Backstab (6 page)

I think my favorite Burt story was something that happened two years ago. That was after Burt's Bar became fashionable, and all the local celebrities and politicians started hanging around his bar. Burt had a whole paragraph in
USA Today
as one of the nation's top ten bars. The
Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post
, and
People
magazine wrote about him. The BBC interviewed him for a series called
All-American Pubs.

It didn't seem as though Burt changed a bit once he became famous. Until he told me he'd bought a hot tub. I didn't believe him. So he took me home to his plain brick two-family flat. We walked up that dark old stairway, past the
brown three-piece living room suite he bought at the Fair-Mercantile furniture store thirty years ago, through the kitchen with the South Side National Bank calendar, and out to the sunporch.

The sunporch had the usual South Side plants: red geraniums and tall, skinny mother-in-law tongues growing in red Folgers coffee cans, scraggly philodendrons, and a fat new Boston fern that was obviously a Mother's Day present from one of the kids. But instead of the usual sagging slipcovered couches or wicker furniture you find on most city sunporches, there was this giant redwood hot tub. There was a silver wine bucket on a stand next to it, and a thick cushiony rug on the floor.

I couldn't get over it. Somehow, that sybaritic scene didn't go with Burt's stern Scrubby Dutch upbringing. I couldn't imagine Burt and Dolores bobbing around in the steaming tub, sipping white wine. I told him so.

“There's a lot you can't imagine about us,” he said, and winked. “You young folks are so stodgy. Think you invented sex. She's still the only woman for me after almost fifty years, and we still have fun, more fun now that the kids have moved out. Besides, the hot tub makes my feet feel good after a day at the bar.”

I loved that story. I thought about Dolores, alone now after fifty-one years. I started to cry, but decided to save it for later. Right now, I had work to do. I owed him a good good-bye.

Besides, if I wrote about Burt, I wouldn't have
to think about the other murder. The one that took place when I was nine. I wouldn't have to remember all that blood, dripping, dripping, dripping.

I
guess I should tell you what half the city knows anyway. It's the reason I started to pass out at Burt's Bar. Burt wasn't the first murder victim I've seen. My mother murdered my father, then shot herself. This happened twenty-eight years ago. I was nine.

It was a big scandal because my parents were supposed to be such fine, upstanding church people. They lived in a suburb called Crestwood, in a split-level house with a carport and, in the front yard, a concrete statue of the Virgin Mary. Dad was a pillar of our parish church, and Mom did a lot of charity work.

The media acted as if Harriet had offed Ozzie. If you were living in St. Louis then, it was all over the newspapers and TV, and was talked about on KMOX radio for almost a week. There was a famous photo of me at their graveside, wearing white gloves and a little blue coat and
staring into space. To most people, it is the picture of heartbreak.

If anyone had asked me, I would have told them my parents weren't quite the perfect young churchgoing couple the press painted them to be. Oh, they were religious all right. At least, they spent a lot of time at church. But they both drank too much. Nobody caught them at it, because they were weekend boozers. This brand of drunk can carry on for a lot longer than your ordinary get-smashed-every-night type. Mom and Dad got through the week with a few beers before dinner, and a few drinks when they went out in the evening. But I remember them with a beer or whiskey sour in their hands from Friday night through Sunday, when the hangover hit them like a truck full of bricks. They went to bed early on Sunday night. By the time Monday rolled around, Dad was sitting soberly in his office, and Mom was busily doing good.

They also fought all the time, but they were smart enough to keep the fights at home. They had loud, screaming battles where Mom broke things and Dad cursed and Mom cried and I hid in my room. I was an only child, so I had a room to myself. My mother did it up in pink and ruffles, because I was a girl. Actually, I hated pink AND ruffles. I also hated being a girl.

Everyone thought Mom and Dad were madly in love. In public, she called him Babydoll and he couldn't keep his hands off her. He was always patting her ass and petting her arm and squeezing her shoulders. Wives used to ask their
husbands, “Why don't you pay attention to me like that?”

