Girl of My Dreams (12 page)

I've been a dependent clause long enough, the occupational hazard of screenwriters, supporting players who push the action along, then wait in the wings until needed for some plotty errand.

The famous screenwriter Ben Hecht called himself a child of the century, but his claim was bogus. I was its true offspring. Though it was a decade old when I made my debut, I paralleled the century, taking personally its wins and losses as Ben never did. The Panama Canal was my first triumph, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall my last. In between came all the wars. Did a hundred million die in the most killing century in history? Christians were the champions, creating the most dead, but Communists and other religions did their share. In my view, not because I'm more sensitive than anyone else but simply because I have lived so vicariously—voyeuristically when possible, eavesdropping on history the rest of the time—I was killed a hundred million times. All the while amassing credits and debits and discredits. I collect in order to recollect.

Flashing forward, I trotted into the motion picture industry as a derivative option, doomed morally and temperamentally to live in the shadow and on the nourishment of others. Owen the parasite. Always looking to become my own self.

Between scripts I dipped my quill in thicker ink with essays on the passing scene, the motion picture business, its politics, and an occasional portrait of an obsessed filmmaker or producing tycoon. After teaching a course on writing at San Quentin during a slow period, I produced a little corsage for the
Threepenny Review
called Prose and Cons. Although a couple of the portraits found their way, as grievously abbreviated Talk pieces, into
The New Yorker
, most of my writing was for the little known
Contempo Reader
, a now-vanished quarterly that devoted itself to fiction and essays from or about the Left. When there was barely any Left left, after the blacklists of the Fifties,
Contempo Reader
began to trumpet the Thirties. I was a natural for them. I profiled some of the old Lefties—the usual suspects: McGurney Harris, Hy Soifer, Evelyn Wilberg deForest, Ripley Link, Jeremy Mah Silberman—and finally did one on Ring Lardner, Jr. for
Esquire
. This last came to the attention of an editor at the also now-defunct Summit Books, and before you knew it out came my collection,
Articles of Faith
.

I left off essays—having loved journalism a while, if only adulterously—when David Begelman hired me to do a script on the narcotics trade. Early Seventies. I knew nothing about it, went downtown to East L.A. and found some pretty strung-out kids, Cal and June. They told me they were on speed when they met. “Stopped for a week so we could ball,” June said. Then they went back on. “After a bit we found horse,” Cal said, “or horse found us.” When they told me about this, I was curious: was the sex so inferior to the drugs that ruined them that they actually preferred the narcotics? “You don't get it,” June said, “the sex was the drug and the drug was the drug but the drug was the better drug.” I scratched my head and went home to work on this, and then
Panic in Needle Park
came out. Begelman dropped me as if he'd been toting a boulder.

But my childhood. When did I notice the stain, coffee or ink? It meant nothing.

“Why does the sun go to bed in one corner of the sky and get up in another?” “Mind your owen business, chuff chuff,” the gruff one said out of his mustache with a twinkle when asked a question while he was busy. “Oh no, blink blink,” said the gentler one. “He is his owen curious self and owenly seven years old.” Nauseatingly precious, but they believed themselves lastingly blessed. My mother would call me her little magpie, tell me it was time to stop chattering and wash for supper. To which my father would gruffly reply, “I didn't think we needed a magpie around here. I thought we were rearing an eagle.”

My childhood was as full of trains as other people's is of relatives, as full of trains as Poor Jim Bicker's nomadic Depression would be.

I came of age enjoying things, American bred and born, a child of western Ohio, which gave us cash registers and aviation. Cyclones of paint, congenial yet dizzying, inevitable as loose teeth in a five-year-old, lifted me off my hinges every few months, depositing me in a new spot where I'd be treated well but in essence left, as my parents said, to my owen self. We were always moving on, six or seven places every couple of years.

If my parents had been animals, my father was an amiable moose. “Chuff chuff, every boy should climb a mountain, shoot a gun, memorize the presidents, read the classics, know how to fish.” While my mother leaped into and out of interests with the excited, nervous grace of a deer. Syrilla and Barnett. “Blink blink, it's time for a new city, blink blink, why don't we see what Indians are really like, surely their humble abodes need a coat or two, Barney.” “Whoever heard of educating a boy, chuff chuff, without some experience of the Continent?” Syrilla, née Stedman, and Barnett Jant. With a blink and a chuff, they said in unison, “We'll try Paris as soon as the Armistice comes.”

