Family Night (12 page)

Margaret looked at the picture of her stepmother in the little catboat and she understood that, in order for Cam to have been abandoned by his father, Elizabeth herself must first have been deserted. This was the term used in Elizabeth’s divorce: “mindful neglect, desertion.” Lewis went off after a few years of marriage, leaving Elizabeth with two daughters, Tina and Jane. She was forced to leave New York and move back in with her parents, who lived on the South Side of Chicago, a leafy neighborhood fading from its turn-of-the-century glory. The house had a small yard with a cherry tree, which inked the children’s play clothes ruby red. “It was the bane of my existence—everything stained,” Elizabeth said.

Lewis came back when he couldn’t get modeling work. He returned for an item of clothing or a loan of money and, as a second thought, he claimed he’d seen a priest who forgave his sins, why couldn’t she? He borrowed the money, swiped her silver brush and comb set to see what he could get for it. She never turned him out, letting him sleep through the afternoon. Then
he was gone all night and half the next day. He returned rumpled, his clothes marred, imprinted with the vermilion lip rouge and fleshy face powders of outsiders. His final intrusion was a first Saturday in May.

He waited until Elizabeth’s parents went shopping, pulling the aluminum-mesh grocery cart behind them. He came into the house, passed by his girls playing with china saucers, and found her.

Elizabeth told Margaret, “He was there under an hour, just enough time for me to give in. He ripped the tiny hook and eye on my skirt, he tugged it down over my hips. A hook and eye doesn’t offer much protection.”

“Today, they say that’s rape,” Margaret said.

“They do? How would they know? It’s not rape if the woman is still conscious.”

“You mean you can’t have a technical knockout in sex?” Margaret said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyway, he’s making love to me and he takes my change purse from the bureau and removes the bills. He’s got it
in
me and he’s counting the tens and singles. Then he picks up my pen and is writing an IOU. He’s writing! He puts the pen down and gets back to business. He tells me: ‘It’s not that I don’t love you. It’s not that I don’t love
this
.’ ”

“This?” Margaret blinked.

“That’s right.
This
,” Elizabeth said. “It was everything to him.”

Margaret always had a hard time not picturing Cam when Elizabeth talked about Lewis Goddard. She imagined
Cam tugging someone’s skirt down. But that would be Tracy. Tracy might or might not take the cash.

Elizabeth had told Margaret, “It must have been God’s wishes. I gave in.”

God’s wishes? What kind of summary is that? From that, what could she make of God? Then she was pregnant with Cam. Elizabeth couldn’t bring herself to pat her swollen belly or to think of a name for it. Later, when Cam asked questions, his sisters shrugged. No one knew anything. Cam told Margaret he used to imagine his father was like Jesse James, someone with a bad side, a mean streak, but wasn’t that the kernel of all great adventures? Weren’t heroes always tempted, weakened, didn’t they fall before they returned to prove themselves?

Lewis lost most of his modeling jobs soon after leaving Elizabeth. His drinking caused some blood vessels to rise on his cheeks; his eyes became rimmed and puffy. Even so, he was incredibly striking, and his girlfriends and acquaintances still called him “The Model.” During the war, the army reluctantly agreed to evaluate him and concluded that his acute vanity verged on the autoerotic. He would be useless in action. For a few months, until the end of the war, he did double shifts in a kissing booth for the Women’s Army Corps. That’s when they assigned him to Times Square, where he waited in a plywood shack, complaining to his sergeant that the kissing booth was freezing, until they installed a portable heater. He touched his lips with a camphor stick to prevent catching head colds from the ladies who filled out forms and queued up to receive a kiss. He
was ordering out for spiked coffees and hot gravy sandwiches, but he was doing so well, recruiting hundreds of women, plain and fancy, they allowed him these privileges.

Margaret’s father had also tried to enlist, but they wouldn’t allow him to leave the steel mill. They told him he was worth a thousand soldiers if he would just stay where he was and run the open hearth. He wanted to go over, because years after a war it’s not so attractive to say you stayed home, even if you were running a steel mill. Margaret’s mother, Sandra, was pleased he was staying put. It was hard enough worrying about those pouring ladles; sometimes the nozzle gets a crack and, instead of pouring a clean jet, it sprays molten froth everywhere, men running in all directions. When Richard heard about Lewis’s kissing booth, he wondered what kind of man kisses women all day long while others were getting imprinted with shrapnel, lead slivers the size of mint leaves, a bloody filigree.

