The Truth About Lorin Jones Page 4

  Seeing from her face that his guess was correct, Lennie grinned more broadly. “Lolly as an unrecognized genius destroyed by the male establishment, that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

  “And what if it’s true?” Polly burst out. “But I suppose you wouldn’t see it that way, would you?” she added more coolly, trying to match his infuriatingly detached tone.

  “I don’t know how I see it,” Lennie replied after a pause. “All I know is, nothing’s that simple.”

  Since Polly could hardly object to this truism, she did not reply. For a few moments the tape recorder whispered on, preserving the dissonances of dishes clattering, blurred voices, and Manhattan traffic.

  “Listen, Polly,” Lennie began again, speaking now without irony, and smiling at her with a patronizing intimacy that had no basis in their relationship. “I’ve known you awhile now; let me give you some advice. Forget the idea of writing a biography of my sister. You’ve got her paintings, that’s all you need to make a good book. Besides, if you go on the way you’re going, you could find out things about Laura you don’t want to know.”

  You mean I could find out things you don’t want me to know, Polly thought. She made a meaningless noise — the gas escaping from the pressure of holding down this and other angry speeches.

  “Think about it.” Lennie looked directly into her eyes and put a sinewy brown hand, furred with dark hair, on hers. “All right?”

  Polly snatched her hand away. “All right, I’ll think about it,” she said, internally vowing not to.

  But during the long ride home on the bus, Polly did think about it; or rather, she thought about Lennie Zimmern. How dared he tell her what to write? How dared he try to come on to her? And not for the first time, either. On more than one occasion in the past she had caught Lennie giving her this same calculated, intense, half-erotic look — a look that said, How about it?

  What made it more infuriating was that Leonard Zimmern was exactly the sort of egotistic, willful man that Polly once used to get involved with. And though she had never given him the least encouragement, it was as if he somehow knew this, and could plug into her neurosis whenever he wanted to.

  For it was a neurosis, Polly knew that now; and one with its roots in her earliest childhood. If you could really learn from experience, she would have learned to distrust this type years ago, by observing her father, who was totally undependable. He was now on his third wife, Polly’s mother having been the first.

  It might have been better, Polly sometimes thought, if her father had just walked out of her life for good when she was four; she would probably have adjusted to that more easily. But instead, for the next five years, Carl Alter kept turning up — though never reliably — to take his daughter out for the day. And Polly’s mother, Bea, always made her go with him. She had read somewhere that almost any father was better than none, and she believed then — and still believed — almost everything she read if the author was a man and was called Doctor.

  How often Polly had mutinied, as if she knew instinctively how hurtful the experience would be! How she had balked and protested when her father appeared at the front door of their row house! Even after she’d heard the bell she would sulk in her room, deliberately not changing into the “nice clean dress” laid out on the bed. Her mother would call again and again, her voice growing shriller and more anxious; finally she would come upstairs to pull off Polly’s T-shirt and jeans, drag a brush through her matted brown curls, and cram her unwilling body into the freshly ironed nice dress, pleading in whispers with her daughter to be reasonable, to cooperate.

  Usually, Polly would clumsily let herself be got ready. But sometimes, without knowing it was coming, she would have one of her temper tantrums. She would feel her face getting hot, and then suddenly her head would be full of big noisy black horseflies like the ones at her grandparents’ farm, buzzing and stinging, and she would hear herself shout: “I won’t go, I won’t!” and before she knew it she would be screaming and kicking the floor. Even today those flies were still in her head somewhere, Polly knew, and sometimes they rose and swarmed.

  When Polly was finally ready, Bea would give her a little shove out the door, and she would stump down the faded, fuzzy-striped stair carpet, looking as cross and ugly as she knew how. Which was fairly cross and ugly, for even when she was a child Polly’s small stubborn chin, straight dark brows, and high coloring lent themselves well to angry moods.

  As she followed her father along the gritty sidewalk, scuffing her patent-leather Mary Janes on purpose against the frost-heaved blocks of cement, Polly wouldn’t even look at him. She would make her way as slowly as possible toward his stupid beat-up old car, a prewar Ford coupe that the previous owner had daubed a streaked chalky yellow with housepaint; it was known as The Yellow Peril. Her father used the back seat as a combined wastebasket and laundry basket, and it was always littered with empty beer cans, squashed cellophane and silver-paper packets of Camels, old newspapers, and grimy shirts and towels and socks.

  Polly would ignore the smile and flourish with which Carl Alter held open the door of The Yellow Peril for her. She wanted to hurt him, she knew that now: to punish him for being such a crummy father, for ruining her whole day, for not coming to see her sooner, for leaving her in the first place. Okay, she might have to go with him, because of what Bea Alter referred to as “the legal agreement.” If she didn’t, Polly half believed back then, both she and her mother could be arrested and sent to jail. But she wasn’t going to like anything her father might show her or tell her or give her. So there.

  What followed, every time, was an elaborate process of wooing. Never since those days had Polly been courted with such skill, charm, invention, and indulgent patience — the art had probably died out, and just as well. Her father never made any comment on her flushed face or bad temper. He rattled on as they drove away, telling jokes and stories, whistling or singing:

  Over the white and drifting snow

  A ghostly voice came calling:

  “Where are you going to, Polly-O?

  Where are you going this morning?”

  He never seemed to notice that she didn’t answer, or that she was sitting in an angry bundle with her arms tight to her sides, as far away from him as possible on the ripped yellow-straw seat covers that always scratched her legs.

  “Hey, Polly-O, look at that crazy red dog running round in circles... that funny sign on the truck over there,” Carl Alter would call out as The Yellow Peril, its exhausted exhaust system coughing and roaring, jolted its way down Mamaroneck Avenue. Or, “Knock-knock —” and after a stubborn silence from his daughter, supplying her line, “Who’s there? ... Victor.” Polly would squinch her eyes shut; she would set her jaw so as not to ask “Victor who?” She would vow not to give in.

  But in the end she never could keep it up. Her father always knew so many funny new jokes; he thought of such surprising things to do. She would resist him as long as she could, but it was no use: a giggle would escape her at the punchline of a shaggy-dog story; or without meaning to she would find herself running beside him when he chased the pigeons in front of the courthouse, calling, “Come on, Polly-O! If you catch one, they’ll let you keep it.” What a stupid thing for a grown-up to do, she thought a few years later; how dumb he must have looked, that tall rumpled awkward man, running after a pigeon through the dry fallen leaves and waving his long arms around, and Polly-O stumbling after him, probably looking really dumb, too. Nobody can catch a bird. So why did he shout for everyone to hear, “That’s it, Polly-O! You almost had him that time!”

  But then he praised whatever she did, no matter how silly it was. At Rye Beach, when she bit off the end of her waffle-pattern cone and started sucking the strawberry ice cream out through the hole, the way her mother couldn’t stand, and made as awful a noise as she could on purpose, her father didn’t mind. He just said, “Hey, that looks like fun. How do you do it?” And then he proved such a slow learner, so uproariously inept an
d messy, that Polly had to burst out laughing. It was years before it occurred to her that he must have been playing dumb on purpose to amuse her.

  Her father took her to all kinds of weird places, often on jobs he was working at the moment. He wrote detective stories, and someday, he explained to Polly, he was going to be rich and famous, but right now he had to get by the best he could, and do whatever he could to keep body and soul together. Would they separate otherwise? Polly couldn’t help asking. “Well, sure; they might.” Polly knew he was kidding, but she couldn’t help imagining the soul part of her father drifting up into the air over Westchester and floating off sideways. It would look just like him, she imagined, with the same lumpy face and big brown eyes and untidy black hair, only sort of smoky and transparent like the ghosts in Saturday-morning movies.