No one who was rich would have called us rich.

No one who was poor would have called us anything but rich.

Yet we didn't fit snugly in the middle either because we moved so much more than the people who came home from jobs to sit in their chain-hung rockers, swinging on their porches as they watched their generation mount the offensive called the twentieth century. The moose wasn't leisured; he was in paints, a middleman, not a manufacturer. Wherever we went people were building offices, homes, schools, bowling alleys, dance halls. When they finished building, they needed color. He gave them that. In his three-piece suit with his gold watch fob and polka-dotted bow tie and the monocle he affected, he marched over to construction sites. He'd go up to contractors in Saginaw, Omaha, Wichita, and he'd offer them colors for what they were putting up. “Here, Mr. Kenniston, chuff chuff, let me show you samples, that's the line I'm really in, the showing business, I'll show you how you can beautify this handsome structure.” “Mrs. Midgley, wouldn't you like to try a muted peach in your parlor?”

Back East, he had connections with the Standard Varnish Works. “We have a painter already,” the contractors would say. “Fine, let me see him.” No matter where we were, Barnett Jant was able to get more paint at lower prices than the local suppliers. “It'll come right out on the same train that brought me here, be in town by Monday,” and so it was that on the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, or the Santa Fe, the paint would flow in rivers out across the country to wherever my father found customers.

He wasn't interested in building a paint empire, only in leading the life he and my mother charted. “You can hear the air, smell the light out here,” my mother said in South Dakota. A life on the move, a life of planting ourselves in a teeming little metropolis followed by transplanting out across the loamy plowland to another temporary center, a life of exploration. The moose himself hailed from Chicago while the deer started out in New York. They met at a travel agent's exhibit in Madison Square Garden.

An early mind's-eye mezzotint when we visited the deer's deer, in New York, probably around 1912, has my maternal grandmother, Ursula Stedman, herself blinking and telling my mother she was the luckiest mother alive as they bathed and powdered me. Looking down late the other afternoon at the sun striking my creased pantleg and Church's wingtip I was reminded of my paternal grandfather, Fielding Jant, the moose's moose removed from England to Chicago and to northern California by the time we visited him in 1915 or 1916. The smell of his pipe tobacco mixed with the heavy scents from his capacious box elder, which shaded us as my father and his father spoke of the war. My father said, “Do you think we should go in?” My grandfather said, “You'll have to but it's rubbish. America thinks it's under this box elder. It'll see soon.” “See what, Pater?” “We're all cannibals and always will be.” While my father drowsed in the garden chair I sat on my grandfather's lap and asked him to tell me anything. The sun through the box elder sprinkled us with dots of itself. Can it be the same sun on my pantleg?

“Say hello to Albuquerque, Owen, and as soon as your father fetches our things from the baggage car we'll get him to take us out to a pueblo like the one we read about.”

It didn't last long. Though it is with me now in the way time has of becoming still, collapsing in defeat, admitting it is only an artifice we impose to bring form to the disorderly tumble of things that happen. Time and I have made a separate peace.

Here is the unhappy ending to my happy childhood. We were at the white wooden marvel on the beach, palatially presiding over surf and sand, my mother and I, when she went to bed early one evening with the complaint of a sharp headache. I always watched her brush her long toffee-colored hair at night, but now she couldn't stand to touch the brush to her head. My father was somewhere in the northwest with his color samples, coming to join us the next day. Disappointed at not being able to play backgammon with Mama, I wandered alone those wide corridors with their paneling and portraits of dignitaries, descending the stairs while patting the balustrade as if I owned it, seeing myself a prince entering an awaiting ballroom.

It was the prince's birthday and his young attendants and courtiers would all have to bring him presents, pricey little tributes to his highness. Midway on the staircase, as I spotted the bejeweled guests in the spacious lobby, the fantasy shifted and I became a buccaneer. The Pirate Prince del Coronado prepared the speech that would begin, “Hand over all your valuables, don't resist, and none of the ladies will be harmed.”

