After Her (9 page)

 

Chapter Ten

L
ooking now at pictures of our mother's young self, I can see she was a pretty woman, with a trim figure, slim ankles, and bouncing brunette curls. Knowing my father—a man incorrigibly drawn to beauty, with the endearing ability to locate what was beautiful in nearly every woman he met—it's not that surprising he would have struck up a conversation with her that first day they met. He was working on the city road crew, fixing a pothole just as she approached it on her old one-speed bicycle. Her glasses fell off and he picked them up. Picked them up and polished them.

She had been on her way home from her favorite place, then as now—the library. She was twenty-one years old—had never kissed a boy before—and she loved to read. For three years she'd been saving up money for college. Our dad was twenty-five, working two jobs while attending the police academy at night. Standing there on the sidewalk, holding out her glasses, he had actually started singing to her.

When he found out she was called Lillian, he made a song out of her name.

The affair would have lasted no more than a few weeks if my mother hadn't gotten pregnant. In fact, it may have been over already by the time she found out. I know she rode the bus to his house then, knocked at the door, was met by his Italian father, and introduced herself. Shy as she was, my mother had always possessed a strict sense of fairness and an unblinking eye when it came to seeing that a person did the right thing, or failed to do so.

Our father would have honored his responsibility and did. Their wedding—in church for the parents' sake, but a small ceremony, pulled off on a low budget—was set for the end of November 1963. The day after the Kennedy assassination, as it turned out. My father's mother had been gone for years by this point; his father would die of a heart attack the following spring. My grandmother on my mother's side, who'd kept JFK's photograph on her nightstand, wore black and wept through the ceremony.

“I don't know which fact about the day made her cry,” my mother told us. “Everything, most likely.”

Our mother had remained dry eyed. “I never trusted that man,” she said, referring to Kennedy, I assume, though the remark could have been construed other ways. Even before all the stories about JFK's cheating came out later, she'd known. She maintained a strong affinity for Jackie, a woman she claimed to identify with, though the two could hardly have had less in common.

With a baby on the way, the college plan was scrapped. Three months later she suffered a miscarriage.

Our parents could have split up then, but something had changed. Where before my mother dreamed of college, and my father had his eye on a big career as a city homicide detective, in their grief and shock all they could think of was another baby.

My mother enrolled in secretarial school and got a job as a typist. Our father graduated from the police academy, joining the force around the time my mother finally got pregnant again, with me. From the photographs she had of that time—one of her and my father on a cable car, and another of her in a maternity dress and him with his hand on her stomach, grinning—I figured this must have been a period my parents were actually happy together.

One of my earliest memories concerns how handsome my father looked in his uniform—the sparkling badge, shiny shoes, the hat he'd put on my head or twirl with his finger or toss in the air and retrieve without even seeming to try. Good as he looked in that uniform, though, what he always wanted was to be a plainclothes detective.

Plainclothes:
hardly the word for how my father dressed. Even in those days, when his salary was very low, he paid regular visits to a tailor to make sure everything fit just right: a black leather jacket that showed off his broad shoulders and narrow waist and hips; shoes of the softest leather; a shirt of some very good cotton, or sometimes silk. His pants were perfectly pressed (ironing, the one domestic chore he performed, other than cooking). His hair was black and shiny as my tap shoes and he cut it himself, perfectly—a gift he'd learned from his barber father.

I have no memory of my sister's birth, given that I was not yet two years old when she was born. That's when we moved to Marin County, the house on Morning Glory Court. And all the other places that made up the landscape of our childhood: Marin Joe's, where our father took us for tiramisu. That wonderful bridge—the Golden Gate—its implausibly red beams spanning the dark and churning water of San Francisco Bay. On one side, the glittering city. And on the other side, the mountain.

Always, before, it had been the city that conjured images of danger, while our side of the bridge remained a safe and sleepy haven. That summer, 1979, everything changed.

T
HE FACT THAT HE WAS
married to our mother—back when he still was—never got in the way of our father's expressing interest in other women. More than that. He didn't try that hard to conceal this, even from us. He never saw his appreciation for the opposite sex as anything to be ashamed of. That's how he was, and the rest of us should just accept it. Love him for it, even.

When we were out with our father, we were always bumping into women we'd never met before, who seemed to know our father well, or think they did.

Once, when I was walking down a street with him—heading to his office at the Civic Center—a woman had mistaken my father for Dean Martin (or claimed to anyway; that might have been her way of striking up a conversation). Oblivious to the presence of a little girl in a Brownie uniform holding his hand (or if she noticed, this didn't stop her), she'd told a long story about seeing him—meaning Dean—with Sammy and Frank one time in Las Vegas on an anniversary trip with her husband. They were divorced now, she told my father—that look in her eye I knew so well. That look in his.

He let her tell every detail of her trip to the Sands, not simply taking it in but conveying, as he always did, the impression that nobody, ever, had told him a more compelling story than this one. My father was not one to cut a woman's story short, and when it was over he asked if she was in show business herself.

“I was thinking you must be a dancer,” he said. “It's something about how you hold yourself. There's nothing more attractive in a woman than good posture.”

