Jane gazed out the window of the rented van as Desmond drove through downtown Waugborn, an architecturally neutered area in which every building—most brick, many nearly a hundred years old—had been partly sheathed in beige vinyl or white aluminum, stripped of their individuality and integrity. Once, this probably had been a collection of family businesses selling the necessities of life; now it looked like a row of portable storage units housing makeshift martial arts schools, video rental outlets, and grimy magazine stores with advertisements for a multitude of lottery games plastered on their windows. A handwritten sign on one proudly proclaimed: “We Had Two $50 Winners This Year Alone.” That told you everything you needed to know about what constituted winning in a place like this.
Waugborn was about fifteen miles from downtown Boston, but Jane had never driven through it. She occasionally read about it in the paper, usually a lurid story of a prom at which there’d been a drug overdose or a shooting, or a report of a tractor trailer overturning and spilling hazardous material onto a watershed area. This was one of those towns people had moved to in order to escape the dangers and congestion of urban living. Now it was as densely packed as the inner city but lacked the city’s conveniences and cultural benefits. Unless you consider a store that sells “balloons for every occasion” a cultural benefit. It was mid-afternoon, balmy and aggressively bright. Jane had on her darkest sunglasses, both to cut down on the glare and to hide her own exhausted eyes. The dusty downtown streets were populated by hunched teenaged boys cradling cigarettes and young mothers wearing windbreakers, pushing strollers, and in general, looking as weary as she felt.
Suburban blight. She’d suggest it as a topic for Dinner Conversation, haul in a few sociologists and urban planners, try to book the mayor of Waugborn or a similar disaster area, a few parents worried about their kids getting gunned down in the junior high. In terms of the pilot, this shot through the window of the van would be a perfect visual metaphor for Anderton’s life, or at least the end of it: the loss of identity, the death of a career. Come to think of it, it was a perfect visual metaphor for Jane’s own blighted heart, full of contorted emotions. It didn’t make sense to her that you could feel so energized and renewed one minute and thoroughly depleted the next; so filled with excitement and erotic anticipation at ten in the morning and so flattened by guilt and self-loathing by noon.
“Anderton’s brother-in-law grew up in Waugborn,” Desmond said, “and her sister, Margo, spent the majority of her life here. After Anderton’s husband died, she moved up here to be with Margo and her husband. She came to love the place.”
“Was she schizophrenic?” Chloe asked. She and Tim Gough, an undergraduate from Emerson College doing an internship at WGTB, were seated in the back of the van surrounded by lights, tripods, and an assortment of video equipment they’d borrowed from the station. “A lot of people who have neurological chemical imbalances are misdiagnosed as alcoholics, drug abusers, and anorexics.”
Wouldn’t it be a tremendous relief, Jane thought, to have something as neat and decisive, something as blameless and clinically sanctioned as a neurological chemical imbalance? That way, you could explain away your own rotten behavior, your own choices. You wouldn’t have to slip so deeply into the murky regions of right and wrong, wouldn’t have to be consumed by regret. Maybe a pill or a transplant or a treatment would numb all your imbalanced longing and lust and the rest of the unwieldy baggage she’d been carting around recently. Including—possibly, who knew?—love. Come to think of it, she did feel as if most of the chemical compounds in her brain had taken it upon themselves to have a blow-out party.
“There’s no indication of schizophrenia,” Desmond said. “No family history of it or any other mental illness.”
“Oh.” Chloe sounded crushed. It would be a tough job to turn Pauline Anderton into a victim, but if anyone was up to the task, it was Chloe. She was clearly horrified by the degraded downtown, and probably horrified by the ordinariness of it, too.
“You’re sure you’re comfortable using this equipment?” Jane asked.
“Pretty much. The camera I used for my senior project was a little more sophisticated than this stuff, but one of the guys at the station spent about five hours going over everything with me. And Tim’s majoring in media studies.”
