Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Normalyn was startled. Careful instructions? She had left her only mysteries.

  “She left you enough to live on,” the Mayor continued, “for a period of . . . discovery. For whatever you may want to explore.”

  A short period of discovery . . . whatever you want to explore. Was he speaking Enid’s instructions? Normalyn wondered. He seemed to be imparting messages to her while not allowing questions.

  “Enid had some money, lived well—good Texas family adopted her, though she never saw them that way.” With a soft laugh of indulgence, the Mayor glided over memories. “Why, they sent her to that private school where she learned the liberal ways that turned her against them! Enid had a way all her own.” His look drifted to the lobby as if he expected the woman who had entered his memory to enter the hotel. His tone became official: “The house is in your name, paid for—”

  “Bought for her by someone else!” Clarinda snorted.

  “You don’t know that.” The Mayor clasped Clarinda’s hand. “This lunch will be orderly!”

  Ted looked in fascination at this powerful man. That was how he established “serenity” in Gibson, by demand.

  Clarinda pulled her hand away. “Enid was a strange woman!” She added in outrage, “And she never even asked to join the Daughters.”

  “But she referred to them often—” Normalyn said seriously.

  Clarinda waited in lofty anticipation.

  “—as mummified clucks,” Normalyn finished.

  Ted laughed aloud, the Mayor hid his smile.

  In substitute reaction, Clarinda located her empty glass defiantly before the Mayor. “Tell that woman to fill it again, Wendell.”

  Mayor Hughes nodded to Lottie, who waited for his signal.

  Clarinda pursued: “Enid was—”

  “You hush and let Enid rest in peace now,” the Mayor ordered his wife.

  “Why should she rest?” Clarinda struck the table. Her rose snapped from its pin. “She wasn’t peaceful. She didn’t bring peace to me.”

  “Ma’am!” Ted began to protest for Normalyn.

  Clarinda released coarse laughter into the resurrected dining room. “Your mother invaded Gibson, Normalyn. And our lives! She came all the way from Hol-lee-wood.” She mocked each syllable. “All alone with her veiled hats and that lighter she never lit, demanding attention.”

  “And she got it.” The Mayor allowed his own memory into the burst of his wife’s anger. “Right here in the lobby of this grand old hotel, Enid snapped her silver cigarette lighter only once, and everyone knew she was here.”

  Then this is where Enid had first appeared in Gibson. Normalyn tried to evoke the beautiful woman pictured in the twin frame. That is how the Mayor had seen her, flaunting her “natural beauty,” flicking away her veil to reveal a perfect complexion.

  “Stood in that lobby”— Clarinda stabbed her finger in that direction—“and brazen as brass she announced to everyone that she expected a long-distance call from some man with the vulgar name of Stan—as if anyone cared!”

  Stan. The object of Enid’s passionate vengeance, whatever shape that had taken. The man who was probably her father. Normalyn listened attentively.

  “And then she disappeared.” Clarinda aimed the words at her husband: “Left you!”

  “But she came back, just as I knew she would, and she stayed until she died.” The Mayor looked at the surrounding tables as if noticing they were vacant.

  “She came back with you, Normalyn.” Clarinda hissed her vague accusation. “That’s why she went away—to have you. She was so vain she didn’t want anyone to see her pregnant.”

  The Mayor said solemnly, “And no one ever did.”

  Seven

  No one saw Enid pregnant. Normalyn allowed disturbing words into her mind.

  Clarinda crushed her perfumed rose. “I puffed up, with all the damn children Wendell wanted—”

  “And never got,” Mayor Hughes reminded quietly.

  Clarinda flung away the crushed rose.

  Mayor Hughes’s voice remained calm. “Stop this display, Clarinda. It is rude.” He slipped the glass of liquor from her.

  She yanked it back. “Tell this girl why I drink, Wendell!”

  Mayor Hughes continued to eat, careful bites of food.

  Clarinda answered her own demand: “Because everyone knew that you and Enid—”

  “That’s not true,” Normalyn protested Clarinda’s words, and the Mayor’s unexpected silence. She had always been present during the Mayor’s welcome visits. “Is it, Mayor Hughes?”