At the foot of the stairs, though shorter than everyone in the lobby, I preened, fancying the hotel guests as my subjects. “Master Jant,” said a servile concierge to me, so resplendent in white tie and green swallowtail that I welcomed him into my masquerade. “Sirrah,” I said. “A wire has arrived for your mother. I shall send it right up.”

Blasted from reverie, I told the man my mother was already sleeping and that I'd give her the wire at the first light of day. Tucking the telegram into the front of my herringbone jacket while regretting it wasn't brocade or at least velvet, I wheeled and made for the beach. A star-filled moonless night greeted me as I patrolled the strand. Thirsty for every star, I was proud of protecting my mother and of the telegram burning a hole in my herringbone. Cassiopeia's Chair greeted me, and the friendly Dipper, Polaris, Castor and Pollux, and my new favorite, Jupiter. As far as I was concerned, the sky was eight years old, like me, newly mapped for me by my father, expected the next evening.

My father! The telegram must be from him. Yes, the return address, visible inside the envelope window, was Coeur d'Alene. Fresh fortunes in Idaho from silver and lumber were all of a sudden generating big houses. He'd found ready buyers there a few months earlier and had returned to corral new business.

Mrs. Barnett Jant
Hotel del Coronado
Coronado, California

CHERISHED SYRILLA UNAVOIDABLY DETAINED COEUR D'ALENE STOP EVERYONE NEEDS PAINT STOP SHOULD ARRIVE WEEKEND STOP LOVE TO YOU AND MONKEY STOP BARNEY

They called me monkey? That had never happened in my presence. So I thought of them as animals and they saw me that way too? But Monkey? I couldn't wait to get to the San Diego Zoo the next day, where my mother had promised we'd go. The star of the zoo was a famous female bear named Caesar, given to the city by the Navy, and I was mad to have a look at her. My mother had started me keeping a diary, and I pulled it out of its hiding place inside a sweater. She'd said to me, engraved in my memory, “We read to learn, we write to understand.” I hoped she didn't look at the diary. Before sleep I wrote how happy I was to be alone with Mama, how unpleasant the discovery that my parents referred to me as Monkey. What other secrets did they have? But I also wrote how much I enjoyed her laughter, especially if I could cause it. I copied out my father's telegram and added, “I'm glad we have more days alone. Please keep this a secret.”

But when I woke up the next morning the first word I heard was mercy. My mother was scarcely able to move, with pains throughout her body, a different pain for every joint. While I still slept she had called the hotel manager. “You must go immediately to Mercy,” he told her while I rubbed sleep from my eyes. The car we had hired to take us to the Zoo instead brought us to the hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy in San Diego. The worst of it, for both of us, was the mystery of her pain. She was given morphine at the hospital, which relieved both of us since she slept a little and I didn't have to watch her features contorted by her pain. By the time the morphine wore off, her pain had eased. Yet as she dressed to come back to the hotel with me, a sudden stab in her stomach sent my mother reeling back onto her bed as if she'd been knocked down.

As for me, I lost my voice. For the first time in my life I had trouble catching my breath. I wheezed, gasped, and briefly felt faint. A nurse had me lie down and gave me something to inhale. “It's the shock of having your Ma take sick,” she said, “a touch of asthma perhaps.” I was better quickly. “Poor dear,” my mother said. “Poor you,” I said.

The doctors kept her overnight and a small daybed was moved into her room for me. She tried to make an adventure out of her ordeal. “Sorry you won't meet Caesar,” she said, “but now you'll see the inside of a hospital instead of a zoo, with the nuns walking around like penguins.” “Indubiterably,” I said, trying out a word I'd heard at the hotel. Each of us, I sensed, was doing a little act to hide our fear from the other.

The next day a doctor, who thrilled me by talking about his war service in France, wanted to telegraph my father, but my mother was adamant that she didn't want to concern him while he was doing business. I butted in to ask the doctor how someone so old would get to go to war, and before my mother could chide me for impoliteness, he asked me if I could tell him how else he could get a free trip to Paris. “Doctor,” my mother said, “you have four days to get me better.” He smiled and sighed at the same time. “We're going to Paris after the Armistice,” I told him.