Missing Mom (12 page)

“What is a ‘career’ journalist?”

“A very serious, very dedicated journalist. An ambitious young woman on her way out of Chautauqua Falls, using the
Beacon
as a springboard.”

Szalla had to be teasing. The
Chautauqua Valley Beacon
was as springy as cooked spaghetti.

We laughed together. Szalla sat across from me, sprawled in one of the leather chairs. Where his wrinkled shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, a spidery mass of graying hairs sprang out. There were matching hairs on the backs of his big knuckles. His large splayed feet were bare in the worn old moccasins, as white as the insides of my thighs.

Awkwardly I began: “Please tell me about your background, Mr. Szalla? You were born in—”

Szalla lifted a forefinger as if in warning. “‘Wally.’”

“Oh, yes. ‘W-Wally.’”

I fumbled my notebook, staring at the questions I’d diligently prepared. Pages of questions! The palms of my hands were moist, I couldn’t believe that I was nervous. Wally Szalla was the least discomforting of men, nothing like the pushy arrogant guys I was always meeting, or who were always meeting me. Guys with names like Dale, Brock, Kevin, Kyle. Guys with names nothing like Wally.

“Born in Chautauqua Falls, W-Wally, in—”

“Haven’t you done your homework, Nikki? I bet you have.”

“Well, but—”

“You’re checking, are you? To see if what I tell you tallies with what you already know?”

“Mr. Szalla, no! I just—only—”

Szalla was laughing at me, but in a kindly way. The only person who ever laughed at me like this, as if my fumbling and blunders were precious to her, was Mom.

I was feeling mildly high, as if it wasn’t Diet Coke I was drinking in Wally Szalla’s bachelor pad but something much stronger.

As Szalla settled in to being interviewed, sipping at his bottle of Sierra Lite, he became professional, serious. He spoke slowly and lucidly into the tape recorder. He was reminding me of my most admired university professors, who’d spoken not in breathy snatches of words like the majority of people but in carefully thought-out and articulate paragraphs. Szalla said, “I’ve been misquoted, Nikki, many times in the past. Forgive me if I overcompensate now.”

I was embarrassed to realize that I’d underestimated Szalla. No one should be judged by the figure he cuts with an adolescent child.

Of course it was so, I’d tracked down a few facts about Wally Szalla. I knew that, though he looked years older, he was only forty-three. (Only! Forty-three, to me, seemed ancient. About as old as twenty-eight would seem to Szalla’s son.) Wally Szalla hadn’t been an outstanding student at Chautauqua Falls High but he’d been president of the class of 1976 and a popular football player; and beneath his smiling yearbook photo was the quotation
I contradict myself
?
Very well, I contradict myself
. After graduating he’d lived in Washington, D.C., for a year, working as an intern for his uncle Joseph Szalla, a Democratic U.S. congressman from our district; he’d taken courses at George Washington University, transferred to the State University of New York at Buffalo, and graduated in 1981 with a degree in business administration and communication arts. In 1982, he’d married his college sweetheart, a TriDelt who’d been Homecoming Queen. The couple had three children of whom the youngest, Troy, was born in 1985. The Szallas of Chautauqua Falls were well-to-do businessmen and civic leaders, mostly aligned with the Democratic party: Szalla’s father Otto had served as mayor of the city for two terms, one of Szalla’s cousins was a state senator, and Szalla himself now served on the County Board of Supervisors, an elected position. In interviews Szalla spoke of himself as an “investor in my home territory”—“an investor in hometown dreams”—and so he had a history of quirky projects: refurbishing the old, baroque Cameo Theater in downtown Chautauqua Falls, remaking an immense bankrupt bowling alley out on Route 33 into an indoor ice rink, introducing a summer jazz festival in Riverside Park, campaigning to bring a film festival to the Chautauqua Valley region. (The Cameo Theater had since been remodeled into a CineMax with eight screens. The ice rink was closed. The jazz festival was “tentatively successful.” The film festival organizers had decided they preferred the more scenic Adirondack Mountains.)

