Very Old Bones (18 page)

I was home from Germany five and a half months in March of 1953 when I visited with my mother for the first time in four years. We talked on the phone from time to time but she
consistently put off any meeting. She was no longer Claire Purcell. She now called herself Belinda Love (not legally) and said at last she’d meet me, under the clock in the Biltmore Hotel,
because she saw that happen once in a movie.

I arranged my one outing of the week for that day, a visit to the publishing house for which I was editing and tidying up the erotic memoirs of Meriwether Macbeth, an extroverted and
pseudonymous bohemian writer and sometime actor who was having a renascent vogue as a result of having been murdered. This was an assignment that seemed doable to me, first because it was the story
of a real life lived in Greenwich Village, my environment of the moment; and further because Peter had known Macbeth personally in the 1920s and loathed his acting, his writing, his ideas, his
presence, and his odor.

I brought in the heavily edited and rewritten segments of Macbeth’s manuscript to my editorial boss, then walked the several blocks to the Biltmore, where I settled onto a bench from which
I could monitor all who organized their futures under the clock.

I spotted my mother as soon as she appeared in the lobby, and saw that she looked remarkably like herself of five years gone. She was fifty-eight, looked forty-five, and exuded (with long,
scarlet fingernails, spike heels, pillbox hat, wasp waist that was visible beneath her open, form-fitting coat) the aura of World War Two, the era when her independence had reached its apogee, the
time of her final separation from Peter, and of her entrance into a solo career as singer and mistress of ceremonies, first in local Albany nightclubs, then with traveling USO shows, and, after the
war, in a 52nd Street jazz club where she sang with the resident Dixieland group, her looks and her legs equally as important as her voice, and, ultimately, more interesting. As she walked across
the lobby she drew the stares of the bell captain and his minions, then turned the heads of two men waiting to check in. Nearing retirement age and still a dazzler. Mother.

“Hello, darling boy,” she said when we embraced beneath the clock, “are you still my darling?”

“Of course, Mother.”

“Are you well?”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Your letters were dreadful. You sounded positively wretched. So discontented, so—what can I say?—scattered.”

“Scattered is a good word. I’m nothing if not that.”

“Whatever happened to you?”

“I went out of my mind.”

“Just like your father.”

She signaled to the maître d’ of the Palm Court and we were seated under a chandelier, amid the potted plants, the tourists, and the cocktail-hour habitués. She ordered a
Manhattan on the rocks, I an orange juice, my alcohol intake at zero level as a way of not compounding my confusion.

“When was Peter out of his mind?” Orson asked.

“Ever since I’ve known him. And I was out of my mind when I took up with the man. I thought he’d have committed suicide by this time. Miraculous he hasn’t.”

“Why would he commit suicide?”

“I certainly would have if I were him. The man is daft. Bats in his hat.”

“He’s painting well.”

“Yes. He does that. Does he have any money?”

“Not really.”

“Of course not. How are you living?”

“Frugally. I’m editing a book for a publisher, and my wife is working.”

“Oh yes, and how is she? The dear thing, she couldn’t bring herself to join us?”

“She’s in Germany.”

“There now, a wife who gets around. Something I always wanted to do.”

“I remember you got around in vaudeville.”

“The east coast. I never went to Europe until the war.”

“What are you doing now, Mother? Are you singing?”

“Good Lord, no. I’m running a talent agency.”

“For singers?”

“Singers, jugglers, magicians, dancers.”

“Strippers?”

“One stripper.”

“Tell me her name?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“So if I see her I’ll think of you.”

“I don’t think I like that reason.”

“She’s your client.”

“I was never a stripper.”

“You came close with some of your costumes.”

“If you’re going to attack me I’ll leave.”

“I don’t want you to leave. It’s taken five months to get you here.”

“I’ve been traveling.”

“It’s all right. We mustn’t dwell on maternal neglect. Tell me something important. How sure are you that my father is really my father?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“Manfredo had nothing to do with me?”

“Nothing.”

“He had something to do with you.”

“In a moment of weakness. You shouldn’t have seen that.”

“Where is he now? Do you still see him?”

“Not for fifteen years or more. He has palsy and can’t do his stage act anymore. He does card tricks at veterans’ hospitals.”

“Peter thinks Manfredo was the one. Nothing convinces him otherwise.”

“It’s his way, to be difficult.”

“He really is consistent about it.”

“I gave up trying to persuade him when you were a baby. Doesn’t he see how much you look like him? It’s quite uncanny, the resemblance.”

“His sister Molly tells him the same thing, but he refuses to believe.”

“It’s rotten that he still does this to you. And you’ve grown so handsome since I saw you last. Has he told you about all his women, how he even brought them home? He thought
every man I knew was my lover, so that’s the way
he
behaved. A severe case of over-compensation if there ever was one. Is he still the king of tarts?”

“He sees several women. I don’t think they’re tarts.”

“Take a closer look.”

“It’s difficult getting close to him. I never even know what to call him. I’ve spent my whole life not calling him Dad. I don’t think he’d answer if I ever did call
him that, or Pa, or Papa. I never call him anything.”

“It’s so depressing. The Phelans are crazed people. They always have been.”

