I'll Be There (19 page)

“Of course you can, but why would you want to?” Cee Cee asked. “While you’re seeing your dad, I could visit my aunt.” Bertie’s Aunt Neetie. Cee Cee’s first impulse was to say, “No way, Jos,” and close the issue because she couldn’t bear the thought of Nina spending even one minute with the Miami Bitch, which was how she thought of Neetie. Aside from Michael Barron, Neetie was Nina’s only living blood relative, and she was always hovering out

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there with something shitty to say about Cee Cee in her letters or phone calls to Nina, or something sn,.‘de to say about everyone in show business in general as if she knew them all personally, and she was an expert at constantly making the point to Nina that Bertie, if she was alive, would have done everything pertaining to Nina so much better than Cee Ccc did. So that when Nina openly and candidly read the poison missives out loud to Cee Cee, it was all Cee Cee could do not to call the old witch in Florida and tell her to fuck off, but she didn’t. Instead she took a deep breath and tried to explain away the things Neetie had written, and though there was no doubt in her mind that Nina’s spending a few days with Neetie would cost a lot of deep breaths and a lot of explaining, she still answered, “Sure, honey. I’ll help you pack.”

Things had been a little rough with her and Nina recently, and late at night when Nina was long asleep, Cee Cee turned to the now dog eared child-raising books looking for answers. This time to read about what they called pre-adolescence. A time when confusion reigned because at eleven they were no longer children and not quite adolescents.

This stage usually hits parents with a wallop. Your stable, reasonable and well-behaved child seems suddenly to have taken an overdose of obnoxious pills.

Nina seemed to fade in and out of surliness. She was a classic case of being neither here nor there, still sleeping with teddy bears but blushing and flirting when one of the crew members on Cee Cee’s show kidded with her. And when Cee Cee saw that, she wished like hell there had been a healthy relationship Nina could have witnessed somewhere along the line, a man she could have had some time with, since she had lived her whole life without a father. A man.

Men. Now there was a joke. Each time a new one came into Cee Cee’s life, she was amazed to see that no matter how bad the departure of the last one had been, the kid was still ready and willing to pin her hopes on the new one. Once Cee Cee read a quote somewhere that said a woman without a man couldn’t meet a man of any age without thinking, even for a second, maybe this is the man. And she could see by the way Nina closely observed each man who showed any interest in Cee Cee, the way she asked him telling questions about himself,

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that she too was trying to test the potential each one had to be the man in their household.

But none had worked out. Some of the men who found their way to their door were too interested in Cee Cee’s stardom, wanted to use her power for their own purposes or to be able to say they were involved with a star. Others were intimidated by her lifestyle, and she had to admit it wasn’t exactly easy. After all, there was no dating her in a conventional way. Everywhere she went she was swamped with autograph seekers, besieged by photographers, and stared at by everyone else. So the men who stepped forward, as she described it, “bearing bouquets of flowers and cocks that didn’t fall to half-mast as they approached my famous and exquisite bod,” were rare and unusual.

And even when they did, eventually some interior buzzer of hers buzzed, like the rasping end-bell on a game show telling the contestant the answer was wrong, and Cee Cee would know it was over with this one too, so she would try to explain nicely, then turn down his requests to come over, and eventually stop taking his calls at all, and soon another would be phased out.

“No more Clan?” Nina would ask (or Chad or Mark or Roger).

“Not for me,” Cee Cee would answer, knowing she would have to face the disappointment in Nina’s eyes again.

Perhaps there is an in-law or a relative, a grandfather or an uncle who can play an active male role with your children. In rare cases a male friend can do this. This person can be invited over to dinner or picnics. He can take the children to movies, take them fishing or camping, take them to sports events, go swimming or sailing with them.

Yeah, sure. There was no one in their lives to fit that bill, except for Hal, but he lived and worked in New Yock, and these days only came in on occasional visits. Cee Cee’s father, who had never been a force in her life, was another story. As soon as she’d started making money she had helped him to move out of an old folks home in New York to an apartment in Miami Beach. Bought him stock, MCA, Warners, enough to give him a reason to get up in the morning, to call his broker and check on his money.

