Limo, page 25
“The situation wasn’t fake,” I said. “Does the plumber cheat on his income tax or doesn’t he?”
I had skipped to what I considered to be the larger issue.
“He does. So what?” Sally said.
“So Kaplan comes in and whether Kaplan is a plant or not no longer matters. The plumber thought Kaplan was real and the plumber reacted. Because the plumber knows the real thing is, he cheats on his taxes,” I said.
Sally said, “Kaplan was a plant. You can cut the bullshit. Thus, to me, the important point is that you provoked action with an outside influence, and that is not what the show was intended to be, or promoted to be or advertised to be, or what the hell ever.”
She grabbed the champagne out of my hand and drank it.
“Is this the review?” I said. “Do I get to read about the opaque concept of the show itself, or how we did nothing more than present a potpourri of cartoon characters?”
Other lines of Sally’s.
“You made up a reality, that’s all,” Sally said.
“Reality is what we had on that screen for three hours,” I said.
She said, “I don’t know why you didn’t just use a script and Hollywood actors.”
“You’re wrong, you know that?” I said. “I could have put three hours up there tonight of nothing but supper time. And how many viewers would we have had? These were real people. Real things happened to them.”
“What real things?” she said.
“Everything that happened was real. How about Georgetown? Let’s say for the sake of discussion that the phone call to Skidmore was a joke. The fact is, Skidmore does jack around on his wife. And everything that happened after the phone call was plenty real, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You probably did fake the phone call,” Sally said. “That’s absolutely something you would do. You had spies in Washington and you knew about Skidmore slipping around.”
“That’s absurd,” I said. “But mainly it’s unimportant.”
She said, “A motivation, Frank, whether we’re talking about human or fictionalized drama, has to be deeply felt, personal, and honest.”
“What’s that? Interrelation of the Arts?” I said.
“You resorted to tricks,” Sally said. “I’m surprised you didn’t have a bunch of bra-burners turn up in Rochester after Roxie got caught naked.”
I said, “You’re being stubborn. I’ll say it again. Real things happened tonight to real people. And the real things represented a substantial truth in their lives.”
Sally said, “Go get me a drink and I’ll work on that for a minute. I don’t want to break a date for the prom with a cadet colonel for the wrong reason.”
Not moving, I said, “Don’t tell me you never made up a quote in a story.”
“I write the truth, buddy,” she said. “And I write about things that I didn’t make happen.”
“Good,” I said. “Then I won’t have to read in New York magazine that ‘Just Up the Street’ was so bland as to be unwatchable.”
Sally said, “Stop quoting me, damn it.”
In the next instant the elevator door in the hall opened and Watts and Travers leaped out. Thurlow Watts wearing a 1943 zoot suit with pegged pants and a broad-shouldered coat hanging to his knees. Larry Travers in a 1948 gabardine Eisenhower jacket, gym shorts, and a motorcycle helmet.
“Frank!” said Watts. “It’s a series!”
Travers said, “Nitroglycerin!”
Watts said, “First episode. Key West and Birmingham. Turtle fisherman gambles it all on fan-tan! Steel worker’s widow tries to raise a family of nine!”
Travers said, “Columbus and Oklahoma City. Ex-fullback selling encyclopedias breaks up with a debutante. Three cowgirls share a Winnebago with a German shepherd!”
Pushing the elevator button, Sally said, “Case closed.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” I said. “I’ve got a lot more to say about this.”
Sally said, “I’m going to get a real cab to take me to my real apartment. In my life, cabs are real. Limos aren’t. How come I forgot that for a while?”
And she was gone.
As calmly as possible then, I turned to Watts and Travers.
“Okay,” I said. “Who thought up the goddam Roman candle?”
It took some time but Watts and Travers convinced me they had not planted Sergeant Jackson. He was real. So was Daphne. Watts and Travers did confess to sneaking the line into the bios about Gladys and Phil de Menil owning a chain of car washes.
D. Wayne Cooper came over. With his keen eyesight that could spot enemy targets radar couldn’t pick up, he could naturally spot a girlfriend angrily getting on an elevator from across a room.
“Old Sally split, did she?” Cooper said. “Reckon show binness done blowed another one for you?”
33.
THE SILVER GOBLET ROLLED into the driveway of the old family lodge in Pelham Manor around 1:00 a.m. The brass carriage lamps were burning. A light was on in the living room. A frail glow came from a window of the upstairs bedroom where Marcie had delivered many of her finest lectures.
“Mom’s awake. Must be something good on TV,” Cindy said.
“Swamp Fiend Women.”
Lines like that hopped out on impulse when I got anywhere near Pelham. Cindy understood it.
When the doors of the limo slammed, they seemed to turn on more lights in the house.
Marcie was coming down the stairs as Cindy and I entered.
She had on a white velour caftan and her hair was not in curlers like the ladies browsing through the K-Mart. Her hair was longer and it had been streaked in pale gold. It looked good, as I was sure Marcie had been told by Dr. Ridley, Rex the Wonder Horse, Eddie Burns, and several suburban husbands on the prowl.
Marcie looked good all over, in fact. The white caftan barely clung to her shoulders and it contrasted nicely with her summer tan, which was doing nicely. By the end of a summer, Marcie could look like a blond Jamaican. She hadn’t removed her earrings, and she was still wearing her eyes for the evening out; the kind of eyes some women needed more time to create than the Sistine Chapel required.
To be truthful, Marcie looked about as good as she had ever looked in the twenty-two years I had known her. Twenty-two years. Lord. She was thirty-eight, but all of a sudden a trim new racing sloop was cruising around Westchester County. Marcie was a book title: Brett Ashley Goes to Pelham.
“Oh, Frank, it’s you,” she said. “I thought it would just be Cooper. I missed the show. Did it go well?”
“It was so funny,” Cindy said.
I asked Marcie if I should wake up Frankie and say hello. She said he was spending the night at a friend’s. Some kid had got some new amplifiers for his birthday. Frankie didn’t deserve to be allowed to go, Marcie said, but she had weakened.
Cindy said, “Mom, these people on Dad’s show. They were so radical. There was this plumber, and these black people in Ohio. And there was this man in Washington who was cheating on his wi—”
Cindy faked a cough.
Good points on awareness, kid. The subtlety needed work.
“Anyhow, it was really fun,” Cindy said.
“Why don’t you run up to bed, angel,” Marcie said. “You’ve had a big day, obviously.”
Cindy squeezed me.
“Thanks, Dad, really. It was great. For sure.”
“Don’t forget to make up that list of movie stars you want to meet,” I said.
I explained to Marcie that I might take Cindy to the Left Coast with me in a month or so, just for a few days. “We’ll talk about it.” Marcie smiled at Cindy. That always meant yes.
“Night, Mom,” Cindy said, kissing her mother. She took the stairs two at a time. From the landing above, I heard, “Love you two guys.”
Marcie asked if I wanted a drink, as long as I was there. I said certainly. She became the bartendress in the room I called a den and she called a library. Marcie never drank Scotch, so she made a drink the way most stewardesses do. When Marcie poured a cocktail it was either all Scotch or all ice and water. This one was all Scotch and ice, and it wasn’t even any of the gallons of J&B I’d left behind.
“Marcie, I can’t drink Teachers,” I said. “Maybe I’ll just have some wine.”
“Taste this,” she said, handing me the glass of red wine she had chosen for herself.
“Let me have some of that,” I said, having decided that some crafty devil had introduced Marcie to a damn good $3.99 California burgundy.
Marcie lit a cigarette without a trace of guilt as we sat down for a minute. “What did you say about the show again?” she asked, now remembering to remove her earrings.
I said it had gone okay, and the ratings would be surprisingly good. She said congratulations, then, on another triumph. Cindy, she said, had built it up around the house as something very important to my job. I said I didn’t know how the critics would look at it. It might get rapped, here and there, I said.
“Would that be fair in your estimation?” she said, exhaling.
“Not very.”
