“Hi,” I said.
Both sisters sat beside me on the floor. “Do you know you sleepwalk?” Lily asked.
“I wasn’t sleepwalking. Go into the bathroom—the paper’s on the floor.”
Margo walked out of the room, returning in an instant with a rumpled
Daily News
. “You sleepwalked up to Bellevue Avenue, bought the paper, came home and read it on the toilet, then sleepwalked down to The Yard.”
“Unie, Unie, Unahhh,” Lily said, throwing her keychain at my legs. “You couldn’t have seen Dad. Dad got cremated, and now his ashes are in the ocean. You weren’t swimming, were you?”
“Please don’t joke about it. He knew about Boom-Boom. He also knew about your birth-control pills, and I’m pretty sure he knows about the Wild One.”
Lily looked terrified for a second, but then she relaxed. The Wild One was a French sailor, extremely handsome in a dark, mysterious, sex-crazed way. He had black curls and hooded eyes. He was noted in Newport for his reticence and distance. Currently he was seeing Lily exclusively, and that did not go unremarked on the docks. Margo and I, and even Lily to some degree, regarded the situation with mild disgust. That a man known for his aloofness to women could be so compelling to Lily.
“Why do you think he knows about the Wild One?” Lily asked. She gave slight emphasis to the word “knows,” as though she wanted to convey true skepticism, but she was nervous. I could tell.
“Because he seems to know everything. It’s horrifying, if you think about it. He actually read my mind at one point.”
“What were you thinking?” Margo asked.
“About Boom-Boom.”
“God, to think that Dad could read our minds,” Margo said, shuddering. “After he died, I secretly hoped he would come back for visits. It seems lousy that he won’t know what we do for the rest of our lives. I mean, when Lily and I get master’s degrees, and when Una moves from the soaps to the movies. When we get married. In a way, I’d like to think that he could know about all that.”
“I’d like to think it too,” Lily said. “But it’s crazy. It cannot happen.”
“If that’s all there was to it, that would be fine,” I said, and suddenly my voice sounded as if it were blowing through a tunnel. “But he can read our minds. We’ll have to live practically like nuns.”
“Nuns can’t do anything, so they think the dirtiest thoughts,” Lily said.
“Una, are you dis or something?” Margo asked, peering at me.
“Dis” was a word we had created years earlier to mean disgruntled, dismayed, disenchanted, distressed, disgusted, disheartened, disengaged, distant.
“I think so,” I said. Prickles were racing around my lips and nose.
“Do you think we should call Mom?” I heard Margo ask Lily.
“No, we’ll keep her right here,” Lily said.
I heard that, and then I went to sleep for two days.
My father made real estate deals. Books on success tell you that real estate is one of the fast tracks to fortune, but in my father’s case it was mainly an excuse to wear good suits and have lunch at places like the Algonquin. He was tall and handsome and had an easy charm that flattered everyone and made them feel grateful for his attention. His name was James Francis Xavier Cavan, and no one ever called him anything except James. His mother had made that clear from the day he was born into a family of seven girls. “Jim and Jimmy and Jamey—pansy names,” she had reportedly said to anyone who asked about the baby’s nickname. One of his sisters had called him “Radio Ears,” but never in front of their mother.
My father’s protruding ears were the only blight on his beauty. He was not beautiful in the smooth television sense; he had freckles and scars and a slightly crooked profile. But everything merged well, and photographs prove that he was an extremely handsome man. My mother was beautiful, the all-American college girl. She painted watercolors and wrote poems. She was my father’s shy, quiet counterpart. How often had my sisters and I heard the story of how they met? It was summer, the year he returned from serving in the Eighth Air Force in England during World War II. It was raining. My father was earning some fast money as an ice-cream man. My mother, wearing her shiny red raincoat, bought a Creamsicle. My father watched her stride away (the words they always used when telling the story: “I stood there and watched Grace stride away”) and then he drove his ice-cream truck right after her and offered her a ride home. Only instead of going home they drove along the Connecticut shoreline until they ran out of gas.
