Any Resemblance to Actual Persons (3 page)

“So I'm gonna need to stay with you for a bit,” she said. “Until something comes through. Okay, little brother?”

I hadn't thought about this. But no, that wouldn't do. Not with my current living situation. “You could stay at the old house,” I said. “Someone needs to get all of Paige's things organized, all of Dad's things organized, for that matter, prepare the place to sell, you know. I don't really have time right now.”

“So busy, so busy,” she said. “You're such a busy body, so many important things to do.”

There was no sign of an accident up ahead.

“Are you still seeing that woman?”

“What woman?”

“What woman?” she said. “Wow, such a playboy. That woman you were seeing the last time I saw you. She kind of looked like the less attractive one from
Three's Company
. She had that dykey haircut and a son.”

“Brenda,” I said. “No, not since the Bush administration.”

“Well, the last time I saw you, you were with her.”

I exited and started making my way to Van Nuys on side streets. “I should tell you that Aunt Paige died in her bed.”

“Why should you tell me that?”

“So you can sleep in one of the guest rooms. The bed she died in is still there, and, you know, it's—well, when a person dies, they . . . void themselves.”

“Honey, I've slept on worse. But thank you for the heads-up.”

“I just thought that was like a thing you're supposed to tell people. An ex of mine—Brenda, I mean—she was a realtor and she always had to tell potential buyers if the previous resident had died in the house. I always figured it was for the voiding issue, but I guess I never really thought about it.”

She wasn't paying attention anymore. She was staring out the window at all the liquor stores with disturbingly child-oriented themes (e.g., Circus Liquor) and all the adult bookstores with their windows covered in big yellow banners advertising ninety-nine-cent videos and peep shows, and all the dollar stores that sold food with smudged-off expiration dates. I knew what she was thinking—whither be those sylvan parklands and friendly ice-creameries of our youth?—so I said, “You know this is now the porn capital of the world?” hoping it would get a laugh. It didn't.

When I finally pulled up to our old home—a ranch-style house, so low and flat, so lacking in dramatic protrusions, you could imagine it had slowly grown out of the pavement, or could just as slowly sink back into it, its genesis more tectonic than architectural—Edie said, “At least one thing hasn't changed.”

And it certainly had not. Walking into the old place, it was impossible not to think of the proverbial fly trapped in amber. True, that might have been because the window shades cast the room in a distinctly
amber light, and there were a few dozen flies buzzing about, but I think the metaphor is still apt. On the mantel was our father's Emmy (Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series, 1956, its like-new shine a reminder that it was a replacement), flanked by framed black-and-white photos of him tuxedoed and shaking hands with various luminaries of midcentury Hollywood, Elia Kazan, Orson Welles,
Rampart
creator and star Jack Hale. Hale was probably the only guy whom our father actually knew; the rest were just handshake photo ops at various award shows and fund-raising galas. You can tell from the pictures themselves: With Kazan and Welles, he's shaking their hands, his body “cheating out,” to use stage-direction parlance, eager to show the camera his momentary acquaintance, his smile betraying excitement, theirs betraying tolerance. What I doubt Aunt Paige ever really saw here was that these photos do not reveal a Hollywood insider, but a fan, just like any of us, who beat his moth wings against someone else's light for a fleeting, annoying moment. With Hale, however, he's different. They are facing each other, clearly sharing an inside joke or pride in some mutual accomplishment. Here it is the camera that is intruding, not my father. The George McWeeney in these photos is short, a little paunchy, his cummerbund appearing more girdle-like in the way it restrains a burgeoning belly, but his face retains the thinness of his youth, his chin pointed in a way that gives his head a crescent-moon quality. Jack Hale, that familiar face, looks in this photo as he always did on TV: small, wiry, but with features that seem drawn in charcoal, both precise and smeared.

“Oh, man,” Edie said. “I remember this furniture. Oh, the days when couches were stiff and scratchy. Really made standing up seem appealing, huh?”