“No more so than the rest of the world.”

“Oh yes. There’s a history of madmen in their past.”

“You’re making that up.”

“Get your father to tell you about his Uncle Malachi.”

“I’ve heard him mentioned, but not with any specifics. They don’t like to dredge him up.”

“Of course not. He was certifiable.”

“What did he do?”

“I’m not sure. But I know it wasn’t good for anybody’s health. Ask your father.”

She finished her Manhattan and touched a napkin to her lips, and I saw in her face beauty in decline, the artful makeup not quite camouflaging the furrows in her cheeks that I couldn’t
remember seeing five years ago. She pushed her glass away and reached for her purse.

“I must dash, darling. I have a dinner party.”

“You’re such a butterfly, Mother. I didn’t even get to ask what I wanted to ask you.”

“Ask away.”

“It’s awkward.”

“You can ask me anything.”

“All right, anything. Can I move in with you? Temporarily. Peter works all hours of the day and night and I can’t sleep. It’s rather a small apartment.”

“Yes it is.”

“It truly is cramped.”

“I’m sure.”

“What do you think?”

“Oh darling, I don’t think so. I have any number of people coming through all the time. Friends, clients. You’d hate it.”

“Probably so.”

“You’re far better off with your father.”

“Perhaps that’s true.”

“Do you have money?”

“I can cover the drinks.”

She placed on the table, in front of me, a folded one-hundred-dollar bill she had been holding in her hand.

“Buy yourself a shirt. Something stylish.”

She stood up, leaned over, and kissed me on the cheek.

“And do get some rest,” she said. “You look worn out. Call me some night and we’ll have dinner.”

It was at this point, while pacing the room and considering how to value my chaos on paper, that I went downstairs to the mailbox and found Giselle’s letter. It was brief:
“Dearest Orson, I’m arriving at Idlewild Tuesday at 3 p.m. on Air France. Please meet me with love.
Life
magazine wants me to work for them. Thrilling?”

The letter was six days in arriving, and so I had only one day to make the apartment livable. My stomach was suddenly full of acid, my head ached, I was weary to the point of collapse, and
relentlessly sleepy.

I began moving things, carrying a three-foot standing file of Peter’s finished and unfinished canvases out of my bedroom and into his studio, which may once have been a living room. Tubes
of paint, boxes of tubes, jars of old brushes, boxes of jars, table sculptures, easels, palettes, rolls of canvas, and half-made frames had also spilled into my room from the studio. Whatever the
artist used or created eventually found its way into every corner and closet, onto every table and shelf in the four-room apartment. He threw away nothing.

I swept the floor, washed dirty dishes, hid dirty laundry, stacked my scatter of books and manuscripts, made up the sofa bed on which I slept and which I would give to Giselle for sleeping. I
would sleep on the floor, use the throw rug and two blankets as a mattress, it’ll be fine; and Giselle and I would reconsummate our marriage on the sofa bed, wide enough for one-on-one, wide
enough for love. We’d often done it in more cramped accommodations.

“What the hell happened here?” Peter asked when he entered the apartment, finding his studio devoid of disorder and dustballs, his own bed in the corner of the studio made with fresh
pillowcase, clean sheet turned down with precision, blanket tucked army style.

“My wife is coming home,” I said.

“Home? You call this home?”

“What else would I call it?”

“Anything but home.”

“It’s not your home?”

“Colonie Street is my home. This is my studio.”

“Your studio is my home. I have no other.”

“But it’s not your wife’s home.”

“Home is where I hang my hat and my wife,” I said.

“That remains to be seen,” Peter said. “You know she can’t live here.”

“Why not? There’s plenty of room.”

“There isn’t even any room for mice.”

“Are you saying she can’t come here?”

“No, I’m telling you it won’t work. She wouldn’t stay here with me hanging around the place all day long. Don’t you know anything about women?”

“I like to think I’m an expert on the subject.”

“I once thought I knew all about the art world, but I didn’t know my ass from third base, as your Uncle Francis used to tell me as often as possible.”

“My Uncle Francis?”

“You know who I mean.”

“Is he really my uncle?”

“He said I was born innocent and would grow old that way. I believed him for years, but I’ve outgrown his prophecy. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether I’ve passed my old
condition on to you.”

I looked at Peter and saw myself as I might be in thirty-seven years, when I too would be sixty-six. It could be worse. I knew men of fifty-five who seemed decrepit, ready to roll obligingly
down that beckoning slope. Peter was still a vigorous figure, grizzled of mien, with his voluminous gray mustache all but minimalizing the crop of gray hair that sat in wavy rumples behind his
half-naked forehead; robust of torso, a man who professed no interest in clothing, but who in public wore the uniform of creaseless trousers, formless coats, always with leather elbows (where did
he find them?), each coat a perfect fit; an open-collared shirt to which he added a neck scarf for dress occasions; the jaunty fedora which, no matter how many times it wore out from fingering and
grease, was always replaceable by a twin from the new age; and two pairs of shoes, one for work, one for walking through the world, the latter less speckled with the artist’s paint. In short,
the man presented himself as a visual work of art: casual self-portrait achieved without paint or brush.