The Rothman Scandal (48 page)

“And
you,
” she said sneeringly. “
You
wouldn't lift
one
of your little fingers to help me—would you? Oh,
no
—that would be too much to ask. You and your damned lawn!”

“I pay the bills, don't I? I put the food on the table, don't I? I pay the bills for you and the girl.”

When they talked like this, she lost her name. She became simply “the girl.” When they argued like this, they seemed not to care whether Alex was in the house or not, or that the walls were thin and that their voices traveled. She pressed her fingers into her ears and tried to sleep against the sound of their angry voices. The next day he sarcastically brought home a carton full of housecleaning supplies. Cleaners. Bleaches. Polishes.

“Can I help you mow the grass, Daddy?”

“No … no. It has to be mowed in a certain way, in a certain pattern. It's too difficult to teach.…”

Absently, she began to pull large clumps of ragweed from her mother's abandoned perennial border.

“Did you notice that I dusted the living room and made the beds, Daddy?”

But he didn't seem to hear her.

She heard her father say, “When I agreed to marry you, Lois, and when I agreed to take on the girl, I didn't realize I was going to have to raise her myself—with no help from you!”

What did that mean—“agreed to raise the girl”?

“Why do you think I'm writing my play? To help you, to help her, to help all of us get out of this hellhole where you've made us live!”

“
I
made
you
live here? Moving out here was
your
idea, Lois—so he wouldn't try to follow you, and try to—”

“I'm talking about my
play!
”

“To hell with your play! I'm talking about—”

“All I need is the last act—the scene in the Winter Palace.”

“I'm talking about that daughter of yours. Where does she go all day? You never—”

“She goes to school!”

“This is
July
, Lois. She's been on her summer vacation since the end of May. Where's she been all day? You pay no attention to her. You want her to grow up to be a slut like—”

“Like who, Jeffrey? Like who!”

“Never mind. What's for supper?”

“Didn't you bring home a pizza or something?”

“Dammit, Lois, today is
Saturday
. Don't you even know what fucking
day
it is, much less the month? I don't go to the office on Saturdays—remember? So where the hell would I pick up a fucking pizza, for Christ's sake? Isn't there anything in this fucking house to eat?”

“I could scramble some eggs, I guess. But we have to wait for Alex.”

“Fuck her! If she can't get home in time for supper, fuck her!”

But I am home, she thought from her bedroom. You just haven't noticed me.

Now she heard the sound of her mother weeping and, as she often did when Alex's parents quarreled, Anna Karenina began to bark—sharp, anxious barks.

“Ah, don't cry,” she heard her father pleading. “Please don't cry, Lois. You know I can't stand to see you cry. Please.… Where's my pretty girl? Let me see my pretty girl, Lois. Please be my pretty girl again.”

“I want a divorce!”

Trapped in her bedroom, Alex knew that her parents mustn't know she had overhead any of this. There was only one solution. She slid open her window, lifted herself across the sill, and dropped softly onto a patch of zoysia grass below. Then she ran around to the front of the house and up the steps to the front door, and burst in, calling cheerfully, “I'm home, everybody! I'm home!”

“The Lunts!” she heard her mother cry. “The Lunts live in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin. That would be enough of an address to reach them, wouldn't it? Just Genesee Depot, Wisconsin? They're so well known, I mean! The post office will know how to find them. What if I sent the script to them there? Then, if they like it, they could take it to their producer! What do you think of that? Or what if I took the script up there personally? Wisconsin's not that far away, and I'm sure everybody in town knows their house, and I'm sure they'd like to meet the playwright who wrote the play. It would add a nice personal touch, don't you think? That's what I'll do! I'll drive up to Genesee Depot! What would you think of that? Then they could read it, we could discuss it scene by scene, and if they wanted any small dialogue changes, I'd be willing to—”

“Would you wash your hair first, before going calling on Mr. and Mrs. Lunt in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin? How long has it been since you've washed your hair? How long has it been since you've taken a bath? Look at the soles of your feet. The soles of your feet are black from walking around barefoot all day long. No wonder people call you a weirdo, no wonder they call you a Communist, walking around barefoot like a peasant—”

“I'm talking about getting my play produced!”

