if somebody did call me up it wouldn’t be anybody to ask me out to ride on fire trails, but would just be some dumb crud a year or two younger than me with arms about this big around calling me up to tell me I’m flat as a board.” She was holding up a zero, the circle made of one forefinger, one thumb, intended to demonstrate the circumference of this crud-type boy’s upper arm, when Winnie let out a banshee shriek.
“Younger than me!” Winnie screamed. “Crud!” she asked, turning toward Lionel, with her face contorted. “Flat as a board!” Wasn’t this just the type of talk Katrinka had so frequently resorted to after stage crew, the type of talk Winnie had no intention of tolerating? Why just last week Charlotte had allowed another child in the high school to write on her blue canvas binder: “Flunk now—avoid the June rush!” “Flunk!” Winnie was screaming blindly, out toward the treetops, “as everyone knows full well is just one more way of saying that other word, the one her mother has always been so fond of, the one which is the most vile word in the entire English language!”
“You mean fuck,” Charlotte enunciated mentally.
Why boarding school was the only place for girls like this, girls with bosoms! who spoke in such a slovenly way! who by their scent alone could draw boys up and onto the fire trails!
“Driving by in sets of threes?” Charlotte asked her mother, talking to Katrinka who was not there, via Space Radio, via E.S.P. Charlotte closed her eyes, concentrated, saw Katrinka there in the mists. Katrinka smiled and tipped her chin up, whispering back: “Threes,” she agreed. She inhaled deeply on her cigarette.
It was to the Marlborough School in Los Angeles that the daughters of many important people went, Winnie was saying. Why, Walt Disney had himself sent his daughter Diane there! Charlotte, opening her eyes, saw that her grandfather was intrigued. He was not eating just then, still he smacked his lips and moved his mouth around, as if practicing for the next day’s mush. Yes, indeedy! he was saying. Why, Walt and Diane Disney—Oh, to shake such a fine man’s hand! Why, Walt and Lionel might take long walks together up Big Tujunga Canyon, remarking on the depth of the water table, on the state of the Auto Club, on Annette Funicello. He chuckled to himself, congratulating Walt on Disneyland. Why, Lionel and Walt might sit together on the Marlborough School Board of Trustees!
He was of the opinion that Charlotte might attend the Marlborough School but he saw no need for her to go there as a boarder. The school was just downtown, a short ride on the freeway, just the way he and Charlotte always drove when they went off to take Winnie’s paintings to the framemaker. He would drive her, then pick her up. He moved his lips around the deliciousness of it: he was busy adding bumping into Walt to the sum of his perfect day.
Charlotte and Winnie watched him, each from under the shadow of her brow. Each was silenced by the sight of her own doomed future flying toward her through the Nash’s windshield. Winnie wanted this teenagedness gone from her house, not brought back home every night by freeway—she wanted it stuck off and away in boarding school where it rightfully belonged! Charlotte, on the other hand, knew that Lionel, with his rapidly dimming vision, could no longer safely drive the car.
By acting up so publicly, Katrinka had always made certain there was never anything hidden about her mental illness. It was Charlotte’s father, the war hero, who was not to be discussed, though he seemed to have died in such a normal, though drastic, way. Lionel wouldn’t speak his name, nor suffer himself to hear it.
Lionel liked to sit like the sphinx in his red leather banker’s chair at certain prescribed times throughout the day, with an arm on either armrest and his mouth shaped into a hard circle, breathing slowly in, then slowly out. If, as he sat cooling down after his six-mile walk, the name was casually mentioned, he would rise angrily and stride stiff-legged down the hall to the back of the house, with the sweaty shapes of upper legs, twin buttocks, and lower back all left there, clinging, shining and indignant, to mark the wreckage of the day.
It was Winnie who told Charlotte privately what there was to tell, that the Indianapolis was Joe, Jr.’s, first assignment, that the ship went down in the deepest waters in the world, that because of secrecy of the cargo the ship had been sailing under radio silence and was never missed. The Indianapolis was sunk just two weeks before the Japanese surrender. The families were not immediately notified that the ship was missing. It sank in twelve minutes. No SOS went out. There was no escort. The survivors were in the waters of the mid-Pacific for four days before the oil slick was sighted, quite by accident, by a single American flier who happened to be off course. It took another day and a half to mount the rescue, by which time three-quarters of the 1153 men on board had perished. Men died in war, Winnie said. It was normal, natural. Children lost their fathers. Charlotte wasn’t to feel sorry for herself, nor to count herself so special.
Charlotte wasn’t all that special. Why, Winnie had herself lost her own beloved father when she was only three. Louis Rutherford had been a great man, a banker, like Lionel, but good at it. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Rutherford had had a wide and poetic brow. (Winnie invariably thumped this brow in the sepia-tinted photograph she always pulled out to illustrate this point in the story.) Winnie’s father had died alone in Hawaii where he’d gone to cure his TB. He died because of an old man at the bank, a clerk who’d coughed all over the books as they were being reconciled, which was the reason Winnie had always detested sick old men. Louis died at twenty-eight; Charlotte’s father at twenty-six. Louis had had a lovely singing voice and had played a three-quarter-sized Washburn guitar, the one shipped back to Winnie and her mother on the mainland on the same sailing vessel that brought back Louis’body for the burial.
It was Winnie who had suffered, with losing her father like that, then ending up with a daughter so abnormally bizarre she had insisted upon changing her given name when she went away to college. She’d said it was because the registrar had told her there was another girl named Katherine Ainsworth at Cal, but Winnie had never believed that tale for one single second since Charlotte’s mother had always been the type to make up peculiar stories, and was so odd, always, that she’d been the one and only girl on stage crew. Winnie didn’t see why she hadn’t picked “Kitty” for short, rather than going so far as to change it to “Katrinka Lionel Ainsworth!” And why the name Katrinka, a name that clinked and rattled like junk clanking in the wagon of a gypsy tinker?
“I haven’t had a REAL vacation in forty years!” These words would erupt from Winnie suddenly, and always as if the enormity of the injustice had only then dawned on her. Since she hadn’t had a job to go to since leaving the classroom in Power, Montana, to marry Lionel all those years before, Charlotte was always tempted to yell right back at her: “Vacation from what, Winnie?” though she never did. She didn’t ask it as it was just that type of question that was liable to provoke the great sloshes, either the blue-tinted turp or the turkey gravy Winnie’d also been known to throw.
Winnie had as little use for Joe, Jr., as she had for her own daughter. Why had he been so hell-bent on marrying Katrinka when she was only one or two courses short of graduation? If she’d only graduated, Katrinka might have gotten by teaching art in the public school rather than having to resort to ventriloquism. Winnie also bitterly resented a comment Charlotte’s father once made about the shape of Louis Rutherford’s eyebrows. Winnie never mentioned just what this insult was. Still, Joseph Black, Jr., all these long years dead, had never been forgiven for it.
Charlotte imagined that what had happened was this: that her father, who’d married into the Ainsworth family rather than been raised in it, hadn’t properly understood what it was he was supposed to have shouted when Winnie got out the sepia-tinted photo and began then to thump it in front of his nose. “Oh, my God!” he should have said. “Look at that wide and poetic brow! Why, Winnie, your father looks exactly like Robert Louis Stevenson!” He may have mentioned something instead about how Winnie inherited Louis’ eyebrows, which were