  Then Normalyn did not know the rumors his mother claimed “everyone knew.” Ted saw how confidently she waited for the Mayor’s answer.

  The Mayor brought a tiny forkful of salad to his mouth. He wiped his lips with the edge of his linen towel.

  “Is it, Wendell? Is it, is it?” Clarinda parroted.

  The Mayor laid down his fork, his knife, arranged them just as they had been set. “I loved Enid from the moment she stepped into that lobby, so aware of her commanding beauty.” He spoke so softly he seemed to breathe the words into the graceful room. “Is that what you want to hear, Clarinda?”

  “Bastard!” The woman’s tiny hands flailed at him. “You and how many others were there?” She tried to drink from her emptied glass. “She was a damn whore!”

  “My mother was not a whore!” Normalyn defended against the word that slapped at her from the past, when Enid had thrust it at her.

  “There were no others.” Mayor Hughes studied his engraved initials on his napkin. “For her, there was only one man, and I regret to say it was not me.”

  Stan? or the unnamed man, Normalyn wondered.

  “You let me believe!” Clarinda accused her husband from years back. “You let everyone believe—!” She tried to adjust to a more wounding truth.

  “It was as close as I could come to her, to make the whole damn town believe that we were closer, that we were . . . lovers,” he uttered the cherished word. “Oh, I loved her that much. But she didn’t love me. She was only gracious enough, kind enough, to allow the rumors. And she gave me a sense of joy I had lost, of being alive, of sharing in her ‘many lives.’”

  More lives than a cat’s! Enid’s voice lilted in Normalyn’s mind as it probably had for the Mayor.

  “Enid gave me what you banished with your meanness and your rotten alcohol, and you did that before she came here, Clarinda,” the Mayor said to the woman beside him. “You pushed me away long before that—and killed our unborn children every time. You didn’t want my love until it was all gone, and then you wanted only to own it.” The Mayor’s words were drained of anger. Not even that would unite them after this day.

  “Liar.” The woman searched for her discarded rose.

  “Oh, don’t bother fussin’ with your goddamn fake rose, Clarinda,” the Mayor said. “Nothing can disguise the rancid stench of your damn booze.”

  Clarinda pushed her glass before him. The Mayor ignored it.

  Hadn’t he seen Enid, too, becoming an alcoholic? Had he understood why? Or had he loved her that much? Had he ever known the angered woman Enid became, the one she knew? Normalyn wondered. No. Full of joy and life—that is how he remembered her, still saw her.

  Clarinda shoved her glass more insistently before the Mayor. “Call her!”

  “You call Lottie yourself,” the Mayor said.

  “I will not address that creature!” Clarinda refused.

  “Then you will do without,” the Mayor said.

  Clarinda banged her glass on the table. “Lottie! Lottie!”

  At the kitchen door, her arms crossed tightly, Lottie did not move until the Mayor nodded. Then she placed the bottle before Clarinda—“Here’s her liquor!”—and left her to pour it.

  But the Mayor did—poured it, slowly, carefully.

  When he had finished, Clarinda hissed at him: “The thought of having your children disgusted me!”

  The Mayor remained impassive, as if he h
ad not heard, or had known all along what Clarinda had confessed.

  Normalyn addressed Clarinda: “I’m glad Mayor Hughes loved my mother.”

  Mayor Hughes held her hands in both of his.

  Ted looked at Normalyn with added admiration.

  Her eyes closing, Clarinda crumbled in her chair.

  The Mayor leaned toward Normalyn as if even now his whispered words might restore his cherished secret: “Honey, you always knew there was nothing to know. For Enid there was only . . . him. And you, honey. She loved you.” His hands on hers warmed his words.

  Normalyn looked down, to keep from shaking her head in denial.

  “Always you and that one man. And that Monroe movie star she talked about all the time, that Norma Jeane.” He seemed for long to ponder his own words, what his next ones would be. “Named you after her, honey,” he said.

  Norma Jeane. Marilyn. Normalyn. The fact, never consciously explored, entered Normalyn’s mind with new impact.

