There Should Have Been Castles Page 5

  She posed for him in his studio but knew enough to not take her clothes off since that was what every artist’s model did as soon as the chips were down (and that portrait of her was the one that hung over our living room mantel). He offered to pay her for her time but she refused, saying something like, “I just want to be in your company, to watch you work. I think you’re wonderful.”

  He responded very well to her lying candor and physical withdrawals. He liked her innocence and was charmed by her virtue. More than anything else, he liked the fact that, in the middle of wicked, wicked Philadelphia she had managed to retain her lovely virginity.

  Mother was smart for she was a virgin, which she quickly proved by bleeding all over the place when he finally got her onto the veranda. Poor father, so delighted that he had brought down immaculate Miranda, never minded that there was a pool of blood in his studio that looked like the French Revolution. She cried and she cried. Oh, how he had hurt her. Worse, he had stolen her jewel. She didn’t want to see him again, ever—how could she? And would he please take her home this instant!

  He called the next day but she would not speak to him. He found her later, in the diner, once again on duty as a waitress (surprise!). He sat down at her table and romantically ordered spare ribs. No fool, she again dropped them into his lap and, after two weeks of soy sauce, they were married.

  From then on it was all downhill. She would have preferred it to have been otherwise but was not surprised at his dullness because dull was the color he had flashed from the beginning. She tried, really tried, hoping that he would develop into a more acceptable fellow. She was dutiful, attentive, and loving; but after five years and two daughters, she was unable to tolerate the boredom of being with him, a boredom made all the more tedious by his inability to develop as an artist. He became duller and duller, finally losing interest in her in bed. So she started moving around on her own.

  She and my father had an arrangement (Ah!). They had never really sat down and worked it out, it just happened. She could come and go as she pleased as long as it was with some semblance of respectability. He was content to stay at home and paint Utah.

  Maggie didn’t go into any great detail about how she spent her time away from home. Just said it was “charity work.” And the only reason she had told me as much as she had was that she was leaving my father and wasn’t sure just when she’d see me again.

  I cried because I felt that I’d just met her, and she cried, too. She would try to keep in close touch with me but that would be impossible for a while as she would be living in Europe with a man whose name she wouldn’t tell me.

  She hoped I’d understand. I hoped I would, too. But at the time it hurt too much for me to make any promises other than that I’d try to make the best of it until she could straighten out her life, get a divorce, and maybe send for me.

  She gave me a tearful hug and swept out of my room like the tail end of a nice dream. It was all screwed up. A week before I had hated her and loved my father. Suddenly it was the other way around. And in the process I had lost them both. I had a mother and I had a father, but damned if I wasn’t an orphan.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Ben

  1949

  On the day of my last good cigar, I quit my job at the Rockwell Greeting Card Store. I don’t know why I quit. Certainly I had no other job. It just somehow seemed the thing to do and so I did it, chalking the whole pointless gesture up to splendid symbolism.

  To further establish the end of an era, I went into a cigar store and bought a package of White Owls, six for a quarter. Lighting up, I most definitely felt the rumble of Somerset Maugham revolving in his grave, even though the man was still alive at the time and, as far as I knew, in the best of health.

  I wandered New York, moseying through Abercrombie’s main floor where everything was leather and crystal and predictably depressing. For I had decided to be depressed; I had earned it. Over the years I had learned that the best way to deal with setbacks and failures was to indulge in the depressions they inspired rather than smile and say “pip-pip” and pretend that life was a maraschino. For always, after a day or two of bottomless depression, I would become so sick of it that all the world suddenly looked good. It was the Ben Webber theory of relativity, and it worked:

  So, after three days of self-imposed gloom, I reentered Abercrombie’s and applied for a charge account, giving my last year’s income as $25,000 and using as personal references Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, two men so high up in 20th Century-Fox that a fella had to be an eagle to get an appointment.

