The Unfortunates (26 page)

“There was a woman sitting in the lobby who guessed right away who we were,” Iris says, looking at George. “Tiny and round? She seemed nice.”

“Probably Dotty. Isn’t she, though.”

“Mother,” George bursts forth, “so great! You look great.”

She does not turn her attention from Iris. Not even a sidelong flicker. She seems, however, to gather some almost imperceptible light and strength to herself upon the sound of his voice. She smiles at Iris. “My word, look at this blouse you’ve worn! How is it not the first thing I saw? Isn’t it festive. You’re like a glass of sangria. Did you leave your paper umbrella in the car?”

“My what? Oh, I just got it. The top. The top and the joke, I guess. It’s new. Can we take you out to lunch? Are you hungry?”

“Of course it’s new. So many new things! Naturally it’s due to your athletics you can wear any unpredictable item and look so lovely. When I was your age, we didn’t have gyms. Or, there were a few. But they were for—boxers, taxidrivers. Men, anyway. A pity!”

“Huh, thanks, I guess. We’re just so glad you’re finally letting us visit.”

“Did George tell you—did George suggest I didn’t want you visiting?”

This is trouble. How had he not anticipated this? Iris, under the impression he’s called his mother every day. CeCe is finally looking at him, but out of the side of her head, like a bird at a button. She seems to be uncoiling, the silk of her emerald housecoat gleaming in the sun. They’re both looking at him.

“Getting away from work’s been difficult.” Against his will, his eyes remain lowered and dashing; he’s committed himself to the alternate study of the tip of his shoe and a table leg. “I’m sorry we didn’t come sooner.”

“They promoted George,” Iris says. “Did he tell you?”

“Not really a promotion. More time off. More flexibility to work from home. It’s very trendy now, Mother, to do everything remotely.”

“And he’s been keeping me updated on how you’re feeling. Is the treatment what you expected?”

“Has he,” CeCe says. “I’m glad. Did you bring your dog? Shouldn’t you go check on him?”

“3D’s with Victor. Our friend Victor? He has a key. I think you’ve met him.”

“Ah. The man who gives massages and walks the animals and prepares your lunches. The hybrid butler.”

“He doesn’t cook for us,” Iris says. “I cook. I mean, if you can call it cooking. How’s Pat? Coming along?”

“I imagine so. Haven’t talked to her lately.”

“We haven’t either, I guess. Have we, George?”

“You,” CeCe says, turning to him. “Hiding in plain view. I haven’t talked to
you
lately.”

“What?” he cries, attempting his most extreme
thunderstruck
, his mouth agape, his hands in tight fists. Soon enough he finds himself genuinely so, as sometimes a true feeling may be awakened by its false expression.

“I’m going to have a look outside, I guess.” Iris gestures toward CeCe’s French doors, the sparkling view beyond. Only now has it dawned on her that she’s been told to excuse herself.

“Yasser’s planted an abundance of late perennials. Have a look at his garden. It’s still quite impressive. Go ahead. We’ll miss you.”

“Okay,” Iris says. George will not meet her gaze.

As the door closes, George whispers, “You don’t have to be rude to her because you’re mad at me.”

He’s right. It’s only—Iris has everything and doesn’t care. Doesn’t care or doesn’t know. Hard to tell which. “You’re right.”

“I am?”

“Yes. I was unkind. I’m sorry.”

“You are?”

“I am.”

She stretches her arms out to him.

“I need some money,” he says, looking at the ceiling.

“And so, you’ve come.” She folds her hands in her lap.

“No, unrelated! Just now, on the drive up, I was thinking I should share more of my progress with you. I thought, Maybe I’m not forthcoming enough. Maybe that’s something I should apologize for. Maybe she’d—you’d—like to be a part of the exciting things that are happening in my life.”

“What an odd kind of promotion to receive, that you have more time and need more money.”

“It wouldn’t be for me! It’s for—listen.”

Nervously, he removes the huge padded headphones and the iPod from his bag. He fits the headphones heavily and loosely over her ears. Her cranium looks reduced by the headphones, both walnutlike and fragile. He’s afraid to touch her and neglects to tighten the band before stepping away. It slides forward onto her brow. By reflex, she reaches up and grasps at the air to catch the band and push it back. Now that it’s on her head and she’s helped put it there, it seems she’s agreed to listen. She feels ridiculous and will endure.

