by Karen Black
“You want to know what was really funny. None of us could believe that all the money to buy that rig came from just plunking our money down on the kitchen table, week after week, year after year. He might not have spoken much English. For that matter, he didn’t speak very good Spanish, but Pops had a head on his shoulders, he was tough and he really knew that business from the bottom up. Once he was on his own he started making real money, and that was when our lives changed.
“One Sunday after dinner, Pops told Mom and Isabel to forget the dishes and the boys to forget the ball game, and we all got in the car and drove across Denver and out into split level suburban dreamland. He sprang it on us like he did the truck. We were driving down a street with nice new houses and big green lawns, when all of a sudden he pulls into a driveway, gets us all out, takes a key out of his pocket, opens the front door and invites us all in. We stood in the middle of this great big living room with wall-to-wall carpet and overstuffed furniture and that new house smell, and he hands Mom the key. She burst into tears. He put his big, thick arm around her and said in Spanish, ‘Don’t cry, Mamacita. If you don’t like this house, I sell it and get one you do.’ But even I knew, and I was only ten, that Mom wasn’t crying about liking or not liking the house.
“Pops made us all sit down. We felt funny about sitting in chairs that had never been sat in before. Then he made the longest speech he ever made. He told us we were going to move up in the world. Mom wasn’t going to work anymore, and we were going to have the best of everything. We’d go to high-class schools with high-class kids, because we were going to make something of ourselves. A lot of good that did Isabel. She was already through high school, just living at home and working. Carlos was through in June. He was strong, like Pops, and taller and had a football scholarship to USC. Pedro had one more year to go and Luis two. Chico was just starting. It didn’t make much sense…just an idea Pops had in his head, a dream…but when Pops had an idea, he had an idea.”
Corky paused. “Can you really stand listening to all of this?” Her voice broke slightly.
“Go on,” I said, “Don’t break the thread.”
“Well, it’s no use even trying to tell what all this did to us. Isabel just up and married a guy from Fort Morgan she met at the stock show and dated a couple of times when he came to town…basically a cowboy. Started having kids, so that’s her life…raising kids, from the time she was a little kid. Carlos was soon long gone. He starred at USC and made it into the pros.”
“Oh, yeah,” I broke in, “he’s that Gonzales, inside linebacker for the Pats.”
“Was. His knees finally had it last year, and they waived him. Has a couple of Taco Bell franchises around Boston. Pedro managed to make it through his last year, but he wouldn’t go to college and he wouldn’t work for Pops. Played a little semi-pro ball but now he pumps gas at a truck stop in Pueblo. Luis and Chico just couldn’t handle it. Luis hitched a ride to somewhere one day, no one knows where. Chico was a bad scene…drugs…dead.”
She paused, downing the last of her now lukewarm water, and breathed heavily a couple of times.
“Corky, if it’s….”
“No,” she said bitterly, but with a touch of spunk. “We’re just coming to the good part–me. Because, you know what? As far as Pops and his dream were concerned, it worked. It was me Pops really did it for. I was his little princess. He always thought I was so cute and so smart; you know how fathers can be with baby daughters. He wanted me to be everything those Cherry Creek Anglo kids were, and more…speech, clothes, style, activities, parties, skiing, riding…the works. You know what? I did it. Right from the start I had a couple of real nice teachers. That helped, and by the time I was through junior high I was everybody’s cute little Chicano friend, and I was into everything. Besides which, something I didn’t fully realize at first, I had a couple of big things going for me.” Suddenly she let out a nervous laugh, blushed furiously and put her hands over her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“What way?” She kept her hands over her mouth, and shook her head. “Come on,” I prompted, “you had a couple of things going for you.”
“I was going to say….” She struggled to suppress another giggle.
“Go on.” By this time she was crimson.
“By the time I was fourteen I was really stacked.”
I laughed. “If you’d just kept your cool, I’m so square, I wouldn’t have gotten it, but I’ve already seen the evidence.”
