Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (19 page)

Either way, Fanny's name doesn't appear in the novel again until page 73, the day before the protagonist's wedding. Again, the correlations Edie draws here, I should admit, are accurate. The protagonist's wedding is on June 20, 1941. George and Iris got married on June 20, 1941. In the novel, the protagonist picks up the June 19 issue of
The Boston Globe
and sees the following headline:
Body of Young Woman Found Slain
. During my research, I did find a microfiche of
The Boston Globe
from June 19. Sure enough, below the fold is the headline
Body of Young Woman Found Slain
. Frances Cochran of Lynn, MA, it says, had been missing for two days, last seen getting into “a black square-backed car.” When she was found, her face and breasts had been mutilated, and her body had nearly been cut in half at the waist. In the novel, the protagonist is devastated, sitting in a Cambridge watering hole the day before his wedding:

His life had seemed to be going perfectly—a newly minted MFA from Yale Drama, a Hollywood job offer, a beautiful fiancée and a child on the way—and now this: The youthful indiscretion he thought he'd put behind him was front-page news, murdered. Her face appeared in his mind, the impossibly green eyes, the button nose, the black, almost Hassidic-looking curls of hair bouncing down around her full cheeks. He held the glass of whiskey. It was
good whiskey. He sipped it. It was sharp, metallic on his tongue, like gun metal. He looked back at the newspaper. He was being punished. He was sure of it. (74)

I love the “Hassidic-looking curls of hair” but I can't help wondering if it clashes tonally with the Hemingway-brand whiskey-as-objective-correlative thing—though perhaps that's the point, the clash between the lyrical and the austere. Anyway, I quote this here because it completely undermines Edie's claim that the protagonist—and by absurd extension George—lacked empathy for Fanny/Frances. He's clearly torn up about this. So torn up, in fact, that the ghost (though not a literal one) of Fanny looms over the rest of the novel, and everything the protagonist does after this is clearly an attempt to put that ghost to rest. What more evidence of compassion could you want?

But of course the real issue here, the real reason why Edie's argument throughout the first half of her book is entirely wrong, is that it's based on a rather blatant logical fallacy. From looking at the basic facts, it's clear that, yes, George McWeeney did draw on his personal life for his novel. It's also clear that he based the character of Fanny on the real Frances Cochran. That much is obvious. Edie then assumes that the affair in the novel was also based on fact.

“To put it another way,” I said to my class, “just because
Macbeth
was inspired by the murder of a real Scottish king, does that mean that everything in it is fact? For example, it would be wrong to then conclude that, say, witches are real.”

“Yo, witches
are
real, bro,” Robert said from a corner desk. “Look, I found one.” He pointed to the shy girl in the back whose name I'd
forgotten. She had dyed black hair and raccoonish makeup. A handful of people laughed and the girl just stared at her desk.

“It's a logical fallacy,” I said. “And if we are supposed to assume then that the affair described in the novel actually happened, then why not assume that everything else in the novel actually happened?”

The point I was trying to make, which no one in that class was listening to anymore, as Robert was off making some other joke, was that Edie apparently has no use for the entire rest of the novel. Just as my George McWeeney diverges from Edie's George McWeeney at that gas station in Lynn, MA, Edie's George McWeeney diverges from this protagonist after the wedding in chapter 7. The next two hundred pages of Dad's novel follow the protagonist as he goes to Hollywood with his new family, writes movies, becomes a big shot, meets celebrities. While this might seem close enough to our father's life, it's nothing of the sort. As much as I love my father, he was no big shot. He spent his life typing away in his home office, occasionally shuffling out in slippers and a cardigan to get some coffee. So how can Edie make the argument that we must take the Fanny affair as fact but then casually discard the rest of the novel? It doesn't add up. It's sloppy, illogical detective work.

