by Boyle, T. C.
The concert is at the Lobero, a restored downtown theater that ticks and groans with the decelerated rhythm of life three-quarters of a century ago, when the world was a bigger place with fewer people in it. Standing there with her mother on the Spanish tiles outside the tall wooden doors, Alma can’t help thinking about that, about a world in which the population was less than a third of what it is now, all these surplus people absent, blown away like pollen to the far ends of the earth to let the rivers recover, the forests, the animals. Nineteen twenty-four, that’s what the plaque out front says. She tries to picture it. Not the flappers and gangsters and all the rest, but people living close to the bone in the aftermath of war and the influenza it gestated and delivered, populations confined by geography and the limits of food production, jungles standing tall, mountaintops unconquered, the seas swarming with fish, mammals and invertebrates—that was the way it was when this theater was erected on the site of the old one, which dated back to 1873, when the world was bigger yet.
“You want another glass of wine?” her mother asks. She’s dressed for the occasion in a powder-blue pantsuit and she’s done her eyes and appropriated a pair of dangling earrings from the jewelry box in the bedroom. She’s wearing heels and she’s teased out her hair and sprayed it in place. She looks nice. And she’s radiant in her pleasure over the evening out. Which is nice too.
“No, I don’t think so,” Alma says, shaking her head for emphasis. They each had a glass at home, to get in the mood, and a second glass—or plastic cup, which is what the wine is served in at the booth outside the theater—when they arrived. Alma likes to be on time, likes to be ahead of time in a way she’ll be the first to admit is just a shade neurotic—she’s not comfortable at the airport unless she’s sitting at the gate with a newspaper before the display announcing her flight even appears on the monitor above the check-in desk—and she and her mother are first in line. Which is not to say that she isn’t ready to unwind, enjoying the faint out-of-body sensation the second glass gives her while the cool of the night breathes around her, and more than happy to chat with the people behind them, two college girls who’ve come up from L.A. on the train because they’re rabid Micah Stroud fans, but she’s thinking ahead to the concert itself and the pressure on her bladder five or six songs in. So, no—no more wine now. “Maybe later,” she says, even as her mother, with a restrained smile, ducks away to get a refill, mouthing (redundantly: the seats are reserved), “Save a seat for me.”
At quarter of eight, the ushers push open the doors and she takes her mother’s arm to guide her across the carpeted foyer. There’s a small contretemps about the wine—one of the ushers gliding up to inform them that no drinks are allowed inside even as her mother drains the cup and hands it over—and then they’re in the auditorium itself, her mother giving a little chirp of surprise over how elegant the theater is, as if she’d expected some barren rave hall or bottle-strewn dive. They stand there in back a moment, silently gazing out on the graduated rows of plush burgundy seats and the darkened stage beyond, before her mother excuses herself and heads off in the direction of the ladies’ room. Alma finds her way to their seats on her own—decent seats, fifteen rows back, center section—and settles in to study the program in the pre-concert hush.
She feels herself relaxing, relishing the moment. The lights glow softly from the wall sconces, people’s voices thrum with anticipation. She’s seen Micah Stroud six times now, twice in San Francisco, three times in L.A. and once in Phoenix. This will be the first time for the girls who were behind her in line, and she envies them that, the rush of experience, the way the lights dim even as the hovering forms of the band members begin to take shape and drift through the shadows and then the spot comes up full on the naked mike and the drummer skims the hi-hat with his brushes and suddenly Micah’s there, his voice floating up and over the anchor of his guitar till it insinuates itself into every last crevice of the house and all the people in it. That’s how it’s been every time. And now, expectantly, she leans forward, studying the stage. Taps one foot idly. Resists worrying about her mother.
