Nora Jane (20 page)

“I know. Then you got on the train and went to Willits and that’s why we were born there. How many times do I have to hear
that story?”

“But do you like the house?” Ann asked. “We’ll restore it and paint it and change the landscaping. But the basic plan, the
house, how do you feel about it, Tammili?”

“Who wouldn’t want that mansion? But I don’t want to move. How are we going to get to school? How will Daddy get to work?”

“It isn’t that far. We’ll keep the other house too. In case we need it. We won’t throw it away.”

“I don’t see how we’ll get to school. We’ll have to get up at six o’clock in the morning.”

“Details,” her grandmother said. “Three months and we can have it done. Paint, new bathrooms, new kitchen. I know just the
people. I’ve been wanting to get them some work. This young contractor who’s helpful with Planned Parenthood.”

“Do you want to see the other two houses?” the real estate agent asked.

“No, we’re mad about this house. We’ll go back to my house and talk about an offer. Oh, Freddy has to see it. I forgot about
that.”

“Can we show him tonight?” Nora Jane asked. “Are the lights on?”

“Yes.”

“Why are we getting this house?” Tammili asked. “You can tell me the truth. You can trust me.”

“Would you wait a few days and let us tell you then?” her grandmother asked. “Could you trust us?”

“Okay. I guess so. But I know why. I know anyway.” She walked off from them and stood looking at the house, smirking to herself.
They think I’m so dumb. It’s because the people next door are anti-Semitic. Dad’s afraid they’ll be snotty to us or something.
He’s so protective it’s pitiful. Now Grandmother will have to spend a million dollars or something to move us all out here
so we won’t have any neighbors. It’s ridiculous. If they’re snotty to me I’ll dump the cat litter in their yard. She walked
closer to the house. Actually, it was four houses joined together to make one. A colonial house like one in some faraway country
in another time. She was drawn to it. She wanted to go back inside and pick out some rooms for herself and Lydia.

“We aren’t ever going to tell them or admit it to them,” Nora Jane said. “We made up our mind. Can you live with that, Ann?
With never letting them know there is any difference in them to you? You have to leave them the same amount of money in your
will and things like that. If we keep this from them and they find it out, the older they are when they find out the madder
they are going to be. But it’s a chance we have to take. I don’t want them to meet Sandy. I don’t want him trying that charm
on them.”

“I always knew this, Nora Jane. I didn’t know how exactly. I studied science as a girl, you know. I knew Lydia wasn’t kin
to me, but it’s never mattered one way or the other. I adore her. I would rather be her grandmother than any little girl in
the world. She’s ten times as lovable as Tammili. Tammili reminds me too much of my mother to be able to pull the strings
of my heart. Look at her, she’s probably going up there to stake out territory. That’s what Big Ann would have done. She was
a weaver when she got old, did you know that? She had a loom and made twenty or so rugs and we don’t know what she did with
them. She never gave us one of them. I think she sold them.”

“Are you sure you want to buy this house? It costs so much.”

“A sound investment. They don’t make any more beaches. It would be a good investment if the lot were empty. I might fix it
up for myself if you decide you don’t want it or Freddy doesn’t like it.”

“Oh, he’ll like it. He’ll go crazy. I know his taste. He’ll start wanting to fill it with period pieces.”

“Let’s go find him. We can send Tammili into the movies if they’re still at the Octoplex. Were they really going to three
movies?”

“Parts of three. That’s how Nieman does it, you know. If he comes to one he likes well enough to stay that one gets a review.”

O
F COURSE NIEMAN
started seeing the Harwoods’ problems as a play. It had everything. Confused passions (the great overbearing winds of the
first circle of the Inferno), uncertain parentage, innocence slaughtered, random ill. He was walking around his house listening
to Kiri Te Kanawa sing Puccini and thinking of Nora Jane’s amazing singing voice, which she almost never let anyone hear.
He was musing on the story of her childhood: a father slaughtered in a senseless war, a mother drinking herself into dementia,
the portrait of her grandfather in the robes of a supreme court justice, the grandmother in the blue house with the piano
and the phonograph records.

