Family Night (24 page)

Laurence was calling to them. She went into the bathroom and lifted the boy from the water. She wrapped him in a towel and carried him to the chair where she had his fresh clothes. Cam tugged a jersey over Laurence’s head; the boy’s ears immediately blazed red.

Tracy came back with three newspapers. “I’ll stay here and read these while you go visit your old man,” Tracy said.

“No, we’re all going. We’re going chain gang,” Cam said.

“I don’t think we should go, we’ll distract you from your work,” Tracy said.

“No,” Cam said. “I want backups.”

“Well, all right. You talked me into it,” Tracy told him. They were grinning back and forth.

Cam took a bottle of bourbon from a paper bag and twisted the seal. He picked up the glass tumbler from the motel desk and flicked off its paper crown. “Do you want any of this?” he asked Tracy, but he didn’t include Margaret.

“I’ll take some,” Tracy said.

Cam poured two glasses of bourbon. He said, “What is it exactly, in your mind, Tracy, that I’m supposed to do now that I’m here?”

Margaret started laughing; her laughter lifted and dipped, was punctuated by rich growls low in her diaphragm, but the men weren’t smiling.

“You know what you have to do, man,” Tracy said.

“What is that?” Cam said.

“Just go introduce yourself. Go face to face. No thumbs. Identify that mystery guest. Name that tune.”

“What’s the point of it, though?”

“That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” Margaret said. She walked over and poured bourbon for herself. “I could have told you that two days ago!” she said.

Cam and Tracy didn’t acknowledge her. They were involved in a peculiar exchange. It was like pilot and copilot going through a checklist, making sure the needles rested at the appropriate angles on all the
gauges. Then it was resolved. The four of them would go over there to the Gregory Hotel. Cam would have his little entourage since he said he needed somebody to flank him. “I need backups,” he said.

“We’re behind you. Your slaves to the end,” Tracy said, and he draped the newspaper he was holding over his sleeve and rolled the neck of the bottle against his arm as he poured another drink for Cam.

“Jesus, you missed your calling,” Cam said.

“What about you? Sweetheart, you could have hustled. You’re perfect for the Oldest Profession,” Tracy told him.

The street was smoky from chimney stacks spewing flecked clouds from basement incinerators. The soot filtered down on them as they stood outside the Gregory Hotel. Margaret had bathed and nicked her leg shaving, a row of garnets bloomed in a vertical line along her ankle. Cam gave her a new handkerchief. He had to tear its cellophane. She dabbed at her leg and folded the handkerchief so Cam could put it back in his pocket again. She had combed Laurence’s hair, parting it on one side and wetting the comb to make the strands stay in place.

“He looks like Alfalfa,” Cam said.

“Alfalfa wore his part in the middle,” Tracy said.

Their attention to Laurence continued as they took an elevator up to the sixth floor. They encouraged the boy to watch the lacy arrow rise and Laurence counted the floors. Tracy commented on the elevator; it was Art Deco.

“Art Deco, art schmecko,” Cam said, “it’s a scummy flophouse.” Margaret studied the romantic lines of paneling inlaid with strips of mirror. The ribbons of mirror were tarnished with metallic lichens. They lifted slowly in the unusual stall, as if ascending into another time, but Cam wasn’t sure of its checkpoints. Cam showed the strain of it. Margaret didn’t like riding the elevator, and she thought she could smell something burning. Like the electrical insulation was smoldering. Then the doors opened.

Looking for the right apartment number, they found the door was left open. Tracy knocked against the molding and waited. “Hello,” Tracy called into the apartment. Cam didn’t wait and walked past Tracy and Margaret. They followed him inside. The rooms were painted deep umber, the rich color accentuated by the candelabra flickering on the sideboard in the living room. More candles on the dining table swelled and shivered with their arrival. Margaret noticed a familiar end table with lion’s head brass pulls. It was a perfect match to a table in Elizabeth’s sewing room; it must have been a pair split apart. The room had lamps with frosted glass shades, pink as sherbet, and these, added to the candlelight, gave a cabaret effect to the cramped apartment. Margaret found these cluttered rooms instantly appealing. Her head felt light as if she had
already drunk too much of something, but the sensation came from the plumped upholstery, the tight satin pleats of the seat cushions. These satin pleats gave her unwholesome shivers.

