Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales

by Mark O'Donnell

  ALSO BY MARK O’DONNELL

  Elementary Education

  Plays:

  Tots in Tinseltown

  Fables for Friends

  That’s It, Folks!

  The Nice and the Nasty

  Plays in translation:

  A Tower Near Paris by Copi

  The Best of Schools by Jean Marie Besset

  COPYRIGHT © 1993 BY MARK O’DONNELL

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Two cartoons, “The Solar Yearbook” and “Extinction of the Dinosaurs Fully Explained,” and one story, “Diary of a Fan,” were originally published in The New Yorker.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Donnell, Mark.

  Vertigo Park : and other tall tales / by Mark O’Donnell. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82917-7

  I. Title.

  PS3565.D594V47 1993

  818’.5402—dc20 92-20673

  Published April 19, 1993

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Vertigo Park

  The Solar Yearbook

  Marred Bliss

  A Tall Tale

  Questions for Review

  The Corpse Had Freckles

  Three Lost Poems

  Diary of a Fan

  Illustration Break

  Guess Who’s Psychic

  The State of the Hate

  Kids’ Most-Asked Questions About Electricity

  Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: The Play

  The Girl Who Dated the Moon

  The Art of Fictitiousness: An Interview with Samuel Beckett

  Overheard While Walking: Fragments of the Perambulation

  The Whom of Kaboom, or What Happened to the Shark

  PROLOG

  It was called Vertigo Park by accident, because Curtis Wills Booney, its founder, was mistakenly advised that vertigo meant green. His wife was a fanciful but dangerously half-educated woman who admired culture but didn’t pay close attention to it, so when he solicited her suggestions for his planned Utopian community, she turned off the player piano (having long since despaired of lessons) just long enough to offer two options—Mount Olympus Valley and Vertigo Park. In those days women were deferred to in matters of civic aesthetics, since aesthetics had no apparent effect on anything. In any case, his gesture helped her feel more like his muse and less like his nurse, though his nurse is what she was, especially at the end, with his project a doomed folly and him raving in his bathrobe about Tomorrow being late. Mount Olympus Valley he rejected as too pagan (also, the acreage was completely level), and, as pundits were to observe repeatedly later, calling the place Vertigo Park was probably the most appropriate choice.

  It had been Booney’s vision to build what would have been the very first shopping mall, in an undeveloped outskirt of St. Louis, just outside Pompey, the rubber tire town. Inspired by the isolationist purity of the glass-domed cities of thirties science fiction, Booney imagined an indoor town square complete with a verdant if not vertiginous small park. In his mind a greenhouse roof would keep out the Depression blight and world tension that were raining debilitation like soot on the farms and factories of what was later called the Rust Belt. If St. Louis had been the Gateway to the West, Vertigo Park was to be the Gateway to Tomorrow, but its unfinished shell was already abandoned and corroding when Booney died, in 1939, the year of the New York World’s Fair, a more famous version of the same mistaken future.

  His heirs, typically, didn’t share his obsession, and concentrated instead on preserving the storm-window installation business he left behind, along with the thousands of sheets of glass that were meant to surmount and contain his dream enterprise. In high winds, some of the panes that had been fitted into the colossal iron skeleton would dislodge and shatter on the ground below, leading local mothers to forbid their children to go near the shivering hulk. Nonetheless, the neighborhood that uneasily grew up around it in the postwar boom was still identified as Vertigo Park, in the way an Indian word for a stretch of woodland survives uncomprehended after Indians and woodland have long been superseded by amnesiac tract houses and demoralizing power plants. It was a favorite irony of later decades that Vertigo Park, Mother of Presidents, Birthplace of Our Carlotta, had languished as a failed suburb for years, with even the freeway passing it unacknowledged. It rose from its prenatal grave only as a ghost, as a tourist oddity of the late nineties—the childhood home of two successive U.S. presidents, the two youngest U.S. presidents, the two worst U.S. presidents, the two final U.S. presidents. Even more mythically, it was the birthplace of the suffering first lady they both shared and lost, who brought them more honor than they brought themselves, who passed from triumph to tragedy and on into the torpor of legend. If a gate has only to stand and let events pass through it, then Vertigo Park was the gateway to tomorrow, since the future is only the present left to run wild.

  CHAPTER ONE

  CARLOTTA BY ACCIDENT

  She was named Carlotta by accident, because the immigrant night watchman who found the abandoned newborn in a car lot ran gibbering with her to the local police, crying “Car lotta! Car lotta!” to explain where she’d been. Her birthdate was calculated to be nine months to the day after VJ Day, a product of the victory celebrations in nearby Pompey, people joked. She was the first fruit of peace, with only a surprisingly full shock of blood-red hair to hint at her lineage, and a remarkable stoic quietness that prompted both the desk sergeant and a newly arrested felon to offer to adopt her.

