Cheat and Charmer (19 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Frank
W
hy are you doing this?” Jake bellowed, as he padded across the floor wearing nothing but his bedroom slippers. “If you ask me, darling, it’s an exercise in absolute futility and gratuitous decency that will be totally lost on your sister and that pompous, pharisaical lout to whom she happens to be married.”
Jake and Dinah were up early. They had celebrated New Year’s Eve the night before at the Steiners’, but were having their own open house later in the afternoon, and there was much to be done. Dinah, seated at Jake’s desk, was still in her bathrobe and, on top of her usual morning befuddlement, looked tired and unrefreshed. Her sleep had been interrupted again and again by the hot, dry Santa Anas, which rattled the windowpanes and made the tree branches scrape against the roof like ghosts clawing to get in.
“You can think what you l-l-l-like,” she said, shrinking from the alarming energy with which he barreled into the bathroom and turned on the shower full blast. “Anyway, I didn’t ask you,” she murmured out of his hearing.
He began to sing almost immediately, belting out “I saw yours last night and got that ooooold feeling.…” She knew what he was trying to do but too set on her purpose to laugh, she turned to the black Royal and dug in.
January 1, 1953
Dear Veevi
,
Pop died suddenly on December 23rd. Mrs. Snyder called to say he’d had a heart attack and was taken to L.A. County General. But when Jake and I got there it was too late. He’d died in the ambulance. We had him cremated, and put his ashes under the same rosebush where we put Mom’s, in the same little green cemetery in Westwood. I suppose he would have liked it better if we’d tossed them into the falls at Yosemite or scattered them under a redwood, but it just seemed simpler this way
.
I went out to the trailer the day after Christmas and found his will in a strongbox. It’s very brief, and Jake’s secretary, Gladys, is sending a mimeo. What little he had, he left to you and the girls
.
She wrote and then erased “and nothing to my ‘Jew-kids,’ as he called them.” The erasure was visible and messy, so she yanked the paper out of the typewriter, crumpled it, and threw it into the wastebasket. Then she stuck another two sheets of paper into the typewriter, reached into the wastebasket, smoothed out the first sheet, copied over the parts she had already written minus the part about the “Jew-kids,” re-crumpled the first draft, threw it again into the wastebasket, and continued:
I’ve told Mrs. Snyder to put the trailer on the market. When it’s sold, I’ll send you the money minus her commission. He had no bank accounts, but in the strongbox, along with the will, there was about twelve thousand in cash. Gladys is wiring that to you as well
.
When I was cleaning out the trailer, I found your letters to him, and Gladys is returning these to you along with photographs you’ve sent, postcards, Claire’s drawings, photos of Coco, etc
.
Did I ever tell you about the time Jake and I and our friends the Steiners drove down to Palm Springs to spend a weekend with the Engels? This must have been three or four years ago. Just as we reached the edge of town, Manny Steiner turned to me and said, “Hey, Dinah, isn’t that your old man?” We backed up to take a look, and sure enough, there was the silver Airstream parked just off the highway and
Pop sitting in a foldout easy chair under the trailer awning reading the paper and listening to the baseball game on a homemade transistor radio, just as happy as pie. We hadn’t seen him in months, and my eyes almost fell out of my head, but it was Pop, all right, with his pipe, railroad engineer’s cap, suspenders, sneakers and all. Somehow or other he’d figured out how to hook up the trailer to the public utilities, and he had electricity and hot water—everything he needed. We stopped and said hello, and the next morning he came to the Engels’ for breakfast and went riding with us, which of course he knew how to do better than anyone else
.
Irv kept staring at him, as if he’d walked out of a ghost town, and when I told him Pop had been on the Oklahoma Land Run in 1889, at the age of sixteen, and earned a Mississippi riverboat pilot’s license in 1891, he damn near fainted and kept saying, “My God, he’s the genuine article! Where have you been keeping him all these years?” It’s the only time I ever saw Irv Engel turn shy in front of anybody. Well, finally, Pop got off his horse to join me for a smoke. “Mr. Milligan, would you like to be in pictures?” asked Irv, still on horseback. “Thanks but no thanks, Engel,” said Pop. “It’s a damn fool business if you ask me.” And then, as Irv pulled away, Pop added, supposedly to me but still in Irv’s hearing, “Too many goddamn Jews.” Irv did a double take. I thought he would fall right off his horse. So right then and there I bawled hell out of Pop, but he was just as cool as could be. “Don’t go beatin’ your gums. I don’t give a good goddamn what he thinks,” he said. “His white-slaver Jew father took my Genevieve away from me.” Jake kept winking at Irv as if to remind him what an “American type” Pop was and not to take him seriously, but I shooed them away and got him out of there fast. The next day when I drove over to see him, he was gone—had taken off, as he used to say, “without so much as kiss my ass or have an apple.”
You were the only person he ever loved
.
D
.
Dinah pulled the letter out of the typewriter and laid it down flat and carefully reread it. Never having given much thought before to censoring
what she wrote her sister, she was aware now of having left out a good deal. At the hospital, she had removed her father’s Masonic ring, with its little round diamond at the junction of the two compass legs interlaced with the square. He’d left her nothing, but she remembered how he’d posed for pictures in mock grandeur, his Shriners’ fez perched on his head, his thumbs in his lapel, and she simply took the ring, whether she was supposed to have it or not.
