West of Rome Read online

  “No danger of rabies,” I said. “He’s had his shots.”

  Denny smiled crookedly. ‘That’s the best news I’ve had in weeks. Now he can chew up everybody on The Point.”

  “I have the solution,” Tina said.

  I waited for it.

  “Have him castrated.”

  It shocked me. ‘That’s a living death. I’d rather see him six feet under.”

  “You will,” Colp said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “The only humane thing to do with a fag dog is put him out of his misery.”

  “There’s no proof he’s a fag. He just hasn’t found the right female.”

  They scoffed and hooted me down, following with a block of icy silence as they stared.

  “I want to talk to you. Dad,” Tina said.

  She marched out of the kitchen and I followed her outside to the patio. She was trembling, her eyes hot with determination, anxious to spill it out.

  “I’ve made up my mind. The dog goes, or I go.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t care. I’ve been awfully patient, and so has Rick. Get rid of your dog or I’ll leave.”

  She had a bird-like intensity, a totally visceral young woman given to unpredictable explosions, screams, and throwing things. And she always got her way. Her threat was meaningless. If I got rid of Stupid and she felt so inclined she would run away all the same. If I had to choose between dog and daughter I would have to choose my dog, but with regret. She wasn’t really giving me a choice. She simply wanted the dog out of her life.

  “The decision is yours,” I said. “I’m not giving up my dog.”

  She breezed past me into the house.

  FOURTEEN

  Next morning Denny had penicillin and returned from the doctor’s office on crutches. There was a change in him, a smiling placidity, a tolerance not usual in a youth at war with the world.

  I looked dismally at the crutches.

  “Don’t take it so hard,” he smiled. “Everything’s fine.”

  The doctor had suggested he stay off the injured leg for three or four days, but he insisted on going to work.

  “No problem. I never get out of the cab anyway.”

  The cheerfulness was puzzling, yet refreshing. Harriet thought he was being very brave. As we walked out to the garage he paused on the crutches to greet Stupid and rub his ears.

  “Good dog,” he said.

  He threw the crutches into the back of his rattletrap Buick and refused my help when he got in behind the wheel. He kissed Harriet, said so long to me, and went rattling down the road.

  “A real nice kid,” I said. “I had him all wrong.”

  Three days later he emerged from his room in his army uniform for the bi-monthly reserve duty at Fort MacArthur. He was still on crutches.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Who needs a crippled soldier? You can’t march. You can’t drill. Stay home and get an excuse from the doctor.”

  “Duty calls.”

  He dangled his right leg six inches from the floor.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “What’s a little pain?”

  That sounded phony, but I didn’t say anything.

  Two weeks later he was still limping about on the crutches, at peace with man and beast alike, smiling like St. Francis, a glow of spirituality in his calm face as he gazed at the far horizon of the sea.

  “How’s the leg?”

  “All healed.”

  He lifted the trouser to show me the hardened scars.

  “Why the crutches?”

  “It still hurts when I put pressure on it.”

  “What does the doctor say?”

  “A strange case. He’s sending me to a neurologist.”

  Strange indeed.

  The neurologist found it baffling and advised further tests.

  “Surely it can’t be permanent,” Harriet said.

  “You never know, Mom. You have to take the bitter with the sweet.”

  We were having coffee in the kitchen at the time, the crutches cropped against the wall beside him.

  “Well,” I said. “It’s one way of beating the army.”

  Our eyeballs met.

  “I don’t want to beat the army. All that’s changed. I like the army. It’s been great.”

  It was a simple statement, shorn of guile, delivered with conviction, the sophistry of a talented actor.

  “Good for you!” his mother said.

  “I intend to serve the full six-year hitch. The army has a lot of opportunities, and I’m going to take advantage of them.”

  “What about your acting?” I asked.

  “For the birds. I’m settling down, shaping up. I want a useful life.”

  ‘The army can’t use cripples. If you don’t get off those crutches you’ll be discharged.”

