Mr. Vertigo (34 page)

I spent twenty-three years with Molly—a good long run, I suppose, but not long enough. My plan was to grow old with her and die in her arms, but cancer came along and took her from me before I was ready to let go. First one breast went, then the other breast, and by the time she was fifty-five, she wasn’t there anymore. The family did what it could to help, but it was an awful period for me, and I spent the next six or seven months in an alcoholic stupor. It got so bad that I eventually lost my job at the factory, and if two of my brothers-in-law hadn’t hauled me off to a drying-out clinic, there’s no telling what might have happened to me. I stayed for a full sixty-day cure at Saint Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, and that’s where I finally started dreaming again. I don’t mean daydreams and thoughts about the future, I mean actual sleep dreams: vivid, movie-show extravaganzas almost every night for a month. Maybe it had something to do with the drugs and tranquilizers I was taking, I don’t know, but forty-four years after my last performance as Walt the Wonder Boy, it all came rushing back to me. I was back on the circuit with Master Yehudi, traveling from town to town in the Pierce Arrow, doing my act again every night. It made me incredibly happy, and it brought back pleasures I’d long since forgotten I could feel. I was walking on water again, strutting my stuff before gigantic, overflowing crowds, and I could move through the air without pain, floating and spinning and prancing with all of my old virtuosity and assurance. I’d worked so hard to bury those
memories, had struggled for so many years to hug to the ground and be like everyone else, and now it was all surging up again, blasting forth in a nightly display of Technicolor fireworks. Those dreams turned everything around for me. They gave me back my pride, and after that I was no longer ashamed to look at the past. I don’t know how else to put it. The master had forgiven me. He’d canceled out my debt to him because of Molly, because of how I’d loved her and mourned her, and now he was calling out to me and asking me to remember him. There’s no way to prove any of this, but the effect was undeniable. Something had been lifted inside me, and I walked out of that drunk tank as sober as I am now. I was fifty-eight years old, my life was in ruins, and yet I didn’t feel too bad about it. When all was said and done, I actually felt pretty good.

Molly’s medical bills had wiped out whatever cash we’d managed to save. I was four months behind on the rent, the landlord was threatening to evict me, and the only thing I owned was my car—a seven-year-old Ford Fairlane with a dented grille and a faulty carburetor. About three days after I left the hospital, my favorite nephew called me from Denver about a job. Dan was the bright one in the family—the first college professor they’d ever had—and he’d been living out there with his wife and son for the past few years. Since his father had already told him how hard-up I was, I didn’t waste my breath telling fibs about my big bank account. The job wasn’t much, he said, but maybe a change of scenery would do me good. What sort of job? I asked. Maintenance engineer, he replied, trying not to make it sound too funny. You mean a janitor? I said. That’s it, he said, a mop jockey. A position had opened up in the building where he taught his classes, and if I felt like moving to Denver, he’d put in a word for me and swing the deal. Sure, I said, why the hell not,
and two days later I packed some things into the Ford and set off for the Rocky Mountains.

I never did make it to Denver. It wasn’t because the car broke down, and it wasn’t because I had second thoughts about becoming a janitor, but things happened along the way, and instead of winding up in one place, I wound up in another. It’s really not hard to explain. Coming so soon after all those dreams in the hospital, the trip brought back a flood of memories, and by the time I crossed the Kansas border, I couldn’t resist making a short, sentimental detour to the south. It wasn’t so far out of the way, I told myself, and Dan wouldn’t mind if I was a little slow in getting there. I just wanted to spend a few hours in Wichita —and go back to Mrs. Witherspoon’s house to see what the old place looked like. Once, not long after the war, I’d tried to look her up in New York, but there was no listing for her in the phone book, and I’d forgotten the name of her company. For all I knew she was dead now, just like everyone else I’d ever cared about.

