Joined by drugged sisters in the same costumes, Jennie and her crowd camped out in Maggie’s living room, smoking joints openly and defying infuriated commands to vacate the premises. Maggie could be a salty woman if she desired—a half century of marriage to a sailor had influenced her vocabulary—but the rain of curses she unleashed brought back only goofy smiles and an occasional “Right on, sister!” On a day when Maggie discovered Jennie and another girl sitting like zombies in the living room, clearly in the throes of a powerful drug, oblivious to all, the grandmother physically jerked her ward by the seat of her bedspread and propelled her into a bedroom, slamming the door. Then Maggie, steaming, ordered the second girl out of her house forever. But the stoned young woman refused to budge, staring defiantly. On her face was a smile that Maggie took to be malevolent. Promptly she found the telephone and pointedly called the police, in clear earshot of the disturbing girl. Maggie spoke agitatedly to the narcotics division, listened quietly, stammered a response, hung up in despair. Later that night she reported to Cap that the police told her that nothing could be done. “Can you believe it?” groused Maggie. “The cops said, ‘Just try and get the girl out of your house, but don’t let her get hurt because she could sue you.’” Maggie threw up her hands in despair. “What kind of world has this become? I can’t kick a drug addict out of my own house because she might sue me.”
Jennie began to travel dark streets. Mecca for the young and disenchanted was the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, and though it was fifty miles from where she lived, Jennie had only to hold out her thumb and transportation could be obtained. Once there, she found birds of all feathers, most using false IDs to enter the discotheques and palaces of rock music, sashaying up and down the aorta of neon fantasy, or just lounging on the curb in front of Filthy McNasty’s nightclub, “laid back,” as the vogue called it. And if she needed currency, it was not difficult to earn. One Sunday morning, Jennie awoke groggy in a motel room near the Hollywood Bowl. Beside her, still sleeping, was a plumpish man well past forty whose bald head had infant hair transplants that seemed like struggling weeds in the desert. She loathed him, even though he had paid her thirty dollars for the night beside his heavy body. Creeping to the dresser where his pants were thrown, Jennie found his wallet and started to take the rest of his money. But the first thing she encountered was a color photograph of the man, standing beside a melancholy woman with unhidden pain in her eyes, and two small, impeccably groomed girls. They posed in front of a storybook house, probably in the Valley, with a peach tree erupted in glorious blossom. Jennie stared at the picture for a long time, feeling the sense of family that it contained, then she put the wallet back in its place, kissed her trick lightly on the forehead, and left.
At home, the situation grew more tense and ugly. Jennie’s behavior would have been difficult for any parent to handle, but for Maggie and Cap, two generations removed, it was beyond a frame of reference. On a night when Jennie emerged unsteadily from her room, her eyes streaked with red, her hair in electric shock, her breasts promising to fall from a transparent and unbuttoned blouse, Maggie tried tenderness. She embraced Jennie and said emotionally, “I love you so dearly, but I don’t know how to handle this new Jennie. Tell me what to do, honey. I’m old and I don’t understand what you’re doing to yourself.”
Jennie feigned astonishment. “I’m the same person I always was, Grandma.” Her mouth was glazed, her words disconnected. “You’re simply imagining things. I’m just modern.”
On another night, grandmother and granddaughter worked themselves into a yelling match, climaxed by Maggie ordering Jennie not to leave the house. Arrogantly, Jennie opened the front door and started outside. “If you go out that door,” warned Maggie, “then don’t bother to come home.” The ultimatum was a common one in Jennie’s town. It could be heard on any night, in a thousand households. Jennie’s response was a smirk. Maggie rushed to the door and did not hesitate. She slapped her granddaughter—hard, across the face. Then the old woman broke down and sobbed. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve never done that before. I just couldn’t think of anything else.” With a glimmer of understanding, Jennie nodded, but then she was gone, down the sidewalk, disappearing into a battered car at the curb whose occupants were yelling at her to hurry, and whose music could be heard, Cap reasoned, miles out to sea.
