Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (14 page)

I found this most unjust, since she was causing all the trouble and
wouldn’t even hear him out. Instead, when Father then brought his fork down with another crash and continued straight on just like Admiral Farragut, as he invariably did, she’d flee to her upstairs drawing room in tears, babbling about headaches, exhaustion, and letters to write. Minutes later, nervously fingering her apron, Lii Gagni, the newest of our maids—a horrid young creature, from Denver by way of Sheboygan, on whom Mother had taken pity; her eyes poking out of her face like toes from a sprung shoe, she was as out of place under a white cap as was Mr. Twain’s hero in that odd chapter where, to gather information, Huck dresses up in calico and sunbonnet—would come in to ask if it would be all right to take a tray up to the missus.

Eventually, the scandal that listening to Father had taught me to fear most occurred, and Mother was arrested with some other women after chaining herself to the White House gates one foggy dawn. Nor was this any mere formality, as Father learned to his considerable indignation when, already in a rage at having to set aside his business for the day, he bustled down to Washington himself. Mother had already been sent to the notorious Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where she and several dozen other suffragettes were incarcerated alongside women of the street and diseased Negresses. On his return, Father declared that, if nothing else, this ordeal was sure to make Mother finally see the light, and took me to Delmonico’s for pastry.

Instead, within a few days, we heard with horror that she and the others had made things even worse by going on what they called a hunger strike for the right to be treated as “political prisoners,” which made no sense to me whatsoever. As Father said, they could have called themselves
petunia
prisoners, and the noun rather than the adjective would still determine their situation. Mother spent
thirteen days
being led out of her cell and force-fed with some sort of horrible device pushed up her nose or down her throat by cursing prison guards, who after all were only concerned about her health.

When she was finally released and came back to New York, she took me to her drawing room, murmuring in a voice I’d come to dread that all she asked of me was to always remember this sight. I could have told her on the spot that doing so wouldn’t be any problem, since I had
nightmares for a week. It was the dingy prison shift she’d worn in Occoquan, which was of a dreadfully inelegant cut, had probably been touched by one or more of the diseased Negresses, and was also covered with perfectly repulsive bloodstains and food stains from when they had had to force-feed her. Father told Lii Gagni to burn it.

Particularly as she hadn’t had a robust constitution to begin with, Mother’s health never really recovered from her time in jail, and since the reason was so embarrassing, her friends and family seldom spoke of it. In fact, on Election Day in 1920, she was so ill that she couldn’t even go out to the polling place and
vote,
which did strike both Father and me as some sort of poetic justice after all her carrying on.

Not long after that, Father made a killing on an investment in some oil wells in Oklahoma, and went out to Los Angeles to drill for more. It must have been a month or two before I understood he wasn’t coming back, although Mother may have known this earlier than I. Once she had what she wanted outside the house and he had what he wanted in it, it was as if he had decided they no longer had a topic; without the distraction of disgust to beguile him, he simply lost interest in her. And in me too, now that I had stopped being the female in the family who wasn’t Mother and was just someone else who wanted more of his time, as if I had been stupid Lil Gagni coming to bother him with stammered questions about the pantry keys.

In tearful letters, I begged to at least be allowed to visit him in California, if not come live in the marvelous Moorish-looking house that he’d had built for himself up in some hills there, of which he sent me a framed photograph for my birthday. But his replies to me were terse, and as I was no longer in reach of a tie whose knot I could playfully unravel with tongue pressed between my teeth, a gold watch chain that I could gigglingly tug out of its fob pocket, or a bald head I could kiss by surprising it in an armchair from behind, I had no means of changing his attitude. At twenty years old, I found myself trapped in a vast, gloomy brownstone from which the smell of cigar smoke had faded, with no company but a melancholy semi-invalid in an upstairs drawing room and some increasingly impertinent servants.

