South of Broad (31 page)

Betty adds, “It’s not perfect, but it’s a plan.”

Ike says, “Let’s give it till Sunday. That’ll mean we’ve been out here for over two weeks. We’ve busted our asses. We’ve put ads in the newspaper, circulars all over the city, got a column out of Herb Caen. Sheba’s been interviewed by every radio and television show in the city. All of the gay newspapers have covered why we’re out here. We’ve given it our best shot.”

“I was with Fraser—ready to get on a flight this morning,” Betty says. “But Ike’s plan seems better. He always keeps a cool head.”

“He’s not a mother,” Molly says. “Neither is Sheba. And Leo is not a father. I’d rather OD on heroin than let Chad and that Brazilian twat raise my children.”

“Don’t forget that Chad happens to be my brother,” Fraser says. “He loves those kids as much as you do.”

“We don’t need a catfight,” Niles says, trying to defuse the situation. “We got problems enough.”

“I saw you sneaking up from the basement the other night,” Fraser says to Molly. “I was using the hall bathroom so I wouldn’t wake Niles. I guess you and Leo were discussing the need for economic reform in Sri Lanka?”

“I warmed up a cup of milk in the microwave.” Molly’s lie lacks conviction. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“You smelled a lot like sex to me,” Fraser says.

The whole room gasps. I have never known such words to come out of Fraser’s mouth; if I had not heard them with my own ears I wouldn’t have believed it. By her expression I can tell she has even shocked herself.

“So the Rutledge family closes ranks,” Molly says. “Little Chad does whatever he wants, and Molly and the kids have to hold their tongues and smile for the camera while the house burns down.”

“Apologize to Molly,” Niles says to Fraser, his blue eyes glittering.

“I have nothing to apologize for,” she replies. “You’d have to be blind not to see what she and Leo are up to. And I didn’t come out here to make orphans out of my kids.”

“What do you have against orphans?” Niles asks his wife. Now the room seems to be spinning out of control, a molecular planet freed from its own minimalist laws of gravity.

“Nothing at all, darling.” Fraser is gaining a measure of control over herself. “It’s just not the fate I choose for our children, no matter how character-building it might seem to you.”

“I’ve never thought of it like that,” Niles says. “It was the most terrifying thing in the world. I woke up scared every day. I went to school scared, and so did my sister. It ruined her whole life. Your loving me saved my life, Fraser. My sister got hurt so bad that even Leo’s love couldn’t come close to touching her heart. So Leo ruined his life by loving someone who couldn’t be fixed. But as scared as I was, and as scared as Starla was, I don’t think that either of us were scared like Sheba and Trevor were. I didn’t have much of a daddy, and that was a bad thing. But they had one who wanted to terrify them and hunt them down through the years. I don’t know the whole story, Sheba, not by a long shot. But I know it’s a bad story, a real bad story.”

Ike stands up, his voice peremptory yet calming. “Here’s the plan that works for Betty and me. We promised Open Hand we’d deliver food to those hotels until Sunday. But we’re changing the way we do things now. Betty and I won’t be making deliveries. We’ll play cops instead. We’ll all move together, one hotel at a time. The San Francisco cops will guard this house day and night. We’ll finish this job up, and we’ll do it right. Toad, will you fix dinner tonight?”

“Be happy to.”

“We’ll eat all our meals inside with shades drawn and curtains pulled. No more swimming, no more hot tubs.”

“What about my honeymoon with Leo?” Molly asks.

“Shut up, Molly,” Ike commands.

“I got scared,” Fraser explains. “I ran my mouth.”

“For the first time in your life you sounded mean, Fraser,” Niles says, staring at his wife, who refuses to encounter his gaze. “My God, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you sounded like a goddamn orphan, the scum of the Western world.”

“That’s not fair, Niles,” Molly says, surprising everyone in the room, but especially Fraser. “She just told you she was afraid. We can all be forgiven that we’re scared.”

Sheba unexpectedly supports her, hugging her knees in a chair at the periphery of the room. “My dad is perfectly capable of killing us all,” she says. “I caused all this; I can repair all the damage. I swear I can.”

“First we’ve got a job to do,” Betty says. “We’ve got to deliver meals to these poor guys. They’ll be waiting for us.”

