Beautiful Kate

1

I have been back all of three days now, back in my father’s house. So where else would I find myself at this moment but alone upstairs in the old bedroom sitting at the old desk, Bic in hand, trying to exorcise the same demons that drove me out of here in the first place, at the fearless age of eighteen. Goddamn his ancient ass, but I do find it hard to like the man, even now, when I can barely afford to feed myself, let alone indulge some grizzled animosity of the blood. It has been eleven years since I was here last—to see my mother into the ground then—and in all that time he has not changed any more than the bronze doughboy posturing down at the town square. Oh, the hair is whiter and his step is less sure and he is thinner than ever. But for me it is the eyes that count, and they are just the same, only blacker and harder, if that is possible, twin points of burning moral certitude in a world clouded by weakness and doubt and corruption—my sort of world, he would tell you. And best of all, you would not even have to ask, for he has never been shy about expressing himself on the subject of his moral inferiors, who happily are so numerous that all he has ever had to do is look up from whatever cranky tome or pamphlet currently deemed worthy of his interest, and there we are, wretched sinners against his word.

Jason, his name is, Jason Cutter Kendall, seventy years old, asthmatic and arthritic and arteriosclerotic, not even rich or powerful anymore, yet here I sit at my perennial legal pad venting my spleen against the old bastard as if I couldn’t punch him out if the spirit moved me, or as if I had no choice at all in coming back here. But then, as you will no doubt discover, logic and strength of character are not exactly my strong points, which might explain why I have been traveling with Toni, a paragon of the simpler virtues.

I remember four nights ago as we rattled across the Mississippi and headed into Illinois in my venerable Triumph, both of us tired and cold and irritable. All I hoped for was a few hours of silence from her, long enough for us to reach Woodglen and—I hoped—safety. Instead she picked up again the tiresome litany of bitching that had plagued me all the way from Hollywood.

You could stop somewhere, she said. Any one of these little burgs ought to have a bar where we could score. Just one lousy joint, that’s all I’m asking.

I told her to shut up.

I’ll make us crash. She reached for the wheel, only to get shoved back against the car door for her trouble.

God, I hate you, she wept. Miserable old washed-up fart. What the hell am I doing here with you anyway? Middle of nowhere, with nothing! I should’ve stayed with Dandy—he could’ve got a part for me, I know he could.

Sure, in some stroke opera for the Princess thee-ay-ters.

It was not a nice thing to say, and not really fair either, for she has appeared in only one porno film and that was almost five years ago, when she was in her teens. But that miserable old washed-up fart still rankled. Forty-three wasn’t that old, I thought, smiling grimly to myself because I could not dispute any other part of her epithet. I expected her to kick me or at least go for the wheel again, though all she did was look over at me with those show-biz eyes of hers while pulling her mouth down into a sexy pout. But whatever she was trying to communicate did not quite come through, such is the general effect of her appearance, that pert face and long bleached hair and tan California body, which together send out a message so clear and constant that all lesser communications tend to get lost in the process.

I hope they catch you, she said. I hope you wind up in Soledad.

I pointed out that being wanted as a material witness didn’t exactly qualify me as public enemy number one.

That’s bull. It was your boat and you knowingly rented it to the poor bastards. So you’re just as guilty as they were. The narcs aren’t gonna forget about you. Ever.

If you say so.

I say so.

We had just driven through a small town and now were going past a roadhouse with a bright neon sign simulating a bubbling glass of champagne.

There! Toni cried. They’re bound to have stuff in there! Please, Greg! You can stay in the car. I’ll do it myself.

It was a scene she had already performed, probably a half-dozen times in the last few hours. At first I patiently had explained to her that a country bar in the Midwest was not the same as an L.A. disco and that all we were likely to score in them was beer nuts and boilermakers. But now I simply drove on past, saying nothing.

God, I wish I was back in Venice, she lamented.

At two in the morning we reached the far southwest suburbs of Chicago and finally Woodglen itself, which over the years had not undergone change so much as decimation. The town square still existed, but only as an arbitrary and purposeless street arrangement, considering that the courthouse had been razed long ago and the four rows of stores which once had surrounded it now stood empty or had been torn down and converted into parking garages—for whose cars I could not imagine, since the entire area was similarly blighted and empty. It was only as we went out of town on Main Street that the city began to show some life again, in the form of bars and fast food franchises and supermarkets, all shuttered and dark at that late hour.

