“What did they do after you left?” he asks now, wiping a crumb off my chin.
“Who?” I’m not following him, being busy trying to wake up and feeling a little stiff from standing still so long last night.
“Mom and Dad.”
“At the party, you mean? I don’t know. I told you—”
“What do you suppose they did? Picture it.”
I think about that and decide that Dad never does find out that Mom is also there; that she sees him, and sees me leave, and drops her tray and heads for the bedroom of the suite, thinking I’ll be waiting in there. And after a while she doesn’t believe it when I don’t show up, and pokes her head back in where the party is, and then sneaks around in there and goes down the hall, still expecting to see me. And then? I don’t know. I never ran away before.
Dad? He maybe confides to Brogan that under the new hair it’s him, Turk, talking to Brogan under his new hair. And Brogan doesn’t punch him in the nose for showing up, because of the good old boy customers, but he’d like to, and he signals Glenna with his eyes and maybe a finger pointing, but she’s already got my note, so she knows, and she can’t believe she’s been in the same room with Turk Jackson, right under his nose in her Joie de Beavre, and she could kick herself. She shows Brogan the note and they tell Dad I’m not there. But Dad probably stays on anyway and puts the party to bed. He’s like that. Being a salesman to the soles of his feet, he probably sold a few oil rig supplies to the same men Brogan was feeding, sold oil rig supplies at a time when people weren’t even pumping mud from their so-called dry-bed navigable streams, much less oil from their back forties. But Dad is like Mom: he could sell oil to the Arabs.
So I tell Henry that.
Then he asks, “What would they have done if you’d stayed?”
“You mean if I’d left with Mom?”
“If you’d gone on about the business of the party. Talking to the women ranchers. When your mom held up two fingers, what would she have done if you’d paid no attention, or if you’d taken a drink from her tray and told her thanks?”
The very idea sends goose bumps along my arms, and I burrow back down under the covers. I can’t imagine that. Me, pay no attention? The Terminix “man” in the hall, and me walk right into Mrs. Evans’s classroom and pick up my pencil for long division? Me wave and mention that there were a lot of roaches in the custodian’s closet? Not possible. “Some things are not possible,” I tell Henry.
“What would have happened if you’d said, ‘Hi, Dad, good to see you, you’re looking well, Mom’s over there helping out at the bar. I’ll tell my uncle you’re here.’ ”
I completely cover my head. The idea is terrifying. Henry lifts off the quilt and asks, “What? What would have happened?”
I scoot down until I’m about at his knees. It’s one of those things that is like a roller coaster ride or a horror movie, to ask yourself how it would be if you did something that you never did and couldn’t ever do in a million years. He doesn’t understand about needing to hide.
“You don’t understand,” I tell his kneecaps.
He pulls me back up. “That’s where you’re wrong.”
He brings us some hot cocoa in mugs I haven’t seen before that say HIS and HERS and have some kind of silly overalls on one and a pinafore on the other. I cannot imagine these belonging to Henry.
“What?” he asks again.
I shake my head.
“Mom’s holding up three fingers.”
“Two. It was two for March second.”
“Two.” He demonstrates.
I close my eyes.
“Dad’s got on dark glasses.”
I cover my ears.
Henry kisses my eyelids. “Let me tell you,” he says. “Let me tell you about what happens.”
He gets up out of bed and pulls on his drawstring pants and a faded blue shirt. He looks sleepy, too, and younger than usual, although I know he must be nearly forty-five. He must be. He is tall and loose and his bones seem too big for his skin, if that makes sense. He has what you think of as a European face, all those eye sockets and jawbones and skull bones and collarbones. I imagine he was considered hand-some when he was young. He must have been to have had two wives. And that seems strange to me just now, with Henry playing His and Hers in the bedroom in a honeymoon sort of way, the idea of him doing all this seriously, standing up there and getting married, having a real honeymoon, talking about dishes and towels and all that stuff. It doesn’t seem believable. Maybe he had very European marriages, whatever they would be. Married on top of a mountain and then skiing down, or out in a meadow and then riding off on horseback? Now I laugh out loud, and that makes me feel better.
• • •
Henry has a box when he comes back. He motions me to come to the still-life table, and we pull up chairs. While he talks, he holds the box, which is tied up with a string, in one hand, keeping the other hand on my back.
“When I was a kid,” he says, “my mother went by the name of Kraft. I thought that was our name. She said my daddy had died in the war, and she had a picture of a man in uniform. It wasn’t my daddy, it was just a photo she’d found. She was ashamed of my daddy. He could hardly read and write. His people weren’t educated. They worked ranches, they worked horses. She was ashamed that she’d run off and married him.”
“Your mother?” The tiny lady in floating gray who was too good for everybody on earth?
“She took me and ran away from him, left him, and went out to Colorado, where she had cousins. She told them some story—they weren’t close—took the name of Kraft, went to school, and got a job as a receptionist in a doctor’s office where she could watch the patients and pick up the way they talked and acted. She got rid of every trace of hill country rancher’s ways.”
“I thought ranchers had money.” I’m thinking of Brogan’s clients, or the ones he wishes were clients.
“Big West Texas ranches, yes. Small rocky spreads in the hill country? Not back then. They had absentee owners, and he was essentially just a hand; he was a hand. For a while he tried other jobs but they never lasted. He knew how to work ranches and that’s what he always went back to.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“When I was almost grown.”
He opens the box and takes out a packet of letters. He spreads open the first three for me, flat on the table by the vase of daisies.
They are handwritten on lined notepad paper and hard to read. The spelling isn’t good and there are capital letters where they shouldn’t be. It would be too insulting to give all the mistakes, but I’ll just give the idea, because they make me want to cry.
Dear Bess,
How do you and the boy like your new home. Has he started to school yet. Tell him I feed Kitty Cat when she comes around.
Mailing you each $1.00 to buy anything you want.
Red
Dear Bess,
How are you and the boy getting along. Are you playing in the Snow. Don’t let the Bear bite you. I clipped a bunch of hair at the end of Blue’s tail and am going to find some Rabbits for him to run. I built a Flower Box across the porch. Mailing you each $5.00. Buy what ever you want. If you want to buy some Steaks or Pork Chops or what ever do it.
Red
Dear Bess,
Its 12:20 am. Working 11–7. Will draw $72 through Dec. 5, $62.50 through Dec. 19 and that’s all. Be sure and watch the Antifreeze in the car. Will pack up Xmas Decorations you like and send them by bus. How does the boy like school. Will send some money soon.
Red
I smooth the letters out and read them again. It makes me think a lot of things about Henry that I didn’t think before. Makes me understand why he doesn’t get mad at his mother, and then it makes me wonder why he doesn’t get really mad at her and never see her again.
I hand him his daddy’s letters.
He folds the lined pages and puts them back in the stack. “I have some letters from my uncle, a few.”
“To my daddy, but my daddy couldn’t read them, more than likely. It was a big family, eight children. My uncle ran off as a boy and bought himself a camera. The rest of them went to work; they thought he was crazy.”
“Why didn’t he ever marry the woman with the hand?”
Henry takes my hair and turns my face so he’s kissing my throat. “Marriage, as you’ll find out, hasn’t got much to do with what matters.”
“Are you talking about your wives?”
He pulls my chair over to his and keeps on holding on to my hair with one hand and the box with the other. “The first one married my mother’s house; the second married my gallery openings. I gave the first one a big piece of what she wanted, and the second one a fair share of sales.”
“But what made you marry them, then?”
He tugs me closer. “Wozencrantz was just getting used to himself. Henry Kraft, a miserable skinny kid with knobby knees and too much hair, didn’t know how to say no to Beauty propositioning.”
I think about what that means.
He puts the letters in the box. “When I got to high school, I pressed my mother about the family. I asked my cousins, who didn’t know much, but some. I made a trip back to Texas and asked around the hill country. It’s a small world up there with no secrets. Everybody knew somebody who knew Red Wozencrantz. The main thing was I’d found out the name; I’d pried it out of her.”
“When did you start to go by your daddy’s name?”
“When I began to paint. I’d heard the name Wozencrantz, because there weren’t many artists being recognized in our part of the world. Not but a handful with his reputation. But I hadn’t known—how could I?—that he was my uncle. It was a revelation. To think that a family like his, as it turned out my family, too, had produced him. Or, more accurately, hadn’t stopped him. When I learned of the connection, I went around to see him; introduced myself. It was his name I wanted, my uncle’s. It was his name I used.” He seems to be back a long time ago. “Later, when I started to show, it helped.”
He tugs my hair a minute. “I’ve spent thirty years of my life, you might say, making ours a name my mother can be proud of. I tried to show her that if you get big enough, they can’t get to you any more.”
“She uses your name.”
“When enough people recognized it, she took it back. But it’s only veneer. Inside, she still denies it. She spent her life running away, and she’s running still.”
“You’re talking about Mom and Dad and me, aren’t you?”
“More or less.”
“I guess you’re saying that I should go back to Brogan and Glenna’s. That my folks can’t get me if I don’t let them.” I don’t believe that for a minute, but I get the idea that he’s ready to stop all the talk, and is leading up to telling me that he’s through now with the old letters, the HIS and HERS cups, and biscuit crumbs, and is ready to roll his easel out of the cabinet and get to work.
“I’m saying something else. I’m saying that sooner than you’re ready for it you won’t have this problem ever again. You may have other problems, and you may hate the sight of me—more than likely you will—but you won’t have this particular problem again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re not to, not yet. I’m saying stay here, Jolene. Stay as long as you want. This is more than I’d hoped for, to have you here. The bed, the table, the studio, all of it was made for you.” He pushes back his chair. “I thought you’d never come.”
And with that, while I am still trying to figure out what he means, and if he is joking with me or not, he pulls me up and leads me back to the bed. “Was there ever a time in my life I didn’t love you?” he asks, as he takes off his clothes and buries himself in me.
26
I DECIDE that if Henry is really painting while we’re doing it and doing it while we’re painting, then what I’m doing while I’m posing is running away.
I wish I could just leave Brogan and Glenna a note saying: Thanks a couple of million times for everything, but right now I’m hiding out in this two-story room with lots of good glare. Drop me a note when the coast is clear. I’ll come back to see you sometime—when I’m about thirty.
Plus I’m glad the big party for all the bankrupt ranchers turned out fine.
27
I CHECK with Glenna that the coast is clear before I show up. I don’t have any idea what Mom and Dad may do. The times they’ve shown up in the same place before, that I know about at least, were the times, naturally, when one of them had me and the other came slipping around to take me back.
I guess I’m going back to Glenna’s now not just to pick up a few things but to see how it feels to be back with family.
On the one hand, I feel safer at Henry’s than I’ve ever felt in my life, but on the other I’m worried that he’s changing how he treats me.
We had a fight about that today.
We’ve been talking a lot, not deep stuff all the time, just talk. This morning he made cocoa and brought it in those HIS and HERS mugs. We made a joke about where were the marsh-mallows and didn’t I have any pajamas with feet in them.
I got to talking about how I’m the youngest in my family, and always will be, even when I’m walking around with a cane or pedaling an old folks’ go-cart. That’s because Brogan and Glenna couldn’t have kids, and Mom had only me. (Dad, too, I guess, at least as far as I know.) Henry said, no, that that would change when I had kids, but I told him I thought I’d skip that part.
Then Henry said he was the oldest in his family or would be when his mother was gone, and always would be because obviously nobody could come along and be older. He said the generation he’s in has already bred like rabbits, so that the next one down, his daughter’s generation, is sure to multiply like the leaves on the trees, he said, or the hairs on our heads or the cars on the freeway.
He said that all of them focused up on him; and I said all of my folks focused down on me.
I told him we were like an hourglass, the two of us; that we were the part where the sand ran through, me at the place where the glass points down and him at the place where it points up. And he liked that, and drew a little cocoa hourglass on his chest.
Later, when it was time to start posing, I said I was going to write L.W. exactly what he told me to. I thought he’d be pleased, but he wasn’t.
“I don’t want you seeing that boy while you’re living here.”
“L.W.? But I’m going to. He was a good sport to come to that party. And then I ran out on him.”
“He’s an actor.”
“I know; I told you that.”
“Don’t you know actors are grave robbers?” He balanced his cup with its silly overalls on the palm of his hand in the air. Maybe he was making a stage. “They dig up old bodies. You fuck an actor you don’t know who he is. Maybe he’s his own grandfather, or he’s some man he saw as a kid in the tourist line at the Alamo. He’s somebody he read about dead for fifty years. It’s necrophilia. You go to bed with an actor, it’s necrophilia.”
“I was taking acting,” I reminded him.
“You were Jolene taking an acting class. Horse of a different color. You have to not exist to be an actor. Nobody in the mirror.” He demonstrated by pretending to look at the side of his cup and wipe his hand across it and there’s nobody there. It made me laugh.
But I didn’t let that business go about seeing L.W. I told Henry that I’d had enough of people prying into my life, that I had a history of that. I wasn’t going to have him tell me that I couldn’t see somebody I wanted to; I had a history of that, too. People, I explained, who have been a bone for more than a dozen years like me don’t get excited when they see a couple of dogs about to fight over them.
Still, I’ve liked a lot sleeping in that bed with Henry, such a deep sleep in recent nights that I haven’t waked up until the sun came flooding through the windows, and even then I sat up and looked around,
forgetting where I was. The kind of deep sleep I don’t ever remember having before. I think from those early years of living with Mom and Dad, back and forth, I got in the habit of sleeping with one ear open. They say people who have babies do that; maybe people who have parents do it, too.
• • •
As I drive from Henry’s to Glenna’s—which is actually only a distance of ten blocks off the same north-south street, but neither of them knows that—I begin to get slightly spooked.
It may be I’m just jumpy, but I think there is a red car, a rental-red car, following me. At least it was behind me when I turned onto New Braunfels, and just now it made the same right turn I did. It may be my imagination, a hangover from all those years with Mom suspecting that one of the men, Dad or Brogan, was around every corner or about to appear at every intersection.
At least I hope so.
28
GLENNA GIVES me a big Shalimar-scented hug. She’s all excited. Brogan is bringing her good news, he just called, and a present. Something she’s been wanting for a long time, he said, but she can’t begin to guess what that could be.
She says she doesn’t think I need to stay gone, really, that Mom and Dad can’t do a thing now that I’m grown. But she seems to understand how I feel, and gives me a second hug before we go out on the patio.
We sit at the wrought iron table the way she and Brogan do on Sundays, and drink a tall thick pineapple milkshake. It’s her new diet drink, made with skim milk, fresh pineapple, and lots of crushed ice from her icemaker. She says she’s had it up to here with spiced-up tomato juice.
“You doing all right, honey?”
“Fine. I’m modeling a lot, and so that’s good. I’m sorry I ran off the way I did. But seeing them again—I guess I just plain panicked.”
Owning Jolene Page 10
