The Angry Woman Suite (34 page)

“Dazed,” Jamie’s signature song, enveloped me.

And this, Francis, was what else I decided, then and there—facts: I could keep your mother at arm’s length forever, a goal that
had
to be easier than loving her had ever been. And I would mourn Matthew the rest of my days. But I would never give up on Jamie. I told myself that this last break with him
had
to be repairable. I couldn’t stand thinking otherwise. I had to keep thinking Jamie would resurface soon, and call me. He was a star after all, and real stars were theater, they were
presentation.
Make them wait, leave them begging for more, that kind of thing. Stars didn’t just fade away. Burn out, yes, and brightly, even garishly sometimes, but they did not fade away: Jamie
would
return.

Matthew told me once that every creature is complex and contradictory. Maybe not using those precise words, but it’s what I took to be his point. Magdalene once said something almost identical. She’d said that not one of us is any one thing through and through. We’re good one minute, bad the next, and anyone who tells you that’s not the way we are is either stupid or delusional. All of which is just my way of saying I’d no way of knowing that the resentment I’d harbored for Matthew would’ve led to his passing—I’d have changed
everything
if I’d known. And neither did I know about Jamie’s illness, or how all our lives and all the facts I’d ever known about anything would continue to change because of Huntington’s chorea and James Witherspoon Waterston, and
his
son.

That son is you, Francis. Your complexity—your very existence—has redrawn many, many maps.

I passed out in that alley, but not before making the decision to pull my life together again. And later that night, while removing the “Not Interested” sign from the front of Washington’s Headquarters, with “Dazed” still whirling around inside my throbbing head, I illustrated my own contradictory nature. Despite my grief and horrible guilt, not to mention sublime hangover, my spirits had lifted somewhat.

The game was still on and it was bigger than ever. Because, fact: I was the Graysons’ next obvious target.

Fact: I was the man who knew too much. I was the bee in Lear Grayson’s bonnet. I was the only one who knew what he and Sahar had been up to—and that
he’d
then turned the tables on Sahar.

Bigger
fact: I meant to triumph over Lear. It was now clear one of us had to go and I’d no intention of it being me.

Fact: Some things in life are
not
repairable. Sometimes something else has to be repaired or eliminated instead, in order to make life
even,
in order to make things right.

So, Lear Grayson had to be eliminated—but Matthew Waterston’s Angry Women,
they
would be my redemption—for you, Francis.

I would be the keeper of Matthew Waterston’s suite’s legacy.
That
would be my life’s real work. Fact.

ELYSE
San Diego 1958–1965

“Elyse
Liebling.
” Those were the first words I heard when we pulled into the driveway of our house in Sacramento, home from Mississippi and then Pennsylvania, and the last words I heard when we pulled out again, this time for San Diego.

“Sweet girl, all right,” Daddy said, getting out of the car and stretching his neck and shoulders. “Been yakking my ear off five days straight.” Daddy pumped Papa’s hand, then went straight to work untying suitcases from the top of the car. Papa didn’t hurry to help. He picked me and Bean up, one in each strong arm, and then leaned forward to peck Aunt Rose and Mother’s cheeks. I ran my hands through Papa’s blond-gray hair, making him laugh and holler for me to quit.

“I could use some help here,” Daddy said tersely. I froze, ashamed of the way Daddy could talk.

“In due time, Francis,” Papa said evenly. “You’re tired. Come in the house first.”

Daddy chewed his lower lip, and I could tell he was hurt at having been put in his place in front of everyone. Daddy was always on the lookout for getting hurt, and despite Papa’s iron-hard arms, my stomach churned and I couldn’t help wondering if even my omnipotent grandfather had stamina enough to go up against someone as dense and complicated as Daddy.

In due time the car got unloaded and Mother went back to her old job at the Mather exchange and Daddy went out looking for work. Despite Grandmother Magdalene’s invitation for us to stay on at Grayson House, Daddy had eventually said no. I loved Daddy for that, because I’d have died if I’d had to stay away from Papa another minute longer.

“But I got real scared,” I confided when Bean and I got Papa all to ourselves. “I thought I’d have to
live
at Grayson House forever. Grandmother Magdalene is very—” I couldn’t think of the right word.

“Persuasive?” Papa suggested.

