Things in Glocca Morra

by Peter Collier

  But all that, and her troubling death with her priapic lord, was still in the future, and I sat there in the San Bernardino Mountains imagining her incandescent innocence as she walked past the Victoria and Albert in her new yellow dress.

  I sensed rather than heard someone behind me and turned to see Niccolo Fortunato leaning against a tree about fifteen feet from where I was sitting.

  This close he was an artifact: the blank eyes and long nose pointing down at a strong chin dimpled at its center came from Roman portrait sculpture; the features couldn’t have been more immobile if the face had been injected with curare. He was younger than I had assumed from the glimpse we’d gotten at the Warners party and later on his front porch—perhaps late forties; of middle height but seeming taller because of his lean dancer’s body. He was dressed in corduroy pants and a shooting jacket, despite the heat, and projected a languid bella figura as well as a coiled menace.

  Watching me intently with raptor’s eyes, he picked a needle off a pine tree, stuck it in his mouth like a toothpick, and let the silence press down. Jack’s father got leverage by doing the same thing, and the fugitive thought flitted through my mind that the two men might be similar in other ways as well.

  “Do you have a black Buick?” I blurted out.

  “Yes.” His smile looked like dental pain. “You have seen me following you?”

  I nodded.

  “I haven’t been hiding.”

  I couldn’t figure out anything to say, and sat there dreading what was next.

  “I am concerned for my daughter. She is not a little girl any longer and I can’t tell her what to do, but she doesn’t know much about this country. In spite of her experiences, she believes that people are good and life is fair. But I know that evil is an active principle in the world and would have made sure she understood this too if things had been better between us.”

  There was a rough candor in how he spoke as well as what he said. He struck me as a man who prided himself on not using emollients when he talked about himself.

  “I’m not very trusting, which is why I keep an eye on your friend and you too, since you seem to be his Siamese.”

  He took the pine needle out of his mouth and studied it. “Even if you don’t see me, I’m probably nearby, looking for one sign of insincerity, even one small indication that Valentina might suffer as a result of the attention your friend gives her.”

  “Jack would never hurt her,” I stammered. “He loves her.”

  “Love,” he mouthed the word as if tasting for an expiration date. “We’ll see. Anything’s possible, but I know something of his family. These are careless people. They use others and allow them to get hurt in the damage they create as they try to attain their objectives.”

  I looked away, but he saw what I was thinking.

  “Even those of us who don’t always live inside the lines of the law have principles in our private lives. You shouldn’t think of this as a contradiction.”

  In the silence that followed, I heard the hawk again.

  Finally he asked, “What do you know about Valentina’s past?”

  “Just the little she told us.”

  “Did she tell you about being taken by the Germans?”

  “Yes.”

  “And about how she got out of her prison camp?”

  “She said you came in shooting.”

  “I ask only because I want to make sure that you and your friend know what she has experienced and how far I will go for her.”

  “She hadn’t heard from you in twenty years,” I frightened myself by saying this.

  He blinked rapidly. “I’m not in the habit of explaining myself, especially to strangers, but it is true that perhaps I was not the kind of father I should have been. But I’m also not the kind of man who makes the same mistake twice. Know for certain that I watch over her now.”

  I thought he had finished, but he didn’t move.

  “My friend Jack would like to get to know you,” I finally said.

  “Know me.” His look was like one I’d seen on Val’s face when she was secretly amused. “Yes, my daughter has told me he mentioned this. I said to her I would meet him only when I was sure that the two of us would not find ourselves at odds.”

  “She put it differently to me—that you didn’t want to meet him before you were sure that you wouldn’t have to hurt him.”

  “I did say that,” he admitted. “Like I told you, I do not have a good feeling about this friendship between them.”

  “But why?”

  “Given all the factors, it seems unlikely that he can benefit her. Leave it at that.”

