Clean Sweep

by Jane Heller

  I went down to the kitchen, made some coffee, and brought it upstairs. Then I climbed back on the bed and stared at Melanie’s manuscript. There were about twenty pages remaining in the section Cullie had hidden, but I’d read enough for one night. I was about to put the pages aside in favor of one of the magazines on my night table when the next chapter in the section on Alistair’s personal life caught my eye. It was entitled, “Alistair’s Jewish Princess: The Woman He Couldn’t Marry.” I was intrigued, to say the least—intrigued enough to keep reading. Melanie did have a knack for keeping the reader hooked, I’ll give her that.

  The chapter began with Melanie’s allegation that, during his dance instructor days in Queens, Al Downey had a steady girlfriend, a Jewish girl who used to take lessons at the local Arthur Murray Dance Studio. According to Melanie, Al had promised to marry the girl but claimed he didn’t make enough money to support her. When he was discovered by a Hollywood talent scout, he told the girl that he’d go out to California, make a name for himself in the movies, and send for her. He went out to California, made a name for himself in the movies, but didn’t send for her. Instead, he broke up with her—first, according to Melanie, because he thought a Jewish wife would be a liability; second, because he got out to Hollywood and found that, as the newly christened movie star Alistair Downs, he had his pick of beautiful women; and third, because he ended up marrying glamorous show girl Annette Dowling. The poor girl from Queens was heartbroken and married a young businessman from Manhattan on the rebound. But she continued to pine for Alistair. When she read that he had purchased an estate in Layton, Connecticut, and planned to settle there with his new wife, the woman convinced her husband to buy a house there too. Before long, Alistair and his old flame rekindled their romance, unbeknownst to their respective spouses. Thinking he might marry her this time, the woman waited for Alistair to divorce Annette. It never happened. Alistair had political aspirations, and a divorce was out of the question. Alistair dumped her for the second time. Years later, though they both continue to live in Layton, Alistair and the woman remain estranged.

  “Ah, Melanie, you’ve done it again,” I sighed. You’ve dug up yet another sad episode in the Alistair Downs saga. “Poor, pathetic woman,” I said out loud, thinking of the Queens woman Alistair spurned. Get out the violins for the old girl. From Melanie’s description, she sounded like one of those pitiful, long-suffering heroines on my mother’s soap opera—the ones who endure year after year of mistreatment at the hands of some cad. I wondered who she was. I wondered if she belonged to my mother’s country club. I wondered how any woman could love a guy like Alistair. He was a complete fraud.

  My musings were interrupted by the sound of the phone ringing. I jumped when I heard it.

  “Cullie?”

  “How did you know it was me?” he said, slurring his words, the result, I guessed, of one too many rum and tonics.

  “I was hoping it was you. Cullie, I read the manuscript and I wanted you to know that I—”

  “Is this the mistress of Maplebarf Manor?” he mumbled. I could barely understand him.

  “Cullie, listen to me. I want to tell you how sorry—”

  “Is your house the one with all the turrets?”

  “No. Cullie, please let me—”

  “Oh. Then it must be the one with the indoor swimming pool and squash court.”

  “No. Would you please stop—”

  “I got it. I got it. It’s the one with the movie theatre in the basement.”

  “Why don’t we talk when you’re feeling better,” I said gently.

  “I’m feeling fine. Just great. How about you?”

  “Fine. I’m fine. It’s you I’m worried about.”

  “Sonny?”

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  “I love you, too. That’s what I was calling you about.”

  “Then why aren’t we together tonight? Why am I here and why are you there?”

  “Because I was too quick to believe the worst about you,” I admitted.

  “Would you have been less quick to believe the worst about me if I had a lot of money and came from the kind of family you did?”

  “Of course not.” Well, maybe not. Would I have been more trusting of Cullie if his parents had belonged to my mother’s country club? Would I have believed the worst about him if he’d been “in the mold”—a rich doctor or lawyer or president of a department store, someone my mother would approve of? I hated to think so.