“Yes,” I said. “It actually had a lot to do with the furniture industry combating postwar complacency. You know, ‘Stand up, mobilize.' The Red Scare and all that. Domestic props have always been fascinating in how they reveal deep-seated sociopolitical anxieties.”

“Jesus, Paulie, I was exaggerating. When did you become such a—whatever. It's not like you're a real professor, you know, so don't try to impress me. You wanna impress me? Loan me some walking-around money. Show me your opulence.”

“Well. It was a real thing. That guy Eames, the chair-maker, he was a total Trotskyite.”

“Either way,” Edie said, examining the clay ashtrays on the coffee table. She was already barefoot. “I don't think real comfort was invented until the eighties. Gimme a fuckin' La-Z-Boy. Poor Paige—her life was frozen in 1964. Like the Amish. Only, you know, a century later.”

I bit my tongue. She was clearly baiting me—with her subtle and knowing allusion to how Reagan's revision of American notions of comfort was in fact an ideological countering to a deeply politicized asceticism, of which the Amish were part and parcel—clearly baiting me to further my very valid point about domestic space being a theater of political conflict, baiting me only so she could accuse me of being a fraud.

“I'm a little short on lending money these days,” I said.

Then I turned back to the pictures on the mantel, as I now turn back to my train of thought about Jack Hale, since this is relevant information that Edie does not cover in her book, despite the large role Hale plays in her utterly fantastical narrative.

Jack Hale's voice is probably one of the most unintentionally impersonated in America. I say “unintentionally” because his voice
is so ingrained in our national psyche as what a cop is supposed to sound like that most people don't realize that the casually authoritative, detached but engaged, clipped but never agitated, slightly nasally tenor was originally Hale's. It has been said (though offhand, I can remember only Aunt Paige saying this, and I am unsure of her source) that after
Rampart
premiered on the radio, applications to police academies doubled and every new flatfoot on the beat was doing his best impression of Jack Hale (a.k.a. Det. Mike Nolan), and you can still hear that voice today—if only faintly, the influence generations removed—in every incarnation of a cop, real or fictional, just as you can still hear the influence of Orson Welles's stentorian droll in such sundry pop culture artifacts as the animated
Transformers
movie, and a little cartoon show called
Pinky and the Brain
, which Chris used to watch and for which I picked up an unashamed affection. When Hale had his first success with
Rampart
as a radio show in the late 1930s—as the star, producer, writer, and director—he quickly codified the now widely imitated three-act police procedural structure. The plot was always pretty simple. The sergeant, a gruff and cantankerous old-timer, told Det. Mike Nolan (Hale) about a murder in the Rampart District of Los Angeles. Nolan investigated. Nolan found the killer. Plot points were strung together with ironic quippery. The success of the show brought Hale to New Haven, Connecticut, in the spring of 1941 to give a talk at Yale School of Drama. Hale himself had spent a year in his late teens apprenticing at the National Theatre on Broadway, and he was eager to legitimize radio acting to the young Ivy League thespians. My father attended the talk and years later reported that it was “a rather uncomfortable display of insecurity” on Hale's part. Regardless, on
that same visit, Hale attended a preview performance of the play my father had written for his MFA thesis, a tense domestic drama called
Hieroglyphs
. This was in the waning years of what we now refer to as Orientalism, but my father's interest in ancient Egypt was not trendy, fetishistic, or imperialistic. He simply wanted to mine the place for metaphors. The play is about an Egyptologist who comes home from a Cairo expedition to find that his wife and sons have changed in his yearlong absence. He sees that he is no longer a necessary part of their lives, and struggles to make himself needed again. It's a fantastic piece of work. I've read it countless times. I have a copy of it here on my desk, a Xerox of the original, since my constant thumbing over the years began to compromise the integrity of the pages. It's subtle, nuanced, and even if the main character's unnecessarily detailed monologues describing the mummification process underscore the fact that my dad was a recent med school dropout (though in my years as an actor, I would use those monologues in auditions), the play is still incredibly perceptive about the ways people ignore and hurt each other, and I'm sure these were the qualities Jack Hale saw in 1941, motivating him to offer my father a job in Hollywood. My father accepted the offer and began spinning murder mysteries for Det. Mike Nolan to solve. But when NBC brought
Rampart
from radio to television in 1948, its popularity suddenly dipped. Audiences saw that Hale's body did not match his voice. Hale was a small guy who'd learned at an early age to sound big. There was no hiding his stature on television, though they certainly tried. Hale stood on boxes, while other actors stood in dug-out sections of the floor. The prop department even made Hale a gun that was two-thirds scale to make him look bigger. But all these
tricks just made him look ridiculous. If you don't believe me, check out
Rampart
's first TV season. There's a reason why those episodes never come on Nick at Nite. My father is the one who came up with the solution. Give Det. Nolan a partner, a sidekick. The Nolan of the radio show was so outsized anyway, so superhuman, that in order to render him in the visual spectrum, he needed to be two men. Nolan was now the brains of the operation, while his new partner, Det. Rob Hawkes, was the muscle. Together they delivered on the promise of the radio show, giving audiences the perfect model of postwar masculinity: Nolan coolly shrugging off the ideals of brawn, ironically commenting on them, while Hawkes reconfirmed their necessity in such a violent world. Besides, now Det. Nolan had someone to talk to. On the radio, he would just soliloquize to himself, and on TV this looked rather lunatic. So that was my father's contribution; he split the original Nolan in two, separating the brain from the brawn, and it ensured
Rampart
's place in TV history.

