Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (26 page)

Walker defended her as best he could, assuring me that I
would change my mind once I got to know her. “She has her troubles too,” he said. “Don’t
forget that.” But I was thoroughly unimpressed.

Winter had set in and with it the rains. Ivy showed up unannounced one
afternoon and remained a few days. She made no effort to help with the children, or even with
the cooking and cleaning. Knowing that I disliked her, she kept out of bounds. Occasionally
she would pop in toward dark to sit by the little stove and poke the fire. For some reason she
had fallen in love with this stove, so much so that she kept it clean and polished.

How the two of them managed in the studio above was beyond me. It was
altogether without conveniences of any kind; there wasn’t even a sink in it. The woodstove,
which I had found somewhere, smoked continually. The floor was of cement and over it, to keep
his feet dry, Walker had strewn some filthy, discarded rugs, potato sacks and torn sheets. The
sliding door, which used to be the entrance (when it was a garage), gaped at both ends, thus
providing an unwelcome circulation of air. Overhead, between the plaster-boards and the
roofing, the squirrels and the rats made merry night and day. What was particularly
exacerbating was the sound of nuts rolling back and forth up there. Not only did the roof leak
but the windows too. When it rained a pool of water collected on the floor in no time. Hardly
a “love nest,” I must say.

Ivy had hardly returned to town when the rains came down in earnest. Never
have I seen it rain as it did that winter. For days on end it deluged us, like a punishment
from above. During this period it was impossible for Val to go to school; the school was about
ten miles away and the road from our house to the highway was virtually unnavigable. This
meant that I had to keep the two of them indoors—and keep them happy.

We worked at it in relays, Walker and I. When it came nap time I lay down with
them. I hoped by doing so to replenish my
powers for the second half of
the day. What a delusion! All we did at nap time was to toss to and fro. When I thought “we”
had enough, I would tell them to scram—and that they would do, like kittens scrambling out of
a sack. Usually I was more exhausted after the nap than I had been before. The hours that lay
ahead moved like lead.

The room in which all the shenanigans went on was of ordinary size and
fortunately not too cluttered with furniture. The main obstructions were the bed, the table
and the little stove. I say “obstructions” because to make their joy unconfined I had given
them permission to use their bikes indoors. The bikes were brought into play whenever they
grew tired of games. To clear the deck (from front door to back door) for the races the floor
had first to be cleared of all obstacles. Everything was thrown on the bed and the table. The
table was piled with chairs, toys, tools and implements, and the bed with games, bugles,
swords, rubber dolls, balls, klaxons, building blocks, rifles and toy soldiers. The rugs I
rolled up and shoved against the big French windows where the rain water always collected. In
the middle of the room, where the bed and the stove faced each other, there was always danger
of traffic congestion. From whichever end of the room they began the racing they always
collided between the stove and the bed. Naturally they engaged in the usual abusive arguments
which traffic snarls provoke.

They could keep it up for an hour or more at a time, the bike races. I had no
place to sit or lie, so I stood first in one spot, then another, like a referee at a boxing
match. Now children who are having fun hate to see a grownup idling his time away. It didn’t
take them long to suggest that, since I had chosen to stand and watch, I might as well be a
traffic cop. I was provided with a club, a rifle and a diminutive bobby’s hat which someone
had made Tony a gift of. Oh yes, and a whistle! My job was to wait till they rode a few paces,
blow the whistle, put my hand up—vertically or horizontally—and then blow again. Sometimes the
change of
pace was so abrupt that one of us would accidentally get conked
with a club or a rifle butt. As to whether they were genuine accidents was always a matter of
hot dispute.

From the bike performance we generally moved into the clown and tumbling act.
At this point Walker would be summoned. Walker was a good head taller than I, and when he put
them on his shoulders and started trotting and bucking they were in seventh heaven. When
Walker had had enough of it, I would get down on the floor and engage them in the snake act.
This meant squirming and struggling, with one on top and the other below, until someone got
flattened. It had no other purpose than to use up energy quickly. To get a breather, I would
suggest we roll dice or shoot marbles. We played dice for pennies, for chips, for buttons and
for matches. They were on the way to becoming real good crap-shooters, I must say. When that
gig was up, Walker or I would play the clown.

