Cheat and Charmer (40 page)

Peter forgot the rules and let the screen door slam behind him as he left Mr. Perrin’s house, he was so excited. His mother’s profile, with its straight nose and pretty mouth, her short brown hair caught on the side in a gold barrette that she always wore, seemed beautiful to him, as always, within the roomy seclusion of the station wagon. He climbed into the front seat beside her, putting his clarinet case on his lap. “Guess what, Mom! Mr. Perrin says I’m ready to start Mozart next time. I have to get this—” and he handed Dinah the slip of paper with the title of the music book on it. “Can we do it today?”

Dinah glanced at her watch. “Sure.”

“And can we stop at the sword shop? Please, Mom, please?”

“We’ll see,” she said, which meant they would. “What’s the M-M-M-Mozart piece?”

“A concerto, I think.” He said the word carefully, liking the sound but not quite certain of its meaning. “Do you think Dad’ll like it?”

“Of course.” She hesitated. “Why wouldn’t he?”

She knew perfectly well why he wouldn’t. Jake was always nagging Peter with “Why don’t you learn to play the piano?” or “I wish you’d play more baseball at school” or “If you like, I’ll get tennis lessons for you at the club.” Peter wanted to play the clarinet, not tennis or baseball. When he started fencing lessons his father said, “Tennis is a great social game. Later on, it’s very useful for meeting people.”

“He never likes anything I like,” Peter answered.

She heard herself making excuses. “Dad just wants you kids to get out there and have fun with other kids.”

The inaneness of this reply didn’t escape Dinah, but she didn’t know what else to say and she would never criticize Jake in front of Peter. It baffled and angered her that Jake was so critical of Peter. Lorna could do no wrong, but about Peter they always quarreled. “Why do you have to be so hard on him?” she would ask in their room at night after the children were in bed. “So what if he doesn’t like baseball?” And Jake always had a ready answer, some wordy and superior explanation pulled out of a psychoanalytic hat. It invariably began not with Peter but with Jake himself and included references to his “unconscious” and his “inadequacies” and his “anxieties.” Back in Chicago, in his Studs Lonigan youth, he’d been uncoordinated, knock-kneed, and Jewish, he explained, and he’d felt terrible about his inability to compete with other boys; and here was Peter, well formed and beautifully coordinated but indifferent to baseball and football and interested only in oddball and egghead things. Jake had therefore concluded that Peter must be having the same conflicts and anxieties and thus needed to learn, as he himself had been forced to learn, how to compete in a larger world, doing the things that normal boys do to learn how to be aggressive and strong.

Dinah always became furious when he talked that way. “How can you say these things about your son?” she would shout at him. Slunk back in the armchair, his silk paisley bathrobe spread open to reveal his T-shirt and blue boxer shorts and his skinny legs sprawling toward the floor, his hand held wearily to his forehead, Jake would say, “Honey, I’m trying to do my
job as his father. I’ve got to prepare him for the struggle of life.” And then she felt that she couldn’t argue with him, even though she was sure he was wrong—not in principle, perhaps, but in the all-important particulars concerning Peter himself. But she couldn’t put that into words. And so she would give up, resentful and angry. Increasingly, she noticed, Peter was reluctant to talk to his father or to play ball with him in De Neve Park, which was just a few blocks away, within walking distance of home and thus convenient for an impromptu game whenever Jake experienced a fit of paternal obligation or—what amounted to the same thing—the impulse to torture and needle his son.

It had been so calm at home since Jake had left for London—so peaceful, for instance, at the dinner table. Peter ate what he wanted to eat and she didn’t sit there anxiously watching every mouthful he took. If he didn’t want Brussels sprouts, she didn’t make him eat them. Would Jake and Peter hate each other in the future? Jake was certainly doing everything he could to make sure his firstborn child would hate him later on. Yet now, driving into Beverly Hills with Peter, and feeling deeply that Jake was in the wrong, Dinah nevertheless missed her husband terribly.

