by Ann Beattie
The dog stayed at Dale’s side, ignoring the doughnut hole that had fallen just short of its paw.
Dale was stroking Tyrone’s head. Tyrone had become her dog. Brenda and Jerome’s child, she thought, would become Brenda’s child. All of Jerome’s women had wanted babies, and he had bitterly resented every one: the son born to the married woman in France, whose husband believed the child to be his; the daughter born as his marriage to his second wife was disintegrating. Nelson had been the only one he wanted. Well— if you had what you already considered the perfect child, maybe that made sense. Nelson was intellectually curious, smart, obedient, favoring his stepfather over his mother, a loyal child.
The two of them would be at the table, finishing dinner, Nelson having found a way to excuse Jerome, Jerome’s passive aggression subsiding into agreeableness—as if, by the two women’s disappearing, any problem automatically disappeared, too. Without them, Nelson and Jerome could move on to the salad course. Drink the entire bottle of Opus One. Nelson would probably have brought down the photograph of Didi, her face deeply lined by years of having kept up with Jerome in his drinking, as well as other bad decisions she had made, and of course from the years at St. Tropez, enjoying too much sun.
Too much sun. Too much son. Jerome would like to play with that.
Though what Jerome was talking about, having already told Nelson he was seriously considering separating from Brenda— was the story of Baron Philippe de Rothschild: the baron, being a clever businessman, and more importantly, a visionary, realized that much might be gained by joining forces with the California winegrower, Robert Mondavi. Mondavi was summoned to Baron Philippe de Rothschild’s, where he dined on fabulous food and drank great wine. It was a social evening: business was not discussed. It was not until the next morning that the baron—at this point, genuinely admired by Mondavi for his taste, elegance, and good manners—summoned Mondavi to his bedside, like a character in a fairy tale. The possibility was discussed of combining their efforts, and sharing the profits fifty-fifty. Mondavi suggested producing only one wine: a Cabernet. Did he say this tentatively? The baron agreed. Would he have said the same? The wine would be made in California, where the baron’s winemaker would visit. Mondavi, flattered, was thrilled, as well. His name, linked to that of Baron Philippe de Rothschild! The baron also triumphed, realizing that by embracing his would-be adversary, both men could profit. Nothing remained except for the ceremonial drinking of a one-hundred-year-old Mouton, followed by a very cold Château d’Yquem: a perfect deal; a perfect meal—it even rhymed, as Jerome pointed out. A brilliant label was designed, providing the perfect finishing touch.
The talk back at the house was about perfection. In a perfect world, all wines would be perfect. Ditto marriages. All books brilliant (a toast was drunk). Superior music (again, glasses were raised) would be listened to, keenly. In that fairy tale, which was not Dale’s, and which was not Brenda’s, either, no woman would lie badly wounded on her kitchen floor.
Brenda crossed the room and stood at Dale’s side. “Doughnut hole,” she said quietly, looking down, then picked it up, at the end of its trail of powdered sugar, as if plucking a shooting star from the darkness.
This time, Tyrone showed interest. Dale picked up the other two. The dog was definitely interested. There was no dirt on the doughnut holes, Dale and Brenda could see, as they examined them closely.
“Why not?” Dale said, giving voice to what Brenda was thinking. They could pretend to be people at a cocktail party, eating pleasant tidbits.
But sirens pierced the night.
They signified a problem for someone, Nelson knew. Another problem, Jerome also thought.
The sound overwhelmed Bartók on the stereo. The sound was shrill and constant: a sound you might say was annoyingly like a woman’s voice, if one could still say such things, which of course one could not.
Then the crescendo of sound, demanding their attention.
One preceded the other out of the house. That door, too, was left open to the wind.
A police car, a second police car, an ambulance, a fire engine—the full militia leading the way.
To what? The two words were like a heartbeat: to what; to what.
Down a dirt road in a country far from France.
Down a narrow road across from a rented house.
The meal left behind, one or the other having remembered to extinguish the candles.
The Infamous Fall of Howell the Clown
IT WAS 1954, and it just wasn’t done. You didn’t have an unsupervised birthday party for a seven-year-old, presided over only by a gentleman friend dressed up in a polka-dot jumpsuit with an organdy collar and red lipstick and blue eyeshadow, wearing beach sandals with pink socks. Well—go ahead and laugh: it turned into a disaster, didn’t it?”
“How old was Cousin Charlie?”
“It was 1954. Charlie was seven, Steven was six. I should also add that your mother was twenty-five, but because women in those days wore almost as much makeup as the clown, she looked like a more mature woman than she was. She was only twenty-five, one year younger than your aunt Sylvie, who had never been put on God’s green earth to supervise the upbringing of children, so of course who did Sylvie marry but Parker Winkleman, the most irresponsible, pig-headed boy for miles around. Nine months from the day they married they had Charlie, and he was no more than brought home from the hospital than the two of them had the bassinet on the back porch and were out in the street riding their bicycles, telling anyone who asked that they were ‘keeping an ear out for the baby.’ Why, the woman who lived next door would have to go out on her front lawn and flag them down, when she got too worried about the crying. There they’d be, riding in bigger and bigger circles, ringing their bells at each other like a couple of bears in the circus. No one could believe such irresponsibility. When she went in to have the second one, Sylvie’s mother took her aside and told her: ‘Tie your tubes.’ She would never have listened, except that she had two babies, and suddenly Parker Winkleman had lost his job at the bank.”
“And when he disappeared, no one went to look for him?”
“What do you think it was, the Wild West? Somebody saddled up his horse and galloped from town to town, inquiring about mysterious strangers? Nobody could take time off from work. Private detectives weren’t heard of in those days, or at least I never knew anyone who’d heard of them. We thought he’d find himself a job and send for the family. We certainly didn’t think he’d disappear. Every time the phone rang, we’d all leap for it. Every occasion, we’d expect to see him return: somebody was always sure to announce a scenario in which he’d suddenly appear, with birthday presents for his child, or bringing flowers on their anniversary. You have to understand that we had no frame of reference for Parker Winkleman. Even Mrs. Winkleman never understood him. She raised him the same as his brother, but he threw spitballs in Sunday school and aimed his slingshot at songbirds, and when he married Sylvie, he had plans to move to Paris, France, and turn her into a fashion model, though how he thought having two children in two years would help her form, I don’t know.”
“How long was he gone before Sylvie started the affair with Howell?”
“First of all, I’m not walking along this street with you today saying that any such thing happened. At least, we never thought in terms of ‘affairs.’ Laugh if you want, but in those days, we thought two people could be friends. I don’t have any stories about Howell creeping out of her house early in the morning, and no one ever so much as saw him put his arm around her shoulder, even when they stood at the funeral of Mrs. Winkle-man. They behaved very properly. Friends of Sylvie’s often went along if they went to the movies, or for a sundae. His father accompanied them, before he became so ill. I think, frankly, that a lot of men in the neighborhood felt sorry for the two boys left without a father and rallied to Sylvie’s side. I don’t know that they had an affair. Maybe he felt sympathetic toward her and the boys.”
“Then why w
as it so wrong to leave him in charge of the birthday party?”
“You tell me, please, why Sylvie had to go shopping when she had a party full of children. For clothes, it was—not even groceries. Oh, I see your look. You think it was liberated of her to go off and do what she wanted. But think of the position it put poor Howell in: you can’t be an adult doing your job of supervising when you’re also disguised as a clown and going around making mischief. You can’t be two things with children at one time, or they’ll stop believing. Can you imagine Santa Claus placing presents under the tree and muttering, ‘Where did the stains come from on this carpet?’ The most important thing was to convince the children he was a clown—I think he had a curly red wig and those bushy eyebrows attached to a big red nose, as well—anyway, if he hadn’t had the bad reaction to the medicine the doctor had given him, he would have stayed put in his tree, but the medicine poisoned him, in combination with the glass of beer he had before he was in costume, when he and Sylvie were stringing crepe paper from tree to tree. He was not a drinker, and it turned into a very hot day, and he must have been twice as hot inside that clown suit, and then the penicillin he’d been given for his throat must have reacted with the beer, so that after he climbed up in the tree to pretend to be Juliet calling to Romeo, which is not something I’m very clear on, or ever was— from up in the tree, he just opened his arms like a big red-haired, red-nosed angel spreading its wings and Bam! He crashed down, and if it had not been for the birthday presents on the ground that cushioned his fall, Howell would have hit into the earth like a meteor. They think he fainted from the heat, and that he was a little delusional when he got into the tree because the medicine had already started to interact with the beer. Apparently he’d been frustrated because the children had never heard of Romeo and Juliet; that was going to ruin his clown routine, so he had to stand there in the hot sun, feeling sicker and sicker, explaining the story, and by the time he started to climb he was already sweating, and more than a little anxious, because he’d seen Sylvie’s car pulling out of the driveway, and where was she going? Surely the poor man never in a million years thought his Juliet would open her arms and then black out and take a dive into boxes filled with animal toys and erector sets and Mr. Potato Heads. He fell with such force they found a baby manatee under an azalea bush outside the porch one week later, and some piece of the Mr. Potato Head stabbed his forehead, so he looked like the Frankenstein monster with its screw when they turned him over. We can only laugh because they fixed him at the hospital, but that day no one was laughing, and some of the children stayed so frightened they didn’t even want to have birthday parties when their time came around. They started going to matinees with a few friends, seeing The King and I over and over. I, personally, consider that a fate worse than death. I never could stand Yul Brynner, but I think that other bald actor, Sean Connery, is extremely handsome. Of course, it helped that he played James Bond, and didn’t have to stalk around a palace singing ‘Et cetera, et cetera.’”
“And that night Steven’s nightmares began?”
“Yes. Before he fell, he’d picked out Steven to be Romeo, and he was speaking directly to Steven when he hit the ground. You can see that would be traumatic for a child. All through school, every play by Shakespeare made him terribly nervous. When they were the lesson, he wanted to stay home, whether it was All’s Well That Ends Well or Macbeth.”
“Well,” I said, “I thought he spoke beautifully at the service. Maybe in spite of that crazy day, years ago, Howell still inspired him to be an actor. When we were kids, he was always so shy. I didn’t expect him to be so dynamic.”
“If you’re so curious, I don’t know why you’ve never asked,” Violet said, suddenly. “When we get to Steven’s apartment, why don’t you ask him before Sylvie shows up and stop bothering me about things I don’t know the answer to.”
“I’m not sure he or Charlie would tell me the truth. They were always a little distant. They always kept secrets from me, you know.”
“You’re a girl. I don’t think they knew what to make of you. They were used to teasing girls, being attracted to them but trying to pretend they weren’t. They saw you as their responsibility, but they weren’t sure how to act toward you because you were also a family member. They were eleven and twelve when you went to live with them, and you were thirteen years old and acted much older. They both had crushes on you. Or at least Steven did.”
“Violet.”
“I’m not saying he wanted to marry you. There are other kinds of crushes.” She frowned at me. “You were always too hard on Steven. Do you realize that? When you were little children, playing together, you’d sometimes explain to people who came into the room that Steven was just there because he was tired of playing outside. You’d find some way to explain that he didn’t really want to be with you, it was just the lesser of two evils. Why have you always been so hard on Steven?”
“I’m not hard on him. Didn’t I say he was the best speaker at Howell’s memorial service?”
“Oh,” Violet said, “it’s so hard to believe. Howell was doing fine until he went for that new treatment, and it poisoned him just like the beer and the penicillin did. He never had a strong constitution. I hope he was her lover, you know. Because if he wasn’t her lover, I don’t think he would have been anyone’s. At least, not much of one, spending all his free time with Sylvie and you and the boys, and the rest of the time living at home with that cranky old father.”
As we talked, we had walked from the church up Sixth Avenue to Sixteenth Street. A few tulips had poked up in the tree boxes, but either someone had picked the blooms or they had not blossomed; the anemic green leaves, dust speckled, curled like banana peels as they drooped to the ground. A single marigold bloomed in a squiggle of foliage. Next to it lay a baby’s pacifier. Farther up the street, we saw one high heel. It was spring in New York, the trees budding, pollen like yellow chalk dust on the steps of the brownstones, vibrant red tulips in a vase offering proof that indoors, at least, tulips prospered. We both saw them through the iron bars of someone’s ground-floor window. I had once lived in the Village behind similar bars and screens—lived far enough downtown that Sixteenth Street seemed like uptown, which it did not seem at the moment. Compared to Fifty-fourth Street, where the hotel I was staying in was located, this was still quiet, pastoral New York. I had come into the city the night before from Pennsylvania for Howell’s memorial service, meeting Violet in the morning, as she got off the Metroliner from Washington at Penn Station. There she had stood, five feet tall, carrying an overnight bag patterned with roses, her good Georg Jensen pin, a stylized, sterling silver maple leaf, pinning her scarf to her wool jacket. She was as alert as a bird, bright-eyed, attuned to the roar of the trains, the noise of the PA system, the crowd. But she had never understood New York. She didn’t know if Penn Station was uptown or downtown, and furthermore, she couldn’t remember where uptown became dangerous or at what point downtown turned into Wall Street. She understood, in theory, how the avenues ran, but alone, she would turn a corner and find herself on another avenue, not a cross street, and how was that possible? She understood there was some mysterious benefit to crossing a street to catch a cab much of the time, but when those times were, or which streets ran uptown or downtown, she could never remember. Now, she hopped along at my side, her practical leather-laced shoes stuffed with two layers of Dr. Scholl’s cushion inserts, part of her money folded in a slip pouch, other money pinned inside her bra, a crisp twenty dollar bill and all her change in her wallet, in case someone demanded her purse. In the last few years, she had begun coloring her hair, which had not become predominantly gray until well after her sixtieth birthday. Whoever was doing the dyeing was good: a few streaks of gray were left, waving away from her temples; it gave her hair a look of motion, made it look as if the wind had uncovered unexpected ripples of gray. Violet had always been my mother’s best friend, as far back as I could remember. The two of them had spent so much time
