Mr Toppit (31 page)

Then they were in the studio having a discussion about the rights and wrongs of building the bomb in the first place, and whether it was wrong to have doubts and if that made you subversive. It was all pretty theoretical. She talked about the power of the FBI to destroy people’s lives, called it—of course—the “Mr. Toppit of our democratic system.” Big nervous laugh from everyone. Then she took her microphone into the audience and talked to some people who had FBI files and whether they had got access to them under the Freedom of Information Act. There was one guy, sitting in a corner with his face in shadow, who had been involved in some student revolutionary stuff and had been living under an assumed name for twenty years because the FBI was still after him.

Then she went back onto the stage and sat down. The lights dimmed and she was talking straight to the camera. “Doing this show has been a journey for all of us,” she said, gesturing at the guys she had gone to Los Alamos with, “a journey into a past that many people in this country would rather forget. I want to know and I want to remember. My father, Rudolph Laurence Clow, was one of the men who worked with Oppenheimer, and I spent some of my childhood in Los Alamos.” I realized she must have been storing this up: she hadn’t mentioned it all through the show.

“My father wasn’t a top guy like Oppenheimer, he was low-level, a technician, just another guy in overalls working in the lab. But they couldn’t have done it without people like him. You know what? He had some doubts. Doubt isn’t illegal in this country. Never was. Skepticism isn’t a federal offense. I don’t know what sort of trouble he got into, some kind of security issue, but they kicked him out, took away his clearance, like they did to Oppenheimer after the war. They removed my dad’s right to work at what he did best. Last I remember, he was working in a photo lab developing people’s vacation pictures. A man who helped in ending the war. That’s not right. Can I find out what happened to him there? Can I get the FBI to show me his file? The wheels of bureaucracy grind pretty slow in Washington. What I do know is this: his life was destroyed. All I know is that he left us and I never saw him again, a man lost to time and history. One of the many, then and now. Thank you for taking this journey with me.” She stared at the camera for a moment, then bowed her head and the credits rolled.

She stopped the tape. “I wish you could have known my dad,” she said.

“What happened to him? I mean, after.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Lost to time and history,” she repeated. I had a sneaking suspicion it wasn’t entirely her own phrase.

“People can’t just vanish.”

“This is a big country.”

“Maybe you should hire a private detective,” I said.

She threw back her head and laughed. “You’ve seen too many movies.”

The buzz of the intercom made us jump. There were
phones all over the place and you could call any part of the house. You could even call the garage. It was Erica, calling from the guesthouse at the other end of the garden where she lived with Alma.

Laurie picked up the phone. “Tell her I can’t come now,” she said. “I’m with Luke. Tell her I’ll see her in the morning. She should be asleep anyway.”

I glanced surreptitiously at my watch. It was only nine o’clock, but I’d already discovered in LA that people did things at strange times.

“Have you given her the Xanax? If her back’s really painful try the Percodan … Yes, two. You coming up?” Laurie smiled. “That would be great. See if you can find BJ and Marty.” They were Erica’s cats, two big, fat, long-haired Persians, who required a lot of grooming or they might drown under all their fur.

“Erica’s going to come and do my knee,” Laurie said. “She’s like a healer. She approaches everything in a holistic way. You’ve no idea what poisons we have in our bodies, the crap doctors give you.”

Before long, Erica came in with a basket over her arm and BJ draped over her shoulders like a shawl. She was very tall and thin, her hair scraped back and held in a tight ponytail. Her face was all bone—cheekbones and jawbones and weird bones around the side of her head that moved behind her skin like ball bearings when she spoke. There was no fat on her: I had seen her play tennis and there were great cords of muscle on her legs and arms as if her body was operated by a pulley system.

As soon as Erica was in the room BJ jumped off her shoulders. “Look!” she said. “She needs her friend Laurie!” She spoke
the kind of English that was so precise she had to be foreign, with just a tiny sibilance that pushed a word like “needs” towards “neadsh.” In fact, BJ didn’t head anywhere near Laurie but scuttled under the sofa.

“Poor little baby,” Erica said. “I think she might have met a coyote in the garden. Bad monsters! Marty’s still out there, but she’s a little toughie.” The thought was rather exciting: it seemed impossibly exotic to be somewhere where there might be proper wild animals, not just dull old squirrels or dormice, lurking around, ready to attack.