Two years before, Szalla had purchased a local radio station, WCHF AM-FM, with the intention of “revamping” it. When I’d been in high school, WCHF AM had been the station to tune in to for pop-rock and country-and-western, nonstop except for the interruption of noisy ads, like most AM stations. I’d stopped listening to it years ago, like everyone I knew. Then suddenly Wally Szalla had stepped in to save the station from shutting down, and to rejuvenate it with NPR programming, local news several times a day, and, amid the ubiquitous rock music, interludes of classical jazz, “opera highlights,” American popular music. There was a morning call-in program that dealt with women’s issues called “No Holds Barred,” hosted by a female personality who’d obviously learned a few tips from Oprah Winfrey; there was even, several nights a week from 10
P
.
M
. to midnight, Wally Szalla’s own D.J. program, “Night Train.” Mostly Szalla played jazz CDs, tapes, and old 78s from his private collection, chatting in the way of a mellow old friend who takes for granted that you have time for him and if you don’t, if you switch him off, that’s cool, too. When I happened to be home at that hour, alone—which I tried not to be—I’d gotten into the habit of switching on “Night Train” to hear the D.J.’s rambling voice, cozy and intimate as a voice in my ear. Yet, to tell the truth, I hadn’t even been aware of the D.J.’s name, I listened to the program so haphazardly. Only when my editor at the
Beacon
pushed this assignment onto me, to interview Szalla, did I realize that I knew the sound of the man’s radio voice.

I knew the kind of jazz Szalla favored, to my untrained and impatient ear so unemphatic and repetitive it was about as exciting as listening to crickets. I did like brassy-bright Dixieland I could bop around to, to make my body think I might be dancing in a club, effervescent and sexy as hell and whoever I was dancing with didn’t actually need to
exist
.

Szalla was a skilled interview subject. If he didn’t care to answer an awkward question (“Mr. Szalla, it’s said that WCHF AM-FM is ‘struggling to survive’—is that so?”) he simply answered another question in its place, smiling and upbeat: “Serious radio programming in the United States is a constant challenge to maintain, it isn’t just TV we compete with but…” (Of course, I wasn’t the kind of aggressive reporter who persisted in unwanted questions. The reader-friendly
Beacon
was hardly the
New York Times
.) When I asked Szalla the only pointedly political question of the interview, a question one of my fellow reporters had told me to ask him, about the possible “conflict of interest” in his serving on the County Board of Supervisors when a number of his relatives and associates were involved in developing land in the Chautauqua Valley, Szalla frowned thoughtfully, drained the remainder of his Sierra Lite, and said, fixing his warmly brown, kindly eyes on my face: “As I’ve said, Nikki, I see myself as an investor in ‘home dreams.’ In the Valley, where I was born. Where my great-grandparents settled, in 1899. The role of local business to plow back money into the local economy, hire locally and demonstrate faith in the future of this beautiful region that has suffered economically in recent years like much of upstate New York.” Szalla spoke with a sincere sort of hesitancy as if these words were utterly new to him. I felt the thrill of his old-fashioned idealism. And I liked it that, as if he couldn’t help himself, my interview subject (only my third, since joining the
Beacon
staff) was staring at my lacy red top with the 1930s shoulder pads, my very short very tight white cord skirt that had ridden up to mid-thigh, and my long slender legs that a second-to-last lover had described as skinny.

To conclude the interview, which had already gone beyond the spare forty minutes Szalla’s protective secretary had granted the
Beacon
, I asked Szalla to describe his personality, and he responded with boyish enthusiasm, as if this was the very question he’d been awaiting. “As a boy, I was fascinated by machines. The way voices came out of the radio, and voices and images out of the TV, and all there was inside was wires, mostly! I loved to dismantle household things like vacuum cleaners, clocks, radios, phonographs, even a TV, once: sometimes I could put the things back together and nobody knew what I’d been up to, but sometimes not. See, a machine is a puzzle. Most people, normal people I’d suppose you might say, just look at it from the outside, as its function. But to someone like me, the machine is also a riddle: how does it work? why does it work? who put it together in this way, and is this the most efficient way? Is there something ‘hidden’ about it? Machines people take for granted are constantly being re-imagined, re-styled. Look at computers, that were once massive. Any machine that’s being manufactured, you can be sure that it’s already being re-styled in someone’s imagination. As a little boy I could spend hours poking around in my mother’s appliances, I remember once I dismantled most of the refrigerator when she was out, it was just the most thrilling thing I’d done yet in my life.”

“How old were you?”

“Maybe four.”

“Four! That doesn’t seem possible.”