together they had often come to use the same expressions, accompanied by many of the same gestures as they spoke. But the way I had been supposed to see it, my mother had been a practical, down-to-earth person, Violet something of a dreamer. My mother was the organized, determined woman who had looked adversity in the face and triumphed over it, becoming a dental hygienist when my father divorced her, whereas Violet talked about going to college but never enrolled, even though the handwriting was on the wall about her husband’s job. Whether my mother had meant to present this concept of Violet deliberately or not, I have no idea, but she had consistently planted seeds of doubt about whether Violet was, at all, a practical person. Since they told each other almost every thought and desire, and since my mother repeated many of those things to me, there were always a lot of things to hope, or even to pray for, on Violet’s behalf, whether it be that she find her missing cat, Bugle Boy, or that her husband get a much-needed raise, or that she be selected to sing a solo in the church choir. My mother gave me to understand that Violet always wanted things—the implication was that she was constantly at odds with the way things were, that she was sadly dissatisfied—and while my mother would say to me that she wished all Violet’s dreams could come true (finding the cat or singing a solo were, equally, “dreams”), that was not very likely for Violet, or for anyone. What I think now is that my mother, so dissatisfied and disappointed by life after her divorce, which forced her to get a job she hated (“Another day of carving the pumpkins,” she would say in the morning, opening her mouth wide and jutting out her jaw as she examined her own teeth in the bathroom mirror), needed someone she could consider more troubled and insecure than she. In her resolute, but world-weary disparagement of Violet, my mother rose to more heroic heights, the way a person reading a fairy tale will nod knowingly and cue a child to anticipate disaster from the moment the wolf appears. When I was young, like every other child, I accepted my mother’s version of everything; then, of course, I saw that she did not predict things perfectly, that her sister—my Aunt Sylvie—took something of the same attitude toward her that my mother took toward Violet. Perhaps because back then people did not often directly contradict others, as is common now, people relied more on gestures, such as an upward roll of the eye or a raised eyebrow. Throughout my childhood, I began to observe a domino effect of skepticism that tipped so gently it did not knock the person down but that nevertheless passed like an electric current from my grandmother to her oldest daughter, from the oldest to the youngest, from the youngest to her best friend. And no doubt part of the reason I was so fascinated was because the falling dominoes did not extend to me; though I was next in line, I was displaced by Violet—unwittingly, just because of her constant presence and because of the place she occupied in my mother’s affections— Violet became the recipient of my mother’s sotto voce concern, the person we of course wished well, though her ideas were quite unlikely to materialize. What a shocking thing it must have been for my mother when she realized she, herself, was dying— that the cancer Violet had assured her would stay in remission had recurred, that she would in all probability be leaving her beloved only child to the care of none other than Violet, a woman who adhered to predictions from psychics, who believed doctors did not pay enough attention to exceptions— to those few patients who inevitably survived unlikely odds. Over coffee, when I was present, my mother gave Violet the bad news. The wolf just sat in the bed and stared. Whatever Violet thought, in its own good time the wolf was simply going to devour its prey, my mother would die, and that, and only that, would now be the end of the story. Of course, my mother had a sort of love-hate relationship with Violet—she was the voice of my mother’s own hopeful, unspoken optimism: how could she not?