Luckily, besides paying for the help and all our other necessities, Father
allowed us to charge whatever we liked to him, and also sent us a huge monthly allowance. If nothing else, that did give me a reason to be grateful that the Nineteenth Amendment had passed, since if it hadn’t and her health had been better I was sure Mother would have promptly poured every extra cent we got from Father right down her favorite rat-hole. As it was, nowadays she hardly cared about the necessities, often sending trays of food back down the stairs untouched. So I had all the say in how we spent our loot, and the Hispano-Suiza barely made a dent in it. Although soon enough there was more than one dent in the Hispano-Suiza, after one of my new girl chums, shrilly exclaiming, “I don’t care about the
vote,
what I want is the
wheel,”
had playfully wrestled the latter item out of our chauffeur’s hands, Cheng not having access to the former in any case, on a wild ride back from West Egg one night.

It was sometime in that same spring of ‘21 that, tiptoeing at two
A.M.
past Mother’s drawing room in my stocking feet, my shoes held in my hand, I heard her voice call faintly, “My dear, is that you?” My already practiced custom was to just keep going until either she stopped calling or I stopped hearing her, but as luck and a beaker of bathtub gin would have it, I lost my balance just then and slipped against the door, which had swung open before I could quite sort out which of my hands was free, though the answer proved to be neither, and stop it.

Under a brocaded lamp, Mother was at her escritoire in one of those starched white high-necked blouses that, along with her old-fashioned, high-piled chignon, made her look rather amusingly like a superannuated Gibson girl in a wheelchair. “It’s so late, I was concerned for you,” she started to say, to which I might have answered that it was much
too
late for that. But then she got a good look at me, and stopped saying anything.

Even I had to admit to a silent doubt that I was looking my best. Although my hair was bobbed too short by now to ever really look disarranged, except for Grace Scape’s chewing-gum in my bangs, my white crepe gown with the scalloped hemline was practically off one shoulder, and one of my two Cuban-heeled pumps (I felt almost positive there had been two in all, back when I and they had first met) had just thudded to the floor from my hand. I also probably still had a big streak of soot on
my face, left over from when drunken Dicky Foulard had started playing Jack the Ripper with the coal scuttle. One of our favorite games at parties was to pretend we were all murderers and then, surveying the room’s available implements, announce what we would use to do each other in. The best weapon—which was always the unlikeliest, of course—won the match.

Not without a tingle of triumph, my other hand now informed me that it held Dicky’s silver flask, from which, having dropped the other pump to the floor at some point in the recent present, I’d now concluded I could use a snort. As Mother went on staring, hands to her wheelchair’s armrests, I felt the need for a ciggie to follow up the gin, and fished one from the beaded bag I’d found hanging from my not yet gown-free shoulder. “
What
?” I finally demanded, lighting it and blowing out smoke, some of which seemed to get stuck in the chewing-gum in my bangs.

That was when I heard a sound no one had in years, which was the tinkling little hiccup noises that Mother made when she laughed. It seemed to catch her by surprise as well, as if her throat was so long out of the habit that it had gotten giggling all mixed up with vomiting. Softly, she laughed in her wheelchair, and looked at me standing there, and blinked back lustrous tiny tears from her dark eyes.

“For this,” she said. I wondered if her mind had finally gone off to join her health, wherever it was—still chained to the White House gates, I supposed. “For this,” she said again. With an amused smile, she glanced down at the half-finished letter on the escritoire. “Dear Alice,” she said, “wonderful news! It was for this.”

That was when I finally understood what she was saying. “Oh,
go
on,” I said scornfully, reaching down to collect my pumps and almost going head first into the escritoire. Once I straightened up, feeling that I had never understood the intricacy of that procedure in as much detail as I should and blowing disquietingly gum-weighted bangs out of my eyes, I thought that I had better start over. “Go on,” I said, even more scornfully. “You and your silly suffragettes didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Oh, but we did, my dear,” Mother said. “We didn’t know it, and
Alice Paul and Lucy Burns and I probably all hoped for better—or let’s be kind, and just say different. But we did,” and she laughed quietly again. “You—
you
—are our monument, not the one they still won’t have put up at Occoquan eighty years from now, for all that my friends and I know it was our Valley Forge; where we suffered, where we won. The fact that you don’t think we had anything to do with it is what proves that we did.”