“Trouble is, I couldn’t put the damned thing back together again. I guess looking back at it, I might’ve been slightly autistic, or afflicted with this Asperger’s syndrome, I think it’s called, where a kid, almost always a boy, becomes fixated on something, it could be baseball scores, it could be counting how many airplanes fly overhead, it could be taking machines apart and seeing their insides…I grew out of it, eventually. I really don’t have any talent for engineering or mechanics. So now I’m a radio man, you could say that I’m inside the radio myself—one of those mysterious voices. I tape most of my shows so I can listen to myself ‘over the radio.’ And sometimes I perspire from just thinking as if my brain is all cogs and wheels, a kind of crazy machine except it’s also a flesh-and-blood brain…” Szalla broke off, embarrassed. He’d been thinking aloud as if he had forgotten the tape cassette, and me; as if he’d forgotten his surroundings altogether.

I heard myself say, with a bright smile, “Well! It must be wonderful, Mr. Szalla, to pursue your dream as an adult.” Even as I spoke these innocuous words they sounded phony and trite, insincere and tossed-together as my conspicuous clothes which Clare was in the habit of calling (to my face as well as behind my back) “Nikki’s costumes.” Except Wally Szalla smiled happily and reached over, as if impulsively, to squeeze my hand. “Nikki, yes! That is what my life is about: pursuing my dreams in the hope that they will be others’ dreams, too.”

His fingers closing over mine were warm. And strong.

The interview ended. I was shaky from the strain but I was very happy. As I prepared to leave his apartment Wally Szalla hovered beside me smiling awkwardly and tamping down his unruly hair and finally he cleared his throat to ask if I was free that evening for dinner?

“No,” I said. “I’m not free. But after I make a brief call on my cell phone, I will be.”

Hours later we were still together. Still talking, or anyway Wally Szalla was still talking. He was gripping my hand on the tabletop between us and telling me that our meeting had been the strangest of his life.

I asked him why.

He said, staring at me, “Nikki, I think you know.”

2.

Ridiculous! Wally Szalla wasn’t my type.

Not a man at whom, in the street, I’d have glanced at twice.

Too old! Overweight, and losing his hair. No more glamour than Dad’s scruffy old moccasins.

Another woman’s husband. And a father of three.

“Clare, I am not ‘seeing’ a married man, who told you such a thing! I happened to interview Wally Szalla who’s the new owner of WCHF AM-FM, that’s all. We’ve become friends, you know I have lots of friends and this one happens to be separated from his wife and we’ve discovered that we have some interests in common. That’s all.”

Clare spoke. At some length. I listened, until my face began to burn as if my sister had slapped me and my hand gripping the receiver began to shake. Even then, I was exceedingly polite. In the sweetest and most cordial voice you could imagine I said: “Wally Szalla is a remarkable man but there is nothing between us except friendship and in any case Wally is separated, there is nothing remotely ‘wrong’ in seeing him. You can tell Mom, too, in case she’s wondering.”

Nikki? Can I see you tonight? I know it’s late and we didn’t plan for tonight but I didn’t go with Isabel and the children to visit my in-laws at Lake Placid after all and on the way back from the station I began to feel very lonely for you, Nikki, and I’m wondering if you are feeling lonely, too?

He brought flowers—“Corny, but can’t help it.” He brought CDs, blues classics by Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith. He brought aromatic New Age candles for me to light. He brought champagne. He brought delicious pre-roasted chickens from The Food Shoppe and he brought a clutch of those miniature books called “inspirational”:
Joy of Everyday Life, 101 Reasons to Love, The Zen Path of Enlightenment: Poems of Solitude and Wisdom
. Gravely he read aloud to me, holding a miniature book close to his face, like a character actor in a sweet, corny Hollywood film of the 1950s: William Bendix, Ernest Borgnine. “‘The song of the yellow oriole/echoes in the forest./Warm sun, gentle breeze,/willows green along the shore./The ox has no place to turn in the brambles.’”

“The
ox
?”

Wally frowned. “It’s a Zen concept, I think. Searching for the ‘ox’ is a spiritual quest. Or the ox is the physical body, to be overcome.”

“But why an
ox
?”

“Nikki, don’t be so literal. It doesn’t have to be an ox, I suppose, it could be, well—a bear, a deer. An elephant.”