Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales (2 page)

His heirs, typically, didn’t share his obsession, and concentrated instead on preserving the storm-window installation business he left behind, along with the thousands of sheets of glass that were meant to surmount and contain his dream enterprise. In high winds, some of the panes that had been fitted into the colossal iron skeleton would dislodge and shatter
on the ground below, leading local mothers to forbid their children to go near the shivering hulk. Nonetheless, the neighborhood that uneasily grew up around it in the postwar boom was still identified as Vertigo Park, in the way an Indian word for a stretch of woodland survives uncomprehended after Indians and woodland have long been superseded by amnesiac tract houses and demoralizing power plants. It was a favorite irony of later decades that Vertigo Park, Mother of Presidents, Birthplace of Our Carlotta, had languished as a failed suburb for years, with even the freeway passing it unacknowledged. It rose from its prenatal grave only as a ghost, as a tourist oddity of the late nineties—the childhood home of two successive U.S. presidents, the two youngest U.S. presidents, the two worst U.S. presidents, the two final U.S. presidents. Even more mythically, it was the birthplace of the suffering first lady they both shared and lost, who brought them more honor than they brought themselves, who passed from triumph to tragedy and on into the torpor of legend. If a gate has only to stand and let events pass through it, then Vertigo Park was the gateway to tomorrow, since the future is only the present left to run wild.

CHAPTER ONE
 

She was named Carlotta by accident, because the immigrant night watchman who found the abandoned newborn in a car lot ran gibbering with her to the local police, crying “Car lotta! Car lotta!” to explain where she’d been. Her birthdate was calculated to be nine months to the day after VJ Day, a product of the victory celebrations in nearby Pompey, people joked. She was the first fruit of peace, with only a surprisingly full shock of blood-red hair to hint at her lineage, and a remarkable stoic quietness that prompted both the desk sergeant and a newly arrested felon to offer to adopt her.

It was settled, finally, that prematurely widowed Almira Hover would raise Carlotta along with her own toddler, Julienne. She certainly couldn’t have guessed the two pretty girls would become lifelong partners in rivalry, like salt and pepper—or, more accurately, sugar and saccharine—and incidentally, mascots of modern history. Mrs. Hover (or “Old Mother Hover,” as her slicker co-workers called her) was an overwrought woman with a plaintive voice that reminded others of a squeegee cleaning a windshield. She had atoned for whatever passions she possessed, as well as the back-to-back devastations of the Depression and the World War, by scrupulous devotion to the sanitary, an unending ritual of domestic purification as advanced by the women’s magazines
of the period. Originally she had worked as an assistant to the Ladies’ editor at the Pompey
Trumpet
, where her late husband had been a typesetter. His eyesight had been ruined proofreading the minuscule type for legions of classified ads, for the all-but-invisible pleas for Position Sought, Help Wanted, and Home Rummage Sale Extended. Still, he’d managed to be drafted, and astigmatically wandered onto a land mine on Omaha Beach. His death, and her own fetishes, led Almira to become a food stylist, an admittedly limited calling in a small town, but she could assuage her grief and guilt by prettifying party platters for supermarket supplement photos, and, as time went by, for local television. Her duty was not to actual nourishment but to credible appearance on camera, a profession ahead of its time, and in that capacity she became a local character, a media midwife to minor advertising promotions and diner menus.

Like her shellacked turkeys and lard passing for whipped cream, Mother Hover’s attempts at nurture were superficially nice and essentially inedible, just as she herself was an imitation rather than a genuine mother to Carlotta. She gave the two girls a love-like substance, but it was a placebo that left its takers restless and with pangs of isolation. They grew up fatherless in an apartment over an unrented storefront, though in her earnest trust in external detail Mrs. Hover festooned the rooms with pipe racks, duck decoys and hunting prints, hoping the tokens of a man around the house would compensate for his absence. Little Julienne and Carlotta guessed
something was missing, and later that led them to look too recklessly for salvation in the opposite sex.

Carlotta’s childhood was uneventful, as the biographies like to point out. Every night, from her window facing the dark, listless commercial street, she could contemplate the illuminated billboard opposite, an eternally filling glass of milk from an unemptying bottle, a promise of progress and relief that was never quite ready for consumption.

CHAPTER TWO
 

The second baby they found they nicknamed Van, since he was swaddled in an empty vanilla ice-cream tub under the refreshment stand near the abandoned mall. He was further proof that the war had shattered the old morality, and was guessed to be a souvenir of the new, momentarily ecstatic atomic world, the first discharge of the baby boom. He was pale and colicky, a squaller, though beautiful when he finally fell asleep, and his hair was a striking sugary white, as if there had been inadvertent truth in packaging.

Big Bill Walker, a foreman at the tire plant in Pompey, said he would adopt Van. He had nine sons of his own, and claimed one more wouldn’t matter. It didn’t, which may have been the start of the problem. The Walkers were ruddy, similar beanpoles in descending sizes, like xylophone bars waiting to be struck, uncomplaining workers and draftees who
smoked heavily or drove the family station wagon too fast instead of ever defying their father or labor union chapter. Big Bill was a bluff man with thick furrowed brows like hillocks in a country churchyard, and he was so conscientious an official he always insisted his own sons be laid off before anyone else, to show he was no shirker or nepotist. His sons were destined to die in Vietnam, or in industrial accidents, or on vacation, but in any case profusely, across a field of years.

Lost in an already self-effacing crowd, foundling Van grew up impressed by his family’s anonymous canine devotion to democracy, and at the same time desperate to distinguish himself. He was christened Christian, since it seemed a likely guess for an unidentified blond, but he was called Van all his life, even on the presidential ballot, and at the end, when the other monks addressed him, though he had taken a vow preventing him from answering. It may have been his perceived duty to vanilla that undid him, trying to be wholesome and popular at the same time.

CHAPTER THREE