“Unfair, unfair, always unfair.” Nieman strode around the living room and waved his arms in the air to the music.
Vissi d’arte
, the consolations of art. There was nothing else. Struggle and death, and in the meantime, beauty. Tammili and Lydia and
Nora Jane and his best friend, Freddy, who was born to bear the suffering of anyone who came his way. He bore mine, Nieman
remembered, when my own father died within a month of his, both taking their cigarette-scarred lungs to the Beth Israel Cemetery.
We were fourteen years old but it was Freddy who became the father. It was Freddy who saw to it that our holidays were never
sad, Freddy who sent off for the folders and found the wilderness camp where we could learn the things our fathers would have
taught us. Freddy who went to Momma and made her let me go. “I won’t let him die, Miss Bela,” he told her. “I’ll see to it
personally that Nieman isn’t involved in anything that’s dangerous. His safety will be more important to me than my own.”

Four weeks later they were stuck all night in a canyon in the Sierra Nevada with half the rangers in the area looking for
them.

The phone was ringing. It was Freddy, catching Nieman up on the events of the afternoon. “They bought a mansion on the beach.
Up by Mendelin Pass. You wouldn’t believe what they bought. It looks like Gatsby’s house. Mother’s in ecstasy, as you can
imagine. She’s been trying to get me in a house she understands for twenty years. Well, on a higher note, I’m taking two days
off for this education jaunt. You want to meet us somewhere or shall we come and pick you up?”

“We all have to be in different buildings at different times. Let’s meet at Aranga’s at noon and have lunch. I’ve got to work
all night to get caught up. Is that all? They bought a house? You haven’t been home?”

“I’m going over later and see if he’s left.”

“Can I do anything to help?”

“Not yet.”

“He has no legal rights. Your name is on the birth certificate, isn’t it?”

“We don’t want him to know where they are, Nieman. Hide your treasures. You’re the one who taught me that. If he sees them
he might want them.”

“Perhaps you should confront him. Pay him off. Who is he anyway? You need more information. Call Jody and get him to put a
tail on him and do a profile. I thought you read murder mysteries.”

“That’s the best idea you’ve had. Tammili has decided we are moving to escape anti-Semitism. It’s a sore spot with her that
she can’t experience prejudice.”

“The angel. Well, I’ll meet you at noon tomorrow. Call Jody Wattes. Get more information. Don’t let your imagination run this.
Athena’s the goddess you need. Balance, knowledge, cool head.”

“See you tomorrow then.”

Sandy walked around the perimeter of Nora Jane and Freddy’s house. It was eight o’clock at night and there were lights on
in the living room and central hall but the garage was locked and no one seemed to be there. “They’ve run off because of me,”
he said out loud. “Well, I deserve that. I never sent her a penny. I guess they have a good life, her and her Jewish husband
and my kids. I wonder what they look like. She always said they might not be mine. What if they were his kids and I’d been
supporting them all these years? Well, things will change for me after this picture is released. I’ll come see them then.”
He shook his head. I’ll just go up and look around. See what kind of stuff they keep around. You can tell a lot about someone
by the things they keep around. Life never lets up on me, does it? If I get happy for fifteen minutes, something comes along
to throw me to the mat. Well, I better get back or Claudine will get worried. She’s the best thing to come down the pike for
me in years. I even like the little kid. Yeah, Zandia’s a kick. He’s got a criminal mind. And Clyda’s okay for an old lady
even if she is a nervous wreck. Yeah, Claudine’s good for me.

Sandy walked up on the front porch and listened for guard dogs, then tried the door. It opened. In their hurry, Nora Jane
and Freddy had left it unlocked. He walked into the foyer and called out, “Anybody here? I brought a message from Clyda next
door.” He walked into the living room and came face to face with a huge portrait of Tammili when she was nine years old. Her
short black hair, her intense, worried black eyes stared out at him. They were in sharp contrast to the frilly white lace
dress Nora Jane had made her wear. It was a powerful, no-nonsense face. A forbidding IQ, an analytical mind, a wide, flared
nose, the painter had captured them all. It was a portrait of a Medici.

Not very pretty, Sandy decided. She sure doesn’t look like me. The face followed him when he tried to turn away. That is not
my kid, he decided. It hardly even looks like a kid.

The painting, the empty house, the strangeness of a life he could not imagine, began to work on Sandy’s mind. If they were
mine they might not like me, he decided. They wouldn’t know anything about me. Maybe when the movie comes out I’ll send N.J.
a print and she can show it to them if she wants to. If they’re mine. That kid’s not mine. I’m out of here.

