Stars Screaming (31 page)

Louie unfastened his seat belt. “I have to make,” he said, standing up.

The small black man was awake, cleaning his glasses with the bottom of his tie. A magazine with Eldridge Cleaver on the cover was
open in his lap. The man in the gray suit shifted in his seat, his face grim and his eyes heavy with scotch.

“He was captured in 1968, during Tet,” Barbara said. “At first I was told he was missing in action. That could mean anything, right?” Burk nodded, but his face expressed doubt. “I know he’s alive.”

“How do you know that?”

Barbara tugged the hem of her skirt over her knees. “I just do,” she said, and they were silent for several seconds.

Louie had a serious look on his face when he came out of the rest room and squeezed back into his seat by the window. The
NO SMOKING
light came on, and Barbara put out the cigarette she’d just lit. Burk turned his head. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“For what?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” she said. A tear dropped out of her left eye and rolled down the side of her face. “Would you like to see his picture?”

“Sure.”

Barbara took a photo out of her wallet and passed it to Burk. “I took that at the Carmel Valley Inn,” she said. “That’s where we stayed on the night we were married.”

The young man in the picture was tall, with wide shoulders and very straight blond hair that was parted in the center of his forehead. He was standing by the entrance to the hotel.

Burk said, “He’s a good-looking guy.”

“Yes, he is,” Barbara said, smiling proudly. “Do you have a picture of your wife?” Burk nodded his head tentatively. “Can I see it?”

Burk found a small snapshot of Sandra tucked behind his driver’s license and his triple-A card. It was taken by his brother during Sandra’s first summer in Los Angeles, when she was already pregnant with Louie. She was sitting on Gene’s redwood deck, wearing white shorts and a blue T-shirt with
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN
lettered across the front. Behind her in the gathering twilight were the outlines of housetops and a sky that was singed with red.

Barbara looked at the picture silently for several seconds. Burk felt he detected something cold—even hostile—in her appraisal. “She’s much prettier than I am,” she said, and an uncomfortable silence dropped between them.

The landing gear came down, giving the aircraft a slight jolt.

Louie pointed out the window. “Look, Dad, we’re comin’ in over the water.”

“I can see.”

“We’re almost home.”

“I don’t want you to call,” Barbara said to Burk. Her face at that moment looked tired and a little bit frightened.

“Are you sure?”

Barbara nodded her head. But when the wheels of the plane touched the earth, she said, “No.”

Seventeen

What Bonnie Told Bobby and Putting Max to Rest

On December 3, 1969, three days before her death, Bonnie’s Greyhound bus stopped for repairs in Council Bluffs, Iowa. When she found out there would be a one-day layover—the brake linings needed to be replaced, along with an engine mount—she quickly left the station and took a taxi across the Missouri River into Omaha.

“Marlon Brando was born in Omaha,” Bonnie told the driver while they were stopped at the intersection of Ames and Leavenworth. “Did you know that?”

The cabdriver nodded his head. “Yes, I do. And so was Dorothy McGuire.”

“Henry Fonda was born in Grand Island but he grew up near Thirty-second and Davenport. You can see the top of his house from the seventh floor of the Hotel Sherwood. Now, of course, he lives in Los Angeles. I plan to go by and see his house when I get there.”

“Sounds like you’re a fan of Mr. Fonda.”

“Yes,” Bonnie said, “I am.”

Up the street, across from radio station KKOW and the redbrick YMCA, was the marquee of the Orpheum Theatre. When the light changed to green, a young man with a round pink face walked out of Chloe’s Diner and started pacing back and forth in front of the box office.

Bonnie sat up in shocked surprise. Although she had not seen Bobby since 1954—on that mild spring afternoon when he stepped out of the Hotel Sherwood wearing khaki shorts and a loose-fitting white polo shirt—she knew without a doubt that this young man, blond and ruddy and radiating fitness, was her son.

And she knew she would find him later, when all the streetlights were on and the sky was thick and dark.

“I was sitting in the balcony,” Bobby told Ricky on the morning of Max Rheingold’s funeral. They were standing next to a transplanted palm tree on the corner of Western Avenue and Sunset Boulevard, eating sugar doughnuts out of a paper sack while they waited for a city bus. “She sat down in the seat right next to me in the front row.”