“Antinoise. These headphones are almost completely sound canceling. Because of the ear cup.”

“What?” She makes a face like sour lemon, pulling one ear cup back.

“Don’t take it personally,” he says, gathering confidence, “that I’ve never shared this with you before. It wasn’t ready. Even Iris hasn’t heard it yet.” Though not for lack of trying, he thinks. Since she missed the rehearsal, why has she not asked to come to another? Or to listen to a recording? “Anyway, my team, we’ve been working away, and it’s only this month I’ve let anyone come to rehearsal. It wasn’t time. Now it is.”

As he says the word
time
, she looks at the fluttered cover of the
Time
magazine on the table. The red letters
T-I-M-E.
George summarizes the plot of
The Burning Papers
for her. She nods. It sounds like nonsense. He is speaking all in a rush, more ragged than she remembers. He puts the iPod into her hand, shows her how to change the volume, and presses play. She listens. He paces back and forth, looking out at the lake, until abruptly exiting into the hall. He’s gone for the good part of an hour. He returns, just as abruptly, carrying a plastic cup of water. He sets this on the table in front of her. While he’s gone, for a brief spell, she turns the volume down and puts her face in her hands, but this he does not see.

When it’s done, she takes off the headphones and puts them on the table. She sits looking at them with her hands folded in front of her.

“You wrote this?”

“Yes.”

“The words? And that’s your, the story?”

What can she say? The music is that of a train hitting a merry-go-round. It sounds like the very incarnation of atrocity. The instrumental is both gastric and inorganic. The discordant principals’ duet is like the nocturnal emission of a cancerous horse tethered in its dolorous slumber to a barbed aluminum fence during an electrical storm. All she can picture as she listens is a windup toy from her childhood, a tin monkey on a unicycle with a painted red coat and bellman’s cap and cymbals that clap together, herky-jerky. The noise is not what surprises her. That the opera will surely be an embarrassment is also not entirely a surprise. What surprises her is that the story’s dream is—of all things!—evil. Lusty for the ranking of and ordering of peoples. For the supremacy of the one over the other to be not by accident of birth but by nature’s design.

She’s about to tell him what she thinks when something stops her. It is—he hangs his head, waiting. His hair is damp. His forehead shines like an ostrich egg. His brow twitches. He’s ready for her to insult him. The slump of his body, his quivering lip, his flinched emerald eye—already he wears the mark. He’s long made an effort to hide his troubles, her son. How had she convinced herself that stowing away his troubles was as good as curing them? But who wants to believe her child is sick? Who wants to admit she’s traded her child’s ease for her own? She sees how much he needs her to love his music, to love him. Someone must tell him not to stage this opera. But how desperate he is, how unsteady, what an incapable individual he’s become. Someone must believe in him. It’s his mother who must. Her poor boy. His bowed head. How is it possible he does not know what he’s made? This atonal, eugenic braying. How is it possible for the generations to evolve
backward
? The natural order should be that each generation becomes more enlightened. Her trouble with Lotta, for example—at least, in her better moments, she knows it to be a limitation. She fails, but sometimes she can admit it. She was taught wrong, for that is how they were taught. But that was long ago. By now, she can’t blame anyone but herself. She will never forget her father telling her of a punishment he heard as a young adviser to one of Theodore Roosevelt’s delegates in Haiti: slaves, a century before, rolled downhill in sugar barrels, the barrels’ interiors fitted round with spikes. Her father raised her to a better world than that. She in turn raised George in a world more generous than hers. But is it? Maybe it is not. Maybe it is as terrible as it always was. Had she taught her son anything? He’s meant to pass her, to become more than she—more valiant, kinder, to see more, to invite more of the truth of the world unto himself. To be left behind by one’s child, this is the way it should be. But here, in his libretto, is foolishness, mostly, but evil too. The bit about the black and the white eunuchs, good God. Who are these Gypsies of the future meant to be? And the women! Each scene worse than the last. Her son, reversing the order of progress—a bad seed, a rotten egg, a man of shadow-clung fantasies and hungry, scrabbling fears. She’s failed. Parents fail all the time—she’d be the first to say that most people are mediocre and most people have mediocre children. She’s not romantic about the world. It’s a common failure, and to be forgiven. But this is different. George’s opera, dragging to mind—the year after the war in Naugatuck. Her father decided she might lend her charm to a promotional film. The major manufacturers were all making them, in the style of the U.S. Army reels boosting the war effort. Georgie was considering a step into politics; the film would make good cross-promotion. She’d forgotten it until Annie Mason’s assistant found “Taking a Look at Rubber” on YouTube a few years ago. Annie wanted to post it to the history page of the foundation’s website. CeCe refused. Uncanny, to watch the folksy actor playing a Naugatuck foreman take his grandson through the plant, explaining each stage of production and rubber’s miraculous everyday applications. At the end of their tour, they step out onto Rubber Avenue.