During her years on the South Side after the war, Elizabeth often left her children with their grandparents and went dancing. She went to the Palmer House, to the old Aragon Ballroom in North Chicago, or to the Trianon on the South Side, where they heard Wayne King or it was Frankie Laine. Elizabeth’s girlfriends arranged blind dates, or she came alone and suffered the usual sots and dandies; even the married men were pestering one another for a turn with her. Elizabeth, having been acquainted with Margaret’s mother during her one semester at De Paul, was invited to sit at a table with Sandra and Richard. Because Elizabeth was there
without a husband, Richard felt he should look after her, keep her glass refilled, check on her coat when it was time to leave. Even then, Sandra was having trouble breathing. She cleared her throat too often, tapping her breastbone with her small fist, rubbing her knuckles against her collarbone. By the end of these evenings, she was coughing. The following summer she was in Granville Sanatorium.

Elizabeth’s parents said it was unseemly for her to start dating a fellow whose wife was so ill. Shouldn’t he be at his wife’s bedside, not at the Aragon? Didn’t he have a tiny baby at home? Wasn’t it sickly, a premie?

“That baby is fine now. And you can’t sit with Sandra all night in a hospital,” Elizabeth told them. “They kick you out. They wash under the beds.”

Soon after that, Richard brought Margaret to play with Elizabeth’s three children. Elizabeth and Richard told Margaret the story with similar emphasis. They said it was their “turning point.” They met at the lake. The older sisters walked in front, kicking tufts of sand that blew backward, into the babies’ faces. Cam was three years old, one year older than Margaret, and both were young enough to tire from plodding through the uneven wells and drifts of the beach; they had to be herded forward. Richard liked the parade. If anyone watched, they might assume this was his tribe, his offspring marching in a pleasing gradation. Then, Elizabeth looked out at the water and saw a sailboat. The wind caught the sail until the craft surged and tilted, revealing its small crew, a man and woman. The mysterious couple faced the shore and waved.

“It’s him,” she said. “Isn’t that Lewis with some bimbo?”

“I don’t think you’re right,” Richard said.

“It
is
him. I should recognize Lewis, don’t you think?”

“You’re wrong, honey,” he told her.

“I know that boat!”

Richard told her, “They rent several of those cat-boats.”

“No, it’s him. He’s rubbing my face in something.”

They watched the little sailboat lift and settle on the chop. “You really can’t tell who it is,” Richard told her.

“If we’re going to get married. Let’s get married now.”

He halted on the beach; suddenly his shoes were weighted with sand and he pulled them off to tip them. He touched her shoulder for balance as he lifted one foot, then the other.

“If we
are
getting married, when exactly?” Elizabeth said.

“I wanted to have an opportunity—” He struggled to say something. He wanted to say, “Couldn’t we wait until Sandra is dead?” His wife’s name would have cast a spell and he didn’t mention her.

Elizabeth told him, “You can get a divorce. Arkansas lets you take a divorce in ninety days. You can go there, get the divorce, and come back and get me.”

“What about the war?” This had been the nation’s line of defense when faced with domestic situations, food shortages, problems with transportation.

“What do you mean, the war? The war’s over!” she told him.

He turned around and looked at the city, its familiar skyline smudged with mist from the lake. He couldn’t look at the water and think straight. “I can’t leave the plant. We’re making adjustments, some changes in production. It’s chaos, and they’re laying people off since—”

“Since the war?”

“What am I supposed to do in Arkansas? How do I make a living?”

Elizabeth said, “I read the ad in the
Tribune
. Men getting divorced are selling aluminum storm windows and floor tiles. Home improvements, that sort of thing. They’re making a killing in Little Rock.”

Richard imagined divorcing his wife, who was dying. Dying alone. Alone now at that terrible threshold, then alone forever. But it was true, it could take months. He recalled the one psalm he had put to memory as a child. It was the twenty-third. He envisioned its tiny inch of text; it offered him nothing, no remonstration, no comfort. The light sifted over them, that resistant, pouty April sunlight, not enough to heat the air. Didn’t he remember a warm lake glow? When was it like that? The small ration of sun had triggered the first bloom of plankton in the lake, and the scent was drifting in. He pictured divorcing his wife, but he couldn’t see quitting his place at South Works. Even without the war effort to consider, he couldn’t imagine walking away from Open Hearth Number Four to start selling aluminum storms and floor tile in Arkansas.