“Nobody's going to produce your play,” she heard him say. “It's a lousy play, Lois. Your play stinks. What did all those agents say?”

“One of them said it needed rethinking, didn't he? And didn't I rethink it—right from the top?”

“It's still a lousy play.”

“I know why you're saying that!” she cried. “It's because you don't want me to have any success! Because you're a failure! Because you weren't made a general partner! Because you were passed over in favor of a younger man. Failure!”

“You know why I was passed over? Because you wrote to Ed Meecham in the home office and asked him for a hundred thousand dollars to produce your play. That was a crazy thing to do, Lois—a really crazy thing to do behind my back.”

“
Failure!
Failure-failure-failure-failure!”

That was when she heard her father hit her, heard her mother scream, and heard her fall back awkwardly against the kitchen table.

She pressed her pillows against her ears.

Later, she awoke to the sound of music playing. She tiptoed to her bedroom door, opened it a crack, and saw a strange sight. A Strauss waltz was playing on the record-player, and they were dancing slowly about the living room, dipping, turning. Her father was wearing his tuxedo—it fitted him a little tightly, since he had probably not worn it since his high-school senior prom—and her mother was wearing a long, red, beaded strapless evening gown with a full skirt. She had washed and ironed her long light brown hair, and it swung smoothly against her back in the rhythm of the waltz. The waltz ended, and another record dropped on the turntable, and now their bodies moved together to the languorous, gliding, erotic tempo of the tango.

In the morning, she found her father sitting on the step of the breezeway. He had got his Toro lawnmower out, but had not started it up.

“Where's Mom?” she asked.

“She's gone,” he said.

“Are you going to get a divorce, Daddy?” she asked him. “I've been thinking about it, and I think perhaps you should.”

“No, it's too late for that,” he said.

“Why?”

“She's gone,” he said flatly.

“Where?”
she asked, suddenly panicked.

“It's a place called the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. Your mother's had a nervous breakdown, Alexandra.”

“How long will she be gone?”

“A few weeks, perhaps. We really don't know, at this point. They came for her early this morning.” He looked out across his lawn. “Look,” he said, almost absently, and pointed.

At first she didn't see what he was pointing at. Then, as she moved out across the grass, she saw them—many livid yellow splotches across the dark green grass. There were more wherever she looked, in ugly, angry shapes and sizes—some large, some small, some in shapes suggesting orbiting planets, others streaked like the tails of comets. There had been a dispute about a neighbor's collie, who had been prone to relieving himself on Jeffrey Lane's lawn, leaving brown spots. But it would have taken an army of dogs to create this relentless pattern of yellowed blotches on the grass. “Daddy, what happened to your lawn?” she sobbed.

He pointed again, and she saw several empty white-and-blue Clorox bottles that had been tossed into the shrubbery.

“She did this,” he said in a toneless voice. “She did this last night. I was holding her in my arms, trying to calm her. And she suddenly jumped out of bed and ran out naked into the night. And did this.”

It was then, at that precise moment, she sometimes thought, that she decided that, somehow, she had to get away from that benighted household. The decision thrilled her with its stunning simplicity, its terrifyingness. Oh, seventeen was an awful age, the worst age for a girl who had been betrayed by her mother and who had lost her father to fecklessness and despair. It was a terrible age, and also the perfect age for her to be setting her sights on something huge and bright and dangerous and indefinable and far away. One thought's impulse later, and it would have been too late.