“I don’t feel like moving a muscle,” Sheba says. “I feel like staying in my bed, getting drunk, and watching old movies I’ve made. Maybe it’ll help me forget that my old man, who I thought was dead, is a psycho ax murderer who knows my address.”

Ike says, “Feed us good, Leo, your fanciest shit. But we need to get all this stuff between us cleared up. Sheba, you get yourself ready, girl. Tonight, every one of us in this room is going to know the whole goddamn story, from A to Z. You came into our lives like gangbusters, about twenty years ago. None of us knows where you came from or why you showed up in the house across the street from Leo. We don’t know anything about your mama except she was born to cause trouble. We’ve got to know everything. You can’t hide anything from us, because this guy has scared all of us before. Your daddy is Count Dracula and Cyclops and Frankenstein and Charles Manson to us, yet I don’t think any of us would know him if he walked into this room. I don’t know his name. I don’t even know your daddy’s name.”

Sheba surprises us by saying, “I’ve told you: neither do I, Ike. Neither does Trevor.”

“Tonight, Sheba Poe,” Ike says, “you’re coming clean. You’re going to lay it all out for us. I don’t mind dying for you. I really don’t. But I’d sure as hell like to know why.”

T
hat night, Sheba takes center stage in her scrumptious bedroom, which stretches the length of the top floor. It has a sitting area made bright with an infestation of pillows and comfortable chairs, an overdone realm dedicated to comfort. All of the women look tiny on their observation perches, except Fraser, who sits tall next to Niles. Molly and I sit ten yards apart, pretending we do not inhabit the same world.

“Trevor and I don’t know where we were born or when,” Sheba begins.

“You’ve got birth certificates?” Ike asks.

“Several,” Sheba says. “On one my name is Carolyn Abbott, and my twin brother is Charles Larson Abbott. The birthday remains the same. But we were born in St. Louis on the first birth certificate and in San Antonio on the second.”

“Your dad?” Ike asks.

“He changed his name and job every time we moved.”

“Why on earth?” Molly asks.

“Don’t have the foggiest. When you move every year, when you go from town to town, when everyone you meet is a stranger, you get confused about everything. When we lived in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Dad was called Dr. Bob Marchese. He spoke with an Italian accent and spent that year as a veterinarian whose specialty was beef cattle. In Pittsburgh, he called himself Pierre La Davide and sold Jaguars. In Stockton, California, he was an insurance salesman. I don’t even know if my real name is Sheba Poe. Trevor once claimed he found four or five fake birth certificates and three passports for my dad, using three different surnames, none of them Poe.”

“Didn’t you ask your mother questions?” Fraser asks.

“Not many. If it was strange for us, it was a nightmare for her. When we got old enough to know better, we could tell she was scared of him. Of course, by then, we knew she had every reason to be.”

Ike asks, “Did he beat her?”

“Not where it showed, but he could devise a thousand ways to torture her. Sometimes he would torture her by not giving her any money for food. We’d always lived out in the country with no one around. No radio, no television, no neighbors, no cars. My dad was the only connection we had with the outside world.”

Fraser cries, “Stop it, stop it right now! None of this adds up. This isn’t an American life you’re describing to us. No one grows up this way. Where were your grandparents, your aunts and uncles? What did they say when they came to visit?”

“Grandparents? Aunts? Uncles? If I have them, Fraser darling, they haven’t stepped forward. Don’t you think I’ve fantasized about that a million times? Don’t you think I hoped that someone would see one of my films and say, so that’s what happened to Sheba? But what if these mythical folks never heard of twins called Sheba and Trevor? What if they know us as Mary and Bill Roberts of Buffalo, New York? What if our mother just fell in love with our dad and said farewell to her family? There are a million scenarios, Fraser, and it’s your tragedy that you only think there’s one.”

“That’s not my tragedy,” Fraser says. “I have the luxury of knowing exactly who my family is and where they’ve lived for three hundred years. Stability was the most important gift of my childhood. I’m giving that same gift to my kids.”

“You don’t know where half of your children’s family comes from,” Niles reminds his wife. “They’re half mine. They’ve got hillbillies and moonshiners and mountain girls who didn’t make it past the third grade in their backgrounds. Our kids have got as many ghosts in their family tree as Sheba and Trevor do. My mama stabbed someone and so did my granny, and both her and my mama went to prison. That’s one of the few things I know for sure.”