“Then I wouldn’t be concerned about it, if I were you.” she said. “You won the night, which was the most important thing.” It crossed my mind that Marcie could debate the issue with Sally better than I could.
Marcie asked if any of the critics would trouble themselves to mention me personally.
“If they try to get their facts straight,” I said, “I suppose they will have to say that I coordinated the luau.”
I stood up to leave and Marcie began walking me to the door.
“Frank, I want to tell you something,” she said. “I want you to know that I know we are doing the best thing for both of us, and the children. You said that from the beginning, and I’ve always really known it. I want you to try to forgive some of my outbursts these past two or three years. I don’t enjoy being angry, whether you realize it or not. I don’t hate you, Frank. I’m no longer in love with you—thank heavens—but I don’t hate you. I’ll always be marvelously fond of you. You are a very special person and you have a very special life. I’ve always told the children that.”
She smiled with a sweetness I hadn’t seen in a long time.
“I just never was very good at trying to ride a tidal wave,” she said. “Let’s let it go at that.”
“Oh, you didn’t do so badly, most of the time,” I said, paying back the smile.
It was a perfect moment for me to say all that stuff about wishing there was a way for people to be able to forget the words that opened all the wounds which couldn’t be healed. To say that a human being could only put those words out of mind for a day, maybe, sometimes two or three, and occasionally from a drunken bout of lovemaking. But they would always come back. And if you didn’t want to go on living the rest of your life with a cage of rabbits in your stomach, and arthritis of the heart, well, then you had a choice. Marcie and I were making that choice: divorce.
At the door I took one of her hands and kind of squeezed on it because it seemed all right with Marcie to do it.
Smiling again, I said, “It sure is amazing what people do to each other without intending to.”
She gave me a look that combined her old, natural radiance with some sort of new agreement and understanding.
I took that look with me to the limo, never looking back.
In the Goblet I turned on all four TV sets, without the sound, to whatever programs were on, and I sank down in the seat to let the magic pictures compete with the dozens of images of Marcie, good and bad, and the dozens of images of Sally, mostly good, that were flashing through my head.
All four screens had a solemn news commentator staring at me. I turned up the volume on one of the sets and got my last jolt of the night.
The commentator was telling me that a great American, a pioneer in broadcasting, Harley O. Chambers, the Big Guy, was dead.
34.
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASIER for me to believe a Swiss Alp had died. Shriveled up unexpectedly and melted into a carton of low-fat milk right there in front of all the eyes on all the sundecks of Zermatt.
But a Big Guy couldn’t die.
A Harley O. Chambers never died.
He could get old, senile, wheelchair-ridden, incoherent, blind, deaf, voiceless, motionless, and of no more use to anyone than the brain of a tuna.
And he could then have his breathing sustained only by each day’s phenomenal scientific advances in tubes, valves, pumps, and transplants.
And he might have to be observed in a plastic tent around the clock by the best medical minds, who would stand over him like the chefs of Lyon stand over an omelet.
For the next two billion years.
But a Big Guy never got poor, he never got powerless—and he certainly never died.
Herb Grant said he died gallantly.
Stanley and I were in Grant’s office on the thirty-fourth floor.
“He liked the show very much, Mallory. He would want you to know that,” Grant said. “He got excited right from the opening billboard. The old logo looked pretty damn good, I can tell you, on that forty-foot screen.”
It was a good party, Grant said, until Harley was called Upstairs.
The forty-foot screen had made it easy for the Big Guy to arrange the seating for his guests in the den.
It was no problem for everyone to see around or between the life-sized stuffed animals. Giraffes, tigers, and polar bears. Or any of the World War II treasures. In fact, Grant said he saw two people—Packey and Deeny from Hobe Sound—sit for a while in the model of a foxhole which had been recreated in a corner of the room.
Most of the male guests were on the Chambers board of directors. Packey, I remembered, was seventy-seven. Same age as the Big Guy. Deeny, his seventh wife, was twenty-two. She had flown for Delta.
