Dallas,” “Lorenzo Jones,” “Mary Noble Backstage Wife.” Must be a geezer next door, over ninety, or were these songs meant for me. He walks with me and He talks with me, the carillon chimed, way off key.
Mona slept like she used to once, as if in a sodden sleep of depression. She used to total sixteen hours, waking up to watch Turner Classics, play solitaire, do crossword puzzles. I would come home to find her waiting up for me, with a list of words she was stuck on. Animal waste, urea, golden brass, ormolu. Oh the blessing of torpor, easy ease as I did my tasks, drove a taxi, worked in a housepainters crew, did whatever it took to keep her happy.
All this before the telephone call from her shadowy lover, Roebuck.
The chiming stopped, the radio stopped, the carpenter planing coffin boards stopped, in sequence, as if on cue. I pictured Roebuck’s oblong noggin, his bulging, baleful left eye. A black patch masked his right eye. I had inquired concerning the telephone call—your lover, who might he be? She had touched up a photo of Tom Cruise, inked in an eye patch, blackened in teeth. “This isn’t the Roebuck I know. He’s the Roebuck you think you know.”
She raised her head up to the headboard. Scrutinized me out of a sunny haze, knowing instantly where my mind was, on the Roebuck she, not I, had known. She’d claimed Roebuck was a lobbyist for Harlan County Strip mines. Promoting strip mining in D.C., driving a tan SUV. She had met Roebuck in a Covington, Kentucky, strip club in her last little manic excursion across the Ohio River—where she had been—mistake—a cooperative cocktail waitress. She had run off with Roebuck in his SUV, barreled around D.C. with him for a glorious month while I suffered an agony of worry back home. Dumped, she had come back home. Come back to me on a Greyhound bus.
Roebuck had sent her a postcard, last week, the Washington Monument. He had printed in caps “I need you. Let bygones be bygones,” and in lower case “Meet me at the Harrington Hotel. A fleabag on Tenth Street.” He’d telephoned her at home. I’d picked up the receiver. Roebuck’s baritone had bombarded my ear like amplified Ezio Pinza. Can you connect me with Mona? Connect? A singing telephone call. Unwillingly I had connected him to her. Before she picked up the receiver she had taken a drag from my cigarette. She had stubbed it out, as she was doing now.
“We are going to march on the White House. You were one of us but you finked out.”
Said Mona. The loonies, the kooks, the feebs, the nuts and bolts of the nation. Fink out, a Roebuck locution. My Roebuck’s, not hers. For only I used words like fink out. Only I had thought of marching on the White House once, so far back in time it seemed primeval.
Mona squinted. She clenched her fists and rolled her eyeballs. She was receiving messages. My gut knotted as I waited for her to get through yet another delusion. Her demons were floating across the room as she motioned them out the window. “Out! No, don’t move! Sit!” Sally had to keep her in Richmond. Sally’s husband had to pay for the therapy. Alex, a textile engineer.
This D.C. business was a ruse. No march. No Roebuck.
“We don’t need you anymore. We’re strong. We have each other.” From Mona, in a monotone.
I was able to get out of the chair. “I’m going to telephone Roebuck personally.”
Extemporize, invent! Get her mind into phase with mine. A bar of Dial and a can of Rise would serve for receiver and mouthpiece. For these I went to the bathroom, pried the Dial off a squash colored stain, grabbed the Rise from the medicine cabinet—our Dial, our Rise. Squirting Rise into my left ear, I put in that call to D.C. Front desk, please. Long distance!
“We can’t make it tonight. The goddamned brakes went out last night. We’re stuck here, stranded, up shit creek without a paddle.”
I lowered the bar of Dial. Felt the seashell pulse in my tympanum, the Rise glob insanely seething. Heard, or thought I heard, a whisper, insidious. Give Mona up. Put her out of your life. Or was that Roebuck whispering?
I laid the Dial and the Rise on the bed table. Watched her pick them up, her moving lips.