Farther on we came to Woodglen Estates, a sprawl of tract houses on land that once had been part of old Jason’s country-gentleman farm—and my home, the place where I had grown up with Cliff and Kate. As on my last return here, I began to feel an odd oppressiveness in the air, almost as if memory were a storm moving in upon me. The estates, I saw, were in even worse shape than they had been eleven years before, identical tiny wooden ranch houses on sixty-foot lots, once gaily painted yellow and pink and light green and inhabited by young white-collar couples on their way up in the world, but run-down now, gray and ramshackle, a number of them abandoned. On the occasion of my mother’s funeral, the area was already beginning to turn black and Latino, and I could see now that it was probably solid minorities, a suburban slum surrounding the startling anachronism of Jason’s big old white house and barn—which suddenly now came looming out of the darkness like a feudal manse in the midst of the spreading huts of its serfs. Only as you drove nearer could you see that the manse was equally ramshackle, and not all that large either, just an old-fashioned two-story nine-room house. Across from it a half-dozen young blacks stood drinking wine on the street corner.

Christ, Toni said. I don’t see anyone but spades.

Maybe that’s all there is.

Beautiful.

That’s what they call it.

As we pulled into the driveway, she shook her head in disbelief. "This is it? This is what we drove halfway across the fucking continent for?"

It’s called home, I told her. A place of refuge and succor.

In response she gave me a pitying look and struggled out of the tiny car, sighing like a condemned woman. I had parked at the side entrance to the house. In front of us the driveway curved back to the barn, which was unpainted and covered with spray-can graffiti. In the gloom I could make out only the largest message: the Lords rule.

Why not honk the horn? Toni said. Stir ’em up a little.

Instead I knocked on the door and waited, then knocked again, louder and longer until finally a light went on inside.

Toni sighed. Well, it’s about time. They must all be stoned.

Or asleep. Do you think that could be it?

The porchlight came on and the door opened—on Junior, my younger brother by a decade, once known as Tan Pants, for the soaking diapers he had worn till the age of four or five. Now though he stood before me very much a man, husky like me, but bearded and longhaired, a hippie diehard in an old bathrobe. As he stepped onto the porch, a smirk pulled at his mouth.

Well, I’ll be pissed—the big screenwriter, no less. And with the usual Beautiful Person in tow.

I introduced them. My brother Junior—and this is Toni. Toni’s an actress.

Of course she is, Junior said.

But Toni liked combat. "Junior? Nobody’s called Junior."

Make it Little Jason, then. Will that do?

Toni smiled at him. How about some grass? You got any grass?

Junior looked at me. Well, at least she ain’t a stuffed shirt like the last one.

Behind him, in the kitchen, the back stairway door opened and Sarah stood there blinking against the light and frowning. She had her hair up in curlers and she was tugging an old chenille housecoat tightly around the dumpy thickness of her body. But now her eyes opened wide and a joyous smile spread on her face.

Greg? Greg! Oh Jesus!

She came running into my arms and I picked her up and hugged her and kissed her. I have always believed that there should be a law that every man have at least one Sarah in his life, a sister or mother or whatever who thinks he’s simply the greatest and loves him doggedly and unquestioningly, no matter how little he may have done to merit such devotion. Sarah, a thirty-five-year-old spinster schoolteacher, evidently feels that I’ve done all the things that she has only dreamed of, from leaving home early and writing screenplays to traveling abroad and bedding the rich and the beautiful. And I don’t think it bothers her in the least that none of these accomplishments has prevented me from washing up on her doorstep now like any other flotsam. But then that’s what I mean by unquestioning love. A gift.

Anyway, that was the scene when I made it back here four nights ago, with Toni. Sarah embraced us and fed us and fell all over us, asking so many questions that the ever tactful Toni finally suggested that she give us a little space.

Jesus, there’s still tomorrow, isn’t there? my love remonstrated.

Sarah sat there in the kitchen like a squashed bug, unable to respond even after I apologized for Toni, saying that we’d had a long hard trip and the girl just wasn’t herself. I tried to pump Sarah about her teaching job at the high school, but she seemed not even to hear me, so great was her awareness of Toni by then. She kept glancing furtively at her, as if she feared not just another reprimand but possibly corporal punishment as well. And when Toni renewed her inquiries about marijuana, flirting openly with Junior in her quest for the stuff, I was afraid that Sarah was about to crawl under the table and stay there. So I took her by the arm and had her show me to my old room upstairs, just down the hall from Jason’s. Till then, not much had been said about the old man’s failure to get up and greet us himself. Sarah had gone into his room to see if he was all right, which he evidently was. But he chose not to get up. It had been eleven years since he had seen me last, I overheard, and he could endure the privation one night more. I told Sarah that it was just as well, because I too would most likely survive the night.

