The Poser

by Jacob Rubin

  Those weighty matters settled, Mama rescheduled her twice-delayed trip for late January when bad luck, this time in the form of one Jesse Unheim, a rakish and far-flung nephew of Sandra’s, sauntered into town. Unheim was a known entity in Sea View, having gone to Sea View Middle School, where, two years my senior, he readily established himself as the town’s miscreant. In fact, I knew Unheim personally, as he and I were often sentenced to afternoon detention at the same time—me for having once again duplicated a classmate, him for a whole menu of sin. Most famously, he drowned Arnold Polski’s gerbil for sport. Another time, he prank-called the office, pretending to be the husband of his homeroom teacher, a man everyone knew to have run off weeks before with a checkout girl at Sawyer’s Market. Inspired only by a dislike for Ms. Edinger, Jesse left a choked-up message, saying he had made a terrible mistake for leaving a woman like that, and would she find it in her heart to take him back?

  After he was expelled from Sea View Middle School, Jesse’s father moved the family to Dun Harbor, where by all accounts Jesse worsened. There was a petty theft, car theft. He went to prison. Once out, he moved west. Many presumed him dead, including the late Sandra DeMille, who referred to her nephew, the few times she could bring herself to (being a woman of famous discretion), as “the poor boy.”

  And so, one frigid Wednesday, this very same Jesse Unheim knocked on Mama’s door, dressed in a canary-yellow suit despite the icy weather, accompanied by a short, energetic lawyer he introduced as Morgan Le Fleuer. Ashplant in hand, Unheim demanded his aunt’s estate be returned to him, her only surviving relative.

  “Some of you may have thought I’d never come back,” he informed Mama. “I’m sure you wished I wouldn’t! Anytime a person gets out in the world and escapes this rat-trap, they must be dead, huh?” Unheim claimed he had found work as an actor in Fantasma Falls, and, though he had sworn long ago “never to return to this site of youthful struggle and underappreciation,” he had collected his lawyer (this is when he introduced Le Fleuer) and flown back to Sea View as soon as he received word of his aunt’s untimely collapse and death. He then informed Mama that he was suing her and Herman Mayfield for fraud and for a “baseless and altogether illegal misappropriation of family funds,” a phrase ominously exact in its wording.

  Common sense, however, dictated that Judge Sutpen, who knew Mama’s and Herman’s motives could not have been purer, would toss the case in a heap of rage, but Sutpen soon fell ill (bone cancer, bad chance) and was replaced by a new circuit judge from the landlocked county of Dyersburg, a tough, ruddy ox named Judge Thomas Tunder, who carried no loyalties to the community and exercised a clinical, dogmatic approach in all matters of jurisprudence. What’s worse, Le Fleuer proved oddly well versed in the byzantine narrows of inheritance law, convincing Judge Tunder early on that a fair trial could not be conducted with a jury culled from the townsfolk of Sea View, since the community more or less abetted the decision made by the defendants. Mayfield objected and was overruled. The judge knocked his gavel, and soon Mama and Mayfield faced a gallery of twelve strangers from the town of Desperate Pines, fifteen miles away.

  The trial lasted two months. A day didn’t go by that Mama didn’t write me to reprise the latest indignity she and Mayfield were forced to suffer. Included in her letters were newspaper clippings (the trial metastasizing into a major county scandal) that contained in their own right a skilled court artist’s inked sketches of the trial, so I came to possess a piecemeal cartoon of all that strange drama: I saw cartoon-Mama sitting at the defendant’s table, a righteous skein in her eyes. I saw Jesse Unheim, that haughty dandy, smirk etched into his face, hair parted down the middle, thin legs tapering into squiggles. (I remembered him as chubby with intelligent, scheming eyes, but he had lost weight and grown handsome.) Mama had said about Unheim, “He’s the kind of man who struts around in borrowed clothes,” and I knew what she meant from the pictures. His whole dandy act, even in cartoon form, was fraught with unease.

  Mayfield, who in the drawings was always chewing his nail or tapping his fingers on the defendant’s table, Mayfield, whose very neck was a rectangle of queasy pen strokes, called as witnesses the entire cartoon population of Sea View to exhibit (a) how much the devolution of DeMille’s estate resonated with the conscience of the community and (b) how little love the late woman had harbored for her nephew. Many witnesses recalled her referring to Unheim as “a scoundrel,” “my good-for-nothing nephew,” and (to gasps in the courthouse) “a cocksucker.”

  Even sure-footed Le Fleuer (who in those drawings appeared as a kind of French horn of a man) buckled a bit under this avalanche of testimony and, in what many local reports took as a sign of his increasing desperation, produced a letter supposedly written by Sandra DeMille to her young nephew in which she wondered, “Where is this young Jesse? I know you’ve made mistakes in the past, but I don’t think it’s right for those mistakes, especially for a young man’s mistakes, to define who he is. Home can be a cruel place. You are, Jesse, and have always been a part of the family.” Le Fleuer carted in his own handwriting expert (an undertaker by the look of the court sketches) who verified the “authenticity” of the letter.

  Things were looking up for Mama and Henry Mayfield when, during a nasty spell of rain in mid-March, Jesse Unheim and Morgan Le Fleuer disappeared. Poof. Not at the Home Away from Home Inn. Not at McSteven’s, Connell’s, or any of the county bars. A garbage man, interviewed by the Sea View News, reported seeing four men in overcoats shove Unheim and Le Fleuer into a gray van around four-thirty a.m. one Tuesday. In their absence, Judge Tunder was forced to drop the case, and in the following weeks, word fumbled down the ladder of gossip that Unheim had owed money to the mob out west. By dangling the carrot of his aunt’s estate, he had persuaded his creditors to lend him their lawyer—hence the bizarre competence of Morgan Le Fleuer. But the mob grew impatient with Unheim, lost faith in his chances of winning in court, and removed him. Or so the story went. As before, he was now presumed dead. He had come—hijacked Mama’s life—and disappeared, this pathetic Unheim, who failed even at villainy.

  Throughout this ordeal, that trial sketch of Unheim seeped into my imagination. I dreamt I caught that sketch of him in bed with Lucy, enmeshing its squiggly legs with hers. Dreamt I was lost in the bowels of the Communiqué, racing to find the stage, and when I reached the wing and stepped out, there stood that sketch of Unheim in my spotlight, Max next to him, the stage transformed into a courtroom.

  Why, in all those months, didn’t I take the five-hour train ride to Sea View and sit by my poor mother’s side? Why did I content myself with writing her, with a leisurely reading of her struggles? There were reasons, though they all seem pale and tired now, like suspects under an interrogator’s lamp.

  For one, I’d offered to come. In letter after letter, I’d insisted on coming—even booked a train ticket—but Mama refused: “I miss you more than you know,” she wrote, “but please don’t involve yourself in this mess. This Jesse is a joke, your Mama will be fine. Besides, what would your volunteers do if I stole you away from them?” And I, as always, obeyed, too naïve to know a woman’s insistence in such cases is asserted solely to be overruled.

  Even so, I might not have risked leaving for fear of deserting Lucy. In my absence, I was sure, she’d forget who I was or vanish altogether. Like Unheim. Thrown in a van, whisked away. If Lucy was five minutes late for dinner, if I couldn’t find her after a performance, I experienced a light, if well-hidden, panic. She was one of those people who seemed ripe, primed for disappearance.

  Plus, I had developed an allergy to Sea View. Or the fear of one. So many smiling angels had descended upon me since I’d escaped—Lucy, the Communiqué, these new handsome manners—all of which would float away from me, I was sure, if I so much as entered Sea View.

  Besides, Mama and I had recovered such naked words in our letters it seemed a shame to test them with faces. A few times she and I
spoke on the lobby phone, but it was never the same: We were tentative and alien. We hung up, ran to our pens. Our retreating hearts needed those letters, the distance and redemptive fiction of letters. That’s what Jesse Unheim was now: insidious and pathetic, but fictional. He, and the home from which he and I had both fled, transformed into a cartoon. Ah, that Sea View could have remained so, that Mama and I could have lived as pen pals!

  • • •

  She visited on April 15, two weeks before Max and I were set to leave on a ten-city national tour arranged by Bernard and financed by the famous eccentric and patron of the arts, Marguerite Harris, granddaughter of the late oil baron D. W. T. Harris. Bernard had invited her to a March performance, and Harris, who above all sought out that which was “fresh,” declared me just that. A week later, Max and I met Ms. Harris and Bernard at the Harlequin Club on Forty-third Street. Within fifteen minutes Bernard and Max were phoning her lawyer. It amazed me how quickly the business was settled. Fates sealed with a handshake. As if to confirm a process already under way rather than inaugurate a new one. How long did it take Achilles to return Hector’s body to Priam? For the Trojans to accept the horse?

  There was one hitch, however: Giovanni, who delighted Ms. Harris’s appetite for wit—He’s something, isn’t he? Oh, what a strange boy!—insisted that an obscure singer, Lucy Starlight, open for him on these twenty tour dates. Lucy who? Ms. Harris asked. Bernard laid his hand on her elbow, whispering in her ear. “Why then it’s settled,” she said. “A boy needs his toy.”

  The day Mama was to arrive, I took a cab to Central Station and waited under its canopy. I wore an old pair of jeans and a suede jacket, an outfit I had owned for years, so as not to betray Mama with some new look. And yet, while waiting, I adopted a posture of cavalier world-weariness: shoulder against a lamppost, legs crossed, hands buried in my jacket pockets, a kind of cowboy’s pose I never would have assumed in Sea View.

  In front of me, as I waited, unfolded a tableau of arrival and departure common to any airport, bus terminal, or train station, any depot where travelers stricken with luggage ship off or dizzily return. Families hailed taxis and picked at the luggage-loaded arriver until he carried no bags. Many kissed and patted and hugged, and it was always so clear, just from the tension and grip, whether the hug meant hello or goodbye. A stranger in that scene looked amazingly like my mother, craning her neck in the timid way one searches for someone in public. “Mama!”

  She smiled. I couldn’t believe it. It had been just seven months, but Mama was years older. That can happen: in a month, a week, going to the kitchen for a glass of wine, a person can age fifteen years. Maybe the trial had done it. Her hair, shoulder length, was stippled with gray. Her cheeks puffed and pouchy. Yet her eyes were the same. We hugged.

  Amazing how easily you forget the only things that matter, I thought, as we motored uptown to the Restless Sailor Inn. Right there, in the vinyl backseat, Mama. “The train ride was just fine! Just fine! Oh, you don’t know how good it is to see you.” She rested her head on my shoulder. I put my arm around her, an action I’d performed for the first time with Lucy. “This trial, Giovanni, beat the life out of me. Jesse Unheim, that little prick—excuse me, Giovanni, you know I don’t like to curse.”

  “I had dreams about him. He—”

  “Why didn’t you come? Just a couple days you could’ve come. You know how lonely I was?”

  “Mama, I—”

  She slapped my thigh with zest. “I know, I know. You have your precious Lucy here.” She wagged her finger. “And we’ll get to the bottom of that.”

  I knew she would calm down once we had her settled in her room, which in no time we had. She took it all in—the brocaded wallpaper, the plastic flowers, the heavy maroon comforter—with the same head-swirling attention she gave the busy city streets walking to Leaning Tower, the Italian restaurant where Max awaited us. All the while, she stayed close, laying her head on my shoulder, frisking me with those eyes.

  Dinner was a play of two voices: Mama’s and Max’s, the latter reporting all the perks of city-wide success Giovanni had been too modest to include in his letters—how, for instance, a TV star and a famous lawyer had recently volunteered—the former exclaiming, “Oh my!” and “Of course!” and rubbing my back. Talk plowed over the expected fields of conversation: revenue (increasing by the week), the upcoming tour, the cities we’d visit, the generous patronage of Marguerite Harris, who, as it turned out, was hosting a major fête at her town house that following Saturday, Mama’s last night in town.

  Over the course of dinner Mama drank three martinis, performing the usual program of memories (my unappreciated genius growing up in Sea View, my old performances for her). Then she started in on me. “I’m angry with you,” she said. “I was all alone up there. Have you forgotten your mama already?” It went on for a while, with Max smiling queasily and Mama wagging her finger at all the sins in the air.

  She drank so much, I had to help her into the cab and guide her by the elbow through the hotel lobby, up the old whirring elevator, and, after a brief burlesque of keys, into the room. I helped her onto the tightly made bed. She motioned with her hand for me to lean in, and when I did, kissed me on the lips. “Ah, here we are, still in life.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “We’re gonna find this Lucy’s thread . . .”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “I guarantee it!”

  “Rest, Mama.”

  “I tell you, you know . . . your father used . . . when he was . . .”

  “Mama?”

  But she was snoring.

  • • •

  “Oh, Giovanni, let me.”

  Lucy and I sat on one side of the table, Mama the other, the three of us at a tea shop downtown. On the train ride there, two kids with baseball mitts had tugged on my sleeve with an autograph request. I obliged, signing their mitts with my standard, “You’re the star.” Mama had watched it all, looking offended by joy.

  “Isn’t he just delightful?”

  “Mama, please.”

  “He’s a strange one,” Lucy said. “That’s for sure.”

  “Strange. Is that a good thing to be these days?”

  “Of c-ore-se,” Lucy said in an ironic voice.

  “‘Of course,’” Mama said. “I liked the way you said that.” I felt something under the table: Mama kicking me. “And you’re going on tour together. Exciting.”

  “Yeah, well, I was the tax. They wanted Giovanni, they had to pay for me.”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that.”

  “Believe it,” Lucy said.

  “No, it’s,” I said, “it’s not true.” A sore spot. When I first came back from that meeting with Marguerite—tipsy after some mandatory drinks with Max—and delivered the news to Lucy, she refused to go. We argued. I’m not your sidekick is one of the things she said. I had to beg, make a whole jokey campaign of wanting her.

  “What do you sing?” Mama asked her.

  “Oh, I don’t know if it really fits into a type.”

  “How would you describe it?”

  “I don’t knoooow.”

  “If forced, how would you?”

  “If forced?” Lucy made a pained expression. I felt Mama again under the table. “Lounge songs, I guess.”

  “What about?”

  “Giovanni! I didn’t know I’d be interrogaaated!” Lucy laughed. “What are they about? I don’t know.” She asked me, “What are they about, Giovaaaanni?”

  “Well, Mama, they’re . . . really, they’re excellent. . . .”

  Over the course of our brief sit-down, we each had two teas. Many times I’d imagined Mama and Lucy meeting, and every time they talked their way into each other’s hearts, and we realized we were family. Only now that we were seated together in a kind of stunned trio did I realize how stupid that was. As Mama and Lucy tiptoed verba
lly on a heightened, high-wire form of small talk (discussing, eventually, Jesse Unheim as well as the scene at the Communiqué), the afternoon recalled more and more that first, nauseating dinner with Max when there was no room, really, for me to be anyone. Yes, between Mama and Lucy, I shuttled in tone between two Giovannis—the bold, strange lover and that thread-hunting boy—and not knowing what to say or how to say it, kept ordering new hot teas and downing them too quickly, kept going to the bathroom to escape, feeling like I might at any moment shout out something wrong.

  At one point Lucy herself went, and Mama leaned across the table. “It’s in her head—the tilt of her head, Giovanni. I’m sure of it.”

  • • •

  That Saturday night Giovanni Bernini, the World’s Greatest Impressionist, devoured ten downy strangers before a packed house at the Communiqué. All show I could feel her: through the mist of smoke, the shrieks of laughter. Like a soft breeze or ray of light, sometimes harkening from the hinterland of back tables, sometimes from the wings of the balcony, I could sense that abiding presence, the bottomlessness of a mother, and many, both in print and out, would stretch the furthest reaches of superlative to describe the power of that night’s performance. The most transporting, they said. A work of art.

  Before the performance I had arranged to meet Mama and Lucy by the balcony bar and there they stood, as planned. There she stood, like some prophetess: Mama, in her old dress, the one she wore to Derringer’s office, with the belted waist and giant bow. “Mama—” I was saying, when Lucy pounced, peppering my cheeks with kisses. “My freeeak.” It was as if she wanted to tattoo me with her kisses, so that any onlooker, in order to see me—and there were many idling by the bar trying to do just that—would have to penetrate the very public veil of her affection. I managed to hold her at arm’s distance. “Max says the car’s downstairs,” I said. “We ought to go.”