Exclusive Page 5
“Ever heard of this new, modern invention?” I said. “It's called a phone booth.”
“It would be easier to call from the house,” he offered, as nice as could be. Nice like a snake. He was offering to let me use the phone in my childhood home.
My mother, key triumphantly in hand, turned back to us. “Hurry up, Jim,” she said. “Or you won't have time to interview me before Dave is released.”
I looked at my car, at my mother, at Mulvaney. I thought about what she might tell him, gently shoved him aside, slammed the car door, and turned toward the house.
“I'll make you both something nice to eat,” my mother said as she led us toward disaster.
The three of us climbed the brick stoop of the semi-detached/attached house. As soon as my mother put her key in the lock, Queen Asta scratched at the door.
“Oh, my little darling,” my mother cooed.
God, how I hated that dog. A smelly wirehaired terrier. Now it was barking. This animal belonged in the wild, or some wild other than Flatbush-Midwood-Flatlands.
“Queen Asta,” I said bitterly. My mother had purchased the creature as soon as I left for Albany, denying it was a replacement for me.
“Her name is just Asta, I'll thank you,” my mother snorted as she jiggled the door open. As soon as she did, the mangy creature jumped frantically into Mulvaney's arms as if they were long-lost lovers.
“My husband mispronounces ‘Asta,'” my mother told Mulvaney, one hand petting the pooch, the other again on Mulvaney's shoulder. “He calls her Esther. Barbara thinks she's very funny.”
I looked at Mulvaney. If he got Kol Nidre Night . . .
“Nora Charles is my ideal woman,” he told my mother. “However regal Queen Esther may have been.”
Figures he knows Dashiell Hammett, I thought.
“And why is that, Jim?” my mother asked.
“Irreverence is sexy,” he said. My mother giggled. We followed her past the small foyer into the living room. She turned back to Mulvaney.
“Barbara is worse than irreverent,” she said. “Ask her to tell you about the time she killed her kindergarten teacher.”
“Mother!” I shouted.
“Really?” Mulvaney asked.
“No, not really,” I said, annoyed. “The woman died reading us a fairy tale. I had nothing to do with it.”
The living room floor, softly lit with Mediterranean lamps in a fruit motif, was covered with a bright green carpet that had enough garish force to make the blind see. On a side table, I spotted a framed photograph, my first-grade portrait. There I was, in ponytail and barrettes, still a free and functioning member of society, despite the dead kindergarten teacher.
That was more than I could say for my father at the moment.
Quickly, I pushed the picture facedown on the table. Was it my photograph or the seashell frame I did not want Mulvaney to see? My mother excused herself to get some food, and Queen Asta, hearing the magic words, jumped out of Mulvaney's arms and followed her into the kitchen. Mulvaney looked stricken.
“She loves whoever feeds her,” I told him.
He righted the frame, accidentally banging it against a purple grape—studded lamp. A small starfish fell off.
“You'll get better-looking,” he said to the picture.
“Speak for yourself,” I replied.
We stood by the couch, which was covered in plastic. Under that was a new slipcover, green like the carpet but with knobby purple stripes. My mother raved about “the convenience” of slipcovers. Then she encased them “just to be sure.” The only thing this particular slipcover needed protection from was itself.
Mulvaney sat hard on the plastic and it rippled like a distant gunshot. He pulled me down next to him, a little too close. I pulled back. “Heads up!” he said. “Armed couch!”
“Screw you,” I said as I stood.
“Must be on your mind.”
“What?”
“Sleeping with me.”
“Mulvaney,” I said, “I wouldn't sleep with you if you were the last man on earth.”
“Barbara!”
I jumped. But my mother was still in the kitchen.
“Not all women feel that way,” he said.
“Put on some more lights, Barbara . . .”
It was too dark. I walked to the switchplate and noticed that my mother had “embellished” it, as she would say, with the same blue and white confetti from Las Vegas Saturday Nite. White lumps of Elmer's Glue popped out as if they, too, were part of her design. Mulvaney followed me with his blue eyes. When he saw the artwork, he rolled them skyward, quick and sharp, but stopped on a dime as my mother, her mutt trailing behind her, returned carrying a tray with matching fruit motif coffee mugs and what, to the uninitiated, might seem to be pale, inconsequential crescent-shaped cookies.
“Jim, you must have some of my mandelbrot,” she said.
“Mulvaney,” I said, “I hope you've got better teeth than your Irish ancestors.”
My mother shook her head and turned to the task at hand. “Sooo . . . Jim, your family comes from Ireland?”
Where else could Jim Mulvaney's relatives possibly come from?
“How interesting,” she said.
Mulvaney's chest puffed. He was obviously fond of his ancestors. I wondered how they would have felt about him.
Mulvaney began with the big picture. With him that meant going back at least a thousand years. This was not a man who dropped a grudge easily. Pagan rites. Irish uprisings against British rule. Brutal retaliations. He pushed on to the seventeenth century and to villages decimated by Oliver Cromwell, then on further to the Irish famine, which, he announced, may have started in 1845 but didn't end for five years. At least.