Soon, the empty spaces around her have begun to fill, the lights quaver and she’s just turning to look over her shoulder for her mother when here she is, clutching her purse in one hand and a rumpled program in the other. “There was a line at the ladies’,” she murmurs by way of extenuation, then settles into her seat. The audience quiets. A few latecomers shuffle up and down the aisles, squeeze in over laps, purses, rearranged knees. The man in front of them lets out a nervous ratcheting cough. And then there’s an accelerating clatter of applause—apes beating their tight-skinned palms and hard-knuckled phalanges together, she’s thinking, no different from the way it was on the savannas of Africa three million years ago, and she’s one of them, clap-clap-clapping in affirmation—as the emcee struts briskly across the stage to take hold of the microphone and give the audience a long bemused look till the clapping trails off.
He’s a diminutive flesh-challenged man in his forties with limp hair hanging in his eyes and obscuring his ears, and he seizes the moment to deliver an abbreviated pep talk about the series that brings such nationally—and internationally—recognized acts as Micah Stroud (applause all over again) to this historic theater in our own little burg of Santa Barbara on a bi-monthly basis and how everyone should feel free to take a brochure and subscribe, because you’ll not only be supporting the music you love but getting a real bargain too, and did you realize that series subscriptions can save you up to a hundred and twenty dollars per season? He knows to keep it short, but still there are catcalls from down in front, and someone behind Alma begins chanting Micah, Micah, Micah till the crowd picks it up and the man at the mike goes silent. For a long moment he merely stands there giving them an impish look before raising both hands, palms up, until the chant dies down.
“And now,” he cries out in a new voice altogether—stentorian, fruity, the voice of the shill, the barker, the advance man—“the moment you’ve all been waiting for . . . ladies and gentlemen, gnomes and little fishes, I bring you the Cajun Wonder, the Lion of the Bayou, the man with the biggest voice and biggest heart in the business . . . MICAH . . . STROUD!”
Though she’s the sort of person who’s hyper-vigilant, always aware of her surroundings and open in all five senses to what the world brings her, she doesn’t stir or look around her or do anything but tap her foot and nod her head in acknowledgment of the beat till he’s three songs into his set, solo, acoustic, the band waiting in the wings because for now, in a reversal of the usual pattern, it’s just his voice and guitar. Her mother is there beside her, but Alma’s not aware of her, the songs that have become so personal they might have been written for her alone sweeping her up and out of herself to some other place altogether. Which is as it should be. Which is why she’s come. Which is why her focus is exclusively on Micah, bent over his guitar till the tight glistening construct of his pompadour breaks loose and the patch of his soul beard shines with sweat.
He opens with “Loggerhead Blues,” a slow, walking blues that segues into the syncopated upbeat swing of “Dip and Rise,” before bringing it back down to the tragic release of “Minamata,” with its images of deformed infants drawn back into the amniotic sea whence they came till the methyl mercury vanishes from the environment, from their mother’s eggs and their father’s sperm, and they can emerge again, whole and clean and waving their tiny unclenched fingers and toes in a salutation of pure joy. She sways in her seat. She’s not thinking, just feeling, because here’s a man who understands, who fights for the environment, who if he only knew would rise up in all his power and influence to back her and Tim and everything they’re trying to accomplish.
And then she is thinking, even as the band slips out of the wings to join him onstage and he ducks under the strap of his electric guitar and the drummer counts off the beat with his two shining sticks, wondering if he’s ever visited the islands, if he knows the gravity of the situation and
what’s at stake. She glances at her mother, who’s enjoying herself, or seems to be. Then she’s focused again on the stage, the opening chords of “Swamp Savior” coming down like an atmospheric phenomenon, but she’s not in the auditorium any longer—no, she’s out on the island, Micah Stroud at her side, assessing the pig damage, bending low to gaze in at the captive foxes in the tranquillity and safety of their cages, asking him if he wouldn’t maybe write a song for them, an anthem to salvation, and he’s leaning in close, hovering over her with the sun caught in his eyes and drawling, Of course, and I’ll go one better and donate the whole proceeds to the cause. How’s that? Good enough for you? No? Well, I’m going to write a check too . . . but only if there’s a quid pro quo here, because did anybody ever tell you how irresistible you are? Hey, you ever take time off? I mean, would you want to go on the European leg of the tour with me? Stockholm? You ever been to Stockholm . . .?
