Clean Sweep

by Jane Heller

  “Not without me you’re not.”

  “You sure? It’s not going to be pretty.”

  “Who needs pretty?”

  “Some men do. Some men only want things to be nice and neat and pretty. Take Sandy. The minute things got rough, he split.”

  “I told you yesterday. I’m not Sandy. I’m here for all of it. Pretty or not.”

  “I don’t deserve you,” I said, my eyes welling with tears.

  “You don’t deserve to be lied to,” Cullie responded, grabbing my hand and leading me toward the door. “My Jeep awaits.”

  Part Three

  Chapter 18

  We pulled up to 89 Pink Cloud Lane at eight o’clock. As I raced up the stone walkway toward the front door of my mother’s house, Cullie grabbed my arm and stopped me.

  “I think you should slow down,” he coached. “Try to stay calm. No point in storming in there and putting your mother on the defensive—not if you want to get the truth out of her.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, then took a deep breath.

  I rang the doorbell and waited anxiously for my mother to let us in, but it was Nora Small, her live-in housekeeper, who answered the door.

  “Hi, Nora,” I said, entering the house without being invited in. “My mother around?”

  “No, Miss Alison,” she said in her Jamaican lilt. “Mrs. Waxman has gone out.”

  “Gone out? Where?” I hadn’t thought to call ahead to make sure my mother would be home.

  “With a gentleman.”

  “A gentleman? Do you happen to know this gentleman’s name?”

  “No, miss. Your mom didn’t say.”

  “Did you see what he looked like when he came to pick her up?” I asked Nora.

  “No, miss. It was the gentleman’s chauffeur who came to pick your mother up.”

  “His chauffeur?” I sneered. “It’s got to be Alistair. He’s got a driver for that Corniche of his.”

  “Is there something wrong, Miss Alison?”

  “Oh, no. Sorry, Nora. Would it be all right if my friend and I waited for my mother to come home?”

  “No problem. I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything.”

  Cullie and I sat in silence in my mother’s living room for several minutes. Then, I rose from the sofa and pulled him up with me. “Come,” I said taking his hand. “Let me show you the Seymour Waxman Memorial.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Follow me.”

  I led him into the master bedroom. “There. That’s what I’m talking about,” I said, pointing to the array of photos, tennis trophies, and other memorabilia that decorated the walls, bookshelves, and dresser tops. “Welcome to the shrine to my father—the room designed to ease the conscience of the grieving widow Waxman.”

  “Amazing,” he said, shaking his head. “There must be a hundred pictures of your father. I’ll say one thing for your parents: they gave the appearance of a happy couple,” he said, holding up a photograph of Sy and Doris honeymooning at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.

  “I can’t bear to look at these now,” I said. “They’re all a lie. My mother’s big, fat lie. Imagine carrying on an affair with Alistair Downs when she had a wonderful man like my father to love.”

  “Let’s wait to hear what she has to say,” Cullie advised. “Come on, we’ll make ourselves a drink.”

  At about nine-thirty, I heard the front door open. Then I heard my mother’s husky smoker’s voice wheeze, “Thank you for a divine evening. You’re a kind and generous man. Good night.”

  There were muffled sounds, then the sound of a car driving off, and finally my mother’s footsteps on the marble floor of the foyer. Kind and generous, my ass. I didn’t make out the man’s voice, but it had to belong to Alistair, the swine. He was probably kissing her good night, with those seventy-five-year-old liver lips of his. Gross.

  Like two loyal subjects who’d been granted an audience with the Queen of England instead of the Queen of Pretension, Cullie and I stood as my mother entered the living room.

  “Alison, dear. What a nice surprise. I didn’t recognize that truck outside the house,” she said, walking toward me with her arms outstretched. I kept mine at my sides but permitted her to bestow one of her phantom kisses on my cheek—the air kisses she resorted to when she didn’t want to smudge her lipstick.

  “It’s not a truck, it’s a Jeep,” I said curtly. “The same Jeep you almost hit as you were coming out of Alistair Downs’s house the other morning.”