The trouble was Dad couldn't keep his hands off any woman. He played around. I think that's probably what drove her over the edge—his fooling around, plus the drinking. I figured out about his lady friends at age five, when Dee, the divorced redhead (well, orangehead, actually, but the color looked sexy on her) who lived down the street started inviting me to come over and play at her house. Even at age five, I suspected that ladies who wore gold ankle bracelets and that much perfume weren't interested in little girls who asked a lot of questions. Dee bought me a beautiful purple tea set made of real china and let me play with it in her basement rec room, which was a cool turquoise and gray. After I played awhile, pouring tap water into the pot and then into the cups and then serving several pretend friends, Dad would come over to Dee's and take me home. One day I came up out of the rec room early to get more tea water and saw him kissing Dee in a way he never kissed Mom, and I knew Dee didn't give me the tea set because she liked me. I went back downstairs to the rec room and broke every piece in the tea set.

There were other women besides Dee, and they all lived in the neighborhood. All but Dee were married. I usually could tell when one was having an affair with Dad, because she would play up to me, telling me how smart or cute I was, or offering to fix my hair. It made me real
suspicious about women. Men, too. I didn't like how Dad used me for cover with his ladies. I never said anything to Mom, because we didn't get along. I was tall and skinny, and she thought I was ugly and told me so. Often. I felt kind of sorry for her. I thought she might have been happier if she'd had my cousin Linda for a daughter. Linda had blond hair that went into soft natural curls. She was graceful and not too tall. She took ballet lessons and wore pretty dresses and never got them dirty. She put doll dresses on kittens. She joined the Girl Scouts and earned so many merit badges she hardly had room to sew them all on her sash. Linda was two years older than me, but I used to fantasize that maybe our moms got us mixed up on a visit and my mom took the wrong girl home. Mom used to dress me in Linda's castoff clothes, but I never looked as good in them as Linda did.

I never knew how much Mom knew about Dad's lady friends. Mom was angry a lot. Maybe she was hungover or maybe she suspected what Dad was up to with the women. One story will give you an idea of what she was like, and I'll tell it because it kinda has a happy ending. I don't talk about Mom much. I'm not looking for sympathy. It's over. Anyway, I was nine and she'd been trying to brush my hair for church and it didn't look the way she wanted and she screamed, “You're hopeless, I can't do a thing with you,” and she hit me in the face with the hairbrush, which left a red mark. I got out of
going to church that Sunday. That was the good part. I liked church even less than I liked Mom.

It was shortly after the hairbrush incident that she found Dad in a clinch with Marcy, her best friend, at a New Year's party. Mom and Dad had a huge, screaming fight right in front of thirty people at the party. Those people all told the police about it after the shooting. Mom and Dad had a bunch of fights at home after that. Every time Mom saw Dad, she'd scream insults at him. Once, she called him a lousy lay. I didn't know what it meant then, but it made him mad. He never walked out, though. They stayed together, fighting and drinking. I hid out in my room and tried to stay out of their way.

The next weekend after the party, Marcy's husband Tom put their house up for sale, and the weekend after that they were gone. I heard they moved to California. I thought things would calm down.

The Monday after Marcy and Tom left town, I came home from school and found the kitchen door was open. Mom always kept the side entrance to the house locked. Dad's car was in the driveway. That was strange, too. He rarely came home before five o'clock. The house seemed unnaturally quiet, except for this odd drip, drip sound, like a leaking faucet. There was no one downstairs. I went upstairs. The drip sound came from their bedroom. It was blood dripping off the light fixture. Dad's, I think. He was shot with the old shotgun he kept in the upstairs hall closet, and part of his head was gone. Some of it
was on the wall over the bed, by the crucifix with the Palm Sunday palm stuck in it.

I couldn't figure out what happened. Later, the police said that Mom shot Dad, then turned the gun on herself. There was a huge hole in her chest, so it looked like she was wearing a red blouse and lying on a red bedspread, although both were really white. She and Dad looked gray green. People in funeral parlors aren't that color. I saw there was blood all over, but I never got a good look at things because I started screaming and I ran out of the house and Mrs. Marshall, the nosy neighbor lady, caught me as I ran into the street. I think she called the police.