“Maybe that’s it. Grayson House is the biggest house ever, but Bean and I stayed outside a lot, if it was nice, in Stella’s garden—”

“And Stella is?”

“Our new aunt. She has a harelip, she can’t talk right.”

Papa then asked Bean her opinion of Stella, but Bean stared at Papa, silent.

“But, Papa,” I protested. “Bean doesn’t—” Papa put a finger to my lips. After several minutes of silence, wherein Papa looked at Bean, waiting, and Bean looked back at him saying nothing, Papa told me he would put Bean down for a nap, but I was to stay put. Papa took me back on his lap when he returned. “Bean talks to you, though?”

“Bean usually talks
only
to me—but she did talk to Stella.”

“And Bean sounds right as rain when she
does
talk?”

“Right as rain.”

“Bean doesn’t even talk to your mother?” Papa pressed.

“I do the talking for Bean,” I explained again. “Bean’s very shy. That’s what Mother says about Bean not talking. Bean is just plain shy.”

“That so?” Papa murmured—but I raced ahead, telling Papa stories about Daddy’s one-armed brother, Earl, who’d stayed drunk the whole time we’d been at Grayson House, and Aidan Madsen and his wonderful museum loaded with old guns and swords and clothes, and letters and coins stored under glass. I purposely left out the murdering women—a subject that had yet to play well with my primary audience: Bean. But I did tell Papa how nice Aidan had been to me and Bean and Aunt Rose.

“Especially to Aunt Rose?” Papa asked, which I understood because men always liked Aunt Rose best.

Except Aidan. He liked Grandmother Magdalene best.

“She doesn’t holler like we do,” I prattled. “Grandmother Magdalene hollers with her eyes. One time I heard her tell Aidan that Aunt Rose is common, and Aidan told her it took someone common to recognize common in someone else. Grandmother Magdalene hollered
and
laughed with her eyes at Aidan all through dinner that night.”

“That so,” Papa said again, but this time it wasn’t a question. This time Papa wasn’t even paying attention to me—but I now understand that my grandfather, who saw all things before most people were even off the train, had gotten distracted pondering what it was that had traumatized Bean into near total silence.

And yet I never once seriously considered telling Papa about Daddy punching me, and Bean watching him do it, scared to death he’d hit her, too. Not once. Not ever. Too scared myself. Too scared Papa might think I got hit because of some terrible flaw in me that he’d somehow miraculously missed.

Daddy came home for lunch, bushed. Papa took Bean with him outside, so Daddy sat at the kitchen table chewing his lower lip, looking at me with sad eyes. He hadn’t found a good-paying job yet, and I could see
Daddy watching himself adrift in an ocean of pointy rocks, looking for just the right one to grab onto that wouldn’t puncture him full of more holes. Hopelessness was something I gravitated to, so I impulsively crawled into Daddy’s lap; unexpected kindred spirits.

“You’re too big for laps, Elyse,” Daddy said wearily. His sadness pierced my heart, inspiring pictures of Daddy making music with Mother in happier days. I told Daddy it would be nice if we could have a little music again, saying music was pretty much a God thing in my opinion. Daddy looked at me.

“You know.
When you make something nice, it’s like you’re being God, and that makes everything so much better when you get to be God.” Daddy said nothing. “Like when Bean draws pictures,” I tried again. “That’s a God thing, and when Papa pastes paper roses on stuff, making everything so pretty, he’s being God, too—” Daddy dumped me from his lap.

“Get a sweater,” he ordered.

“But I’m not cold,” I protested. Daddy said it might be cold where we were going.

I’d never been inside a church before and when I asked Daddy if he’d been, he said he wouldn’t have had to drive around looking for one if he’d known exactly where to go, now would he have?

Daddy steered me to a pew and told me to sit quietly. I looked at my shoes because I didn’t want to look at the man hanging on the wall, blood dripping from his hands and feet. But the bleeding man didn’t seem to bother Daddy, and after a while Daddy even took me over to a bank of candles beneath the man, handing me a penny and showing me how to light a candle.

“Say a prayer,” Daddy instructed. “But keep it to yourself.”

I prayed to escape that church as soon as humanly possible, intact; and then Daddy put a penny in the slot to pay for a candle of his own. But the funny thing was, as soon as that coin clinked into the receptacle, the worry lines on Daddy’s forehead smoothed clean away, similar to what always happened when Papa smoothed wet wallpaper with his bare hands, flattening the air bubbles beneath and making yellow roses bloom.

