Family Night (25 page)

Margaret asked Lewis, “Did you ever know my mother? My mother, Sandra Rice?”

“Sandra? Sandra. The name itself rings a buzzer. The name in itself is delightful, endearing, but I don’t believe I had the pleasure.”

Margaret said, “Of course you knew her. She was Richard’s first wife, Elizabeth’s acquaintance. My mother. You must have met her.”

“I probably did know her. Rest assured I didn’t really
know
her.”

“You didn’t have the pleasure?” Cam said. The men chuckled in three distinct notes, blending into a rude chord.

Margaret didn’t like this.

“Sandra was the one who died in Granville Sanatorium. Now do you picture her?”

Lewis looked hard at Margaret. “Of course, my dear. I was avoiding the subject. It was terrible, you know, they
snuffed
her. A feather pillow to end her misery. It was ghastly. Out of pity we can do devil’s work and call it charity.”

Margaret was standing up. She couldn’t find her voice and whispered, “Pillow? What pillow? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“Mercy killing, no kidding?” Tracy said.

“Sit down, honey,” Lewis told her.

“She had cancer. This pillow idea—are you mad?” Margaret said.

“Just a metaphor, my dear,” Lewis told Margaret. “I didn’t mean she was actually asphyxiated. Your father running around with Elizabeth must have killed her off a lot faster. You know, Sandra was a poor invalid unable to do her duty. Then, here comes Elizabeth with her love calisthenics, her feats of exceptional endurance.”

“Elizabeth?” Tracy asked. “She was athletic in the sack?”

Margaret looked at Cam to see if he was going to put up with this. Cam was scraping a knife over the faded gold rim on a china saucer; it was coming away like a piece of old cellophane. He didn’t have an opinion.

Lewis apologized to Margaret once more. He told
her she shouldn’t cling to morbid thoughts. He reached across the table and took her hand. He forced Margaret to meet his eyes. She tried not to return his look, even as she studied his onyx pupils; his eyes looked hard as glass, as if she couldn’t scratch them with a pin. She tugged her fingers, but he wouldn’t release her hand. He started to recite some lines of poetry—

Lewis seemed pleased with the little stanza, its immensity. He pulled it off. The other men were impressed. It was an eye-opener for Tracy. Verse might be a new angle for him. Margaret tried to look at Cam, but Lewis kept her; she was tethered by his gaze. She felt her spine curl and tighten, an imperceptible response, yet Lewis seemed to know it. Margaret licked her finger and touched it to the red ellipses along her nicked ankle. “Do you have Band-Aids?” she asked Lewis. Her voice was flat.

There were some first-aid supplies in the bathroom cabinet. She went in there, glad to be out of hearing. In the narrow bathroom there was a skylight window. The skylight could be propped open by pushing a lever. When Margaret pushed the lever to open the window, a good ration of soot studded with the shiny husks of flies fell down upon her. She saw the veil of insects and black granules in her hair and was repulsed; she had to
grip the sink and take her breath carefully. In a few moments Tracy came in to find her. She was trying to wash the floor with a triangle of sponge. “Cam will kill me if he sees this mess.”

“What is that all over you?” Tracy said.

“It’s filth from out of nowhere! Crap from the stratosphere.”

“It’s hard going for Cam,” Tracy said.

“Cam had to come out here to see it was true,” Margaret said. Lewis was coldhearted. He displayed such a chilly amorality, or maybe he was just crazy. How long could Cam hold up in front of them? Margaret thought of a sword swallower. A sword sinks in inch by inch, past the vocal cords, into the gullet. When is it deep enough to impress an audience? Deep enough to meet one’s own test of strength? Tracy would remind her that the blade collapses; it’s a simple trick.

When they returned to the table, it was empty. They found Cam and Lewis in the bedroom. Lewis pulled a shirt from a drawer, an old-fashioned shirt without a collar. The shirt was yellowed but Margaret could see it was finely tailored, its front bib still crisp, the pleats sharp, each tuck an even line. “We’re the same size,” Lewis said, “and I have so many. I thought I could give Cameron—Cam, something as a memento of our extraordinary meeting tonight.”

Lewis’s bedroom was dark and narrow. The wardrobe looked frightening, like a locker in a mausoleum. He jerked some clothes loose from tight layers on the shelves; he struggled with overburdened drawers. He said he had often kept the shirts that he modeled; they
were a bonus. It was the suits he had to return. They wouldn’t have suits altered for the models; the suits were pinned and tucked with tape, and then he had to return them. He tried to walk away in overcoats; sometimes it worked out.

