In the Beauty of the Lilies (48 page)

Clark said crisply, by way of concluding, “You better tell Zebulun you want me to help him. He wouldn’t believe it, if it came from me.”

Those four years he went to St. Andrew’s, in the middle of the Seventies, he visited his grandparents once a month on the average. He liked his grandmother fine, though he wondered why her leg had never been fixed by one of these simple operations that the doctor shows on television are always performing, and why she kept feeding him this rich sweet country food that had made her so fat she could hardly hobble between the stove and the kitchen table. But it was his grandfather he loved—the way people called him “Teddy” though he was over seventy, and the old man’s patient way of moving, of listening, of suffering in silence. If there was one thing Mom did not know how to do, it was suffer in silence. Though she had had fits of trying to be a mother, as he achieved the shape of a man she was generally distracted if not thousands of miles away, on location in Mexico or Louisiana. After 1970, when she hit forty, she weakened and began to accept TV work—older-woman roles in four- or six-part adaptations of last year’s popular novels, in costume dramas with an enlightened slant on ethnic issues. Her platinum-blonde phase was over; her hair went dark again. She played the obstructive but eventually enlightened and forgiving mother of an aristocratic Mexican girl involved in a romance with a peon turned revolutionary, and in another the Creole madame of a New Orleans bawdy house burned down for accepting clients of
mixed blood. Older sisters, female executives, women with tortured pasts that had come back to haunt them—television, relatively cheesy though its production values were, embraced a world where middle-aged women could still play a role. The big screen, bewildered by its liberation from censorship, clung to the ideal of youthful beauty, and there was no shortage of fresh examples: Ali MacGraw, Katharine Ross, Karen Black, Maria Schneider. They wouldn’t last the way she had, Mom said, but then she hadn’t lasted the way Crawford had.

Teddy had more time on his hands now that his nephew Ira had energetically taken over the greenhouse, and he welcomed his teen-age grandson’s inarticulate companionship. The two were physically akin—stocky, squarish, with mild brown eyes and straight dull hair. Teddy walked with the boy around the town, pointing out vacant lots where there used to be houses, and new houses where there had been fields, or houses that had once been neighborhood grocery stores, or a dilapidated mansion where the man who founded the bottle-cap factory had lived, or a big run-down house gone into apartments which had belonged to his father’s sister and where he and Em had lived when newlywed, or shacks where black people had lived in deplorable conditions, when you think about it now. From his days as a mailman he knew the name of the family that had occupied every house years ago. Many of them were still there, some had passed on. Oh, he could tell a story or two, if regulations didn’t forbid it. A letter carrier, coming to the door every day, gets a sense of a house, and sees things—women in bathrobes asking if he’d like to come in for a coffee, cars parked out front that belonged on the other side of town, children left unattended squalling themselves blind upstairs, signs of the heart going
out of a house by the peeling paint and broken screen doors. “You can tell,” he told Clark, “by the kind of mail people get—if they have the interest to subscribe to a magazine or two, if there are any picture postcards and hand-addressed letters from acquaintances who are keeping up in the world, or if they get too many bills stamped
ATTENTION
, if there are registered return receipt requesteds from some legal outfit. It’s a terrible thing, Clark, when a house starts to sink—when the man of the house is being dragged down.”

The boy heard a note of personal grief, of grievance. He asked, “Is that what happened to your father?”

“Yes. Yes, it did. I don’t like to remember it, if you don’t mind.”

“But then your daughter became rich and famous.”

“That helped. But she paid a price. There are no free rides. Look at the television bilge they have her in now. No better than soap operas, I don’t see how Em watches ’em day after day. She ought to retire on her money, your mother, but she can’t. That’s the penalty of success. Nobody knows when to stop. Everybody always wants more.”