  “I’ll make it. Give me time.”

  Our eyeballs collided again. Jesus, what a liar.

  FIFTEEN

  Three weeks later Rick Colp and Tina went over the hill. It came as no surprise. For days Colp’s bus had been parked in the driveway while they made preparations for the break. Tina bought yardage for flower print curtains and matching seat covers, sewing the material together while Rick pulled the engine and overhauled it. He also wired the bus with twin speakers for the cassette player. The surfboards were racked to the top of the cab.

  Some of the zing and romance went out of the trip when they realized that we made no protest about their going off together. It really was the only way to handle it, for they were determined and there was no way we could have prevented them. As for their sleeping together, they had done it for months, so why quit now? We assumed they would one day marry, but that wasn’t mentioned either, lest Rick flee from parental pressure. The only intrusion upon their privacy was an extra supply of pills Harriet slipped into Tina’s suitcase.

  We gathered in the driveway for farewell and Harriet wept, but I had no trouble staying calm and dry-eyed. From the beginning I was never a part of my daughter’s world. She had always been ferocious to the point of instability, and there was only one workable strategy—to let her have her own way in all things. Observing her now, in white levis and a red blouse, her hair in two braids, her beautiful face angelically contravening the disposition of a wildcat, I thought how sad it was that we were strangers. She did not dislike me. She loved me but thought I was a nuisance.

  ‘Take good care of her,” I said, shaking hands with Rick.

  “You take good care of your dog.”

  Stupid rested on the concrete, staring heavy-lidded and adoringly at Colp. Rick went over to him and poked him gently with the toe of his moccasin, saying, “Goodbye, Stupid.”

  The dog got to his feet, crossed to the rear wheel of the bus, raised his leg, and diddled on the hub cap, his way of exercising the territorial imperative.

  I kissed Tina.

  “When’ll we see you again?”

  “Who knows?” she sighed. “Some day…”

  “Where are you going?”

  “North.”

  “Big Sur?”

  “Maybe.”

  We knew nothing of Rick’s finances, but Tina had withdrawn the six hundred she had in a savings account, so there was no concern over the basics of food and lodging, at least not for a while. I figured they’d float around until the money was gone, and then they’d come back to Point Dume.

  Mother and daughter wept at the final embrace. Blinking away tears, Tina said, “You be nice to her, Dad. You hear me?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I mean it,” she said sternly.

  They stepped aboard and I had a last look inside the curiously stark tube. Despite curtains and color and a new carpet it had a Mickey Mouse artificiality and lacked warmth and comfort. I gave them two weeks. With waves and thrown kisses they scooted away toward the highway. My thought was: one down and three to go, but it seemed premature.

  In my heart though, I hoped they were gone f
or good, for I wanted Tina’s bedroom as my study. It had the best view of the ocean, with two large windows facing south, the finest room in the house. It also had built-in bookcases and an adjoining bathroom with a tub.

  But I was dreaming. They were back in a week, a one night stop-over to do their laundry and wash the bus. Tina raided the kitchen for pots, pans, seasonings, dish towels, a garbage can, a broom and dust pan, a clock, a steam iron and an ironing board.

  Three days later they were back again, this time to wash Tina’s hair and use the hair-dryer. They made off with a carton of cigarettes, a jug of wine, and a gallon of olive oil. Thereafter that was the pattern. They never moved farther south than San Ysidro, and every night there was a collect telephone call to Harriet. Between the telephone and raids on the cupboard she was more expensive than had she remained at home.

  I told her, too.

  “Fish or cut bait. Are you living here, or not?”

  “Of course I’m not. I’m just visiting.”

  “Fine. I’m moving into your room.”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  She marched out to the bus with an armload of blankets. Later I discovered that she had locked the bedroom door with the key, which couldn’t be found.

