Everything and More (2 page)

Roy was twelve, and her redundancies (affectionately called “Pudgy Pudge” by her father) had not yet blossomed or indented into the curves of puberty. Her wide smile, large round eyes, and tilted nose gave her the look of a pretty, eager teddy bear. She considered herself triply cursed by her weight, her freckles, and her wayward auburn-brown curls that no amount of brushing could subdue. “Pa didn’t get home,” she worried.

“I know.” Marylin’s eyes showed similar concern. “That inventory’s sure taking a longer time than he figured.” Chilton Wace was currently employed in Roth’s menswear shop on Long Beach Boulevard, and Mr. Roth had assigned him—the only full-time employee—to take inventory in the dim, cramped stockroom with its unpainted shelves of dungarees and racks of vivid, big-shouldered sportswear favored by the dockhands and oil crews who inhabited the port town.

“Slave labor, that’s what it is. Pa’s too darn good-natured,” Roy said. The bathroom door closed on her.

Marylin was in a board-enclosed porch. Strong morning sunlight came through the glazed door which was the makeshift bedroom’s only window, and there was a pervasive odor of petroleum from the surrounding forest of oil rigs. She edged around, making her and Roy’s sagging iron cots, humming in tune with her mother’s loud, cheerfully off-key rendition of “South of the Border.”

A single room at the front of the cottage served as dining room, parlor, master bedroom, and kitchen.

NolaBee Fairburn Wace was flipping pancakes at the old high-legged stove. NolaBee’s skin had the drab, pocked texture that is a leftover from bad acne. Her features weren’t pretty enough to make up for this flaw, and she would have been classified as a homely
woman—if it weren’t for the snap and sparkle of her small brown eyes and the mobile expression that indicated curiosity, interest, life. NolaBee Wace’s nomadic existence had worn down neither her girlhood enthusiasm nor her sense of fun.

Her thin brownish hair was coiled in many strips of newspaper, a dishcloth of flour sacking served her as an apron, protecting her worn blue kimono.

“Good morning, Mama,” Marylin said as she went to kiss her mother’s drab cheek.

Without removing the cigarette that dangled from her mouth, NolaBee smiled at this gorgeous creature who had improbably sprung from her. “That blouse is right becoming,” she said. “I reckon it never looked so good on Aunt Lucie Fairburn.”

Marylin forced a smile. The one thing she did not admire about her optimistic, lively mother was the way that NolaBee took it for granted that the Waces should wear hand-me-downs. Chilton Wace’s wanderings during the Depression had never taken the family back to Greenward, Georgia, so Marylin did not know firsthand the homeplace of generations of Waces, Roys, and Fairburns, but she had learned the town’s convoluted genealogies by the ribbon-tied cartons of old clothes that arrived every Christmas. Back in Greenward this cousin overused mothballs, that niggardly aunt cut off every button, this in-law sweated corrosive acid into her clothing.

“Here,” her mother said, sliding three large brown pancakes onto a plate. (At the beginning of the month there would have been bacon.) The table was not set: NolaBee kept house casually, messily, cheerfully, and meals were eaten wherever,
chez
Wace.

This sunny April morning Marylin elected to breakfast perched on the window ledge, and as she ate, she gazed down the steep slope that leveled out near the harbor. Tall, oil-blackened rigs towered over shabby little houses set amid untended yards. Marylin tilted her head to see the gray frame shack where a jazzy piano sounded all night and men came and went. With tight lips NolaBee had warned both girls not to go near—or even to look at—the place, so Marylin understood this was a bad house. Naturally she was forever angling for a sight of the three vividly dressed women who dwelled there. Each time she succeeded in glimpsing one, she felt a pang of guilt. Her mother did not want her to, and Marylin, though she had not inherited her father’s timidity, was a dutiful child. Obedience was her one means of repaying NolaBee’s lavishly adoring love.

NolaBee asked, “Going to the Drama Club again this afternoon?”

Marylin turned hastily, blushing. “We’re reading
The Male Animal.”

“I reckon you’re the best little actress there.”

“Not by a long shot, Mama.” Marylin sighed.

“You need more confidence,” said NolaBee with an amused chuckle. “Else you’re never going to make it in Hollywood.”

A prodigiously enthusiastic fan of everything and everyone connected to the screen, NolaBee read and reread her tattered pile of
Modern Screens
and never missed the broadcasts of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. She gossiped about Claudette, Joan, Clark, Tyrone, and Errol as she would family members. Whenever there was any spare change, she treated the girls to double-bill Saturday matinees, and more than half-seriously twitted her gorgeous elder, her pet, about becoming a star.

“Drama Club’s a good way to meet people, that’s all,” Marylin said, dipping a slim wedge of pancake in syrup.

“You’ll be able to use everything you’ve learned, I reckon, once you’re signed.”

Marylin’s dreams had nothing to do with movie fame, but were mundanely centered on falling in love, marrying, having babies. “Oh, Mama, stop teasing. You know I’m not any good.”

“What are you saying! Last Christmas in San Pedro, who got more curtain calls than anyone?”

“Mama, a high-school play, and—”

“Mrs. Wace?”

Both mother and daughter turned toward the voice.

At the rusty screen door stood a tall, gangly boy. Marylin recognized him as the part-time janitor who worked with her father at Roth’s. His name was Jimmy Brockway, and like her he was a junior at Long Beach Jordan; when they passed in the hall, he sometimes stammered out a greeting.

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Wace,” said NolaBee.

“My name’s Jimmy Brockway, I work at Roth’s Menswear . . .” His voice petered off in a miserable gasp as if he were clutched in a stranglehold.

“Yes?” encouraged NolaBee.

“I sweep before I go to school. . . . This morning, when I got there . . .” His voice faded again.