Cam didn’t seem comfortable with the idea of a shirt. These shirts were thirty or forty years old! The room smelled of the pressed linens and Pima cottons; it was an ancient scorched smell coupled with a trace of liniment. There was something ugly about the transaction. Cam didn’t want to wear his father’s clothes. Lewis sensed this, and he went to the wardrobe and pulled a jacket from a wooden hanger.

“Cashmere,” he told Cam.

Everyone reached to touch the sleeve. The fabric was soft, like the short velvety hide of a hamster.

“Very nice,” Tracy said.

“Try it,” Lewis told him.

“I’d like to,” Tracy said.

The jacket looked good on Tracy, the lapels too wide, but the overall effect was pleasing. Lewis said the jacket had been made for him in London. It was a gift years ago, and look how it had held up.

“Do you want it?” Lewis asked Cam.

“No, I don’t want the jacket.”

“I understand,” Lewis said.

Again, they went back to the table. The food was cold. Margaret tried to stab a cherry tomato in her salad, but the plastic bowl wobbled each time she poked the tiny sphere. Cam kept drinking the wine, but Tracy declined a refill.

Lewis was telling Cam, yes, he had loved his mother, Elizabeth. He thought so anyway. He
would
have loved her, but he wasn’t the Master of Love. Love was a dictator, he told them. He explained how he suffered if he saw an attractive woman. “Just the turn of an ankle, the flare of the calf can be like a hot poker to the eye! I wasn’t responsible for utter reflex,” Lewis said. He told them he suffered for months, for years at a time.

“A leg man,” Tracy said. “What about you, Cam?”

“Tracy, shut up,” Margaret said. As the men talked, Margaret studied the photographs. It was less a gallery documenting someone’s vanity than a tribute to youth itself. All the pictures were more than thirty years old; there was nothing that documented that Lewis continued to exist after a certain decade. Margaret noticed that not all the images were professional. There were some small snapshots, society clippings, but it all stopped at the same time, somewhere in the mid-forties. Then she saw it. The little catboat with Elizabeth. Margaret got up from the table and went over to the sideboard. The candelabra flickered, increasing the yellow tones of the photographs. “This is Elizabeth on Lake Michigan, am I right?”

“That’s correct, I liked that one,” Lewis said. “I kept it as a record. You’ll notice that she’s not alone up there; there are several ladies.”

Margaret looked at the faces of the women in different snapshots. They were all pretty, but Elizabeth was the most appealing. Not one of them added up to Elizabeth’s perfection. Elizabeth reigned. She would love to know that, Margaret thought.

“She has her own copy of this snapshot, I saw it,” Margaret told him, but she suddenly felt she might have betrayed her stepmother to tell him that.

Then Cam shouted to her just as she, herself, saw it. Her hair caught fire, the flame lifted over her head, pulling the blond strands upward. The burning hair condensed, crackled at her ear. Cam was beside her, tugging the rope of flame and slapping her cheek until the fire was out. She screamed and Laurence woke up. They went into the kitchen, and Cam shoved her head under the tap. He rinsed her hair, separating the blackened debris from the rest. She hadn’t lost too much hair, but her cheek was sore and they couldn’t tell if she was burned or if it was red where Cam had slapped her to put the fire out.

“You don’t stand over candles with shoulder-length hair,” Tracy was scolding her.

“As if I need this.”

“You’re okay. It will grow back.”

“It stinks,” she said. She recognized the smell of charred protein from the time she watched a farmer poke a branding iron against a steer’s flank. It was the same when a farrier placed a red-hot horseshoe against a hoof to measure it; the smell is everlasting.

Her hair was frizzy, curled at the temple. “We’ll trim it,” Tracy said. They stood in the bright kitchenette, relieved to be out of the dark parlor. Cam was looking at a stack of mail on the kitchen counter. Government checks of some kind. Social Security checks, disability, and various military pension checks. There were almost twenty envelopes.

“They’ve passed on,” Lewis told Cam.

“These checks passed?” Cam asked, trying to follow what Lewis was saying.

“These folks are deceased. They didn’t have offspring, no one waiting in the wings. It’s a small existence really.”

“You mean you can cash these checks?” Cam was grinning.

“For a fee. I can have them cashed for a fee, let’s put it that way.”

“You’re telling me, you cash these dead people’s checks?”

“If not me, someone else.”

