Michael Tolliver Lives (22 page)

“What’s up, babe?”

“Oh, just…the Irwin thing. He sounded so stricken when we talked.”

Ben nodded slowly, his intuition confirmed. “Bring him to the house, then. I’ll still be at work. You guys can talk all you want.”

“He didn’t seem to want that. And how can I tell
where
we should talk, if I don’t know what he wants to talk about?”

Ben shrugged. “Give Patreese a call. If it’s anything at all to do with your mom, he might have some idea.”

I thought that was brilliant and told him so.

“I try,” said Ben.

I found Patreese’s cell-phone number on my copy of the power of attorney. He had scribbled it on the bottom at the very last minute, in case we needed him.

“It’s almost midnight there,” I pointed out.

“He’ll be up. And if he’s not, he doesn’t have to answer.”

He answered, as it happened, on the fifth ring. There was noise in the background: screaming, drunken female voices. “Yeah?” he said, shouting above the din.

“It’s Michael Tolliver.”

“Who?”

“Alice’s son. From San Francisco.”

“Oh, Lord, honey. How are you doin’?”

“Great,” I said, relieved by his cheerful acknowledgment. “I’m here with Ben.” I swapped a private smile with my husband. “Is this a bad time?”

“Nah. These crazy bitches can just cool their engines. Hang on, my brother.” He was gone for a matter of seconds while he must have closed a door somewhere, since the din was largely gone when he returned. “That better?” he asked.

“Much. You workin’ a gig or something?”

“Yeah. Fuckin’ bachelorettes. I’m changin’ into my sailor outfit.”

I bugged my eyes for Ben. “He’s changing into his sailor outfit.”

Ben laughed.

“Listen,” I said to Patreese. “I won’t keep you but…my brother’s coming out to see me tomorrow, and he’s been acting really peculiar since we got home.”

“Uh-huh.” This was noncommittal at best.

“Has something…happened around there?”

“Around where?”

“The Gospel Palms.”

A long silence and then: “Well…your mama had a fight with ol’ whatshername…Lenore. I reckon that must be it.”

“A fight?”

“Yeah. Knock-down-drag-out. She don’t want her comin’ around anymore.”

“Was this about the power-of-attorney thing?”

Another puzzling silence. “I don’t really know for sure.”

“Yes you do, Patreese. She tells you everything.”

Patreese cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Sorry, Michael…I can’t do this. You just wait and talk to your brother. You’ll be fine. I don’t feel right about gettin’ all tangled up in family matters. It wouldn’t be fair to you, either.”

“Okay,” I said evenly.

“A lotta shit shakes loose when folks are dying. You don’t need to hear it from the hairdresser.”

What on earth?
I thought.

“You’re not pissed at me, are you?”

“No…of course not.”

“I saw your mama day before yesterday. She’s no better…but she looked a lot more at peace, you know? Now that she’s spoken her peace.”

Someone must have opened the door, because that mindless estrogen roar was drowning us out again. “I gotta go,” said Patreese. “Say hey to that sweet thing o’ yours. I’ll call if there’s any change with your mama. Don’t you worry.”

Before I could thank him he was gone. I closed the phone and turned to Ben.

“Now I’m really freaked,” I said.

22

Keep Me Company

T
he restaurant at the Airport Marriott was called JW’s Steakhouse, presumably after old Mr. Marriott himself, the archconservative Mormon billionaire. It made sense that my brother had picked it. This was a piece of
his
America, clean and predictable, a safe refuge at the gates of Sodom. Whatever his mission today, Irwin would feel better here, buffered by families and beef-eating businessmen. These were his peeps.

Me…I’d never felt so out of town this close to the city.

Irwin had chosen a quiet corner of the restaurant. He stood up when he saw me, fussing reflexively—and rather touchingly, I felt—with his comb-over. When we were face-to-face, he thrust out his arm and grabbed my elbow with the other. He’d learned this trick from our father, an acknowledged master at keeping love at arm’s length.

“Hey, bro,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

“No problem…I was already in the neighborhood, so…”

“Sit down, sit down.” He was too distracted to joke. “You ordered yet?”

“Irwin…I just got here.”

He looked mortified. “I meant…you know…would you like to?” He handed me the menu. “These places are pretty dependable. I’ve been to the one in Anaheim and the one in Philly. Fine cuisine every time. The Cowboy Steak can’t be beat.”

