The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  Besides, she thinks, it’s a way of making things up to Gloria. Deprived of her father, at least she will be rich. Yes, now that Sarah thinks about it, it even appeals to her; this life-long sentence to a loveless marriage strikes her as a fitting punishment for her denial of heart. And last but not least there is a fair amount of greed in her. This afternoon she will put personal grief aside, and forget the brave buck for the big one. She says, “Harry, the marriage of convenience you propose is the perfect compliment for a man of the world to pay to a woman of the same place. But if this is business we must first get the details of the arrangement straight and out of the way. For the right price almost anything I have is yours. How much of the thirty million is mine?”

  “Since divorce is out of the question, all that I can say is that you can help yourself, and help me spend the quarterly checks, whatever way you like, fifty-fifty.”

  Because she is half Harry’s age she does not overlook the possibility of retiring early, a wealthy woman. “What would happen if you should die?”

  “This is a legal marriage with common property. You will get my share for yourself.”

  “And what if we both die together, at the same time, how will Gloria be taken care of?”

  The playboy has a chance to die by his live-for-today philosophy. He looks up to heaven and thinks, easy come, easy go, Dad. Then to Sarah he says, “Unless you have a child of mine your daughter will be the next of kin, entitled to the whole thing, or, should you and I have a child, a share equal to that of our issue.”

  The assurance for the seed of Corn Dog makes the deal sound square indeed, ideal. She nods.

  “Then you will?”

  “I want to be very clear about it, Harry. You cannot buy all of me for money. My vow is to appear to the world a faithful and dutiful wife, but you must agree that at home, when no one is looking, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. Sex is not included in the agreement. You have to be old-fashioned and earn it as if we had never been to bed together.”

  She includes this stipulation as a form of penance. Besides she does not expect to be in the mood for love soon and, although Harry swears himself too selfish to want to be a father, it may come in very handy should he suddenly get unselfish and have the urge for a little Swan with whom Gloria would have to share her inheritance.

  The playboy is not worried by what Sarah asks. He thinks he knows the art of showing a woman a good time, believes that the old-fashioned way means presents, candy, flowers, and sweet talk. Besides if things don’t work out in bed, ravishing his ravishing young bride, he will have plenty of money to find what he wants for sale, very discreetly, elsewhere.

  “You just swear to me that, in any case, you’ll never touch another man but me for as long as I live.”

  “Agreed,” she says.

  “Agreed,” says he, shaking her hand and tickling her palm.

  “Good.” She withdraws her hand. “Then put it in writing and I will say ‘I do’ anytime you do.”

  “How about the first day of summer?”

  She looks at the calendar, silently counting the days. In The Poongi Book of the Dead it says,

  He who stays in the light for forty-nine days is called a non-returner.

  It was the wee hours of May the ninth when Corn Dog left this world. Let’s see, she calculates, if these Poongis have their dates right my buck boy will still have a few days left in this transitional state come the first day of summer. But, of course, she thinks, I don’t want to be too dogmatic. By forty-nine days they probably mean a passing square period. If I haven’t made contact with his shade by then, I guess it means I’m never going to.

  Where money’s concerned, she faces hard facts.

  The playboy leers, “And just to make it look good we’ll have it in church. Like the opera, there’s something about church that makes me feel really sweet on you.”

  “All right,” she says with a sigh, “the first day of summer, wherever you say. Set it up and I’ll see you there.”

  Here Comes the Bride

  Of course, when Harry’s sister hears of the wedding, she has Sarah thoroughly investigated. Other than recent history, her tenancy in the Golden Gate Hotel, the facts of Sarah’s life are not easy to trace. The only person in the Golden State she’s ever told about being from Zion is Laudette, and Miss Lord’s loyalty is unquestionable. Sarah has told her other friends and lovers a variety of lies. By nature the peach is secretive, and her life experience has taught her that to tell the truth is to leave oneself vulnerable and disarmed.