Suicide is a mortal sin in the Catholic Church, and so is murder, so there was a debate in the parish about whether my mother could be buried in consecrated ground with two mortal sins on her soul. But the Church didn't want any more scandal, especially after the
Life
magazine story called “The Pillar Cracks: Wife-Swapping at a Suburban Church.” I didn't think Dad was swapping. He just borrowed the wives for a while, and some of them, like Dee the Divorcee, weren't even Catholic. He didn't swap Mom with anybody.

Finally, the priest said no one could know what was in Mom's mind at the time of her death and it was possible she made a valid Act of Contrition at the last moment and was genuinely sorry, so the Church let her be buried next to Dad. I wondered what Mom and Dad thought about that, lying side by side. I used to wonder if
their ghosts were screaming at each other when I heard the wind howl on cold nights. Or maybe, now that he couldn't chase other women, they were happy together.

After the double funeral, I went to live with my grandparents in the city. My father was an orphan. These were my mother's parents. Mom was kind of ashamed of them, because they were fat and poor and never got past the fourth grade, and my mother had a diploma from a secretarial college. Grandma and Grandpa had a confectionery on the South Side near Arsenal Street. They sold cold cuts and comic books and penny candy and things people ran out of at the last minute like Campbell's tomato soup for a meat loaf recipe, or milk and bread. They worked six days a week, twelve hours a day and didn't make much money. Everyone felt sorry for me because I went from living in this nice new suburban split-level in Crestwood to a rundown apartment over an old store in the city.

I couldn't tell anyone, but I was happier than I'd ever been in my life. My grandparents liked me. Grandma didn't think I was ugly. She and Grandpa called me Angel. They never hit me, even once. Grandpa bought me glasses and that made me more graceful. I could see where I was going and I quit falling over things. Grandma got new clothes just for me, and I quit wearing Cousin Linda's old things. I started putting on weight and didn't look so gawky, because Grandma liked to fix food for me—pancakes for breakfast, pork chops and fried chicken and
gravy for dinner. She made biscuits and peach cobbler and blackberry pie….

“Are you going to eat, or just stare into space?” asked Lyle, calling me back to the present. Lyle Donnegan is the man I love and wish I could live with. I called Lyle after I finished my story on Burt. He liked Burt, so I knew he'd feel bad. He did, too.

“The poor bastard,” Lyle said. “That's awful, baby. He was a real gentleman. Are you okay? Come on over.”

I could see him there in his wing chair, sipping single-malt Scotch. Women take one look at him and get this dreamy look in their eyes. Guys don't get it. They can't figure out what we see in Lyle. Part of it is the way he moves, as if he knows what he's doing. Part of it is his beautiful clothes. I especially like his navy blazer, made for him by Kilgore, French and Stanbury, the London tailor that sounds like an American law firm. The rest is that Lyle is genuinely interested when he's talking to you, and few women can resist that kind of attention.

He was waiting for me at the door of his house in the Central West End. He had warmed up some tenderloin in the oven. He has this special recipe. It includes fresh ground pepper, but no salt, because he believes salting meat before you cook it makes it tough. He slow-cooks the meat in the oven and it's incredibly tender. I hate kitchens, so I'm a sucker for a man who can cook. Lyle sat me down at his dining room table, and made sure I ate one of his tenderloin sandwiches
on rye with hot English mustard before we talked about Burt.

“You and my grandmother have one thing in common,” I told him. “You both feed me when I'm upset.”

“We try to, but you're not eating. You keep taking that sandwich apart and putting it back together. Are you thinking about Burt?”

“No, I was thinking about my parents' deaths, and how much better my life was after they were gone.”

A lesser man would have looked shocked, but Lyle let me talk. I picked up the sandwich, and took a bite to please him. Then I said, “My grandparents had that confectionery, I told you that. I had to help out in the store, but I liked that. After school, a lot of neighborhood kids would come in to buy penny candy. I was a big shot because I got to hand them the paper bag filled with ten cents' worth of Mary Janes, or red licorice whips or candy buttons on paper strips. I also read the comic books first when they came into the shop, before anyone else saw them. I met a lot of interesting people, too.”

I could see the customers coming into my grandparents' store. I could hear the bell on the door that announced their entrance: