by M. E. Kerr
I managed, “I’m Wally Witherspoon.”
“Hey, Sabra St. Amour!” said Monty. “How about that?”
Lunch began to bark furiously, standing there like Martha complaining about the whole idea of Monty striking up a conversation with a star.
“Shut up, Lunch!” Monty commanded. Lunch barked all the harder.
“Well.” Monty tried talking above the noise. “Tell me more!”
Sabra St. Amour made a face as though she always got that wherever she went, and Lunch persisted, only then he began to jump up on Monty. Monty would shove him back, and Lunch would charge with more gusto, until Lunch was actually snarling, and Monty was really giving it to him with his knee in Lunch’s neck.
“Don’t hurt him!” Sabra exclaimed when Lunch let out a yowl of pain.
“Dogs aren’t supposed to be on the beach.” I put in my two cents.
“What are you doing here then?” Monty asked me, but he finally had to give up and jog away so Lunch would follow and desist.
Monty called over his shoulder, “Better not let Harriet catch you, Wither-Away!”
“Who’s Harriet?” Sabra St. Amour asked, when we could hear each other again.
“Just some fellow I know,” I said.
She laughed.
“Does he smoke?” she said.
“Sure he does,” I said. “Harriet’s very suicidal.”
“Is he around?” she said.
“He’s around someplace.”
“Would he have a match?” she said.
“Harriet’s out of cigarettes, not matches,” I said. “He smokes Merits. May I take him those?”
Then I did a crazy thing, maybe out of excitement over who she was, maybe out of self-consciousness at who I wasn’t: I began to try and get the pack away from her. She held on to it hard, and we began this tug-of-war, laughing and pushing each other, stumbling around together on the beach until she finally wrenched herself free and ran toward her towel. She scooped it up, along with a beach bag, and headed toward the hardpacked sand near the surf, running fast, but calling over her shoulder, “Good-bye!”
“Wait a minute!”
“I can’t. Good-bye!”
I didn’t follow her. I read somewhere in one of my mother’s movie magazines that a lot of famous female stars sit home alone at night because ordinary guys are afraid to pursue them, afraid to be rejected or just figuring someone like that has a whole life going for her, and certainly doesn’t need some average clown butting in.
That was my feeling as I watched her speed down the beach on her long legs; she was a fast runner, too. I had the feeling she didn’t expect me to follow her, and wouldn’t welcome it.
So I just stood there, going over the little interlude detail by detail in my head, fixing the memory of her so I could tell someone about it: Harriet or my sister—my mother, most of all. My mother’d love it that I met Sabra St. Amour on the beach. She’d tell her hairdresser about it and they’d cluck and twitter over it for a whole wash and set.
Then I looked down and saw the large, gold cuff bracelet in the sand. It must have fallen off during our little wrestling match.
I picked it up and read the inscription inside.
4. Sabra St. Amour
After I left him standing on the beach, I walked back through the surf remembering this book an actor brought onto the set once. It was called All About Sex After Fifty. When you looked inside there was nothing but blank pages. I could write a book just like that called What I Know About Boys.
There was a time when we were all living in suburbia that I wrote a long love letter every day to Elvis Presley. I had his pictures plastered all over my walls, and I played his records so often even Mama complained. I went from Elvis to David Cassidy, and from David to John Davidson. After I started in daytime, I got a crush on an actor who played my father, and when his story-line ended, I lost so much weight Mama had to force cans of Metrecal down me on the set. . . . But none of it was ever real.
“You think it’s real,” Mama would tell me when I was down and dragging myself around, “but it’s like the difference between plastic and wood, honey. The real thing is wood. When it happens to you, you’ll know, because it’ll splinter, crack and burn. You just be patient.”
It’s a pretty ironic situation, when you consider that my new legal name means Saint of Love. The only date I’ve ever been on was one with another daytime actor arranged by Hometown’s publicity woman, for a Soap Opera Digest awards banquet. We never saw each other before or after the affair, though there were various items about our “romance” in the gossip columns. Most of what you read in gossip columns is sent in by a press agent, and a lot of it is just made up.