  Not that I ever thought Abercrombie & Fitch would issue me a charge card, it was just that I wanted them to know my name, to be ready for me when my time came, and for the imperious bitch in the New Accounts window to one day have to explain to her superiors why she had failed to issue Benjamin Rex Webber, prominent eye surgeon and leading tenor at the Met, an Abercrombie & Fitch credit card. Couldn’t she see, even then, that the young man was going places—like to Saks Fifth Avenue, where he similarly applied and similarly was turned down? Was she insane?

  With a jauntiness to my gait I went into Thomas Begg’s and bought an eleven-dollar fedora of the ilk of Don Cook’s. I didn’t like the feather it flew and said as much to the salesman who, anxious to please, pulled out a box of feathers that would have given a pea hen an orgasm. After a half hour of comparing color and texture, I made my selection, and not until I hit the street did I realize that I had for a feather the identical twin of Don Cook’s. I wasn’t surprised.

  I bought a bag of hot chestnuts because it was October and chestnuts evoked images of blonde girls in camel hair coats cheering at football games. I winked at a pretty girl and stared down an even prettier one. And in the Museum of Modern Art I found myself less occupied with Brancusi than with the girls who were taking notes on his works.

  It has always seemed to me that, in October, girls in the Museum of Modern Art are outrageously beguiling. Girls in Bloomingdale’s are older and more sophisticated. And girls in Bonwit’s are sweet if a touch antiseptic. But girls in the Museum of Modern Art in October are descendants of F. Scott Fitzgerald, slender, fragile, waiflike, affluent things, wrapped in mufflers that go three times around their necks before bouncing against their thighs. In October, girls in the Museum of Modern Art are virginal but experienced, unembittered by cooled affairs and ever-hopeful that magic is just around the corner. And maybe the magic is me. Ergo—

  Feeling good, I walked all the way back to the apartment, three White Owls still in my quiver. I consumed a glass of sherry and reshaped my new hat to something more nearly my mood. A tilt to the left, a crush to the crown, a flick of the feather for luck.

  Our stewardesses were away. Alice was in Cincinnati being drilled nightly by her dentist-husband. Susan, the orange-squeezer, had jumped ship in Miami, holing up with a retired stockbroker whom she hoped would marry her if she read the market right. And Jessica was off on a leave of absence during which she was determined to lose weight.

  With our stewardesses gone, Don and I were free to bring home anyone and anything we fancied. That we did not or could not was a testimonial to how much we missed our three First Class Fly Girls.

  I was denied unemployment insurance because I had quit my job rather than rigging it so that I could be fired. But I didn’t care. I still had a few bucks in the old cookie jar and if I didn’t know where I was going, I at least knew where I had been, all of my decisions along the way having been made with integrity, morality, and stupidity—a combination of medically proven ingredients guaranteed to cause my death if somebody didn’t stop me in time.

  Most of my days were spent soaking in New York. It was heady wine and, to my credit, I was never envious of the more successful types who trod the same sidewalks as I. Most of my nights were spent with television, for I was drawn to that thing like a bee to a bud. I particularly watched the dramatic shows, all of them live and most of them written by “another promising playwrig
ht.” I could be a promising playwright, too. I’d promise them anything if they’d let me be a playwright.

  Don saw to it that my social vistas broadened. And on Friday and Saturday nights we often wound up in the Village, pretending to understand the two-beat Dixie that blew out of every joint from Phil Napoleon’s to Eddie Condon’s. In the mix I was allowed to travel with the guys from 20th, i.e., the boys with whom Don worked in the big brick building on West Fifty-sixth Street between Ninth and Tenth. And I liked them, every one. Big Al Epstein was a winner, had it stamped all over him. Arnie Felsen, yearning to be a playwright, took notes wherever we went, nothing escaping his goiterlike eyes. Everything had a significance to Arnie, and once I even came across him in the men’s room at the 181 Club, peeing away with one hand while balancing a pencil and pad against the tile wall with the other, recording some obscure observation without missing a drop. Indomitable Arnie. Even then he was a pisser.