The act they loved the most was an imitation of Red Skelton advertising some
famous brand of beer and getting drunk in the process. Red Skelton had been to the house some
months before and he had put on this skit as the crowning touch to a long and most hilarious
afternoon. The kids had not forgotten it. Never would. Nor I either…. To do it properly, one
has to have a suit of old clothes and a battered slouch hat, preferably a size too big. The
reason is simple. Aside from the beer which one has to guzzle, and which must trickle freely
over one’s chin, throat and chest, there comes a fall at the end which, taken on a floor
slippery with beer and pieces of bread and cheese, plays havoc with one’s clothes. (Oddly
enough, what my kids remember most vividly about that afternoon when Skelton came is the fact
that he himself, he, the great Red Skelton, had insisted on mopping up the mess he made!)
Anyway, as all television fans know, it’s a sloppy, goofy, hiccoughing, sidesplitting
performance. Anything goes, so long as you keep on guzzling, spilling the beer, sticking bread
into your eyes and ears, and rocking back and forth on your heels. Sometimes I actually felt
drunk after giving one of these imitations. The kids would
get even
drunker. Just watching, I mean. At the end we would all be flopping around like double-jointed
crowbars. If I happened now and then to slide under the bed, I would lie there as long as
possible, to recuperate.

Then dinner. Time for a general cleanup. Had a visitor walked in at this hour
he would have thought himself in a lunatic asylum. For one thing, we had to work fast.
Because, when Walker starts cooking, he cooks like lightning. Every evening he would cook a
full course meal, beginning with soup and salad and including meat, potatoes, gravy,
vegetables, biscuits and pie or custard pudding.

Of course everyone was famished by dinnertime. What objects we had failed to
allocate during the cleaning up period we left on the floor—for later. Later meant after the
kids had retired for the night, when, so to speak, there was nothing more to do. It was only a
half-hour’s work, this mopping up. A pleasant fillip to a gruelling day. Bending, stooping,
sorting, wiping, disentangling, arranging and rearranging—child’s play, you might say. I used
to think how lucky I was that we had no pets to take care of, no livestock in the house, no
bird cages to clean out.

A word about the meals. … To me they were delicious. Every day I blessed
Walker for being the excellent cook he was. Not the kids, however! Hungry though they were, it
was not the sort of cooking they had been used to. One didn’t like gravy, the other didn’t
like fat. “I
hate
Brussels sprouts,” Tony would say. “I can’t eat macaroni any more,
it makes me vomit.” This from Val. It took days to discover, by the trial and error system,
what they did like, what they would eat. Even pie and puddings were no longer to their taste.
They wanted jello.

Walker was not only at his wit’s end but plumb disgusted. From a chef he had
been reduced to a short-order cook. I did nothing but apologize for their behavior throughout
the meal. Often I was driven to assume the ridiculous role of the anxious parent who feels
that his only recourse is to plead with the child, beg it to try
this,
taste that—just a weeny, teeny little bit! Spearing a piece of juicy roast pork with a
succulent rim of fat around it, spearing it from Tony’s plate, I would hold it a few inches
from my mouth a moment, admire it, examine it, make clucking sounds with tongue and palate,
dribble a bit into the bargain, then, just before gobbling it, say: “Ooooooh! How delicious!
Ooooooh! you don’t know what you’re missing!” All to no effect, naturally.

“It stinks!” he would say. Or, “It makes me puke!”

And then with a sigh, the sigh of a weary
grande dame
, Val would push
her plate aside and in a languid, bored tone inquire what the nature of the dessert might be
this evening.

“Jello, my dear!” I would say, putting all the venom and sarcasm into my voice
that I could command.

“Jello?
I’m sick of that stuff.”