NolaBee’s curl papers tilted at an odd angle. “I reckon you saw Mr. Wace, then?”

“Uhh, maybe I’d better come inside.”

NolaBee, usually so swift and sure, did not move, so Marylin set down her plate and went to unhook the screen door.

The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbled as he looked at her; then he turned away. Fixing his attention on the double bed, which was
rumpled only on one side, he mumbled, “Uhh, there was a problem over there. Mr. Roth sent me to tell you.”

NolaBee and Marylin continued staring at him.

“Mr. Wace . . . he . . . uhh . . .”

“Go on,” Marylin whispered.

“He’s in the hospital,” the boy blurted.

Marylin gasped. NolaBee gave one loud cry.

“What happened? What’s wrong with him?” Marylin demanded hoarsely. Among her father’s numerous complaints about his health were chest pains.

“I don’t know. Mr. Roth just told me to tell Mrs. Wace to get on over to St. Joe’s—St. Joseph’s.”

“Yes, the hospital,” said NolaBee, her face pale and squeezed into piteous lines.

“I’ll take you—I have a car.”

NolaBee, yanking off the dishcloth-apron and pulling on a sweater, the brown one that Cousin Thela Roy had sent with holes already in both elbows, rushed out into the too bright sunlight.

“My sister!” Marylin cried urgently. “I have to get my sister!”

She ran through the boarded porch, banging on the bathroom door. “Roy.
Roy.”

“You took your own sweet time, now let—”

“Open up! It’s Pa—he’s in the hospital.”

The door burst open. Roy stood there, the Arm and Hammer baking soda that the Waces used as toothpaste caking her mouth, which was nearly as white. As Marylin was NolaBee’s girl, so Roy was her father’s favorite.

NolaBee and Marylin sat up front in the Onyx jalopy while Roy rode in the rumble seat. Aside from that, not one of the three could ever remember any other details of the brief ride to St. Joe’s.

  
2
  

The Onyx shuddered to a stop in front of the hospital’s stucco Virgin. Roy clambered down from the rumble seat and raced up the steps ahead of her mother and Marylin.

In the empty lobby she halted a few feet from the reception desk. A wizened peroxide-blond nurse continued reading her
Saturday Evening Post,
ignoring the intruders.

NolaBee’s face seemed shrunken inside the Medusa’s nest of curlers. Garrulous in almost any situation, she approached the desk silently.

It was Marylin who said in her soft little voice, “We’re looking for Mr. Wace, he was brought here this morning. Do you know what’s wrong with him?”

“Weights?”

“W-a-c-e,” Roy spelled.

The nurse slowly bobbed the eraser end of a pencil down a page of names.

“W-a—” Roy started.

“Little girl, I’m not deaf,” said the nurse.

NolaBee gave a small cough. “Is it his heart?”

The nurse, opening her magazine, said, “Go down the left corridor as far as you can go, then turn to the right. You’ll come to doors with a sign on them.”

Marylin and NolaBee gripped hands while Roy darted ahead of them.

On each of the double doors was painted:

“Emergency,” NolaBee whispered. “Emergency?” A chrome and Leatherette couch was pushed against the wall, and she sank down on it as if her legs had given way. Hand at her mouth, she watched Marylin press the button. A metallic buzz sounded briefly.

The three Waces stared expectantly at the doors. The faraway sounds continued, voices, a rumbling as if wheeled carts were being moved.

Nobody came out.

Roy jammed her finger down on the button, keeping it there.

After what seemed an interminable length of time both doors banged open and a short, fat nurse bustled out. “What do you think you’re doing with that bell?” she demanded.

“We’re the Waces,” Roy said.

“Family of Mr. Chilton Wace,” Marylin added politely.

“There’s no need for this sort of ruckus!” The nurse glared at Roy. “As soon as there’s anything to hear, you’ll be told.”

“But we don’t know what’s wrong with my husband,” said NolaBee in a strange, humble voice. “What’s happened to him?”

The nurse stared at her, taking in the old kimono beneath the disreputable sweater, the paper curlers. Then her scornful gaze turned to Roy, who had not yet put on her shoes or socks, her glance rising disdainfully to the curly brown hair that had been blown into a tumbleweed during the ride in the rumble seat. Her glance slid over Marylin to her immaculately polished saddle shoes bought on sale for a dollar because they were scuffed. “That’s for the surgeon to tell you,” she said coldly.

“Surgeon?” asked Marylin. “But I thought . . . Nurse, hasn’t he had a heart attack?”

The nurse backed through the left door.

Before it swung shut, Roy caught glimpses of a corridor that was empty except for a stretcher. She opened her mouth and began to scream.

The nurse bobbed back. “Quit that racket,” she hissed.

“What’s wrong with my Pa?” Roy howled.

“You damned little Okie charity case, don’t you know you’re in a hospital?”

“Where is my Pa?” Roy shrieked.

“He’s in the operating room,” snapped the nurse with a malevolent glare. “He was shot in the chest. Doctor’s trying to get out the bullet, and I shouldn’t be surprised if all this caterwauling has jarred his hand.”

Roy’s screams halted abruptly.

NolaBee said in a flat, questioning tone, “A gunshot?”

They stared at one another.

“There must have been a robbery,” said Marylin dully. “Don’t you think so, Roy?”

Roy couldn’t answer. She was biting her lower lip to prevent her sobs from welling up.

“He’ll be all right, Mama, he’ll be all right,” said Marylin, her cheeks streaked with tears.

All through the morning they sat on the hard, cold couch, NolaBee gripping Marylin’s hand. They were in an isolated part of the hospital and nobody came by except an old black woman swishing a broad, Lysol-soaked mop. She obviously didn’t know anything, but that didn’t stop Roy from inquiring about Mr. Chilton Wace.