Stress (18 page)

And thinking of it made her want a drink more than ever.

Strongly enough anyhow that she had to force herself to stay in the room, actually grip the angle irons of the bed frame so tightly they left creases in her palms, rather than desert her daughter yet again to go looking for a bar or a drugstore that would sell her a drink after hours.

Until Opal, her thirst had not seemed out of the ordinary. Her childhood had been one glittering string of parties at the mansion in Grosse Pointe, pink champagne sparkling in bowl-shaped glasses held by attenuated women in fringed dresses, ice cubes colliding in brown bourbon in thick squat containers clutched in the fists of thick squat former machinists whose two hundred-dollar suits bagged at the knees like two-dollar overalls. For them the great drafty drawing room was merely an extension of the Detroit Athletic Club, and before that the Pontchartrain Bar, where whiskey came two glasses to the quarter and a nickel beer was a nickel beer, and if the coin that paid for it smelled slightly of crankcase oil, it just slid faster down the bar top. Yet there was gold, or what passed for it, among this base metal. Caryn’s mother still spoke of the time Charles Lindbergh knelt before her little girl to converse with her on her level, but Caryn’s only memory of the incident was of the aviator’s pale face and bottomless black eyes, like finger-holes in white flour. The year was 1932, after the kidnapping, and when she learned that, it helped to explain the fear she had felt at the time that those twin empty wells were enticing her to dive in, there to stay forever swaddled in moist warm darkness, safe from abductors and experience.

Her coming out, observed against red-white-and-blue bunting and orange-and-yellow Rosie the Riveter posters, had ended in a geyser of gin and vodka at someone else’s house and the disturbing but mildly thrilling suspicion, while inspecting the ruins of her frothy green Dior gown the next morning, that somewhere in the alcoholic night she had sacrificed some part of her virginity. Liquor made it all right, absolving her of responsibility and fogging the details just enough to make the experience seem a deliciously wicked dream.

Then came peacetime, available men, and a return to business as usual, factories redirecting their military aggression toward the war against thrift: Make this year’s model longer and lower, add fins and chrome, make last year’s must-have look as far out of step as sleeve garters. The auto shows got bigger and shinier, the spokesmodels’ swimsuits got smaller; the hospitality rooms became suites, and the service elevators in the Penobscot Building groaned beneath cases of Old Grand-Dad and Hiram’s. Caryn decorated the arms of out-of-town dealers undecided whether to commit showroom space to Chevy’s dependable Bel-Air or the sexy Buick Riviera. The West Coasters drank gimlets and daiquiries, the Texans bourbon and branch. Martinis and Manhattans, naturally, for the New Yorkers. Scotch and soda for our friends from D.C.—any brand, as long as it was Glen-something, and came accompanied by a complimentary two-year lease on an Eldorado to ensure all government cars continued to bear the company emblem. Caryn, photographed in Carl’s ChopHouse with Palm Beach Cadillac merchants and John Foster Dulles, quickly became multilingual in the study of mixology. Her own preferred choice in those days was a Brandy Alexander. When this was reported in the
Ford Times
, single women and housewives throughout Detroit abandoned their Carling Black Labels for the chocolated drink, guaranteed to knock them on their fannies while their brains were still convinced they were sipping Ovaltine.

