He meant it as a joke, but she didn’t smile. They looked at each other so intensely that they both blushed.
“I didn’t peg you as a loser,” she said. “I could be wrong. I hope I am.”
Sandy dropped Gus off at his parents’ house. He didn’t explain why Flora and FDR were living in Milk River. She had to be curious, but didn’t ask. He was thankful for that.
He’d hurt his head by banging it against the Turnpike Cruiser’s roof. Sandy had gunned the car as it approached the beach to make sure it didn’t get stuck halfway up. The shock of hitting the sand catapulted Gus off the seat. His head slammed into the padded headliner of the steel roof. It knocked him out for a few seconds. By the time they got back to town he had a tender lump on the top of his skull and a headache he felt down to his teeth.
Sandy consoled him with a goodnight kiss. It started as a heatless brush of lips, but it lingered several seconds and then developed into a full engagement of energetic tongues.
She broke away first. “Uh-uh, no way,” she said.
“Maybe I’m one of your losers,” he said.
“Whatever you are, this stops here.”
Gus got out of the car, thinking he really might be one of her lucky losers. That seemed twisted enough to qualify for Ray Springer’s shithouse rule.
“Where have you been?” Flora said. She was seated at the kitchen table, a glass of Rhine wine in her hand. The record player was on. Mantovani’s “Charmaine.” “We waited dinner on you, then went ahead and ate it cold.”
“Something came up,” Gus said.
“Something always comes up, it seems,” she said. She was more than mad, she was distant, as if a line had been crossed and there was no going back.
“I’m sorry, Mommy,” he said. “It was a crazy night. I got involved with some people. I couldn’t get out of it.”
“I don’t expect you to explain, Gussie,” she said.
She poured herself another glass of wine. “Charmaine” ended and another Mantovani piece came on: “The White Cliffs of Dover.” It sounded just like “Charmaine” to Gus. Beatless music to lull you into a coma.
“Where’s FDR?” he said.
A choked-off laugh stuck in her throat like a chicken bone. She cleared it out. “FDR? He went to bed an hour ago. His stomach was sour and he had to take a bicarb. There’s a sliced roast in the fridge. You go ahead and eat something, Gussie.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“You really should eat. You’re skinnier than ever. You’re skinnier than he ever was.”
She raised her glass. She kept her eyes on Gus as she drank, making an effort to keep him in focus.
“Skinnier than FDR?” Gus said. “FDR’s never been skinny.”
“Did I say FDR? I didn’t mean FDR.”
“Who did you mean?”
She sat up and straight in her chair. “I don’t know if this is the right time to tell you. There may never be a right time.”
“Tell me what?”
“About Orson Gunlocke. My God how odd that name sounds. I haven’t said it aloud in years.”
“Someone we know?”
She emptied her glass and then refilled it. Her eyes lost focus again and seemed to be looking at something beyond the kitchen wall. She smiled fondly, then frowned, then started crying. Tears spilled down her plump cheeks.
“No,” she said. “We don’t know him. He was a figment of time and foolishness.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense, Mommy,” Gus said.
“It’s never made a lot of sense.”
“What hasn’t made a lot of sense?”
“You look so much like him, my darling boy,” she said. She reached her hand toward Gus. He leaned away.
“Maybe you should stop taking Milltown, Mommy,” Gus said. “I think the drug is messing you up. You’re not tracking.”
“What can I do about it?” she said. “What can anyone do about anything? Sometimes things happen and it’s like an avalanche. You try to get out of the way, but you can’t. How can flesh and blood be expected to stand against an avalanche?”
“Jesus Christ,” Gus said under his breath. He went to the fridge and took out the sliced roast. He made a half sandwich with tomato, onion, and lettuce. He wasn’t hungry. He was still full of noodles and sweet-and-sour pork and spring rolls and the memory of Sandy’s mouth on his, but he thought it might make Flora feel better if he ate something she had prepared. And as she watched him eat she seemed to gather strength.
“When you’re young,” she said, “you’re all good looks and confidence, isn’t that so? Age and time, and all the stupid mistakes, shape your final self. The one you were meant to be. Don’t you agree?”