Maggie was at the point when she was preparing to call the Los Angeles County juvenile authorities and implore them to take custody of her granddaughter, when Jennie’s real mother turned up once again and announced that she was taking the troublesome girl to Seattle. Naturally Jennie balked at the idea of leaving home and friends, but there was no room for negotiation. Sandra, her mother, gave her two options: Seattle or the juvenile home.
Once ensconsed in Seattle, Jennie began running around the same old track. At a rock concert she took LSD, then removed her blouse and danced topless in the aisle until two policemen arrested her, scolded her, and told her that what was tolerated in L.A. was not appreciated in Seattle. She took to shoplifting minor items, notebook paper, for example, and told her new friends that she was “liberating” such goods and fighting “capitalist oppression,” although it is doubtful Jennie had any notion what the potent phrase meant. When all maternal counsel was rebuked, Sandra threw her out, and for a few nights Jennie found herself on the cold, damp streets of Seattle. Someone led her to someone else, and eventually Jennie found shelter in an informal foster home operated by a black man named Prince, whose white wife, Samantha, was reportedly a witch, or at least the dozen youngsters who lived in the old, gabled white frame house said so. The house had garrets and hidden corners behind stairwells where secret conversations could be held, or quick urgent couplings.
Jennie was not popular among the wards of Prince during her first weeks in residence. She was arrogant, temperamental, rude. When boys in the home asked her out on dates, she refused haughtily, pretending instead to be going steady with a university philosophy major. In truth her only friend was a thin, equally lonely eighteen-year-old black boy whom she had met on the street during her homeless period in the Queen Anne district. His name was Claude, and since neither of them had any money, their dates consisted of window-shopping and sitting above the lake, speaking of music and witchcraft.
One night, watching Jennie streak like a comet through the gabled house, Prince stopped her and led her to one of the secret places for a talk. He knew little of her background, save that she was one of a forgotten number of youngsters who had been cast out of broken homes and were trying to survive. Pleased to be asked, Jennie delivered a marathon biography. Prince listened patiently to the cocky recollections, undermined as they were by loneliness and insecurity. He told her that she was not unique. Jennie was no more or less abused than any of the kids who had drifted in and out of his house in recent years. And those who blamed their parents as an excuse to embrace drugs and sex—with no more commitment than soldiers on a weekend pass—were common in Prince’s eyes.
“Have you ever loved anybody?” he asked gently.
Jennie thought on this and shook her head negatively. In her early teens, she had waited weekly for love to arrive, but lately she had not fretted much over its absence.
Prince said he was not surprised. “And the reason is,” he suggested, “you don’t believe in anything. A dog believes in his master. A whore in her pimp. A priest in his bishop. A man in his woman. You’d better grab something to hold onto, or you’re gonna be sucked under.”
On her seventeenth birthday, Jennie was given a surprise party by the kids in the house, who found her more agreeable after the long conversation with Prince. Jennie broke down. She cried as she opened gifts as random as a string of amber worry beads, a peacock feather, a roach clip, a book of Rosicrucian philosophy. A girl named Katie gave her a diary. “I love you all,” wept Jennie. “You’re my family now. I’m sorry I’ve been such a pain in the ass.”
By the time ice cream and cake were served, Jennie’s stom
ach was pitching. She put it down to the excitement of the night, and too many glasses of wine. But during the party, she rushed to the bathroom and was sick.
Several weeks would pass before Jennie wrote her first entry in the diary, not until she had recuperated from the abortion of a two-month-old fetus growing within her. The fee was seventy-five dollars and she borrowed it from her friends. They comforted her and assured her that the decision had been the right one. She was not even sure who the father was. All of this she told her diary. Then she wrapped her amber worry beads around the book, put it beneath her pillow, and, despite the pain, slept very soundly.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
When it was over, and assemblages could be made, and the story followed, a swami in India was asked to comment on a curious coincidence. With more than two billion people on earth, why did destiny choose two young women from the same state, California, to play principal roles? And what is destiny, anyway? The wise man, who lived beside the Ganges and drank of its sulfuric water each day, and who, it was said, could make his body spin like a falling meteor and cause slivers of fire to dance on the holy river and leap out as bidden to play around his fingertips, smiled. “Each life is a strand in the rope of mankind,” he said, “and only the gods know how and when one strand will entwine with another. That is the best definition of destiny I can give to you.”
