North of Montana (29 page)

“There’s a locked cabinet back there,” I say.

All of us have assembled in the examination room where I once posed as a patient. It is crowded now with the federal marshals, Eberhardt in the white lab coat, and two thunderstruck nurses.

“May we have the keys?”

He nods and one of the nurses hands them to me.

It is close and hot with too much breathing. I reach toward the lock like an observer outside my own drama, hoping that in the next moment I will be proven wrong and lose all credibility at the Bureau, that Jayne Mason will be vindicated and the shelves will be stuffed with narcotics—not because I want to see Eberhardt suffer, but at least then all this destruction would be for a reason.

“Why do you keep this cabinet locked, sir?”

“I do a lot of work with children who have disorders of the spine.” Randall Eberhardt licks his lips as if they have suddenly become dry. “You know how kids get into everything.”

There is silent tense anticipation in the room as the door swings open. Inside is a collection of tiny teddy bears.

“My patients give them to me. I used to keep them on display but they started disappearing. Then some kid would get upset because his special bear wasn’t there on his next visit.”

In front of everyone I must examine the teddy bears as solemnly as I would any evidence. Alone, I think I would have banged my head against the door. There must be a hundred little cutesy figures of every conceivable material—clay, calico, metal, origami, even homemade teddies of pink cotton balls with wiggly plastic eyes.

I run a flashlight over the inside of the cabinet, feeling for false compartments as if I am firmly in charge here, then get up from my knees. “Let’s get started.”

As the marshals pack medical equipment and records into card board cartons, Dr. Eberhardt shoulders his way down the hall toward the sound of hammering.

He opens the front door, appalled to find that a locksmith is already changing the locks and another guy is nailing up a sign over the dove gray paint that says “Property of the U.S. Marshals.” Then, suddenly, he is confronted by a sea of cameras and questions shouted about charges by the actress Jayne Mason that illegal narcotics were dispensed from these offices, and that’s when the shock sets in.

He turns back pale and disoriented.

“This isn’t really happening to me.” His eyes are watery and enlarged.

I take his arm and steer him away with pity, remembering that he once put a compassionate hand on me, guiding him to a quiet corner of the waiting room, where he slumps into a peach and gray chair with a look of dissociation that comes from being deeply violated, when the only way to escape the torture of humiliation is for the body and mind to shut down; a look of passive despair I have seen before in victims of rape.

PART FOUR

THE FOUR ROADS

NINETEEN

THE SECURITY NATIONAL BANK building on Wilshire where Poppy opened a savings account as a young Santa Monica police officer is now the Ishimaru Bank of California. It must have gone through several face-lifts since the sixties, but all the changes have added up to nothing more than a box made of beige bricks, inside and out.

I imagine the vault is exactly the same as when Poppy first deposited his important papers. You don’t move vaults around when you remodel. I’ll bet every day for the past thirty years the time lock has clicked at 8:45 a.m. and the manager has spun the wheel, grunting and pulling the door open with both hands, leaving it ajar for the public to marvel at six inches of layered steel. It’s still impressive, the way a mausoleum is impressive; the way you know, from the weight of the granite stones sealed together with mathematical precision, that inside this place nothing will change, ever.

A quiet pensive black woman with her hair pulled back into a ponytail and long crystal earrings checks my signature against a card and unlocks an interior gate. We pass through a massive doorway inlaid with a checkerboard pattern of brass and chrome to a small room lined with burnished gray doors on hinges. I hand her my key. She puts a blue heeled shoe on a stool to reach up and unlock number 638. Behind her is a sign that says “Emergency Ventilation” with a set of instructions. She steps down from the stool and places an oblong box on a desk inside a tiny cubicle with a door I can close for privacy, leaving me alone in the dead air.

I am stilled by a sense of dreadful sadness and it takes many moments to force myself to lift the long metal lid.

I had expected there would be nothing except the will rattling around in a cold empty box, but it is filled with an assortment of household stuff like a drawer casually pulled from a sideboard.