When I got back to our beach house, Mama was waiting for me out on the deck.
“I thought you were just going for a little walk?” Mama said.
“I was. I did.”
Mama looked at her watch, the face of which simulates the dashboard of the Porsche automobile, black with red hands and luminous white dots. The watch cost $325, which is cheap compared to some of Mama’s watches. Mama has a thing about watches and shoes: She buys them by the carload. She has shoes she’s never even worn, never even taken out of their boxes. When Mama was little she was the youngest of four girls, and she always wore shoes that had already been worn by one of her sisters. That explains her obsession with shoes. The watches are something else again. Maybe she had a compulsion to buy all of them because she looks at a watch constantly, trying to fit everything into our elaborate schedule: my classes at Manhattan School of Performing Arts; my acting lessons with Mrs. Chaykoffsky; my twice-a-week sessions with my shrink; my hair appointments and my fittings.
“Well you don’t have to worry about getting a sunburn anymore,” Mama said. When you do a soap, you have to worry about things like that. You can’t have a sunburn unless your storyline has you in a resort area, or it’s mentioned you were at the beach.
Mama wasn’t the type you told about meeting a boy at the beach. I think anybody’s mother would like the looks of Wally Witherspoon. A casting department would file him in the “All-American Boy-Next-Door” category, with his short, straight black hair; round, light blue eyes; longish thin nose and great wide white smile. But all Mama would think about if I told her we’d met was what was I doing striking up a conversation with a stranger! Hadn’t I ever heard of rape and murder?
Mama was the type who’d read every word in the Daily News about some young psycho, look up from her paper at me and say, “Here’s another one. All the neighbors say he was an angel, never missed Sunday school and adored his old mother, but he picked up a hatchet and committed bloody murder on an innocent girl he’d done God knows what to beforehand!”
My shrink warned me I was too dependent on Mama, but I wouldn’t be anything, including able to afford a shrink, if Mama didn’t watch out for me. Maybe I wouldn’t need a shrink if Mama let up, but I probably wouldn’t be an actress, either. Practically everyone on the show has a shrink, or was in analysis at one time or another. Mama says acting is a demanding profession, and it’s good to get out all the kinks so they don’t interfere with the discipline all actors need.
I don’t think I really miss a social life—I don’t know because I’ve never had one. But I would miss acting. I’ll miss being on Hometown, too, I can’t deny that. Once my ulcer quiets down, I’ll try for something besides daytime T.V. I’d like to try Broadway again, or act in a film.
Mama likes to tell me to hold myself dear while I’m young.
“They don’t make chastity belts anymore, Mama,” I tease her.
“I’m not talking just about that,” says Mama. “I’m talking about having a value on yourself, your whole self, not just what’s below your waist. You. Sabra St. Amour.”
“I don’t even know who I am,” I say.
Mama says, “You’re a first-class talent. Someday you’ll be a wife, and a mother, but before that day comes you’ll build yoursel
f a good, big bank account so you’ll never have to depend on anyone for your security.”
After I changed out of my bathing suit, I put on a robe and got out the backgammon set. Mama and I have always relaxed together by playing games: Careers, Scrabble, Monopoly, Yahtzee—you name it. That summer it was backgammon. We played for a few hours every night before dinner.
“Not tonight,” Mama told me as I walked out onto the glassed-in sun porch overlooking the ocean. “Sit down, honey, and turn the tape down.”
Ethel Merman was singing Gypsy, which was a play about a stage mother. You’d think Mama would hate it, because it wasn’t a flattering picture of a stage mother. Rose, the main character, was a hard, driving woman who didn’t care if her kids were happy, so long as they were stars.
Mama happened to love the story, though sometimes she’d laugh and say, “How’d you like it if I was like her?”
When I wanted to get a rise out of her I’d say something like “Oh, is there any difference, Rose?” and she’d give me her famous raised eyebrow, or the finger which meant “up yours,” or a mock punch to my $5,000 all-caps mouth.
Mama doesn’t happen to be at all like Rose, but if I want to bug her I call her that.
