by Max Shulman
Gabriel frowned. “I know that name,” he said.
“Watch the program, dear,” said Boo.
“Ira Shapian,” said Gabriel thoughtfully. “Why does that name stick in my mind?”
“Shh!” said Boo.
He fell silent. For thirty minutes mother and son sat quietly and watched a stark, staccato documentary about Los Angeles’ sun-bright nether world—the winos, the junkies, the whores, the drifters, the perverts: the losers and the lost. It was a tough, laconic film, blessedly lacking in artiness. The commentary, brief and pointed, was spoken by Ira himself.
As the program finished, the end-titles began to crawl over the picture. Boo rose to switch off the set. “Wait!” called Gabriel, his eyes riveted to the screen. “PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY IRA SHAPIAN” was the final credit before the fade-out.
“Better get over to the dance, dear,” said Boo with an over-bright smile as she turned the television set off.
“Ira Shapian, Ira Shapian,” Gabriel repeated slowly. “I know I know that name. Why?”
Boo carefully kept her tone casual. “It’s perfectly simple, dear. There was an Air Force base in Owens Mill during the war, and Mr. Shapian was stationed here. No doubt you’ve heard Virgil or somebody mention it.”
“That’s right,” he nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Good night, son. Have fun.”
“But there’s more,” he said, not moving, his forehead furrowed in thought. “A photo!” he exclaimed with sudden certainty. “There used to be a photo of Shapian in this house!”
“Really? I don’t remember.”
“Not a photo of Shapian alone. I mean a group picture. There was Shapian and you and Virgil and another lady. Yeah, four of you … And it was in this room! In fact, right here!” He walked over and pointed to a spot on the wall directly above Boo’s small white desk.
“Why, I do believe you’re right. Now that you remind me, yes, I distinctly remember that picture.… But,” she added quickly, “I got rid of it a long time ago.”
“How long ago?”
“Ten years.”
“It’s crazy, said Gabriel. The lines in his brow deepened. “How come I remember Shapian’s face so clearly? Not so much his face, just the eyes. It’s like I’ve been seeing those eyes every day, every hour! Now why should I feel that way?”
“My dear boy,” answered Boo, “if I knew why you feel the way you feel, I would have to be a genius like you are, and that I most definitely am not. True?”
“True.”
“Thank you.”
“Forget it.”
“A genius, as you so gallantly agree, I am not. But there is one thing I can do: tell time. The dance at Acanthus has started. So saddle and ride, my boy.”
“Look, Ma, about that dance—”
“Which you are going to, and no excuses!”
“Listen, let me stay home, and we’ll look for the picture of Shapian. I’m positive it’s still here.”
Boo took a deep breath. “And I’m positive it’s not,” she said firmly. “Because ten years ago I personally put a match to it.”
Gabriel searched her face. “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“I am not.”
“No, you’re not,” he said, nodding. “You really burned it. You really did, I can tell.… But why?”
“Because every once in a while I get an irresistible urge to set fire to things—like old photographs, or young boys who don’t mind their mothers.”
“I’m going, I’m going!” he said with a shuddering sigh. “Oh, Gawd!” he wailed as he lurched toward the door.
“No kiss, huh?” said Boo. “We’re all washed up, is that it?”
Gabriel stopped. He grinned, an abrupt, dazzling slash of white across his swarthy face. He hugged his mother hard, gave her a loud kiss on the cheek, hugged her again, kissed the other cheek.
“Bonne chance,” she murmured, aiming him toward the door.
“Ça sera un débâcle,” he warned.
“Va-t’en.” She pushed him gently, then stood in the doorway watching him as he left the house. Then she went to her bedroom window and watched him some more as he walked briskly down the driveway, vaulted into a sports car he had built himself, gunned the engine, and zoomed away with a spray of gravel.
Tears, warm tears of felicity, stood in Boo’s eyes as she watched her son. How beautiful he is, she thought, her breast swelling with love. How like his father! Of course, there were some physical differences: Gabriel’s height, for example, came not from his father but from Boo, as did the leanness and the short Anglo-Saxon nose. But all the rest derived from his father—the startling black eyes, the brooding darkness, the quicksilver passions; melancholy followed instantly by euphoria; serenity chased by frenzy; despair hard on the traces of hope.