  It was quiet for too long. I knew he was playing a game of chicken with me, but I couldn’t keep from breaking the silence first: “Jack greatly admires what you did in the war.”

  When he replied, the words were as devoid of emotion as his facial features. “I don’t ask to be seen as a patriot. I made contact with the people in Washington for one reason only: I needed a way to get into Italy and connect with the right people there so I could do what was necessary for my daughter. I am very far from what you’d call an idealist.”

  He glanced down at the ground. “Being able to kill people without wondering if they deserve it: that’s the only good thing about war. Those I’ve killed ignore me during the day. It is only at night that they appear. This does not especially bother me. I almost look forward to seeing them.”

  Then he came up so close to me that I could see the enlarged pores on his nose and smell the wintergreen tang of his breath. “Did Valentina tell you that I promised her she would be safe in America?”

  I nodded as sweat slid down my sides.

  “Even people who are not my friends say I keep my promises.”

  His eyes released me and he stood back. “You don’t say much. Maybe you’re better at listening than talking. I hope so because I want you to tell your friend what has been said just now. This is serious business.”

  He never raised his voice. He had a blemished dignity, even a certain finish, I thought, until he abruptly rattled off a burst of Italian: “E che non si cazzeggia piu!” He translated as if for himself, “We’re not fucking around here!”

  He brushed off the front of his jacket, and just before walking away he slowly raised his right hand, made the fingers into a gun, smiled at me, cocked the hammer of his thumb and let it fall as he mouthed the word Bang.

  When I arrived back at the cabin in a flop sweat, Jack was sitting at the kitchen table with a surfeited look. Val was on her side facing away in one of the beds, the sensuous curve of her rump edified by a flimsy après-sex negligee. She sat up and pulled a comforter over herself, and said she would cook dinner if we got bread and lettuce for a salad.

  I wanted to drive to the little store we’d seen on the way in, but Jack said he preferred to take in the good mountain air. For the first quarter mile down the dirt road, both of us were quiet, for different reasons.

  Finally I told him, “I saw Fortunato.”

  That stopped him in his tracks. “You’re shitting me.”

  “No, it’s true. He followed me on my hike. I was as close to him as I am to you right now.”

  “Jesus!”

  “He admitted he’s the one who’s been following us all this time. The dark Buick we’ve been seeing is his.”

  “How long did you talk to him?”

  “Several minutes.”

  “What about?”

  “About Val.”

  “And…”

  “And about you and your situation with her. He said to tell you that he’s got his eye on you and he’s ready to go to the mat if anything goes wrong. He even talked about how he’s not bothered when the ghosts of the people he’s killed come to visit him.”

  Jack blanched, and then started forward again. “Like I told you, I’m happy, Val’s happy. There’s no problem here. If I could meet him, I’d take care of all the doubts.”

  “He also said that he’s not f
ucking around. When someone like Fortunato says that, you need to listen.”

  “Just gangster melodrama.”

  “I think he meant exactly what he said.”

  But Jack had already put my caution behind him.

  Trekking back up the road with our supplies, he was sweating heavily and I could tell that he regretted his decision to walk instead of drive.

  Val came to the cabin door to receive the groceries with her hair gathered in an up-do and a fey look on her face. She appeared to be wearing nothing but an apron and high heels. “My gift to you for walking all the way up from the market,” she pointed down at herself. “Now we have some fun.”

  She turned and walked across the room to the tiny stove, naked in the back except for the apron’s thin drawstring around her waist. Her perfect ass cheeks jiggled as she shook a pan on the fire while prancing to silent music.

  We were both mesmerized by the spectacle. Finally she turned to present a steaming pan with a magician’s flourish: “Ecco! Pasta all’amatriciana!”

  She put it on the table and then looked at Jack and began singing “How Are Things in Glocca Morra” in a quavering soprano, with stylized hand movements and drawn-out syllables that made the song into a sort of homemade Neapolitan bel canto.