This is the point in Edie's manuscript where she jumps forward to 1995, tells us all about returning to Los Angeles (but makes no mention of how I dropped everything to pick her up at a motel in Eagle Rock). This is where Rory Beach enters her story, though she seems careful to keep him hidden, obscured. Notice how she refers to him only as her doctor, never Rory. At most she'll refer to him as Dr. Beach. But no physical description of him exists in her manuscript, no direct quotes. This is odd, considering what an influence he had on
everything that follows, including the writing of this book, which I'm sure he, at the very least, co-authored. So why does she take such pains to obscure him, to cover up the strings, as it were? Well, to continue with the string metaphor, or at least tweak it a little, it is because she must know, at some fundamental level, that he is the puppet master here, and if he were more visible in this book, then readers would see those strings. But I've seen this man, seen how he is with my sister; I've witnessed the dynamic between them. And I can say without a doubt that the “personal journey of discovery” that Edie describes in those chapters was entirely constructed by him. Not only did he surely write the script for her “personal journey,” but he probably even wrote those chapters. It's not like my sister—the daughter of a professional writer—to pen such nonsense as “the scent of Old Spice recalled old memories—standing beside my father in his bathroom, watching him get ready” (145). Recalled old memories? That's just sloppy writing. My sister is smarter than that. A sentence like that is clearly the work of Rory, mired as he is in the mnemonic abstractions of his profession.

The evidence in the second half of Edie's book is based mostly, though not exclusively, on memories that she claims to have repressed until Rory extracted them last year, but since she does such an admirable job of intertwining these “memories” (yes, I should qualify that word with the condescending claws of quotes) with what might at first glance seem to be empirical evidence, I cannot dismiss it all by undermining the whole theory of memory recovery. It would be simple enough to do that. Just consider the recent court case of Ramona v. Isabella, which has laid the legal precedent to debunk not just my sister's claims but hold Rory Beach culpable: Just a few years ago,
Holly Ramona—a young woman from Napa Valley who was beginning college in Orange County—began seeing a therapist who helped her “recover” memories of her father, Gary, raping her. She sued her father, and her father's life began to fall apart. But then Gary Ramona brought charges against her daughter's therapist, Marche Isabella, and proved in court that Isabella had implanted these memories in his daughter's head. Gary Ramona won $500,000 in damages. Although this was the first case of this sort, a legal landmark, the phenomenon of a woman making up gibberish—whether that gibberish be doctor-implanted or not—and using it as courtroom slander has a long and storied history, going as a far back as the Salem witch trials. In court, if our case gets that far—and I assure you, if you go ahead with this publication, then I will take it that far—it would be simple enough to dismantle Dr. Beach's methods; all I'd have to do is say “Ramona v. Isabella” and the judge would be on my side. But, as I've said, Edie has knotted together these erroneous memories with facts, and I must unknot the whole tangled mess.

