The Last Thing He Wanted (14 page)

“It was something that happened,” he said about the death of his sister at age nineteen. “I was twelve, thirteen years old when it happened, there were
the seven years between us, seven years at that age could be a lifetime, to all intents and purposes Mary Katherine was someone I barely knew.”

“For all anyone knows it was an accident,” he said when I tried to follow up on this subject. “She was watching the seals, the surf came up and took her, Mary Katherine never had any coordination, she was always in the emergency room, if she wasn’t breaking her ankle she was dropping a bicycle on her leg or knocking herself out with a tetherball or every other damn thing.”

“I guess I didn’t see any useful reason to dwell on that,” he said when I suggested that very few people who get accidentally taken by the surf while watching the seals happen to have mailed goodbye notes to (although not to their mother or father or brother) three former teachers at Lowell High School and a former boyfriend who had recently left to go through OCS at Fort Lewis,
MISSION TEEN A HOMEFRONT CASUALTY,
the headline read in the San Francisco
Chronicle
the morning after the letters began to surface. I had found it on microfiche,
LOWELL GRAD WROTE FINAL DEAR JOHN
. “There you see the goddamn media again,” Treat Morrison said about this. “Goddamn media was meddling even then in something they couldn’t possibly begin to understand.”

“Which would have been what.” I recall trying for an offhand delivery. “What was it exactly that the media didn’t begin to understand.”

Treat Morrison said nothing for a moment. “A lot of people get some big mystical kick out of chewing over things that happened forty, forty-five years ago,” he said then. “Little sad stories about being misunderstood
by their mother or getting snubbed at school or whatever. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, I’m not saying it’s self-indulgent or self-pitying or any other damn thing, I’m just saying I can’t afford it. So I don’t do it.”

I find in my notes and taped interviews only two instances in which Treat Morrison volunteered anything about his background that could be construed as personal. The first such instance is buried deep in a taped discussion of what a two-state solution would mean to Israel. Three-quarters of the way through a sixty-minute tape, at 44:19 to be exact, Treat Morrison falls silent. When he resumes talking it is not about two-state versus one-state for Israel but about having once had some pictures framed for his mother. It seemed that his mother had broken a hip and been forced to move from her house in the Mission district to a Mercy convalescent home in Woodside. It seemed that he had stopped to see her on his way to a meeting in Saigon. It seemed that she had kept mentioning these pictures, snapshots of him and his sister at a place they used to go on the Russian River. “She’d had them stuck in a mirror, she wanted them at the new place, I thought I’d get them put in a frame, you know those frames that take four or five little pictures. So fine. But when I go to pick it up, the clerk has written on the package
‘kids playing by stream.’
”

47:17. A pause on the tape.

“So that was a lesson,” he says then.

Actually I knew immediately what the lesson would have been.

I had been working this row long enough to make the inductive leaps required by Treat Morrison’s rather cryptic staccato.

The lesson would have been that no one else will ever view our lives exactly as we do: someone else had looked at the snapshots and seen the two children but had failed to hear the music, had failed even to know or care that he or she was lacking the emotional score. Just as someone else could have looked at the snapshot Elena McMahon took from her mother’s bedroom and seen her father holding the beer and her mother in the apron printed with pitchforks (
“man and woman at barbecue”)
but never seen the fat little sizzler rockets, never seen the sparklers that made fireflies in the hot desert twilight. Never heard
half a margarita and I’m already flying,
never heard
who needs the goombahs, we got our own show right here.

I knew all that.

The conventions of the interview nonetheless required that I ask the obvious question, follow up, encourage the subject to keep talking.

50:05. “What was the lesson,” I hear myself say on the tape.

“In the first place,” Treat Morrison says on the tape, “it wasn’t some ‘stream,’ we didn’t have ‘streams’ in California, ‘streams’ are what they have in England, or Vermont, it was the goddamn Russian River.”

Another pause.

“In the second place we weren’t ‘playing.’ She was eleven, for Christ’s sake, I was four, what would we
‘play.’
We were getting our picture taken, that’s the only reason we were even together.”