  When she had finished a verse, she sensed that something was bothering me. “Why are you sad, Billings?”

  “Don’t mind him,” Jack said before I could reply. “It’s that time of month.”

  I smelled Val’s distinctive bouquet when she came over to ruffle my hair: “No matter what it is, Billings, good food cures all of our maladies.”

  Then she pointed at the pasta and commanded, “Mangia!”

  After dinner I drove the Zephyr home, leaving the two of them to spend the night at the cabin and return the next morning in a car that Warners had agreed to send. I replayed the encounter with Fortunato over and over during the nearly three hours it took to get to Malibu in heavy Sunday evening traffic.

  By the time I arrived, a sudden squall had come up off the ocean and the wind was howling like a Greek chorus. Inside the beach house it smacked the bay window every few seconds like a fist. I secured all the doors and windows and then cowered on the sofa as I had done after seeing Mischa Auer in The Monster Walks when I was a kid. And like then, I suddenly panicked at the thought that I had not locked the monster out, but inside with me.

  I slept badly, and the next morning I was wakened by the sound of the front doorknob being turned aggressively, followed by a loud pounding on the door. Rehearsing the hell I was going to give Jack about forgetting his key again, I got up and unlocked the door. Standing there, impatient as always to put his thumbprint on reality, was Joseph P. Kennedy himself!

  New York

  March 30, 1981

  TWELVE

  When we were at Choate, I sometimes tried to tell Jack about my dreams as I was just waking up. He always interrupted me with a huge histrionic yawn that concluded with a loud smacking of his mouth. Pulling the covers up over his head, he’d say in a muffled voice, “What could be more boring than someone else’s dreams? Spare me. I’d rather hear about your bowel movements.”

  Maybe he would feel differently now if I could tell him about the dreams I’ve had lately—one blending into another; all labyrinthine and all drawing their jumbled dreamwork from the high points of our lives together.

  Last night, the main feature was about the Cotton Club. The first time we actually went there, Jack and I were college freshmen; Kick was still at Sacred Heart but we snuck her there too. We all got dressed up in evening wear and had a hell of a time. Later on, the Old Man found out about it and ripped Jack and me royally. But it was worth his wrath. Kick was at the apex of her bloom, wearing her first off-the-shoulder dress. She had her hair in an updo showing the nape of her neck, a spot every man in the place, including the wary Negroes, would have given his life to nuzzle. She was laughing and tossing her head in that effulgent way of hers that added so much wattage to a room.

  On that actual visit, Cab Calloway, wearing his vanilla tails and high-stepping like a drum major, strutted over to our front-row table in the middle of “St. James Infirmary,” bringing the spotlight with him, and jabbed a long finger down at Kick while he chanted, “Hydee-Hdyee-Hydee-Ho…”

  My dream, of course, mangled this and other facts and recombined them into a menacing dada. Calloway was dressed like Chiquita Banana. Val joined Jack and Kick in a conga line behind him while I stood apart, nervous because I realized something they didn’t: that the people at the Cotton Club were not the unduly polite conked-hair Negroes we actually encountered back then, but the resentful militants of a later time, wearing shades and dark watch caps over their Afros and shooting hard looks at all the whites.

  One of them, a Mister T lookalike with a heavy noose of gold chains around his neck, loomed up in front of me to stab a big index finger in my face: “Whatchu lookin at, boy?”

  As I cowered, Jack congaed by and saw my predicament. “Don’t worry about these jitterbugs, Lemuel,” he called out in a lighthearted way. “They won’t hurt you. They know that Bobby and I are going to set them free.”

  The dream ended abruptly as Kick, with one foot bare and a red dancing pump on the other, stepped up portable stairs in a shimmering blue cocktail dress with sequins like fish scales and entered a gleaming twin-engine airplane that had taxied up to the club’s entrance on 142nd Street. I screamed to her that she was in danger, but she ignored me. The plane took off with a midget pilot at the controls and got smaller and smaller until it was a tiny aluminum coffin in the sky.