  The story Sarah told Harry about her background and how she came with Gloria to the Bay Area is an obvious fake. She said that once upon a time, back east, in the Bay State, she was married, and that her husband, Gloria’s father, one Cornelius Duke the Third, and her own father, a well-known heart specialist named Gerard Black, died in a tragic boating accident two weeks before the baby was born. Two days before she gave birth the market crashed, wiping out the two fortunes she had inherited, and she was forced to flee west trying to start a new life in the arts. She explains Gloria’s dark color by inventing a fictitious mother-in-law for herself, Maria Santos, Cornelius’s banana-queen mother. The Santos Fruit family is tan from generations in the Caramban sun.

  None of this is in the Bay State hall of records. There were no Gerard Blacks licensed to practice medicine, and no Cornie Dukes among the Beantown Who’s Who or any other social register Hilda’s investigators can think of combing. And even if they knew where to look, in Zion, Beehive, their search would come up blank, for, by Shibbolite law, an unwed teenage mother’s name was erased from the Book as if she never existed. When her pregnant condition was revealed, disgraced Sarah was taken off the Prophet’s Honor Roll. Her child, similarly, was declared a non-person.

  The skeletons of her early days are buried, but a few tips around the hotel by Hilda’s men reveal who came and went to the Black apartment. The woman had a host of male friends, all older, married, and wealthy. There is some gossip about a disturbance in one of the penthouse suites that ended in a suspect’s death. But the inquiry meets a stone wall in hotel security and the Bay City Police. Those who know the incident well cannot remember it.

  Before the wedding Hilda sends Harry the report. In the detailed, though somewhat exaggerated list, of his bride-to-be’s sins there is nothing about her before her career at the Golden Gate. But Hilda writes an added, personal note.

  She is clearly not who she says she is. I have information that this “Sarah Black” has been to bed with half the men you’ve invited to the church. I always told our father that if you got married it would be to some gold-digging little piece of social sediment.

  Even though Harry takes the report with a grain of salt, it would seem that nothing much of what his future bride has told him about herself is true. But so what? If he were interested he would have checked himself. And all the better that she’s a blank, for he plans to color her in with his fantasies.

  The playboy is a man who likes to fool around in bed; he need go no deeper than the way she looks to love a woman he sleeps with. Even if her class act is phony, her body is so sweet and firm, like white angel food cake with sugar white icing, it makes him suspend his credibility gladly. He adores Sarah, and feels honored to have loveliness so divine on his arm. Besides he knows his rights. The will says nothing about who his bride’s parents have to be, or what she was beforehand.

  And so, here comes the bride. Miss Sarah Black has never looked whiter than walking down the aisle in her wedding dress. The Mrs H Thornton Swan Junior-to-be shows up three shades lighter than her antique gown. Her creamy skin is lily white. Her hair, fixed in a halo of baby’s breath, looks silver white as moonlight, and outshines her eyes, those dark devil wells made misty by a white veil.

  Rex, Duke, Pug, Lance,

  let my buck boy have another chance …

  Now, with the big day here, Sarah is less capable than ever of letting the sleeping Corn Dog lie. Her
lips, muttering prayers to the dogs beneath her breath, are caught in their own slip knot of trying to undo what can’t be undone. To think of the dead as dead is more than her mind can bear but the grief she carries inside those heavenly round hips and breasts and her waspish waist, thin as a wisp of a weeping willow, in no way mars the beauty of their surface, filling up all that fine old lace.

  She is a peach at the peak of a perfect figure eight and Harry has picked her. When he sees her there in church, with the stained glass and the flowers, he sees all the playthings of this world coming his way. After the ceremony, not only will he be a multimillionaire, but he will have the pleasure of being married to the sweetest doll he’s ever seen, the playboy ideal!

  Sarah is all alone. There is no one to give her away. And she can see the groom’s mind is entirely on himself; what fun he plans to have with her after the ceremony. Sarah’s only well-wishers are Gloria, Laudette, and Laudette’s guest Earl McCoy, a jazz musician of some note. The groom’s friends and family number almost one hundred and include several of Sarah’s former clients and their wives, members of Harry’s club.