Oh, yes, thought Boo. Oh, yes, dear Gabriel, you are Ira Shapian’s son. You are his heart’s heir, his soul’s spit and image. But you will never know it, my good sweet beloved bastard Gabriel. Nor will Ira ever know it. It will always be my secret and nobody else’s.
The photograph is safely burned now. It was weakness, it was folly, to keep Ira’s picture on my wall as long as I did. But I needed to look at Ira’s face, and you, dear Gabriel, were still a little child. How could I recognize so soon that you had the mind and memory of a genius?
Well, the picture is gone now. The only time you will see Ira’s eyes again is when you look into a mirror. You will be haunted, yes. There will always be a rustling of unease at the back of that incredible brain of yours. But you will not know. That’s the important thing: you will not know. Ira will not know. Nobody will know.
Boo’s eyes gazed out the window of her bedroom, across her estate, across two miles of sloping countryside, and came to rest on the lighted skyline of the town of Owens Mill. A wry half-smile suddenly appeared on her lips. The Owens Mill skyline—if such it could be called—was a cluster of shops and houses, one and two stories tall; a tobacco warehouse, three stories tall; a cigarette factory, four stories tall; the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, six stories tall; and, finally, standing in solitary, phallic splendor, the Tatum Tower, headquarters and home office of Jefferson’s cigarette company, thirty-one stories high with a red beacon slowly revolving on the capstone.
How ironic, thought Boo. Indeed, how comic, if such a thing could be called comic. Not a leaf dropped, not a sparrow fell, in Owens Mill except that Jefferson knew of it. There was no secret in town to which the old man was not privy—except the biggest, deepest, darkest secret of all: Gabriel’s paternity.
Chapter 8
True, Jefferson Tatum was not aware of Gabriel’s paternity, but he was nonetheless the cause of Gabriel’s being, just as he was the cause of everything else that came to be in Owens Mill.
In 1939 the business offices of the Tatum Cigarette Company were jammed, helter-skelter, in odd corners of the factory and the warehouse. Then, in the autumn of 1939, Jefferson went to Winston-Salem to discuss industry matters with his colleagues at the R. J. Reynolds Company, and he saw their home office for the first time—the R. J. Reynolds Building, twenty-one imposing stories of Indiana limestone.
Jefferson was pensive when he returned to Owens Mill. He summoned his executives to a meeting. “Fellers,” he said, “I’m going to build me an office building.”
The executives beamed. Even the most senior of them had never had an office to himself.
“How big a building are you planning?” asked the vice-president in charge of sales.
“I don’t care,” said Jefferson. “Just so it’s bigger than the R. J. Reynolds Building.”
The comptroller blanched. “But sir,” he protested, “the Reynolds Building is twenty-one stories.”
“Mine will be thirty-one,” said Jefferson.
“What in the world do we need with all that space?” asked the comptroller, getting nervouser.
“Shut up,” said Jefferson.
“Yes, sir,” said the comptroller.
“What costs more than limestone?” asked Jefferson.
“Oh, lots of things,” said the vice-president in charge of engineering. “For example, if a man really wanted to go crazy, there’s marble.”
“That’s it,” said Jefferson. “Make it out of marble. Thirty-one stories tall. And way up on top I want a big red light that goes round and round and round.”
“But, sir—” said the comptroller.
“Meeting adjourned,” said Jefferson.
Ground was broken for the Tatum Tower six months later. By the end of 1941 the skeleton of fourteen stories had been completed. Then the contractor came to Jefferson, shuffling his toe with embarrassment. “Mr. Tatum,” he said sheepishly, “I can’t get no more steel.”
“Why the hell not?” asked Jefferson.
“On account of the war.”
“We’ll see about that!” said Jefferson grimly and caught the first train to Washington.
He called on his Congresman, the Honorable Mr. Petti-grew, a portly gentleman of seventy, now serving his twelfth term, who wore a black suit, a white waistcoat, a string tie, a long hair-do, and a perpetual smile.
