The Chaperone (44 page)

BOOK: The Chaperone

10.02Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

Her physician, who looked like he might have been born around the time she’d turned fifty, asked if she had longevity in her bloodlines. “Did your mother or father live a long time? You’re still in very good health.”

“I don’t know,” Cora said. “I was adopted.”

“Hmm.” He was writing in her chart. “Well, whoever they were, they gave you good genes. You’re ticking like a watch.”

She was seventy-nine when Senator Frank Hodge introduced a bill in the Kansas Senate that would require the Health Department to furnish information on contraception upon request to any Kansas resident. Hodge wasn’t a particular favorite of Cora’s, as he’d made it clear he was more interested in trimming the welfare rolls of dependent children than safeguarding the health and dignity of women, but whatever his motivation, she thought the bill was a good one, and she threw in her support, financial and otherwise. She offered to testify on the extent of grief she’d witnessed at Kindness House and the rampant and damaging use of Lysol as a prophylactic. However, her testimony was never sought. She thought at first that she perhaps wasn’t the best face for the campaign, as a white-haired widow of means. As it turned out, during the hearings, no women testified at all.

She did what she could. She met with representatives who’d known Alan, and she wrote letters, and she asked old friends to do the same. Many flatly refused, including women who were younger than she was. It was 1965, and birth control was still a radical cause. A spokesman for the Catholic Bishop of Kansas told the papers that the bill was essentially “state-financed adultery, state-financed promiscuity, and state-financed venereal disease.” Raymond warned Cora that she might be wasting her efforts, as the bill was unlikely to pass. The
Wichita Eagle
threw in its support, but the
Advance Register
threatened to print the name of every senator who voted for it, and warned that careers would be ruined. In the end, the bill did pass, though without the governor’s signature, and only after the supporters agreed to change the wording of the bill to only include married citizens. The unmarried of Kansas would have to wait another year before a federal law mandated that health departments provide information on birth control to every adult, married or not.

Raymond bought her a cake—Cora’s favorite, white with lemon icing—delivering it with both his congratulations and his apologies: he said he hadn’t meant to be discouraging—he really thought the bill wouldn’t pass. Greta and her husband came over to celebrate. Joseph got out some champagne, and Cora found herself the subject of a toast. She was embarrassed, and a little tired, but she did her best to soak up the goodwill. “How nice to have cake and a party without having to get any older,” she managed, thinking how good it was to see the faces of people she loved around her, smiling at her little joke.

Later that night, when they were standing by the sink and brushing their teeth, just the two of them in the house, Joseph nudged her arm. “You can take a rest now,” he said. “You can retire.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re one to talk,” she mumbled, leaning over to spit. Joseph had retired from Boeing years ago, but he spent much of his time going around and fixing people’s cars. People were always coming by or leaving notes, saying they’d heard he could help. “I’m like you,” she said. “I like to stay busy.”

He cocked his head, watching her in the mirror. “It’s more than that. You do not do needlepoint.”

She was quiet. She thought of the cemetery in McPherson, how light the rain had been the last time she drove out to pull weeds and put out flowers for the Kaufmanns. The farm was gone now, the property divided up into small tracts of land for little houses with built-in garages. The Kaufmann children must have sold.

“You’re right.” She put her toothbrush back in the holder. “I suppose I want to do some good in the world.”

“You have.” He looked at her in the mirror, unblinking, until she understood.

Maybe he knew. Maybe he didn’t. But he gave her that before he died. A month later, he was out in front of the house, looking at the engine of someone’s car, when a blood vessel burst in his brain. It was the middle of the day on their quiet street, and no one saw him fall. Cora was inside, taking a nap. The little neighbor boy, maybe seven years old, saw him on the pavement, already blue, and ran home crying to his young mother, who was crying herself by the time she knocked on the front door, waking Cora from her dreams.

At this funeral,
too, people were kind to her. It was a hard thing to lose a brother, they said, even a brother she didn’t grow up with, whom she’d only met as an adult. Family was family, and they were sorry for her loss. But how amazing they had found each other in the first place, people said, and Cora knew they were trying to say something good because she looked the way she felt—scared, aching. But yes, she said, it was amazing that they’d found each other. Such wonderful luck, even so late in life, and she was grateful for the years they’d had. Greta held her hand, and Howard and Earle each stood up to say good things about their uncle.

But she held on to Raymond the longest, reaching over his walker, her face pressed into his hunched shoulder, his dark lapel smooth against her cheek. She closed her eyes like a child hiding in plain sight, just the two of them knowing and known.

Later,
when Cora became something of a marvel to people, the eighty-five- and then ninety-year-old woman with the sharp mind and the steady gait who still got up in the morning and made her own coffee, who still read the paper every day, she would try to explain that there was a downside to all her genetic good fortune, her indefatigable health. The problem, she sometimes explained, was that she outlived so many people she loved. At ninety-three, she was healthy enough to fly with Greta down to Houston for Howard’s funeral, to reach out with steady hands and touch his grandchild’s—her great-grandchild’s—soft cheek. Howard died at seventy-six, an old man with a fortunate life. From the eulogy, it was clear the minister saw his death as sad, but hardly tragic. And yet it still seemed so wrong, so backward, for Cora to live to see her funny and lively son’s casket, to stand beside Earle, her remaining, gray-haired son—scared that she would outlive him, too.