“Go-” But I’d already said “Go on” twice; I’d counted. “Go to
hell”
I told her, which was a first and so felt marvelously emancipating. Swinging the chewing-gum around in front of me like a carrot on a stick, I hauled flask, pumps, beaded bag, stockinged feet, and ciggie back into the hallway. But I hadn’t been able to close the door with either hand or foot, which is why I heard Mother call gently after me, “I’m there, dear. But we did.”

Ohh—let the old loony think anything she likes, I thought once I was back in my room, had found the electric light-switch, and could start strewing things about. She might depart the upstairs drawing room for the—attic, soon, at the fast clip she was fading. But she’d just better never
bother
me about it again, I thought, at the same time I discovered that I had made a sudden decision to fall into bed with one stocking on, while three or four of my Cuban-heeled pumps scuttled about the floor in the dark like friendly crabs.

She never did. Soon afterward, she began sending grotesque Lil Gagni, who had dusting and all sorts of better things to do, clumping off to the public library to obtain bound volumes of old newspapers from 1917 and 1918, which Mother kept as the fines mounted, writing gracious notes of apology instead of returning them. Her correspondence also grew more voluminous, and the letters that came in reply from Alice Paul and all those dreadful women she was so proud of having known in prison were sometimes so bulky that they would stay wedged in the mail slot of our front door, like the tongue of some atrocious dog, instead of dropping through to the carpet. Even if the light from her brocaded lamp still showed beneath the drawing room’s door, I no longer had to worry about making noise when I went past it at ungodly hours, for I knew I wouldn’t hear her voice; only, if I listened closely, the
faint sound of Mother’s pen going scratch-scratch, like a mouse’s claws, across vellum.

Still, I felt it was my daughterly duty to look in on her once or twice a day. When I presented myself, she’d ask about my plans and friends, carefully keeping her voice and face clear of everything but a maddening gentleness so as to indicate in advance that no aspersions, or indeed opinion of any sort, would be forthcoming. Nonetheless, I was always relieved when my visit found her dozing in her wheelchair, her face cast up and blind in sleep and her mouth open like a sore. “It’s nice to see you, Mother,” I would murmur, “you’re looking well. I’ll just be going now.”

Otherwise, I went on enjoying my new life. But not until Grace Scape, now Grace Foulard, made a slighting reference at a garden party to “your ratty old Hispano-Suiza” did I realize that it had become my old one. After finding a pretext to discharge Cheng, whose imperturbable face I now saw had always masked a critical attitude, I bought a Duesenberg, having startled Cheng into an actual widening of the eyes by telling him to take the Hispano-Suiza with him. Later, that led to his arrest, and all sorts of nonsense with beefy police detectives from Connecticut; I believe he was finally deported.

As his English was somewhat better and his racial stock less exotic, I was sure that Bruno, who had come with the Duesenberg, would be far more likely to talk himself out of that kind of trouble. All the same, as I came down for breakfast one afternoon, I did overhear him telling Lil Gagni in the kitchen dat onda day da Fraulein vired him he vud chust as sun valk.

Da Fraulein, as it happened, found it faintly disorienting to hear herself called that, as I had just turned twenty-six. Fortunately, we girls of the golden Twenties were under a good deal less pressure than the previous generation to get married immediately to whatever suitable man came knocking. I put this down to the fact that we were so much better at having fun than our dreary mothers had been, and also that now there was so much more fun to be had.

Not that there weren’t risks involved, and penalties to pay. After one frankly rather sordid episode on a balcony of the Biltmore Hotel, of which I remembered very little except the spiky leaves of an inconveniently
placed potted plant pricking the undersides of the bare thighs under my hoisted skirt, I had to ask Grace—who didn’t know it had been Dicky—for help in finding a doctor, since I suspicioned I knew better than her hard-drinking husband why the Foulards had stayed childless. She took me to a dreadful man above a dreadful dive in dreadful Jersey City, and held my hand as he did horrid scraping and then plopping things to a distant continent of me and I thought Oh Mother Mother why didn’t you chain yourself to a hospital instead. With Grace’s help, I made my tottering way back to the Duesenberg, and from the flick of Bruno’s eyes beneath his cap, I knew I’d have to count on his discretion. Had it still been Cheng under the visor, I could have just counted on his unintelligibility.