You had to believe him. Even when he said something that would probably sound like a line if delivered by anybody else; he had this unimpeachable sincerity about him. Our father could walk into any bar and find someone he knew, or if he didn't know them before, he would in five minutes. Men bought my father drinks and offered him cigarettes. Women flat-out adored him. Partly because he was handsome, but it was more than that. He was so unmistakably a man who loved women, which is a rarer kind of man to find than a person might think.

But there was one who occupied a different place for him than all the others, though neither Patty nor I could identify exactly what it was.

The first time I heard her name—a wail that pierced the night like the cry of a wounded animal and made my sister and me tremble in our beds—was the night our mother told our father to leave.

“Don't come back,” she called out, into the night.

He didn't.

M
ARGARET
A
NN.
A
YEAR MIGHT
have passed, after that night, in which her name was never spoken. And then it was.

It was one of our Saturdays. He'd picked us up in the Alfa he'd bought after moving out. He got the car used, from a buddy on the police force whose wife had a baby; all of a sudden a car with only two seats just wasn't practical. Not that having a couple of daughters stopped our father from taking us out in that car: he just buckled my sister and me in together in one bucket seat. We were skinny enough.

He'd taken us to the beach that day and set out bocce balls. (What other father did a thing like that? Only ours.) Now we were headed back up the highway. “Volare” had just come on the eight-track player. I was on the side next to the shift column, close enough to my father that I could smell his aftershave and play with the thick dark hair on his arms.

“I thought we'd stop by Margaret Ann's on our way home,” he said. He said her name as if she'd been around forever. No explanation needed.
Margaret Ann.

I felt something then, like what a field mouse might sense on the mountain in the moments just before a hawk dives down for him. I didn't ask “Who's Margaret Ann?” It seemed I should know.

She lived in an apartment complex on a lagoon somewhere in Corte Madera. There was a pool and a tennis court, which made me think she must be rich. She was wearing a dress that day we met her—and high-heeled shoes though it was the middle of the day, and she smelled like night-blooming jasmine.

When we got there, she had cookies on a plate, and Kool-Aid, already poured, with colored plastic bendy straws of the sort I'd always wanted us to buy, but that our mother said were a waste of money.

She was very pretty—slim, with dark hair that hung down her back in a way that the hair of our friends' mothers never did. In the car on the way over, my father had instructed us not to ask Margaret Ann if she had kids.

“It's a sore spot for her, girls,” he told us. “Margaret Ann doesn't have any children.”

She had a doll collection though, arranged in a glass case in her living room, and a music box that played the song from
Dr. Zhivago,
she told us, and a lemon tree with real lemons on it, and a little dog that looked like a combination of two breeds that never should have gotten together, with patchy fur that probably clogged up her vacuum cleaner. Patty kept that dog on her lap the whole time we were over at Margaret Ann's, naturally.

“This one's got your eyes, Tone,” Margaret Ann said, as we seated ourselves around the table, nodding in my direction. She knew without asking that our father liked three scoops of sugar in his coffee.

We played cards, and I won, though it seemed to me that Margaret Ann might not be trying. She wanted to give us manicures and brought out a little silver tray with four different colors of nail polish. I would have liked to have her put some on me, but I didn't think it would go over well with our mother.

“No nail polish,” I told Patty. She looked disappointed but did not argue.

“You girls can each pick out a doll,” she told us. We'd been studying them closely already, in the cabinet. Close enough that Patty's breath had fogged up the glass.

This time the offer was too good to resist—even for Patty, though she was not generally a doll lover. “You take your time deciding,” Margaret Ann said. “Choose whichever one you want.”

She and our father went into some other room for a while then, and I could hear music playing there, a smoky-voiced woman, singing slow. The choosing was hard and took a while. I couldn't decide between a Spanish dancer with gold shoes that came off and a shepherd girl who came with a tiny miniature sheep. Patty liked the baby, even though I tried to talk her into a different one, so we could trade doll clothes. After, we got to turn on the television and watch cartoons. We sat on a mauve-colored love seat with needlepoint pillows and watched two whole shows before they came out and my father told us it was time to go. When we left, Margaret Ann hugged us for a surprisingly long time.

In the car on the way home, our father took a deep, slow drag on his Lucky.

“What did you think of Margaret Ann?” he said.

“She's okay.”

“Not as pretty as Mom,” Patty said, though we all knew this was untrue.

“She likes you two a lot,” he said. “It probably made her a little sad seeing two great girls like you and not having her own little girl. But happy too, that you came over.”

“She's nice,” I said. The fact that this was so confused me and made me feel disloyal to our mother, who never made Kool-Aid.

“We might start seeing a lot more of her soon,” my father said. “If that sounds okay with you two.”

Patty had taken the diaper off the doll she'd picked out—taken it off, put it on, taken it off again about a hundred times in the car. This was the early days of Velcro, I think. She'd never seen it before. I was wondering what our mother was going to say about the dolls.

“Next time, maybe she can get us ice-cream sandwiches,” Patty said. “We never get those at home.”

I was right of course. Our mother spotted the dolls right off when we came in the door from our visit, even though I'd been planning to stuff them under the bed, quick. Uncharacteristically, she had been waiting on the steps for us.

“Go to your room,” she said. “I need to talk with your father.”

We weren't supposed to hear them, but we did.

“I draw the line at this, Anthony,” our mother said. “Do what you want but keep my children out of your shenanigans.”

“I need to move on with my life,” he said. “You need to do that too. I want to marry Margaret Ann.”