“I was born in the wrong century,” her mother said to her once, many years later, when she had gone to visit her mother at one of the series of hospitals and sanatoriums that her mother would go into and out of for the rest of her life. This one was a particularly pretty place. It was set on a hilltop, surrounded by lawns dotted with big old shade trees, live oaks and elms, and there were many graveled walks and tanbark trails winding among the trees. The place had been designed to suggest a small New England college town, and the grounds were called its campus. Even her mother's room there was pretty, Alex had decided, though it was small and simple—a narrow bed, a comfortable chair, a chest of drawers, and a television set turned resolutely against the wall. Bright floral chintz curtains hung at the single window, and the only other decorative touches were a tall crucifix above her bed, and aquatints of Jesus and the Virgin Mary hung on either side. These were “my family,” she explained to Alex. Since giving up playwriting, Lois had become very religious and, the nurses told Alex, much of her mother's time was spent alone in her room, kneeling by her bed in prayer, though she occasionally took walks outside, pausing to sit on one or another of the wooden benches that were placed wherever there happened to be a pleasing view.

“I should have been born in the nineteenth century, in Paris,” her mother said, as they strolled, arm in arm, along one of the tanbark trails. “I should have been born into the world of Henri Bergson and Massenet, and Ibsen and Strindberg, Tchaikovsky and César Franck. Those were the sort of people who would have understood me. In the little cafés on the Left Bank, La Flore and Brasserie Lipp, or in the Latin Quarter, I would have been a beautiful bohemian, and I would have had many friends. At night, I would have joined the gypsy dancers in Montmartre, and clicked my ivory castanets with the flamencos of Andaluz. A dissolute duke would have made love to me, and praised my silky skin and Roman nose. I would have painted my eyelids with ochre and rouged my lips bright red, and have danced the night away. Then, when my play opened at Le Théâtre Français or L'Odéon—the play no one knew I was secretly writing—and the cries of
Auteur, Auteur!
rang out through the audience, I would have stepped out into the footlights of center stage, that perfect circle of light, and taken my bow, while the audience tossed roses onto the stage.” She had smiled a small, wry smile. “But instead, I was born in nineteen twenty, and let myself be trapped in a squirrel cage by the banks of the Platte River. It was the river, and all those endless rows of corn, that made me crazy.”

How had Alex spent her days that summer? Strange as it seemed, she had become a hitchhiker. She never talked much about that period in her life, probably because she didn't really understand it. On certain days she would leave the house, where there was nothing to do anyway, and walk down Old State Road 27 to where it met the four-lane, stick out her thumb, and hitch a ride to Kansas City. Why Kansas City? Simply because it was the nearest town of any size at all. It never occurred to her that there might be anything dangerous about this. Missouri was considered a safe place. No one had heard of drugs then. The Lanes' front door was never locked. Sometimes the people who picked her up were neighbors, on their way to the city to do some shopping, but just as often they were strangers. That was how she met Skipper.

“Hop in,” he said, reaching across the seat of his yellow Corvette to open the door for her. He offered his hand. “Name's Jim Purdy,” he said easily, “but call me Skipper. Everybody does.”

For a moment she thought he was the same tall blond man she had seen with her mother in Mr. Standish's store years ago, grown only a little older. He was certainly tall and blond, with wide and curious blue eyes. Then she decided that he merely bore a strong resemblance to that man who had frightened her mother so, but, just in case, she asked him.

“Do you know Lois Lane?”

“No, can't say as I do,” he said. “Should I?”

“She's a playwright in Paradise.”

“A playwright in Paradise! Boy, that sounds like a nifty job!”

“Paradise is the name of this little town,” she said. And she added, a little lamely, “She's my mother.”

“Well, I can't say as I know your mom,” he said. “I'm not from these parts. I'm just in K.C. for a two-week gig. Had the day off, and thought I'd see a bit of the countryside. But I like the sound of that—a playwright in Paradise.” And as he drove along he began to sing. “‘Hold my ha-a-a-and, I'm a playwright in Paradise.…'” He had a pleasant voice, soft and humorous. “Where you headed?”

“K.C.,” she said, though she did not usually call it that. Local etiquette dictated that it was bad form to refer to Kansas City as K.C., just as it was vulgar to call St. Louis St. Louie.

“Take you all the way,” he said. “That's where I'm headed back to. Got a gig tonight.”