By late 1946, Edie writes, George McWeeney was well established in Hollywood. He had a beautiful wife, a beautiful five-year-old daughter (“beautiful” is Edie's vague and sentimental adjective, repeated like a tic; in truth, the photographic record proves she was an unfortunate-looking girl, like Kafka in culottes). He had just bought a home in the beautiful San Fernando Valley, was part of the first wave of suburban settlers. Iris, pregnant with their second child (me), was spending weeks on end back East to be with her ailing father, so George was left for long stretches by himself in their new house with little Edie, balancing the demands of fatherhood with the demands of his career. He had
been writing for
Rampart
's very popular early radio incarnation for five years now, and he'd developed a close friendship with its creator, Jack Hale. All this is pretty much true. Although I was not yet born to remember this, I am inclined to believe Edie in chapter 16 when she recalls sitting with George and Jack at our kitchen table. The two men were doing men things: drinking scotch, playing cards, relaxing after putting the show to bed. I never saw our father do any of these things, but I suspect that the demands of having two children, and the increased pressure when
Rampart
made the transition to the small screen, curtailed these moments. I am sure he did do these things at one point, all in the service of homosocial bonding with Jack. Consider, for example, the precision of some of Edie's recollections: the “rustle of Dad rubbing his hand against his unshaved chin like the soft white noise on a record,” the way they both looked like “hunched giants” sitting beside her, Jack jokingly offering her a nip of scotch, George laughing and propping her up on his lap where she “could smell the iodinic bite on his breath” that she heretofore had “associated with a scraped knee, a parental warning, a quick dab of Bactine,” and George and Jack's prurient banter that her kid-brain absorbed only phonetically—“boy hide shirt tie that caboose”—which she was only able to understand years later—“Boy, I'd sure ride that caboose” (156). Scenes like this strike me as genuine—even though Bactine was not yet commercially available in 1946—in part because Edie sticks to a child's understanding of the scene. As more of these “recovered memories” come out, though, the more you can see Edie (or, more likely, Rory) imposing adult consciousness on five-year-old Edie, our only witness. For example, Adult Edie then writes that she recalls a scene shortly after this
where she is riding in the front seat of our dad's black 1939 Ford Mercury as he drives through “the serpentine roads that wound through the Hollywood Hills like termite-trails in ancient wood” (160). Forget for a moment Adult Edie's sin of piling two metaphors onto one image, forget that those two metaphors are competing not just at the imagistic level but at the ecosystemic level as well (snakes are predators, termites prey), and just remember that this is a child's consciousness we're being asked to enter here. No five-year-old would think this. Adult Edie is taking control of this scene, contorting it. This becomes even clearer when George stops to pick up another passenger and Edie has to sit in the back. The new passenger is “alabaster-skinned, her curtain of black hair melding into the slinky black silk cocktail dress she was wearing despite it being the middle of the day” (161). As Adult Edie steps in, the sentences get sloppier. This particular tongue twister (just try to say “slinky black silk” with out mashing it into “slilk”) seems to reveal some cattiness that only Adult Edie would intone (the observation about the evening dress in the middle of the day implying this is a walk of shame for the passenger, something young Edie wouldn't know or care about). But what is most glaring is the perfectly recalled dialogue. Gone is the impressionistic wash of meaningless adult-speak, all sounds, shapes, and colors. It has been replaced with dialogue so precise it is impossible to believe that it has survived fifty years in Edie's brain. The sheer specificity of it draws that specificity into question. This is, in other words, not remembered dialogue, not even reconstructed dialogue, but purely constructed dialogue. When the mysterious passenger—whose “curtain of black hair” is surely an intentional echo of Frances Cochran—turns around and starts talking to young
Edie—introducing herself as Betty, saying she's going to be famous one day, saying she's met so many nice people since moving to Hollywood from boring ol' Medford, Mass—doesn't it strike you as unrealistically expository? Yes, of course, this is Elizabeth “Betty” Short's first (live) appearance in Edie's book, but the artifice here is transparent. And it's not just the fact of the exposition that is revealing but the content as well. Edie has her say things to our father like, “I like Jack just fine. I mean, he's a big shot, but not a
big-shot
big shot. I've been with some big shots, honey. Ray Milland. You know him? And Joel McCrea. No, but my biggest big shot you'll never believe—
Mister
Orson Welles. That's right. But I like Jack better than all them. He's nicer, less crazy.” Since this scene is fiction, it is particularly interesting that Edie chooses to introduce Betty Short in a way (reeling off all her johns, still dressed in the previous night's cocktail dress) that suggests our father is picking up a
fille de joie
, knowing that readers will carry that connotation, however subconsciously, with them for the rest of the book. (I feel compelled to admit here that I've now paused at my keyboard for a good ten or fifteen minutes staring at that phrase,