Over the years she had extended vague invitations to him to come to Los Angeles to visit, never sure what she would do with him if he said yes and showed up, but Nathan Bloom had always declined.

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Now he was ailing and not long for this world, and the illness had dictated that he move back into a convalescent home, the one toward which her taxi now moved through the bright, sunny Miami Beach day.

“Why don’t I take this cab to Neetie’s and you take that one to see your dad? You don’t need to come with me to see Neetie,” Nina had said to her at the Miami airport.

“You mean because she loathes and despises me and that makes you uncomfortable?”

“Yes,” Nina answered.

“You got it.” Cee Cee felt remiss agreeing to take separate taxis, but she couldn’t bring herself to have to see Neetie and her pinched, judgmental face waiting for Nina’s cab to drive up outside her building, so she agreed to let Nina get there alone. At the cabstand she gave her enough money to last for several days, exchanged phone numbers with her, and hugged her goodbye, regretting her decision the second the cab pulled away, and she tried hard to fight back the fear that Nina would see Neetie after so many years and love her so much she would beg her aunt and uncle to keep her in Miami Beach.

Even at its worst the L.A. heat didn’t have the kind of dense humidity Miami Beach did. By the time Cee Cee had paid her cabdriver and carried her overnight bag to the door of the Beth Shalom Convalescent Home, she was soaked with sweat, and her black silk sweater stuck to her in several wet places. As she pushed the glass doors to the lobby open, she tried to steel herself for what it would be like seeing Nathan after so long. Nathan, who had been a silent figure behind a newspaper for most of her childhood. Cowering from that cow Leona. “Let the kid sleep late, for chrissake, Leona,” he would offer now and then on a Saturday morning as Leona hollered for a tired Cee Cee to “Getyertapshuzon.” And when he did, Leona would turn on him and yell, “And you mindyerowngoddamnbizness,” and he always did. Occasionally there would be a burst of humor from him, a moment when he could ease the overbearing Leona into an uncharacteristic grin or a sudden girlish giggle. Like when the two of them sang together.

“I’m the sheik of Araby,” Leona would sing, and Nathan with a sexy little twinkle in his eye would follow every line with the words, “Without a pair of pants.”

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“And your love belongs to me.”

“Withot’t a pair of pants.”

“At night when you’re asleep.” “Without a pair of pants.” “Into your tent I’ll creep.” “Without a pair of pants.”

“This is where you got your talent, Cecilia,” Nathan would tell her pointing to himself.

“Oh yeah?” Leona would say. “I guarantee ya, Eddie Cantor ain’t losing any sleep over you, Bloom.” Sometimes by the end of the song he would be wearing a kitchen towel around his little bald head as his costume for the sheik of Araby. Remembering him that way now as she walked up to the desk at the convalescent home made Cee Cee regret all the years she had stayed away from him, and wish she could have them back.

When she asked the nurse at the front desk where 4C was, she answered, “Ahhh, you’re Nate’s daughter. He’s a prince of a man,” then gave her directions to her father’s room. As she moved down the carpeted hall, Cee Cee looked at the old people who sat slumped and staring in wheelchairs posted outside the doors to their rooms, probably because they didn’t want to stay inside the rooms all day but only had the physical wherewithal to get as far as the door jamb.

Now and then the eyes of one of them would meet hers and she would see a glimmer that probably meant, “Look! A young person!” But that was all the contact most of them seemed able to make. On the cardboard plaque outside of room 4C there was a sign which indicated that inside the room there were two occupants. MARTY ELMAN

AND NATHAN BLOOM it said, and there was a photograph of each

man’s face next to his name. Cee Cec looked long at the picture of her father. It was an old one from long ago, in fact it was half of one in which the other half had been her mother standing next to him. Cee Cee knew because somewhere in a box of pictures at home she had the original, and now she wondered if Nathan had used that particular picture because since then no one else had taken another one of him. That thought made her so sad she reached up and put her fingers on the picture.