Silent, long-haired Tim was so in awe of Chloe, he’d barely shown signs of life since they left the station. Today Chloe had come to work wearing a dark business suit. With her fashion-model frame and cascading curls of raven hair, even this conservative outfit look inexplicably fetching. Everything Chloe wore would make Jane look like a drab, harried lawyer or an over-the-hill hooker. There was no point in trying to do something about her fashion sense now; in five years, when she hit her mid-forties, she’d turn invisible, assuming she wasn’t already. But for the past few weeks, despite all the chemical imbalances in her brain, she’d felt wondrously visible for the first time in years. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t turning heads on the street, that people like Chloe had sorted her into the remainder bin; someone was actually seeing her when he looked at her, and approved of what he was seeing. Too bad—too inconvenient—that the someone was Dale, but you can’t have everything.
Jane could tell Desmond was disappointed that Chloe and an unpaid assistant were doing the taping. Maybe he suspected something. She wasn’t going to press the issue; reassuring him would only make him more doubtful and might raise too many questions. This was just a preliminary taping and Chloe would do a good job with this as she did with everything else. Jane had seen her senior thesis film, a thirty-minute documentary about her mother and her mother’s family, all gorgeous camera angles of her gorgeous mother sitting in pools of gorgeous fading sunlight. Of course, given the fact that it had been made by Chloe, it was a story about one woman’s triumph over adversity, even though, as far as Jane could tell, the most adversity mom had to overcome these days was traffic on the Long Island Expressway as the family shuttled back and forth between their Park Avenue duplex and the house in East Hampton. Despite herself, Jane had watched the end of the film fighting back tears, mostly because it was such a bald, blunt love letter from a child to her adored mother. Jane never had felt that way about her own Scotch-soaked mother, and if Gerald ever made a film about Jane, it would probably fall into the horror movie genre.
They’d left behind the morbid downtown and had entered a sprawl of houses pressed too close together with a few browning hedges between them and an occasional lonely tree, like something preserved for its historical significance. Desmond pulled up in front of a low mint green house with faded green and white metal awnings over the windows. “This was Margo and her husband’s house,” he said. “That window above the garage was Pauline’s room. There were only a few houses around when they lived here, but they’ve developed every available inch of open land.”
Not exactly Graceland, but there was something interesting in the way the paint was peeling around the trim and in the rust stains dripping from the awnings. “Who lives there now?” Jane asked.
“I’m not sure. It was sold years ago. After Pauline died, Margo got sick and she and her husband moved to Florida.”
“What’s the architectural style?” Chloe asked.
“I think it’s called a raised ranch,” Desmond said. “Although it could be a split-level. I can’t remember exactly what I call it in the book. We should have brought along an architectural consultant.”
This was an obvious reference to Brian, a reference Jane was not going to pursue. Two days ago, Rosemary had called and mentioned that she’d bumped into Brian and Desmond in Boston. There was nothing wrong with that, but the fact that Desmond hadn’t said anything about it had given her pause. “I guess they were headed for Desmond’s apartment,” Rosemary had said. Having been at Desmond’s apartment, that didn’t seem likely. And yet . . .
“I’ll call it a raised ranch,” Chloe said. “Sounds exotic.” She made a note in a black leather notebook while Ti
m hooked his stringy yellow hair behind his ears and watched her with slack-jawed admiration.
Jane wanted to think she’d once been like Chloe, young and ambitious and exacting, but she knew it was more simple and complicated than that. Yes, she’d been ambitious, but usually impatient to be somewhere and annoyed with the process of getting there. Desmond pulled the van away from the house and continued down the block. Maybe this impatience had in fected all of her life. Maybe she’d been so eager to be in love with Thomas, with a man who loved and respected her, had been so eager to be a reliable wife and mother, after having failed once at being a wife, she hadn’t paid enough attention to the tiny details involved with getting there.
They stopped in front of an even more unpromising house, a brown, vinylcovered raised ranch or bungalow or Gothic cathedral for all she knew. Planted in the front lawn was a cut-out piece of plywood depicting a woman bending over at the waist and showing her bloomers. In the big picture window, two egg-shaped people in sweatshirts were waving cheerfully.
“Wow,” Chloe said, awestruck. “This is right out of Diane Arbus.”