He went back out the way that he had come, wiping his prints off the door handle, locking, then unlocking the door. He walked
across the yard and climbed over the fence and let himself down into Clyda’s backyard. “Where have you been?” Claudine asked.
“Zandia’s been looking for you. I want to take him down and rent him a video. You want to go with us?”

“I used to know that woman who lives next door,” Sandy said. “I knew her in New Orleans. So what are they, rich Jews or something?”

“They run a bookstore,” Clyda answered. “I’ll go with you to the video store. I need to get out of the house myself.”

Claudine sighed. “Well, Momma, I just wanted to get Zandia off to myself for a while. I don’t like to have everyone in one
car.”

The next morning Claudine and Zandia and Sandy got into Claudine’s BMW and started driving back to L.A. “I know she got her
feelings hurt,” Claudine was saying. “But I couldn’t take any more. I don’t know how I grew up with her working on me morning,
noon, and night. It’s a wonder I survived. My analyst says it proves what a powerful personality I have that I got away from
her. What was all that shit she was telling you about Scientology?”

“She’s just lonely, baby. She’s an old lady and she’s lonely. It was nice of her to keep the kid for so long. Don’t go bad-mouthing
your mother. You should have seen the one I had. When I had one, which wasn’t long. I like your old lady. I think she looks
good for her age and she leaves you alone.”

“Well, it’s over. We did it. Let’s go home and get back to our own life. That’s what I told her. I said, Mother, I have a
life of my own, believe it or not, and I need to get back to it.” Claudine bent over the wheel, pulled out onto the eight-lane
that runs along the coast. ’At least it isn’t raining.”

A
T FIVE MINUTES TO TEN
on Monday morning Nora Jane was settling into a seat in the back of the history class. A tall man in a gray shirt came into
the room and put his books on the professor’s desk. He was overweight and soft in the face but he had intelligent eyes and
huge black-rimmed glasses and he rolled up his sleeves as he waited for the class to assemble. There were thirty or forty
students when all the seats were filled. Nora Jane got out a notebook and a pencil. She began to write. “Walls and foyer,
decorator white. Porch ceilings, French blue. Tammili and Lydia’s rooms, sunshine yellow, ask them. Go by Goyer’s Paints this
afternoon.”

“Where to begin to talk about the history of the world? How to begin to sort out the threads that led to the Golden Age of
Greece and the first historian, Thucydides? Agriculture, the domestication of animals, the wheel, pots to store food, ways
to carry water, the idea that man has a soul. Where does history begin? Is history a concept of the brain? Does time move
in one direction? What is a Zeitgeist? What is an inventor? Is he only a sort of point man, the natural next step created
by the force or need of many brains, or is he a lone individual stumbling onto a good idea? What is an idea? Who drilled the
first well? Was it a pipe in the ground or a boy or girl sucking moisture from the earth with a straw or reed? Tell me the
difference in a hat, a roof, and an umbrella.

“Water, food, shelter, keeping the young alive. Are these the things man needs? When there is an earthquake in San Francisco,
what are the first things the survivors do? You do not run into the living room to save the video recorder or the Nikonos.
You run to save the babies….” The professor’s voice was deep and soothing. Nora Jane got chills listening to him talk. She
was thrilled to be here in this class with her books beside her on the floor. If only Sandy doesn’t go over to their school
today and kidnap them. They wouldn’t go with him. The school wouldn’t let them go. I have the mobile phone. I could go out
in the hall and call the school. I will in a minute. I have to. I can’t stand it.

“Our hold on the earth is tenuous at best,” the voice was saying. “It doesn’t seem so if you are an English-speaking citizen
of the United States of America and don’t live in a ghetto. We wake up with our automobiles and jet helicopters and computers
and video cameras and houses full of every imaginable sort of thing and we know we have gotten rid of the lions and tigers
and bears and wolves and bacteria. Unfortunately we have replaced them with the AIDS virus and antibiotic-resistant tuberculoses,
by threats to the very air we breathe and polluted lakes and rivers. Also, the same comets that perhaps destroyed the dinosaurs
are aiming at us in the sky. …”