The city had grown a lot since the 1920s, but it still wasn’t my idea of a good time. There were more people, more buildings, and more streets, but once I adjusted to the changes, it turned out to be the same backwater pancake I remembered. They called it the “Air Capital of the World” now, and it gave me a good laugh when I saw that slogan plastered on billboards around town. The chamber of commerce was referring to all the aircraft companies that had set up factories there, but I couldn’t help thinking about myself, the original birdboy who’d once called Wichita his home. I had some trouble finding the house, which made my tour a bit more thorough than I’d planned Way back when, it had been located on the outskirts of town, sitting by itself on a dirt road that led to open country, but now it was part of the residential hub, and other houses had been built around
it. The street was called Coronado Avenue, and it came with all the modern accoutrements: sidewalks, street lamps, and a blacktop surface with a white stripe running down the middle. But the house looked good, there was no question about that: the shingles gleamed white under the gray November sky, and the little trees that Master Yehudi had planted in the front yard towered over the roof like giants. Whoever owned the place had been treating it well, and now that it was so old, it had taken on the air of something historic, a venerable mansion from a bygone age.

I parked the car and walked up the steps of the front porch. It was late afternoon, but a light was on in a first-floor window, and now that I was there, I figured I had to go through with it and ring the bell. If the people weren’t ogres, they might even let me in and show me around for old time’s sake. That was all I was hoping for: just a glimpse. It was cold out on the porch, and as I stood there waiting for someone to appear, I couldn’t help thinking back to the first time I’d come to this house, half-dead from losing my way in that infernal blizzard. I had to ring twice before I heard footsteps stirring within, and when the door finally opened, I was so wrapped up in remembering my first encounter with Mrs. Witherspoon, it took a couple of seconds before I realized that the woman standing in front of me was none other than Mrs. Witherspoon herself: an older, frailer, more wrinkled version to be sure, but the same Mrs. Witherspoon for all that. I would have known her anywhere. She hadn’t gained a pound since 1936; her hair was dyed the same snazzy shade of red; and her bright blue eyes were as blue and bright as ever. She was seventy-four or seventy-five by then, but she didn’t look a day over sixty—sixty-three tops. Still dressed in fashionable clothes, still holding herself erect, she came to the door with a burning cigarette wedged between her lips and a glass of Scotch in her left hand. You had to love a woman like that. The world
had gone through untold changes and catastrophes since I’d last set eyes on her, but Mrs. Witherspoon was the same tough broad she’d always been.

I recognized her before she recognized me. That was understandable, since time had taken a more drastic toll on my looks than on hers. My freckles had all but vanished now, and I’d turned into a squat, dumpy sort of guy with thinning gray hair and a set of Coke-bottle lenses perched on my nose. Hardly the dashing smoothy she’d dined with at Lemmele’s thirty-eight years before. I was dressed in dull workaday clothes—lumber jacket, khaki pants, cordovan shoes, white socks—and my collar was turned up to ward off the chill. She probably couldn’t see much of my face, and what she could see was so haggard, so worn out from my struggle with the booze, there wasn’t anything to be done but to tell her who I was.

The rest goes without saying, doesn’t it? Tears were shed, stories were told, we gabbed and carried on until the wee small hours. It was auld lang syne on Coronado Avenue, and I doubt there could have been a better reunion than the one we had that night. I’ve already given the gist of what happened to me, but her story was no less strange, no less unexpected than mine. Instead of parlaying her millions into more millions during the Texas wildcat boom, she’d sunk her drills into dry ground and gone bust. The oil game was largely guesswork back then, and she made one too many bad guesses. By 1938, she’d lost nine-tenths of her fortune. That still didn’t qualify her as a pauper, but she was no longer in the Fifth Avenue league, and after floating a few more ventures that didn’t pan out, she finally packed it in and returned to Wichita. She thought it would be only temporary: a few months in the old house to take stock and then on to the next bright idea. But one thing led to another, and by the time the war came she was still there. In what can
only be called a startling about-face, she got caught up in the patriotic fervor of the time and spent the next four years working as a volunteer nurse at the Wichita V. A. Hospital. I was hard-pressed to imagine her doing that Florence Nightingale bit, but Mrs. W. was a woman of many surprises, and if money was her strong point, it was by no means the only thing she thought about. After the war she went into business again, but this time she stayed in Wichita, and little by little she built it into a nice profitable concern. With Laundromats of all things. It sounds funny after all that high-stakes speculation in stocks and oil— but why not? She was one of the first to see the commercial possibilities of the washing machine, and she got a jump on her competitors by entering the field early. By the time I showed up in 1974, she had twenty Laundromats scattered around the city and another twelve in neighboring towns. The House of Clean, she called them, and all those dimes and quarters had turned her into a wealthy woman again.