And that was Daddy’s first miracle.

Daddy got his trumpet out when we got home. “We’re going to play,” he told Mother. “We’re going to play for Elyse.”

“But I’m barely in the door from work,” Mother objected. The look she shot my way was a million miles short of loving.

“For Elyse,” Daddy said firmly. I moved in closer to Papa and Bean on the couch, savoring my new-found power for making Daddy happy. The first note from Daddy’s horn made me tremble. Daddy was so handsome, and so kind to want to light candles with me.

“Ah,‘Moonlight Serenade,’” Papa said.

“Our song,” Mother said, looking up from the piano at Daddy, mood improved. Those were the words that coincided with the telephone ringing and Daddy’s exclamation that it was Uncle Buster calling from San Diego, and that Uncle Buster had found jobs for both of them if Daddy was interested, in San Diego.

“Elyse
Liebling,”
Papa murmured, watching me watch Mother and Daddy forget me.

***

“Elyse
Liebling,”
Papa repeated two weeks later as Daddy, ignoring my pleas to let me stay in Sacramento with Papa, packed the car up again.

“No, Elyse,” Daddy said firmly. “Family stays together.”

“But Papa’s family!”

“No,” Daddy said, eyes on his packing. “It’s not the same.”

I clung to Papa. He said San Diego was not far, just six hundred miles, and that he would visit at Christmas, and I could come see him and Grandma and Aunt Rose every summer.

“Praise God,” Daddy agreed.

Scant comfort—and suddenly I hated Daddy again. Six hundred miles was the other side of the universe, like Biloxi, and Daddy had been horrible in Biloxi. Daddy would be horrible in San Diego, too. He’d be horrible anywhere Papa wasn’t. Or Aidan wasn’t. Daddy would be unmanageable.

Papa whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t hear it because in a split-second of momentous lucidity I was able to look right through Papa’s skin onto the fear sparking at his core, and it took my breath away.
Papa was afraid for me.

I felt sick. “Papa?”

His lips brushed my cheek. “Play from the center,” he coached, offering me this sole tip for surviving Daddy.
“Liebling.”

I didn’t play anything. Daddy was completely in charge of my new world, so there was no time for strategy. I nurtured resentment instead. I nurtured my truth that Daddy shouldn’t have yanked me from my old world again, and that Mother shouldn’t have let him.
He had no right
. I belonged to Papa and Grandma, and
then
Mother, and then Aunt Rose, not Daddy.

Never Daddy.

The first thing we did in San Diego was buy a house. The second thing was we went to church to thank God for dropping a job in Daddy’s lap. With the exception of Daddy’s job at a big aeronautical company called Convair, everything else—the newly built Catholic church and the market at the top of a hill, and my school, all six rooms of it, at the bottom of the same hill—was within walking distance of our house in a new development of 6,000 cookie-cutter homes called Pacific Gardens, miles from downtown San Diego. Miles from anywhere.

Unlike Sacramento, there were no magnificent trees in Pacific Gardens. No shrubbery, no flowers, no anything of interest or beauty; just block after block of small houses set at precise angles on a dung-colored crust; we didn’t even have grass. Yet, despite the lack of amenities—a movie theater, restaurant, even a library—Pacific Garden’s claim to fame was “Town
and
Country, One Location,”
town
being an exuberant ad man’s hyperbole, and
country
being dairy farm and tumbleweed that stretched for miles, straddling a thin river that ran perpendicular to Ajax Road, one of the two thoroughfares connecting Pacific Gardens to the outside world. Ajax branched off Highway 80, the two-laner that dissected Mission Valley, the river, and farms that stretched five miles west of the sea, east to the mountains. Our new house, a three-bedroom, one-bath, with a mortgage payment of seventy-three dollars per month, was on Morningstar Street, off Ajax, thirteen miles northeast of downtown San Diego, fourteen blocks down from the church and the market, and a mere block up from the edge of a dairy farm. Mother’s crystal and china, the remains of her marriage to Stephen Eric, were shipped from Sacramento, as were the range and clothes washer bought with the money my grandparents paid Mother for our old Sacramento house.

We were the outskirts of town, Daddy said with pride.
Suburbia.
The Promised Land.