Unfortunately my father drank. He said he didn’t know why, but on certain nights he would fail to come home. He suffered from black moods, fits my sisters and I called “Black Ass.” When I was old enough my mother would take me out to look for him, and we would find him at bars like the Blue Danube or the Wonder Bar, buying rounds for everyone, charming the waitresses, telling stories. One time my mother stayed in the car, keeping it running, while I went inside to get my father. He was sitting at the bar, telling a story to a rapt audience of the bartender and two patrons. I stood in a dark shadow behind a coatrack and listened.
“He’s sitting on a fortune in real estate,” my father was saying, “and there’s nothing anyone can do. He’s a hell of a guy, a real gent, but he doesn’t have a clue about what I could make happen. I mean, it’s waterfront property, honest-to-God waterfront. You can see clear to Orient Point. New London’s a halfway point for—what? Boston and New York? Providence and New Haven? Hartford and Riverhead, for godsakes. On a train line with ferries and a major airport nearby. But will the guy sell? No way.” My father chuckled and slugged from his martini. He whirled his finger in the air, a signal for the bartender to pour another round. “He wants to sit on the Goddamn place, just because he was born there. I can see his point. He’s a sentimental guy, a real family man. He wants to keep the place for his kids. But I’m telling you, so help me God, you put a hotel there, or a big marina, or even a
heliport
, and the sky’s the limit. That bastard could buy twenty waterfront parcels and give them to his kids and all their goddamn friends.”
I hated to interrupt. His friends were drooping slightly, but they were all nodding in sympathy and admiration: here was a guy who could throw the word “heliport” around in general conversation.
“Dad,” I said. “You have to leave.”
“What the—” he said, spinning around on his stool. He smiled when he saw me. His eyes grew bright for an instant, and he looked proud. “Fellas, will you look who’s here? Wasn’t I just telling you about this one?”
Both friends glanced up from their drinks, and the bartender nodded.
“This is my daughter Una. Just graduated from high school and next year is going to drama school in New York. What an actress! Ever seen the play
Wonderful Town
?”
No one replied.
“I mean it—you, Fred? You ever seen
Wonderful Town
?”
“I sure have,” Fred said. “It’s a really good show.”
“Bullshit—pardon me, Una angel. But you haven’t seen a good show until you’ve seen Una in
Wonderful Town
. She brought down the house. Wasn’t I just telling you fellas how she brought down the house?”
“And now she’s off to the big city,” the bartender said. “Where are you going to study, hon?”
“At Juilliard,” I said. “Dad, we have to go.”
“Where are you taking your old father?” he asked, still smiling.
“Home. You have a conference call.”
“Oh, a
conference
call,” Fred said, nodding and making an exaggerated frown. “Big-shot papa you got there.”
“We’d better go before they hang up,” I said.
When we were outside, my father sped up, leaving me behind. “What the hell, coming in and embarrassing me like that. You damn kid. You get your own ride home.” He tried to open the door to his car, but it was locked. He didn’t notice my mother’s car idling in the space beside him.
“That car,” I said, pointing at my mother’s. “You can’t drive—you’ll kill yourself.”
“Damn smart aleck. Embarrassing me like that.”
“This place is a sleazehole,” I said just before opening the front door to let him in.
He wheeled to face me. “What are you talking about? You were inside.”
“It’s a dump.”
“Right, a dump with paneling like that. You don’t know anything about real estate, Una. Your father goes first class or he doesn’t go at all.”
“Oh, I know
that
,” I said. Then I climbed into his car and drove it out of the parking lot behind him and my mother, leaving the sign with the words “The Blue Danube” and the bubbling champagne glass flashing in blue neon behind us.
At home my mother no doubt threw him into bed, said a few words over him as if he were a cauldron and she could actually affect its contents, and settled down with a cup of milky tea at her easel. I would find my sisters. For years it seemed that they had no idea at all of what was happening. In those days we would sit on our beds in the room we shared and play Hubbabub or Antique Store (games we had invented) or talk about places like Los Angeles, South Africa, New Orleans: places that seemed too bizarre to be real.
Years later, when they understood the truth about our father’s late nights and could see how sad it made me to drag him out of places like the Blue Danube, they became violently protective of my well-being. They became my emotional Mafia.
“Look what that creep’s doing to you,” Lily would say, angrily gritting her perfect teeth when I would walk into the house sobbing behind my wobbly father and silent mother. “Why do you let him get you? He’s got a real bad case of Black Ass—you should just let Mom go alone. Let them pick up his lousy Cow tomorrow.” He drove a Volvo station wagon, and to us it had the noble, graceless lines of a cow.
