A Deceptively Simple Story

 

by Camille T. Christie

 

    My mother believed in a certain dignity of appearances. Always wear good shoes and carry a fine handbag. Never lick your fingers. Laugh softly. In her way, she would try to prepare us for life.

    Shortly after I was born—the youngest of three children—she began knitting tops on baby caps at home. It was called finishing work. Mr. Kreps, a strapping man in his forties with a German accent, would carry into our kitchen hundreds of unfinished wool hats in brown paper tightly strung with cord. My mother, who had been raised on the Adriatic coast of Italy, and who never held a job, worked long into the solitary night. She talked about her five sisters, my aunts, and of our beach house at the sea. “Birthplace of D’Anunnzio,” she would say with a lilt in her voice.

    Later, after she had a falling out with Kreps over an additional two-cents a cap, when she spent her days next door in a coat factory, she told me to think about the future carefully.

    “Do something with your life. Never allow a man to make decisions for you.”

    I was ten at the time, inventing roles for myself. We went to the movies a lot during hot summers, and I liked to listen to the English language and watch men and women in evening clothes. Batman and Tarzan didn’t interest me. The year I discovered Rita Hayworth, I let my hair grow tumbling down my shoulders. “If you keep it that way,” my mother said, “you’ll be taken for a streetwalker.”

    Now everyone wears long hair, and I have mine drawn back with a paisley ribbon. It fits in at the library where I work on the corner of Tahquitz Way in Palm Springs, California.

    I enjoy my work, but lately, I have been writing movie scripts at home. I always wanted to be an actress—to be discovered—but finally understood that it was more fun to observe than perform. I could hardly believe it when my last script, “The Outpost Cafe,” got final accep­tance from a grade B producer. None of his eighteen films was a success but they made heaps of money. And now he has asked me to co-script a story in Rome about a young woman who plans her father’s murder in a castle with the help of her mother. I went out and bought myself a lap­top computer.

    The way I see it is this, if a person can’t look for new challenges in life, then she is half-dead anyway.

    In Brooklyn, New York, where I grew up, I was a skinny kid afraid of bullies. To complicate matters, my mother allowed my nickname to creep in. “Milly, nilly, skinny, ginny,” the tough girls on the block would taunt. “Where is your Mamma now? How come she no speaka da Englissh? Huh?”

    The strange thing about nicknames is that you seldom know why or when they began. The first time I remember hearing mine was around five when I interrupted my father during a baseball game. “You’re no damn good, Milly,” he said in a loud voice. After that, the name went with a definite curse.

 

    Because I was raised a Catholic, I am very good at kneeling. In the sixties, I married an assistant math professor and slipped on a broken glass during the ceremony. They lifted me ever so carefully off my knees. Two weeks before the wedding I asked the prospective groom, “Is this conversion really necessary?” “Yes,” he said in a firm voice, “my mother would like it.” When a helpful rabbi immersed me in water with a single sheet over my naked body, I crossed my legs in a kneeling position. None of this, I thought between intonations, is really happen­ing. The night of the wedding I bought six fashion magazines and wept over the toilet seat in a plush hotel on Lexington Avenue. When I came out, my husband said, “You are the most selfish woman I know.”

    What could I do? I bit him.

    A year later, his uncle, a Wall Street lawyer, annulled the marriage and asked me for a date.

 

    Even if my father was right, my mother could not get herself to agree with him. He beat my brother senseless once for not handing him a mop. “Here, Pop, catch.”

    My brother was fifteen at the time, which made me about three. I remember the boy falling back into a tin bucket while blows steadily fell on him like bricks from an earthquake. My mother carried him to his room.

    All that week he read me stories from his bed. He held no contempt for the bizarre. Tier by tier he whispered the fate of Amontillado, ignoring my age, ignoring everything but reverence for Poe. It turned my initiation to literature upside down: the scratching, the screams, the sepulcher. “Aw, Ma, it’s just a story,” he would yell out. So is Bow-wow and Me-ow, I wanted to say. But that was years later.

