News of the Spirit (16 page)

Other times I’d give the money away to the bums who slept on the beach at the end of the street, or to the children who lived on top of the Cuban grocery where I went to buy cigarettes for Mama and café con leche for myself. I came to love café con leche, and usually that was what I’d have for breakfast, café con leche and a Hershey bar.

It thrilled me to walk down the alley behind the Havana Madrid nightclub, where strippers worked and “unimaginable things” went on in the back room, according to Mama.
One of the signs on the front of the club said “Live Bottomless, Friday Only”—a show I’d have given anything to see. By mid-morning, the strippers were often out on a wooden porch behind the nightclub, sunning themselves and smoking cigarettes and giggling like high school girls. Two of them, sisters maybe, even looked like high school girls, not much older than I.

One day they were sitting together on a ratty chaise longue, looking at a fashion magazine, when I came walking along. “Hi!” I said loudly, on impulse. Immediately I could feel myself turning red all over.

“Hi!” they said right back. They jumped up and came to the rail. Their fresh morning faces, without makeup, were open and friendly. “Me Luisa,” the thin one said. “Me Rosa,” said the other, blinking into the sun. Over the rail, they stared at me curiously. I felt like an exhibit—an American Girl, member of an American Family, suddenly exotic in this locale.

“Me Jenny,” I said, thumping my chest in a gesture so awkward it made us all break into giggles.

“You smoke a cigarette?” Luisa offered her crumpled pack of Camels.

I loved the way she said “seegarette,” and resolved on the spot to say it that way for the rest of my life.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I said, and took one.

“Rosa! Luisa! What are you doing? This little girl doesn’t smoke!” An older woman wearing a purple silk kimono
stepped up behind them. She had a hard leathery face and dyed red hair.

“Oh yes I do,” I assured her, putting the cigarette in the pocket of my camp shirt. “I’ve just been trying to quit.”

The woman grinned at me. “You have, huh?” she said. “Well, as long as you’re here, why don’t you make yourself useful, and get me a newspaper.” She flipped me a fifty-cent piece.

When I came back with the paper, she said, “Aw, honey, keep the change,” and I did. Then I got to go up on the porch and sit in a chair and smoke my cigarette and get my stubby fingernails painted by Rosa, who was doing everybody’s, while the woman turned to the crossword puzzle and worked it in a flash, just like Daddy. Her name was Red.

Rosa and Luisa had other, stripper names (Candy Love, Nookie) for their acts. The billboard on the sidewalk in front of the Havana Madrid featured a photograph of Luisa/Nookie, wearing only a G-string. She was much too thin, with no breasts to speak of. (Rayette could have made a fortune at the Havana Madrid.) Luisa and Rosa both looked tired, too. I was always worried about their health. Sometimes I brought them oranges, and one morning I left a bottle of vitamins for them on the porch rail. The bottle had disappeared by afternoon, but Rosa and Luisa never mentioned the vitamins to me. Of course, they didn’t know I was the person who had brought them. But this didn’t matter; it was still a good deed.

Another place I loved to go was the graveyard, where I could always clean off a grave or two. There were about a million graves over there, a million people buried above the ground in white concrete boxes that you could walk on or sit on, and some of them had not been cleaned off for the longest time, you could tell. You could tell that nobody cared about those people anymore at all. Maybe everyone who ever knew them was dead. I’d push the brown leaves off the graves into little piles, then scrape green mold off them with the snow scraper from Daddy’s new car. Then I’d walk around the graveyard admiring the statues—swans, angels, lambs, cutoff tree trunks, and even some stone dogs on dogs’ graves.
Those dogs are all dead now
, I’d think, and a thrill would shoot through me. I liked to subtract the dates and figure out how long the people had lived and try to imagine what they had died of. I liked to read the names and inscriptions, my favorite being:

HERE LIES OUR HEART

What if I died right now? What if I was hit by a car on my way back to the motel? What would they write on
my
grave? I hoped it would be “Our Jenny, a good girl.” The very thought of this made me cry and cry. Mason’s stone had only his full name on it, Henry Mason Rutledge, and the dates of his birth and death, and the carving of a bird in flight. They had buried him in our family plot at St. Michael’s,
next to Granddaddy who had killed himself, and a whole bunch of other old dead people in our family, people so old that even their names were all but gone from their stones. I wanted to be buried in the nifty aboveground graveyard in Key West, and informed Mama of this one morning when I got back to the motel and found her out sunning by the pool.

