arch that Katrinka’s had, the arch she used to give her ironic words an even more exaggerated inflection. Charlotte, like her great-grandfather Louis, like Winnie herself, had ended up with the straight ones, the ones from under which Charlotte would peer out, trying usually to keep her face as plain, as deadpan, as Buster Keaton’s.
What Winnie always said, finally, about Charlotte’s parents was that they were too much alike. They were just alike! and they both made Winnie tired, and so did their artistic Berkeley friends. These friends had had funny names, which had served to encourage Katrinka in her own abnormality. Some had had three names—there was an Alec Something Something—and one of them had gone by his initials only. They had been artistic and they were funny-looking. They’d had drunken soirees and had talked their filthy language. What was wrong with Charlotte’s parents was that they’d both had high IQs and no common sense! This was the type that had always given Winnie the absolute pip. She’d known some like that at the university at Missoula, but had never imagined her own child would turn out that way. She had never thought to worry, and, by not worrying, this very thing had come to be.
Although Lionel and Winnie pleaded with her doctors to keep her, Katrinka was always released from the hospital. One morning she’d been put onto a Greyhound bus at Ventura with a ticket for Glendale. Lionel had spent all the afternoon and on into the evening at the bus station waiting but she had not arrived. The last bus had come without her being on it, so now he was home again, and they were waiting for the phone to ring. Each lay awake in bed in the hot, dark, and ticking house, each listening for disaster.
Though willed to so do, the phone would not now ring. If it did now ring it might be the police, or it might be Sugarman saying Katrinka had found her way to the carnival and so was there safe with him. Or it might be Katrinka herself saying she was near Pershing Square, staying with a very close dear and personal friend of hers, a Negro, a Negro mental patient, a male Negro mental patient, someone she’d met in board and care. “Oh, he may be a little cuckoo,” she’d tell Lionel, “but he’s not as cuckoo as you,” adding: “In the words, Dad, of Johnny Mercer.” If the phone hadn’t rung by morning, Lionel would go for his walk, shower, shave, slop his interminable mush, then begin to notify the authorities. He was very good at notifying the authorities, his voice becoming deeper, more authoritative with each of the calls he made.
Now as the three of them lay in bed, each was listening to the Dodger game to pass the time. Lionel had recently given Charlotte his own Sony portable radio. She’d washed the flesh-colored earplug with soap and water, then had rinsed it with alcohol, but within the plastic she still could detect the smell of his earwax. She now heard the game in three places: from within the scented plug guarded from touching the inside of her ear by the sheath she’d made of Kleenex; from the front bedroom where Winnie was listening on her big radio that had many bands, some that picked up police calls, some calls from ship to shore; and from Lionel’s old Philco console, which stood in the study next to the daybed upon which he always slept. The Philco was imprecisely tuned. At Winnie’s insistence, all the doors within the house were standing open. Since the house had come to contain someone who was so determinedly teenaged these days, Winnie was increasingly suspicious of the kinds of things that might occur behind closed doors.
Charlotte listened but could not concentrate on the events of the game. She listened only to hear the soothing voices of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett announcing the plays. She loved the modulation of their intertwining voices, the way they did not yell except in joy, how they did not interrupt. She loved the way they were so kindly, so forgiving, even to the opposing players. She loved their intelligence, their godlike apprehension of baseball statistics. She had once loved baseball, too, but had now stopped. She had stopped at the same time she’d stopped loving her grandfather. She had once loved Lionel ardently, to the soles of his feet, loved him as she’d never loved her grandmother. This love had been based, it now seemed, on his good humor and his reason, on the rules of building trashfires and the game of chess, on the sound of his voice reading aloud from the complete works of Charles Dickens. She had loved him but did no longer and she could not really remember why. She thought it might be for the way he smelled after lunch, like coffee and peanut butter, or because of the look of food ever whitening on his working tongue.
Suddenly the crowd roared. On this night, Frank Howard had suddenly hit a homer so far up into the stands of center field that it may well be the longest home run ever. The crowd in L.A. Memorial Coliseum was wild. “Lionel!” Winnie called out excitedly from the front toward the back of the darkened house, “will you listen to that?”
What Charlotte could never stand about the Ainsworths was that they ranted and raved about Katrinka and what she’d done to them but were unable to concentrate on the simplest facts of grief. Their daughter was lost out in the night someplace. She was not safe, was never safe. They called to one another back and forth about the Dodger game, exclaiming over how fine and tall Frank Howard was. Charlotte moved the dial away from the voices of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett, stopping at any bump of noise that might be the rock and roll on KFWB.
Outside, within the wired glass dome of the porch light next to Lionel’s study door, a fat moth was dying, as the men in the water had died, slowly, over time. Each of the awful sounds the moth made was amplified by the hollow shape of the dome. She heard the thud of the body as it flung itself against the heat—the bumping made the moth sound huge, at least fist-sized. She heard, too, the airy flutter of the dusty wings being ripped apart on the wires. To escape, it needed to fly up past the white and mesmerizing glow of the bulb and out into the cool soft dark, but it never would. This was one of the things she, born to a dead father, had always known: that death, like life, did also exert its own sure pull. She heard the moth fall heavily against the hot glass, heard too the nothing of its waiting.
Charlotte waited too, hoping it was dead at last, but then the thumping started. She wanted it to quit, to die, DIE! to burn up, sizzle, expire! Death she could live with: she had seen the face of it on the brick mason lying on his back on a lawn on Montecito one morning on her way to school. Death she could stand, but not this other—the moth, the man on the cross, the ones in the water, her mother out there in the dark being drawn ever back toward the shock that lit up every cell of her brain. In electroshock all the synapses were caused to shoot off at once. Then there was the rest to fall back into, the velvety darkness, the clean slate.
The mason had lain on a bright green lawn within a swirl of leaves. The sky was low, gray, darkening. The press of clouds enlivened the hues of earth: the fallen leaves were peach-colored, golden, scarlet, russet. She’d stood on the sidewalk and had looked at him: he looked as if he’d been pitched from sleep into a more terrible dream. He had died, they’d thought, of a heart attack but he looked rammed, bashed, his arms flung up and out, his mouth agape. Someone came forward and used the mason’s own dropcloth to cover him. The canvas was smudged with marks of dirty red. Still, the body showed from under it, the feet splayed wide apart, the hollow of each boot, between toe and heel, clotted with whitening clay. It was to hide his shame, Charlotte felt, at being caught dead like that, that they’d covered up his face.
It was torture to think that Katrinka was not safe. She was never safe, not on Ward G-1, where her brain was showered with the waves of sudden light, not here on Vista del Mar sleeping in the other twin in this very same room with Charlotte. Try as they might Charlotte and her mother couldn’t keep one another safe from the other two, those two, the ones calling from room to room.
She pulled the pillow over her head and tried to imagine something her heart might bear. She thought of Bob Davidson, of the smoky smell of his Pendleton, of the way he held her to him on the dance floor. They rocked in one place, as if dazed, stupefied. She was wrapped in the heat of him, in the smell of cigarettes, her face pressed to the scratchiness of the wool. She thought of his thin and cynical lips, of his narrowed eyes, of the way he watched in class but would not volunteer. He was not like Charlotte, who said, always said, who was forever speaking out, just as her mother did, each one talking as if to save her very life. Lionel