  Hilda, up from her big ranch outside of Stetson City, Lone Star, witnesses the union from a front row seat but does not wish it well. “Sis” looks like a tough nut, a bull of a woman in the square country and western tradition, with crew-cut hair and no makeup, wearing leather boots stitched with a cactus design, a blue suede skirt and matching wide-lapel jacket, and string bow tie. On her flank is another big beefy woman, her lawyer. The look she gives Sarah as she passes has such bad blood in it, the bride-to-be quickens her pace up the altar steps to Harry, the playboy grinning like an idiot, but a friendly face nonetheless.

  Gloria is not so easily glanced off. She and Hilda regard one another from across the aisle. Hilda looks with a depth of disgust at the bride’s tan daughter. The bull sees red. Her bushy eyebrows rise into her hairline. Gloria glares back. She thinks Hilda is a strange sight herself. Up until now she thought all ladies were feminine like her mother, or big-hearted like Laudette, but now she sees otherwise.

  At the altar, close enough to smell Sarah’s soft flesh, Harry says, “I do.’ When it comes time to kiss the bride, he lifts the veil and notices that she has no peaches in her cheeks today. Behind the white veil is a black one, the sign of mourning, the flag of protest. Her misery shows on her face. Her eyes are faraway, and her smile is pale and fruitless. Her lips, normally outstanding, moist, pronounced and puckered, red as cherries in season, are trembling; that sweet kisser is white as bone.

  Harry chalks up her expression of discomfort to it being “the Big Day.” Lately, preparing for the wedding, he has noticed that she has been acting peculiarly, but he jovially waves off her distraction to a girl’s nuptial nervousness. Arrangements can be such a strain and after all, the older man thinks, in some respects, she is really no more than a child. What pleasure that thought gives him!

  Women, he thinks, they are such a mystery.

  He smiles and winks to help her feel at ease, and gives her his experienced playboy kiss, warm and gentle.

  On the reception line Hilda is introduced to Sarah and Gloria. The sitter, on around-the-clock duty, stands behind her baby, and Earl, feeling a general disapproval from the snoots of all the white millionaires, keeps close to Laudette. Harry however is honored to have the Earl of Swing, the Real Thing, at his wedding and falls back with McCoy to have a cigar and tell him so, a little side talk that leaves Sarah and Gloria wide open to be trampled by Hilda.

  “I understand you’re from back east, Cookie. You must tell me all about yourself.”

  Already disoriented, pitching with the sorrow within, exhausted from sleepless nights, Sarah cannot keep her pretenses straight. Fumbling with her mind and her memory, she tries to recall what she’s told Harry and make her lies to his sister match. She blanches and bumbles on with a story about being from a nice Bay State family, marrying a Beantown Duke named Cornelius. Or did she call him Cornwallis?

  The bully knows every last word to be false, and has the horns to say so. “I don’t know who you are, Cookie,” she snorts, “but I do know you were never married to any Duke. It looks to me as if your daughter’s father was—well, we can sort of guess, can’t we? From the gutter. Probably a lying tramp like you.”

  Sarah tries to reply but her voice trails off absent-mindedly. The accusation of being a liar ties her tongue, a muteness the result of a mind firing blanks. She looks around and can’t remember where she is. Who is this bothersome bull woman? She looks at Harry. That man looks familiar, but she can’t remember who he is, either. She is not even sure she can place herself.

  “I’ve already told my brother all the dirt I dug up on you, Cookie,” the woman is saying to her, “and you know what? He doesn’t care. That’s the kind of man you’re marrying. You deserve one another. You’ll both be sorry someday.”

  Indeed, the woman is one self-righteous stiff. She reminds Sarah of someone but Sarah can’t recall who.

  Laudette reaches over the child and squeezes Sarah’s shoulder. “Sugar,” she whispers, “snap out of it, wake up! Don’t let her push you around. The nerve of her calling you a dirty liar at your own wedding reception! Don’t let her make you ashamed.”

  But Laudette’s advice falls on ears turned to another time and place. Sarah is straining to hear the dogs of the dead, baying. Where is that barking that will signal the returning buck?