 

    Bobby, my present husband, is steering me to Las Casuelas, a restau­rant on Palm Canyon Drive. We have just seen The Player at a local movie theatre. The temperature is 105 degrees. I am wearing a blue-gray Mexican skirt with a Pierre Cardin gypsy blouse and a multi-col­ored Guatemalan belt. My black and silver sandals, with one long strap leading away from the big toe, are Ferragamo’s. We are sipping mar­garitas and listening to a small combo at the bar. The tourist season is ending, but there are enough people around to keep the place packed.

    “I am going to write a script,” I say to Bobby teasing.

    “About what?”

    “Sand City West.”

    “Nothing sarcastic?” he sighs.

    From my seat I can see cool bursts of forced mist filtering down from under the eaves to the outdoor patrons. They are smiling in their fash­ionable clothes. The Hollywood set. Bobby—I still call him that—is fifteen years older than I am and thinking of retiring to Sand City West, Arizona. Some of the senior residents call it paradise, and the last time I was there, it occurred to me that where the gods dwell, so do the dead. Even primitive tribes understood that.

    “No, nothing sarcastic, a happy city unaware of its own existence,” I say, referring to one of Italo Calvino’s stories. The margarita is begin­ning to go to my head.

 

    In the sixth grade I realized I could lick the bullies with my school­work. Two of them got left back. I was on to something new, and some­how, the toughs didn’t have so much power.

    “Teach me about Dante,” I asked my mother one day. “Okay, I’ll tell you about his love for Beatrice,” she said gently pinching my chin. Dante was the hero of literature at Sixty Stanhope St. La notte che le cose ci nasconde, my brother would recite as we sat around Mamma’s hats. He had a grave and dramatic chant when performing.

    The first book report, of course, was called Dante’s Inferno. It had a cover sheet in brilliant shades of red done with Crayola. Ambitious. I was handed a copy of Tressler’s English in Action with the inscription: To Amelia, for good work in English, especially her book report. T. L. Doyle.

    Doyle was strikingly tall and manly and pronounced my first name with an English accent. All of my life I have been attracted to people like that.

    I won first prize.

 

    Even in the heat, Bobby is talking about Sand City West, city of white dreams and empty streets. A distinct flicker dances across his eyes.

    “We can probably get a mansion on the golf course for about two-hun­dred thousand.”

    “What about the environment? I say politely.

    “The environment?”

    “Yes, when you step out your door.”

    “Pools and golf courses and recreation centers.”

    “But you don’t swim, play golf or bowl.”

    “No, but you could.”

    Bobby is an engineer. He can always come up with logical answers. He loves to watch Joe Montana bent over the center, ready at the play because Joe is a winner. During the games, he abandonedly strokes his white Pyrenees dog, over and over again. Hercules, the dog, looks up to him with absolute trust. He can be counted on not to stir emotions over Sand City West.

 

    One winter night, my father came home late for dinner. While he was washing up in the bathroom, my mother quickly rushed to where his grey overcoat was hanging and searched his pockets. I looked at her quizzically. It seemed odd, out of the norm. All she could manage was a snicker. Mamma always giggled like a schoolgirl when she was ner­vous. Five minutes later, opting for expediency, she held up a small square package and flashed it at him. I stood there watching her right hand wave back and forth, her arm tensed like Agamemnon’s spear. I didn’t know what Trojans were, but it sounded serious.

    “I know they’re yours.”

    “So what.” He smiled as he sat down to a plate of pasta and calmly opened a bottle of beer.

    “What you don’t know is that it’s over,” she cried out.

    He leaned sideways and turned the little knob of the radio.

    “So?”

    The next day my mother called on Mr. Handler, an insurance man, and opened a policy naming her children as beneficiaries.

    “Just in case,” she said removing her feathered hat.