“Now don’t tease me. The other thing is, I can honestly say, like Pops, I’ve got guts.”
“I’ve already figured that out too. It sounds like a winning combination…but one that could get a young girl in a lot of trouble.”
“Yep,” Corky agreed, shaking her head up and down, “but you don’t know that when you’re fourteen and having fun. Anyway, I guess you know how cosmically crucial it is, maybe I should say comically crucial, except it ain’t funny at the time, to be a cheerleader in high school sub-culture? Well, I was a natural acrobat. I got into gymnastics in junior high. By the time I was in senior high I was willing to try anything. You want a cute little girl in tights to toss over the goal posts with a blanket? Corky would go for it. You want someone to do a one-hand handstand on top of a six-man pyramid twirling a baton in the other hand? Corky was your girl. And if somebody goofed and the pyramid crashed, she’d pick herself up, flash a big broad smile, and the crowd loved it. She could cry later. By the end of the first year in senior high I was a star. Those nice, long-legged blonde Anglo kids were in the chorus with the pom-poms, and Corky was the curvy little girl in the black-sequined, low-cut, strapless body sheathe twirling the baton in the spotlight.”
“Envy began to rear its ugly head?”
“Not really, not then. I was popular. I seemed to know how to handle it pretty well. Kids invited me to all the parties. A lot of their families had places in the mountains, and I was always off skiing on weekends. That’s another thing I took to. I was hot-dogging by the end of my first winter.”
“Hot-dogging?”
“You know…stunts, flips and jumps, trick stuff on skis. I was the queen of the hot-doggers until, as I mentioned before, I tore up my knee in the Olympic Alpine tryouts.” She pointed to a thin, white scar running almost all around the knee cap, which somehow I had failed to notice before.
“It’s okay now, and I’m getting a little old for that stuff anyway.”
“Meanwhile,” I said, “back at the Gonzales ranch?”
“Yeah,” she sighed, “back at the ranch, Isabel was having babies in Fort Morgan, the boys were long gone, and Pops was on the road more and more. It’s funny, the more I became what he wanted me to be, the less he had to do with me. He bought me anything I wanted…clothes, the last word in skiing gear, a cute little sports car. But time slipped by and we never really what you would call ‘communicated’ again.”
“Jealous, I expect.”
“Jealous?”
“Of all your friends, everything. You were slipping out of his world and into another he could never enter, even to savor your success.”
“Poor Pops, that’s what he wanted for me. Poor Mom, just a little old Chicano lady keeping house for herself, because of course her super popular baby daughter was out having fun and far, far too sophisticated to take any crap from her. All Isabel ever did was take care of babies, and all Mom ever did was clean. First johns in office buildings, then her own house which was just another building to her. That house was so squeaky clean I was ashamed to take my friends home. It was like nobody lived there, and I guess you could say nobody did.
“Predictably, sooner or later, things had to get pretty wild, and predictably, as I mentioned before, you think you’re in love with the Senior Dreamboat, and go all the way with him one night after a football game. You wait for Dreamboat to call all day Sunday, and you go to school a little shaky on Monday, and there is Dreamboat talking with a bunch of boys and acting like he
doesn’t see you. So you put on your cutest dimpled smile, and you walk up and say, ‘Hi,’ and he and the other boys sort of grin at each other, and as you walk away, they start laughing. You turn around, and Dreamboat is shaking his fingers like he just dropped a hot potato.
“Then it slowly starts to dawn on you that while you were out there in your sequined tights, a thousand horny high school boys up in the stands were having sex fantasies all about you. Something changes. They smirk when you walk by. Every creep in school tries to get his hands on you. All those nice Anglo girlfriends start getting busy when you’re around, even the ones you know darn well didn’t hold out as long as you did. ‘Breeding will tell,’ their sappy mothers will say, because everybody knows you’re just a little nouveau riche Mexican tart that will put out for anybody just to be popular.