“Right next to you? That’s pretty weird.”

“I know. Since the theater was almost empty.”

“What did you do?”

There was a thoughtful pause as Bobby summoned his mother’s haunted face out of the crowd of people floating inside his head. “Nothing,” he said.

He turned and looked at Ricky, who still questioned him with his eyes.

“When the movie was over I heard her say my name so softly that I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined the sound. The lights came up and she said, ‘You don’t know me, Bobby, but I’m your mother.’ I remember almost losing my breath and wanting to scream out loud. I said I didn’t believe her, but she said my name again, and when and I met her eyes, I felt all the broken chunks inside me come together for the very first time.”

It was already dark when Bonnie and Bobby left the theater and began walking south on Jackson Street. At Dodge they cut a path
through the parking lot behind the main library and came out on Hayes, a small dark street that led down to the Missouri River. And it was there, sitting on a bench by the riverside with the lights of the city behind them, that Bonnie told her son about her life.

She told him first about her mother, Grace Elliot Simpson, about the day she took the train to Los Angeles, leaving Bonnie to live with her grandparents in a broken-down house by the railroad tracks. It was wartime and Bonnie’s father was a soldier fighting overseas against the Japanese.

In the spring of that year a man in uniform came to the house with a letter from her father’s commanding officer. Bonnie remembered the soldier’s long legs, his droopy face, his nervous voice; the presence of her grandmother behind her, the odor of stew in the kitchen cooking in an iron skillet; her grandfather, who was almost deaf, saying, “What, what, what?” and her grandmother answering, shouting, “He’s dead! Tommy’s dead!”

Grace Elliot Simpson came back for her husband’s funeral but left again the following day. Bonnie remembered sitting in the rocker on the side porch watching her go, the dark clouds overhead, her toes and fingers numbed from the cold. When the taxi pulled away, her grandmother came through the screen door and knelt beside her. She smelled of nicotine and medicated ointment. She whispered to Bonnie, “Come on back inside and help me cook.”

Bonnie went out to Hollywood on the Union Pacific, the same train that took her mother. It was the summer of 1949 and she was thirteen and pretty, with light-colored eyes and perky breasts.

She remembered the orange trees, the fast clouds and salty air near the ocean, the red and gold twilights and the dark clear nights that followed. She remembered riding in convertibles and limousines, and parties where lovely women whispered and giggled in small groups, their gold rings sparkling on their long slender fingers.

She mentioned to Bobby a girl named Maria Schlumberger, riding horses with her in borrowed clothing. She remembered getting caught in a thunderstorm, then bathing later at Max Rheingold’s house. She said the scariest thing was not the rape itself, which happened a few days later in his office at the studio, but the way Rheingold’s rough fingertips felt on her skin, and the way his eyes were blood-streaked and shiny, like some wolf or frantic night beast.
She remembered kicking and screaming, feeling like she was in a car skidding sideways, out of control, with a passenger on top of her, crawling across her body, her heart exploding with fear; then, standing up, dripping blood on the Oriental rug, seeing his fat belly and chest hair sticky with semen and sweat, a hideous smile separating his bloodless lips. She told Bobby she felt like a flower that was ready to bloom and was suddenly trampled to death.

Bonnie said the memory of her mother’s death in the fire was too painful to speak about. She attended the funeral but remembered only that the casket was closed. On the train back to Omaha she was given a private berth, which she later learned was paid for by Max Rheingold. She ate Belgian waffles every morning and played a loose game of casino with a Cajun lady and a man named Bill Oliphant. Oliphant worked for an outfit that sold land in Florida and Texas. He claimed he went to high school with Alan Ladd.

Daniel Schimmel and his wife, Madge, met Bonnie at the train station. To help out at the hotel, she worked as part of the housekeeping staff, changing the flowers in the dining room and waxing the woodwork in the lobby. She had keys to the empty rooms on the upper floors and sometimes made long-distance phone calls to her grandmother in Michigan, telling her not to worry but not letting her know where she was.

Once she called Maria Schlumberger in Los Angeles. They talked for over an hour. Bonnie spent the whole time lying about her record collection, her boyfriends, her clothes and jewelry, and whatever else she could think of.