“Is Alma out for the count?” Laurie asked, and Erica did a little mime, putting her head on her shoulders, closing her eyes, and letting her tongue loll out. Laurie hooted with laughter. Erica looked pleased. “Now,” she said, putting the basket on the table, “let us look at the patient. Your knee, please, madam.”

Laurie raised her leg onto a footstool in front of her chair and Erica knelt beside her. “I have that nice lavender oil you’re fond of, Laurie, or the bergamot. You choose. I think the skin absorbs the lavender better. It’s a little lighter.” She turned to me. “Now. What will Luke do during our little procedure?”

I could see the problem. Erica had rolled up Laurie’s black trouser leg, which had hit the obstacle of her thigh where the material had bunched and come to a halt. The trousers would have to come off.

“Honey, why don’t you go see what Travis is up to?” Laurie said. “He might take you out for a drive. He’s supposed to be looking after you.”

“Supposed to be looking after you” had a ring about it that I didn’t entirely like, implying not only that I needed looking after but that someone had to be assigned to do it—but
at Laurie’s there were people to do everything. The drive was sometimes so full of the cars and trucks of those who had come to do things in the house and garden that the intercoms would be buzzing all the time because someone was needed to move their vehicle so that someone else could go in or out.

Travis was a couple of years older than me. He stayed in the poolhouse, in the small dark space behind the changing room. He had helped Laurie in the studio when she did her hospital radio show back in Modesto and she had brought him down for the summer. He took care of odd jobs for her and drove her around on weekends when Stan, her other driver, didn’t work.

Jesus and Ronnie came every day to sort out the swimming pool. They didn’t speak much English. Lupe and her daughter, Consuela, were the housekeepers. They did the cleaning and cooking. They didn’t speak much English either. Ruthie and Bob were a husband-and-wife gardening team, who arrived every morning to do the lawns, the plants, and the watering, and had arguments with Jesus and Ronnie because the grass round the pool always had brown patches where they spilled chemicals.

There was Angie, who Erica described dismissively as “the cat person.” She came over to groom BJ and Marty. She was English, doing cat stuff and trying to be an actress. I used to flee whenever she came because she was such a big fan of the books. The first time I’d met her, she’d got me to autograph a set of paperbacks, then forced Lupe to take some photos of me and her with BJ and Marty on our laps.

Kevin was Laurie’s wardrobe supervisor. Laurie always seemed to dress in black so I didn’t know why she needed anyone to help her, but I suppose if you were on television in
America it was the equivalent to being in the Royal Family. You couldn’t wear the same thing twice, even though it looked like the same thing. People who watched the show regularly could probably tell.

Then there were the program people. On Fridays, about fifteen of them turned up at the house for an all-day meeting—that was when the driveway got really chaotic—to plan forthcoming shows. It was obviously really popular: on Sunset Boulevard, I saw a giant poster with Laurie’s face, heavily retouched, staring down. She was now so well known that she didn’t even need a name: the caption simply said,
“She’s the One!”

Everyone had their job, and they didn’t intrude much in the life of the house. The exception was Rick Whitcomb, who was Laurie’s Manager. He intruded all the time, along with his wife, Jerrilee, and their daughter, Merry. The first time I met them was at supper—what Laurie called her “Friday Family Night,” even though none of us were her family. Travis and I had got back from the beach, and found Rick in the kitchen telling Consuela not to put so much mayonnaise in the chicken salad. Then as the pool boys were leaving, Rick shouted angrily out of the window, “Too much chlorine in the pool today, Jesus! I’m smelling like a pharmacy.” I supposed that being her Manager meant that he felt he had to manage everything.

When we went to the table He put himself at the head and opened the wine while Jerrilee liaised with Consuela and Lupe over serving the food. I’d never been in a house where grace was said before a meal—we certainly never did it at home. I was already sitting down before I heard Rick give a little cough and realized they were all still on their feet.

“Thank you, Luke. Erica, perhaps you would like to say grace,” he said. They looked very solemn.