Margaret said, “I heard of that. It’s a racket, but it’s a federal thing, you know. You better be careful. We have people in the joint who stole mail trucks, that’s U.S. government. They get sent up immediately, no lengthy evaluations. They go to those federal prisons. It happens fast. They send them up without a lot of pre-trial.”

Cam was still grinning. “You mean to tell me you’re a crook as well as a queer shit?”

Lewis shrugged, but he didn’t lose his elegant posture; he was the same, he didn’t stiffen. He wasn’t someone to flinch. Margaret believed he might have felt disappointed in his own carelessness. He’d permitted his son to discover a detail that could have been easily concealed. He could have put those checks somewhere out of sight. He wasn’t thrown off balance by what had happened in the last several minutes, not by her hair catching fire, nor by their discovery of these checks. Lewis was asking them if they wanted some Rémy-Martin.

“Absolutely,” Cam said. He tapped the envelopes against the counter’s edge, evening their corners, leaving them in a neat stack.

“Sure,” Tracy said, accepting the glass of brandy from Lewis. “A little nightcap for old times’ sake.
To our ghosts from the past
.” Tracy lifted his glass. He swallowed the brandy, keeping his face level. Margaret didn’t like the toast, but she admired the way Tracy drank his brandy. Another man might toss his head back or make a grimace. Tracy held his glass steady for another golden dribble of the Rémy-Martin.

“So you’re doing quite well for yourself,” Cam said to Lewis.

“It’s hit-and-miss. I have to deal with scourge, but I have a few loyal compatriots.”

“Fellow crooks,” Cam said.

“You’re coming through loud and clear, son. I don’t blame you. One day you’ll reach my age and the first part falls away like a rotten log. Then make your accusations,” Lewis said.

Cam told him he wasn’t accusing him. “I’m just a bystander,” Cam said. “Your stump can fall off for all I know.”

It was beginning to degenerate. The light was scratchy on the walls, the candles sputtered. Laurence was sitting on Margaret’s lap after waking when Margaret’s hair caught fire. “We should take him back to the motel,” she said. She saw the excuse was welcomed by all. They stood up to leave. The cashmere jacket was on a chair, and she brushed it with her hip as she passed. The coat slipped onto the floor. Tracy picked the jacket up and
patted it admiringly before putting it over the chair. The ancient garment disturbed Margaret, its decay steamed and pressed, shaped and brushed.

They took the elevator down to the street. “Hello. Goodbye. That’s it,” Cam was saying. He must have had too much to drink. He kept repeating variations of the same words. “Hel-law. Good-bye. Thaz sit.” Tracy had his arm hooked around Cam’s neck and he knocked his hip into Cam. Cam pushed him off.

The motel’s long, carpeted hall caught the soles of their shoes. Margaret watched them stumble like a three-legged beast. Laurence was preoccupied, eating an ice cream sandwich from a freezer case they saw out on the sidewalk, and he followed a few paces back. Margaret had to take the key from Cam to unlock the door. Inside, Cam went right over to the bourbon and lifted it high, eye level, as he poured his drink. He was filling a Dixie cup, since the glasses were dirtied with cigarette butts. It was ridiculous. Then she saw it was a way to come back. Like dogs after a long swim—they walk onto dry land and shake themselves. They shudder, their hide twirls loose with water, their hair stands out straight like a wheel of fur, ridding one environment for the other.

She helped Laurence brush his teeth. “Open,” she said, “like a dinosaur.”

“A crocodile,” Laurence said, “you mean like a crocodile.” She saw how it starts early, the dogmatic search for the specifics, the insistence on correct details. She
could hear Tracy’s voice, Cam’s laughter. She couldn’t make out the words; they sounded like sudsy rivers running into one another, a crosscurrent, alternating force and submission.

When she finished brushing the boy’s teeth, she started to brush her own teeth. Tracy came into the bathroom. He grabbed the toothbrush from her hand and tried to insert it into her mouth; he tried to brush her teeth.

“Stop it,” she told him when he poked her, scraping the bristles against her lip. Then he held her jaw with one hand and pressed his weight against her so she was pinned against the sink. He maneuvered the toothbrush in and out of her mouth; he brushed her teeth. She saw herself in the mirror, the small web of burned hair at her temple. She was laughing, but he was hurting her. She started choking on the minty foam. Still, Tracy circled the brush over her teeth. Cam was at the bathroom door, but he wasn’t going to help her out. Then Tracy was finished and he stepped backward. She kicked him in the shin; her toes cracked, but he didn’t flinch. She was furious; she looked into the mirror to check the abrasion on her lip.