The walls showed the familiar drawings of Lewis by Leyendecker. Several of the Arrow Collar ads were matted and framed. Some of these were the original Leyendecker paintings and sketches. Margaret liked the Sanforized-shrunk ads, and one for Pepperell rayon coat linings that showed Lewis being dressed by an Oriental servant. Another picture had Lewis tugging his cuff high on his ankle to reveal glossy Bostonian wing tips. Finding these pictures all together, tracking them in one whirling glance, wall to wall, was stunning. Lewis had been more handsome than she’d ever imagined. Some of the angles in the photos showed similarities to Cam, and she found herself looking back and forth between the advertisements and her brother.

“Are we vain, or what?” Tracy whispered to her.

“Be quiet,” she told him.

Lewis entered the room. He held his face high, allowing his sculpted jaw full prominence. His shoulders were still broad and level even as his physique appeared perhaps a bit slight. It was just a hint of his age; his bones might be hollowing. His face was startling, and Margaret forgot her surroundings and moved past the beautiful sconces that decorated the wall, although she had wanted to study them. Lewis lived up to his legend. Margaret had seen certain people—usually an actor or a singer—who possessed this same trait, the blessing or burden of looking always larger than life. Lewis pulled
his left arm backward in an elegant motion, inviting them inside the living room, although they were well past the threshold already.

Lewis stood squared with Cam. There was no question that Cam was his progeny. Cam introduced everyone, but he didn’t offer his own name or greeting. Lewis complimented Laurence, calling him “a little Freddie Bartholomew.”

Cam squinted for a moment; Margaret saw he probably didn’t know the reference to the child actor. Cam would have known about Mickey Rooney, but then, of course, Laurence
didn’t look
like Mickey Rooney.

“Of course, you must be Cameron,” Lewis said after long enough.

Cam nodded. Cam’s smile was immediate, warm, but he checked it. His mouth fell even.

“Cameron Goddard,” Lewis said, “Goddard, we share that coat of arms.”

Cam looked at his father. His eyes followed the man’s face from the high forehead, along the smooth terrace of cheekbone, and down the jaw to the well-defined mouth, Cam’s mouth. Margaret saw how Cam avoided looking directly at Lewis’s eyes.

“This is an unusual moment, but probably for the best. It was probably unavoidable,” Lewis said.

Cam was trying very hard to concentrate, to understand if his father’s comment was warm or defensive.

“I thought it was time,” Cam said.

“We might have been ships passing in the night,” Lewis said.

Again, Cam showed some uncertainty about Lewis’s
meaning. Margaret saw how he suffered. What a thing to say to your own son, “Ships passing in the night.” Margaret recognized a peculiar sensation, the drilling at the base of the spine as if riveted to this one moment in a previous lifetime. Some people called it
déjà vu
; scientists say it’s chemically induced, the brain repeats its own thought. It happens in a fraction of a second and someone senses a distant connection, a dream or vision. She felt that bitter tingle.

Laurence was sleepy and Margaret suggested they feed him something soon. Lewis carved an edge of lasagna from an aluminum foil tray of pasta. The lasagna was from the restaurant on the corner. He’d ordered the whole meal—pasta, garlic bread, salads in Styrofoam bowls—and he’d told the restaurant to deliver it to the apartment.

“I thought the child would like lasagna. Spaghetti is sometimes cold by the time it comes,” Lewis told her.

“How nice of you to think of these things,” Margaret said. Laurence ate his dinner and Margaret put him to sleep on an overstuffed chaise longue; its feather upholstery encircled the boy in lovely billows. “It just makes you want to go to sleep,” she told the boy.

When she came back to the dining table, the men were sitting down. Lewis was telling Tracy a chronology of his modeling career, pointing to different drawings and clippings on the walls. “This was my first
Collier’s
, and that one, that was a full page in the
Times
. Women wrote letters, a half ton of them, a literal half ton of letters, asking who I was. Dinner invitations, marriage
proposals, threats of suicide, real estate opportunities, a half ton of them.”

Tracy was skeptical. “Did they actually weigh these letters at the post office?”

“They can tell the weight of something by figuring the volume alone. A sack of mail is a certain volume, then they figure the weight. So many sacks of mail, love letters you might say, equals so much volume from which they figure the weight. One half ton from a full page in the
Times
. A record, really,” Lewis said.

“Why didn’t you go into films?” Tracy said.

“Oh, you mean Hollywood? That was Fred March and Brian Donlevy.”

“Fredric March was an Arrow Collar man?” Margaret was impressed.