  Hilda imagined her brother’s wife would be light-headed. She had not foreseen a mental case. She turns and breaks into the conversation between her brother and Earl McCoy, points at the little girl standing in front of the baby-sitter, and says with a serrated edge in her voice, heedless of Earl’s feelings, “Brother, it doesn’t surprise me that low blood runs in this family you have married into. I hope you don’t plan on having any children. I’m sure our father would turn in his grave to have a grandchild with a half-black jungle bunny for a sister.”

  Harry apologizes for his sister to Earl and gives her a roguish look. “What burns you up, Sis, is that you are related to me,” he says. Then he turns his eyes from her to the bewildered young goddess in white. If Sarah, his ticket to thirty million, is a slut all the better. Revenge. He thinks it is rich how his father’s will backfired on its maker, and how clever he is for using it as an occasion to exhibit the very behavior the will was meant to put an end to. And he considers it a bonus that coming along with white angel food Sarah is his new milk-and-coffee colored step-daughter. Off-white Gloria couldn’t be a better diddle to his sister’s prejudices.

  Gloria knows what a snob is because she is one herself. The little kitten has the pride of a lioness, and an itch to see this bustling bull woman squirm. She twists her shoulders out of the big hands of Miss Lord and starts tapping out a drum rhythm with her toes.

  “Baby,” Laudette grabs her, “hold still.”

  But Glory ignores her and begins to call attention to herself, singing a popular song that Earl taught her about the chicken frying pot calling the pancake griddle black.

  Laudette pulls Gloria back, away from the adults, and whispers, “Be quiet, darn you. This is not the time or the place to show how naturally you swing. You see those ladies?” She points to Hilda and her lawyer. “They’re as smart as cookies. They can get you up on charges if you don’t behave.”

  Gloria settles down but does not fail to notice that Harry gives her a quick wink of approval as Hilda boils over.

  “Harry,” she says his name rolling her r’s in a growl, “my lawyers tell me that what you have done is legal, and unless this marriage goes bad and falls apart or proves a sham there is nothing I can do about it. But you have destroyed the spirit of our father’s will by bringing such utter gutter trash into the family. I promise you I’ll keep a close eye on you, and this so-called wife of yours. The first sign that either you or this whore you picked up is fooling around and I’ll take you to court and beat your inheritance out of you. Such a disgrace,” she casts
a revolted eye on Gloria, “will surely bring retribution from God.”

  Gloria stares back, returns the evil eye with an eviler one. Casting curse for curse, she wishes a very personal bug on her step-aunt.

  It is a happy day for Harry, after all these years, getting the last laugh on his sister as well as the first installment of his birthright. “Investigate us as you like, Sis, but what you see is what you’ll find out: I have taken this fine young woman as my legal partner, for better or for worse, until death do us part, and have provided for her daughter’s future as if she were my own.”

  The bull charges out of the reception, spitting angry, and the bride remains white and blanked-out. A tormented pinch on her lips says “Ouch!”, but nothing actually comes out.

  Gloria understands that her stepfather stood up for her against his own flesh and blood. Harry is a strong link in the chain of males that the girl uses to bind her independent father image, her shining, knight, unarmored, to her altar of ego sacrifice. She’s proud to have him as a stepfather. Like Uncle Early and … and … yes, did she dream it or was there an ice cream man she fell in love with? No matter, Harry Swan is clearly on her side.

  “Daddy-o,” she frees herself from Miss Lord and grabs him by the hand. “Let’s dance.”

  “Anything you say, Gee Bee.”

  The Bridal Suite

  After the wedding, Sarah agrees to give up her place at the Golden Gate and, while they decide about their place of permanent residence, will move temporarily into the Swan town house. She insists her new husband let go of his man Edgar, a slipshod gambler, to make respectable room for Gloria and her baby-sitter. Laudette is in full charge starting on the wedding night and going through the couple’s upcoming honeymoon cruise. Sarah, ever distracted, is used to leaving Gloria entirely in the capable hands of Miss Lord. The child takes it for granted.