  It was settled, finally, that prematurely widowed Almira Hover would raise Carlotta along with her own toddler, Julienne. She certainly couldn’t have guessed the two pretty girls would become lifelong partners in rivalry, like salt and pepper—or, more accurately, sugar and saccharine—and incidentally, mascots of modern history. Mrs. Hover (or “Old Mother Hover,” as her slicker co-workers called her) was an overwrought woman with a plaintive voice that reminded others of a squeegee cleaning a windshield. She had atoned for whatever passions she possessed, as well as the back-to-back devastations of the Depression and the World War, by scrupulous devotion to the sanitary, an unending ritual of domestic purification as advanced by the women’s magazines of the period. Originally she had worked as an assistant to the Ladies’ editor at the Pompey Trumpet, where her late husband had been a typesetter. His eyesight had been ruined proofreading the minuscule type for legions of classified ads, for the all-but-invisible pleas for Position Sought, Help Wanted, and Home Rummage Sale Extended. Still, he’d managed to be drafted, and astigmatically wandered onto a land mine on Omaha Beach. His death, and her own fetishes, led Almira to become a food stylist, an admittedly limited calling in a small town, but she could assuage her grief and guilt by prettifying party platters for supermarket supplement photos, and, as time went by, for local television. Her duty was not to actual nourishment but to credible appearance on camera, a profession ahead of its time, and in that capacity she became a local character, a media midwife to minor advertising promotions and diner menus.

  Like her shellacked turkeys and lard passing for whipped cream, Mother Hover’s attempts at nurture were superficially nice and essentially inedible, just as she herself was an imitation rather than a genuine mother to Carlotta. She gave the two girls a
love-like substance, but it was a placebo that left its takers restless and with pangs of isolation. They grew up fatherless in an apartment over an unrented storefront, though in her earnest trust in external detail Mrs. Hover festooned the rooms with pipe racks, duck decoys and hunting prints, hoping the tokens of a man around the house would compensate for his absence. Little Julienne and Carlotta guessed something was missing, and later that led them to look too recklessly for salvation in the opposite sex.

  Carlotta’s childhood was uneventful, as the biographies like to point out. Every night, from her window facing the dark, listless commercial street, she could contemplate the illuminated billboard opposite, an eternally filling glass of milk from an unemptying bottle, a promise of progress and relief that was never quite ready for consumption.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A BOY CALLED VANILLA

  The second baby they found they nicknamed Van, since he was swaddled in an empty vanilla ice-cream tub under the refreshment stand near the abandoned mall. He was further proof that the war had shattered the old morality, and was guessed to be a souvenir of the new, momentarily ecstatic atomic world, the first discharge of the baby boom. He was pale and colicky, a squaller, though beautiful when he finally fell asleep, and his hair was a striking sugary white, as if there had been inadvertent truth in packaging.

  Big Bill Walker, a foreman at the tire plant in Pompey, said he would adopt Van. He had nine sons of his own, and claimed one more wouldn’t matter. It didn’t, which may have been the start of the problem. The Walkers were ruddy, similar beanpoles in descending sizes, like xylophone bars waiting to be struck, uncomplaining workers and draftees who smoked heavily or drove the family station wagon too fast instead of ever defying their father or labor union chapter. Big Bill was a bluff man with thick furrowed brows like hillocks in a country churchyard, and he was so conscientious an official he always insisted his own sons be laid off before anyone else, to show he was no shirker or nepotist. His sons were destined to die in Vietnam, or in industrial accidents, or on vacation, but in any case profusely, across a field of years.

  Lost in an already self-effacing crowd, foundling Van grew up impressed by his family’s anonymous canine devotion to democracy, and at the same time desperate to distinguish himself. He was christened Christian, since it seemed a likely guess for an unidentified blond, but he was called Van all his life, even on the presidential ballot, and at the end, when the other monks addressed him, though he had taken a vow preventing him from answering. It may have been his perceived duty to vanilla that undid him, trying to be wholesome and popular at the same time.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SON OF DANGER

  Cliff knew who his parents were, ironically, because of the three he was the one everyone thought of as a bastard. He certainly behaved with the rudderless ease of one unencumbered with parents. He was named Cliff because his mother had conceived him on the edge of one, overlooking the local lovers’ leap. She had gone there near the war’s end, despondent over the death of her imagined true love, and there she’d met greasy, lithe Chick Burns, an unlikely lady-killer who’d finally been killed back and figured literal death should follow. Dizzy with the height, the two agreed to make love on the spot, as a farewell to life’s absurd sensuality. After their bout, the momentum toward suicide had passed, and when it became clear later that a baby was on its way, they married. This was as impetuous as their lovemaking, because Chick and Kitty—both had had parents who diminished them even in naming them—were as repellent to each other as identical magnets, and they quarreled with the same passion with which they waged sex. Cliff had feral black hair, with a sheen that made it seem blue; he was an alarmingly healthy thirteen-pounder who was two weeks overdue, which may have disposed him to his lifelong habit of showing up late but triumphant.

  Before he was five his parents divorced—a greater scandal then—and the sullen handsome boy was shuttled between Kitty’s diner and Chick’s gas station, which lay on opposite sides of a busy freeway, only a few perilous yards apart. Dangerous as it was, impatient Cliff found it easier to race across the road than to walk a mile down to the pedestrian overpass. His reflexes were good, and he was always lucky.