On top of the pile is a yellowed clipping from the
Santa Monica Evening Outlook
dated September 12, 1962. The headline reads, “ ‘M
EANEST
T
HIEF’
F
EELS
P
ANGS OF
C
ONSCIENCE
.” The article tells the story of a partially paralyzed baseball fan who was carried to his seat by friends to watch the “exciting game” in Dodger Stadium. He left his wheelchair at the top of the aisle and it vanished. After some publicity, it turned up days later just a few blocks from the Santa Monica police station with the following note:

I am that meanest of mean thieves who stole your wheelchair. I would like to offer an explanation if there can possibly be one. Yes, we did it as a practical joke, but I honestly thought the chair belonged to Walter O’Malley and was put there for an emergency. I still realize this offers nothing but a very low sense of humor.
I hope if at all possible you may find it in your heart to forgive me. I think I will have learned a great lesson from this “joke” that backfired. I am really not that sarcastic of an individual and hope that both you and God will forgive me for this prank.
Sorry

Accompanying the article is a photograph of Poppy with one hand on the recovered wheelchair. He looks young and vigorous with his crew cut and dark uniform. You can see the outline of the nightstick and the Smith & Wesson .38 on his belt. The caption explains:

PARALYZED MAN’S WHEELCHAIR
, stolen while its owner watched last week’s game between Dodgers and Giants at Chavez Ravine, is inspected by Santa Monica patrolman Everett Morgan Grey. The owner has been offered a new chair by a rental firm.

What a poignant relic of a time when Santa Monica was a sleepy undiscovered seaside town and thieves had consciences and somebody thought that having your photograph in the local newspaper was an event of such importance that they entombed it in the bank.

Digging underneath my grandfather’s moment of glory I find silver dollars worn to the color of pewter and Kennedy fifty-cent pieces wrapped in tissue, still as shiny as new. There is also a series E savings bond from 1960 with the face value of $100 made out to me, a brown photograph with a white scalloped edge of my mother as a baby being held by her parents, my grandfather’s Last Will and Testament (naming me as the beneficiary of his estate), along with his birth certificate, my grandmother’s birth certificate and social security card, insurance policies from 1955, a small notebook embossed
Your Child’s Medical History
with a record of my childhood immunizations written in my mother’s hand, a spiral note pad containing a ledger of household expenses for the year 1967, and, inside an envelope, my grandmother’s gold wedding ring and a brooch with amber stones. Loose in the box are a small gold heart with an enameled pansy, some costume bracelets, and a thin string of real pearls that were given to my mother on her sixteenth birthday.

I touch these things and for a few moments my mother comes back to me, her quilted cotton apron, where I would sometimes be permitted to lay my head, woven with splatters of batter and oil, the residue of a hundred meals and a thousand washings—it was like inhaling the essence of comfort. I suddenly remember that her nylons smelled of tannin and autumn leaves, drying on the towel rack in the bathroom with the salmon and black tiles, and at her dressing table in the front bedroom where she kept her rings in a glass ashtray, my God, she used Chanel No. 5. Furniture polish. Meat loaf with green peppers. She wore wool skirts and see-through white blouses with tiny round buttons and demure ruffles when she worked as a receptionist for Dr. Brady, but what you saw underneath was the stern construction of slip straps. They were short-sleeved blouses that revealed the pale fleshy undersides of her upper arms, which now in this stagnant closet I recall with foolish tenderness.

She worked until noon on Saturdays and often she and I would take the Atlantic Boulevard bus past those mysterious landmarks of childhood—Peg’s for Perms, Bardlow Top Shop with a painting of a 1964 Mustang on a revolving oval—to a one-story dental building across the street from the Long Beach Mortuary, where I would spend three hours in a tiny back room, kitchen cum laboratory, waiting while she typed on the IBM and answered the phone, reading Superman comics and finding the hidden pictures in office copies of
Highlights for Children—“Fun with a Purpose.”
Mother would freeze those tiny cans of Mott’s apple juice and I’d eat my American cheese sandwich and suck out the icy slush with a straw, looking through huge dusty textbooks with close-up photographs of malformed gums. The place smelled like ether.