“Why are you asking me?” Gus said.
“Don’t you know? No, you don’t. You settle into what you really are and what you’ve always secretly been. Yes, secretly! It often isn’t pleasant when it comes out. You didn’t want this ugly gosling, did you? So you adopt a version of yourself you can live with.”
“By you you mean you, right?”
“And everyone else. The easiest person to lie to is yourself, Gussie. It’s true! Great men in high places lie to themselves and so become great fools, or great monsters. But this is well-known. They’ve documented it and they will document it again and again in the years to come. It’s not a news bulletin.”
She refilled her glass, drank half of it, then filled it to the brim again.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be saying these things to you, Gussie. I don’t mean to frighten you into a solitary and loveless life, away from all the complications and miseries of mistaken involvement—never knowing the joys and disasters of a life fully lived. No, that’s not what I mean to do at all. I just want you to know that I’m human, human as you, human as your father.”
“And therefore fucked up,” Gus said.
Her face, which had been bravely unmoved by her speech, suddenly collapsed. She began to sob silently. She fought against the emotion and didn’t recover until another record dropped on the spindle. Mantovani’s soaring strings played “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time.”
“Oh! Isn’t that lovely!” she said, dabbing at her tears with a paper napkin. “This song speaks to my heart every time I hear it. It’s so sad, so hopeful, and such a damn lie. You know they’ll never see each other again, in apple blossom time or in any other blossom time. I mean the lovers. But they had their time, their moment.” She reached for Gus again and this time he didn’t back away from her touch. She stroked his cheek with her damp fingertips.
“Who is Orson Gunlocke?” he said.
“He was a penniless sharecropper from the Oklahoma panhandle. The terrible drought ruined the land he worked. The winds carried the good soil away. Nothing could be planted, and if it was planted it did not sprout. And then the landowner told him he had to leave, the bank was taking back the land. He was left with nothing, not even food. He ate out of garbage cans and for fresh meat he killed squirrels and doves with a slingshot. He hitched rides to California with just the clothes on his back, eventually stopping at our door hoping to find some kind of work. I gave him a sandwich—roast beef, like the one you’re eating now! I watched him eat with tears in my eyes, his hunger was so terrible. He was so thin and gaunt, so ruined by things that were not his fault. I hired him to take care of our lawn and shrubs, and for odd jobs around the house. He excelled at plumbing and electricity. This was before the war.”
“Orson Gunlocke,” Gus said, testing the syllables.
“He called me Queenie, because I was like a queen to him. ‘Queenie, might I have a glass of water?’ he would say. ‘Queenie, my shoe leather is so thin I can see my toes. Does your mister have an old pair he won’t miss?’ ”
“Queenie,” Gus said, trying out the word. He hated it, but in a comical way it fit. He stopped a grin twitching like a tic at the corners of his mouth. “Really, Mommy. You should back off on the Milltown.”
�
�At first it was ordinary human compassion. Then I made my mistake: I fell in love with him. I so wanted to make him happy. I even considered leaving FDR, but when it came time to decide I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was a coward caught between love and comfort. I didn’t think I was a coward at the time. I thought I was being sensible. Now I know. I know exactly what I was then and what I am now. A sensible woman, a coward.”
The bread and beef in Gus’s mouth was dry as cardboard. He couldn’t swallow. He took a beer out of the fridge. After a minute he said, “Does FDR know he’s not my father?”
“We never discussed it. What would be the point? He’s a very good man. I think he’s always known you couldn’t be his son, but he raised you as if you were. He loves you, Gussie.”
“I look like an Okie named Orson Gunlocke,” Gus said, more to himself than to Flora. “Where is Gunlocke now?”
“I don’t know. The last I heard he was married and living in Chula Vista. He sent me a letter informing me that he’d found work in a defense plant. I wrote that he had an infant son named Gus. I never heard back. Then came Pearl Harbor, and the world was never the same.”
“So everything worked out more or less for the best,” Gus said.
