Only Begotten Daughter (34 page)

“Now what?” said Bix.

“I want to bring her home,” said Julie. “I mean, I don’t
want
to, but—”

“That’s a crazy idea.”

“I know. You have a better one?”

Considering the modest rent, their neo-Victorian house in Powelton Village—a bohemian enclave on the west bank of the Schuylkill, a world of brick sidewalks, dozy cats, and walk-in garages jammed with bearded young men welding hunks of squashed metal into art—was astonishingly large. Crumbling, true. Roach-ridden. But certainly a surfeit of space, including a relatively uninfested back parlor. They dumped Phoebe unconscious on the living-room couch and set about preparing for the worst, nailing bed slats over the parlor window, installing a dead bolt, and removing every object with which she might stab or strangle herself—sash cord, table lamp, radiator valve. A war was coming, Julie sensed. They must dig their trenches and gird up their loins.

“Should we call that psychiatrist?” Bix asked after Phoebe was imprisoned.

Julie threaded the key through a length of twine. “I think this is bigger than psychiatry, Bix.” She suspended the key around her neck like a Saint Christopher medallion—like a millstone, an albatross, like Phoebe’s weighty and confounding dementia. “
I
think this is war.”

“Happy honeymoon,” said Bix.

Had Julie not actually lived in Andrew Wyvern’s domain, she might have called the subsequent six days hell. Grotesque, impossible, nerve-shattering, but not exactly, not quite hell. “Life imitates soap opera,” she moaned. To enter the back parlor—here, Phoebe, eat some chicken; hey, kid, we have to empty the commode—was to invite a skirmish, Phoebe swooping down on you like a fascist angel, kicking your shins, uprooting your hair. A war. A war, complete with artillery fire, Phoebe’s screams answered with her keepers’ pathetic replies: Phoebe, settle down, Phoebe, get a grip on yourself. Like Eskimos naming the myriad varieties of snow, Julie and Bix catalogued her screams, each unique in pitch and rhythm. There was the scream that signified general despair, the scream that accompanied her pleas for beer and rum, the scream that underscored her demands for her Smith & Wesson. It was like living with a diurnal werewolf, a lycanthrope from the new spinning city in the sky called Space Platform Omega, world of eternal moonlight. They wanted a silver bullet, anything to put Phoebe the werewolf out of her misery, anything to get her out of their lives. They wanted to bash Phoebe’s brains out with a silver-headed cane as Claude Rains had done to Lon Chaney in Roger Worth’s favorite movie,
The Wolf Man.

On the seventh day, Julie marched up to Phoebe’s door, tugging on the key. “Phoebe?” The twine pressed against Julie’s throat like a garrote. “Phoebe, you there?”

“Get me a drink.”

“Phoebe, I’ve got something important to say.”

“A beer. One damn Budweiser.”

“This is important. I’ve seen your parents.”

“Oh, sure. Right. Get me a six-pack.”

“Your mom and dad—I’ve seen them.”

Silence. Then, “My father? You saw my
father?
Christ—where?”

Hope, Julie concluded. A nibble from God. “I’ll tell you … when you start going to Alcoholics Anonymous.”

“Is Mom okay? Dad alive?”

“Promise you’ll go to A.A.”

“Assholes Anonymous,” Phoebe wailed. “I tried it. Bunch of macho dorks bragging about their binges—forget it. Is Mom all right? Tell me that.”

“Get your act together,” said Julie, “and we’ll talk about your parents.”

“Two drinks a day—okay? What’s my dad like? He in America?”

“Zero drinks a day.”

“You’re lying! You don’t know where they are.”

“Think it over.”

Perhaps it was the week of mandatory sobriety she’d already suffered, perhaps the proposed bargain, but ten hours later Phoebe declared that she’d seen the light.

“I’m a new woman, Katz.”

Julie said, “Tell me about it.”

“Really. A new woman. Where are my parents?”

“Do you love me, Phoebe?”

“Of course I love you. Where are they?”

“Will you stay sober for me?”

“I’m a new woman. I’m no bum.”

“Will you stay sober for twelve weeks?” Twelve weeks, Julie figured, and Phoebe would be home free. “Can you ride the wagon that long?”

“I told you—I’m no bum.”

“Twelve weeks, okay?”

“Whatever you want.”

Twelve weeks, and—what? The truth? Both your parents were murdered, Phoebe, too bad, kid? “In twelve weeks I’ll tell you everything.”

“Deal, buddy. Unlock the fucking door.”