“Roebuck,” said her lips. She clenched her fists, she glared at me. “Please don’t try to telephone him. You know he won’t listen to you.”
“I will listen,” I protested passionately, knowing she wouldn’t listen, heed, do anything to help me help her. I had to watch her go to the bathroom, I had to sit on the bed while she brushed her teeth. This she did with concentration. Her straggly hair showing rust streaks which she seemed to be trying to lather out. Soapsuds laced her nipples and aureoles, seen through the bathroom mirror. The pipes groaned as she rinsed.
We had a late breakfast in the coffee shop. It adjoined the bar and beauty parlor, these facing away from the lobby, fronting a side street of plum-colored brick. There was a familiar marble-topped counter, a tarnished nickel coffee urn, booths, a tessellated floor, an ornate cash register from times gone by, a glassed-in cigar and candy counter, another with slices of various pies, apple, lemon meringue, pumpkin.
Mona was slumped on her side of the booth. Her eyes were dulled. She was wearing her purple T-shirt, appliqued with a yellow cello. Brown crystals choked up the salt cellar. The plum-colored bricks outside were rippling with maple-leaf shadows.
Suddenly Mona spun something dire for me out. “This town is a good place for you. Your family is here. Your friends. Me, I’ll be moving on. On and on,” she crooned.
I made myself tune Mona out. The plum-colored brick, the soft maples, the darker green of a tree lawn on the other side of this side street, an embankment, steps, a front porch, green shingles, blazing white imbricated boards. Black Packard, Dad’s, in the driveway. Other members of my family in other booths, for the coffee shop was familiar, the cashier had a bow tie, red polka dot, a clip-on, like Dad had on. He had nicotine-stained teeth like Dad.
I thought of E. A. behind the prescription counter of the vanished West Side Drug Store. A laxative is it you need now. Or a ladies aid. Or salted nuts. Is it Sal Hepatica you need.
“It fits,” I exclaimed, “it figures.”
Mona’s rosy lips agreed. “Right, it figures. Your dad is in a back booth. The old fart who balled his fountain girls.”
“When he had the chance,” I said buoyantly, for we were having a conversation.
I ordered black coffee. The coffee arrived in pea-green mugs that I had once beheld brimming in Ovaltine. “Okay, so my Dad did my Mom dirt.”
Mona patted the yellow cello. The conversation was over. “I want soft-boiled eggs,” said Mona when the waitress showed for the second time. Her iron-gray hair and beaming face loomed like a No Smoking sign. I stared at—who else—Mom. Right here! Bless her! Love her! It was Mom who’d kept my Ovaltine hot. E. A’s Vera C. E. A.’s blood pressure she’d monitored—made him lay off strudel and shortcake. Now she waited to take my order.
“You make his sunny-side up. And lotsa hash browns. Lotsa toast.” And then, “Looky there in the back booth.” Mona smacked her purple T-shirt, cello reeling, wambling, straightening up. “It’s your cousin. Your nutty uncle and aunt.”
A chubby lad munching a grilled cheese, slurping a cherry Coke through a straw. Sweet pickle slice, sweet disposition, sitting next to Uncle Dell. Uncle Dell ran a ladies’ shoe store. Aunt Flo juggled Indian clubs back in vaudeville days at B. F. Keith’s. Uncle Dell chewed on a dead cigar, incessantly working crossword puzzles. Urea again. Ormolu. Cousin Robert made model airplanes. His fingers were gummed with airplane glue. Hunks of balsa wood in the bathtub. It was a race with hungry white corpuscles that Cousin Robert had run and lost. Yet here he was slurping a cherry Coke, munching grilled cheese. Dell and Flo wolfed down pasta. They were good people living careful lives. They ignored my funk, Mona’s mania as they might cripples. Just passing through, I grinned at them. Try not to let on they are sickos, Morse-coded their chinking forks.
Mona blurted with conviction. “Only creeps and weirdos, sickos will be members of Roebuck’s family. Every one of us is an only child.”
Mistake!