  That Monroe movie star. . . . The Mayor had spoken the famous name carefully. Ted saw Normalyn react to it the way she had to the reference to the Kennedys, as if in avoidance. Ted remembered his mother’s once saying that “the Gibson movie star” was rumored to have been “a friend of that Monroe woman.” She had said that after she had read—in a tabloid she tried to conceal but quoted constantly from—that “they” were uncovering “all kinds of evidence that Marilyn Monroe was involved with the Kennedys.” But how did any of that connect to Normalyn?

  “My mother spoke a lot about you, too, Mayor Hughes,” Normalyn told him—and wished she could have said that Enid had loved him. And perhaps she had, just differently from how he had loved her. Normalyn had glimpsed another Enid through the Mayor’s eyes, and that had purged some of her anger. “She always said you were a good man,” she added.

  Mayor Hughes smiled. “Enid.” He spoke the name as if that were the only eulogy required for the woman he remembered. He opened his hands, palms up, releasing memories held captive until today. “And now finally she’s free of her ‘blackness.’ And you’re free, too, honey,” he said.

  Free? The thought astonished Normalyn. It meant she had choices! She said experimentally, testing herself, testing Mayor Hughes, “I may go to Galveston, to find out more . . . about myself.”

  Oh, would she go away? Ted wondered.

  “You won’t find much there that you don’t know already, honey,” the Mayor told her. “Go where Enid began—to her ‘city of lost angels—’”

  Guiding her? Whether so or not, he was speaking his words carefully, Normalyn was sure.

  “And I believe she knew someone there . . . someone mentioned kindly . . . someone important . . . talked about her, a lot, at the last,” the Mayor added slow words, as if he might yet retract them. “Oh, yes, a Miss— . . . Yes, Miss Alberta—” His firmed look assured Normalyn’s attention.

  Alberta. Miss Alberta. . . . Normalyn tried to remember that name. The Mayor had spoken it precisely.

  “Yes, go to her ‘city of lost angels’—that’s what she called it.” He still cupped Normalyn’s hands in his. “Go to her ‘city of long beaches.’”

  “You mean the City of Long Beach, near Los Angeles, sir?” Ted asked courteously—because the Mayor had paused as if to be corrected.

  “Do I? Do I now?” The Mayor smiled. He said to Normalyn, “You do whatever you have to do now, honey. But walk softly,” he seemed to warn. “Find out who you are.” He pulled back. “Well, now, isn’t that what every young person wants, to find out who they are?” The Mayor seemed to shake away a trainee. “That’s all I’ll tell you, Normalyn, y’heah? Don’t ask me more.” He tightened his lips, sealing any more words.

  To emphasize his loyalty to Enid’s secrets and mysteries? Normalyn thought she had detected in the Mayor’s voice the weariness of kept promises. That would explain his careful, vague words.

  Now only the sounds of dishes being cleared controlled the enormous room. Lottie snapped peremptory orders at the two Mexican men, calling them “boys.” Ted watched in confusion.

  In the shifting sun, illumined motes of dust floated indifferently. Mayor Hughes stared about his dining room. Beside him, Clarinda did not move, as if the truth she had pursued had defeated her. The Mayor passed his hand through a diagonal of sunlight and stared at his fingers to see whether they had collected dust. “I’m old now,” he said aloud. “Steeped too deep in the past.”

  Normalyn looked in surprise at the man she had known throughout the years of her life. Was the sadness there only now or had she never seen it before? His smile waned, the flushed face looked desperate, the eyes were . . . lonesome.

  “Why, honey,” the Mayor sighed to Normalyn, “I just bet your young friend here considers me an old dinosaur; heard he even called me that out at that college he goes to, right, Gonzales?”

  “Yes, sir, I did.” Ted wondered whether he should apologize, the man seemed so vulnerable now.

  “And do you know who’s going to render me extinct, honey?” the Mayor asked Normalyn.

  “Who, Mayor Hughes?” Normalyn asked, with kindness.

  “Ted Gonzales, that’s who.” The Mayor smiled at Ted. Then his face twisted, his voice resurged with strength. “Right, boy?”

  “Yes!” This time Ted did not say “sir.”