“O.K. How about frogs’ nests then? Or a bowl of rusty nails with sliced
cucumbers on the side? Listen, kid, tomorrow we’re having pea soup with finnan haddie and
smoked oysters. And you’re going to like it!”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, and don’t throw that crust of bread to the birds either! We’re serving
it up for breakfast tomorrow morning, sprinkled with honey, mustard and garlic sauce. I know
you
love
mustard. Did I ever tell you, my finicky little sweetheart, that when bread
gets old enough, moldy enough, it breeds worms? And out of little worms come tapeworms. You
know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” (Brief pause, to observe effect.) “Do you remember
that restaurant I once told you about … on the rue de la Gaîeté … where I used to go for
snails? It was a smelly old place but everything tasted good there. If you didn’t like the
food, they threw you out on your….”

“Oh, Daddy, cut it out! We don’t want to listen to that stuff.”

From Tony: “Daddy, you’re not talking right. You don’t mean it, do you?”

“I do too mean it, Tony me boy. I’m just working into it. You
kids talk puke and vomit; I talk snails and turtle soup. Get me?”

Val, sort of haughtily: “We don’t like that kind of talk, Daddy. Mommy never
talks that way….”

“That’s what’s the matter. …” I check myself just in time. (Ahoy, mate! Up
with the jib!) “What was I saying now? Oh yeah, about the mock turtle. There are three kinds
of turtle, you know: the mock, the hard shell, and the Ojibway….”

“Daddy, you’re drunk!”

“I am not drunk neither!” (I sure would like to have been.) “No, I’m just
feeling feisty. That’s a new one for you. Wrap it up, it’s yours for the asking.”

“Aw,
shit!”
says Tony.

(Now where in the world could he have picked up a word like that?)

“You mean caca, don’t you, son? Or
manure?”

“I said
shit,”
says Tony.

“And I say caca-pipi head!”

“And I say you’re goofy,” says Val.

“Good, now we can start all over again. But how about a piece of pie first …
with some nice Yogurt smeared over it? I say now, did you ever have a go at limburger? No?
Well, you’ve got a treat in store for you…. Walker, why don’t you bring us home some limburger
next time you go to town? Or Liederkranz … the soft, runny kind…. Now if you’ll all join me in
a piece of pie I’ll have another cut of salami and a swig of Haig and Haig. How’s that?”

(Delivering this little spiel, a most bizarre thought entered my head. What
if, when the divorce proceedings came up, I were to hand the judge a stenographic copy of
these post-prandial
divertissements?
Wouldn’t that be a stunner?)

A lull. I’m holding my head in my hands, doing my damndest to keep my eyes
open. Walker’s already washing the dishes, scraping the pans. I ought to make an effort to
toss the garbage, but I’m glued to the chair. I look at the kids. They have that groggy
look of a pug trying to fall into a clinch after a swift one in the
guts.

“You gotta read us a story, Daddy.”

“The hell I do.”

“You promised.”

“I did not neither.”

“If you don’t read us a story we won’t go to sleep.”

“Ich gebibble.”

To jerk them out of it I make a reference to the frying pan. “How would you
like me to conk you with
that?”

A few more pippa passes and I’ve got them as far as the bathroom. I’ve cajoled
them into washing their faces, but not into brushing their teeth.

What an ordeal that was—getting them to brush their teeth! I’d sooner drink a
pint of Sloan’s Liniment than go through that routine again. And, despite all the bloody
fussing and fuming at the wash basin, today they’ve got cavities galore. The wonder is that I,
the taskmaster, haven’t got chronic laryngitis, what with all the coaxing, pleading, wheedling
and threatening I indulged in.

One fine day Walker lost his temper. The incident made a deep impression on
me. I had never believed it possible for Walker to say so much as a cross word. He was always
calm, amiable, yielding, and as for patience, well, he had the patience of a saint. With
dangerous psychopaths Walker could hold his own. As an attendant in lunatic asylums he had
kept things under control without ever resorting to strap, club or truncheon.

But the kids had found his Achilles heel.

It was in the middle of a long, exasperating morning when he exploded. I was
indoors puttering around when he called me out. “You’ve got to do something,” he yelled, his
face red as a beet. “These kids are completely out of hand.”

I didn’t even ask what they had done. I knew that he had taken more than his
share right from the start. I didn’t even try to apologize. I felt thoroughly humiliated, and
absolutely desperate. To see Walker in such a state was the last straw.