  Bob Steinman, ex-World War II navigator, was continually homing in on provocative womenfolk and with unearthly success. With that kind of aim he should have been able to hit Berlin and end the war at least a year before the rest of the Allies finally pulled it off. One minute he’d be sitting next to me, and the next minute he’d be flying a sortie with some girl twenty yards across the room. I can’t remember a night when Bob Steinman ended up alone. There had to be more action in his two-room apartment than ever took place in Europe. The best thing about him was that he never gave us any of that “I’m a combat veteran and an officer” crap. He never lorded it over us, never treated us as anything but equals. And even though he was over thirty, he never bemoaned the years he lost in the service. All he wanted to do was get laid and, I must say, it didn’t seem to matter with who. If Bob shot down a dozen or so sleek Messerschmitts before our very eyes, he also knocked off a couple Piper Cubs, a handful of blimps, and an occasional turkey.

  The man I felt a special affinity for was Roland Jessup. Out of an orphanage in New Jersey, Roland was a black man—but barely. By that I mean he was light enough to pass for white but simply didn’t choose to go that route. It was rumored that he was homosexual but none of us knew for sure, nor did Roland ever attempt to clue us in (though we did know that he lived alone in a Greenwich Village apartment fixed up to look like an Arabian tent—striped drapes, purple cushions, beaded curtains, Turkish hookahs). Whatever he was, Roland was a good guy and a tireless worker—which was more than could be said for a lot of people walking the earth at that time.

  One day—it was a great day—Don came home from work to tell me that the union, the Screen Publicists Guild, had bargained with management and that, as a result, two new jobs were created in the ranks of the “Men of Tomorrow” and that I was supposed to call W. Charles Gruber about one of them.

  “But,” I said, “I’m not a college graduate.”

  “You are. University of Pittsburgh. They liked that. Marshall Goldberg was an All-American there.”

  “But what if they ask to see my diploma?”

  “They didn’t ask to see mine.”

  “Do you mean—you never went to college?”

  He shrugged, pseudo-Jewish. “Don’t ask.”

  I called W. Charles Gruber, vice-president of the whole thing, but never got to speak with him. His secretary, though, expecting my call, told me to call Stirling Silliphant’s secretary for an interview. Stirling Silliphant, soon to become a most successful writer-producer, was then in charge of 20th Century-Fox’s exploitation department. I met with him that afternoon and told him that no offense but I thought I’d do better in the advertising department because of my “inherent knowledge of writing” (greeting cards). Stirling Silliphant said that Josh Meyerberg was advertising manager but that he was fully staffed and would I mind working for Dan Steier in Publicity and I said no. So I was hired and on the job the next morning.

  It had all happened very quickly. I had called Gruber, met with Silliphant, was told that Meyerberg was who I should be working for, and ended up working for Steier who didn’t know I was alive until I walked in and told him so.

  I knew I would like being in the movie business because, from what I could see of it, it was delightfully imbecilic, no one in it ever went to college, and my being Jewish was an advantage. I haven’t been Jewish since, but it was fun.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ginnie

  1949

  So there I was, at The Stokely School for Girls, in Maryland, turning sixteen, failing at everything except jazz dancing, and being called in for a private conversation with Miss Marjorie Stokely her regal self. I assumed it would be about my cavalier attitude and general all-around beastliness. I was wrong.

  Uncharacteristically, she beat around the bush for over ten minutes, talking of life, experience, field hockey, cabbages and kings—everything but how to rid Malaya of crotch rot. I let her ramble on, figuring she’d get to the point sooner or later because she was well into her seventies and didn’t have all that much time left to indulge in a filibuster.

  Marjorie Stokely’s countenance was marble smooth because she had filled in all the lines and creases with what had to be a mixture of face powder and plastic wood. If a high wind were to suddenly come up it would have blown her patina to Paducah, revealing her face for what it was—a pale prune, ravaged by drought, in which nothing living could take root beyond two pasty lips the width of rubber bands and maybe a dozen beige teeth that George Washington would have turned down. Her creped neck swiveled her head from window to door, to ceiling, to floor but never at me. Finally, she stopped the blathering and, looking straight into my face, said, “Virginia, life is a fragile thing at best, and too often things we love are taken from us all too prematurely.”