“Please don’t be mean, Gussie. Yes, it all worked out. We made our separate lives. Sadness and regret were part of those lives. But that’s the way of the world. You’ll see.”
“The shithouse rule,” Gus said.
She looked stern for half a second, then she hid her face in her hands and sobbed. “Please don’t hate me,” she said, her voice tiny and wet as it bubbled between her fingers.
“Tell you what,” Gus said. “Why don’t you take some Milltown and go to bed? Take the whole damn bottle.”
Gus felt ashamed of his outburst but not ashamed enough to say he was sorry. He went to his room and flopped down on his bed. His skull ached. He put the pain out of his mind and thought of Sandy. He relived their parting kiss, improved on it, then fell asleep.
He woke before daylight, thinking: They’ve kept me in the dark, all of them. He understood that he needed to find out who he was, who he was not, and who he might have been.
17
They deplaned into the hot Santa Ana winds of Southern California, then dragged themselves and their B-4 bags out to the freeway to hitch a ride to Lyle’s place in North Hollywood. They were wearing their sheepskin parkas over their winter blues. The plane was a bare-bones C-47 left over from the war—no heat in the back compartment, no insulation. Steel bucket seats lined the fuselage wall. At altitude, the temperature had been sixty below. Overheated and sweating in their arctic gear, they looked as out of place on Sepulveda Boulevard as elephants on the moon.
Curiosity and pity got them rides. Two hours later a farm truck loaded with citrus dropped them off at Tujunga and Weddington, six blocks from Lyle’s house. The driver gave them a sack of oranges. They peeled and ate oranges as they trudged through the neighborhood.
“Fantastic place,” Gus said when they reached the Dressen house, a flat-roofed modern structure. A grand bougainvillea vine with its million blooms covered one wall of the house. Lemon trees, birds of paradise, and oleander bushes filled the front yard. Ice plant with yellow and orange flowers lined the walkway to the front door.
“They can’t afford it,” Lyle said.
The house was empty. They went to Lyle’s room and got out of their winter gear. “Let’s go for a dip,” Lyle said. He rummaged around in a dresser for swimming trunks. A pair Lyle had worn in grade school were small enough for Gus.
The pool was behind the house, just beyond a brick patio big enough to play tennis on. The pool was shaped like a kidney and had two diving boards, one three-feet above the water, the other ten feet up. Lyle climbed the ladder to the high board and cannonballed into the pool. Gus jackknifed in from the low board.
“Who the hell is violating my goddamned swimming pool?” The voice came from behind an oleander bush.
“Hey, Pop,” Lyle said. “It’s me. This is my buddy, Gus Reppo.”
A man stepped out from behind the shrubbery. He was big-bellied and bald, wearing Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. His sweating face was florid and thick. He had a martini in one hand, an electric hedge clipper in the other. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the army defending the nation somewhere?” he said.
“Air force, Pop. We got some leave time and caught a hop from Malmstrom. We go back in three days.”
“I’ve got the afternoon martinis made. You boys can have one. I guess if you’re old enough to bleed for your country, you’re old enough to have a martini.”
Gus and Lyle climbed out of the pool. They went into an atrium off the kitchen to dry off. Mr. Dressen went into the house and brought out the pitcher of martinis.
“Where’s mom?” Lyle said.
“Don’t have the slightest idea,” Mr. Dressen said. “Probably trading lies with her fancy Brentwood friends. I thought you joined the army, Lyle.”
“No sir. I joined the air force.”
“Not that it matters a hell of a lot,” Mr. Dressen said.
“Matters to me, Pop,” Lyle said.
Mr. Dressen looked at Gus. “What about you, Gus? You gung ho like Audie Murphy here?”
“I guess so, sir,” Gus said.
“Well good for you,” Mr. Dressen said without interest. He picked up his clippers and went back into the bushes.
Gus and Lyle carried their martinis into the kitchen. Lyle opened the fridge and took out a plate of cold cuts—cheese, sliced tongue, and deviled eggs.
After they ate Lyle showed Gus around the house. The living room was white carpeted and big enough to house a semi trailer. It was full of light from the floor-to-ceiling windows that filled an entire wall. A grand piano occupied one end of the room.