A new woman? Ambiguous. Uncertain. On the surface, things looked good. Phoebe returned to 522 South 43rd Street and prospered, supporting herself through a conglomeration of part-time jobs—McDonald’s server, laundromat attendant, grocery bagger. She called Julie every day.

“Sobriety bites the big one, Katz.” Phoebe’s voice was wobbly but clear. “Sobriety sucks raw eggs.”

“Can you hold out?”

“My hands shake. There’s a Brillo pad in my mouth. Yeah, I can hold out. Pussycat. Watch me.”

According to Bix, Phoebe’s transformation was a sham, the deal she’d cut with Julie a farce. According to Bix, they were “walking on eggs.” Julie disagreed; Bix didn’t know Phoebe as she did. Bix had never peed off a railroad bridge with Phoebe or collaborated with her on bombarding a Fourth of July parade with dead fish. Julie and Phoebe’s love would conquer all. It would conquer the Courvoisier Napoleon, shoot the Bacardi bat, run the Gordon’s boar to earth; it would defeat Old Grand-Dad, Jack Daniel’s, Jim Beam, Johnny Walker …

On Phoebe’s birthday, Julie visited 522 South 43rd bearing a bottle of Welch’s Nonalcoholic Sparkling White Grape Juice and a stout chocolate layer cake.
Happy Third Week of Recovery,
the compliant clerk at the Village Bakery had squirted onto the icing.

“Know what I
really
want for my birthday?” asked Phoebe, sipping the virginal champagne. Her face seemed deflated; her eyes looked like rusty ball bearings. “I want to pack up H. Rap Brown Bear and move in with my best friend.”

“We’ve got roaches.” Julie slashed open the cake with one of the stilettos Phoebe had confiscated during her career as a hooker.

“Yeah.” Phoebe devoured
Recovery.
She was dressing in style these days—a green blouse made of the flashiest new silkoids, a gold earring dangling from her left lobe. “I miss ’em.”

“We’ve got my husband.”

“He doesn’t like me, does he?”

“Bix likes you fine,” said Julie. Bix could not stand Phoebe. Yet he would agree, Julie knew. The man was loosening up. “I’ll take the boards off the window.”

“Great.” A new woman. Before, Phoebe would never have wanted the sun.

As spring wafted into Powelton Village, Julie came to realize that ministering was both harder and more satisfying than having a ministry. Saving a friend from rum easily eclipsed saving humankind from nostalgia, especially since the former ambition lay within the possible.

Not that this life could hold her forever. True, there were no overt signs of Revelationism in Philadelphia, no hints that anyone hunted heretics on the American side of the Delaware. Ostensibly the founder of Uncertaintism was as safe at 3411 Baring Avenue as anywhere. But a stark fact remained: Milk’s ravenous theocracy was barely seventy miles away, so close that, lying beside her husband at night, Julie imagined she heard the squeal of Ned Shiner’s pickup truck hauling dead sinners down the bone-lined expressway.

Bix was no less her patient than Phoebe. Just as her friend might return to the bottle, so might her husband slip into either his traditional nihilism or more recent religiosity. And yet, he seemed to be healing. “You have to understand,” he explained one evening during a roach hunt in the kitchen. “Your performance on that Space Tower knocked me out. I was completely unprepared—the South Seas native getting the white man’s head cold. Disaster.”

“It’s all behind us now.” Julie removed her shoe, raising it like a hammer.

“Will we
ever
get this behind us? Haven’t we been touched by some deep cosmic mystery?”

“I suppose so. Sure.”

“I mean, you
did
have powers, you
were
a deity.”

Slap,
Julie sent a roach to hell. “Cosmic mysteries don’t interest me much these days.”

“It really helps talking with you, Julie. I think I’m becoming a normal person.”

“Know what a normal person has, Bix? A normal person has a job.”

Bix squashed a roach with a paper towel. “Job?”

“We could use the money, sweetheart. We could use the damn medical insurance.”

Ever since the turn of the century, the Philadelphia Public Schools had been short of English teachers, and Bix the former
Midnight Moon
editor was a shoo-in. The only mandatory credential was American citizenship, a status that everyone caught up in the Jersey secession still technically retained. A week after applying, Bix was deputized to bring “language arts skills” to one hundred and twenty-three eleventh graders at William Perm Senior High School.

He was terrified. The eleventh graders bewildered him. “I never know what they’re thinking,” he told Julie. “There’s too much going on at once. I can’t keep track of it.”

“Every teacher has that problem.”

“They say I’m fat.”

“You are fat. I’m proud of you. You’ve come a long way, Bix. Father Paradox to Mr. Chips.”