She took off her dark glasses and sat up in the lounge chair to stare at me. “You what, honey?” she said.

“Bury me in Key West,” I said. “In case I die, I mean. I want to be buried in the cemetery here, in one of those cool white concrete boxes, with an angel. A big angel.”

“Oh, honestly, Jenny, where do you get these crazy ideas? And for heaven’s sake, take off that awful blouse,” Mama said. “I swear, it looks like somebody
made
it.”

W
E FELL INTO A ROUTINE
. I’
D GO FISHING WITH
D
ADDY
, and I’d shop or sun or watch the movie stars with Mama. This way, I got to have plenty of everybody’s undivided attention, though I kept wishing my parents would do more things together. Sometimes they did, though Daddy always looked like a man fulfilling a duty, even after Mama started wearing flowers in her hair.

I loved those rare nights they went out without me. I’d swim in the pool or run errands for Mr. Rudy or smoke Mama’s cigarettes or hide in the shrubbery by the pool in
order to keep up with several romances I had taken an interest in. Then, of course, I would have to do a lot of good deeds to make up for all that. Then I’d read
East of Eden
, which somebody had carelessly left by the pool (I had finished
Bridey Murphy
), and then I’d have to read my New Testament to make up for
that
. I was really busy, and was often completely exhausted by my efforts.

I couldn’t tell whether or not the good deeds were working. My parents were endlessly cordial to each other now, but so far they had never slept in the same bed. I knew this for a fact. I checked their room every morning.

So I doubled my efforts—buying more candles, cleaning more graves, using up all Mama’s Kleenex on Cary Grant’s hubcaps, donating a jar of her Noxzema to the Havana Madrid girls. But we seemed to have reached a stalemate. Entranced by the stars, Mama was becoming herself again. But would this ever be enough for Daddy? Could it be? I knew that Frank Sinatra still loved Ava Gardner right now, even though she was now in Spain living with a bullfighter. The bullfighter meant nothing to Frank. He was peanuts; he was toast. Frank would
always
love Ava.

I prayed it would not be so for Daddy and Carroll Byrd.

It was hard to stay mad at Daddy, however. His lawyerlike quality of paying close attention was flattering; he was winning me over again. I especially liked our fishing trips. Once we got up at four a.m. to drive up the Keys and go out with a one-eyed man named Captain Lewjack who gave me
a mug of black coffee and a jelly glass of brandy and strapped me into a fighting chair and kept chanting, “C’mon, baby, c’mon, baby, hootchie-koo,” when I hooked a dolphin.

“Not a
dolphin
!” I cried out at first, though Daddy and Captain Lewjack assured me it wasn’t
that
kind of dolphin but the other kind, a game fish. Still, the dolphin was so beautiful that it took my breath away when it leaped out of the water for the first time, its lovely colors like a rainbow in the sun. It turned iron gray the instant Captain Lewjack hit it on the head with a hammer after I pulled it in, with Daddy’s help.

This was the same day Daddy caught a marlin after a three-hour struggle, and I still have the photograph that was taken of him and the marlin on the dock when we went back in: Daddy bare-chested and grinning from ear to ear, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, wearing a Panama hat. It is impossible to tell that he had a broken heart, or that anything at all was the matter with him.

I have another photograph, of myself beside a giant jewfish which I hooked when we went out on Captain Tony’s party boat. This picture ran in the Key West newspaper, even though I didn’t actually catch the fish; it was brought up with block and tackle by several of Captain Tony’s crew members. It was the ugliest fish I had ever seen. In the picture, I’m nearly invisible behind somebody’s enormous sunglasses; the caption reads “Va. Miss Gets Big Jew.”

Daddy and I were fools for fish. We also took the
glass-bottom boat trip out to the reef, where we peered down into another world, another universe, with its softly waving sea fans and giant brain coral and gorgeous deadly fire coral and silly octopuses and squids with big round doll-baby eyes. Daddy took me to the old aquarium at Mallory Square, and later I went again and again by myself. I liked to touch the barracudas and turtles. I especially liked the sharks, and never tired of leaning way over their open pen to watch them glide by (constantly, endlessly, they
could not
be still), knowing that they would kill me if they could. They would
love
to kill me, and I loved to think about this. For a nickel, you could feed them, which counted as one good deed.