“So you see,” she said, “I’ve been a fallen woman since I was sixteen. The bright side is,” her smile had a brittle edge, “that latest statistics show I belong to a majority. I think this is where I started before. Soon after that Pops was killed, and I just hit the road, and I’ve been a bum ever since. Now you know all there is to know about me. And there’s still so much I don’t know about you.”
I reached over and pulled her towel across the boards to mine, and took her in my arms. “I have a feeling you and I are going to have a lot of time to share more memories…and perhaps even make a few together.”
Although the sun was almost down, she pulled her towel over our exposed bodies, mine already looking a little pink, rested her head on my shoulder, and said, “I hope so,” and emotionally spent from conjuring up all those painful family memories, promptly fell asleep.
CHAPTER XIII
Los Angeles, Day 3, Wednesday, Hennie & McCafferty’s Tavern
We checked, found McCafferty’s Three Harps Tavern in the phone book just off Glendale near Colorado, and set out on the drive across town. After a few minutes apparently lost in thought, Corky asked, “Greg, did you ever meet Charley’s mother?”
“Once, ten years ago.”
“Tell me about her.”
“It was after I came up from Ecuador. I told you about that. There was an enormous report to write, and I took a leave of absence from the university and came out here for several months. TINMAN fixed me up in a very decent residential hotel, and Charley and I worked together twelve to fourteen-hour days. I didn’t mind too much, they were paying me by the hour, and Charley was fun to work with. I admit that once in a while when I’d drag out of the office late in the evening, I’d feel a little wistful about all those bright lights, but generally I was too bushed to care.
“As for Charley, I had no idea where or how he lived. We just checked out in the evening and in the next morning, and I got the idea that what happened in between was strictly private business, an idea that was reinforced by several comments from fellow workers at TINMAN suggesting that Charley’s private life was a rarified world of its own.
“Then one day, or night, I should say, when we were getting ready to split for our respective pads, Charley suddenly said to me, ‘McGregor, laddie,’ which is what he insisted on calling me, ‘how is your social life in the City of the Angels?’”
‘“Are you kidding?’ was about all I could say, considering he knew damned well we were working until ten or eleven every night.”
“‘I know, I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a mad, mad whirl, but do you think you could slow the pace for an evening and have dinner with mother and me? She’s an old-fashioned lady,’ he added, ‘so put on your best bib and tucker, and I’ll have a bunch of posies for you to give her. She likes camellias.’”
“I couldn’t believe the reaction when, a day or two later, I innocently dropped the word at the company cafeteria, while lunching with some of the younger engineering staff, that I was going to dinner that night at Charley’s. Everybody stopped eating. Suddenly I was in the middle of a spreading pool of silence.”
‘“At the Farnsworth mansion?’ Somebody asked incredulously.”
‘“I guess so,’ I said, puzzled. I didn’t know it was such a big deal. Then the talk broke out around me like a squall breaking over a reef, everybody talking at once…would I meet his mother…Did I know about the ghost…How many servants did I think they had…Did I know anything about antiques? I beat a hasty retreat to the peace and quiet of my drawing board.
“Charley picked me up at my hotel at precisely 6:10 p.m., having admonished me to be very prompt. Precisely at 6:25 p.m. we pulled up to a radio-activated wrought-iron gate, which swung open noiselessly to a semi-circular drive, which took us by a lot of ornamental shrubbery to the porte cochere of a magnificent Palladian mansion in flawless Indiana limestone. Charley opened a florist’s box and handed me a very handsome bouquet of camellias, and at 6:27 we were admitted to a marble-floored foyer by a liveried butler who relieved ‘Mr. Charles’ of his Panama hat and Malacca cane. We turned expectantly to a sweeping flight of marble stairs, and at precisely 6:30 p.m. a tiny little old lady swept majestically down upon us.