In the eighteen months Toni has been living with me I have not done any writing, so she is somewhat annoyed at my new habit of coming up here alone to our room to scratch out a few words. She keeps asking me how my diary is coming and did I mention the great head she had given me last night? Did I record how utterly bored she is on this ghetto farm? Naturally, in her boredom she has taken to doing what she does best, which is to keep all available males in a state of high sexual turmoil. Junior, for instance, is suddenly much clumsier than I remember his being. He keeps spilling things and is always tripping over himself, especially when Toni is flouncing around in my shorty samurai robe. And unbelievably, she seems to have even old Jason’s juices running stronger, to the point now where he is getting out of bed at eight in the morning instead of at noon, as he has been for years, according to Junior.

On our first day here, though, a Saturday, it was almost one o’clock before the old man blew his little whistle and Sarah went scurrying up to his room, which caused Junior to snort with derision.

Weekdays I have the privilege, he said. I get to take him breakfast in bed.

Toni was incredulous. Why don’t you just put him away somewhere?

Because I live off him. Because I’m a leech.

What a neat family, Toni said. And here I always thought mine was the pits.

Sarah appeared at the top of the stairs. He’ll see you now, she announced.

Toni laughed. Well, hot damn! Aren’t we fortunate!

But suddenly I had no time for her or her pragmatic sarcasms, because my heart was beginning to pound at me and the old dryness was powdering my throat. Even if I had wanted to, which I did not, I doubt if I could have explained to her the special character of the relationship between my father and me. To love someone without liking him, to fear him without respecting him, that was only part of the problem, as was his longstanding but erroneous conviction that he knew me totally, in all the secret chambers of my soul. More to the point was the fact that I knew he always had blamed me in some willful and senseless way for what had happened to Cliff and Kate, as if I had not loved them more than life. But he never knew that, you see. Together, the two of us spoke only the language of contention.

As I followed Sarah into his room I experienced again the old feeling of growing smaller in his presence, of shrinking back to some childhood moment of guilt and confrontation. Over the years—in my four brief visits here—it has been such a recurrent phenomenon that I even have a name for it, diminishing returns, as if humor could mitigate the humiliation I feel in such moments. Toni had followed me into the room, but I was not aware of her or anything else except those laserlike black eyes following my progress to the foot of his bed.

Well, the prodigal returns once more, he said, in a voice much frailer than I remembered it. What happened? Did your Santa Barbara millionairess dump you?

A few years ago, yes.

And this is your new one?

This is Toni, I told him. Toni, meet my old man.

Jason, Sarah amended.

Toni for once had nothing to say, an affliction that my father unhappily has never experienced.

A very pretty girl. But then you always could pick ’em, couldn’t you, Greg? He grinned at Toni. His only problem is holding on to them. You all get his number eventually.

And what number is that? Toni asked, having found her voice now.

Jason pretended innocence. Don’t ask me—I’m not a girl.

You want to know why we’re here? I asked him.

You want to tell me?

Not particularly, but I suppose I should. You remember Janet?

The one before the millionairess?

Yes, that one. She’s got the police on me for non-support, I lied. And I’m broke. I had nowhere else to go.

It was a speech that Jason relished. His seamed face settled into an expression of patrician disdain as he looked up at Sarah now. And this is your hero? This is the man who’s—what is it you always say—the man who’s had it all?

Sarah took a deep breath and suggested to him that, since we were all going to be living together for a while, it might be a good idea if we tried to get along.

Of course, it would, Toni interjected. But you know men. They like to think they’re boys. And boys fight.

Jason was not amused. Are you reprimanding me, young lady?

Why not? The two of you don’t sound like a father and son—more like a couple of kids.

I could see in Jason’s eyes that he was teetering between outrage and feigned indulgence. And I’m convinced it was only Toni’s looks that made the difference, that easy, disarming sexiness which made the old martinet break into a brittle laugh finally.

Well, maybe we do at that, he said. Maybe we’ll have to clean up our act, eh, Greg?

I said nothing, as usual unable to give the man any quarter at all.

That evening, after Jason had gone to bed, the four of us sat around the kitchen table drinking beer and eating popcorn. Sarah had got out the family photo albums and Toni for some reason was captivated by them. Normally she had a hard time evincing interest in anything that did not relate in some way to herself, but the albums proved to be an exception. What seemed to intrigue her most of all were the early snapshots of Cliff, Kate, and me as children on the farm and how totally different that world was from the one outside our windows now. The open fields looked immense and beautifully peaceful, with cattle and horses on them instead of cheerless ranks of deteriorating tract houses. And the house and barn and corrals in the photos were a startling white and so well kept it beggared belief that they too could have turned to ruin in a single generation. Yet they had—don’t ask me why. It’s as if all of us—the people in Woodglen Estates the same as the Kendalls—fell into some sort of pernicious time warp in which a millennium of degeneration was miraculously compressed into a few decades.