“Several went into films with some success. I like to think there was a distinction between the two professions.”

“Didn’t you want to be a film star?”

“I liked the modeling. Posing for Leyendecker was a dramatic test in itself. He was demanding.”

“This painter, Leyendecker, wasn’t he a lavender colleague of Norman Rockwell?” Tracy said.

“No, Rockwell came after; Leyendecker was first,” Lewis said. “Very different types. I wouldn’t say exactly lavender for Leyendecker; he deserves a better word, something more particular. His sensitivities were, let’s say, acute. He was often attracted to someone’s bee-stung lips. He had a reputation with that. But I was his subject for work, not his amusement. Critics said that Leyendecker could never paint women with any sympathy. As for Rockwell, he painted children.”

Tracy leaned on the table; he said he had an interest in this, he had come to believe the artist’s studio was much like a casting couch. Was that the case? His curiosity was piqued. “You’re saying Leyendecker was single-minded and painted the male animal expressly; he couldn’t paint women?”

Cam said, “This isn’t Twenty Questions, is it, Tracy? Can you back off?”

Lewis smiled at Tracy and lifted his shoulders as if to say he might have answered his questions or he might not. The matter was derailed. Margaret scratched at a petal of wax on the table cloth. Lewis poured wine from a double-sized bottle. She imagined the four of them drinking the whole amount; that would be several glasses each, and she knew Cam couldn’t survive it after drinking three drinks at the motel. She decided to slice the big square of lasagna so they could eat something along with drinking the wine.

“Did you leave my mother before I was born?” Cam asked Lewis.

“Let’s jump right in,” Tracy told Cam.

Lewis said, “Oh, that’s all right. I expect there’s many things to clear up. You weren’t born. Actually. She kicked me out long before that. I was surprised to hear about you. It was a shock, really.”

“I see.”

“We’re not denying the truth, though,” Lewis said.

“We’re not?” Cam said.

“No, it adds up. I mean it wasn’t impossible; it was just a matter of luck.” Lewis lifted his glass and cupped its bowl without drinking.

“What kind of luck?” Cam said.

“Luck. Just luck, the roll of the dice—you tell me? I don’t have any claim to it.”

Cam said, “This reminds me. Did you send me that five-pound chocolate Easter egg in 1960?”

“Excuse me?” Lewis said.

“I was fifteen. Someone sent me a gigantic, solid chocolate Easter egg with a pair of dice inside.”

Margaret said, “I remember that. I was jealous. Solid chocolate with two gleaming dice inside.”

“I don’t know anything about a chocolate egg,” Lewis said.

Cam said, “I thought you might have sent it to me. No one knew where it came from. You’re so
into
this idea of luck, I thought maybe it was you. That’s okay. Excuse me. Strike one.”

Tracy said, “Luck is an interesting concept for some. Random chance is an impressive thing, isn’t it? I like throwing the cubes. African golf. Does it fascinate you, I mean, as much as it does me? Did you roll a number and decide to invite us here, to dinner?”

Lewis shook his head. “I had time to think. Bette rang me yesterday. I knew you were coming.”

“You mean Elizabeth? Elizabeth called here? She couldn’t keep out of this?” Cam shoved himself back from the table, but he decided against standing up.

Margaret noticed that Lewis had called Elizabeth by her French pet name, one syllable, “Bette.”

“She wanted me to have a chance to escape,” Lewis said. “She’s afraid of what might happen. The two of us together like this; we could unite in an opinion. All of us here, we could have a quorum.”

Cam drank the wine and smiled. He looked at Tracy to see if Tracy understood what this meant to him. Lewis showed the same sarcastic tolerance of Elizabeth as he himself felt. But Cam’s expression changed quickly; he was reevaluating each notch of feeling as it came to him.

“So tell me what’s new with your mother?” Lewis said.

“She sold her body to science,” Cam told Lewis.

“To science?” Lewis asked.

“I tell the truth,” Cam said.

“My God. I can’t think of Bette in a laboratory. Imagine the experiments even I didn’t try,” Lewis said.

The men laughed. Their laughter accelerated, dipped and rose again. It was the joke’s vile resonance that prolonged their laughter. It was terrible to watch Cam. His waves of comprehension, his shifting expressions reminded her of films using fast-forward, time-lapse photography. A nature film shows a seed germinate, then the little green shoot struggles upward through the baked clay, next the bud forms, swells taut until the blossom explodes.