And then, without a beat: “Which has to kind of give you an insight into how differently an Israeli and
a Palestinian might view the same little event or the same little piece of land.”

That was one of Treat Morrison’s two ventures into the personal.

The second such venture is also on tape, and also has to do with his mother. It seemed that he had arranged to have his mother driven to Berkeley to see him receive an honor of some sort. He did not remember what the honor had been. What the honor had been was not the point. The point was that because they would have no other time alone, he had made a reservation to take his mother to dinner at the Claremont Hotel.

“Big white gingerbread job, just as you start up into the hills,” he says on the tape. “Funny thing was, I don’t know if you knew this, I parked cars there as an undergraduate.”

“I think I did know that.” My voice on the tape.

“Well then. So.” A pause, then a rush of words. “My memory of this place was of someplace very very—I mean the definition of glamour. I mean at that time for that side of the bay this place was pretty much the
ne plus ultra
of big-deal sophistication. So I take my mother there. And it still looked the same, same big lobby, same big wide corridors, except now it looked to me like a cruise ship beached in maybe 1943. I hadn’t walked into the place in twenty-five years. I mean, hell, I graduated in 1951, and I swear to Christ they still have the same piano player in the lobby. Playing the same goddamn songs. ‘Where or When.’ ‘Tenderly.’ ‘It Might as Well Be Spring.’ Now the night I’m there with my mother it so happened it
was
spring, spring 1975 to be exact, April, goddamn Saigon closing down, and outside the hotel while my
mother and I are having dinner there’s this torchlight parade, march, conga line, whatever, all these kids carrying torches and chanting
Ho Ho / Ho Chi Mirth.
Plus something about me personally, I frankly don’t even remember what it was, that’s not the point. And inside the piano player keeps pounding out ‘It Might as Well Be Spring.’ And I’m sitting there hoping my mother doesn’t understand that the kids are outside because I’m inside. ‘Mary Katherine died thirty-three years ago tomorrow,’ my mother says. Real casual, you understand, never looks up from the menu. ‘I believe I’ll take the prime rib,’ she says then. ‘What will you take.’ What I took was another goddamn double bourbon, bring two while you’re at it.”

Ho Ho / Ho Chi Minh

The war Mister Morrison / Will not win

Was what they chanted outside the Claremont that night.

Something else I found on microfiche.

The first time Treat Morrison was alone with Elena he mentioned Mary Katherine’s death.

“Why did she do it,” Elena said.

“I don’t have an answer for that kind of tragedy,” he said.

“Which kind do you have an answer for,” Elena said.

Treat Morrison studied her for a moment. “I read you,” he said then.

“I read you too,” she said.

Of course she did, of course he did.

Of course they read each other.

Of course they knew each other, understood each other, recognized each other, took one look and got
each other, had to be with each other, saw the color drain out of what they saw when they were not looking at each other.

They were the same person.

They were equally remote.

2

D
REAM, the notebook entry is headed, all in caps. The notebook, a spiral-bound Clairefontaine with a red cover and pale-gray three-eighth-inch graph paper inside, was one kept by Elena Janklow during the months in 1981 and 1982 immediately before she left the house on the Pacific Coast Highway and once again became (at least for a while, at least provisionally) Elena McMahon.

“I seem to have had an operation,”
Elena Janklow’s account of the dream begins. Her handwriting, all but the last entries made in the same black fine-point pen.
“Unspecified but unsuccessful. I am ‘sewn back up again,’ but roughly, as after an autopsy. It is agreed (I have agreed to this) that there is no point in doing a careful job, I am to die, a few days hence. The day on which I am assigned to die is a Sunday, Christmas Day. Wynn and Catherine and I are in Wynn’s father’s apartment in New York, where the death will take place, by gas. I am concerned about how the gas will be cleared out of the apartment but no one else seems to be
.