In her book, Edie mentions this Nolan-Hawkes bifurcation only once, almost in passing on page 170, in order to suggest that since it occurred about a year after the Black Dahlia murder, our father, still traumatized by what he'd—allegedly—done, was in effect “splitting” his own psyche, separating the superego (Nolan) from the id (Hawkes). It's a cute theory but smacks of high school–level psychoanalytic lit crit and presumes that Dad saw the character of Nolan as an extension of himself, which is utterly ridiculous. Nolan was not a stand-in for Dad; he was obviously an expression of the conflicted role governmental authority played in the shifting postwar nexus of public and private life. A grad student who interviewed Aunt Paige a couple years ago
wrote as much in his master's thesis; I have a copy of it, and it is far more incisive than Edie's reductive Freudian pronouncements.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm going to get to the specifics of Edie's claims later. I will. I have three full boxes of evidence, each box labeled
evidence
, beside my desk. It's all sitting right here, waiting to be unpacked before the jury, my sturdy blockade of justice. (The one hole in the dam, of course, is the autopsy report. Still need to track that down. And I will.) But before I get to all of that, I do need to get back to that day in our Van Nuys house, before Edie met Rory and concocted this whole murder theory, back when she was just a slightly lost middle-aged woman who, like me, missed her dead dad and was now pulling her huge suitcase (it had wheels and a leash) into her childhood bedroom.

“Fuck,” she said.

Her room had not gotten the preservationist treatment that the rest of the house had received. Aunt Paige had apparently used Edie's old room for storage. Boxes were stacked everywhere, each one labeled in black marker:
Taxes 1989, Taxes 1990, Taxes 1991/Camping Stuff
, and one that was labeled, simply and inexplicably,
Cats
. I counted three sewing machines and eight lamps.

“She hated me,” Edie said.

I chose not to remind Edie of the reasons Paige had to hate her, most notably Edie's 1972 Emmy theft, and said, “She just needed the space is all.”

Paige's old clothes covered the twin bed in the corner, and I helped clear them off.

“I bet
your
bedroom is in pristine childhood condition,” Edie said. “Of course it is. You were the heir to everything George McWeeney.
Don't you think it's a little sick? Like she was trying to keep you a child? I mean, she never could acknowledge us as adults. I don't think she ever really saw me, like really saw me, you know? Even when we were kids, she showered you with attention and completely ignored me.”