“Jefferson,” said Mr. Pettigrew reasonably, “you know I’d like nothing in the world better than to help you, but there’s a war going on.”
“I know there’s a war going on, you overweight pecker-head,” said Jefferson to the Honorable Mr. Pettigrew. “Ain’t my factory working three shifts to help out our boys in the trenches?”
“I do not minimize, mark you, the importance of cigarettes to the morale of our gallant young warriors,” replied the Congressman, “but to obtain steel these days you must have a reason that is, shall we say, more military.”
“All right then, find me some military outfit that can use the Tatum Tower—only for the duration, of course.”
“A military outfit in the Tatum Tower? I don’t see how I can swing it, Jefferson.”
“Too bad,” said Jefferson. “Washington ain’t going to seem the same without you next term.”
“I’ll swing it, I’ll swing it,” said Mr. Pettigrew hastily.
The Congressman promptly paid visits to the Army and the Navy, but all his rolling oratory failed to persuade them that the tide of victory clearly depended on completing the Tatum Tower. At the Army Air Force, however, Mr. Pettigrew struck pay dirt.
The Air Force, for so many years the neglected orphan of the services, had suddenly become the pampered darling. It had only to ask, and it was given. Naturally, like any spoiled brat, the more it was given, the more it asked. Thus, when the winged generals heard about thirty-one stories of marble available in a place called Owens Mill, their eyes grew as bright as the stars on their shoulders. A new area command was created within minutes—headquarters, the Tatum Tower. And, of course, one can hardly have an Air Force area command without an airfield, so Jefferson Tatum patriotically sold the United States five thousand acres of bog just outside the town.
Quickly there was steel to complete the Tatum Tower. There was also concrete to lay the runways for the shiny new airplanes, and there was wood to build the barracks to house the troops who kept ’em flying.
A certain Private Ira Shapian, assigned to Special Services because of his theatrical experience, was given the task of delivering a series of lectures on “Why We Fight.” This he did with such skill and fervor that every soldier present was passionately aware of why he fought. Nobody ever learned, however, who he fought.
While Ira and his colleagues manned their posts with exemplary zeal, others in Owens Mill also contributed their bit to the war effort. Each Sunday the gentry of the town opened their great houses to the lonely soldier boys at the base, except for Jefferson Tatum, who never allowed visitors in his house, unless you count Millie and Esther McCabe, the round-heeled twins from packaging, but they were always required to leave before cock-crow.
Virgil Tatum, however, held open house every Sunday. (Virgil, of course, was not in the service; he was 4-F because of his gimpy leg.) William Ransom Owens also opened his house on Sundays. (William Ransom was 4-F too because his testicles had never descended.) And another who entertained on Sundays was Boo.
Boo had been eighteen years old, a second-semester freshman at Wellesley, when she had received the shocking news that both her parents had died in an automobile accident. She rushed back to Owens Mill in time for the funeral. Afterward she stayed a couple of weeks for the grim legal necessaries that follow death. Then she prepared to return to Wellesley. But, to her astonishment, she found she did not want to leave. It came to her suddenly that she was an Owens of Owens Mill. Her place was here. She had no brothers or sisters, and it seemed all wrong—she could not say exactly why—to trust executors with duties and obligations to which she had been born.
She unpacked and stayed. She became—it happened effortlessly—the mistress of her house and estate, a clubwoman, a doer of good deeds, a worker for civic betterment and cultural enhancement. And, one year later, when the Air Force moved into town, Boo, like her friends and kinfolk, held open house each Sunday.
Ira Shapian met Boo at one of her Sunday at-homes. Ira was with Polly and several other G.I.s and their wives when he arrived. At first he did not see Boo; he was too overcome by the house itself to notice anything else. Never had he seen a home so expensively appointed, yet so warmly inviting. He knew the chairs were priceless, but he would not have hesitated to flop in any of them. Nor would he have shrunk from plunking down a drink on one of the irreplaceable tables. He, Ira Shapian, the Armenian kid from Tenth Avenue, felt perfectly easy in this perfectly magnificent house. In fact, he had a sudden, powerful conviction that here, among this unaccustomed splendor, he, the groaner and breast-beater, could find true tranquillity for the first time in his whole spiky life.