“I can’t,” I would sob. “They need me.”
“This is what he needs,” Margo would say, tipping an imaginary bottle upside down and glugging.
“Yes, that is all he needs,” Lily would say. Then she would walk into his bedroom and stand at the foot of his bed, glaring at him while he smiled and waved and said things like “Hey, sweetheart, what’s doing?”
One Christmas Eve day, during an ice storm, my mother, Lily, Margo, and I went shopping for nuts, cranberries, stollen, figs, turkey, and white onions. On our way home from the market, I noticed Margo nudge Lily. Both heads snapped to see something out the window. They glanced at me but were silent. “What?” I mouthed silently, but they only shook their heads. Our mother was concentrating on not sliding off the road. Glare ice made the asphalt gleam like a black river. At home we unloaded the car. My mother and I started making figgy pudding.
“Where are the girls?” Mother asked.
“I’ll look.” I ran upstairs but they were not in our room. Then I checked the living room and TV room and finally all the rooms in the house.
That look
. Suddenly their secret glance made sense. It had something to do with Andrew Wilson or Aldo Fabbiano or some other current loved one. I returned to the kitchen.
“They’re doing homework,” I told my mother.
“On Christmas Eve? They have the entire vacation.”
“They’re also wrapping presents.”
We stirred the pudding and added a small dose of rum. Presently, because I had been listening for it, I heard the front door close quietly. I heard my sisters go upstairs.
Forty minutes later, when it was past six and becoming increasingly clear that it was going to be a night out for our father, the front door opened.
“Goddamn pukes slit my tires,” his voice croaked.
“James, what happened?” my mother asked, hurrying into the front hall. She stood there, regarding her rumpled husband with a thin-lipped stare.
“Goddamn pukes slit my tires. Four sixty-dollar Michelins
kaput
.”
“Where did this happen?”
“Down at Frank’s. Down the corner.” He meant Frank’s Tavern, a mile from our house. He rarely drank so close to home, but he apparently figured that he would make it the first of several Christmas Eve social calls: Ebenezer Scrooge spreading cheer to one and all. He rubbed his hip, and I noticed that his Chesterfield coat was torn.
“What happened to your hip?” I asked.
“Slipped on the goddamn ice. Fell flat on a stick.”
“And you tore that
coat
?” my mother asked. “Did you break anything?”
“I don’t know,” my father said, patting his pockets for cigarettes. He walked into the living room and sat heavily down on a green horsehair chair. “Walked the whole way home in a damn ice storm.” For the first time since coming in, he met my mother’s and my eyes. “Did you know that? Ice is coming down, but it’ll turn to snow. Santa needs a nice snowfall for midnight, sweethearts. We’ll hear the angels singing tonight.”
Upstairs I found Lily and Margo. “Can you believe it? Someone slit his tires.”
“Meet Vigil,” Lily said.
“Meet Ante,” Margo said, giggling.
“You two slit his forty-dollar Michelins?”
“You bet we did,” Vigil said, slipping her strong arm around my shoulders. “Couldn’t have our little search party going out on Christmas Eve.”
“
Sixty
-dollar Michelins,” Ante said.
“You’re both going to get coal in your stockings,” I said.
But the next morning, sober and happy, our father wakened us at sunrise with mugs of hot chocolate in our beds.
“Hohoho,” he said, bearing a tray. “What happened to the old days when my girls couldn’t sleep past three
A
.
M
. before they had to check for Santa?”
My sisters and I snuggled under our separate quilts and sipped our steaming-hot chocolate. I felt it burn a blister on the roof of my mouth. Our father sat on my desk. “Come on, come on. Drink that stuff and get hopping. Your mother’s downstairs waiting for you.”
Ice covered the inside of our windows, making feathery patterns through which the pink light of dawn shined. We all yawned. Downstairs bacon crackled and the odor of wood-smoke drifted up. Our father walked to one window and made circles in the ice with a nickel. I looked across the room at Lily and Margo, snug in their beds. They shrugged, and Lily did what all three of us wanted to do: blew apologetic kisses to our father, behind his back.