“It occurs to me that I must shop for Saturday night dinner, and make it special, since this will be my last day alive. I go out on 57th Street and along Sixth Avenue, very crowded and cold, in a bundled-up robe. My feet are very loosely sewn and I am afraid the stitching (basting really) will come out, also that my face is not on straight (again as in an autopsy it has been peeled down and put back up), and getting sadder and sadder.

“As I shop it occurs to me that maybe I could live: why must I die? I mention this to Wynn. He says then call the doctor, call Arnie Stine in California and tell him. Ask Arnie if you need to die tomorrow. I call Arnie Stine in California and he says no, if that’s what I want, of course I do not need to die tomorrow. He can ‘arrange it for later’ if I want. I continue shopping, for Christmas dinner now as well as for Saturday night. I get a capon to roast for Christmas. I am euphoric, relieved, but still concerned that I cannot be sewn back together properly. Arnie Stine says I can be but I am afraid I will fall apart while shopping, walking on my loose feet.

“I am trying to be careful when I wake up.”

It was Catherine who found the spiral-bound notebook, the summer Wynn picked her up at school and brought her first to the Hollywood Suite at the Regency and then to the house on the Pacific Coast Highway. She had been looking through the desk in the pantry for takeout menus when she found the notebook, on which her mother had printed, in Magic Marker, the word
MENUS
. In fact there actually were menus in the notebook, not takeout menus of course but menus Elena had made up for dinners or lunches,
a dozen or more of them, with notes on quantities and recipes (
“three lbs lamb for navarin serves eight outside”
), cropping up at random among the other entries.

The peculiarity was in the other entries. They were not exactly the kind of notes a professional writer or reporter might make, but neither were they conventional “diary” notes, the confessions or private thoughts set down by a civilian. What was peculiar about these entries was that they reflected elements of both modes, the personal and the reportorial, with no apparent distinction between the two. There were scraps of what appeared to be overheard dialogue, there were lists of roses and other garden plants. There were quotes from and comments on news stories, there were scraps of remembered poetry. There were what appear to have been passing thoughts, some random, some less so. And there were of course the dreams.

“I get a little spacey when I stop smoking, probably because I get too much oxygen.”

“What he’s best at getting hold of is other people’s money.”

This much I can see without going outside: climbing Cecile Brunner roses, Henri Martin roses, Paulii roses, Chicago Peace roses, Scarlet Fire roses, blue and white amaryllis, scabiosa, Meyer lemons, star jasmine, santolina, butterfly bush, yarrow, blue lavender, delphinium, gaura, mint, lemon thyme, lemon grass, bay laurel, tarragon, basil, feverfew, artichokes. This much I can see with my eyes closed. Also: the big yellow and white poppies in the bed on the south wall.

“You may have stayed at the Savoy, but I doubt very much you stayed at the Savoy and lost sixteen thousand pounds at Annabel’s.”

I have eaten dinner on Super Bowl Sunday in the most expensive restaurants in Detroit, Atlanta, San Diego and Tampa Bay.

Interview in LAT with someone who just resurfaced after thirteen years underground: “I never defined myself as a fugitive. I defined myself as a human being. Human beings have things they have to deal with. Because I was Weather Underground, being a fugitive was something I had to deal with, but it wasn’t a definition of me.” What mean??? If a fugitive is what you are, how does it change the situation to define yourself as a “human being”?

I fled Him down the nights and down the days I fled Him down the arches of the years

The most terrifying verse I know: merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.

DREAM,
the next two entries nonetheless begin.

I go to my mother’s house in Laguna, crying. Ward’s daughter Belinda is also there. Catherine has been kidnapped, I tell my mother. “I thought she came to tell you she was having Christmas dinner at Chasen’s,” Belinda says.

A party in a house that seems to be this one. Wynn and Catherine and I live in it but so do my mother and father. The party is in progress and I go out on the beach for a little quiet. When I come back my father is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. Catherine is either drunk or drugged, he says. He can hear her vomiting upstairs but doesn’t want to intrude. I run up and notice that the upstairs has been painted. This is a little disturbing: how much time exactly has passed?