Maybe so, but they looked content in their house, happy to welcome their guests, thoroughly pleased to be themselves.
2.
“I would say you don’t look a day older than you did a couple of years ago,” Mr. Walsh told Desmond, “but I guess you’d know I was lying. Wouldn’t he, Jean?”
“Oh, sure,” Mrs. Walsh said. “Dennis knows how old he looks.”
The last time Desmond had interviewed these two, a couple of years ago now, they’d called him every male name that began with a D—Dennis, Donald, Douglas, Drew, Derrick, David, Daniel. You’d think they might have landed on Desmond once, purely by chance, but it had never happened. He’d stopped trying to correct them, figuring it couldn’t matter all that much, even though he found the whole business infuriating. Best not to alienate them. They were important to him, the only link he’d found to this part of Anderton’s life. They’d given him eyewitness information about her final years, her death, her burial. And their batty behavior, gaudy house, and cheerful, inappropriate laughter could be major assets on screen. They were all sitting in oversized furniture in a small room at the back of the house paneled in something that was supposed to be wood. The windows looked out to what had been a field two years ago and was now a tidy circle of new houses which, like the furniture, were much too big for the setting. Desmond was willing to bet they all had four or five bathrooms, each with a slew of water-thirsty tubs and toilets and shower stalls.
“They finally got rid of that barren wasteland we had out there,” Mr. Walsh said, following Desmond’s gaze. “Came in and put up those houses in a few days.”
“It feels so much more private now,” Mrs. Walsh added. “Before, anybody could be out in that field looking in the windows.”
“I see what you mean,” Desmond said.
The disappointingly amateur team of Chloe and Tim was setting up the lights and video equipment while he and Jane tried to make conversation. It was probably a good thing Jane was being cautious with the fifteen grand they’d been granted, but he wasn’t convinced that the camera crew was the best place to get economical. Mr. and Mrs. Walsh were sitting on a red plaid sofa shoved against one wall, both in navy blue sweatshirts, looking like a pair of plumped pillows. They had similarly round bodies and sagging jowls and matching receding hairlines. Tim, who, in tight blue jeans and a baggy yellow T-shirt, looked almost prepubescent, held a light meter up to their faces, took a reading, and reported back to Chloe.
“Should I introduce you to the new kids while we wait?” Mrs. Walsh asked. She took a sip from her glass of apple juice, a Scotch-and-water if ever Desmond had seen one.
Jane looked at Desmond warily. “They won’t be here for the taping will they?”
“Oh, sure, they’ll be here through the whole thing. But they’re quiet. Aren’t they, Denny?”
Not the kids, Desmond thought. “Yes, they’re very quiet.”
Mr. Walsh clapped his hands and the lights went on in a tall glass cabinet against one wall. Inside was Mrs. Walsh’s collection of ceramic figurines, many of whom Desmond had met the last time he was here. The collection had multiplied significantly in two years, so much so that the shelves looked as crowded as Brighton Beach on a steamy July afternoon. Mrs. Walsh unlocked the cabinet and took out the figure of an androgynous boy. He appeared to be wearing too much rouge and his pants were hanging low in back, revealing the crack of his lush behind as he bent down to French kiss a puppy. “This is Carey,” she said, “our youngest. He’s a collector’s item. And this one here’s his sister, Cookie.” Cookie was a nymphet in hot pants whose toes were being licked by a kitten, to her obvious delight. You had to wonder how people got away with selling these things on the open market. Jane looked at Carey suspiciously before handing him back to Mrs. Walsh.
“Do you buy these on the Internet?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “They just arrive here when they need a good home.”
Desmond had played along with this the last time he visited, but in the presence of Jane, the little game struck him as humiliating. Mr. Walsh had gotten up to refill the juice glasses, and Desmond suddenly wished he hadn’t turned down their offer of a drink so quickly.
“Oh and here’s the one you were so smitten with last time,” Mrs. Walsh cooed, pulling out a bare-chested boy with a fishing pole sticking up between his legs. “He was excited to hear you were coming today.”
“He looks it,” Jane said. “Did Pauline like your collection?”