He and Clark would get into the family Chrysler—a stately sober gray-blue, it was one of the few luxuries they had allowed Alma to buy them—and drive around Delaware, up to Wilmington, where he would point out the buildings that held the old movie theatres and O’Connell’s School of Practical Business, before the downtown was pretty much given over to the blacks. “Not their fault everything runs down,” he explained. “They don’t have the money for upkeep. They don’t have the money because they don’t have educations. They don’t have educations because nobody had any use for ’em, once they stopped being slaves. You know this was a slave state, right through the Civil War? They wouldn’t ratify
the Thirteenth Amendment until 1901. Any black tried to vote, he was in big trouble. We had it all—lynchings, whippings. People are meaner than mules.” Clark’s grandfather laughed, as the Chrysler purred through blocks of tumbledown, boarded-up Wilmington. “Well, here’s the result. American cities are the black man’s revenge. They’ve taken them over. A white man’s scared to go into town, after dark. There used to be shops all through here, and pretty gals riding open trolley cars in their bonnets. Don’t think back then we didn’t look at the girls, and they didn’t know it, even though they didn’t show us everything they had on the first go.”

Nothing made his grandfather indignant. He was a man at peace, still curious about the world but with never any hope of changing it. Even the monstrous white-painted holding tanks, acres of them behind an eight-foot silver playground fence, down along the river where he and Jared used to fish, and where there used to be marshes full of heron and muskrat and terrapin, he found admirable in their way, as a triumph of expenditure and engineering, of Man’s ability to impose himself on Nature. They parked on the roadside and he rolled down the window, so they could smell the tanks, the rich and intricate chemistry of their processed petroleum. A sunlit shoal of cirrus clouds arching in the direction of New Jersey seemed to carry flakes of the tanks’ white paint up into the sky. Freon gases released in aerosol spray cans are destroying the ozone layer, scientists had announced that fall. Clark was fifteen, and at St. Andrew’s had been exposed to small doses of Machiavelli and Plato, Byron and Camus, even some Nietzsche—enough to know that there was less to the sky than he had once vaguely assumed. Every trip to the moon took something away from God. He was jealous of his mother; she
had had a God, here under the cozy close sky of Basingstoke, and in her Hollywood egotism hadn’t bothered to pass Him on to him. He didn’t know what to believe; he only knew that he was going to die some day, and that was unthinkable—everything going out like a light bulb, and people and planets going on and on without him, even beyond the time when the sun exploded and became a cinder. He lay down at night into this charred and leaden eventuality; it belonged to the adult smells of his body as the sheets warmed, and masturbation’s headlong relief eclipsed the knowledge with a kind of inner light only to have it sourly wash back, even as he blindly dabbled at the sheet with his handkerchief, hoping the school laundry would mistake his ejaculation for snot. Lynette and Bobbi Anne and (most down and dirty) Alicia, eighth-grade girls he knew in his last year at Beverly Vista Elementary School, starred in the little movies he projected in his head, but when they were over the bottomless black truth remained. In Hollywood there were these well-groomed churches and synagogues along the palm-lined boulevards but his mother had never led him into them, except for a crowded funeral or two, the death of a star, photographers snapping and excluded fans crowding the sidewalk and the tone inside that of a publicity handout or a roast with fewer than usual jokes. Who was this God everybody talked of but no one ever met? The Episcopal chapel services at St. Andrew’s seemed perfunctory and weightless, the same words every time, like a mumbled foreign language he had never learned, the homilies by faculty members chatty and down-to-earth if not, in tone, downright mocking. Where was the hidden miracle? Who could he talk to but his grandfather, who had mild, unblaming opinions on everything? He asked, one November day when they had gone to the beach in the car, and were happy to be
back out of the wind in the Chrysler’s warmth, “What was Mom’s religion like when she was a girl?”

It could have been put better, but his grandfather grasped the gist. “She went to the Presbyterians over on North Elm, with her mother and mine. The Siffords had been Methodists, but it seemed easiest once the baby had come for Emily to switch, my mother was so keen for her own church. The family always said she should have been the parson, not Dad.”

“Was Mom, you know, real sincere?”

Teddy reflected back. “She never said one way or another, that I can remember. Went to church school every Sunday, and was confirmed at thirteen. Pretty as an angel, in a white dress my mother made with her poor old eyes. I didn’t go generally, but I went to that service all right. This was my
girl
.” He studied his grandson, his face looking worried, wondering what the boy wanted. “Then, about your age I guess, the age when she began to do with boys, her attendance began to slump off, and she’d stay home with me, doing her homework or going off and seeing some friends. It was normal, even Mother agreed. She’d say you expect to lose them at that age, they’ll return when they have children of their own. Mother had been head of Sunday school out in Missouri; that’s how Dad met her.”