fille de joie
. Approximately fifteen minutes ago now I finished typing it, clicked my Wheelwriter back a dozen spaces, and underlined it. The underlining is perhaps what made me stop, drawing such attention to the obscure phrase, but I must defend the underlining, pedantically, on the grounds that as a foreign phrase it must be marked as such—it must be copyeditorially Otherized. What I'm less certain that I can defend is the use of the phrase itself, which is, according to my Webster's, French for a “girl of pleasure, used euphemistically for a prostitute.” I know that's the precise definition because I have the dictionary right here. Worse, just
behind that, is the thesaurus. That's where I found the phrase. That's right. I was sitting here, knowing I could just use the word “prostitute,” but I felt the need to reach for something slightly more obscure. So I got French with it. While I understand that casually dropping a foreign—usually French or Latin—phrase into a sentence adds to its authority, implying that the author has a wealth of cultural knowledge to draw on, even if he chooses to keep the specifics of that knowledge veiled in italicized foreignness, I do not myself know French or Latin, so I have no recourse but the thesaurus, despite the fact that everyone in the writing biz regards thesauri as demonic, warning you that it will turn clear and direct Anglo-Saxon prose into something so Latinate it could have been written by one of my ESL students, who are an enthusiastically thesauric bunch. While I am suspicious of the idea that there are right ways and wrong ways to discover new words, I feel admitting all bias adds more authority than a condescending, faux-polyglottic posture. But of course what I'm really concerned about here is that initial impulse to posture, to impress you with my authoritative voice. Am I still operating under the delusion that you might sense a novelist's voice buried in this cease and desist letter and casually recommend that those literary boys down the hall reconsider my work? No, I must shed myself of those delusions. You are my opponent in this case. I will not undermine the integrity of this project by attempting to ingratiate myself with you, even if it is in a snobby and condescending way. On with it.) Edie's implicit jealousy when describing Betty Short suggests what Rory would probably call an Electra complex, which might shed some light onto the real motives for her claims here. Regardless, in the montage of memories that follows, in which Edie
describes being backseat witness to “countless midday pickups” (not quite countless, I counted seven), George always taxiing Betty Short from Jack Hale's house in the Hills to her apartment in Hollywood, we learn—still in suspiciously expository front-seat dialogue—some interesting information, some true, some not (I will do my best to parse the two). First, Betty is carrying on an affair with the very married Jack Hale. George, trying to balance being Jack's underling and best friend, has been roped into helping them conceal it from Mrs. Hale. (I admit that Edie captures George's insecurities here in some nice, cringe-inducing details, particularly in the way he insists that he's Jack's buddy, as if you can hear how desperately he wants to not feel taken advantage of.) There is a surprisingly long explanation from Betty about how she and Jack are coordinating the logistics of this affair, as if Edie anticipates getting sued by the still-kicking Mrs. Hale who would insist that there was no way Jack ever had a lady on the side, but that's none of our concern here. What is of our concern is how Edie drops into this fiction a few facts. Betty mentions that she has a rose tattoo on her hip. This is true. Both Harry Hansen and Aggie Underwood would report this detail the following January. She also mentions that she is saving up for a trip to the dentist because her teeth are getting bad. This is also based in fact. According to testimony from a woman Betty stayed with in San Diego, she had terribly rotten molars and would try to patch up her cavities with wax before heading out on the town. Edie drops these facts into the conversation but they come across as bizarre non sequiturs, revealing how eager Edie is to assert the veracity of her “memories.” It reminds me of when I once came home in the middle of a school day to find Chris lounging on the
couch with a bag of Funyuns, and when I asked him why he wasn't in school he concocted this long, elaborate lie about his math teacher: “Mrs. Wise, who is from England and collects elephant stuffed animals on her desk, she had a heart attack so they sent everyone home for the day.” It was an admirably bold and nonsensical lie, but I was totally suckered by his transparent attempt to anchor the fiction with two truth-nuggets, that quick aside about her nationality (and doesn't the mere mention of Britishness send a bolt of authority through anything?) and her pachyderm fetish (perhaps an atavistic memory of her countrymen's days colonizing the subcontinent?). Chris and I ended up going out to a movie that day, the one about the retarded fellow that got all the awards, and over dinner at Sizzler we got pretty good at doing his voice. (Stumped for the title, I just now found it in
Fleeber's Encyclopedia of Film
, which I have near my desk here. It says
Forrest Gump
came out in 1994. I keep wanting to think that our movie date was recent, six months ago tops. But, if
Fleeber's
is to be trusted, I guess that was about two years ago.)