Grant said the Big Guy sat by the controls of the forty-foot contraption between Batten Down Boynton and Shotsy Stovall. Mrs. Chambers, whose first name was known to very few people—Eula—wore a sailor suit and mainly occupied herself supervising the staff.
“In a way,” said Grant, “I suppose he would still be here today if it hadn’t been for that damn recording device on the Stroganschleiger.”
It seems the Big Guy videotaped the show as he watched it, and thus he had it to run back again.
“He must have shown those segments with the plumber at least eight times,” Grant said. “Each time, he got more worked up.”
It was the last time that did it, according to Grant.
Nearly all of the guests had slumped into their chairs and sofas asleep, including Bat and Shotsy. Grant said he had just returned from strolling down to the yacht basin to show Deeny the submarine and mine-sweeper.
Looking at the forty-foot screen, Grant said he suddenly realized there was a shadow on it—the shadow of a figure pointing a finger.
It was the Big Guy’s shadow on the screen, which at the time was showing a closeup of the plumber. A moment when Angie Rocco was pleading with Kaplan about his income tax.
The sound volume was turned down low, so Grant could clearly hear the Big Guy’s voice.
“Let’s see your contemptuous gaze now!” the Big Guy screamed at the plumber.
Grant vividly remembered that much.
Stanley and I pressed Grant for every detail of the Big Guy’s last actions and words.
It took a while to get most of the story. For one thing, the three of us needed to talk a good bit about something other than the Big Guy’s actual departure. We were going on the air that evening with a two-hour memorial special—“Harley O. Chambers Tonight: A Tribute to a Great American.”
Realizing he had been in on a part of history, Grant tried to tell us all that he saw and heard.
And I think by combining that information with only a little journalistic license, I can pretty well describe the Big Guy’s final few minutes.
It went something like this.
“Come down here into our homes now with your contempt!” the Big Guy yelled at the plumber on the screen. “You can’t fool with Uncle Sam! How does it feel to hear the rat-tat-tat-tat of the IRS on your padded repair bills?”
With that, the Big Guy picked up an empty buttermilk glass and spoke into it, not knowing it would be for the last time.
“Burrrroooom!” he said. “Ta-ta-ta-ta! . . . Deeeeeeyow! . . . Wooooo-up, woooo-up, woooo-up! . . .
“A bitter surface battle is raging around me while I stand here on the pitching deck of this carrier. I’m out here in the middle of the wild, heaving Pacific near a whacky chunk of coral that I won’t try to spell or pronounce. . . . It wouldn’t mean much to you, anyway. . . .
“This is Harley O. Chambers, and I’m counting angels. . . . Some of their wings are clipped, but they’re fluttering back here to their nest . . . I’ve got a bunch of grease monkeys standing here with me—and they’re counting, too. . . .
“They know, like I do, that we’ve got a lot of fresh-faced kids up there in that crazy, deformed, kami-kaze sky. . . . Kids out of the corner drug stores of our home towns back in Duluth and Joplin . . .
“Yeah, they’re kids. But today they’re wearing the collars of their flight jackets turned up and their crushed caps in the jaunty angles of older men. . . . You know why, America? . . .
“Because they’ve just dropped a bundle of red, white, and blue kisses on the filthy little slant-eyed yellow dwarfs who started this whole stinking mess. . . .
“Achtung, plumbers! . . . I-cho, ki-ma, oh-so, Mai Tai, chocko . . . Send us more Japs! . . . Now hear this, now hear this . . . The hard-fighting Russians pushed further into the Urals today. . . . Ein deeter bine der klingin! Stroke das vine kutz! . . .
“The rag-tag remnants of the British fighting forces today defied all the odds of mangled limbs and withering supplies and hurled themselves against the blazing, steel-girded might of Von Stilson’s panzer faucets. . . .
“What, Mr. Rankin? . . . I went . . . The gutty little leatherneck knew he was out of ammo. . . . I saw the slimy yellow midget plumbers crawling toward him through the jungle rot
“Saddle up, Marines! . . . Ya had a good girl but she . . . she . . . lef . . . she right . . . she . . . she . . .”