 

    In college I was tempted to write a term paper on the psychology of women and clothes. How clothes are an extension of our most private selves. Instead, I spent time with Carl Rogers and buzz words like indi­viduation, interpersonal and intergroup.

    Today, I am not so easily bamboozled. I mean, how do you trust a guy like Freud in understanding human relationships when he gave up sex at forty?

    To see the thing clearly was different then.

    I had a teacher—call him Edgar—who taught American Lit and owned a pet raven. Wherever he went, the raven went. Its wings were clipped, of course, and at that time I began to suspect that I liked authoritative men. This professor knew everyone in New York. He was well connected, but in my love-sick way, I was too stupid to know it. One day he sent me to see a Doctor Feelgood with a minor complaint. I thought I was pregnant. The doctor had what seemed to be a plush office in the East Seventies.

    “What is in this shot?” I asked rolling up my sleeve.

    “You don’t need to know. You will get better,” he said smiling from his Eames chair.

    I didn’t believe him, but went back a second time anyway until I fell one day without the benefit of a parachute.

    I learned to call such episodes experiences, life experiences, and now, here I am on my second margarita surrounded by people coming out of the mist, getting closer to the music. The band is playing Besame mucho . . . Kiss Me My Darling and Say that You’ll always Be Mine. I can feel the silk ribbon of my hair rubbing against the nape of my neck. My voice is distant and breathless like I am interpreting messages from some­place beyond. I am the kid from Brooklyn again in my Rita Hayworth role.

    “Like old times,” Bobby says looking at a waitress in her off the shoulder blouse and her large, dangling earrings. In his late bachelor days, Bobby used to fly to Las Vegas to catch a show on weekends. I once found a snapshot in his dresser of a blonde with a beauty mark on her face. Real or fake? I wondered.

    “I hope it gets cooler,” I say struggling for eye contact.

    “We can always go to another movie.”

    “Which?”

    “White Sands.”

    “Oh, no, not a desert scene.”

    People are crowding in. The air suddenly gets heavy. It reminds me of the heat one August at Coney Island. My mother pleaded with my father to take my sister and I to the beach. Neither of us could swim. I clung to the rocks while my sister plunged into the water. Two teenage girls brought her up after a third try. A woman remembered seeing a man. “Where is the father of the girl?” someone yelled out to hundreds of bathers.

 

    My mother died at Kings County Hospital. She was in a ward with thirty women because like them, she had no health insurance. After her death, I sat twisting Bobby’s engagement ring a lot. In the top drawer of her bureau I found a faded black and white photograph of her fiance in uniform, circa 1914. Underneath it was a pile of returned letters in her poet’s cursive hand. It gave me pleasure to think that he died loving her. I called Bobby from New York and asked him not to postpone the wedding.

    “Are you sure?”

    “Yes, but no frills.”

    “Not even the piper?”

    “No, please.”

    “What then?”

    “A honeymoon far away.”

    The Hawaiian scene was Bobby’s turf. He knew his way around nightclubs, while I was still a skinny kid from Brooklyn. Geez, how could he find me sexy, I thought. Taxis and tipping and calling the porter in advance for luggage, all went like glass. He talked about Pearl Harbor and the Arizona intimately. I loved the way he towered over me and moved with the grace of an athlete.

    A few days before we were married, his father, in a William the Conqueror voice said, “Remember young lady, you are getting the cream of the crop.” I didn’t know whether to kiss the finger he was pointing at me or what. I felt guilty about taking Bobby away, and asked him to stay with us for a while. When we returned from our honeymoon, we left our bedroom door opened six inches at night.

    Women often have unrealistic expectations about marriage. My mother never did leave my father. Her sisters patiently waited while they collected rent from the tenants at the beach house. In the mean­time, there were births and deaths. Some of them crowded into the lit­tle cemetery in the Abruzzi. I finally went for a visit. My uncle was in the funeral business.

    “Your mother,” he said, “why did she marry that man against her father’s wishes?”