“Generally tiny little old ladies find it difficult to sweep majestically, but this little old lady would have had difficulty doing otherwise. Her poise was awesome, and somehow I suddenly felt like an uncouth lout who would inevitably make some dreadful faux pas. She wore an oyster-gray-satin gown, a lace choker embroidered with seed pearls, and long gloves. ‘Good evening, Charles,’ she said, and presented a delicately rouged cheek for him to kiss. Then she turned to me and extended her hand, palm down. ‘Mother, may I present Mr. Gregory McGregor.’”
‘“How good of you to join us for dinner,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’”
“I mumbled something dumb, like thank you ma’am, and thrust the bouquet at her. ‘How very thoughtful,’ she said. ‘Camellias. You must have a sixth sense.’”
“An aged maid in a dark gray uniform with starched white collar, cuffs and cap appeared, seemingly out of the woodwork, and took the camellias. We withdrew to the solarium for a drink among exotic palms and other plants and some rather showy orchids. ‘Charles does so well with orchids, don’t you think?’ His mother said.”
‘“Now, mother,’ Charley demurred, ‘You’re the one who caters to their every whim.’”
“And so it went. At dinner amidst much crystal and silver, the camellias appeared as a centerpiece, for which I was duly credited, and Charley’s mother artfully proceeded to draw from me the story of my life. ‘Gregory McGregor is a rather uncompromisingly Scottish name,’ she began.”
‘“Well, actually, I was born in Two Harbors, Minnesota, on Lake Superior.’”
‘“Indeed,’ said Charley’s mother, ‘Is there a story behind that?’”
‘“Not really. My father was chief engineer on a Great Lakes iron ore carrier.’”
“Mrs. Farnsworth nodded approvingly. ‘I would never book an ocean passage unless I was assured that we would have a Scottish engineer, and usually the old Cunard liners did.’”
‘“Well, actually,’ I felt compelled to confess, ‘My father came from Nova Scotia.’”
‘“New Scotland, but perhaps a step enough removed so that it won’t arouse ancient tribal hostilities if I reveal to you that my maiden name was Campbell.’”
“I shook my head. ‘I’m afraid that I could never sort out fact from fiction in all those tales of clashing clans. I was never quite sure where history ended and Robert Louis Stevenson began.’”
‘“Oh, dear, underneath it all, you really are a Scotsman. Separating fact from fiction is terribly important, isn’t it? Especially for engineers. How my son, Charles, manages to be an engineer and still be as interesting and entertaining as he really is, I’ll never understand.’”
‘“Now, mother,’ Charley remonstrated mildly, ‘facts and reality can be interesting and entertaining too.’”
‘“In very small doses, artfully mixed with fancy,’ Mrs. Farnsworth said firmly, with an airy wave of the hand, then suddenly burst out with a
wild shriek of unrestrained laughter. I glanced uncertainly at Charley and saw a rather strange expression cross his face. ‘Dear me,’ said Mrs. Farnsworth, as though there had been some extraneous interruption, ‘Well, never mind. I want to hear more about you, young man, and I must insist on fact, not fancy.’”
‘“I’m afraid then that I am destined to be dull,’ I said, and we laughed merrily. I sensed that somehow some kind of small crisis had passed.”
“The drawing room, where we retired for cognac and coffee, was rich with 17th and 18th century English and early American antiques, glistening hardwood floors muted with Persian rugs, and ornately framed oil paintings, which ran rather heavily toward swan-necked ladies with tiaras and serious, bewhiskered gentlemen in tartans. ‘A rogues gallery, if the truth were known,’ Mrs. Farnsworth said, dismissing them with a gesture that took in the room.”
“Charley insisted on driving me back to my hotel when I made my adieu, promptly, as promised, at 10 o’clock. He was elated. ‘Greg,’ he said as soon as we were in the car, ‘I can’t thank you enough for joining us this evening.’”
‘“Not at all, Charley,’ I demurred. ‘I’m indebted to you and your charming mother for a pleasant, memorable evening.’”
‘“Yes, she was charming.’ Charley seemed to say it more for his own benefit than mine. ‘She really was quite fine, wasn’t she?’ He turned to me as though for reassurance.”