Bonnie spoke briefly about leaving Omaha after Bobby was born, never mentioning the tough times but only how free she felt bumming around the country for those three years, riding the freights and road-gossiping with men with names like Louisiana Slim and One-Armed Kelly. Then she skipped ahead to 1963, when she was living in Chicago with a man named Gil Frost.

Gil was a small man, smaller than her, but she considered him handsome despite the fact that his neck was too fat and his curly black hair was thinning fast. He’d recently graduated from Northwestern University and worked as a copywriter for Leo Burnette, the advertising agency for Procter and Gamble.

He took her to twenty Chicago Cub games that summer. Because they were the same size, she wore his Levi’s and his cotton knit pullovers
with the alligator scooting across the front. He told her he loved the way she kissed. Nobody had ever told her that before.

When Kennedy was shot he cried for four straight days. After that he started losing interest in his job. He said working on an ad campaign for Kraft cheese made him feel corrupt. He said he wanted to write a novel or direct a film. After lunches with clients he liked to sneak away to play chess in coffeehouses near the University of Chicago. Nuclear war frightened him. He could talk about racial discrimination for hours. Eventually he got fired.

He began to sleep during the day. At night he smoked marijuana and listened to records by Leadbelly and Muddy Waters and other black blues singers. Women who were paranoid and obese started to drop by at odd hours. They wore dark shapeless clothes, and read aloud from Jack Kerouac’s
On The Road.

Bonnie began sleeping on the couch. On the day she left, Gil was nearly bald.

He gave her five hundred dollars.

She took the Greyhound to Detroit. She lived in a motel near the airport. At the Pontiac Lounge, a bar located directly across the highway, she became friendly with a group of rowdy engineers who worked for General Motors. She started going with a guy named Herb Freeman. Everyone called him “Herb the Heeb.” She said he looked a little like Tony Curtis. His father, Leon, was a bookie.

In Las Vegas, where they were married, Leon arranged for Bonnie and Herb to stay free at the Sands Hotel, and they received complimentary front row seats for Dean Martin’s show in the Copa Room.

Several months later, back in Detroit, Bonnie saw Herb kissing a well-dressed woman on Michigan Avenue. “Giving her his lips,” was the way she described the scene to Bobby. She was inside a department store, looking out. She became dizzy and stumbled, nearly knocking over the cosmetics on the counter in front of her.

The next day she moved into a rooming house and found a job at a soft drink bottling plant in a run-down section of the city. At work one day a janitor came into the washroom while she was sitting on the toilet. He looked over the top of the stall and laughed at her; then he turned off the lights on his way out. She left the building immediately, without picking up her paycheck.

That same afternoon she gave blood and volunteered to work for Tom Carter, a light-skinned liberal black who was running for
mayor. His father was a distinguished judge and his daughter, Kimba, sang in a Baptist church choir led by the Reverend James Franklin, Aretha’s father.

Bonnie and Tom Carter had a brief affair. He was a trained hypnotist, and several times they made love while she was in a trance. She remembered absolutely nothing of these experiences, except that she was dissatisfied afterward. When they broke up, Carter told Bonnie she could never love another man because he’d hypnotized her soul.

She quit the campaign, spending her afternoons going to movies that only starred black actors. One Saturday she met her second husband, Freddie Bousquet, while she was watching Jim Brown in
The Split
. She picked him up. It was her choice, she said.

He lived in a redbrick ranch-style house in a new development on the west side. On the walls were illustrations of animals that were extinct or ecologically endangered. He said he had a brother who fought in the Bay of Pigs. He brushed his teeth for an unusually long time each morning and night. When he smiled, his eyes looked desperate, reflecting the light like chips of blue glass.

Behind the house was a thickly wooded area where Bonnie said she went for long walks in the afternoon. She fed the birds and squirrels and picked marsh marigolds and wild roses beside a murky creek. One day a man wearing cracked black boots passed her on a path and squeezed her arm. His eyes were hidden by a strip of white gauze.

After that she couldn’t sleep through the night. She cried uncontrollably for hours at a stretch. Thoughts bounced around inside her brain, then suddenly disappeared as if they were sucked out her ears. She knew she was going mad and finally called the psychiatric unit at Wayne State Hospital. The woman who answered made an appointment for the following day.