  “I see. And who is this?” she said, meaning Cullie but not deigning to look at him. Instead, she peered down at her Perry Ellis plaid skirt and picked off a speck of lint.

  “This is Cullie Harrington. Cullie, meet my mother Doris Waxman,” I said.

  “Hello,” Cullie said, extending his hand without smiling. My mother did not take it.

  “Harrington…Harrington,” she mused. “Do we know any Harringtons?” she asked me.

  “Yes, one. And he’s standing right in front of you,” I snapped.

  “Still, there must be others. The name is familiar somehow,” she said.

  “That’s because I mentioned Cullie’s name the night you took me to the club for Maine Lobster Night. You nearly choked to death when you heard it, remember?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.” There was a pause. “Please, sit down,” she instructed Cullie and me. We took our places on the sofa, while she sat in a nearby wing chair. “So, young man,” she said, lifting a Winston from her gold cigarette case and lighting it. “Tell me about yourself, your people.”

  His people. God, my mother was a piece of work. I remembered an afternoon from my elementary school days when I’d brought home a boy named Chuck, whose father was a dishwasher at the local deli. I’d felt sorry for him because he said his family had only one television set, while we had four—three color and a black and white, for the maid. I’d invited Chuck over to watch “American Bandstand” after school one day, when all of a sudden my mother stormed into the TV room where Chuck and I were dancing. She stopped dead in her tracks and said in her deepest, most intimidating, most disapproving voice, “Whom are you entertaining, Alison?” “Oh, hi, Mom,” I said. “This is Chuck. He’s in my class at school.” “From where does Chuck come?” she asked with a puss that made her look like she’d just stepped in dog shit. “I don’t know. What road do you live on, Chuck?” I asked him. “Hitchcock Avenue,” Chuck replied, sensing that he’d just given the wrong answer. “I’ve never heard of Hitchcock Avenue,” my mother said, speaking directly to Chuck for the first time. “What is your last name and who are your people?” That did it. I remember wanting to strangle her. I always wanted to strangle her when she asked about people’s people, as if she were saying, “What tribe are you from?” or “What cave did you crawl out of?” or “How dare you pollute my air with your presence.” Who did she think she was anyway? She was a Jewish girl from Queens whose “people” were Hungarian immigrants who worked so hard to give their daughter the finer things in life that they forgot to teach her a little humility. Boy, I thought. She and Alistair deserved each other.

  “My people?” Cullie asked with a puzzled look on his face. “You mean, my parents?”

  My mother nodded.

  “My dad was a sailor.”

  “A delightful hobby. What did he do for employment?”

  “He taught sailing at the Sachem Point Yacht Club.”

  “How intriguing,” she said, drawing on her cigarette. “Is he retired now?”

  “No, he passed away nine years ago.”

  “So sorry. And your mother?”

  “She was a waitress at the club. She’s gone too.”

  “My my. How tragic for you.” I could tell she was crushed. “You and Alison have that in common, I suppose.”

  “You mean, the loss of a parent?” Cullie asked.

  “Exactly. Alison’s father, my beloved husband Seymour, passed away when she was only a girl.
I miss him terribly.” My mother blew smoke out of her nose in a long, downward stream.

  “Speaking of my father,” I interrupted, itching to get to the point of our visit, “who was the gentleman you were out with tonight?”

  “The gentleman with whom I was out?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not sure I should tell you,” my mother said coquettishly, batting her eyelashes for dramatic emphasis.

  “Oh, come on, Mom. You and I don’t have secrets from each other. Fess up. Who’s the guy? A new beau? An old beau? A beau so old you won the swing jitterbug contest with him in the forties?”

  “Of course not,” she said. “There hasn’t been anyone since your father.”

  “Really? Then who were you out with tonight?”

  “If you must know, I had dinner with Louis Obermeyer. From the club. You went to school with his daughter, Betsy, remember?”

  Was this another of my mother’s cha cha chas? “What were you doing with Mr. Obermeyer?”

  “I wanted to talk to him about you, dear.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes. But I’m not sure we should discuss this in front of…”

  “Cullie? He and I share everything.”

  “Oh?”