  “Do you think we can make this right?” he said, garbling his words.

  “Yes, I do. But first, you need to get some sleep. So do I.”

  “You don’t want me to come over there now?”

  “I’m not letting you drive in your condition. I love you, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember. It feels good that you love me, Sonny…” His voice trailed off.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  “Your berth or mine?”

  “Mine. I’ve got to stay here and take care of a few things. Like Connecticut Light and Power. Like the gas company. Like the phone company. They’re all threatening to cut off service unless I pay them.”

  “How’re you gonna do that? You’re broke.”

  “I’m gonna make like Scarlett O’Hara: I’m gonna think about it tomorrow. And speaking of tomorrow, will you come over here when you’re finished with work?”

  “You got it. Is yours the house with all the turrets?”

  “Oh, shut up and go to sleep,” I laughed.

  “Good night, Sonny girl. Sleep tight.”

  “That reminds me of the advertising slogan of my father’s mattress company: ‘Sleep Rite. Sleep Tight.’”

  “Catchy. I wish I could meet your father. I’d tell him I love his daughter.”

  “You’re sweet. He would have loved you, I know it.” My mother was another story.

  “Would he have accepted me as the man in your life? Even though I’m just the sailing teacher’s boy?”

  “You’re lots of other things. Lots of other wonderful things. Now say good night to me and hang up.”

  “Good night to me and hang up.”

  “I’m serious. Go to sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Sonny girl, you will.”

  I spent the next day trying to appease my creditors, all of whom were not amused that I owed them so much money. I promised them I’d come up with some cash by holding a county-wide tag sale, unloading all my clothes, furniture, and tableware, as well as whatever jewelry I hadn’t already sold. They seemed to like the idea.

  I called the woman who ran all the tag sales in my area.

  “Hello?” I said. “Is this Second Hand Rose?”

  “Yes, it is. How may I help you?”

  “I’d like to sell my things at one of your tag sales. How soon could you arrange it?”

  “In about two months.” My creditors would never wait that long. “Everybody in Layton’s having a tag sale, it seems. I’ve never been so busy.”

  “And you can’t handle one more? The items for sale will be the entire contents of my estate on Woodland Way.” I thought I’d get her to change her mind by dazzling her with the big commission she’d earn by taking me on as a client.

  “Ah, Woodland Way. Good address.” She was impressed. My strategy was working. “It just so happens I have three other clients on Woodland Way, all of whom are having tag sales this weekend.”

  “Really? I didn’t know any of my neighbors were moving.”

  “Who said anything about moving? They’re all on the verge of bankruptcy and have to raise cash. It’s that nasty recession, you know. Awful for the economy. Wonderful for me.”

  It was gratifying to know that somebody was getting rich from the recession. “So there’s no way you can have my tag sale right away?” I tried again.

  “Absolutely not. There are people ahead of you. As I said, I’m very busy.”

  I wasn’t giving up. “Could
you have my tag sale right away if we made a deal?”

  “What kind of a deal?”

  “Instead of your usual twenty percent of the profits from my sale, I’ll give you thirty percent of the take.”

  She paused. “Forty percent.”

  “Thirty-five percent.”

  “I’ll run the sale next week.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  Cullie arrived at my house at six o’clock that evening. I flew into his arms and draped mine around his neck.

  “Whoa. I’m happy to see you too,” he laughed after I almost knocked him over.

  We’d only been apart for a day, but I felt as if I hadn’t seen him in months. “You look so handsome,” I cooed, stroking his beard. He was wearing jeans and a golden yellow sweater that played nicely off his wheat-blond hair.

  “We should separate more often,” he smiled. “This is quite a reception.” Then his expression darkened. “On second thought, we shouldn’t separate at all. It’s bad for my liver.”

  “Are you hung over?” I asked.

  “Let’s put it this way. When I looked into my camera lens to shoot the exterior of a house today, I saw two houses instead of one. Everything took just a little longer than it needed to. I came straight here from my last job.”