  I was wrong in believing we would never lose her. On March 10, her birthday, she telephoned from Santa Cruz to tell us she and Rick had been married that afternoon and were on their way to Canada. It left me groggy and incredulous at my miscalculation and brooding over my sins against her. To paraphrase the song, it was always so nice to have a girl around the house, and now she was really gone. She had been very important to the fabric of our lives, the bright thread that gave the pattern color, adored and respected by her brothers, cherished and spoiled by her mother, and a beautiful mystery to her father.

  Over the phone she laughed and said that I could have her bedroom now, and that the key was under the hall rug at the door. A few minutes later I slipped into the room, lay on her pillow and got a whiff of her scented hair as I looked at her dolls sitting along the top of the walls staring at me with glass eyes. I thought, oh shit, and started to cry, remembering that I had spanked her severely when she was eight. Already her room was part of the house that was mystically dead, a place of wistful ghosts. I touched her dresses, her belts and ribbons, her things on the dresser, all throbbing with the pulse of her fingers.

  While Harriet sobbed on the patio I went to my room and wrote Tina a letter I knew I would never mail, four or five wailing pages from a kid who had dropped his ice cream cone. But I got it all said, my guilt, my agony for forgiveness. I read it over and cried at the loveliness of the phrasing and thought it very beautiful in some places, and even considered the possibility of expanding it into a short novel, but I was an old hand at being spellbound by my own prose, nor was it painful to tear up what I had written and drop it into the wastebasket.

  I did not move into Tina’s room.

  The morning after her marriage I found Harriet drinking black coffee and blazing for a fight, her eyes raw from crying.

  “Well,” she said. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You gain a dog, and I lose a daughter.”

  “She didn’t elope with the dog. She eloped with Rick Colp.”

  “The dog drove them away.”

  There was only one way to avoid a shoot-out. I threw my clubs into the car and cut out for Rancho, where I teed off with three drunks. And as it must always happen to a man with the salt on him, they took me for six bucks.

  SIXTEEN

  A week later we had another telephonic chiller. It came at four in the morning and both of us said hello together, Harriet from the bedroom and I from the study. It was Katy Dann, breezy as always.

  “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad.”

  “Why are you calling at this hour?” Harriet said.

  “Dominic’s been hurt.”

  “What happened?”

  “He got into a fight.”

  “Who with?”

  “You’ll have to ask him.”

  “Blacks?” Harriet asked.

  “Never mind that,” I cut in. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s better now.”

  “Where is he?”

  She gave the address of an apartment house on Pier Avenue in Venice. I told her we’d be there in thirty minutes. Harriet was ready before I was, a coat over her nightie, a scarf holding her hair. We ran to the garage and I ripped through the gears.

  With the Coast Highway deserted I strained the Porsche past a hundred and we were in Santa Monica before I dropped her down to seventy-five. Finally Harriet broke the silence.

  “Niggers,” she snarled.

  I glanced at her. She was Medusa, the scarf loose and trailing, the breeze exploding her hair in all directions. Her chalky face without makeup had the rigidity of a gravestone and her eyes were unblinking with rage and concern. Frightful. The unknown. A stranger.

  Oh the years, the years! I found myself drifting back a quarter of a century to an autograph party in San Francisco to celebrate the publication of my first novel, a slim blonde sensuous girl in a tweed suit, blue-eyed and round-mouthed, talking to me atop the Mark Hopkins hotel, her wine-wet lips kissing mine, her smile melting my bones as I took her hand and led her to the elevator and down into the street on a cold windy afternoon. We walked all over Nob Hill until the sun went down, until I was hoarse from talking.

  How beautiful she was! How accurate the sweet prophecy in her eyes, where I saw the mountains and valleys of my whole life and even counted four children and a shelf of great novels. What would have happened to us if we had not left that party? Where would we be now? Certainly not on the Coast Highway at four-thirty in the morning, racing to the rescue of a son conceived that mystical Nob Hill afternoon so long ago.