Oh, but there were great rewards for inhabiting the world for so long. She was aware of that, too. She could remember riding in the Kaufmanns’ wagon, a black horse trotting in front, yet she’d seen the topsides of clouds from the window of an airplane. No generation before hers had seen the earth from so far above. She’d lived for years without indoor plumbing, without feeling too deprived, and some ninety years later, she let Greta help her into a Jacuzzi tub at a hotel in Houston. She got to vote for Della’s grandson when he ran for the state senate. And though she would outlive Raymond, and reel from that loss as well, he was still alive in 1970, and the two of them were watching the news together when the first gay pride marches in New York and Los Angeles were reported; after the news cut to a commercial, the two of them stared at each other in disbelief, their TV dinners going cold.

And she got to be with those she loved for so long. Cora remembered Greta as a little girl hiding under a table, and she remembered her as a young mother, and now Greta herself had two grandchildren. Little Donna, whom Earle had once bounced on his knee, turned into the adolescent who told her parents and her great-aunt Cora to quit calling people “colored,” and who once stood up in church to ask, with a trembling voice, a room full of white Presbyterians to support the sit-in at Dockum Drugs. Greta’s youngest, Alan, who grew up to be as handsome as his namesake, became a science teacher in Derby with two boys of his own.

And to Cora’s surprise, one day in 1982, Howard’s son Walt really did come to Wichita to talk to Cora about the summer she spent in New York as a chaperone to Louise Brooks. By then, Walt was in his fifties, a portly college professor of film studies, and Cora was living in the retirement home not far from Greta’s new house. Walt brought with him a little box he called a VCR, and he plugged it into the television in Cora’s room, explaining he’d brought along a few Louise Brooks movies—he had them right in his bag. They could watch one if she was feeling up to it. Yes, he said, right on her television. And if she got tired, he could just push a button, the film would stop, and she could resume it again whenever she liked. Yes, he agreed, yes. It really was a marvelous little machine.

He wanted to talk with her about Louise. He was writing a book about Hollywood’s Golden Age, he said, and anything she could remember about Louise Brooks, any particular story, would help. Cora told him what she could, avoiding what she’d promised not to tell anyone. She said nothing of Mr. Flowers, and she said nothing of how she’d found Louise in 1942, drunk and broke and raging at her mother in her attic room. Cora wouldn’t betray her, even now. But as it turned out, Walt already knew about Mr. Flowers and Edward Vincent and about Louise’s miserable return home during the war. He knew everything. He’d read her memoir, he said.

He was apologetic for Cora’s confusion. Sorry, he said. Did she not know Louise Brooks had just published a book? Yes, he said. A book. Just last year.
Lulu in Hollywood
. It got quite a bit of press, all good. Yes, he said, she was still alive. She was seventy-six, living in Rochester. He heard she’d stopped drinking, but still, her health wasn’t good. Emphysema. But her book was sterling. It wasn’t just a memoir, but a collection of essays, some about her own life, some about the film industry and the famous people she’d known. She’d gotten rave reviews from
Esquire
and the
New York Times
. Everyone was so impressed with the writing, the sharp observations and wit.

“I’ll get you a copy,” he told Cora. “You would enjoy it, I’m sure.”

Cora thanked him. She couldn’t read anymore, but Greta read to her when she came to visit, pausing like Walt’s amazing little VCR every time Cora drifted off. And really, she was just so happy to know that this book existed, that Louise, hardly down for the count, had bloomed again. And at seventy-six! Perhaps she’d needed that long to discover that she was more than youth and beauty, more than her mother’s ambitions, more than circumstance. Her beloved Schopenhauer was perhaps right: old age did drop the masks.

Greta was never able
to read Louise’s book to her. Not long after her grandson’s visit, Cora suffered a stroke, and she spent her last days in bed, moving in and out of memory, the past and the present as one. She couldn’t see anything but gray and shadows, but she knew that Greta and Earle were there with her, her children, one on each side.

“Aunt Cora?” Greta said. “Can you hear me? Cora?”

She couldn’t talk, couldn’t form the words, but she could hear—she could hear her name. And the low rumbling of a train. She was not in her room, but at a hospital, lying on a bed with scratchy sheets, and there were beeps and unfamiliar voices. And more and more, she heard the train. There were tracks near the hospital, perhaps, and every time a train rumbled by, she could feel a slight vibration, not enough to rattle the window, but just enough for her to recall the feeling of being on board, rocked gently but relentlessly forward.

“Yes,” she said. “I hear.”

An unfamiliar woman’s voice, friendly. “What’s your name?” A hand on her shoulder. “Can you tell me your name?”

She knew it. She was Cora, of course. She was every Cora she’d ever been: Cora X, Cora Kaufmann, Cora Carlisle. She was an orphan on a roof, a lucky girl on a train, a dearly loved daughter by chance. She was a blushing bride of seventeen, a sad and stoic wife, a loving mother, an embittered chaperone, and a daughter pushed away. She was a lover and a lewd cohabitator, a liar and a cherished friend, an aunt and a kindly grandmother, a champion of the fallen, and a late-in-coming fighter for reason over fear. Even in those final hours, quiet and rocking, arriving and departing, she knew who she was.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m indebted to the people who helped me do research for this book. Al Jenkins was kind enough to answer my questions about cars in 1922. Tracy Floreani helped me with the Italian spoken by the woman in the drugstore. Eric Cale and Jami Frazier Tracy of the Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum helped me imagine the interior of Wichita’s Union Station. Kathryn Olden, a longtime resident of Wichita and wonderful conversationalist, met with me to talk about her memories. Alice Lieberman put me in touch with Ann Kuckelman Cobb, who answered questions about the hazards of childbirth in the early 1900’s.

Here are some of the books and documents I read while writing this book: