MacGregor Tells the World

by Elizabeth Mckenzie

  “Are you kidding?” he brayed on the talk show. Not a happy bray, more like the bray of the stabbed. A braying man on a hill must come down from the hill and excuse himself, lest he scare children. He took out his phone and called her number for the first time in a long while.

  “Carolyn?” He was speaking into some kind of electromagnetic holding tank, which had become an acceptable mode of communication these days. “I’ll kill myself if I’m wrong here—but are you Molly’s—you know—mother? I mean, you’re more than a sister, aren’t you? It’s all become clear.” He paused, considering his options. “If you think it’s an obstacle for me, forget about it. It doesn’t matter at all! I can handle it! We’ll never speak of it again unless you want to.”

  Smoldering, he added, “Carolyn. How’s this? If you don’t call me back, I’ll assume it’s true.”

  15

  Evening on Mission Street. End of a hot, clear day in May. Everyone outside—the sidewalk was as crowded as morning. Girls in flowered dresses, strutting with their guys, in high-waisted black pants; babies in frilly pinafores, tottering in tight, shiny shoes; babies in A’s and Giants caps squeezed in papooses. On a long, low wall next to a Burger Fry were exactly sixteen couples, the girls in their short skirts with bare legs stretched out before them, the guys clubbing themselves in the face with gangly knees. Kids scraping circles into the cement on their skateboards, ramming bikes up over curbs. Propped against a closed storefront, six young dudes were flying pennies into a fat pipe coming out of the ground. Two cops he saw, handing out tickets to guys in hydraulic lowriders for bouncing up and down. He passed the hardware store where he’d had the key to his apartment made, he passed the store where he bought his groceries, and he passed his favorite bar and the shop of the barber who clipped his hair his first week here.

  And here and there another hungry person, for there were a lot of good restaurants around. He passed the place he went, sometimes every day—a taqueria called Vallarta. All of this, only a couple blocks from his apartment on Guerrero. The apartment was a large, odd-shaped room on the third floor with a closet-size kitchen, from which he could actually see the sawed-off points and peaks of the downtown skyline. He also had a great view west through the window of his closet.

  This evening he wasn’t stopping for soft tacos. He had a dinner invitation. Filipo had called that morning before he left for work— he said their home had been invaded by cousins. Four girls had just come up from San Salvador with his aunt. His mother was preparing a feast and wanted Mac to join them. Filipo was into movies now, too. He wanted to talk about them, sometimes frame by frame; Mac was renting old classics for him. Last week they’d watched Vertigo.

  “Look at how Hitchcock builds Scottie’s isolation,” Mac had remarked. “We keep getting these shots of him driving in his car, many more than we actually need to establish it, following the woman, unsure of every single thing in his life.”

  “Madeleine’s a woofer,” Filipo commented. “What’s he thinking?”

  Novak had never appealed to Mac, either. “Look, Filipo, what matters is watching Jimmy Stewart completely disintegrate and turn into a man capable only of revenge.”

  “I’m glad that didn’t happen to you,” he muttered.

  Food for thought: it could have.

  Yet life moved on. Fran and Tim’s baby girl was born in April. They named her Helen Cecille. Mac was surprised at how fast and how much he loved the little baby. When she was only a few days old, she wrapped her hand around one of his fingers, and he sat there frozen so as not to break the spell. A few days later she smiled at him. Calling her Helen didn’t seem to stick, and they moved on to Helen Cecille, then settled on Helsie, and Helsie she became. The tribute to his mother in the name moved Mac immensely, and he soon realized he’d worry about Helsie’s safety and happiness every minute for the rest of his life. He drove down to Redwood City with bright-colored rattles and soft, chewable bunnies as often as he possibly could.

  Fran would be yawning and tired in her robe. “Could you hold her while I make some coffee?” she’d say.

  “Sure.” The baby would be wearing a yellow terry-cloth sleeper, and her thighs were plump and strong. “Look, she’s trying to stand up!”

  “I know. She’s determined. She won’t sit down now. Look how she’s holding her body totally stiff!”

  Tim had all kinds of new boxes for his piles. When you had a baby, you were authorized to purchase so much stuff—a crib and a car seat and a stroller and a plastic bathtub and a bassinet and a wiper warmer and a diaper compactor, and that was just for starters.

  “Melinda says you’re going to a concert together at Montalvo in June,” Fran said.

  “What a gossip,” he said.

  “This is progress, Mac.”

  “Your mother is saying very obnoxious things,” he said to Helsie, smiling at her smiling eyes. “Yes, she is. She’s saying very obnoxious things, and I’m glad you don’t know it.” He was moody, and even in the middle of holding the baby he could grow morose, not understanding the source of it. Alternate realities—past, present, and future—taunted him. He’d hand Helsie back and go.

  Now he passed his laundromat and then the thrift store where he had bought a perfectly excellent IBM Selectric for five dollars. Once the crown jewel of typewriters, the flagship of office equipment everywhere, now despised and treated like an old hobo with dirty toes. So were the fortunes of men made, and then plowed under. The world turned. It was already a brand-new day. And here was the drugstore where he regularly bought his newspaper, dental floss, and candy bars. Then he spotted the old woman with the rose bucket— he handed her a five, and she presented him with a pink bouquet. She had holes in her earlobes the size of dimes. The fruit store was closing up, the fruit man was packing away his produce—Mac stopped the guy and threw a few things into a bag. Big, ripe local strawberries for Filipo’s mother, and a few lemons for himself.

  Finally Mac let himself into the open grille of the stairwell and trotted up the cement stairs. The sewing and ironing room was crowded and loud with voices, and the parrot was soliloquizing from his perch on the TV. Elena pushed through when she saw him. “Mr. Mac!” she said. “Come here, you hungry? We got a lot of food.” She pulled him through the threads of many conversations—they arrived at a table heaped with all kinds of stuff. None of those pink dough balls! “Put some of this on a plate,” she said. Then, “Mac, meet my sister Josefina. Filipo’s auntie.”

  She had a kind smile, long hair glossy as a wine bottle.

  Filipo found him then. “Hey, Mac.” He began elaborating on the different dishes on the table. A woman came over and heaped her plate, and Filipo thought this was making Mac nervous and said, “Don’t worry, there’s more in the kitchen. These are empanadas, and here’s some papusas de chiccharón, papusas de queso, and some tamales, plátanos fritos, yuca frita, bistec encebollada, guisado, mariscada, frijoles, arroz. Help yourself!”

  Mac piled it on and so did Filipo, and they ate. They ate a lot. For ten minutes they just stood there and chewed food and swallowed. Some of it was peppery, and they guzzled pineapple juice to cool down. Filipo was intent. “Pretty good,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

  Mac nodded between mouthfuls.

  “Who’s that guy?” Mac asked at one point.

  “You should know.”

  “The guy across the way?” he realized. The person Filipo had once called El Monstruo was sitting next to Elena, talking and eating with the stout satisfaction of the ensconced.

  Filipo pulled Mac by the arm and led him to the back room.

  Mac didn’t recognize the large installment at first. It sat against the wall like a cabana. Welded to the end pieces were four steel bars, rising up and supporting a canopy of blazing orange fabric, while fluffy pink puffs dangled from it all around. The bed frame itself had been swathed in a shocking pink coat of enamel. Tiny white lights coiled around each support, up to the top, crissing and crossing the fabric sky
. Hanging on the filaments and posts were plastic fruits— pineapples, mangoes, bananas. A leopard-print comforter plumped up the thin mattress and was heaped with fat pillows of every color and stripe.

  “Holy cow,” Mac said.

  “It’s garish, but my mom loves it.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “He fished it out of the dumpster; the rest is history.”

  “He really did a number on it.”

  “I know, it’s what convinced her.”

  “Jeez. What do you think of the guy?” asked Mac.

  “You said anyone who tries to make something is automatically cool,” said Filipo. “So, I guess he’s cool.”

  Mac looked at the fold-up bed, never to be folded again. “More than that—a visionary.”

  “He’s from Argentina. He loves beef.”

  Filipo’s four girl cousins were there, screaming, yelling, laughing. Filipo said, “They’re going to be here indefinitely.”

  “Your aunt’s moving here?”

  “She sure is. She’s going to try to get a job like my mom’s. Then maybe after a while she can afford her own place.” Just then the assertive bark of a small dog rose above the party noise. “Oh, man,” Filipo cursed. “And check this out.” He opened the door to the bathroom.

  Some kind of short-haired mongrel was leaping against their legs, strange-looking in that not only was it missing a hind leg but it was wearing a diaper. Mac said, “What a charming pet.”

  Filipo said, “Yeah, they found it and felt sorry for it. Stupid dog. Can’t lift his leg ‘cause it’s not there, so he can’t figure out how to pee anymore. You want to get out, don’t you, puppy?”

  Filipo pulled One Hundred Years of Solitude from his book bag, and for the next forty-five minutes or so they sat together with the dog on the lumpy couch. Mac was mostly savoring his full stomach, and enjoying the noise of the party, and trying to get a glimpse of Josefina’s hair, which flickered from time to time in the doorway like a twitchy horse tail. That he could finally notice another woman’s hair showed he was thinking about Carolyn a little less as the months went by.

  But he was still thinking about her plenty.

  “Mrs. Ware?” he’d said one day last winter, in a phone call hard to make. “This is MacGregor West.”

  Only the smallest of pauses. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you, Mac. Are you in town?”

  Mac said, “You’re the one who’s been away.”

  “Yes, that’s right. We’re here for two months now, then back again.”

  “Great,” he said. Then, “Could we meet somewhere? I—” He fumbled for the words. “How about lunch at Fort Mason?”

  She said, “I think I could manage that, Mac. But you can pick me up. Charles is away.”

  So the next day, in the pale, warmish light of a San Francisco winter, he drove over to that house once again and felt himself turn to ice at the sight of it. It was the first time he’d been past since he had been madly, passionately in love with Carolyn Ware.

  “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, Charles is very busy,” she said, following Mac to the Cavalier that first day. “He’s on a very tight schedule with his new book. He’ll finish it, or bust.”

  He held the rusty door of the car open for her, and she fell into the old, sheepy seat with a squeak from underneath.

  “Glad to hear that,” Mac said.

  He climbed in on his side, and off they rattled down the street.

  “And Carolyn’s doing quite well, she’s fallen right in; the press has a glorious new office near Times Square.”

  “Glad to hear that, too,” Mac said, catching his breath.

  “And Molly, of course. A mighty girl. She is taking everything in her stride, making it her own. She’ll do very well for herself in this world, I’m confident of it.”

  “Super.”

  What was he doing? His hands shook.

  Lunch over, and they were taking in the weak sun at Fort Mason. The smell of tar wafting up through the planks of the pier, sea lions bellowing from below, and his unfinished business waving like a giant banner in the breeze. They were talking about Adela’s tapes for the first time since he’d finished his work on them and given them back. There were holes in the story, he was advising her. There were places where the audience would surely “want more.”

  “I don’t care to spend all our time talking about Mr. William Galeotto, if that’s it. I’ve heard he’s your father, but I can’t stand the man.” “I can see why,” Mac conceded. “But people are interested in

  him.”

  “People like you?”

  “Why did you have lunch with me, Adela?”

  By the time they met for lunch another day, this time in North Beach, she had loosened up, and she described how thrilled the elder Wares had been when she arrived on the scene. After an enormous wedding at Grace Cathedral, they set the young couple up in a handsome, twelve-room apartment on California Street. Thus it didn’t take Adela long to start talking about William Galeotto, despite herself. He and Chloe Routinier eloped six months later. Charles was bitter—he wanted to be best man. When the newly-weds returned to San Francisco after a monthlong honeymoon in Italy, they found an apartment in North Beach—Galeotto would run the press from this apartment for the next five years.

  And Adela had a new friend in Chloe Galeotto.

  They were thrown together all the time while their husbands capered about. It was a wonderful surprise that they should like each other so much. Three, four nights a week the four of them dined together; Adela couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something terribly odd in the way her husband so worshiped his friend. Galeotto seemed an elusive dream to Charles, someone whose full regard was always just out of reach. Not only that, but months went by and Charles wouldn’t lay a finger on her.

  And then there were other problems. They had a lovely daughter together, but she was a daddy’s girl from the start. And in no time, she dressed and behaved like a young woman. Hadn’t she worn pigtails a year ago? And carried an old bear everywhere? And then Chloe became ill, and Adela was spending almost all her time with her friend, reading to her—anything to keep her spirits alive.

  After Chloe Galeotto died—

  What exactly did happen after Chloe Galeotto died?

  “You see, Mac, I had to get on with my life.”

  Mac took a long drink of wine. It was to be the last time they would meet, due to an error in his judgment on how far he could get with her. It was just as well. They were in a tiny restaurant in North Beach, and two men were laughing loudly at the table next to them. Outside the wind ripped up the avenue. A parked motorcycle tipped over and hit the bumper of the car in front of it. A trim woman in a business suit leaned over and spat right in front of the restaurant window. Mac said, “Mrs. Ware, forgive me for asking so personal a question. But I still feel as if I’m missing something. Not that you don’t tell your story in great detail. But after Chloe died, what happened with my father?”

  “Well, he and Charles quarreled—”

  “Yes, they did. Why?”

  “It was their business. I don’t know Bill; he never had the time of day for me.”

  “Or for Carolyn?”

  The men laughed again, and Adela choked on a piece of ice. She coughed and chewed it up and replied, “Carolyn? That would be rather inappropriate, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It would.” And the conclusions he’d already drawn had blackened any future he might have had with his biological father— and nauseated him to the core.

  “He’s fond of the girl,” she said blandly, toying with her fork.

  “Must have been a time. New baby, older daughter doing her own thing. Must have put a damper on the acting.”

  “Why, yes,” Adela replied. “I suppose it did.”

  Mac pulled out his folder. “I have copies of some reviews here. Looks like you got a great one for Blithe Spirit that year.”

  Adela brightened. “Let me see tho
se,” she said, putting on her reading glasses. “Where did you find them?”

  “I’ve been busy,” he remarked. “Looked them up on microfilm at my cousin’s library. She showed me how to use the machine—man, are those things prehistoric monsters!”

  “Why, yes, I was in this festival. It was great fun—”

  “And look at this one. You were in this Albee play, too, that year, and Streetcar Named Desire, too. Was it hard, keeping up the rehearsal schedule while you were pregnant?”

  “I suppose, yes, it always wore me down,” Adela said. “But I can’t complain. Women all over the world continue to toil during the childbearing years.”

  “My poor cousin put on fifty pounds and had a month of bedrest. How about you, any complications? Gain much weight?”

  “What a trouble to lose it!”

  “And Molly was big. I found her birth announcement. Delivered by Dr. Isabel Porter at a private hospital in Switzerland. Ten and a half pounds!”

  “Why do you care about such things? Why are you telling me this?”

  “You were in your forties. You were performing or rehearsing every night of the week, from what I can tell from these reviews. By then you were probably in your seventh or eighth month. Yet there’s no mention of your pregnancy anywhere. Why is that?”

  “Now, why should anyone mention it?”

  “Mrs. Ware, is it possible—” Mac coughed. “Is it possible you didn’t give birth to Molly?”

  She began to laugh at him, the biggest, throatiest laugh he had ever heard from her. She outdid the men. And he had half expected as much, because the Ware family vessel, which conveniently included a licensed physician by the name of Dr. Porter, would never spring any more leaks than it already had. “God, Mac! Where do you think she came from, a stork? A spaceship? Waiter, check please! God!”