At eighteen ounces the Cowboy Steak would have choked a coyote, so when the waitress arrived, I ordered the seared tuna. “That’ll be good, too,” Irwin offered gamely. “It’s all good here.” Then, without a word to me, he ordered double scotches for both of us.

“Hey,” I said. “I’ve got clients this afternoon.”

“Just bring ’em,” Irwin told the waitress.

When she was gone, there was a lead-footed silence, so I jumped into the breach and asked him, as tactfully as possible, what the hell was going on.

“First off,” he replied, “it’s not about you havin’ the power of attorney. I know about that and I don’t care. Mama can die whenever she pleases. She’ll get no trouble from me. I want to make her as comfortable as possible. She knows that, too.”

I nodded, wondering how he’d found out. “Does Lenore feel that way?”

His expression grew stony. “She’s got nothin’ to do with this. You and me are the next of kin, and that’s that. Whatever we say goes.”

“Maybe so, but Mama seems to think that Lenore—”

“Fuck Lenore!”

Under other circumstances, I might have teased him about the language, but there was real anguish in his eyes. He ran his palm along the tabletop, smoothing out his thoughts. “Lenore moved out last week. She’s living with Mel Brook.”

He said Brook, of course, not Brooks—I heard that clearly—but I got the visual, anyway: Lenore humping away on the beloved entertainer. There had to be a joke in there somewhere—maybe about Christians needing Jews for the rapture, or Lenore confusing Mel Brooks with Mel Gibson—but I managed to restrain myself.

“Is Mel Brook…someone I should know?”

He shook his head. His right eye flinched convulsively a couple of times—a tic I hadn’t seen before. “Just this gal she knows from Sunday school.”

Now I had a new image of Mel: a Bible-toting dyke in a gray mullet and a polyester pantsuit. I couldn’t help myself: “She left you for a woman?”

“No!…Hell, no!” He looked like I’d smacked him in the face with a dead flounder. “She didn’t leave me for anybody. I…banished her.”

“
Banished
her?…Jesus, Irwin.”

“Could we leave His name out of this?”

“Then don’t talk like a biblical patriarch. Who the hell says ‘banished’?”

“I asked her to leave. I told her to leave. Stop messing with me, Mikey. This is tough enough as it is.”

I offered him penitent silence, then spoke in a more reasonable tone. “What happened? Y’all always seemed pretty content to me.”

That was not the right word, of course.
Complacent
would have been closer to the truth. Irwin and Lenore weren’t as lovey-dovey as they once were, but they seemed resigned to each other for the rest of their days. They had their McMansion and their grandkid and their Personal Savior, and that had seemed a gracious plenty.

Lenore, you should know, wasn’t always such a tight-ass. When Irwin was courting her back in the seventies, she was still the social director at a convention hotel in Tallahassee and something of a firecracker. She was Christian, but she didn’t make a fuss about it. She was pretty and perky and sometimes very funny, and my folks were openly amazed that their crazy-ass delinquent son had landed someone so presentable.

This was roughly the time they learned of my “lifestyle,” so they were thrilled to have a shot at breeding grandchildren. Irwin bought a split-level house just down Abbott Springs Road, and the four of them—Mama and Papa and Irwin and Lenore—became a functioning unit. Mama would write me effusively about their long road trips in Irwin’s Buick: one to Colorado, as I recall, and another to New York to see
Cats
on Broadway. For almost a decade they were Lucy & Ricky & Fred & Ethel, and it got to me more than I would ever have imagined. I would not have traveled with them for anything in the world, but I felt a little jealous sometimes. More of an outsider than ever.

Then Papa died and I announced my antibody status and Mama dug deeper into Jesus, taking Lenore with her. The reason seemed clear at the time: they had already lost one Tolliver man and were almost certain to lose another. Whatever their petty rivalries over the years, grief had made them sisters in salvation. Or so I believed. Irwin did, too, poor bastard, so he began strangling his cuss words and praising the Lord to placate the women he loved. Like me, a fellow male, he was oblivious to the
real
bond between Mama and Lenore, the secret they had planned on taking to their graves.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Irwin’s eye was flinching again.