  I figured she was about to tell me that her turtle died. I’d heard it had been sick for quite some time and was destined to be an ashtray in a fortnight. But she wasn’t talking about her turtle because there it was, looking at me from its glass case, its own creped neck holding up its own shriveled head. Like mother, like turtle.

  “Virginia, there’s been an accident. A fire.”

  “Chicago again?” I asked, ever the weisenheimer.

  “In Stamford.”

  Oh, Christ! I thought. Daddy.

  “Your father.” She dabbed at her eyes with an Irish linen something. Too ornate to be a handkerchief, it had to have been cut from an unused wedding dress or an unfledged shroud. “I don’t really know the details, Virginia. We received a call. The fire was confined to his studio. The main house was untouched. You have to go home, I’m sorry.”

  She said a few other things to fill the void because I wasn’t in the mood for babble. Apparently I said so little that, as I left, she seemed rather surprised. “You seem to be taking it very well, Virginia.”

  “Well—he wasn’t my real father.” I don’t know why I said that. I always knew I could be counted on to say something bizarre in a delicate moment, but that one surprised even me. Maybe I was just trying to ease the hurt. Or maybe it was the way I really felt. Not that I ever doubted that it was Daddy’s sperm that had catapulted me into creation. It was simply that, as I grew older, I came to realize that it takes more than a shot in the dark to be a father. I mean a real father.

  As I left Stokely I knew I’d never be back. The only reason I was there was that my father had sent me there. With him gone, who’d give a damn where I’d go? My mother? I hadn’t gotten as much as a “Happy Arbor Day” card from her since our first and last fireside chat. I wondered if anyone had told my mother that the old man had curled up his toes. How could they? She’d pulled off the greatest disappearance since Judge Crater. No, wherever she was, the lovely Maggie Maitland would know nothing.

  So it was good-bye, Stokely, hello, Stamford, as the dumpy old train carried me back to the old homestead. I had some difficulty getting my head together. Yes, I felt mortal and vulnerable. After all, my own flesh and blood had perished. And yet, it wasn’t as if some dread disease, something in the famil
y line, had claimed Daddy, and might one day claim me. It was fire. And fire could happen to anyone. So I didn’t feel all that threatened. Nor did I feel denied a great paternal crutch to lean on since Daddy had trouble enough standing on his own without having to steady a dizzy daughter.

  Still, I did feel an overwhelming sadness. Not for me, but for him. For if he never succeeded in accomplishing anything in his life, neither did he ever hurt anybody. His was like the death of a small animal that you never know is around until you find its dead body—a hummingbird, a koala bear, a marmoset—sweet, benign bits of life, unnoticed except as echoes and shadows of their small former beings. We’d be burying an echo and a shadow in Stamford, Connecticut, in a small cemetery within a semicircle of evergreens. Who will come to the funeral of Howard Maitland? Do try to attend as hardly anyone will be there. (Betcha never knew his first name.)

  My sister, Mary Ann (yecchh), and my brother-in-law, Walter (ugh), met me at the station to console me the rest of the way home. But I needed no consoling because just the sight of them made my heart dance with joy. Mary Ann, barely twenty, looked forty. And Walter, reeking of alcohol, looked ninety. Obviously their marriage had gone well (from my point of view), and when Walter’s hand fell on my knee on the ride home, I let it stay there (eat your heart out, Mr. Nine Inches, it’s as much as you’ll ever get from me).

  Oh well, funerals are pretty much alike, I guess. A gathering in the church, a mumbo-jumbo service, a dogmatic litany, limousines to the planting grounds—and lower away! What I hadn’t counted on was my own particular reaction to it all. I was all right until the coffin was being lowered into the grave. And I would have stayed all right if I hadn’t said anything. But, at the last moment, unbeknownst to me—I did speak. “Good-bye, Daddy,” I said, and that did it. I almost collapsed, mammoth groans pouring out of me, huge uncontrollable spasms wracking me, and I had to be led away.