    So that’s it. My father started out as an outcast in her family.

    “I don’t know.”

    “She had a fiance called Silvio.”

    “Yes.”

    “Gentiluomo.”

    Now in Palm Springs, California, I am wishing that she told me about her great love. “No longer do I crave the sweetness of ideal romance,” she once said, “I have been there.” But his name, I know, car­ried a kind of reverence for her that increased as she grew older. Even my father, before his death, would have considered it a sacrilege to tear his rival’s photograph.

    Of course, my uncle must have been right about Silvio being a gen­tleman. But how do you tell someone that who is dead?

 

    During World War II, when hundreds of letters were passing through the mail, and people were rushing to Woolworth’s to buy foun­tain pens, we entered an era of writing to strangers: prisoners of war, generals, senators, information clerks, the Red Cross. My mother was a woman who put her effort into friends, women who could not compose well in English or the language of their parents. Factory girls looking for romance.

    “How shall we begin?” she would ask at the kitchen table.

    “I don’t know. You decide.”

    “How about, in my soul there trembles an infinite joy?”

    More than one Italian in a prison camp overseas or at Camp Shanks, New Jersey, fell in love with his avowed correspondent. Later, at the festivities, after all the paper work was cleared, Mamma would care­fully adjust a veil and grin.

    When she was dying, I held her hand and asked her why she never became a writer. It was an innocent enough question. We were down to an essence of words. I could hear my father chatting with a stranger in the hallway. Two nurses were laughing outside their station. Tears welled in her eyes. She turned her head to the wall, away from the dying, e bello avere nell’ospedale un po di natura, meaning a window that would let in fresh air. The next day her bed was empty. The mat­tress bare. An unfinished glass of water sat on the night stand with a sign that said, NO ICE WATER FOR PATIENT. My father went to a telephone and rang a number: “Joe? My wife is dead, go ahead with the funeral arrangements.”

    It was the first time I’d heard the word dead used unguarded, with nothing withheld.

 

    “It’s late,” Bobby says, “let’s have some dinner.” The booze has had its effect. You can only feel high for so long. We slide into a booth next to some people. Over the menu I observe three men and a blonde. A gray-haired fellow has a straight torso and looks like an ex-stunt man, while another guy is wearing a Hawaiian shirt with muscles straining against the seams. The third man is gray too with a deep suntan. The blonde looks like a younger version of Betty Hutton. Innocent with a vulnerable look. She has a non-stop smile on her face and keeps nodding her head vigorously. She is wearing a Calvin Klein T-shirt with a blown-up black and white photo print of a beautiful woman screaming with rage. I think it’s rage because when she swings around, the same long-haired woman is cradling her head. I turn to Bobby.

    “Have you heard from your aunt lately?”

    “No, she doesn’t seem to have much to say anymore.”

    I think of my own aunts who write with perpetual emotion hoping to complete a cycle abandoned by their sister. “My ancestors,” my mother would say in a resolute voice, “were anchorites on the Maiella. They beat themselves ’til blood came. They filled their fists with snow and ate it.”

    I look at the Betty Hutton blonde across the aisle, and say calmly, “I have asked for a leave of absence from the library to do the script in Rome.”

    “Which script?”

    “You remember, the story about a girl who has her father thrown off a fifty-foot parapet.”

    “Don’t count on my coming. The Forty-niner games are starting up.”

    “You don’t mind?”

    “Of course I mind. It will spoil my plans for house-hunting.”

    “Something else may come along.”

    “Like what?”

    “I don’t know, something wonderful.”

    “We’ll see.”

    My eyes get misty. I slowly put my hand under the table and rub his knee. I feel that I will miss him, while a part of me is already writing in the Borghese Gardens. It is the plot that keeps me interested. I have given it a great deal of thought. Yet, I know that when the main char­acter goes to her execution quietly in a red silk dress, it will appear to be a deceptively simple story.