“What do we have here?” the foreman says, squinting into the sunlight. A crowd of workers and reporters is gathered in front of the plant, actors all.

“Whatever it is,” his grandson answers, “it looks exciting. Let’s go and see.”

Here, watching, CeCe had glimpsed herself. Ten years old, sallow and bolt-eyed, on a podium in front of a banner that read
THE SOLE OF AMERICA
, beside Georgie and his pretty wife of three months, Gloria. CeCe, in a checkered dress with a white collar, her pale hair tidied off her face. She remembers the dress was blue, but she will never be sure.

“That’s Mr. Somner himself,” the foreman says. “Let’s have a listen.”

The camera shifts to Georgie. “—this industry, so vital to our noblest endeavors overseas, to the protection of the freedoms and rights of all peoples in all nations. With the fine product we now make here at home on Rubber Avenue, the next generation”—here he gestures with a droll smile to CeCe—“will invent greater than we can dream, for we Americans are as strong as we are flexible—why, just like rubber.”

She could hardly bear to watch. To recognize his speech’s banality and its lie, a YouTube banner ad for a fitness system beneath. He was promoting synthetic rubber—during the war, Japan was poised to take the pan-Asian fields that supplied the United States with 97 percent of its rubber. The Somner company, along with a dozen others, restored production at their plantations in the Amazon; back in Naugatuck, Somner Industries, as part of a consortium, was commissioned by the government to improve synthetic-rubber production so the United States might never again find itself reliant for an essential commodity on foreign, tropical climates. By 1945, synthetics were so improved that Somner Industries again deserted the Amazonian fields. Deserted too, CeCe knows, were the workers who’d been force-migrated, without their families, and deposited in the jungle to man the trees. Left behind in the dense Amazon after the plantations’ second closings, they died—from malaria and hepatitis and scorpion. Died by panther, died by thirst. The number, unofficially admitted by Brazil and officially denied by Somner Industries, seven thousand.

“Last,” her father continues, “let’s not forget it’s our young people who know a good thing when they see one. They do badger and needle mother and father for the best, am I right, Cecilia?”

“Right,” she says. This is her cue. Gloria lets go of her hand. CeCe lifts one foot and the other, showing off the rubber soles on a pair of sneakers—a thick, thumpy kind of shoe until that day she’d only seen other children wear. (The film’s great challenge was avoiding reference to the automobile. Ford would not work with Georgie, and Somner Industries had never broken into private-sector tires. CeCe’s bit had been the answer. At any mention of Ford, her father would quote
Henry the Fifth
—
How he comes o’er us with our wilder days, not measuring what use we made of them
.)

With the camera whirring and the fake reporters’ flashbulbs popping, an actor-reporter calls out, “Now, missy, how would you like to be in charge here someday?” She looks back at her father. They hadn’t gone over this part in the car.

“How about that,” her father says, smiling at the camera. Gloria smiles too. But CeCe didn’t know the answer. She didn’t know! Then she did.

“Sir,” she said, her voice high. “No thank you. I’d prefer to have a family.”

“That’ll be all, boys. We promised a visit to the ice-cream man.”

They step into the crowd, Georgie shaking hands, working his way to the foreman and his grandson, who, in a final shot, declares that one day he wants to be a rubber man too. At this moment CeCe trips and falls, clumsy in the unfamiliar shoes, shaken by the pop of the flashbulbs and the attention of the crowd, even if it is pretend. Gloria reaches down—not her mother!—and pulls CeCe up, saying, “You all right? We’ll try it again?”