She met Ted Ogden at a Monte Carlo Night held at the Fox Theater to raise money for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, where he cut a simple figure in a perfectly tailored blue suit against all the formal gowns and cummerbunds. He impressed her even more when she ran into him again a few weeks later at the Caucus Club. She was sober then, and pleasantly surprised to learn he looked just as good to her as he had through a haze of Dom Perignon. Soon afterward he took her to see
My Fair Lady
when it played the Fisher, and escorted her backstage to meet Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. “I Could Have Danced All Night” was the first number performed at their wedding reception the following June. Europe for the honeymoon, and an audience with the young queen and a blessing from the Pope—events that would have brought apoplexy to Caryn’s adoptive great-great-grandfather Abner I, anti-royalist and staunch Freemason that he was. Back home, an embarrassment averted when Ted, a success in his own business, chose to accept graciously Crownover Coaches’ offer of a board seat rather than assert his independence by refusing. Three mornings a week he dutifully studied the documents placed before him on the long walnut table in Papa Harlan’s old office, serving as the boardroom pending completion of the company’s new building in Southfield, voted on each measure or abstained, then excused himself to see to the administration of his investment firm. Wary at first, the other directors, even the aggressive Gashawks, eventually came to respect the newcomer for the soundness of his decisions, and in particular for the charm with which he handled the odd irate attendee at stock-holders’ meetings. As years passed and Abner IV continued to demonstrate his indifference toward the affairs of the business whose profits had enabled him to acquire part ownership of his beloved Detroit Tigers, there were whispers in corner offices that Ted Ogden might succeed him in the chairmanship; but Caryn, who knew better than anyone how swiftly and savagely her brother could act whenever he sensed a serious threat to his security, downplayed the rumors wherever possible, maintaining quite truthfully that her husband was far more interested in the company he had founded on nothing but a bachelor’s degree in business and a five-thousand-dollar savings bond than in assuming the inherited directorship of an institution.

But the pressure of such diplomatic chores took their toll on a debutante who had scarcely been brought up to deal with the demands of a corporation in flux. Frothy drinks photographed well for the Sunday supplements, but when it came to winding down from industrial and family politics, whiskey sours worked better in practice. Still, the escalation didn’t alarm her. Liquor was recreation, as useful in its way as golf and the opera for working out the kinks of the week past and replenishing the stores of energy for the one upcoming. She had never thought to question this philosophy. Of those few mornings when old Harlan had not risen with the dawn and left for the office, his daughter couldn’t remember one that didn’t begin with a servant carrying a glass of beer up to his bedroom—a habit which, minus the domestic help, went back to his youth on the loading dock—and it was a rare sunset that didn’t find an extra gleam in Mama Cornelia’s eye courtesy of the voluminous wine cellars beneath the Grosse Pointe mansion. Hangovers dominated the household schedule in the forenoon.

Caryn marveled at Ted’s self-control the first time he declined a second glass of wine at dinner, but did not interpret his abstinence as a reflection on her own bibulous habits. He claimed a low capacity, which drew her sympathy, and it was certainly true that the mathematical nature of his work and the financial welfare of his clients required an early day and a clear head. When it developed that his temperance was customary, she began to feel self-conscious. For a time she drank only moderately. However, her intake remained greater than his. Soon she had drifted back to her old level.

It occurred to her now that she had never seen Ted intoxicated. No doubt she had been aware of this phenomenon all along without acknowledging it. Certainly the awareness had made her shrewish when her own drinking reached a particular intensity. A gay inebriate in youth, she faced the fact now that she had in middle age become a belligerent drunk, taunting her husband in public for the willpower she herself lacked. It shamed her, for Ted had never once lectured her.

Twice she had quit cold. The first time was on the severe advice of her obstetrician. Visited so late in life with the miracle of approaching maternity, she had been so deathly afraid it would be snatched from her that whatever symptoms of withdrawal she experienced seemed minimal.

The second time lasted just a month. That had been two years ago, when in an alcoholic fog she had stepped into the stairwell on the second story of her own house thinking she was entering her bathroom and cracked a vertebra when she fell. Three weeks in traction followed by a visit on crutches to the basement of the Elks Lodge and her first AA meeting.

She hadn’t gone back. She felt she could put up with the harsh fluorescent lighting and the supremely bad coffee served in Styrofoam cups—really, if they were serious about substituting group dependency for chemical craving, they could at least
try
to compete with the rosy atmosphere of a corner bar—but when the first speaker got up to announce how successful his life had become in the six years he’d been on the wagon, and went on to extoll the virtues of his appliance chain over those of his nearest competitor, Caryn drew the conclusion that when you finally managed to sober some people up, they proved to have been assholes to begin with. She took a cab home and put away her first glassful while the front door was still closing.

She thought now she would give it another try. Opal would recover (she refused to contemplate otherwise), she was coming into a time of life when the example of her parents was the matrix for how she would conduct herself in adulthood, and anyway the appliance salesman
must
have finished speaking by now She would bring her own Thermos of coffee if that was what it took.

