, are they referred to as men. I
mogene figured that was why she had never really dated when she was growing up in Mississippi. She wanted a man, not a good old boy. The wheelchair didn’t help, obviously, even though none of the boys in school, around town, or at the club ever said anything rude about it. In fact they were perfectly polite. The problem was they didn’t actually see her as an option. She was just the poor crippled girl.

  On the second-floor gallery of The Sweetest Thing, cup of coffee in hand, Imogene chastised herself for thinking that way. She wasn’t just a disability. She wasn’t even just a girl. She didn’t “want” anyone. Want implied need, and need was weakness. Her uncle’s wedding, two days from then, must have put her in mind of such things, though, she thought, that wasn’t an excuse.

  Years later she would be called the Virgin CEO. Despite welcoming the title—“Strong women don’t resort to clichés” was her response when pundits defended her by asking people who used it, “Would you call a male executive that?”—Imogene knew it was a lie, one she affirmed as such repeatedly throughout her career, and always with the same person. Her lifelong, secret affair with “Barry from the Crimson,” as she thought of him in college, when they were only friends, began around the time she took over the Panola Cola Company following her grandfather’s death. For many years his ascent in journalism mirrored hers in the soda industry. He was a beat reporter when she first introduced cans to the soda market and he was a managing editor when her worldwide sales became more than a third of the company revenue and he was a bureau chief when she reinvigorated the industry with diet cola. Barry Rojas was editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal at the time Imogene was ousted from PanCola. On Imogene’s return to the company after her brother’s accident, Barry was the only person she confided in, about her newfound lack of enthusiasm, about her overwhelming fear of failure, and throughout the next year, the Journal was the only major newspaper in the country not to run coverage of how “PanCola Goes Flat!” when the introduction of new products, Vanilla Pan and Pan with Lime, failed to right the company.