Four songs with the band, then the stage goes dark but for the spotlight. He turns his back a moment, ducking into the shadows to change guitars—back to acoustic—and then sidles up to the old-fashioned standing mike that’s become his trademark to wonder aloud if anyone out there’s having a good time. Well, they are. All of them. Even Alma’s mother, who lets loose with a war whoop right out of the 1960s as the crowd roars its affirmation. “Hot town,” he murmurs, wiping the sweat from his face with a limp towel. “And I surely do appreciate that on a cool autumn evening out here on the California coast where a poor boy from the bayou can always wrap himself up in the heat you good folks generate”—whistles, applause—“and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
He bows his head a moment in acknowledgment of the applause, his hair fallen loose in a sweated tangle, and when he straightens up and the light catches his face again, she sees that he’s grinning. “But do we have a treat for you tonight, folks, one of your very own”—he raises a hand to shade his eyes and peer out into the audience—“a supremely gifted singer-songwriter who’s going to join me on the next number. Anise? You out there, sweetheart?”
That’s when everything seems to swirl and rush as if she’s caught in a vortex, an open drain sucking her down and taking the whole section of seats with her, her mother an illusion, the sneezing man vanished, hipsters in their trailing coats and scarves and photochromatic lenses all sieving past her as Anise Reed rises from a seat in the front row—how could she have missed her?—in an expanding mushroom cloud of kinked-out hair. But that’s not all. Because Dave LaJoy is there too, in the seat beside the one she’s just vacated, bringing his hands together in praise as the whole auditorium takes it up, Wilson Gutierrez at his elbow, stamping and whistling, while Alicia lifts her pale expressionless face to the light flooding down off the stage and the woman next to her with the big hair shocked with gray . . . beams with . . . with the pride of a mother. Anise’s mother. Anise Reed’s. And before Alma can even begin to process that revelation, here she is, the supremely gifted singer-songwriter herself, mounting the steps to the stage, her bare feet palpitating, toenails shining, as a lackey darts from the wings with her guitar held aloft in offering.
Nearly sixty years earlier, in September of 1946, when the Lobero was just beginning to fill its seats again after the lean years of the war, Alma’s grandmother brought her baby to term at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica—a healthy girl of seven pounds, seven ounces, who showed no ill effects of her mother’s ordeal on Anacapa Island. Beverly was then living with her own mother, having no way to meet the rent on the apartment she’d shared with Till beyond the end of that first catastrophic month when she missed him through every minute of every day as if he’d gone off to war all over again. So they were two widows in that house she’d grown up in, her father ten years’ dead, her mother on her feet all day long, working the cash register at a grocery on Lincoln Boulevard though she suffered from varicose veins and her ankles sagged till they were like layer cakes collapsed over the edges of the pan.
At first, when she awoke in the hospital and the nurse brought her daughter into the room, Beverly thought there must be some mistake, so convinced was she that her child would be a boy, Till’s son, his reified image come from out of the void to stand in for him—Till Jr., who would grow into a man with both his arms pliable and intact. She hadn’t thought of any girls’ names. But when her mother, still in her uniform, came straight to her from work and took the baby up in her arms with a look of ecstasy, a new name darted into her head—Matilda, she would call her Matilda, Tillie for short—and she said it aloud, pronounced it for her mother in the echoing room while the woman in the bed beside her looked on with her twin boys and a placid smile. “Tillie, what do you think of Tillie?”
Her mother, staring into the baby’s face as if the baby were an embodied message from an unknowable place, clucked her tongue. “Do you really want to live with that for the rest of your life?” she said, without looking up.
“Live with what?”
“If you don’t know, then I can’t tell you. But think about it. Just think.”
