Cheat and Charmer (20 page)

That afternoon, as Dinah sat with Mrs. Snyder in her stuffy office, going over arrangements for selling the trailer and occasionally glancing out the window to see lights flashing on small Christmas trees crammed inside the trailers in the trailer park, she learned that her father had arrived back from the mountains late in the night. At about noon the next day, he’d
come to Mrs. Snyder’s office and picked up the package of mail that Dinah had sent after she’d received a postcard from Dutch Flat with a black-and-white picture of an old run-down saloon and the message “It’s colder than a witch’s tit here. Home for Christmas. Forward mail to Mrs. Snyder. Yours, Pop.” Then, Mrs. Snyder said, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes later, she happened to look out the window and saw him stagger out of the trailer, clutching his chest, and collapse on the ground. Naturally, she’d called the ambulance right away, and Dinah just afterward.

At the funeral home, where she had seen him laid out in blue pajamas, his hard face not tranquil but stilled, Dinah kept trying to figure out what her father had been doing when the pain hit him. Now she knew, and the image of him clutching his chest displaced forever and with terrible clarity what had always been her favorite way of conjuring him up: sitting back in his rocking chair, right leg crossed over left knee, puffing on a pipe, reading the paper.

She had wanted him home for Christmas. Her children loved him but were afraid of him. He was gruff with them, often rebuking Lorna for carrying around a naked doll. But he sat with her once for an entire afternoon when she was home from school with a cold, and read a book he had brought her about a little dragon named Horace who lived in London, at the bottom of the Thames. He set up a canvas tent for Peter in the backyard, before the pool was built, and stayed out there overnight with him, making a campfire and cooking bacon and eggs in an iron skillet. And Lorna and Peter stayed in the trailer with him from time to time, and were fascinated by the sight of his tobacco-stained false teeth sitting overnight in a glass of water. It was true, she acknowledged, that he disliked the largeness and luxury of her house. More often than not, when the family was watching
Toast of the Town
with Jake’s mother, Rose, who always came over on Sundays and spent the night, Pop would get up suddenly, look at her and say, “So long, Sadie,” to her (she nodding and smiling, never letting on that she’d heard the anti-Semitic insult), and go into the kitchen to have a smoke with Gussie, who served him whatever he wanted and with whom he felt comfortable and superior. They would both leave the house at the same time—he to his trailer, she to her apartment above the garage, and Gussie told Dinah that he always waited until she had climbed up the wooden stairway, turned the key in the lock, and said to him, “It’s all right, Mr. Milligan. You go on in to bed.”

The last time Dinah had seen him, in May, he’d simply shown up one day, parked the Airstream in the driveway, breezed into the house, stayed for dinner, demonstrated to Peter how to spit brown tobacco juice in a straight line right into the bamboo bushes near the pool, played the piano, sung his old songs, danced a sailor’s hornpipe, and taken off the next morning for the Sierras. He’d seemed happy enough to be in her house. Still, he must have said something to Veevi in a letter about not being able to stand it, and once again she felt the old hurt, as old as her memory, as old as her life.

That he had never loved her she was certain. He had wanted a son for his firstborn, and long ago, for the first three years of her life, not disguising his disappointment, he had called her Papa’s Baby Boy. Then one day her aunt and uncle had swooped her up and put her in the backseat of their pink Winton and taken her away to their big house in Wilkinsburg. There everything was brown velvet, and her aunt would put her in a hot bath and scrub her neck with Old Dutch Cleanser and talk to a medium named Black Hawk, who she said was always leaving messages in chalk for her on a blackboard in the sewing room. The day they’d taken her home to Beaver Falls she’d run up the stairs and found her mother sitting up in bed wearing a white lace cap and holding a very small wriggling animal that kept rooting at her breast. “What’s that?” Dinah had asked. “That’s your baby sister,” her father said. “Her name is Genevieve. Isn’t she a beauty?” Dinah didn’t think so.

Her father had had a Model T. On Saturdays they would wash the car together and inspect the parts and repair whatever needed fixing. She was proud of being able to say the big grown-up words—car words like
crankshaft
and
universal joint
. One Saturday, while her mother nursed the new baby on the front porch and she and her father were inspecting the engine, she began to say, “Did you check the carburetor, Daddy?” but something strange happened; the word
carburetor
got stuck. It fired and fired again, and she felt the sound “c-c-c-c-c” jamming her throat, but it wouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t, come out. The same thing happened again and again that day, and she remembered the way her father looked at her without saying anything, running his eyes over her with an expression of horrified curiosity. From that time on, every waking hour became a struggle against the dark foot in her throat that crushed her words as they fought their way up toward the open air.

Why don’t you go into analysis and get yourself straightened out about
all this? Jake had said to her more than once. You need to unearth your memories, get into your unconscious. I don’t have any unearthed memories, she’d tell Jake. Perhaps it would be better if I did.

When she finished making arrangements with Mrs. Snyder, she returned to the trailer. Stretching out on her father’s bed, she held his pillow to her face and sobbed into it, smelling his lonely old smell. It had been three days since the trailer last received an infusion of acrid pipe smoke, and Mrs. Snyder had decided to air out the place for prospective buyers. A hot dry Santa Ana was blowing through the open windows, ruthlessly taking away every last trace of her father.

