Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (21 page)

I just got off the phone with Jack Hale's widow, Clarice. She is eighty-something and has a voice like tissue paper. I asked her if she remembered the New Year's Eve party her husband threw on December 31, 1946. She said she did. I asked her if she could confirm a few details about the party. Jazz trio: check. Notable celebrities in attendance: Eddie Cantor, Lionel Barrymore, Waldo Salt, Margaret O'Brien.

“Margaret O'Brien?” I asked. “The cha-, child actress?”

“Yes,” she said, “there was a little girl here, knotty pigtails. I'm pretty sure it must have been Margaret O'Brien—you know, from
Meet Me in St. Louis
. Oh, that was such a delightful film. I think Arthur Freed had a hand in that one. He was a Jew. Tell me, what sort of article are you writing?”

While this might seem to confirm my sister's version of the story, consider what the old lady said next: “There certainly seems to be a lot of interest in that party. I don't know why. Once Jack's show moved to television, we threw some much bigger parties. At an Easter party in 1951, Rock Hudson said my shrimp cocktail was the best he'd ever had.”

“Wha-, what do you mean?”

“I use fresh-squeezed orange juice and a bit of lemon verbena. That's the secret.”

“No, I mean about the interest in the pa-, party. What other interest?”

“Oh, a while ago a woman came to see me, asked me all sorts of questions about Jack, said she was writing a book. She was particularly interested in this party.”

So: Edith's “memory” has been supplemented. She clearly got Clarice Hale's version of the party and tweaked it a bit to fit herself in there.

“Nice woman,” Clarice continued, “a sloucher, though. Pretty common among bosomy women who try to hide their bosoms. It's no way to get a husband.”

“That's true.”

“Well, I'm very observant. I used to work as a continuity girl before I married Jack. Like your stutter. I noticed that. You should really nip that in the bud. Try tongue-strengthening exercises. Like saying the alphabet with marbles in your mouth, or cunnilingus.”

It's true: I've been stuttering lately. The lack of sleep, the drugs, the stress, it's bringing out an old tic. It's particularly noticeable when I'm teaching. The other day, after my last all-night work session, I was lecturing my 9:00
AM
class about the balance of logos and pathos in Montaigne's “Of Thumbs,” and my stutter got so bad (it's an excessively consonantal essay) that one student said I sounded like a remix. It's really getting in the way, and the worst part is that it's all my own doing. I am not a natural stutterer. Growing up in Hollywood, surrounded by people who recited
she sells seashells
every morning in front of the mirror, the city where people shed their regional dialects for a neutral elocution (until, of course, Brando showed up and turned everyone into mush-mouths), I always spoke clearly, free of tics and clicks. In my late teens, I even survived one short season of TV stardom—and the pressure not just of those cameras but of an entire phalanx of writers, producers, and directors ready to step in and tell you that you're dropping your G's again—without developing a nervous speech impediment. It wasn't until I left that all behind and went to Iowa to remake myself as a serious writer that I voluntarily adopted this record-skipping habit, and now, years after
I thought I'd shed my pretentious affectations, it's shown up again, unbidden, unwanted.