“They all have them now,” someone said, and Cee Cee turned to see a small round blond nurse holding a pile of what looked like

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sheets. “Originally we started putting pictures up so our Alzheimer’s patients could find their way back to their rooms. Then everybody wanted them.”

Cee Cee nodded a numb nod in reply.

“I’m your father’s nurse, Cee Cee. I would know you even if I never saw you in the movies or on TV, which I did, because he has a million pictures of you in his drawer.”

“He does?” Cee Cee wasn’t sure why that surprised her. “He’s asleep now, I just checked him,” the nurse told her, shaking her head sadly. “Not good. On the first floor alone we lost three this week. They wear out. The human body unfortunately was only designed to last sixty-some years. You take perfect care, you last more. Not such good care, you last less. Your father, he’s in his

eighties, so it’s his time.”

“I’ll go see him.”

“Don’t mind the roommate, Elman. He’s a pain in the tochas. You

know what a tochas is?”

Cee Cee nodded.

“Anyways, how’s that little girl of yours?”

“She’s fine,” Cee Cee said. “Thanks for asking.”

The room was divided by a panel of curtains, and Cee Cee wondered why, with all the money she was paying, Nathan only had a semiprivate room instead of a private one. She made a mental note to ask somebody in charge after she spent some time with her father, whose head was thrown back and his mouth was open in a snore, as he twitched in the throes of a dream.

Overlaid on the disinfectant odor in the room, she breathed in a familiar Nathan scent from her childhood she recognized as Old Spice cologne, and the smell of it brought back the old apartment of her childhood, and the memory of Nathan standing with only a towel wrapped around his waist, his hairless pink chest and fat little arms, leaning over a sink of hot water trying to shave, while Leona hollered at him so much it was a miracle he didn’t cut his face to ribbons.

“Hiya, Sheik,” Cee Cee said softly now to the soundly sleeping old man. “Long time, no see.”

Aunt Neetie looked as if there might be tears in her eyes when she walked out of the lobby of her building to greet Nina’s taxi. She was

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a slim woman with hair dyed too black, and skin that was a kind of muddy brown and very wrinkled from the sun.

“Well, aren’tyou a big girl!” she said. Nina thought by the way she walked toward the taxi with her hand in her pocket that maybe she was about to pull out money and pay the cabdriver, but when she made no move to, Nina opened her pink plastic “ttello Kitty” wallet, took out some of the money Cee Cee had given her, and remembered to add a tip before she handed it to the driver.

As the cab pulled away Neetic explained away her watery

“I’m allergic to hibiscus,” she said. “And it’s all around now.” Nina’s suitcase sat on the front step of the building where the cabdriver had dropped it. “Can you manage that bag all by yourself or shall I get Uncle Herb to come down? The Cuban doorman is off today. He says one of his kids is in the hospital. The little spic has so damn many kids there’s always an excuse,” she said, and then laughed a forced throaty laugh.

Nina picked up the heavy suitcase and dragged it toward the front door of the building.

“You’re the picture of your mother,” Neetie said, opening one of the glass doors into the foyer of the building to let her in and holding it open. The airconditioning brought goose bumps to Nina’s little arms.

“Thank you,” Nina said, pulling the suitcase over the threshold and across the marble-floored lobby toward the elevator. The building smelled of onions cooking and the odor made Nina, who hadn’t eaten anything on the flight from Los Angeles, feel hungry and queasy at the same time. The elevator was so small, Neetie and Nina and the suitcase just fit inside. There was a notice taped to the elevator wall, listing a schedule of events which Nina read to herself as she and Neetie took the ride up.

MONDAY NIGHT - SEVEN P.M. BINGO (REC ROOM SEVEN O’ CL0CK) REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT - BOOK DISCUSSION - THIS MONTH AIRPORT.

The elevator doors opened and Nina pushed her body against the suitcase and shoved it into the hall. “It’s the third door on the right,” Neetie said, walking ahead of her with a kind of stoop-shouldered

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walk. “Your Uncle Herb is watching television as usual. Herbieee,” she yelled out, opening the door to her apartment, “Roberta’s daughter is here.”