At the music store, they bought the clarinet instruction book, and Peter browsed through new releases of clarinet performances. Then they walked up to the store on Little Santa Monica, where he gazed lovingly at a saber he planned to buy when he’d saved up enough money. Finally, they drove to the Wil Wright’s just below Wilshire and Beverly and ordered hot-fudge sundaes.

They were wonderfully happy together, waiting for the sundaes. Dinah looked at her boy’s solemn oval face and questioning eyes. She thought his musical talent came from her mother, who had played the piano in silent movie theaters, and she loved it in him. It was fine with her that he wanted to be a musician.

She asked him if he remembered his grandfather, Ed Milligan.

“Sure. I remember Papa Milligan,” Peter said. “I remember the way his trailer smelled. It was kind of strong, but nice. Was it his pipe tobacco?”

“Yes. It had a very acrid smell.”

“Mom? You know what?”

“What?”

“I never told you this, Mom, but once when Papa Milligan stayed overnight at our house—in his trailer, I mean—I went out there and he was brushing his teeth, only he was holding them in his hand.”

“Those weren’t his real teeth—they were false teeth.”

“And, Mom, I looked at them and they were all black. He told me he chewed tobacco, and he gave me a piece of it and told me to chew. The taste was so horrible, I ran out of the trailer and threw up in the ivy.”

“Golly, that must have been t-t-t-terrible,” she said, making a ghastly face in sympathy. “In Little R-R-R-Rock, when he was a kid, all the boys chewed tobacco. They had cuspidors and would spit the wads of tobacco and tobacco juice into them.” She made another face, and Peter laughed. “They made bets about who could spit the farthest. And he used to have a little saying. Imagine a little boy who lisps, and who says: ‘I can thpit in a thraight line, I can thpit in a curved line, and I can thpit in a thircle. But when I thpit in my friendth eye, he’th both thurprithed and pleathed, but more thurprithed than pleathed.’ ”

Peter couldn’t stop laughing, and asked Dinah to say it again. The ice cream sundaes were served, and they spooned up ice cream and fudge sauce in a familiar ritual of small, delicate bites. “Another thing I remember about Papa Milligan,” Peter said, “was that he always sang the tobacco song: ‘There was an old soldier, who had a wooden leg / He had no tobacco nor tobacco would he beg.’ ” Peter continued to the end.

“Gee, Petey,” Dinah said, “it’s great how you remember that. You can pass it on to your children—when you have them.”

He looked up from his ice cream, finding it odd to hear his mother talk this way, and saw that her face, so lively and happy a moment ago, had suddenly turned a grayish white. “Mom? Are you okay?”

She got up slowly and reached for her purse. “I’m just going to go to the ladies’ room for a minute,” she whispered. She saw the worry on his face. “I’m okay, sweetheart. Just a tummy ache or something.” But he turned to watch her as she walked away, and her walk, it seemed to him, was too careful, as if the stomachache was really bad or she really had to go to the bathroom. Uneasy but not alarmed exactly, he kept eating his sundae, scraping the sauce off the bottom of the silver dish and saving for last the little macaroon that always came in a waxed-paper envelope. He took his mother’s from her saucer because he knew that she would have given it to him anyway. He kept waiting, but she didn’t come back. He saw what was left of her sundae and wanted it, but he left it alone, feeling that it should be there for her when she came back. After fifteen minutes, it had begun to get soupy, so he finished it and ate both of the macaroons. Thirsty, now, he drank his glass of water and hers, and still she hadn’t come back.

He was worried now. He supposed he should go to the ladies’ room and knock on the door, but that would be really embarrassing. He was wondering if he should say something to the waitress, when he saw his mother walking slowly back to the table. She was still pale, and she had a strange look on her face. She didn’t even sit down. “Have you finished, honey? Good, because we have to go home right away. I’m sorry, honey, but I don’t feel well.”

She looked terrible: her skin, usually coffee-and-cream-colored, was an eerie greenish gray.

“Mom?” he said, taking her hand and finding it cold and moist.

“It’s okay,” she said, and they both knew it wasn’t.