  Carl Alter took Polly to a junior high school where he was a substitute teacher, and to the offices of a magazine in Mount Vernon that printed pictures of naked ladies, and to the back part of the New Rochelle library, where worn books were rebound and there was a smell of glue and dust. When he was driving a taxi in White Plains he let her ride in the front seat with him. For a while he was working for the Fuller Brush Company, and drove around back streets selling brooms and mops and hairbrushes to ladies in three-decker wooden houses with pictures of Jesus over the sofa. Her father talked to them in an eager, grateful voice, not like his real one. They called him “young man,” and gave Polly things to eat and drink she wasn’t allowed at home: sticky fig newtons, and powdery pastel Nabisco wafers, and iced tea with wet gray sugar in the bottom of the glass. Carl Alter didn’t have Mommie’s rules about nourishing food, or about not talking to strangers or telling them personal things. (“Yep, ma’am, this big girl is my daughter, would you believe it? She just won a prize for the best Memorial Day poster in her class.”)

  By the end of the afternoon Polly would be wholly lost. She would climb back into The Yellow Peril, slide across the broken straw stubble, and lean against her father as he drove back along Mamaroneck Avenue, feeling how large and solid and warm he was underneath the old cord jacket with the shiny leather patches on the elbows. When he spoke, she would turn up to him a face lit with the wide amazed smile that had always been her — and his — best feature.

  But as they sat in their favorite booth in the coffee shop on Main Street, with a cherry Coke for Polly and a beer for Carl Alter, he would begin to shift about on the bench, to turn and look around the room. If he saw people he knew he would call and wave at them to come over. And even if he didn’t, he’d stop hearing what Polly was telling him. Soon, too soon, he would scoop his change from the wet wooden tabletop and tell her to drink up; he would say that her mother would be wondering where the hell she’d got to.

  On the ride home her father would be almost silent, or whistling in a thin, tuneless way. He would gun the engine and stutter through yellow lights, as if he couldn’t wait to get there and be rid of Polly. When he stopped the car at the house he sometimes wouldn’t even go around to open the door for her — he would just reach across and yank on the pitted chrome handle. “So long, Polly-O, see you next week, same time,” he would say, but often that was a lie.

  Once she had had some therapy, of course, Polly realized that she had still been in love with her father all those years, and furious at him for abandoning her, for forcing her to grow up in a family she didn’t belong in. She told herself that it was the chase, the effort of wooing, perhaps even the novelty of being refused, that had engaged Carl Alter’s attention. When he knew himself secure in his daughter’s love he became restive, in fact bored with her. Because that was how men were. They’d do anything to persuade you into caring for them, trusting them, giving up your independence, taking on what they used to call — not that most of them would dare use the phrase nowadays — “the feminine role.” And then once you were really caught, once you’d cut your options and were helpless and dependent, economically or emotionally or both, they disengaged as fast as they could.

  With Elsa’s help Polly had slowly moved toward forgiving her father, at least intellectually, for the way he had behaved when she was a child. She had taught herself to remember that he wasn’t much more than a child himself — only twenty-two when she was born, an embarrassing six months after the hurried shotgun wedding of two college students who hardly knew each other. Polly was barely a year old when Carl Alter was drafted into the army, and it was two years after that before he came home to stay. Many young guys in his position, she had to admit, would have decided to forget that they had ever had a daughter.

  But Polly still couldn’t forgive her father for the way he had behaved later on, after her mother married Bob Milner and they moved to Rochester. She couldn’t forgive him for not writing more often, or for coming to see her only twice a year, and sometimes not even that. Carl Alter was living in Boston then, but it wasn’t that far, she used to think, opening the atlas and running her finger across green Massachusetts and pink New York State. It wasn’t as if she were in Texas, or Alaska.

  After a while Polly had decided she didn’t care whether her father came to Rochester or not. He was an embarrassment, anyhow, with his broken promises, his unsteady jobs, his unpressed clothes and his battered old cars (The Yellow Peril had died, but it was succeeded by vehicles of the same genus, The Black Death and The White Whale). She decided she was really glad when he went to work on a small-town newspaper in California, across a whole checkerboard of colored states, because she wouldn’t have to bother with him at all anymore.