Public education in America was not following a rigid curriculum that year, progressivism being on the upswing. As far as Bix could tell, only three standards held for everyone on the William Penn faculty: no blood on the floor, no sexual relations with the students, and leave all window shades half-drawn at the end of the day. It was an era of creativity and change, of innovation and relevance—Bix talked incessantly of something called “the curriculum of concerns”—and when Julie suggested he toss away the syllabus and have the students publish a newspaper instead, a rehabilitated and rationalistic
Midnight Moon,
his spherical face glowed. A newspaper! Sure-fire. Fabulous. Jack Ianelli would do the sports column. Rosie Gonzales would write the horoscopes

Julie could barely keep up with the transformation. The man who used to have difficulty loving his own mother had fallen for a bunch of adolescent zotzheads and thugs.

And Phoebe. Talk about idealism, talk about rebirth! Phoebe now believed in everything—in resuscitated rain forests, lesbian pride, saved whales, full bellies, empty missile silos. “I have powers,” she liked to say. “I have powers coming out my ears.” She bought a truck, converting it into a kind of traveling soup kitchen. It consumed her life savings, the full fruit of her years on the streets, but there it was, parked in the driveway of 3411 Baring Avenue—a used United Parcel van, repainted a bright shamrock green. The Green Tureen, Phoebe dubbed her soup kitchen. Love on wheels.

“You should see how these people live,” she told Julie and Bix. “Home is a packing crate, if that. Come with me on Sunday, Katz. You too, Bix. Plywood City.”

“A lumberyard?” asked Bix.

“These people sell their blood,” said Phoebe. “They sell their bodies. Will you come?”

“We’ll come,” said Julie brightly.

“We’ll come,” said Bix gloomily. Always this skepticism, this devout disbelief in Phoebe’s recovery. Walking on eggs, he kept saying.

Plywood City: not a lumberyard, Julie learned that Sunday, but a West Philly shantytown, its splintery suburbs sprawling for half a mile between two sidings near 30th Street Station; it was as if the Penn Central Railroad had erected a theme park, Poverty Land, and this was the first exhibit. Phoebe drove the Green Tureen as far into the yard as she could, parking beside a Chesapeake and Ohio refrigerator car, a traveling abattoir whose hundred slaughtered haunches—Julie imagined them hanging in the car like subway commuters—could have nourished the shantytown for a year. Julie and Bix unloaded both serving carts, outfitting them with charity. Fresh coffee, sugar, milk, oranges, Hostess powdered doughnuts. Most importantly, Phoebe’s homemade soup, its broth packed with diced carrots and robust lumps of chicken.

“What they
really
want,” said Phoebe, “is for us to hold the broth and lay on the beer.”

“No doubt,” said Bix.

“How about you?” asked Julie, uncertain whether Phoebe’s mentioning liquor was good or bad.

“A nice hot cup of Budweiser? I could go for that, sure.”

Julie winced convulsively. “It’d kill you.”

“Like a bullet,” said Bix.

“Where are my parents?” said Phoebe.

“Five more weeks,” said Julie. “Thirty-five days.”

Phoebe tugged her gold earring so fiercely Julie expected the lobe to rip. “Where are they?”

“Five weeks.”

“I must say, Katz, I liked you better divine.”

“Thirty-five days.”

“Right. Sure. You bet.”

Phoebe shrugged and took off, cart rattling along the rocky ballast, soup slopping over the rim of her pot. The old Phoebe would be a handy person to have around now, Julie thought—the crazy, alky Phoebe, the one who would’ve jimmied open the Chesapeake and Ohio refrigerator car and passed out the meat, Santa’s little redistributionist.

Side by side, Julie and Bix started into the town, pushing their cart through the planet’s discards, through the olfactory cacophony of tobacco, cabbage, urine, feces, and beer. Zotz-heads with three-day beards sat on fifty-five-gallon drums, staring into space, brains running on empty. Naked preadolescent boys with muddy feet urinated against the sides of their homes, painting the plywood with curlicues. A portable radio blared Gospel music. By Phoebe’s account, the majority of Plywood City’s inhabitants were refugees of one sort or another, people for whom cold, cruel homelessness was preferable to their colder and crueler domesticities: their abusive husbands, molesting parents, fleabag orphanages, hellish reformatories. The second largest category comprised the winos and zotzheads, forever in need of transportation to Madison Memorial for detox or to the West Philadelphia Free Clinic for general repairs. Then, of course, there were the itinerant mental cases, a manageable group provided they remembered to take the free chlorpromazine that Dr. Daniel Singer, an iconoclastic shrink from Penn, dispensed from the back of his station wagon, Dr. Singer’s soup kitchen for psychotics.