Erica cleared her throat and put her hands together. “Thank you for the bright sun we received today and the warm rain we received last night. Thank you for the opportunity to be together under your watchful care and for bringing the gift of Luke to us. Creator, Earth Mother, we thank you for our lives and this beautiful day.” Everyone turned towards me and clapped. Laurie leaned over and kissed my cheek.

Travis said dreamily, “Did it rain last night?”

“It’s a prayer, Travis, not a weather report,” Laurie said.

“That was very pretty, Erica,” Jerrilee said with a sickly smile. “Some kind of Dutch thing? Lutheran?”

“It’s Hopi Indian,” Erica said curtly.

“Indian?” Rick said with a gruff laugh. “Dutch-woman-talk-with-forked-tongue. I’m not familiar with ‘Earth Mother’ as a Deity.”

Jerrilee gave a little tinkle of laughter to indicate what a charming curmudgeon he was. “Oh,
Ricky!”

“The Hopi Indians have a very rich culture,” Erica said coldly. I could see there was no love lost between her and Rick and Jerrilee.

Although Rick was the one with the job, Jerrilee came with him like a free toy in a cereal box. She wanted something to do as well. Maybe to be Laurie’s stylist: “Little too much blusher on the show yesterday. I’m not sure they’re getting your eyes right either. More definition, I’d say. Glad to come in and talk to your makeup girls if you want.” Or maybe her clothes consultant: “Your friend Kevin! Never understood why the gay boys think they know so much about our clothes. I saw some great stuff for fall at Barney’s. I’m sure they’ll let me bring it
over if I say it’s for you.” Behind Laurie’s back she was less unctuously polite. One night in the kitchen I heard her whisper to Rick, “For Christ’s sake, talk to the producer about her clothes! She looked like a truck driver in drag on the show the other day.”

It took me a while to understand Rick’s relationship with Laurie. One night she explained that when she left the TV station in San Francisco to come to LA, Rick had negotiated her contract and become her manager. I thought only pop stars had managers, and Laurie laughed when I asked her why she needed one. “Even managers have managers in this town. It goes with the territory. Martha must have a raft of agents and money guys and lawyers now, doesn’t she?” Then she grimaced. “I hope they’re smarter than Rick.”

“Then why do you have him?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I’ve known him since I was a kid, I feel kind of loyal to him. He let me read
Hayseed
on KCIF, got me started.” She gave an uncharacteristically girlish laugh. “Anyway, I didn’t have my dad for long—it’s nice to have a man around the house,” and then, squeezing my arm, she added, “Apart from you.”

Laurie’s view of Rick’s skills was not shared by him. He was always boasting about the success of the management company he had set up since moving to LA with Laurie. In fact, she told me, until a year ago she had been his only client, and it was her show that had opened the doors for him. Now he was trying to take on new clients including, she laughed, a ventriloquist he was grooming for stardom. He was certainly not short of opinions about the entertainment business. We listened to them endlessly at Friday Night suppers.

There was a lot of stuff about the show, of course. It seemed
to bear endless analysis from him—the audience share, how many stations it was syndicated to, ideas for the future. Rick would hold forth about his career plans for Laurie. “You shouldn’t dismiss endorsements. What you got to realize is that you’re a brand. Now, that’s a good thing, don’t get me wrong, but a brand’s got to
move
. It’s a living thing, it’s an animal, it’s like a shark. Keep moving, dodge the bullets. That’s line one, page one.”

“I don’t think a shark is an animal, Rick,” Travis said. “Isn’t it, like, a mammal?” but Rick ignored him and turned his career advice onto me.

“Listen, I know those books have sold millions of copies. I mean, you’re in the record books, son. You’re a phenomenon. But what next? That’s one thing I’ve learned—there’s always got to be a next. Your brand needs some savvy management. You should put me in touch with your mother. She sounds like a smart lady. You know
Gone With the Wind?
The estate of Margaret Mitchell is going to commission a sequel. Maybe you should do that with your books. You got a load of people wondering what happens when Mr. Toppit comes out of that forest. More when the TV show airs. That’s a lot of people with money to spend. Don’t turn your back on them.”

Luckily, there was someone round the table who felt they could rise to the task of extending the
Hayseed
brand, improving it, even. Merry clapped her hands like a child given the present she had waited for all her life. “Oh, I could do that! I know so much about the books.”