  I woke with a jackhammering headache and knew immediately that I would spend another day feeling that my charge was off; another day dealing with the revolution of inanimate objects, as forks and pencils seemed to jump out of my hands by their own volition and skate over tabletops just beyond my reach; another day of uncertainty about whether the relationship between cause and effect still held; another day of being pathetically grateful when I found my keys and wallet right where I had left them.

  I could imagine what Jack would say if he were still here: “You need to take a Midol and get control of your emotions.”

  In fact, I emitted blood sometime during the tangled night, from my nose. When I saw a copper-smelling Rorschach on the pillowcase, I felt once again that death is in my vicinity—hanging around more than stalking—although I know that when we finally make contact it will not be the operatic finale that it was for all the others, but something far more mundane, like barking your shin on an unseen piece of furniture when you get up to pee in the middle of the night.

  I went to the bathroom and cleaned myself up, then came back to the bed and sank into a hospital sleep for an hour or so while the volume gradually increased on the street sounds of the Upper East Side—the sirens and horns and the construction noise blending in the dissonant chamber music of urban life. Still carried along by the deep currents of the dream, I thought about all of them, my people, all gone in their violent moments but all still alive for me.

  I hold Daniel Goldman partly responsible for the dreams as well as this penny-ante existential dread I’ve been feeling. About ten days ago, I received a manila envelope from him with some Xeroxed pages and a note saying they had been culled from what he grandly called the “Joseph P. Kennedy Papers.” Not knowing how ruthlessly this hoard was scoured and sanitized by the family, he probably doesn’t realize that this will always be the greatest story never told.

  “I thought the enclosed might interest you,” Goldman wrote, “and perhaps jog your memory and even encourage you to tell stories into the tape machine I left with you.” Then came the threat: “I’ll be calling soon so we can discuss all this.”

  The Xeroxes have been on my nightstand since then. The first one—a Cartier-Bressonesque photo of Jack, Val and me completing a ride on the Griffith Park Merry-Go-Round—causes total recall. We had scrambled for our favorite mounts as the previous ride was gli
ding to a stop. Jack climbed onto a valiant black stallion with flaring red nostrils. Val chose a more feminine palomino in front of him. I trailed behind both of them as their Sancho Panza on a small, squat horse with a drab hide.

  “Let’s catch her,” Jack turned to yell to me as the calliope music started up and the platform began to move. He whipped his horse across the withers with the reins.

  “You’ll never,” Val said over her shoulder. Posted elegantly in her steed’s stationary stirrups, she looked like a model advertising the equestrian life.

  The merry-go-round reached cruising speed, and at each revolution I focused momentarily on the spectators in the sitting area. On a couple of turns, I saw a figure standing on a bench with a camera pointed at us, largely concealing a disconcerting face. The image he snapped that ended up in the so-called Joseph P. Kennedy Papers captures our dismount, and the essence of our position in the universe just then.

  In the photograph, Val is stepping off the platform, suspended in midair with one hand grasping at empty space, appearing uncertain where or how she will land. I’ve just dropped the bridle of my horse and I’m moving forward on the apron of the carousel as if to stabilize her. Jack is standing next to his steed, smiling the smile of someone who has not yet heard the bad news.

  Goldman had copied the back side of the photo too, showing the block-printed words, “Here she is.” And below that, “Beaufort 10/6/45.”

  The next Xerox was of a letter dated October 13, 1945, on the official letterhead of the FBI. The typed “Dear Mr. Kennedy” had been struck out with “Dear Joseph” handwritten over it in ink:

  Receipt is acknowledged of your air mail of October 9.

  Thank you for your views on the labor situation in Hollywood and thank you too for the actions you have already taken during your brief time in Southern California to convince the men who count there to do everything in their power to oppose the advance of communism in the entertainment industry.