  The diner and the garage were both failures. People resented Chick as they do doctors and lawyers, suspecting he was overcharging them to exploit their ignorance. He wasn’t, and this made him bitter. Men assumed Kitty to be of easy virtue because she ran a truck stop. She was, and this made her bitter. The neon signs above their respective establishments were each sadly half missing—her restaurant sign read only RANT, and his garage sign read only RAGE.

  Unsupervised, young Cliff entertained himself by jumping on the garage driveway’s bell cord, imagining he had the power of a sedan pulling in for more gas. It maddened his father, who occasionally lost customers when he wrongly guessed the bell was just his son pretending to be a car. When he was with his mother, Cliff would drink cup after cup of black coffee, which one truant officer later suggested had made him adult before his time. More likely it was the ill-advised playfulness of the truckers who ate at the diner, teasing his mother with leaden double-entendres and teaching him dirty words as they would a parrot, to laugh when so tiny a thing should pipe up with their own jumbo obscenities.

  On either side of the road, Cliff was an outsider, just as Carlotta was in her department-store-window home, and Van—lost in an orphanage-sized crowd—was e pluribus unum. It may have been this keen sense of exclusion that governed them and brought them together, and was recognized gratefully by so many millions later on. The ideal of individualism includes an unsounded bass chord of loneliness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NOTICED ARE THE NUBILE

  Carlotta and Julienne both grew into pretty teenagers. Carlotta, having come from nothing, demanded nothing, which gave her a lustrous, accepting quality, as unwittingly seductive as a landscape. Her friendly silence caused the boys at Sacajawea High School to project their fantasies onto her like movies on a blank screen. She was sympathetic, and boys confused that with love. Conversely, though Julienne was beautiful, she made boys think she wasn’t. Partly from her inherited faith in falsity, she developed the unconvincing, self-seeking good cheer of a singing commercial. She didn’t realize deliberate perkiness offended, the way the smell of ammonia becomes associated with the odors it’s supposed to remove. Carlotta waited to see what would happen, whereas Julienne was perpetually tensed for success, like a game-show contestant straining to collect while looking good on camera. She knew all the rules, but she still had to fear chance.

  However, fate usually withholds destruction until adulthood. Julienne managed to become head cheerleader at Sacajawea, and had frequent solo yells. She urged her seemingly pepless stepsister to go out for cheerleading too, and was hurt when Carlotta mildly pointed out that it seemed needless and self-involved to her, since sideline activity distracted from the game and didn’t help the players except with pressure disguised as love. Julienne was further frustrated by Carlotta when the team members themselves flocked to Carlotta’s repose more than to her own obstreperous approval. Carlotta was even drafted to portray the Spirit of Freedom in a school pageant, though she was instructed not to speak. Finally, her driver’s ed teacher created a small scandal when he sped off with her during her first lesson, mesmerized by her stoplight-red hair. He was halfway to Chicago before state troopers got him for what only looked like drunk driving.

  Worse, or perhaps better, Carlotta attracted the attention of Culvert Booney, son of Vertigo Park’s would-be founder, head of the local Legitimate Sons of the Pioneers, and also its best-known playboy. He first noticed Carlotta when she accompanied Mother Hover to the TV studio in Pompey, where she helped Vaseline a roast. A plumpish bon vivant, Culvert had found undemanding renown as the local television weatherman. He routinely predicted high winds and frigid temperatures to encourage people to buy storm windows from his family business, and he had done quite well with it, so well that pare
nts were patient with the liberties he attempted with their daughters.

  Mother Hover, duly impressed by a celebrity’s interest in Carlotta, even an alcoholic like Booney’s, invited him to dinner, inexplicably if understandably draping the house in Christmas lights to encourage good feelings. Carlotta responded with innocent indifference, and guilelessly galled Booney by talking throughout the meal about the two boys she had crushes on, student council president Van Walker and poor misunderstood Cliff Burns. Already she was trapped between the antipodal loves that would wrack her life, though she was still too young for full-tilt confusion. Julienne shook with envy to see her ignore an opportunity like Culvert, and Mother Hover served the dessert liqueur in secret despair. Booney drank to unconsciousness, and had to be taken home in a neighbor’s car. Although it was a night he would never remember, it was to prove to be a night he could never forget.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE THREE-HEARTED KNOT

  Van did seem to pursue Carlotta, but clumsily and chastely, convinced as if by an imaginary friend that she was the cure for his unhappiness. Although an honor student with good teeth, his will to virtue stymied and bemused people; his first major act after reaching puberty was to announce his vegetarianism and lie down naked in the neighborhood butcher shop window. It was meant to be an evocative protest, but made him better known as an exhibitionist than a moralist. Then, in his search for athletic activity that wouldn’t pit man against man or get anyone dirty, he tried to organize a synchronized swimming team at Sacajawea, though no one else would participate. Nevertheless he persisted, swimming for hours every evening in the school pool, perfecting routines for scores of nonexistent teammates, and he often recruited Carlotta to help him time a particularly complex sequence.