“Mom? Are you sick? Mom?” he said.

Once they were back in the car, she lit a cigarette. “Don’t be scared, sweetie. I just need to get home and lie down.”

“Can you drive okay, Mom? I can drive. Dad taught me how in Palm Springs. It’s an emergency. I can drive you home.” He wanted desperately to drive the big station wagon. He wanted a policeman to stop them so that he could explain that his mother was sick and he happened to know how to drive and was driving her home because she couldn’t drive. He wanted his father to know.

“Thank you, darling, but I’d better drive. I’d have to be dead first before I couldn’t drive.”

He fell silent, because she really did look very sick and her joke wasn’t funny. He glanced over at her. She was still pale, and the expression on her face was sadder than anything he had ever seen in his life—sadder even than she had looked at Papa Milligan’s funeral. He didn’t want to make her talk, but he moved to the center of the seat and put his hand on her shoulder, and she glanced at him with love. He was a tender, sweet boy, she thought, and Jake was a son of a bitch for being so rough on him.

They took the long, winding way home, since there was late-afternoon traffic on Sunset. Even so, the blinding sun was bothering her, even with her dark glasses on, and she lowered the sun guard. He watched her drive, her mouth set, and still wished with all his heart that he could be the one behind the wheel. He was certain that something was very wrong.

“Does it hurt, Mom?”

“Yeah, honey. Yeah, it does.”

“A lot, Mom?”

“Well, kind of. Yeah. A lot.”

“Mom, are you still going to have a baby?”

“I don’t know, sweetie. Maybe not.”

Finally, his mother pulled the car into the driveway. “Now, Peter, when I stop the car, run into the house and get Gussie.”

Peter ran, shouting, into the house, and Gussie, who had been peeling potatoes, flew out the back door. With a knot in his stomach, he saw her put her arm around his mother’s back and help her up out of the car. His mother was bent over, but her head rested against Gussie’s shoulder. Gussie, who was saying something too low for Peter to hear, guided her slowly into the house.

A few hours later, a doctor came. He was a huge man whom Peter had never seen before, and he went upstairs to his mother’s room with Gussie, who closed the door. Then an ambulance came. Peter and Lorna stood at the top of the stairs with Gussie while the ambulance men brought their mother out of the bedroom and took her down the stairs, their feet making a muffled clomp-clomp on the carpet. “Careful,” they said to each other. “Watch that turn there. Got it.”

Peter and Lorna ran downstairs behind the stretcher. Dinah told them she was going to the hospital and that everything would be fine, but she looked sad.

“Oh, Gussie dear,” she called out as the men lifted her into the ambulance. “Call Gladys at the studio and tell her to please wire London. And maybe you and the kids could go and pick up Jake’s mother. She’ll be happy to come and help out.”

“Mrs. Lasker, honest, I don’t need no help with the children. You know as well as I do Mrs. Lasker senior is just going to get in the way.”

Dinah laughed and reached for Gussie’s hand. “Oh, Gus, you’re great. You’re in charge now, so just do it your way. Kids, listen to Gussie. I’ll call home very soon.”

S
he awoke slowly. The incision hurt. It was early evening, and the fading light, with its orange streaks, filled her with desolation. Her eyes, only slightly open, took in Jake, sitting near the bed, his round head, with its receding hair, leaning against the back of his hand. He seemed to be staring at the dull linoleum floor. On his face was an expression of terrible weariness. She thought, with sudden anger, You’d think someone had just sentenced him to death. Why was he here? What had he come for? Was that expression on his face love? It couldn’t be. No. It had to be obligation. She’d dragged him home from Europe.

They looked at each other. “How are ya, honey?” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“The nurses tell me you’ve been crying.”

“Well?” she said almost defiantly. Then her head drooped and she wept.

He sat on the bed and took her hand. “It’s a big blow, honey. I feel it, too.” He felt her hand limp in his own and squeezed it. Then he waited until the crying subsided.

She saw something on the windowsill—a bouquet of red, yellow, and pink roses. “Are those from home?”