What I did with Mama never varied. Shortly before nine o’clock every evening, just after dinner, we’d go into the lobby of the Blue Marlin and settle ourselves on a large rattan sofa, which she called “the davenport.”

“’Lo, Miz Billie,” Hal, the skinny night clerk, would say, and Mama always said, “How are you, Hal?” as if she really cared. Now restored to something approaching her old self again, Mama had everybody at the motel eating out of her hand. Hal adored her. Everyone did.

Mama carried a newspaper. I carried a magazine or a book. (Once I brought my New Testament, but Mama said, “Honestly, Jenny! Take that thing back to your room,” rolling her eyes, so I did.) We’d sit down ostentatiously on the davenport and begin to read. Right behind us stood a row of potted plants. Right behind them stood a table with an
ashtray and a telephone on it, the only telephone at the Blue Marlin available for guests to use. An old armchair was next to the table.

And every night, at exactly nine o’clock, here came Tony Curtis through the plate-glass doors. He nodded to Hal, then walked to the table, where he sat down and lifted the receiver and asked for a long-distance operator. Mama rattled her paper, reading. Sometimes there’d be a brief wait, during which Tony lit a cigarette, until Janet Leigh answered the phone in Hollywood, all the way across the continent.

“Hello, darling,” Tony said.

Mama sighed. I sighed. We kept on reading.

Tony talked about what had happened on the set that day; he referred to Cary Grant as a fine fellow. Then he’d ask about the kids, and about the rest of the family, and about their friends. They seemed to have a lot of friends. Sometimes they’d talk about really boring things, such as money. Janet Leigh always had a lot to say, and Tony chuckled intimately into the phone and smoked another cigarette while he listened to her. Then he always told her how much he missed her. At this point, Mama and I would take deep breaths and straighten up: here came the moment we were waiting for.

First Tony said, “I love you,” and then listened, while (we guessed) Janet Leigh said, “I love you,” back.

Then he said, “God bless you, darling,” and hung up.

By then Mama was breathing so hard she could barely
hold her paper, and I felt just as I had felt in the Bomb Shelter when Harlan Boyd stuck his tongue in my mouth. Mama and I were so rattled that we didn’t even notice when Tony Curtis strode back through the lobby and out the door. “Thanks, Hal,” he’d say, giving Hal a mock salute. Tony Curtis was
so cute
. I even thought old bucktoothed Hal was cute, by then. I thought everybody was cute.

Romance was in the very air here—in the lush bright flowers, the seductive vines, the lazy twirling overhead fans, the snatches of song on the soft, soft breeze. Surely Mama and Daddy would
catch it
somehow. Surely they would fall in love again.

I had everything riding on this.

Then came the big night—when Tony Curtis had just said, “God bless you, darling,” and Mama and I were still in a fever state—the night that Tony Curtis paused before going out the door and then turned on his heel in a military way (his role was that of Navy Lieutenant Nick Holden) and walked to the davenport, right up to Mama and me. He was wearing white shorts and a red knit shirt, I will never forget. He cleared his throat. “Ladies?” he said.

Mama and I went on reading as though our lives depended on it.

“Ladies?” Tony Curtis said again.

I looked up into those famous blue eyes and suddenly had to pee.

Mama folded her newspaper and stuck out her hand. “I’m
Billie Dale, from Virginia,” she said, “and this is my daughter Jenny.”

Tony Curtis shook Mama’s hand, bowing slightly from the waist, and then took mine. “So pleased to meet you,” he said. He was smiling. “From Virginia,” he repeated. “A beautiful state.”

“Yes, it is,” Mama said.

“Are you in Key West on business or pleasure?” Tony Curtis asked.

“Oh, it’s just a vacation,” Mama said.

“Actually, my parents are trying to patch up their marriage,” I blurted out. All of a sudden I was determined to spill the beans, to tell Tony Curtis the
whole thing
. He had such a good marriage himself that maybe he could fix up Mama and Daddy’s, give them some good Hollywood advice—a hot tip from the stars.

“Jenny, don’t you dare!” Mama shrieked.

Tony Curtis looked very surprised. “Well,” he said, inching back, “I was going to say, if you’ve got the time, and if you’re interested, we’ll be shooting crowd scenes for the next two days, and we need extras. Your daughter”—he rolled those big blue eyes at
me
—“might get a kick out of being in the movie.”