But when it was over we’d get back on the bus and continue downtown, where she would pay her bills at the electric and gas company offices, then continue on to Buffum’s and Sears and the tedious business of keeping up a household: getting extra keys made, buying shower curtains and aluminum pots, Mother asking my opinion about every tiny purchase because she could never make up her mind. The worst was Lerner’s, where I remember many excruciating hours playing beneath racks of blouses while she dawdled and agonized.

If I was lucky we’d end up in Woolworth’s or Kress, where I’d wander the flat wooden tables, drawn to cheap beach souvenirs like plastic wallets with photos of palm trees or figurines made of sea-shells, but what I lusted after most—and was never allowed to possess—were the medals of St. Christopher, which they kept in a locked glass case because every kid in Southern California wanted “a Christopher” like the coolest surfers wore.

I suddenly have the sense of sitting at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s spooning a black-and-white ice cream soda while Mother had cinnamon toast and coffee, sharing a guilty pleasure because it was just an hour until dinnertime. My mother rarely indulged either of us, maybe because in a way it would mean robbing Poppy of something, but those Saturday afternoons did provide an indulgence—being alone with her, away from my grandfather, which I now realize was the underlying reason we were so dumbly, unknowingly, happy.

Because at the other end of the bus ride, after carrying those heavy shopping bags past an oil rig that pumped day and night in a fenced lot in the middle of the neighborhood, we’d inevitably arrive at the one-eyed redbrick house on Pine Street. I saw it that way as a child because a loquat bush hid one of the two front windows and the other seemed to stare from between gray shutters with glassy spite.

The house was new when Poppy bought it, the only one on the street made of brick. It was buttoned up, closed off like a bunker, with a square green lawn mowed to anal uniformity, no ornamentation except a black mailbox on a post. One innovation of the sixties was a bright yellow all-electric kitchen with a clock built into the stove that of course ran on Poppy’s time:
“Ask your grandfather what he wants for dinner …”
“We’ll eat when Poppy’s ready …”
Looking at the household ledger in the spiral notebook, I discover that for our two rooms in my grandfather’s spartan home, my mother paid rent, $54.67 a month.

I miss her then, I want those freckled arms around me, I want our bond, broken not only by her death but by a mysterious invisibility during my young childhood, to be healed. But how? Instead of coming close, I feel her fading away from me again, eclipsed as always by Poppy.

What was her shadowy life compared to the scary, exciting visits to police headquarters in the bold blue glass building on Broadway? Poppy would steer me through busy offices where everyone thought I was cute, then, if there were no prisoners, through the actual jail with its terrifying steel toilets. Waiting outside for him, I’d call out to his buddies by name as they climbed into their squad cars, running my fingers over a big brass plaque near the lobby, a bas-relief of a policeman sheltering a boy and girl, “Lest We Forget”—Long Beach Police Officers Association, with a kind of preadolescent sexual thrill.

Poppy took me trick-or-treating, Mother stayed home. He took me body surfing in the breakers off Shoreline Drive, bullying me to get up and do it again no matter how many times the waves sent me sprawling—where was she? Timid, passive, afraid, self-effacing until dissolving into a ninety-pound cadaver before my eyes. In the end her skin was actually green and she didn’t have the strength to roll over in the hospital bed, lying on her side facing away from me, one arm struggling to rise above the collapsed curve of her hip, one word, my name, spoken as I entwined those dry brittle fingers in mine at age fourteen.

And yet she is not completely gone and yet … perhaps I really did mean something to her. Who else would have saved the document I now hold in my hand, and for what purpose other than someday her daughter might find it, shoved way in the back of a safe-deposit box inside an unused birthday card inside an envelope? It is her marriage certificate, stamped by the City of Las Vegas, August 3, 1964. It states that on this day, Miguel Sanchez and Gwen Grey, my father and mother, were married.