The spareness of the trailer made her think of Pop’s life. He had been a handsome man, tall and slender, with well-defined Scotch-Irish features. He had strong, deft hands, and could build anything, fix anything, charm the poison out of a snake, and tell stories like no one except Jake. But his life had been a series of failures, one after another, always following success, which he couldn’t stand. He had sold steel, and was good at it, but every time he got promoted he’d go out and get drunk, wreck the company car, disappear for two weeks, and come home stinking and sorry. A thirty-second-degree Mason, and a Shriner, he’d had to accept Shriner charity after going on a binge and wrecking the car in the summer of 1930, just after Dinah graduated from high school. Having fractured three vertebrae near his neck, he came home from the Shriner rest home completely broke and unable to work, and she’d put aside her plans to start UCLA in the fall, and had gotten a secretarial job instead. He’d given up after that and allowed her to support the family, but she remembered his bitterness, and his permanent contempt for himself, which pursued him everywhere: on his camping trips to the Sierras, on his prospecting trips to the Mojave, on his pilgrimages to the redwoods, under whose shade he would have somebody take his picture, which he would send her to show the kids, with the caption, “Grandpa and the redwoods: guess who’s older?”

Later, in the kitchen, she noticed a small tin percolator on the two-burner stove. It was heavy with old cold coffee. A white tin cup, chipped at the rim, sat in the sink, an inch or so of coffee thickening into a sludge at the bottom. “Cough-on-the-puddypot”—put on the coffeepot—he used to say to her mother in the mornings, after they’d moved from Beaver Falls to
Pittsburgh and from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, a new start coming every two years in the wake of the triple tsunami: promotion, binge, and lost job. Once more he was hopeful, once more he would tap-dance down the stairs, revving up to go out and be the best goddamn steel salesman the Mossberger Knife and Forge Company had ever seen.

After rereading her letter to Veevi a second, third, and fourth time, during which Jake emerged from the bathroom in fresh shorts and T-shirt, shaking his head at her, Dinah searched for an envelope in his desk, pushing aside the clutter: notebooks, business cards, photos, a box of the Wrigley’s Doublemint he went through by the pack, sharpened pencils, Scotch tape, scissors, paper clips, boxes of brass studs for the three-hole binders in different colors he used for his scripts, each color signifying a different stage of revision. Among the business cards were innumerable scraps of paper with names, addresses, phone numbers, and availability dates for cameramen, makeup men, stuntmen, doubles, costume people, production designers, actors, actresses, cutters, composers, arrangers, assistant directors—all of them wanting a job. Except when he was writing, she reflected, Jake came into contact with hundreds of people—many of whom she knew nothing about and would never even meet—while her days included long stretches of time alone. Dinah was glad not to have to be around people. She found her own company sufficient and her own thoughts absorbing, and she rarely had lunch with other wives. Nevertheless, seeing these slips of paper, she was reminded of her high school days, when she’d needed a job and had danced in pictures. She had been proud of herself and her high school newspaper had run articles about her, with photographs. But even then, what she had longed for was to be loved, married, and safe, free of the fear of losing her job and not being able to support herself and her parents. After marrying Jake, she had never, ever, wanted to go back to those days, and she never missed working. Yet all these people he came into contact with sometimes made her feel something akin to an envy of her former self—as if she had once been another person, someone she admired who had survived an ordeal, even if it was just the everyday ordeal of having to put food on the table. Sometimes she was haunted by the thought that there was something not quite right in her being free of that struggle.

She found the kind of envelope she was looking for, a plain white one,
not the kind that had
MRS. JAKE LASKER
and their address printed on the back flap. She folded the letter, stuffed it into the envelope, and thought, I might as well be throwing this off the Santa Monica pier. There’s not a chance in hell I’m ever going to hear from her again. But she put a stamp on it.

Jake, now dressed, told her he was going to take the kids and pick up his mother and bring her over for the day. “By the way, did Groucho call to say he’s coming?” he asked.

“Groucho’s coming.”

“Good. My mother will have an orgasm—one of the two or three of her life. And, honey, for Christ’s sake, this time make sure you don’t give him a drink in a green-bottomed glass,” Jake said. “I ran into him at Hillcrest the other day, and I thought I’d never hear the end of it. ‘I like to see my Scotch when I’m drinking it,’ he said.”

“I better warn Peter,” Dinah said. “Groucho scares him to death.”

Jake scowled.

“Don’t start now,” she said. “Don’t be hard on Pete about this. Groucho’s awful with little kids. Don’t you remember how he snapped at Peter the last t-t-t-time he was here?”

“Two minutes after Groucho arrives, we’ll send my mother upstairs to watch TV in our room with Pete, and that will take care of that,” Jake said, as if he’d just discovered fire.

“Fine,” said Dinah, not really listening to him. There was something she had to do today, and as soon as Jake was out the door she reached for the phone and called Dorshka.