  “I’m so glad you did. Let’s go upstairs and get reacquainted,” I said suggestively.

  “Love to. Oh, but first, I’ve got something for you.” Cullie handed me a gift-wrapped package that looked and felt like it might contain a magazine.

  “Another present? You’re going to spoil me.”

  “It’s not exactly a present, Sonny. Why don’t we go into the kitchen and sit down.”

  I followed him down the hall into the kitchen and sat next to him at the breakfast table. “What’s in here?” I asked, shaking the package like a kid at Christmas.

  “In view of our new policy of full disclosure, I wanted you to have these. They’re part of the missing pages of Melanie’s manuscript. You didn’t find them in the navigation desk yesterday, because they must have come loose from the pile and ended up on the floor. I wrapped them up with the same gift paper I bought when I got that diary for you. I wanted to make a present of them. You know, like a symbolic gesture. I didn’t want you to think I was holding out on you again.”

  “I told you last night. I was wrong to doubt you. Now let’s see what new indignity Melanie planned to inflict on some poor, unsuspecting soul.”

  I unwrapped the package and lifted out a small stack of what appeared to be photocopied photographs.

  “They must be the ones that were going into the book,” Cullie explained. “Melanie must have copied them to give the publishers an idea of what she was planning to include.”

  “Let’s look,” I said mischievously. Each 8 × 11 copy featured a black-and-white photograph and a short, typewritten caption. “You take some and I’ll take some.”

  “You go ahead. I’ve already looked at them,” he said, waving me off. “I wanted to see if Melanie wangled a picture of my father out of the yacht club and used it in the book.”

  “Did she?” I asked.

  “No. At least it’s not in this group of photographs.”

  I began to leaf through the photos. They were in no particular order or chronology, just random glimpses of Alistair Downs’s life. There was one of him standing beside his Mafia pal, Frankie Fuccato, outside a Beverly Hills restaurant. There was a shot of him sitting with Annette in her brand new XKE. There was a picture of young Al Downey attending elementary school in Queens, and another one of him watching the Giants play baseball at the old Polo Grounds.

  “Hey, look at this one,” Cullie said, handing it to me. “It’s a shot of Alistair in his Al Downey/Arthur Murray period. Looks like he and the woman with him won some kind of dance contest in the forties.”

  “Lemme see,” I said, swiping the photo out of Cullie’s hand. First, I looked at the caption, which read: Al Downey and girlfriend win swing jitterbug contest at Forest Hills Dance Studio. Then I peered at the grainy old photo and felt a stab of recognition—a stab so jolting I nearly stopped breathing. There, in black and white, on the dance floor of the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Queens, was a handsome young man with his arm draped around an attractive young blonde. The man was unmistakably Alistair; the woman looked like my mother.

  “Cullie?” I said nervously. “You mentioned that you came straight over here from your last job. Does that mean you have your equipment with you?”

  “Sure. It’s in the car.”

  “Do you by any chance have one of those things that magnifies a picture?”

  “You mean a loupe? Yeah, I’ve got one.”

  “Would you go get it, please?”

  “Now?”

  “Right now, if you don’t mind.” Cullie jumped out of his chair and made it out to his Jeep and back before I even realized he was gone. I was so mesmerized by the photograph in my hand that everything else became a blur.

  “Know how to use this?” he asked.

  “Yeah. You just put it down on the photograph and look into it, right?”

  “Right.”

  I placed the loupe on top of the face of the woman in the photograph and bent over to examine the magnification. There was no mistaking the fact that the woman was a very young Doris Waxman. She looked just like she did in our old family photo album—the clothes, the hair, the makeup all vintage 1940s. What was different from the old photos I’d seen of her was her smile. I’d never seen her smile the way she smiled at the man in that picture—not at me, not at my father, not ever. That look of pure, unadulterated adoration was apparently reserved for Alistair Downs. A chill ran through my body.