She fought the notion through the hushed course of that first day, through the changings and the feedings and the trip in the taxi that came for her next morning, stubborn, seeing Till as he was before the war, Till in his uniform, Till without it, in bed, pressing his urgent body to hers. For the first two weeks, right up to the eve of the christening, the baby was just the baby, but finally, sitting there in the rocker by the window of the only house she’d ever known until her husband came along, her daughter sucking placidly at the rubber nipple of the just-warmed bottle and her mother, tired on her feet, shuffling into the room to offer her a cup of tea, she came to herself—she had a daughter, not a son, and Till was a spirit now. In that moment the baby had her name—she would call her Katherine, after the gentle woman with the suffering face and sweet compressed smile who balanced the teacup on its saucer as if it were a feat of legerdemain and never took her eyes from her all the while.
Men came round, men cut from the same mold as Warren, but Beverly never gave them the slightest encouragement, and eventually they stopped coming. There was no question of remarrying, even for the sake of her daughter, because she was a one-man woman, then and always, and she was prepared to die alone at the end of her life to keep herself for Till when they met in heaven. If Katherine (or Kat, as they began calling her because she wouldn’t part with her stuffed tabby except in the bathtub, and then only reluctantly) grew up without a father, she wasn’t the only one, what with the divorce rate and the toll the war had taken, and she never seemed any the worse for it, at least not while she was in school. Of course, Beverly had no choice but to go back to work within a month after her daughter was born, reversing roles with her mother, who quit the grocery to stay home full-time.
Did her mother spoil the child? Yes, absolutely. There were endless afternoons at the beach with a red plastic bucket and shovel, the seashell collections and the dried starfish, trips to feed the ducks in the canals, cones and sundaes at the ice cream parlor, a parade of toys and dresses and shoes. Children were meant to be spoiled, that was her mother’s attitude. And if Kat wanted a story right in the middle of dinner, well, she got it. And another at bedtime and then at breakfast too. In the beginning there were the nursery rhymes Beverly had received from her mother’s lips when she herself was a girl, “Goosey, Goosey Gander,” “Little Jack Horner” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” in the very same worn volumes she’d kept on a special shelf in her room till she was old enough to be embarrassed by them and banished them to the garage, and then the narratives stretched out and the three little pigs came to the table along with the three bears, and after dinner each night, before she switched on the radio—and in later years, the TV—she and her mother traded off from book to book and still Kat demanded more. After the nursery rhymes it was “Dick and Jane” and “Winnie the Pooh” and on up the ladder till Kat was already beginning to read on her own by the time she started kindergarten.
&nbs
p; School illuminated her. She was an eager student, utterly absorbed in the task at hand, no matter how repetitive or frustrating it might have seemed to her classmates. Her report cards were glowing. And when the achievement tests came round in sixth grade and then again in seventh, she consistently ranked in the highest percentile. She was a happy child. She bloomed. She grew. And then came adolescence, which hit with the sudden impact of a meteor—one day Kat was a little girl with a Minnie Mouse barrette in her hair and the next she was filled out and there were boys mooning round every day after school, junior versions of the men who’d come to the house before them—but Kat never seemed to fall under the spell of one or the other of them and never, even for a day, even for prom, let her schoolwork flag. Beverly began to hope for college, a scholarship even, because she really felt there were no limits to what her daughter could do.
To that end, she put aside money each week from her paycheck. She hadn’t had the opportunity of college herself, graduating from high school in the midst of the Depression and then going right to work in a defense plant during the war, but she’d taken a secretarial course and it had paid off. She’d begun working as a secretary in the main offices of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District when Kat entered first grade, and the work was steady and guaranteed, and since she lived with her mother and her mother owned the house free and clear, what would have gone to rent went into a special savings account. And this was no dollar-a-week Christmas club, this was the real thing. A college fund. For Kat. Kat was her hope. Kat, whose mother was a secretary and whose father was dead and drowned in the roiling waters of the Anacapa Passage, was going to be the first of her family to go on to college and thus have access to all the professions a college degree would open up for her—law, medicine, education, science.