Nor did she mention that among his belongings she had found wrapped Christmas presents with little tags inscribed in her father’s elegant, old-fashioned hand: “To Genevieve, With All My Love, Pop,” “To Claire, With Love from Papa Milligan,” “To Coco, With Love from Grandpa,” “To Mike, Cheers, from Ed.” These, too, she would give to Jake so that Gladys could send them to Paris. Dinah made no mention of a letter, lying on her father’s unmade bed, which she had nearly memorized:
November 15, 1952
Dearest Pop
,
It’s awful to have to tell you this, but we aren’t coming after all. It’s not that we don’t want to. It’s that we can’t. A few weeks ago, the American Embassy here ordered us to come in for a “special talk.” When we showed up, we were told that if we went back to America my passport would be taken away and I wouldn’t be able to go back to France. The only way to get it would be for me to snitch on people we had known years ago who are accused of being Communists, of all things. It’s hard to imagine anything so silly. Really, it’s all such a frightful bore. You and I always feel the same way about everything, and I know you’d find it as ridiculous as I do. But I do feel
dreadful
about having to disappoint you. There may be a solution, though. Mike and Claire and I want you to think about coming here, and not just for a visit. Move here, Pop. Come live with us permanently—in Paris, and wherever else we go. Mike wants me to tell you that everything you love is here—mountains, fishing, horses and, of course, us
.
Think it over, Pop. I miss you so much. Wire me about dates and Mike will send you a ticket and arrange to have you taken to the airport. You will have to get a passport. Ask Dinah to go with you, and bring your birth certificate. I imagine you’re not too keen on flying,
though if you give it a try I dare say you’d rather like it. I’m dying to take you all around Paris and show you the sights. Claire wants to take you to the zoo
.
xxxxx V
.
P.S. If you want more details about this political nonsense, ask Dinah when you go there for Christmas. She can tell you why the government has all these crazy ideas about me. Of course, I know you can’t stand being at her house. V
.
Everything about the letter bewildered and confused her. She stared at the date, feeling stupid, until she figured out that this wasn’t the letter her father had received at Christmas last year. That one she found inside a polished wooden box, lined with green satin quilting, that he kept next to his bed; that letter, much to her puzzlement, said nothing about a visit, nothing about Dinah’s testimony, and nothing about Veevi’s own subpoena in Paris—nothing, in fact, except that her pregnancy was going well and that she missed him as usual. After staring again at the date of the more recent letter and realizing that Veevi was reporting her hearing in Paris as if it had happened only a few weeks ago, and not more than a year before, a thin filament of white-hot anger raced through her. What the hell is this? she said to herself. Some kind of monkey business? She went over the dates again and again. Mike said in
his
letter that Veevi had been subpoenaed very soon after Dinah testified. But hadn’t that been almost a year and a half ago?
She remembered very clearly that Mike’s letter to her and Jake had come last spring, the day of that birthday party for Elsinore’s kid, which had been a nightmare: screaming kids tracking water into the house, ice cream dripping all over the pool deck, Elsinore running Gussie ragged, the goddamn hired clown asking her if he could leave his head shots with her to show Jake, she running into the den to take a hit of Scotch from time to time just to get through the afternoon. So she wondered, if Veevi’s passport had been taken away that long ago, how could she have promised to come for this Christmas? It didn’t make sense. It didn’t add up—it was a complete riddle. And that invitation to their father to come to Paris—completely insincere. What was she going to do, take him out to bistros every night with the gang? Veevi, Dinah was quite sure, had issued it knowing
perfectly well he would never take her up on it. He had lived nearly eighty years without once flying. Sometime in ’47, Veevi had written her to encourage him to come, and Dinah, sitting companionably out in the garden with her father while Lorna napped in her baby carriage, had said, “You oughtta fly to Paris, Pop,” to which he had sensibly replied, “If God wanted me to fly, he’d have stuck a feather up my ass.”
But it was now, recently, that Veevi had written about the passport, and done so, it seemed to Dinah, with a peculiar malice and arch innuendo that seemed at odds with the direct tone she usually took with their father. It was as if she had written it expecting him to read it out loud to Dinah, thereby forcing her to explain herself to the old man. And this in itself was strange and mean, because Dinah and Veevi had never done that sort of thing. They had never once quarreled—at least not openly—for as long as she could remember, and they had never involved their parents in their lives. There had been what Dinah called “moments”—brief and unacknowledged flickers of anger, envy, and resentment that quickly dampened. But having heard stories from friends about great roaring battles between them and their sisters, Dinah knew that she and Veevi were different, and perhaps a bit odd in this respect. They had never screamed or shouted, never gone for months without speaking to each other, never called each other names. Even though Dinah had come to the conclusion that this was strange and not quite
normal
, she was glad of it, because the idea of openly fighting with Veevi filled her with horror.
Dinah took the letter and put it in her purse, and then, thinking better of it, returned it to the pile that would be sent back to Veevi. She’d decided not to say anything to Jake about it. He would see another reason in it for her not to write Veevi about their father’s death, and Dinah was determined to write—to be almost spitefully decent under the circumstances. Just what those circumstances were, she hadn’t a clue, but it also seemed wrong to feel such anger at her sister. There had to be an explanation. Surely Veevi wouldn’t play their father for a fool or deliberately lie to him and deceive him.