Her name was Annabella, and it suited her, sounding like music. She was a “many splendored child” in the eyes of her mother, and “a blessing of joy and happiness” to her father. The parents, whose names were Dick and Jane, could have posed for the cover of a government booklet promoting the American dream. Annabella, their only child, was born in 1946, the year in which computers first appeared, in which Winston Churchill pronounced the phrase “Iron Curtain,” and in which post-war babies were counted in such record numbers that it was a cause for naïve rejoicing.
The California of Annabella Tremont was far removed from the hedonistic beach world of Jennie Bolliver. Annabella was reared in the middle of the state, a place rich with fruit and wine, with softly rolling hills and a sense of permanence. Victorian houses bespeak the flavor of New England. Families trace ancestors back to centuries past when Spaniards arrived; a settlement was thriving near San Jose when the Declaration of Independence was being signed in Philadelphia. Few more lovely pieces of earth can be found, and after hard storms, rainbows arch and fall into the valley where Annabella grew. When she became a woman, Annabella studied Eastern religions, and she came across a passage that caught her attention. “Some people believe that an unborn baby chooses its parents,” she told her mother. “If that is true, then I chose wisely.”
Dick Tremont worked for a utility and made twenty-five dollars a week when his daughter was born, a year after his discharge from the Coast Guard. He was a quiet, hard-working man with strong shoulders and hands, and intelligence that removed him from the outdoors that he loved into an executive job that he only tolerated. In middle age, he still looked as if he preferred hard labor to dictating letters. A dignity emitted from Dick Tremont, an old-fashioned courtliness, a respect for all men. He was a perfect counterbalance to Jane, whose Italian blood gave her not only dark beauty but a temperament in concert.
They had planned a large family, but Annabella was the only child that Jane was able to carry full term. No matter. From the moment of her birth, Annabella was the altar at which her parents worshiped. She was dark, like her mother, with deep, large eyes of brown that matched her hair. The early years were unremarkable, save for the grace with which she lived them. Annabella was the child who got the most valentines in her class, who was invited to every birthday party, who issued calm orders to her friends that were always obeyed, who read books, painted pictures, composed poetry and music. Clearly she was marked as special. The diseases of childhood rarely lingered, as if she was beyond their curse. “Annabella was not only the most beautiful little girl I ever saw,” remembered a teacher, “she had enormous potential. When the other kids had trouble remembering that if you mix red and blue you get purple, Annabella could name six shades of purple. How many eight-year-olds know the word mauve?”
It must not be construed that Annabella was the baby goddess of daintiness and saintliness, for she burst across the wooded fields near the fine home that Dick built, animals trailing after as if in a parade. She found rocks that looked like jewels in fast-running streams, and the wings of butterflies held her attention like masterworks in a museum. When she tumbled out of trees, she came up laughing; even the dirt on her face was artful. Hers was the good life, the American promise. There were no shadows. No dark corners were permitted in the house. Surely she was heiress to a future of rich reward.
Now, looking back, Jane well remembers the moment that her daughter’s life changed. It is as clear to the mother as the portrait of Annabella that hangs like a shrine over the fireplace, the child in white lace, two favorite poodle dogs sitting obediently in her lap. There are confused moments when Jane cannot grasp why everything happened the way it did, but there is no quarrel in her mind over when it all began.
When Annabella was ten, her mother surrendered to the exhortations of her father, Carlo, who had begged since the child was new for the privilege of showing the child the old country. Italy! Carlo insisted that his granddaughter could not wait any longer before she understood the land of her maternal origin. Tradition must be honored. Relatives must be introduced. Feasts must be laid in outdoor restaurants beside the sea, under lattice arbors of grapes and roses. In her heart, Jane felt the little girl was too young to plunge into the volatile land of her forebears, none of whom spoke more than broken English. But Carlo was persistent, warning that he was old and his heart was rusty, and his death would be impossibly melancholy if he could not show his American grandchild the beauty of la vita italiana.