“Look at the children,” Elizabeth said. “A nice large family. A boy. Men dream of it.”

Cam drove into Ocean City and found the Talbot Street Pier. He parked the car before a network of horseshoe gangways where boats were docked. A few beat-up cabin cruisers rested out of the water, centered on shipways or makeshift perches where a man worked patching a hull with grey fiberglass compound. Cam told them to wait in the car and he went to find the man who had advertised the Donzi. Margaret watched him go along the pier and turn down one of the gangplanks to a long, floating dock. He was reading the names of the boats and looking at the berth numbers. A speedboat went past and she watched its wake roll the floating pier with Cam on it. He looked different, a hundred miles away, rising and sinking there all by himself.

Margaret tried to share the weight of the big Coleman cooler with Tracy, but it kept bumping against her leg when she took one of the handles, leaving a wet smear of rust on her skin. Cam waited beside the Donzi, tipping his fist against his lips and pretending to chug-a-lug. Tracy’s face looked still; his mouth kept an even line. It must be the idea of going out on the water, Margaret thought. He was usually skittish when confined to a small space. The tiny deck of the speedboat would be a test. He was telling her it would be a personal challenge.

“I can’t locate the owner,” Cam told them when they arrived. Margaret looked down at the boat.

Cam saw her taking it in and said, “The Donzi deep-vee, remember?”

It was a glossy red-and-white with a low deck line, but not too sneering. Everything was sleek; the chromed grab rails and hatch hinges gleamed with little pricks of light.

“It’s just like the old one,” Margaret said.

“That’s why it’s called the Classic, it’s almost exactly the same year to year. Look at this rub rail,” Cam said, “every Phillips head is turned in the same direction. That’s one of Donzi’s trademarks.”

“Pretty anal,” Tracy said.

“Excuse me?”

“Anal compulsive,” Tracy said. “Amazing example.”

“It’s detail,” Cam said. “There’s a difference.”

The boat could seat two at the helm and three on the back bench if you had to take a whole party, but three was the perfect number of people. The boat wasn’t something for maiden aunts or grandmothers. It was for erotic mix-and-matches, slave duos, race-minded marrieds, any pair of intimates, maybe a love triangle.

“Look at the upholstery, the graphics. These aren’t decals, they’re gel-coated right into the vinyl,” Cam said. He waited for Tracy’s opinion.

Tracy said, “I see.”

Cam waited.

Tracy said, “I think it works. It works for me.”

“I told you. It’s the Classic deep-vee. Not too sterile or Miami. It’s the original, and fast. It pulls out clean without too much bow lift,” Cam said. He followed the lines of the boat, he was grinning. Margaret liked seeing him forget himself.

“I’m sure it’s fine unless there’s glitch in the Cobra, but I can’t tell a thing standing here.”

“Let’s just take it out, otherwise the man might lose the sale. You look ready to buy,” Tracy said.

“We can’t take it out without a key. You’re thinking of a rowboat.”

“A rowboat. There must be a secret to a rowboat. When I try to row, I go in circles,” Tracy said.

“Oh, Cam can teach you how to row. Can’t you, Cam? You could show Tracy how to keep from digging with the oars,” Margaret said.

The men looked at opposite specks in the distance. The idea had upset them both.

“It can’t hurt sitting here for a while,” Cam said, and he stepped down into the boat. He sat down on the bench, taking a beer from the cooler. Tracy landed too hard and the boat shivered, rocked for a second, then lofted back to its trough on the water. The marina was pretty quiet; most of the slips were empty, it was a perfect afternoon to be out sailing. A man walked heel to toe along the side of his yacht. He was using a squeegee to clean grey lichens of crystallized salt from the windscreen. Then, on one of the big cabin cruisers, a woman in a string bikini was splashing a hose over the gunwales. Margaret noticed Cam avoiding that sight, although, looking in the other direction, he faced the sun. He looked at his shoes; then he took out his wallet to count his money. Tracy watched the woman hosing the boat; he followed her in and out of the galley and back up to the bow, where she emptied a Coke can into the water. Her skin was deep from the sun and flushed from her activity. The cruiser was called
The Mermaid
.
Tracy said that she must be Ethel Mermaid. “There’s no business like show business,” he told Cam in a flat voice. Cam kept his face angled down. He wanted another look, but the woman had gone around to the other side.