And what about men? I asked. Oh, lots of men, she answered, more men than you could shake a stick at. And Orville Cox— what about him? Dead and gone, she said. And Billy Bigelow? Still among the living. As a matter of fact, his house was just around the corner. She’d brought him into the Laundromat business after the war, and he’d worked as her manager and right-hand man until his retirement six months ago. Young Billy was pushing seventy now, and with two heart attacks already behind him, the doctor had told him to go easy on the pump. His wife had died seven or eight years back, and with his kids all grown and gone, Billy and Mrs. Witherspoon were still in close touch. She described him as the best friend she’d ever had, and from the way her voice softened when she said it, I gathered that relations between them went beyond simple shop talk about washers and dryers. Ah ha, I said, so patience finally won out,
and sweet little Billy got what he wanted. She threw me one of her devilish winks. Sometimes, she said, but not always. It depends on my mood.

It didn’t take much arm-twisting to get me to stay. The janitor thing was only a stopgap measure, and now that something better had turned up, I didn’t have to think twice about changing my plans. The salary was only a small part of it, of course. I was back where I belonged, and when Mrs. Witherspoon invited me to step in and take over Billy’s old job, I told her I’d start first thing in the morning. It didn’t matter what the work was. If she’d invited me to stay on to scrub the pots in her kitchen, I would have said yes to that, too.

I slept in the same top-floor room I’d occupied as a boy, and once I learned the business, I did all right for her. I kept the washing machines humming, I jacked profits up, I persuaded her to expand in different directions: a bowling alley, a pizza joint, a pinball arcade. With all the college kids pouring into town every fall, there was a demand for quick food and cheap entertainment, and I was just the man to provide those things. I put in long hours and worked my buns off, but I liked being in charge of something again, and most of my schemes turned out pretty well. Mrs. Witherspoon called me a cowboy, which from her mouth was a compliment, and for the first three or four years we galloped along at a sprightly clip. Then, very suddenly, Billy died. It was another heart attack, but this one took place on the twelfth fairway of the Cherokee Acres Country Club, and by the time the medics got to him, he had already breathed his last. Mrs. W. went into a tailspin after that. She stopped going to the office with me in the morning, and little by little she seemed to lose interest in the company, leaving most of the decisions in my hands. I’d been through something like that with Molly, but it wasn’t much good telling her that time would take care of it.
The one thing she didn’t have was time. The man had worshiped her for fifty years, and now that he was gone, no one was ever going to replace him.

One night in the midst of all this, I heard her sobbing through the walls as I lay upstairs reading in bed. I went down to her room, we talked for a while, and then I took her in my arms and held her until she drifted off to sleep. Somehow or other, I wound up falling asleep, too, and when I woke in the morning I found myself lying under the covers with her in the large double bed. It was the same bed she’d shared with Master Yehudi in the old days, and now it was my turn to sleep beside her, to be the man she couldn’t live without. It was mostly a matter of comfort, of companionship, of preferring to sleep in one bed rather than two, but that isn’t to say the sheets didn’t catch fire every now and then. Just because you get old, that doesn’t mean you stop getting the urge, and whatever qualms I had about it in the beginning soon went away. For the next eleven years we lived together like husband and wife. I don’t feel I have to make any apologies for that. Once upon a time I’d been young enough to be her son, but now I was older than most grandfathers, and when you get to be that age, you don’t have to play by the rules anymore. You go where you have to go, and whatever it takes to keep on breathing, that’s what you do.

She stayed in good health for most of the time we were together. In her mid-eighties she was still drinking a couple of Scotches before dinner and smoking the occasional cigarette, and most days saw her with enough spunk to doll herself up and go out for a spin in her giant blue Cadillac. She lived to be ninety or ninety-one (it was never clear which century she’d been born in), and things didn’t get too rough for her until the last eighteen months or so. Towards the end she was mostly blind, mostly deaf, mostly unable to get out of bed, but she remained herself for all
that, and rather than put her into a home or hire a nurse to take care of her, I sold off the business and did the dirty work myself. I owed her that much, didn’t I? I bathed her and combed her hair; I carried her around the house in my arms; I wiped the shit from her ass after every accident, just as she had once wiped mine.