There were some framed photographs on the piano. A platinum blonde with metallic skin and blood-red lips looked out of an ebony frame. The woman didn’t look real to Gus. She looked like a manufactured product—one of those movie star photos anyone can buy at Woolworth’s. The photo was signed, “Best Wishes, Lorena Lamb.”
“Believe it or not,” Lyle said. “That’s my old lady. She’s even scarier in real life.”
“She’s kind of beautiful in a way,” Gus said.
“She was in movies for a while, twenty years ago. Bit parts, mainly. She was a body double for Jean Harlow once. She hasn’t worked much since then, but she keeps an agent. Lorena Lamb is her movie name.”
“Who plays the piano?” Gus said.
“Nobody. It’s decoration.”
Lyle took Gus out to the garage. Two identical pale blue 1956 Cadillacs sat side by side. It was a three-car garage. One space was empty.
“Mom’s got the Bentley. She won’t drive a Cadillac, even though Pop sells them. ‘Ordinary people aspire to the Cadillac. Uncommon people aspire to the Bentley.’ That’s her philosophy of life in a nutshell.”
“I thought my family was fucked up,” Gus said.
“You don’t know the half of it, Reppo,” Lyle said.
Gus saw a motorcycle parked in front of one of the Cadillacs. “Whose bike?” he said. It was blue and had a chrome gas tank.
“Mine,” Lyle said. “It’s a BSA Goldstar. The best damn bike ever. It’ll beat any stock machine on the road. I’ve had it up to a hundred ten and the tachometer was still climbing. I didn’t come close to redlining.”
They went back into the house.
“I hate to desert you, Reppo,” Lyle said, “but I’m not going to stick around. I’ve got a girlfriend in Van Nuys. I’m going to spend my time over there. I don’t like leaving you with my folks, but it can’t be helped. You get hungry, grab what’s available. Or you can walk out to Tujunga. There’s a few small restaurants close by. We had a cook for a while, a Swedish woman, but she couldn’t deal with Mom and took off. Mom can’t boil water without scorching it but she’ll tell a professional cook how to stuff a squab. Go figure.”
> “You hate your folks?” Gus asked.
“You see something here not to hate?”
“They’re your folks, Dressen.”
“I don’t hate them. I hate what they do. Or what they don’t do. Or how they think. That doesn’t leave much, does it? Yeah, I guess I hate them. What about you, Reppo? You hate Mr. and Mrs. Reppo?”
“No.”
“No? That’s it?”
“I don’t hate them. I pity them.”
“Pity’s worse. Is that why you enlisted? Because you pity them?”
“I enlisted to get away from them.”
“But you don’t hate them. Sounds like hate to me. You run from the things you hate. Am I missing something here?”
Gus got on the BSA. “Let me use this while you’re in Van Nuys,” he said.
“You know how to ride?”
“How hard can it be?
PART THREE
18
Gus let himself into the house with a spare key hidden in the garden shed. The deserted house was, and was not, as he remembered it—everything the same but somehow not the same. Recognizable, but part of a past the details of which he’d have to rethink and reconstruct. He felt he’d been away for ten years, not less than one. He’d grown up here, sheltered from Flora’s secret. Maybe it was FDR’s secret, too. The secret that now cast a new and darker light on every word that had been spoken and every gesture that had been made within these walls.
He looked out the sliding glass doors that opened to a patio. He imagined Orson Gunlocke leaning on a rake, looking through the glass doors at Flora, the grin on his face familiar to her now. He imagined her unlocking the door and the door sliding open and Gunlocke saying, “Queenie, might I have a glass of cold water?” and Flora taking him inside where Gus, a nonentity—less even than a forethought—became a physical presence in the world.
He searched the Chula Vista section of the San Diego phone book and found only one Gunlocke: M. A. L. Gunlocke, on a street that intersected Kearny Avenue. He thought about it for a while. He thought about it while he showered. Thought about it again while he shaved. He thought hard, thought maybe this was a mistaken impulse and that he should end his side trip into the past and go back to LA.
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