  “Hey, what is it, babe? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” Cullie put his arm around me, much as Alistair was putting his arm around my mother in the photo that now rested on the kitchen table.

  “I haven’t seen a ghost, Cullie. I’ve seen my mother.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The woman in that picture—the woman the caption calls Al Downey’s girlfriend—is my mother.” My mouth was dry with panic and my throat was closing.

  “Your mother? I sink you’ve got vhat vee call a mother complex,” Cullie intoned. “You keep seeing your mother everywhere, Sonny. Remember when you thought she was the one whose Cadillac raced out of Alistair’s driveway and almost hit us?”

  “She was the one who almost hit us. I asked her. She admitted it.”

  “You’re kidding? What did she say she was doing at Evermore? You told me she’d never met Alistair.”

  “Obviously, I was wrong.” I glanced down at the photograph on the table and shuddered. “She told me she went to see him to convince him to hire me back at the newspaper.”

  “Maybe she was telling the truth.”

  “Look at this picture, Cullie. The caption says the woman in the picture was Alistair’s girlfriend. This is all so bizarre I don’t know what to think.”

  I began to shiver uncontrollably. Cullie went to the closet, brought me his jacket, and draped it over my shoulders.

  “Look, maybe Alistair and your mother did have something going when they were young,” he said. “So what? It’s not as if they’ve been lovers all these…”

  Cullie stopped himself and looked at me with a mixture of horror and compassion. He’d read the final missing pages of Melanie’s manuscript, and he knew I had too. We’d both seen the chapter called “Alistair’s Jewish Princess: The Woman He Couldn’t Marry.” Suddenly, we both realized the all too chilling implications of that chapter and the photo in front of us.

  “Oh my God,” I screamed, grabbing onto the table for support. “My mother was the woman Melanie was writing about. But how? How could she have loved Alistair all these years? She loved my father. They were blissfully happy. She said so. She would never have carried on an affair behind his back. Never! And never with Alistair! It can’t be, it just can’t be!”

  Cul
lie tried to calm me down, but I ignored his attempts.

  “All those years,” I cried. “All those years of lecturing and pontificating and trying to run my life. All those years of making her marriage out to be so perfect I couldn’t possibly measure up to it. What a fucking hypocrite! My mother spent her whole life running after a man who didn’t give two shits about her. If what Melanie writes is true, my mother’s marriage was a lie.”

  “And that’s a big ‘if,’” Cullie reminded me. “Maybe Melanie was embellishing the truth, just to sell books.”

  “She told the truth about your father and Annette, didn’t she? She didn’t embellish that story one bit, according to you.”

  “True. But I just don’t want you to—”

  “To what? To uncover a secret like this about my own mother and not go crazy?”

  The thought suddenly crossed my mind that I might as well add my mother’s name to the list of murder suspects. She had turned out to be an adulteress. Maybe she was a killer too. Maybe she, of all people, couldn’t afford to stand by and watch Melanie publish her book. Maybe she was the intruder who smacked Melanie over the head and offed her.

  The idea was so gruesome I couldn’t look Cullie in the eye. What must he think of me now? I wondered. And he was so worried about not measuring up to my family. What a joke.

  Quick! A joke! A joke! Don’t let yourself feel this pain, Alison. Tell Cullie a joke about Doris Waxman, his mother-in-law-to-be. You must have a mother-in-law joke in your repertoire, right? Quick! A joke!

  “Cullie,” I said. “What’s the definition of mixed emotions?”

  He looked at me helplessly, as if he wanted to ease my pain but didn’t know how.

  “Seeing your mother-in-law driving off a cliff in your brand-new Porsche. Get it?” I began to laugh hysterically. I was a basket case. Poor Cullie didn’t know what to do or how to help me.

  “Let’s get you upstairs,” he offered. “Maybe if you lie down for a while…”

  “Lie down?” I said, getting up from the table and walking toward the back door. “I’m going over to Mommy Dearest’s house.”