Then he was introduced to Boo. His black eyes widened with a strange mixture of awe and desire. Boo was the house; the house was Boo. Just as he found the house at once dumfounding and cozy, he saw Boo as a great, patrician, touch-me-not lady who—he was dead sure of it—had been put on earth expressly for his pleasure.
Whoa, boy. Steady, boy, he told himself firmly. First of all, you’re a married man with a wonderful wife whom you love with all your black, hairy heart. Second, you are all wrong about this dame Boo. She is way out of your league, and if you make a pass at her, she will brush you off like a fly. Steady, boy. Whoa, boy.
Yet he kept returning to Boo’s house on Sundays. He interspersed the visits with calls on Virgil Tatum and the various Owenses because he wanted to be sure to throw Polly off the scent—no simple matter, for Polly had a nose almost as smart as her head.
Every time he saw Boo the certainty returned that she was meant for him. He watched her closely as he told wry anecdotes of the theater and of his boyhood on the streets. He noted her big, free, open, unself-conscious laughter, and he was all the more positive that she would not say him nay. In Ira’s experience beautiful women did not laugh unguardedly. It cracked the façade; it left them vulnerable. Therefore, Boo’s laughter could only mean that in her heart she did not want to protect herself from Ira. She was his. He knew it, he knew it, he knew it; and his soul soared with the joy of it.
But when he was away from Boo, another thought would come to Ira, a thought that chilled his liver and frosted his lights. Idiot! he yelled at himself. Dumbhead! You’ve got a wonderful, darling, sensational, perfect wife, but you are falling in love with the princess with the golden hair. You will never have her. She doesn’t even know you exist, or if she does, she thinks of you as some kind of grimy little joke-maker from the New York pavements. Dumbhead! Idiot! Dumb idiot-head!
What Ira could not know was that Boo was falling in love with him too. All her post-pubescent life she had been courted by Southern men, and they had always made her feel vaguely inadequate. Southern men, including lame Virgil, were basically Elizabethans. They fought fearlessly, copulated tirelessly, hunted skillfully, drank prodigiously. They were equally
competent behind a shotgun or a desk. They shunned self-pity; they embraced strength.
Ira, on the other hand, was a woe-shouter who wore his weakness proudly. There was something little-boy about him, something that clutched the maternal strings in Boo’s heart. She knew that to him she would be necessary. She would be more than an appendage, more than the chatelaine a Southern male would make of her.
But, of course, it was not even thinkable to reveal her feelings to Ira. He was a married man. Moreover, Boo was genuinely fond of Polly, whom she found to be a willing, cheerful coworker in all of Owens Mill’s worthy projects—the hospital, the blood bank, the orphanage, the manifold fund drives. She was, besides, a witty, amusing, dear, upright woman, whose love for Ira was plain to see. No, thought Boo. Good sense, good taste, and good breeding all told her the same thing: hands off Ira.
So the tacit romance between Boo and Ira dragged on. Pain burgeoned, but no word was spoken, not on either side.
Then Polly got pregnant—doubly pregnant, grotesquely pregnant. She gave up civic virtue and stayed at home, groaning when she was not actually vomiting. Her temper, never long, got steadily shorter. Ira looked at cool, tall, slender, elegant, beautiful Boo. Then he looked at sullen, swollen Polly. Then he did some groaning himself.
When Polly went home to New York to give birth to the twins, Ira, after a fierce losing battle with himself, paid a visit, alone, at night, to Boo’s house.
“Ira!” she said, startled. “What do you want?”
“I don’t know,” he said. Then suddenly, wildly, they were in one another’s arms.
And then they were on a couch—grabbing, sobbing, sobbing, tearing, grabbing, grabbing.
“No! No!” cried Boo, pulling away.
“Yes! Yes!” cried Ira.
“I mean yes, yes,” said Boo.