  “That’s right, Mrs. Waxman,” Cullie said. “Your daughter and I are very close.”

  “Oh?” My mother grew pale, just as she had on Maine Lobster Night when I’d first told her about Cullie. Thank God there were no lemon twists around.

  “What did you talk to Mr. Obermeyer about?” I pressed on.

  “I don’t want you to be angry, Alison dear. But I’ve been so worried about this murder investigation in which you’re involved. Louis is a lawyer, a very successful trial lawyer. He defended Edith Eisner’s son Fred when he was arrested for insider trading, remember? Fred’s a free man now, thanks to Louis. Not only is he a free man, he’s a very wealthy man. He’s made a fortune in the stock market, Edith tells me.”

  “Bully for Fred,” I said.

  “I consulted Louis,” she went on, “because I wanted to make absolutely certain that if the police accuse you of murdering that Melanie Moloney, you will have the best representation money can buy. If anyone can get you out of the mess you’ve made for yourself, it’s Louis.”

  “I’m touched by your confidence in me,” I said, dripping sarcasm. “I’ll get myself out of my own messes, thank you. Which reminds me, Mother. Tell me more about your meeting with Alistair Downs the other day. It was swell of you to go over to Evermore to plead my case the way you did.”

  “That’s for what mothers are,” my mother said in her absurd version of grammatically correct English.

  “Did you find the Senator charming? Cordial? Sexually arousing?”

  “Alison! What’s gotten into you? You never used to speak to me that way. When you were married to Sandy, you were respectful of your mother. Now, I simply don’t know you.” She glared at Cullie, as if he were the cause of the breakdown of my morals.

  “What’s gotten into me?” I said, my voice rising an octave. “The truth. That’s what’s gotten into me.”

  “What truth?”

  “About you and Alistair. Tell me how you met.”

  “I told you. I went over to his estate to discuss your employment at the newspaper. I—”

  “Tell me how you met the first time, when he was teaching ballroom dancing at the Arthur Murray Studio in Queens.” So much for Cullie’s suggestion that I not put my mother on the defensive.

  My mother’s complexion became as white as the lies she’d been telling me all my life. Her lower lip began to quiver and her left cheek developed a twitch.

  “What…what…gives you the right to…to speak to me…this way?” she sputtered, looking back and forth between Cullie and me.

  “I’m your daughter, that’s what gives me the right. That and the fact that you’ve made yourself out to be something you’re not. You pretended to be the poor, depressed widow after Daddy died. And all the while, you were having an affair with our United States Senator from Connecticut.”

  “That’s a lie!” my mother wheezed. “Al and I haven’t been—”

  “Al?” I sneered. “Tell me all about you and Al. Go on, mother. You might as well get it off your chest.”

  “Get what off my chest? I have nothing to be guilty about, Alison.”

  “Holy shit! My mother just made a grammatical mistake! You did mean, ‘I have nothing about which to be guilty,’ didn’t you, Mom?” I was enjoying making my mother squirm after a lifetime of being her squirmee.

  “Where are you getting your information?” she asked, glaring at Cullie.

  “From Melanie Moloney’s biography of your boyfriend,” I said.

  “You read that book? She talks about me? She actually mentions me by name?” My mother looked horror-stricken. I did not feel sorry for her.

  “She doesn’t use your name, but she devotes an entire chapter of the book to your star-crossed romance with Alistair—sorry—Al.”

  “If she doesn’t mention me by name, why do you assume it’s I about whom she’s writing?”

  “Take a look at this, mother.” I handed her the copy of the photograph of her and Alistair.

  “Oh my God! I don’t believe this. Where on earth did you get this old picture?”

  “Obviously, not from your personal collection,” I said wryly. “It was with the manuscript. Melanie must have dug it up from somewhere.”

  “I just don’t believe this,” my mother said again, lighting up another Winston.

  “Believe it, Mom. I do. Cullie does.”

  “Cullie? Who is this Cullie person and what does he have to do with my life?”