See, there was this guy at Iowa, whom I will leave nameless, a fiction writer with the sad, shadowed eyes of a boxer and the fine cheekbones of a girl. He wrote devastatingly beautiful stories about sad men doing sad things, full of clear-eyed lyricism. He had a stutter, and women loved him. When he read those sad stories at MFA readings, the women in attendance always had one hand delicately touching their throats, anticipating a good cry. They would flock to him, want to clutch his head to their bosoms, fellate him. Whether they loved him for his writing or for the vulnerability they saw in his stutter, I could never figure out. I never conversed with the guy personally, but after one of his readings, when I was mingling nearby, hoping to pick up one of the women who couldn't quite get the stutterer's attention—playing cleanup, I suppose—I overheard him tell one freckled young poetess that his stutter contributed to his prose style, as ever since he was a child his speech impediment had forced him to think relentlessly about words, mapping out sentences in his head before he ever spoke. “Plenty of great prose sta-, stylists have stutters,” he went on. “Updike, Maugham, Ba-, Ba-, Borges.” I went to the library that night—as none of the stutterer's castoffs were interested in going home with me—and confirmed this claim. Stuttering does seem to give people a step-up when it comes to wordsmithing. So I tried it on myself. I had just started teaching freshman composition, and so I used that forum to experiment with a stutter, dialing in different intensities, levels of impediment, different “problem notes” as I thought of them. That first semester my students thought I was simply insane, but by the spring
semester I had really found—to put it in MFA-speak—my own voice. It was a nice, subtle stutter, not abrasive at all, just a slight hesitation at every
P
and
M
. I began doing what the stutterer said he did, mapping out sentences in my mind before speaking, and although I usually did it to hit those problem notes rather than avoid them, I really believe that I saw a marked improvement in my sentence-crafting. Of course I never took the stutter outside my own classroom, as my cohort would have known immediately that I was faking, but I knew it was a good stutter when several of my female students began talking to me after class with that same earnest desire to take care of a wounded puppy that I recognized with the real stutterer's female fans. Unfortunately, the only female students who proved susceptible to my new tic were the zaftig ones, so I did not reciprocate their attentions as I suppose I could have. But I did enjoy their reactions to me, and my awareness of this gave me a rather uncomfortable consideration. Had I been jealous of the stutterer's success with writing, or his success with women? Was there a difference? Or were my literary aspirations simply a ploy for pussy? Surely my intentions were purer, surely I had something to say, something that needed to be said, something that needed to come out, not just some desperate squirts of spunk but something real and meaningful. (Actually, I did take one of the huskier girls up on her offer and she proved very understanding when I didn't last as long as I should have.) It's still something that scares me, something I think about whenever Julia poses the “Why do you write?” question. And yet no one seems to question Darin Erskine's intentions. (I said I wasn't going to spill the stutterer's name, but it slipped out and I'm not about to fetch the Wite-Out for him.) Erskine's latest made the
New York
Times
list of Notable Books. Kakutani said that
Son of Chance
“contains some of the most dazzling sentences an American author has put to the page in years, capable of limning an entire life in one heartbreaking turn of phrase.” I haven't read it, but the other day I skimmed the acknowledgments page in the back, worried (needlessly as it turned out) that I might find Oliver's name (I recalled them hanging out some in the Iowa days).

After a couple years of using my stutter whenever I felt the need for some extra sympathy, however, it found hold in some crinkle of my cerebral cortex. After a while I realized I no longer had control of it, and in order to free myself of the damn thing I had to buy speech therapy records, spending endless hours repeating those problem notes in front of the mirror, watching my lips make those soft plosives, to train myself right again. It's been dormant for years now, but it's coming back and this time not in the sexily vulnerable way I'd trained it. Now I sound like someone with a spastic neurological disorder, which makes me more nervous, which just makes me stutter more. I really need to get some sleep.

The chapter after the New Year's party contains what might be Edie's biggest leap of imagination. She attempts here to narrate our father's thought process, but of course she has absolutely no access to those thoughts. She says that George did not take Betty Short down to Mexico to get that abortion as Jack had instructed, which I suppose is true. She also has a lot of statistics about just how dangerous abortions were south of the border, which I suppose are accurate. But then, based on that, and what she claims happens next, she imagines an entire inner dialogue that she has
no access to
. She presumes that George researched the safety of Mexican abortions and then silently
debated with himself for two weeks about whether it would be worth risking Betty's life, and in turn Jack's reputation in the event a botched Mexican abortion could be traced back to him. Edie really goes out of her way in these passages to lay on the irony. Yes, we get it: Betty probably would have been safer just going to Mexico. As for Edie's claim that George ultimately decided to perform the procedure himself, I've looked into Yale School of Medicine's curriculum in the late 1930s. George completed only the first two years of med school and there is no indication that those first two years would have given him adequate training to perform an abortion. True, no accredited med schools were providing this training in the 1930s, but the point here is that it is highly unlikely that George would have been confident enough in his medical abilities to go forward with this plan. According to the Yale curriculum, he would have had no hands-on surgical experience. Those first two years were most likely spent sifting through theory, not viscera. George surely would have realized that operating on Betty himself was far more dangerous than taking her to Mexico. But no, not according to Edie's version. According to Edie's version, this mild-mannered Hollywood writer decided it would be a good idea to take a shopping trip to a medical supply store, sedate Betty in the bathtub of our pool house, and do the deed himself. Considering how much Edie claims to have witnessed, it's curious that she makes no mention of how Betty herself reacted to this plan. Betty may have been young, naïve, and susceptible to the seductions of older men, but I really doubt a twenty-two-year-old woman would allow a non-doctor to operate on her in the pool house of his suburban home. But Edie claims to have seen the young woman walk into that improvised OR on her own two
legs. “By the time she'd leave that pool house,” Edie writes, “those legs would no longer be attached to her torso” (210). Yes, Edie, we get it.