“The Brits caused that, too,” Mulvaney told my mother. His eyes welled into a blue battlefield. My mother was transfixed. “Even if they didn't cause it, they didn't exactly do anything to stop it.” Revision, I could see, delighted him.
We still hadn't heard about any specific Mulvaney ancestors. He probably believed he was related to all the Irish. Or they to him.
“Tipperary horse trainers,” he said finally. “My great-great-grandparents. “Until the Spencers, that is, the Princess Di Spencers.”
One should, I thought, be able to tell a simple tale about family history without invoking characters from People magazine.
“The Spencers took all my family's grazing land, and their horses, and left them with a small plot and hard planting.” As he spoke he broke off pieces of mandelbrot and made it look like he was eating it, but without actually taking a bite. I'd heard from the Non-Naked Men that he could fake drinking a glass of whiskey with as much expertise. That way he could get an interview subject drunk, yet remain sober himself. “My great-grandfather hated that life so much he got on a boat to New York. You know the first thing he saw?”
“The Statue of Liberty,” I announced dully.
“A sign that said ‘Irish need not apply.'”
“How terrible!” my mother said. “I thought that only happened to Jews and black people.” Queen Asta jumped on her lap and barked sympathetically, like the most reprehensible of newspaper reporters.
“Why don't you tell your own story, Mother?”
She looked at me, startled. I usually didn't encourage this.
Mulvaney, though, did not take the hint.
“Well, that kind of prejudice happened to my Irish great-grandfather,” he continued. “But his son, my grandfather, wound up being so rich he held the patent for nylon during World War II. Actually, I'm thinking of moving to Ireland. But to the North.”
“I'd never go back to the place I came from.” My mother was, I hoped, gearing up.
But, as if he'd been launched like an oblivious rocket, Mulvaney expounded on about the Easter Uprising of 1916, the ensuing revolution, and the deal—a bad deal, he said—that freed most but not all of Ireland from British rule. “The six counties of Ulster are still ruled by Britain,” he said. �
��That's because they had a Protestant majority there. But not for long.”
“The British were not very good to the Jews in Palestine,” my mother commiserated.
“In Ireland they wouldn't let people speak Gaelic,” Mulvaney said. “In the North, Catholics still can't get jobs. People are getting killed all the time over this, but nobody in New York covers it. The New York Times covers Belfast from London.”
“Jim,” my mother said, “would you like to hear about my family?”
Finally. Now she would hang him out to dry.
I had heard my mother's real-life mythic party piece weekly, if not daily, since I was a little girl. The sentimentality, chauvinism, and melancholia, not to mention the violence, had practically ruined my childhood.
Still, it would blow Mulvaney out the front door. He was the type who couldn't stand it when anyone else told a better story.
But my mother had one. In a million years, Mulvaney, even if he made it up, could never match the historical heft or the emotional appeal of the tale my mother was about to tell.
Not with a few stolen racehorses. Not even if one of them won the Kentucky Derby.
My mother's story had drunken Cossacks, naive Bolsheviks, chicanery, fire, and mayhem.
It had six hundred dead villagers, including babies impaled on spears and children burned to death.
Even better, she was the star.
Like a myth-in-the-making, my mother, a six-year-old child who had been presumed dead, emerged unscathed from one of the worst anti-Semitic pogroms in Ukrainian history.
When my astonished grandfather saw her, he grabbed her in his arms and said it was not only a miracle but a sign. Now he was certain. Nothing would stop them from getting to America.
Mulvaney, even with Princess Di, didn't have a prayer.
I went upstairs and called the paper to see if the copy desk had any dumb questions about my stories, even if they were from Huntington. I also left a message for Leisure Suit: “Mulvaney about to file bogus feature from Brooklyn, which is in New York City, which we do not cover.”
Bad news. My husband found an agent who wants to make a movie—and then a book—out of the Jim Mulvaney story. Look at any story that did not need to be told and there's an agent behind it.
“For example?” Mulvaney demands.
“Monica Lewinsky.”
“Ahem,” he says as if he is wearing a cravat. (As if he might ever.) “Ken Starr is not an agent.”
“Yeah, but if it weren't for an agent, we wouldn't have had Linda Tripp. And if we didn't have Linda Tripp, we wouldn't have Monica.”
Mulvaney found his agent at a bar, which is where he finds most things he wants, needs, or loses.
He reminds me that he did not find me at a bar, and this, I have to admit, is true-true. “I found you at a murder,” he says, which is imprecise.
But it does reflect the ongoing criminal nature of our relationship.
On the night Mulvaney found his agent, he had roared into the city, singing rebel tunes, ready to mow down every British soldier on the Long Island Rail Road. Hours later he stumbled home and into bed, perfumed by whiskey, maybe Powers Irish whiskey, and fueled by affection. He placed a warm hand up my nightgown and touched me in the places men find when they want their wives to fall in love with them all over again.
That done, he told me he wanted me to talk to the agent in the morning.
“The agent's in from L.A.,” Mulvaney said, as if a movie agent could be from anywhere else.
“I should have known you'd find an agent if you went to Elaine's.”
“And why is that?”