Finally, sighing, Jane sent her daughter off to Italy for three weeks. It would be more than three months before Annabella returned to California, and on that day, Jane would know that irrevocable change had taken place.
The family album bears witness to Annabella’s happy initiation into Italy. Photographs show the little American girl posing happily in front of Carlo’s old stone house in Forte dei Marmi, its façade covered with climbing roses and geraniums. In others, old women in black throw eager arms around their distant relative, blowing clouds of garlic and olive oil through a few gold teeth. Oddly, a “European look” had already come to Annabella, as if it was meant for her to discard the manner of middle California and put on the robes of Northern Italy. In every picture, Carlo was proud and expansive. He was a little old man with a stomach crowded with pasta and wine, with eyes merry and bleary. His hair was as white as the marble in nearby Carrara, where four centuries earlier Michelangelo had personally chosen the stone for his David. Carlo had worked in the quarry until his lungs could no longer tolerate the glistening powder that rose in clouds from the explosions of dynamite that pried marble from its place. Now he was retired and had nothing but time, time to show Annabella where he had worked when he was young and strong, time to stroll with her on the Italian Riviera, time to stop and eat shrimp in tomato and garlic sauce, time to sit in the surf and feel the warm sea that bathed the feet of emperors, time to visit the tombs of family ancestors, time to tell Annabella the story of the cowardly fascists who tumbled so easily to the ranting of Mussolini—and how Carlo led a band of courageous partisans.
Between Annabella and Carlo grew the special relationship that can exist between the very old and the very young. When the old women of the town tried to share the child, Carlo shooed them away. He cared for her as if she was Victor Emmanuel’s daughter. Annabella awoke each summer morning in the stone cottage and smelled delicious odors rising from the kitchen—breakfast rolls with cheese hot and runny baked inside, steaming chocolate with milk taken from a neighbor’s cow a half hour before sunrise, fresh grapes and apricots, a little glass of red wine with a spoonful of sugar on special occasions. The
agreed-upon three weeks disappeared quickly, before Annabella could even learn the names of her third and fourth cousins. Carlo telephoned across the ocean to his daughter and begged Jane for an extension. When she wavered, Annabella grabbed the telephone and shouted, “Buon giorno, Mama, I’m learning Italian!” Jane sighed and agreed. “Grandpa’s kidnaped our child,” she told Dick, but he laughed and saw no peril in an extension.
One afternoon Annabella burst into the stone cottage to wake Carlo from his post-luncheon nap. It was time for their daily walk. Something was wrong; an eerie silence bespoke it. Annabella found her grandfather crumpled beside his bed, his face leaden and drained of color, an arm outstretched for help. The other hand pressed against his heart. Carlo tried to smile as Annabella rushed to him. His breath came in one last rattle, and then he died.
The experience was profound for Annabella, discovering her beloved grandfather in his last moments, then staying for the funeral and mingling her tears with the villagers who had known Carlo for almost eight decades. On the day she left Forte dei Marmi, Annabella insisted on going alone to the grave, where she placed a bouquet of wild daisies and climbing roses on the fine marker of white marble from Michelangelo’s quarry. She had seen the stone all summer, propped up against a work shed, not knowing that Carlo had selected it personally. The child stood beside the marker for a long while, sorrowing that the quickening chill of autumn had taken away her perfect summer.
Annabella returned to California and was changed, somber now, speaking only Italian. “I am Italian,” she told Jane, who was disturbed over the transformation. “I sent away a ten-year-old American girl,” she told Dick, “and back comes an adult Italian woman.” But time passed, and the years blurred, and Annabella was once more Americanized, even though she often begged her mother for a return to Italy. By the time Annabella was in high school, she could not have been distinguished on sight from her sister cheerleaders who swirled in ecstasy over football heroes and knew the words to every Elvis Presley song. But Jane saw more, she knew that her daughter was on a holding pattern, that the die was cast, that the day would come when she would leave the valley. And then—Jane knew it in her heart—she would never come back.
Serpentine Page 13