“Do you remember,” he said slowly, “what you told me out in the boat?”

It took me a moment. “About Mama wanting to leave Papa?”

He nodded darkly.

I still wasn’t getting it.

“It’s the same reason, Mikey.”

“The same reason as
what
?”

Right about then our drinks arrived, though I have no memory whatsoever of interacting with the waitress. The glasses just materialized and remained there undisturbed, while my eyes stayed glued on my brother’s flinching eye.

“The same reason as what?” I repeated.

“The same reason I threw Lenore out. Her and Papa…they were having a…I mean, you know, they’d been…” He lifted his palms from the table and tilted them to parenthesize the unspeakable. The gesture wasn’t graphic but it screamed its meaning.

I gaped at him. “How do you know this?”

“Mama told me last week. Right after you left.”

“Papa and
Lenore
?”

“Don’t make me say it again.” He reached for his scotch and drank half of it, then pushed the other glass toward me. “Keep me company.”

I picked up the glass, took a swig, and set it down again.

“Jesus,” I murmured.

“Mikey—”

“Sorry.” I hardly knew where to start. “When did this happen?”

“Just before Papa died. Mama drove up to Deltona to spend the day at that big outlet store, but it was closed for some holiday…Martin Luther King or something…so she came back. She couldn’t find Papa at the house, so she went down to our place. They didn’t even lock the door. She found ’em in the family room.”

“In flagrante?”

Irwin flinched violently. “I don’t know
how
they were doing it.”

I did my best not to smile. “I mean…they were actually in the midst of…?”

“Yes sir. Yes they were.” Irwin just rocked for a while, his hands between his knees, like one of those plastic birds bobbing into a glass of water.

“All righty,” I said, always ready with the brotherly wisdom.

“Mama said they were buck naked.”

I wanted to be the unhysterical one. I wanted to guide my brother rationally through the labyrinth of sex like enlightened queers are supposed to do. But I screwed up my face as if I’d just caught a whiff of a flaming cow pie.

“Papa just hit the ceiling,” Irwin went on. “Throwin’ stuff all over the place. Like Mama was the one who’d done something wrong.”

Wouldn’t he just?
I thought.

Irwin polished off the rest of his scotch. “And then he died.”

“What?”

“He had a heart attack. Right there in front of them.”

“But he died of cancer.”

“Cancer can cause heart attacks. The coroner just considered it…a complication.”

“I’ll say. Was Papa still naked when the coroner arrived?”

Irwin shook his head. “They got his clothes back on and put him on the sofa with the clicker.”

“The clicker?”

“Like he was watching TV when it happened.”

“Jesus…sorry, sorry!”

Irwin offered me a weary smile. “You’re entitled.”

“In that case, Jesus H. Christ! How the hell did Mama make it through the funeral? She looked so…composed.”

“I guess she was kinda in shock. She said she prayed a lot.”

“Did that help?”

Irwin scowled at my sacrilege.

“It’s people who have to be good to us, Irwin. Not God.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

I apologized for the preachiness—the last thing he needed right now. Still, I couldn’t help thinking how
biblical
the whole thing sounded. All that begetting and begatting among kinfolk. Not to mention those wailing women dressing the dead patriarch.

“Where were you?” I asked.

“Out showin’ a house. By the time I got home, Papa was already at the funeral parlor.”

“And Mama and Lenore had worked out their story.”

“Yep.”

We just sat there for a moment, silent as men, working out our own story, each in his own way. “It’s just so…pathetic,” I said finally.

“What?”

“That Mama just buried it all these years. She never had closure of any kind.”

“She didn’t want folks to know. She didn’t want
me
to know. And Lenore sure as hell didn’t want me to know. Mama was pretty much stuck, I reckon. So they drove up to Georgia after the funeral and got born again where nobody would know ’em.”

“I’m sorry…
who
did?”

“Mama and Lenore. The preacher baptized ’em both. One after the other. Little church on the highway. One o’ those aboveground pools.”

“Did you know about this at the time?”

“Sure.”

“And that didn’t strike you as strange?”

Irwin shrugged. “Mama said the womenfolk had to grieve on their own. And Lenore was a Presbyterian, so she’d never been born again. I just reckoned Mama was killin’ two birds with one stone. So I stayed home and took Kimberly to Disney World.”