“Nobody ever goes to Elaine's and comes back with anything really useful, like a cheap plumber or an honest contractor.” We now own a house on Long Island, another thing I never thought would happen. After the Tiananmen Square massacre Mulvaney counted bodies in the morgues, compared his numbers with those of the Chinese government, and decided that even he couldn't be around liars of such magnitude. So we came home. Home for him, that is.
CHAPTER 9
Such Interesting People
“We left Felshtin, our little village. The only home we knew. We rode carts, and walked when we had to, through Europe.”
My mother had reached her refugee segue.
“Somehow we got to Scotland. And in Scotland, Jim, we got on that boat without my father. . . .” Mulvaney looked bad, but not as defeated as I had hoped. Wouldn't it be unfortunate if, along with everything else, he could tolerate my mother?
“She's winding up this section,” I said, but they both ignored me.
“My father had to come later because he had lice in his hair. My mother was all by herself, taking three small children to America. I was seven by then, the oldest. . . .”
“You are about to hear about the ultimate spoiled brat,” I said.
“Shh,” they both replied.
“We were in—what do they call it?”
“Steerage,” I said. She never remembered that.
“Upstairs the sailors were selling chocolate bars for a penny. Can you imagine that, selling them to poor immigrants?”
“I can't imagine that, Ida.”
“Give me a break,” I said.
“Shhhh,” they both said.
My mother then launched into a description of a Hershey bar that was markedly nicer than anything she had ever said about my father.
“I told my own poor refugee mother, a woman alone with her three children on a boat to a strange country, that if she didn't give me a penny to buy one, I would cry until I went blind,” she said. My mother's pride in telling this part always amazed me.
“What happened?” Mulvaney asked.
“I cried.”
“And you got the penny?”
My mother nodded.
“Jim,” she asked, “are you absolutely sure you are not an Irish Jew? Maybe you should check with your parents?”
Fortunately, the phone rang. My mother, whether she liked it or not, had finished her latest version of her life story.
“Three's a lucky number, Dave,” she said into the receiver.
My father, I figured, was already at the Madison Club, Steingut's hangout and the bastion of Brooklyn Democratic politics. That was quick. Even better, Mulvaney had been wrong.
My mother put her hand over the mouthpiece. “This is his allotted phone call,” she said dramatically.
“What,” I yelled, “he's still there?”
“But it's okay,” my mother held her hand up to stop me. “He's in a cell with two lovely transvestites.”
“Such interesting people,” she told my father. “And it will be a great story to tell at the next Board of Trustees meeting.”
Now I could hear him on the other end of the line, doing a Stanley Kowalski routine, which was unlike him. He rarely yelled. Even at my mother.
She held the phone out. I stood to take it but she handed it to Mulvaney.
“The transvestites are wearing red evening gowns,” Mulvaney announced.
I could tell that the “bright” he was going to write over my dead body had suddenly become brighter.
“What are transvestites again?” my mother asked.
My mother said she would stay home because she couldn't stand to see my father incarcerated, even if it had been her idea. “Steingut will be here soon, I'm sure,” she added.
I walked outside in the cool, dark evening air to my Nova. Mulvaney jumped in front of me.
“Let's take my car, it's faster,” he said.
I scowled.
“No girl has ever refused to ride in it,” Mulvaney said.
“Do they all have duct tape fetishes?” I got into my Nova, smoothed my good black dress, and turned on the ignition.
Silence.
Mulvaney tapped on the window. “You have jumper cables?”
I shook my head.
“Can you fix a flat tire?”
“I don't have a flat tire, Mulvaney,” I said.
“Wait outside until I slide over,” I said.
“Fat chance,” he said, sitting and giving me a pretend shove. “Broads do not order me around in my own car.”
The car's upholstery was also beyond triage. “Nice to be king of the castle,” I said as I inched in carefully. The ancient BMW started immediately. Mulvaney switched on a tape and the Allman Brothers blared. Along with its other virtues, his car, I noticed, had fold-down seats.
As we sped down Avenue I, Mulvaney coughed up what my father had said. The transvestites, apparently, had confessed all to the President of the Shul.
“You know Snooky's?”
It was a gentrified bar in Park Slope. “I once had a boyfriend who was the bouncer,” I said.
“Figures a place like that would have some Jewish guy as the bouncer.”
“And by that you mean?”
“Jewish guys do not make good bouncers.”
“Mulvaney,” I said, “my grandfather bit a Cossack.”
“Your mother left that out.”
“She tells the story a different way every time.” He nodded and smiled.
Jim Mulvaney, connoisseur of inconsistent narratives.
The transvestites had gotten into an argument with a Snooky's customer, left in a huff, and made their way in a drunken, destructive haze up Flatbush Avenue, defacing billboards with pink Magic Marker and hanging garter belts from street signs.
“Actually,” I said, “it sounds like fun.” Clearly, I needed to get out of Huntington.
“Mulvaney?”
“Yeah?”
“My father's done some small financial maneuvering of the books at Steingut's club.”
“I figured it was something like that,” he said.
“No, that's not why he's locked up. But it is why my mother believes Steingut will get him out.”
“Uh-huh.”
“If you write a story about him, could you leave that out?”