  We found the apartment house on the hill above Venice beach, a brand new structure surrounded by full grown palm transplants. It looked expensive and impressive in contrast to the shabbier dwellings around it. I pulled into the parking area and as we got out Harriet picked up a screwdriver from the back seat.

  “What’s that for?”

  “None of your business!”

  I snatched it from her hand and threw it back into the car. Then we went inside.

  It was the second apartment on the ground floor. I rang the bell and Katy opened the door immediately. She was in a tight-fitting simulated leopard-skin outfit complete with a tail.

  “Hi, Dad,” she smiled, pressing a kiss on my cheek. With a swishing leopard tail she held out her arms to Harriet.

  “Mom!”

  “Don’t you dare kiss me!” Harriet said, muscling past her. “Where’s my son?”

  The living room looked plundered, a couple of broken lamps on the floor, overturned chairs, a smashed coffee table, food and dishes spilled over the carpet, and here and there the splatter of blood.

  Katy crossed to a door.

  “In here.”

  Dominic sat against the headboard of an unmade bed, a bloody towel to his nose, crimson streaks down his shirt and on his pants. Both his eyes were purple and one almost swollen shut. Underneath his shredded shirt were red bruises across his ribs. He did not speak but his eyes smouldered with resentment and he shivered as if in fever. Harriet sprang to his side but he pressed himself against the headboard and wouldn’t permit her to touch him.

  “Okay, okay,” he mumbled under the towel, backing away.

  Then he removed the towel and we saw his bruised and bloated lips. His nose had stopped bleeding, blood caked blackly at his nostrils. Harriet rushed into the bathroom, fumbling about, opening drawers, saying, “Aren’t there any towels in this pig sty?” She emerged with a wad of water-soaked toilet paper and sat on the edge of the bed, dabbing at the blood stains on Dominic’s chin and around his nose.

  “Who did this?” she said. “Who were they?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, his eyes going to Katy leaning cold
ly in the doorway. Harriet glared at her.

  “Who were they?”

  Katy wasn’t talking either.

  “Did you call the police?” Harriet said. She looked at Katy. “I’m talking to you. Did you call the police?”

  “Just drop it, Mother,” Dominic said.

  “I won’t drop it!” Harriet shouted. ‘They were Panthers, weren’t they? They attacked you for fooling around with one of their women.”

  “Oh, Christ, Mother!” Dominic said.

  Katy Dann shrieked with laughter, doubled over with laughter, staggering into the living room, her leopard tail bobbing up and down as she fell across the divan, torn by laughter.

  “Panthers. Oh, Mom! You’re priceless. Panthers! It’s too much!”

  It all sailed past Harriet as she did what she liked best—taking care of her boy. She helped him slip his coat over the torn shirt and both of us steadied him to his feet. He stood with rigid dignity, brushing us away, and we followed him into the living room.

  Harriet opened the door to the hall.

  “Let’s get out of this terrible place,” she said.

  Dominic stood there irresolute and confused, his eyes meeting Katy’s.

  “Goodbye,” she smiled.

  He walked out into the hall without answering or looking back. I was the last to leave.

  “So long, Dad,” Katy said.

  “So long, Katy.”

  I closed the door.

  We reached home as the sun came up red-eyed and gasping for air out of the eastern smog. All the way we had been silent, aware of the upheaval in Dominic, the earthquake in his soul, a shattering deep torment too terrible to address. Harriet held his hand for a while, but it must have been very cold and repellent, for she released it, and we felt more like fools than rescuers. We were driving him away from Katy but he was not with us. He was back in Venice with her.

  I made coffee while Harriet filled a hot tub, washed his wounds, and soothed him with healing oils. He was almost himself again when he came into the kitchen in a white terry robe. He looked at his reflection in the mirror beside the cupboard and leered in disgust at his discolored eyes and battered face. He was deeply troubled, psyched out. I poured his coffee but he refused it and went down the hall to bed.