  “I wouldn’t be so quick to judge Cullie, if I were you,” I said as calmly as I could. “He wasn’t the one who cheated on his husband. You were.” I paused, letting my mother feel the sting of my words. “Now why don’t you tell us the truth. We’re listening.”

  My mother slumped in her wing chair and sighed. “All riiiiight,” she said in a long, drawn-out whine. She reminded me of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz who, when her power had finally been diminished by Dorothy’s pail of water, cried weakly, “I’m mellllting…”

  “I met Al when I was sixteen,” she began, dragging on her cigarette. “I was an impressionable young girl. I had never been with a man. I had no experience with that sort of thing.” She paused. “My friends wanted to learn the latest dances. They said they were going to take lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio in Forest Hills. I went with them. You should only know how I wish I’d never gone.”

  There seemed to be genuine pain in my mother’s expression, but who could tell what was genuine anymore?

  “Al was one of the teachers there,” she continued. “He terrified me. He was handsome and charming, and flirted with me mercilessly. Why me, I’ll never know.”

  “Oh, don’t be modest, Mother,” I snapped. “You were quite the stunner, if the picture from Melanie’s book is any indication.”

  “Oh, I looked all right, I suppose. It was Al who made me feel beautiful.” Her lip quivered. “He took quite an interest in me, and I was quite taken with him. He was so different from the boys at school, so smooth, so worldly, so…forbidden.”

  “So gentile,” I added, then winked at Cullie, who was sitting so rigidly on the sofa that he looked like an exhibit at a wax museum. It occurred to me that this little scenario probably wasn’t the best backdrop for introducing one’s boyfriend to one’s mother.

  “Yes, so gentile,” my mother conceded. “My parents were opposed to my dating gentile boys, so I had to see Al on the sly. It was terribly upsetting to me.”

  “Tell me about it.” When I was in high school, my mother was so dead set against my dating gentile boys that if she suspected I was even thinking of going out with Mike Methodist or Eddie Episcopalian, she’d hire a private detective and have me followed.

  “Al had big plans,” my
mother went on. “He was going to take all the money he earned from giving dancing lessons and go to California, to Hollywood. A talent scout had discovered him and offered to help him break into the movies. I was so proud. I knew, even then, that he would be an important man someday. He had a certain something that made him shine brighter than the rest.”

  “Yeah, he had a certain something, all right. A set of brass balls.”

  My mother gave me a disgusted look. “What he had, Alison, was ambition. A little ambition never hurt a man.” She glared at poor Cullie again. “He promised that as soon as he got settled in Hollywood, he would send for me and we would be married.”

  “You were really going to marry the guy?” Sleeping with him was one thing, marrying the asshole was another.

  “Oh, yes. I would gladly have married him. I was so mad for the man I would have done almost anything for him.”

  My stomach turned. My mother mad for Alistair Downs? The same woman who warned me never to wear my heart on my sleeve? The same woman who acted as if it was against the law to really love a man? My stomach turned again. I wished I’d eaten something.

  “Six months I waited. Six months without so much as a phone call or a postcard. My only news of Al was reading about him in the newspaper. I couldn’t understand it.”

  “So he dumped you when he got famous, is that it?”

  “That’s not the way it happened at all,” my mother scolded me. “Al decided that the life out in Hollywood was inappropriate for me. He wrote me a letter telling me I was too much of a lady to be subjected to the depraved and decadent lifestyle those movie people enjoyed. He said he wanted to shield me from all that. He said it would be better if we went our separate ways. He said that giving me up was the most difficult and unselfish thing he’d ever done.”

  My mother wiped a tear away from her left eye. I, on the other hand, was unmoved. As for Cullie, he remained in his state of near catatonia.

  “You bought his act?” I asked her. “You believed him?” I’d never before regarded my mother as stupid. Out of touch, maybe, but not stupid.

  “Of course I believed him. When you truly love a man, you believe him.” I felt a pang of guilt as I remembered how quick I had been to believe that Cullie, the man I loved, was a murderer. “When I found out he had married Annette Dowling, I was more certain than ever that he had told me the truth. Annette was in show business, just as Al was. He knew she would be better suited to the life out there than I would have been.”