Borrowed Finery: A Memoir (7 page)

“I’m locked out,” I told him.

He nodded in agreement. He seemed to know that no one was home. He said, “We’ll go to my house. Are you hungry?” I said yes, though I wasn’t. He held out his hand and I took it. We walked a short distance to his house.

In the kitchen, his wife sliced a banana into a bowl. I ate it at the kitchen table, observed by their grave, friendly faces. When I’d finished the banana, I was so sleepy I could hardly hold my head up. The wife led me up a staircase to a spare bedroom, unused since their son had grown up and moved to another state to live and work. I crawled beneath the sheet in my underwear, and she drew up a quilt over me. I was nearly asleep when she whispered she had made the quilt herself.

It was warm, bright with color. My last thought was of Joseph’s coat, which I’d heard about in Sunday school in Uncle Elwood’s church.

*   *   *

Early the next morning, I walked back to my parents’ house and climbed up the outside steps to a door. It was unlocked. I opened it, at the same time calling, “Daddy!”

From one of two beds, a blanket rose into the air like a large animal getting to its four feet. Suddenly my father was holding me like a rag doll and running down the back stairs. His pajama top was unbuttoned. I glimpsed patches of pale skin as we entered the kitchen where a black maid was ironing. He seemed unaware of her presence as he whirled about looking for a chair. What he’d wanted was to get me out of the bedroom.

I knew it wasn’t my mother in the other bed. I’d seen yellow hair on the pillow.

He lighted on a chair, put me across his knees, and began to spank me.

“Mr. Fox! That isn’t right! It isn’t fair!” the black maid protested.

My father looked up at her as if surprised by her presence. I was astonished that she had defended me and lifted my head from his knee to stare at her. Years later, when I thought about her—and I thought about her often—about how much she had had to overcome in the way of an enforced and habitual discretion, how a sense of justice in her had outweighed the risk—I realized how brave she had been.

A decade after the incident, my father told me, in what he deemed to be a comical voice, that that night he had pretended to be a childless bachelor and had “brought home a girl from the party.” Then I had burst into the bedroom at a heathen hour of the morning, shouting “Daddy!”

I never discovered where my mother had spent the night. Nor did my father ask me where I had been before I opened the door to the bedroom.

*   *   *

A few days later, my father drove me to Redlands, a small town thirty-five or forty miles from Hollywood. He left me there in the care of an old woman, Mrs. Cummings. She kept house for Sophie, her enormous daughter, who ran a summer camp for girls in the Big Bear Mountains.

*   *   *

One morning before I went off to school, I had just sat down on the edge of my bed to put on my shoes when the house shuddered, tipped forward and backward, and pitched me to the floor. At that instant, Mrs. Cummings called out, her voice sounding like a cat’s cry of distress. I crawled to the front door. It had been wrenched from its hinges and lay upon the narrow wooden porch. In the middle of the street, in front of the house, smoking with clouds of dust, a deep crevice had opened. No one was out of doors. I stood up and ran to the kitchen, where I found Mrs. Cummings crouching beneath the kitchen table, looking straight ahead with a crazed glare. “Get under here,” she muttered.

We sat beneath the table, our knees touching, the closest we’d been in all the months preceding the earthquake. There was another great shake of the house; for a few seconds the walls undulated like cloth.

Gradually, as the silence deepened around us, her expression grew focused. It conveyed that there was no language to describe what had just occurred. For moments, the world’s heart had stopped.

After minutes—it could have been hours—she crept out from under the table, revealing her pink bloomers to me as the skirt of her dress tangled with her legs. Human cries began to reach us from the street. I went again to the porch. Families, solitary people, dogs, stood in front of their houses staring down at the great wound in the street from which now issued several muddy, slow-moving streams of water.

I wondered if the chameleon Mrs. Cummings had given me a week earlier had survived. The last time I had seen it, a few days before, it was pausing in front of a mousehole in the kitchen baseboard, staring at it with its right eye. When I looked back a minute later, it had vanished.