“That sad story has nothing to do with our children,” Fraser insists.

“It’s got everything to do with our children,” he says. “It’s the central story of their whole lives; they just don’t know it yet.”

“I’ve protected them from everything about your history,” Fraser says.

“My history’ll find them,” Niles says. “’Cause that’s how history works.”

“That’s how it worked for Starla,” Fraser admits. “But I’ve protected you from that past.”

“There’s no such thing as protection from the past,” I say.

Ike puts up his hand to end this. “The subject is Sheba. It’s Trevor. It’s her dad. It’s her past we are trying to figure out now. We can talk about this other shit when we get back to Charleston.”

“The smiley face?” Molly asks Sheba. “I don’t understand why that became the theme of your dad’s presence, his evil.”

“When I was a small girl, I loved smiley faces.” Sheba shrugs. “We had no money, so I would clip smiley faces out of newspapers and magazines. I found them everywhere for a while—on cups and paper plates, on ribbons and balloons. My dad didn’t believe in hobbies, except for the piano. He was the one who taught Trevor and me to play. Otherwise, he had to be the center of our world. I came home from school one day and he had painted a red tear on every smiley face I owned. He used my mother’s fingernail polish. But by that time, everything was clear. My mother had already made plans to escape.”

Molly asks, “What was clear?”

Sheba says, “He’d already started in on me and Trevor. Especially Trevor. I always thought he liked little boys better than girls, but he had a taste for both.”

“Enough,” Fraser cries. “I can’t even pretend I want to hear the rest of this. And I think I speak for all of us.”

Silence can be measured out in shot glasses of time or it can take up space in half-gallon bottles. This one lasts to the point of making Fraser feel both isolated and defensive. Her eyes glint as hard as those of a lioness that has caught the scent of hyenas moving toward her cub. Sheba’s confession is unsettling to us all, but it is taking a horrific toll on Fraser’s famous self-composure. In the elaborate collage that our friendship has patterned itself into over the years, Fraser has taken the high ground of normalcy. You could always depend on her to be both a solid citizen and a good egg, no matter how powerful the disturbances became in the air-streams around us. It is painful to watch her world turn to quicksand.

“Niles, are you coming with me?” Fraser asks. “I’ve had enough. My imagination can provide the details.”

“I want this thing finished,” Niles says, not unkindly. “We all need to close this loophole in our lives, especially Sheba.”

“Sheba, there’s no use in dragging us through every sordid detail of your dad’s abuse of you and Trevor,” Fraser protests. “We get it already. We’re in the middle of trying to live decent lives. We don’t live in a world where kids get sexually abused by the adults in their lives. That’s alien and disgusting, and I don’t think it helps us find Trevor.”

Niles says, “In an orphanage, anything can happen to a kid, Fraser. I was butt-fucked by two men before I was ten and survived it. Me and Starla survived. That was the only thing.”

“Your sister didn’t survive anything, Niles. Your sister is human wreckage and we never know where she’s going to wash up,” Fraser spits out.

“Niles and I know what an orphanage can do to a kid’s spirit, Fraser,” Betty says. “We’ve made good lives for ourselves, but we have a long way to go.”

“Good night, everyone,” Fraser says. We hear her footsteps as they bound down the stairs with the athletic grace that remains her trademark. A door slams on the floor beneath us.

Ike asks, “You okay, Sheba?”

“No,” she answers. “This is starting to make us hate one another. So I would rather stop. I’m sorry that my dad did that to me and Trevor, but these are the facts of my life. I didn’t even know it was wrong when it was happening. Dad told me that girls and boys owed their fathers sex. It was how they paid for their upkeep. How were we to know different? Now I know it’s sick. But I didn’t know it when I was five or six.”

“Sheba?” Betty slides off the couch and kneels down next to a distraught Sheba, taking her hand. “Same thing happened to me. My mother’s boyfriend. He did me till social services moved in and got me out of there. I got to Charleston the same year as you and Trevor, same orphanage as Niles and Starla. We all helped save one another a little bit at a time. I was lost so deep inside myself I thought I’d never get out. Let’s put an end to this, sweetheart. I ever get your old man in my gunsights, I’ll send him over into the next world. So will Ike and Niles and Toad.”

Molly interrupts. “I feel the same, but I don’t think I could kill him. I just don’t think it’s in me to kill anyone.”