  “But I warn you, youngman,” the Mayor’s voice gained more force. “I’m not extinct yet, not by a damn long shot. I still have lots and lots of power and I intend to hold on to it.” He folded his embroidered napkin, frowning at one jagged edge that crushed his initials. He looked at Clarinda, slumped in her chair. He stood up. “Well, now, wahn’t that a sumptuous lunch Lottie fixed us up? That’s why we all gathered here together, in a civilized and orderly way.”

  Watching him standing, Lottie, carrying a hot pecan pie to cut at their table, turned on her heels, knowing the lunch had ended.

  The Mayor walked past vacant tables and chairs and out of the empty dining room.

  2

  Outside, it was a glorious afternoon under limitless blue. Along the street, oleanders bloomed, pink, white, purple.

  Her back to the Texas Grand Hotel, which seemed like a surrendered relic now, Normalyn waited on the street. “And now!” she said aloud.

  “And now?” Ted turned her words into a worried question. She looked so innocent, her cheeks flushed as if this short journey to the Texas Grand Hotel had given her life.

  She and Ted cut across the plaza, along tree-lined streets.

  Before the house where Enid would no longer be, ever, Normalyn paused. Then she hurried toward it, almost urgently, to test its power. She felt excited and afraid.

  At the top of the three steps outside the house, she turned to face Ted.

  “Normalyn!” he said. “I hope you believe now that I would never hurt you, never. And that makes me want to tell you— . . . be able to tell you— . . . that I— . . . that I . . . like . . . you . . . a whole lot.”

  She saw the broody face which could become boyish in a moment, like now. She smiled. Then immediately she saw the face of the man who had thrown himself over her. She turned away. “You tried to rape me,” she said.

  He looked quickly at the scar on his fist. “That was someone else,” he said. “Not me, now. Please look at me.”

  She did. The violent man was gone.

  “Maybe I can change your memories,” he said.

  Could he? She sat down on the steps. He sat down beside her. She did not retreat from him.

  “I’ll even sing for you!” he said suddenly, determined to bring back her smile. He sang, hummed: “‘Memories, memories, of laughing eyes sweetened through the ages just like wine, sweet memories, memories’.” Embarrassment conquered. “When I was a kid, I thought I was Elvis.”

  She felt a tenderness for this man, this other man, only him, the new Ted, the man she had met yesterday, only yesterday. She removed her glasses. She pushed her hair back, away from her face, welcoming a fresh
breeze.

  Ted saw her smiling, a beautiful new haunting smile. He touched her hand gently. She did not pull it away. He let his hand rest over hers, holding it.

  She raised her head, looking up at the sweep of Texas sky, away.

  Following her gaze, Ted said, “You’re going away, aren’t you, Normalyn?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  3

  Ted spent the rest of the day with her. He told her what he had considered telling her the first night he had stayed with her—about the night of guilt, angry remorse. He showed her the scar on his fist. “That—and so much else—is what changed me.”

  “I believe you,” she said, and she did.

  As evening approached, she insisted he return to Langsdon. She would no longer be afraid to be alone. She needed to test her resolve against the commanding house.

  That night, the haunted voices were hushed, although, once, when she woke, she thought they were conspiring in whispers.

  The next day Ted parked again before Normalyn’s house. He had borrowed his mother’s car so Normalyn would not see the white pickup of their ugly shared memory. She asked him to come with her to tell Mayor Hughes that she was leaving Gibson, that she was going to Los Angeles.

  Sitting in the patio of his hotel in the warmth of a Texas spring day, Mayor Hughes sighed. He smiled a crushed smile. “Why, yes, of course, you must go, honey.” He would make arrangements for her, himself, draw whatever money she needed, in traveler’s checks from his own bank. He would give them to her on the day she left. If necessary, he would make further arrangements with a bank—when she was “settled.” “But we’ll wait and see about that, honey, won’t we now?”

  “I might just come out and see you real soon.” Ted pushed his assertive words against the tone he detected in the Mayor’s voice, a tone that prepared for final separation. Right there, Ted wrote down two telephone numbers where Normalyn could reach him—one where he worked, the other at home.