Since then, I had thought about it constantly, its sudden stillnesses, its skittering about, its tiny clawed feet on my skin, the way it turned the color of what it was placed upon. “I hope it finds something to eat,” I said to Mrs. Cummings. “It’s fine,” she replied. “Living in the cellar … eating flies.” I didn’t believe her but didn’t say so.

*   *   *

A terror of leprosy leapt into my soul. I looked under my bed every night in case there was a leper sleeping there. Leprosy was the most awful thing in the world. Tidal waves ran a close second.

*   *   *

I sat on a high stool in front of the kitchen sink, staring down at an egg I had broken to find out how its inside got inside. The orange yolk bled into the drain; a gelatinous white mass followed the yoke sluggishly. Mrs. Cummings entered the kitchen and began to reproach me for wasting an egg. I wasn’t listening. I was recalling the way I had cracked open stones on the long driveway that led up to the minister’s house on the hill. I grew weak with longing to be in the downstairs hall where we had all gathered during storms, to see old Mrs. Corning; even Auntie; most of all, Uncle Elwood.

*   *   *

Sophie was director of a camp in the mountains called Tamarack Lodge. One weekend morning in early spring—though I couldn’t tell the months apart in that country without seasons—Sophie and Jay, the man who did the maintenance work in the camp, drove to the lodge and took me along. Jay was heavy-set and looked unshaven by midmorning. When I saw him, he was always wearing a plaid shirt drawn tightly over his big belly.

The campgrounds were silent. The shuttered main house, the swimming pool emptied of water, its bottom covered with evergreen needles, a line of boarded-up cabins, and the boulder- and rock-strewn thickly treed hills that rose all around had a thrilling look of desolation. Jay and Sophie talked in low voices as they walked about, pausing in front of various buildings, their faces serious.

A decade later when I returned to California from the East, one of the first things I did was to take a bus to the village near the campgrounds. It was December and chilly, and patches of old hardened snow were on the ground. I didn’t know if the camp would still be there. I walked from the village on a narrow road until I came upon a gravel driveway that led beneath an arch with the camp’s name on it in rustic letters. I wandered around for a while. A stream, full this time of year, formed a natural barrier at one side of the camp. It tumbled and sang in the silence. A memory slid into my mind.

One summer day when I was six, I was riding in the open back of a camp truck and, egged on by the older girls, I hit a child smaller than I was. She was odd-looking. Her lips were nearly invisible and her teeth protruded. I didn’t have a reason—there never is one—except the illusion that I would thus gain favor with the others. She cried out; her hand flew to her cheek. At that very moment, Sophie, sitting in the truck’s passenger seat, glanced back at us through the dust-streaked window.

When we reached the general store where we would buy fruit and sandwiches for our picnic, Sophie led me to the bathroom at the back, sat down on a toilet seat, and placed me across her lap, all this without a word. She spanked me, and I welcomed the punishment as much as I could. I had committed a bully’s crime.

Years later, I told my father that I had returned to the camp when I was sixteen. He said, “Ah, well … people who’ve been parceled out and knocked around are always returning to the past, retracing their steps.” He spoke distantly, in a detached voice.

It was during that same exchange that he told me what my mother had said—after I’d spent a week or so in Hollywood in the house with the waterfall—which had resulted in his leaving me in old Mrs. Cummings’s care.

“She gave me an ultimatum,” he began. “She said, ‘Either
she
goes or I go.’” He shook his head ruefully. “I had no choice,” he said, in a faintly self-pitying tone of voice.

“I had only a few days to find someone to take care of you.” Then he repeated his words: “I had no choice.”

*   *   *

Along with the other younger children in the camp, I dug for gold in the bank that rose from the stream. Sophie explained that it was “fool’s gold,” a glittering pyrite, that we were unearthing. The others wandered off. I went on digging as though my life depended upon it, as though I were tunneling out of a prison.

*   *   *

One free-time afternoon, I explored the other side of the stream, crossing it where flattened stones formed a kind of watery bridge. Although I was watchful, on the lookout for mountain lions, whose roars at night I had heard, and my skin prickled at the swoosh of wings as a bird flew from one tree to another and at the scrabbling sound of a chipmunk running up a tree trunk, I persisted.