I turned down Ethel and sat on the footstool of the chaise Mama was stretched out on.
Mama said, “I have a Reluctant Admission.”
“Ohmigawd, I thought we left Lamont behind us,” I said.
One of Lamont Orr’s off-off-off-Broadway flops was a musical called The Wind of Reluctant Admissions. He was hoping it would be another smash like the old hit The Fantasticks, but the critics hated it. One reviewer printed just one comment: “Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.” It was a stupid play about a mythical kingdom which would be periodically hit by a strong wind. Whenever the wind blew, the people made reluctant admissions about things they feared, or hated, or wanted, or couldn’t help.
“Reluctant Admission,” Mama persisted.
“What is it?” I said.
“We’re going out for dinner tonight.”
I didn’t fall off the footstool or anything because we went out for dinner about three nights a week. I just waited for Mama to continue. Beside her, on the table, there was a More still smoking, though she’d tried to put it out when I entered the room.
“Mama,” I said, “did it ever strike you that cigarettes have strange names lately? More and Now and Merit, as if we all need more cancer now, as if we merit it?” I didn’t put it as well as Wally Witherspoon had, but it didn’t matter, anyway, because Mama wasn’t really listening.
“We’re going to have a long talk about cigarettes soon,” said Mama. “We might even enroll in Smoke-enders. But right this minute I have some news for you. Fedora Foxe came all the way out here by seaplane just to see you. We better be on our guard.”
“She’s delivering my obituary in person, probably,” I said. I was trying to be funny about it, because neither Mama nor I were completely honest with each other when it came to our feelings about leaving Hometown. It wasn’t just the money, though Mama would have to resist any impulses to buy $325 watches for a while. It was the hole it would leave in our lives, and the forcing of certain decisions like should I go to college? would Mama keep our large apartment in The Dakota if I did? what would happen to our lives now with no more of the familiar running around to keep appointments and stay on schedule?
“There’s something in the wind when Fedora hops on a plane, Tootsie Roll,” Mama said. “Fedora hates flying.”
“Why are you so in awe of Fedora?” I said. I used to be. I remember when my knees would shake and my lower lip tremble around Fedora. After I became featured and “Tell me more” caught on, I began to realize Fedora needed me as much as I needed her. Mama said I should get that idea right out of my head, I could be replaced overnight, but Mama was talking from her experience. She’d married Sam, Sam, Superman in a weak moment when her role had been written right out of a Broadway show. It wasn’t that big a role, but I don’t think Mama ever recovered from the blow. Mama never felt really secure in her whole life; she still didn’t.
“I’m not in awe of her,” Mama said. “I’m terrified of her. She’s a manipulator.”
“How can she possibly manipulate us, Mama?”
“She can connive,” Mama said. “We have to be firm.”
“She’s just an old lady, Mama.”
“Some old lady!” Mama said. Mama fanned herself with a copy of Daytime TV. The air conditioning was on; it was actually on the frigid side on the sun porch, but Mama liked to fan herself in mock irritation the way grand ladies do in old Oscar Wilde plays.
“Okay, Miss Know-It-All,” Mama said, “don’t let anything faze you. But would you mind washing the sand out of your hair and getting into something elegant? We’ve got a seven-thirty date, and I’m impressed enough to want to be on time.”
“I’ll put on knee pads,” I said.
“Meaning what?” Mama said.
“Meaning shouldn’t we make our entrance on our knees with our eyes down?”
“What did I do to displease you, God?” Mama said, looking up at the ceiling. “Was it so bad I had to be saddled with this wiseacre kid?”
As I was going upstairs, Mama called after me, “Wear your nice new bracelet, honey. I want Fedora to see it.”
5. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.
I never liked bringing home kids from school because of the way they got quiet once they were in the house. I always had the feeling they couldn’t wait to talk about it once they got out of there. (“They’ve got three rooms in front for the corpses!” et cetera.) But Charlie Gilhooley was the exception. He was another bookworm, another receiver of A pluses from Mr. Sponzini, and almost as big an authority on Seaville and its history as old Mr. Sigh, who lived with his sister and wore knicker suits year round.