  By the time she reached high school Polly had realized that Carl Alter not only seldom came to see her, he never sent any money for her support. It used to make her furious that her mother wasn’t angry about this.

  “I don’t see why you want me to write to him,” she had complained once. “I don’t see why you can even stand him, after the way he’s treated us.”

  “Oh, well,” Bea Milner said, with her characteristic smiling sigh. “It’s not his fault, you know. Carl never had any money; probably never will.”

  “It’s his fault that he married you and then deserted you,” Polly insisted.

  “Oh no, darling. You mustn’t think that way. It was nobody’s fault. We were both so young, and we didn’t think about the future. Things happen, that’s all.”

  Which was typical of how her mother’s mind worked, Polly thought as the bus ground its way through Columbus Circle. Bea Milner was a classic example of the unliberated woman. Men, and what men wanted, always had priority with her. When Bob Milner proposed to her she probably didn’t even ask herself what it would mean to her daughter, or mind that it would be the end of her own career. And, like the virtuous heroines of Victorian literature, she would not bear a grudge, especially against a man; she was infuriatingly forgiving. A college junior gets a freshman pregnant, so that she has to drop out of school to be married, and then he leaves her, and all the effort and expense of the next twenty years fall on her, and that’s just how Things Happen.

  For years Polly thought she had learned everything she needed to know from her mother’s mistakes. So, even though what she wanted in high school was to be a painter, she took care to finish college and then take a degree in art history: she wasn’t going to end up a glorified secretary like Bea. And when she began to go out with boys, she was careful not to catch a baby.

  But, having forgotten her painful early attachment, Polly was condemned to repeat it. Over and over again she became involved with unreliable men. Usually they were Jewish, and often they had something to do with art or literature, like Carl Alter. Or, of course, like Leonard Zimmern.

  At home everything was as she had left it that morning: bed unmade, dishes in the sink, yesterday’s Times on the sitting-room floor, and a general look of dust and emptiness.

  The apartment was also empty in more than the psychological sense; and this was Polly’s own fault, the result of one of her fits of bad temper. During that awful spring a year ago
Jim had asked if it would be okay for him to ship his desk to Colorado, and Polly had shouted that as far as she was concerned he could have anything in the place he wanted. Jim must have known she’d spoken rashly, but he had taken her at her word. Saying that he hoped she would soon follow, he decamped to Denver with nearly half their furniture, plus one of the two signed Rauschenberg lithographs and the little Frankenthaler that had been their wedding present to each other. After he had gone, the apartment looked like someone who had been in an accident: its walls were scarred with lines of dust where bookcases and bureaus had stood, and by tender pale rectangles with a blackened nail hole in the center of each, like skin where bandages have been ripped off over a half-healed puncture wound.

  Even now, the rooms were half bare, Polly had read recently that after a divorce the man’s standard of living goes up by an average of seventy percent, while the woman’s is reduced by half. It hadn’t been that drastic for her; but even with Stevie’s child support she hadn’t been able to replace most of the kidnapped objects, and she’d let the housekeeper go this summer when she left her job. As long as she had Stevie, she didn’t really care about the stuff, but now —

  “I want my pictures and furniture back,” she cried aloud. “I want my son back, damn it.”

  Talking to herself. Well, they said that was what happened when you lived alone: you became eccentric. Polly had also noticed that her mood swings were wider: she was up one day, down the next, as if she were on a roller coaster, with the same sense of giddiness and danger.

  Stevie had been gone only two weeks, but already she was miserably sick of living alone. And this was just the start. For the next three months she would be wandering in a funk around this big empty apartment without even the Museum to go to. Nothing moved here now unless she moved it; nobody spoke unless Polly spoke to herself, or turned on the radio to fill the rooms with the lively voices of totally deaf people. When she talked back to them, even shouted at some idiotic adman or cheered some commentator on “All Things Considered,” they didn’t answer; it was as if she didn’t exist. Of course, Polly wasn’t crazy: she knew they couldn’t hear her, but all the same it gave her a bad, slightly insane feeling, as if she had disappeared.