—so toward the end my mother complicated matters by arranging for Sylvie to take me, though she made Violet swear that she would oversee my upbringing, made Sylvie promise that Violet would be a second mother to me, made the two of them all but promise that they would bake alternating layers for my birthday cakes and sing to me in unison. Fortunately, Sylvie did not dislike Violet, or resent her intrusion. She had seen so much of her through the years, she considered her a member of the family. It was also a rather lonely life, difficult enough economically and emotionally before I joined her household of two increasingly wild boys—and because I withdrew so completely after my mother’s death, Sylvie was no doubt happy to have someone else shoulder part of the burden: someone to share the task of driving me twice a week to the psychologist’s office; another person to confer with about her decision to take out a loan and settle me, eventually, in another school; someone to confer with as she tried to learn the proper but always shifting signals of when to approach me and when to leave me alone. Though Violet was married, I have only the sketchiest memory of her husband, who worked a night shift and slept most of the day, so that even when my mother was alive, he rarely appeared in our lives. Also, by that time, something had happened and it had been decided—or had it simply turned out?—that Howell Jenkins would not join Sylvie’s household. He stayed with his parents, nursing first his mother, then his father, through long illnesses. When I first went to live with Sylvie his mother was very ill, and in part because of guilt (his mother was ill, but my mother was dead)—because of the numbing grief we had in common, and because there was such turmoil when I first tried to settle in with Sylvie and the boys, Howell began to visit infrequently, though a few times Violet came to stay at Sylvie’s house on the weekend, to take care of the three of us, while—we were told—Sylvie stayed at the Jenkins’s house. Or maybe she didn’t: maybe he left his parents to fend for themselves, and he and Sylvie went to a motel and had wild sex for two days. Maybe they watched Casablanca on TV and ordered steaks from room service and drank champagne and planned their future, in the happier times sure to come. They could have, because somewhere along the way Sylvie had gotten divorced from her runaway husband, eventually Howell’s mother died, and in the last year of his life, Howell’s father was moved to a nursing home when Howell could no longer lift him, so finally Howell had the house to himself. Then she could have gone there any time, snuck over in the afternoon, during her lunch break, detoured there on her way back to her house after work. . . . All my information about Sylvie’s divorce, and about Howell’s parents, I found out in bits and pieces from Violet, when we were shopping for new school clothes or eating lunch at a downtown tearoom or—those times the psychic guaranteed Violet would not break any bones—ice skating together in the evening, at Parker’s Pond. Violet didn’t suggest the romantic scenarios; I thought of them myself, admiring my grown-up imagination, sure that someday I, too, would lead whatever secret life was necessary to fulfill my every desire. When I was the age my mother was when she married, eighteen, I was living in the East Village with a drug-dealing cabdriver who was married to a woman in Mexico City. That summer I left him, left New York for Vermont, though that may have been a preemptive strike, because he’d begun missing his wife in Mexico. When I was twenty, the age my mother was when she had me, I had dropped out of school and was working as a waitress, proud of myself, in those years of pinwheel eyes and paranoid, incantatory fixations, for not using anything stronger than grass. I was mugged on Avenue A by two teenagers who said “Peace and love” as they jumped my back, got arrested for shoplifting, applied for a student loan and went to another college which I flunked out of at the end of spring semester, had an abortion, wrote half a novel, was arrested for rioting, finished the novel and abandoned it, dramatically, on the IRT, hitched to California, went with a man to London, broke my ankle dancing in a nightclub, and through it all—though I can’t picture it and I don’t want to remember the particulars—I apparently wrote letters to Sylvie and to Violet, as well as calling Violet, drunk, from a pub in Wales, asking that she send me my blue jacket which, as I described it, she realized was a jacket I’d had when I was eight or nine years old. A boy I’d broken up with maliciously called Sylvie and said I’d OD’d and was dead. During that same per
iod, Violet phoned a friend in London and asked her to come to my flat and take me to dinner, and when the woman got there, though I’d been hungry, and therefore receptive to her proposal on the phone, I refused to go to the door and told my boyfriend to tell her I’d left London that afternoon. I think she saw me in there, behind him, sitting in one of the two canvas butterfly chairs, smoking a joint, listening to the Rolling Stones. I think I remember her going on tiptoes and waving, at the same time I was waving a cloud of marijuana smoke away from my watering eyes. But that’s pretty much the story of my generation. Maybe a little different in the particulars, but similar in content to so many other people’s lives. Sort of the counterpart of Violet’s: “It was nineteen fifty-four, and it just wasn’t done.” It was nineteen sixty-seven, and it was done every day.