But as Toni continued to leaf through the pages of the albums, firing questions at us, I realized that it was not decline that fascinated her but Kate.

You know who she looks like here? A young Vivian Leigh. Only blond.

No way. For some reason, the comparison irked me unreasonably.

Oh yes she does, Toni insisted. She’s got that same—I don’t know what.

Wildness? Sarah asked. She was always pretty wild, wasn’t she, Greg?

It was not a subject I liked, that of my twin sister, flesh and spirit once so close to mine, so inseverable, that I sometimes lost sight of that arbitrary line where she left off and I began, even to the point where I found myself wondering whether she was half male or I half female. No, that’s both silly and inaccurate, for what we really were together—with Cliff—was something almost asexual, a troika yoked by spirit and empathy, not sex. Not then, anyway.

Wild? I said. Yeah, I guess you could say that.

Junior was laughing, wiping the beer foam from his beard. I remember she had a name for everybody. Chief Tan Pants for me. He smiled ruefully at Sarah. "And remember what she called the two of us? Emily’s kids. Which meant, I guess, that she and Greg and Cliff were Jason’s."

Well, we did come along pretty late, Sarah said. I really don’t remember that much about her. Except that I always wanted to look like her. And sound like her. And—

Her face reddened as she broke off.

She was very attractive, Sarah finished. Very unusual.

Toni was smiling at me. "And she was your twin?"

Not identical, I said.

I’d say not.

But Sarah would not have me denigrated, even by my lover. She flipped the album to a snapshot of me sitting on the corral. He was just as attractive, she said. And he still is.

Continuing to smile, Toni looked me over, like a used-car buyer. "Hmmm, I don’t know—twenty-five years is twenty-five years."

No, it isn’t—it’s more, I said.

As the evening wore on, Junior kept at his beer as if he were being paid by the can. And with each one he emptied—and crumpled—he seemed to recover a bit more of that bitchy belligerence he had greeted us with on our arrival, before the sight of Toni in her samurai robe had begun to play tricks with his head. He kept going on about the trinity as he called us—Cliff, Kate, and me—and what a drag it had been growing up as a member of Emily’s family. And Kate had been so right, he said, dubbing them that, because that was exactly how Jason had always treated them, as if they were poor relations. It had always been Cliff this and Kate that even after the two of them were both dead and buried.

And it really stuck in my craw, Junior said. "You’d have thought Sarah and I were just some niggers who worked here, somebody who didn’t count, you know? And you— Looking at me, he sneered openly, not unlike a silent screen villain. The old man always goes on like you’re his biggest disappointment, you know? Like he hates your guts. But in the next breath he’s mumbling about what an athlete you were and how talented and all that shit, like you could’ve been somebody famous if it wasn’t for your weakness, as he calls it. His word for cunt."

I had pushed back my chair, getting ready to leave. But he reached out and took hold of my wrist.

Now, come on—stick around, he advised. Toni likes all this dirty linen, don’t you, sweetheart?

Sure, I really dig it, she said, laughing at the look I gave her.

With my free hand I took hold of Junior’s wrist and squeezed until he let go of mine.

See? Just what I said—the great athlete! He stopped rubbing his wrist long enough to pop another can. "Never mind that Sarah and I’ve been taking care of him all these years, while you just drop in for funerals and spend the rest of your time living off women and pretending you’re a writer. Never mind who keeps this place going and keeps the dudes from burning us out. No, that’s not important. No way. It’s the past, that’s all that matters with him. You and them—a suicide and a lunatic."

I did get up then, resisting a powerful urge to punch my little brother’s drunken face.

Come on, I said to Toni. We’re going to bed.

Her face was a pout. Aw, just when it was getting interesting.

Our room upstairs once had been the guest room, where Jason put up all the cranks and phonies who shared his passionate views on organic gardening, agrarian populism, and the vital importance of securing elective office for Jason Kendall. In the forties Governor Stratton had appointed him to fill a vacancy in the state senate, but when he ran for the same office two years later he was soundly defeated in the primaries. He was similarly slaughtered in a bid for a U.S. congressional seat, the main reason being his generously expressed contempt for all politicians and public leeches, whether Democrat or Republican. This sorry political record seemed to have no effect on his houseguests, however, who through the years doggedly addressed him as Senator, possibly because his mail still went out under the letterhead of Illinois State Senator Jason Cutter Kendall.

In time, though, their visits became