Mr. Walsh emerged from the kitchen with two full glasses and handed one to his wife. “She kept threatening to smash up the whole case,” he laughed. “She was a great one for joking around.”
“I think we’re set over here,” Chloe said. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Mr. and Mrs. Walsh went back to their plaid sofa. Mr. gripped his wife’s knee, while Mrs. grinned into the camera. They were old pros at this, loved to talk about Pauline Anderton or, Desmond suspected, just about anything else, but it might help to reassure them. “I know we’ve covered most everything you have to say in the earlier talks I had with you, but we want to get some of it down on videotape for our film on Pauline. So I’d like you to relax and enjoy yourselves, and don’t worry about repeating things. This is very informal. As much as possible, pretend you’re talking to me for the first time.”
“We don’t remember what we told you last time, so that should be no problem,” Mr. Walsh said. He was stroking his wife’s knee in such a casual, distracted way, it was almost as if he were scratching himself. Maybe that’s love, Desmond thought, and then stopped himself from pursuing it further. He’d given up looking for a definition of love. Any definition was bound to be as unreliable and fleeting as the thing itself. “Is there anything you’d like to add here, Jane?”
She pulled a strand of hair back from her face and he saw, for the first time that day, the dark circles of exhaustion around her eyes. “Tell us everything you know,” she said. “Don’t worry about trying to say nice things about Anderton. Our goal is to present her whole life, so if some of it is a little unflattering, it isn’t going to matter. The best way to honor a person is to tell the truth about her, without judging any of it.”
“In that case,” Mr. Walsh said, “I wish we had some filthy gossip, but basically, we were just good pals.”
They didn’t need much prompting once they got going, remembering the first time they’d met Paulie, the first time they’d had her over for dinner, the way she liked to regale them with stories about the people she’d met when she was at the peak of her fame. “Not that we believed all of it,” Mr. Walsh said, staring straight into the camera.
“Not that we believed most of it,” Mrs. Walsh said.
Desmond had heard the bulk of this before, although the Walshes seemed to be adding new details as they went along, perhaps inspired to embellish by the presence of the came
ra.
“Margo had a fit when she heard Paulie was coming to move in with her,” Mrs. Walsh said. “And Carter, the husband, he came stomping over here and told us he’d move out if that big so-and-so moved in with them.” She used her fingers to pick at her thin, curly hair. “I guess they were worried she’d come in town with that giant personality of hers and suck up all the oxygen.”
“Either that or start singing,” Mr. Walsh chuckled.
“Still,” Desmond said, “you told me they all got along quite well.”
“Oh, I don’t mean they didn’t get along once she arrived.” Mrs. Walsh brought her face down to her glass and sipped off the top inch of liquid. “It’s just that they had a fit when they heard she was coming. Wasn’t that it?”
“They were afraid she’d be bored living out here surrounded by trees. Not that they needed to worry about that with the police showing up a couple times a month.”
There was a bowl of hard candy on the table between Desmond’s and Jane’s chairs and Jane was poking through it as if she was looking for a particular flavor. Her hand stopped moving and she glanced up. “Police?” she asked.
“Oh, if Paulie had tossed back a few drinks and was in a good mood,” Mr. Walsh said, “she’d get belligerent and start throwing around the furniture. The sister was always afraid the TV was going to go through the window and spoil their reputation in the neighborhood.”
“Not that anyone would have cared,” Mrs. Walsh added. “We were always open-minded and didn’t get in each other’s business. As long as she didn’t bust up our furniture.”
“What would she do if she was in a bad mood?” Jane asked.
Mrs. Walsh chuckled and took another sip of her apple juice. “Well, if she was in a bad mood, you didn’t want to be around. I think that’s why Margo spent so much time in the hospital, just to get away from her sister.”
Desmond was thumbing through an indexed file of transcripts of his previous interviews with the Walshes. The room was getting increasingly hot, probably from the lights, and he wished he could take off his sweater. “I believe you told me Margo had some early signs of Alzheimer’s and that was why she was in and out of the hospital.”
True Enough Page 25