“How come you never went?” Clark asked.

The retired mailman turned his profile into the tinted glare of the windshield and his thin lips gathered into a pugnacious pursed hardness—a Wilmot kind of mouth. “Never seemed to need it,” he allowed. “Stopped dead after Dad died.” He reflected a bit more, thinking back. “I must have had a grudge.” A patch of whiskers his razor had skimmed over showed white stubble in the glare. Just by the silver fence a strip of marsh lay undisturbed and out of it flew two great
blue herons, the S of their necks straightening as their shadowy wings labored to beat their arrowing bodies into the air and away.

“Grudge?”

His grandfather slowly scratched his jaw at the very spot where the razor had skipped. “This’ll sound strange, coming out of the way people used to think, but it seemed to me God could have given Dad a sign. To help him out. Just a little sign would have done it, and cost God nothing much. Damned if I’d go to church to sing His praises after that. Mother never pushed me on it, either, much as church meant to her. Actually I think I scared her. Emily came along, and went in my place. I would never take the comfort away from those it comforts, and I don’t mean to bother your head with this, Clark—you asked, and I answered the best I can remember. It’s all a long while ago. Now we have a President resigned, and nothing’s sacred.”

He waited for Clark to say something, to argue with his position possibly. But Clark could think of nothing to say; the thought of God, right there by the glossy white gas tanks that could explode in a fiery ball as big as an atom bomb might make, frightened him, so his tongue felt enormous and numb.

His grandfather put the key in the ignition and said kindly, “Sometime when you’re here for a weekend we ought to drive up to Paterson and see how much is left that I remember. It seemed the center of the universe then; the silk strike made headlines all over the country.” He put the heavy Chrysler in gear. “Now let’s go home and see what good thing Mother has cooked up for us.” In this sentence “Mother” meant his wife.

After he had graduated from St. Andrew’s, and come back to college at U.C.L.A. in Westwood, and dropped out when
it seemed a really good opportunity in an independent production unit of mostly young people had started up to make a picture that would cash in on the Superman craze (only he wouldn’t be called Superman or after any superhero in copyright, and all of his superhuman effects like bending a crowbar or lifting a steam engine wouldn’t come off, hilariously, which also meant a big saving on special effects), and drifted back to take some classes when he couldn’t take any more crap from the snotty head of production, who seemed to get his kicks putting a star’s son down, just with little nasty subtle things, and Clark had told him what he thought of him—after all this, while waiting for the right combination to click, sleeping to noon and watching MTV or the old movies on cable and wondering why the people in these black-and-white screwball comedies talked so fast and loud—audiences then must have understood them but he couldn’t—and phoning around and showing up at Ma Maison or Jimmy’s or Spago or the Colony with the right-looking chick, who for all her leather mini and see-through blouse and pierced nostril and stiletto-heeled purple vinyl boots and the butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder blade was a nice-enough good-hearted girl who like him had improved her mood with a few too many chemicals and hoped that just showing up at these places redolent of success would catch her up in the gears, the magic mechanism that maneuvered the trip to the stars, and then going to the parties in somebody or other’s absent parents’ house with everybody a different flavor of stoned it seemed and the water in the swimming pool lit from underneath like a piece of sky upside down by wobbly golden bulbs and the pet Russian wolfhound lying out on the terrace watching with a worried look and wanting to play with the chewed yellow tennis ball between his long white paws but
nobody playful, everyone too wasted and self-absorbed and carefully moussed and pinned together to go entertain a dog, all this arduously attained and Mex-trimmed multi-million-dollar home being turned into the shit of boring chatter going nowhere, not even to bed, people too strung-out and scared of or tired of the idea of love, the moviemakers had
done
love, the songwriters had done it, what was left were jagged images, one after another, mocking, slicing in MTV like sharks’ mouths in a feeding frenzy in that documentary about the Great Barrier Reef—during all this his grandfather would send him patient letters from Basingstoke, in stamped envelopes and the address very tidy in its numbers, the high Los Angeles numbers that amused the former small-town mailman. The letters were in acknowledgment of the affection the boy had shown him and attempted to respond to the need he had sensed in his grandson, for a faith. But Teddy had no faith to offer; he had only the facts of daily existence. Weather, family news, local change.