“Ramps instead of stairs!” Charlie exclaimed the first time I ever dragged him home from the library with me. “Of course! To wheel the bodies around! Makes perfect sense!” Charlie was slightly on the enthusiastic side about nearly everything—that was his way—but it was better than just clamming up and pretending my house wasn’t any different from anybody else’s.
Charlie wanted to know everything there was to know. He wanted to know more than I wanted to know about the Witherspoon Funeral Home, and I’d have to tell him I didn’t know the answers to half his questions because I had this deal with my father: I didn’t have to take an active interest in the business until I was out of high school. Charlie’d ask, “How can you not want to know?” “I’ll never want to know,” I’d tell him, “even after I know.”
Charlie was sixteen when he started telling a select group of friends and family that he believed he preferred boys to girls. The news shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who knew Charlie even slightly. But honesty has its own rewards: ostracism and disgrace. Even Easy Ethel Lingerman, whom Charlie dated because he loved to dance with her—Easy Ethel always knew all the latest dances—even Easy Ethel was ordered by her grandmother to stop having anything to do with Charlie.
My own deal with Charlie was don’t you unload your emotional problems on me, and I won’t unload mine on you. We shook hands on the pact and never paid any attention to it. I went through a lot of Charlie’s crushes with him, on everyone from Bulldog Shorr, captain of our school football team, to Legs Youngerhouse, a tennis coach over at the Hadefield Club. Charlie, in turn, had to hear and hear and hear about Lauralei Rabinowitz. (“How can you be so turned on to someone with a name like that!” Charlie would complain.)
The same week Charlie made his brave or compulsive confession, depending on how you look at running around a small town a declared freak, Mrs. Gilhooley visited Father Leogrande at Holy Family Church and tried to arrange for an exorcist to go to work on Charlie. Charlie’s father, a round-the-clock, large-bellied beer drinker, who drove an oil truck for a living and in his spare time killed every animal he could get a license to shoot, trap or hook in the thr
oat, practiced his own form of spirit routing on Charlie by breaking his nose. It was a a blessing in disguise, Charlie needed at least one feature that was just slighty off, to look believable. The nose gave him that credibility, but people still always looked twice at Charlie, even before he spoke or walked. To use my sister’s favorite, and maybe only, conversational adjective, Charlie’s good looks are unreal.
Mrs. Gilhooley’s idea of dinner is a paper plate swimming in SpaghettiOs, with a Del Monte peach half in heavy syrup thrown in for variety. The Gilhooleys live in a ranch house on half an acre up in Inscape, near the bay, and Mr. Gilhooley has crammed the yard with old cars, front seats of old cars, assorted old tires, a boat which no longer floats, rusted lawn mowers and broken garden tools, and an American flag, on a pole with the paint peeling off it, which has been raised one time only and never lowered. It flies on sunny days, in hurricanes and through the Christmas snows, a tattered red-white-and-blue thing that must resemble the rag Francis Scott Key spotted after the bombardment of Fort McHenry.
I won’t describe the inside of the Gilhooley house. It’s enough to say that it was one of life’s little miracles that Charlie came out of that pit every day looking more like someone leaving one of the dorms of the Groton School for boys than someone leaving something that long ago should have been condemned by the Sanity and Sanitation Committee.
I think Charlie regrets having emerged from his closet, even though long before he did he was called all the same names, anyway. Charlie told me once: “You can make straight A’s and A+ ’s for ten years of school, and on one afternoon, in a weak moment, confess you think you’re gay. What do you think you’ll be remembered as thereafter? Not the straight-A student.”
My father has an assortment of names for Charlie: limp wrist; weak sister; flying saucer; fruitstand; thweetheart; fairy tale; cupcake, on and on. He never calls Charlie those names to his face, naturally; to Charlie’s face, my father is always supercourteous and almost convivial. After all, everybody’s going to die someday, including the Gilhooleys; why make their only son uncomfortable and throw business to Annan Funeral Home?