After a while, I came to a dip in the hills and, in it, a village. I walked down the middle of the only street. Nothing stirred, not even a leaf on a straggly tree next to the saloon with its swinging half-doors. There was something odd about this place. I looked up. Windows on upper floors framed blue squares of sky. Behind the church, the boardinghouses, the store, a sheriff’s office, were huge braces supporting what were only fronts.

It was so unexpected to come across it, so mysterious. When I told Sophie about it, she said it was a movie set no longer in use. Like fool’s gold, I told myself years after, so false in its promise, so real in itself.

*   *   *

Every weekday I walked several long blocks to the public school I attended in the flat, dusty little town. On my way there, I passed a large weedy lot. One morning, policemen were all over it, staring at the ground. The headless body of a child I’d known by sight had been discovered the afternoon before. Her head had been found stuffed into her book bag.

*   *   *

I learned that if I were to see my parents, I had to live away from them. The four or five times I visited them during that year I spent in Redlands, Mrs. Cummings would put me on a train to Los Angeles, placing me in the charge of a porter. Once, a friend of my father’s, Vin Lawrence, met the train. He drove directly from the station to an all-night miniature golf course. It was brightly lit up, like a small-town circus. Vin loved golf, which he called “the green mistress.”

He talked to me as if I were grown up, in a voice that sounded like soft barking. Now and then he whistled or made popping sounds with his mouth and clapped his small hands together—especially when his stroke had been good—resting the golf club he was using against one leg. He explained that my father had been unable to meet me because he had “lifted a few too many glasses,” an explanation I had heard before that wasn’t one.

He played the little course with utmost seriousness as I walked or waited beside him. He kept up a running commentary. A story about my mother held my attention. He called her “Spain.”

He and my father had searched for and found an elegant black gown for her to wear to a movie opening at Grauman’s Chinese. They didn’t know she had spent the day stuffing herself with olive oil and garlic on dark bread, food for which she had been suddenly possessed by intense longing. She arrived at the theater in time, wearing the velvet gown but stinking to high heaven. It was the first story I’d heard about her. Until then I had had only my own stories.

Another time, no one met the train. It was early evening. I sat for a while on a station bench, a small suitcase next to me. I worked out the words on a sign over a booth a few yards away.
TRAVELER’S AID
, it read.

I was a traveler and I needed aid. I went over. I don’t recall any conversation, but I do remember the outcome. The woman behind the booth gave me taxi fare, and she smiled as she put the bills in both my hands.

*   *   *

My parents moved to Malibu Beach, where they rented a house built to look like the midsection of a small ship. A deck jutted out over the sand. At the top there was a large square room, like a captain’s bridge, my father said, from which I could see the vast ocean.

I spent several weekends at the Malibu house. At a fated hour all the mornings I was there, my father gripped my resistant hands and lifted me over the foaming waves of the surf toward the dreadful green waters of the Pacific, into which he dropped me.

I sank at once, then rose, running in the water, keeping afloat in a way that every second left me in doubt about whether I would live to the next. I heard myself gasping and sputtering; it frightened me further. I knew there were miles of water-filled space below me. The only thing keeping me above it was the frenzied movement of my feet. “I’m drowning!” I’d cry. “No you aren’t!” my father called out in a hard, jocular voice from a few yards away. And I wasn’t.

*   *   *

Malibu was a beach movie palace. Actors and actresses, oiled with various preparations to keep themselves from getting sunburned, lay gleaming on the sand, or walked along the edge of the surf, as I once saw Richard Barthelmess do. On a morning, the next-door neighbors appeared, Lilyan Tashman in a startling white bathing suit, her face a polar snowfield of cold cream, and her husband, Edmund Lowe, with his black thread of mustache.

One Sunday morning, John Gilbert took me for a long walk, holding my hand and talking to me in his high, thin voice. Most weekends I was there, one of my father’s actor friends, Charles Bickford, would drop by from somewhere to sit on the beach and talk to Daddy in his deep voice.

After he had gone, Daddy said, “Actors are so dumb. You wouldn’t believe how dumb they are!”

*   *   *