As if to confirm this fresh determination, the little girl in the hospital bed sighed in her sleep, a contented sound. She appeared to be breathing more evenly. Letting go of her daughter’s hand for the first time since she’d entered the room, Caryn plucked a Kleenex out of a box on the nightstand and used it to sponge a fleck of spittle that had appeared in the corner of Opal’s slightly open mouth. As she did so, she caught sight of her watch. 2:03. She realized she hadn’t called Cornelia to tell her what had happened. Her mother would be awake, reading one of the paperback romances she devoured like chocolates; addictions of one kind or another ran in the family, and the old lady seemed to have outlived the need for sleep.

“Mommy will be right back, baby.” She kissed Opal’s forehead—it felt cooler; or was that wishful thinking?—and went out to ask the nurse at the station for directions to the nearest telephone.

When she returned, nine minutes later, the station was deserted. The nurse was running toward the little girl’s room.

“D
AY-FOR-NIGHT’S A CROCK OF SHIT,”
C
ORKY SAID.

“Don’t you agree, Paul?”

Kubicek, who found himself falling into the director’s habit of addressing people by name every time he spoke to them, said, “Corky, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

They were relaxing in the back of Corky’s motor home, which the sergeant calculated had cost more to furnish than his own house. It contained an eight-foot sofa upholstered in lavender suede, rose-colored carpeting wall to wall, a burgundy leather Eames chair and ottoman, a bar
and
a soda fountain, and brushed aluminum paneling with framed original posters advertising
Touch of Evil
,
Torn Curtain
,
Gun Crazy
, and something Italian. The director had spent the entire afternoon stretched out on the sofa in yellow Tweety Bird socks with his ankles crossed, balancing a tall glass of carrot juice or somesuch shit on his stomach, talking about movies Kubicek hadn’t seen whose titles he couldn’t pronounce and telling stories that demonstrated what a straight-arrow the actor who played Eddie Haskell on
Leave It to Beaver
really was when the cameras weren’t turning—waiting, apparently, for night to fall. Meanwhile the cast and crew were sitting around outside and in motor homes jerking off, and nobody was getting rich as fast as the Teamsters, who started collecting triple time at five o’clock.

Kubicek, who couldn’t figure out why Corky had chosen him to kill the time with, spent most of it crossing from the Eames to the refrigerator behind the bar where the imported beer was kept and back, with the occasional trip to the chemical toilet behind a folding screen decorated with full-size cutouts of James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and some frog actor with a wide-brimmed hat and a cigarette drooling out of the corner of his mouth. The beer tasted like swamp water and sitting in the backward-tilting chair made him queasy, as if he were waiting for a fucking Apollo launch. The conversation bored him shitless. He’d had more fun staking out a much-robbed Sinclair station with “Chili” Carbone, whose favorite dish, in addition to giving him his nickname, had seen to it that he’d changed partners three times in one year, each time following a period of enforced proximity in close quarters.

It didn’t help that his muscles burned when he got up, and cramped painfully when he sat still longer than ten minutes. The time was past when he could close a day of intense physical activity with an all-night session in some noisy bar, sleep for two hours, and report for roll call the next morning clear-eyed, bathed, shaved, and ready for another day of the same. Now, days after a little workout, he felt as if an army of angry niggers had marched all over him with cleats. He opened a bottle with a lion and something in Swedish on the label, poured some of its contents down his throat, and waited for the numbness to crawl into his muscles. Rolling the aftertaste around his mouth, he wondered how those Swedes got the lion to piss into such a narrow neck.

“Day-for-night,” Corky repeated, obviously impatient with the sergeant’s ignorance. “You know, blue lights and filters. Dean Martin, for chrissake, in
Rough Night in
fucking
Jericho
and isn’t it amazing how we can read ‘It Pays to Increase Your Word Power’ inside a stable at midnight? Phony as hell.”

“I like Dean Martin westerns. You don’t miss anything trying to figure out what you just saw. You see
Doc
? I couldn’t tell Wyatt Earp from Doc Holliday, and that Dunaway broad’s a skag.”