As for the procedure itself, which Edie claims to spy through the open window, I will withhold comment, except to say it is a gratuitously detailed scene that reveals Edie's—and your—sensationalist motives. Toward the end of the chapter, she does seem to offer a kind of justification for all this horrific detail, saying that it was

the extremity of this horror that cast all these memories into the far corners of my consciousness, not to be retrieved for another fifty years. What I saw that night made no sense, could not be rationalized, was such an aberration from the reality I knew, that it had to break off from that reality. (210)

Perhaps, but there's no need to punish your readers with a detailed description of a botched abortion, though I do admire Edie's dedication to the child's perspective here when she limits her figurative language to things in a child's world (but does a womb really resemble a “swollen tomato”?). Of course, the thing Edie's referring to that made no sense was not so much the abortion itself, or even Betty hemorrhaging and eventually, despite our father's panicked ministrations, dying, but rather what he did after that: walking outside, smoking a cigarette, looking at Mom's now-withered geraniums, then going back into the pool house and calmly mutilating Betty Short's body into the condition in which it would be found the following morning. This (seemingly) monstrous act did not make sense to Edie until a half century later when she read about the unfortunate fate of Frances
Cochran. She posits that our father needed to cover up his fatal mistake and the only way he could think to do that was to make it look like Betty had fallen victim to the same fiend that Frances Cochran had years earlier, butchering and dismembering the body in all the same ways. Cochran's killer had never been found—though there hadn't been much of a search—and it's important to note that Edie does not accuse our father of that first murder; she simply accuses him of imitating that killer's MO in a desperate cover-up. This is an important point because Edie's logic is flawed on many levels. First, if our father had really had an affair with Frances Cochran, wouldn't he be concerned that he could now be traced, however tenuously and circumstantially, to both victims? Second, as I've pointed out, Edie goes out of her way to depict our father as having a “sociopathic detachment” from women (122). But according to her version of Betty Short's death, he was acting out of need and a genuine concern for Betty's well-being. And her whole “sociopath” theory is further contradicted when she begins to postulate that the whole incident threw our father into a fit of despair, thinking that these two women were being punished for his unfaithfulness. Doesn't a sense of guilt disqualify someone from sociopathy?

The third issue here is the autopsy report, which supposedly says Betty Short's killer removed her womb. This fact, Edie claims, was used as the “control question” when the LAPD interviewed suspects, the question all those false-confessors got wrong. I can finally say that, yes, the autopsy report Edie is working from does in fact say her womb “had been removed” (like most governmental documents it's rife with the passive voice; grammatically it's as if her killer simply didn't exist).
The real question here is whether or not this document is legit. I have it here on my desk, and I'm going to give it to Chuck this Sunday so he can finally confirm my suspicions that it's a fake. Getting my hands on this thing has been no easy task. Of course Edie had it, but I didn't want to deal with the unpleasantness of our last meeting, when I retrieved the copy of my father's manuscript and we got tangled in a mess of miscommunication, and, just like then, I worried that asking for the document outright would reveal my plans to officially counter her argument and cause her to block potential paths of research. But a few weeks ago, sitting right here at my desk, as I was narrating that unpleasant scene from February, I found myself describing—and in doing so, remembering afresh—those red plastic filing boxes on Rory's kitchen table. I've been thinking about them ever since, imagining my way into them, flipping through those files, and since Rory's Canoga Park apartment is actually on my way to Pinz—where I've finally convinced Chuck to relocate our Sunday evening game—it's been unavoidable that I've driven down Rory's street enough times to get a general sense of their weekend schedule. Based the absence of Rory's station wagon in his assigned parking spot, it seemed that on Sunday evenings, between 7:00 and 9:00
PM
, they are always out. Of course, there was a chance that Rory was out and Edie was home, so I took the precaution of phoning a few times—having practiced a good fake voice (a hint of a Sicilian accent, dulled by an American education), and an even better telemarketing pitch (for something of my own imagining called a LintDuster)—but no one ever answered during those hours. Though oddly disappointed that I didn't get a chance to use my telemarketer character, since I'd put so much time into making him believable in
the event Edie or Rory actually answered the phone, it did seem that the coast would be clear for me to do a little investigating.