The Bill from My Father Read online

  Perhaps she thought my remark was a way to defend my father or convince her that she’d jumped to the wrong conclusion, when what I’d meant to do was protect both of my parents (and myself) by making that stain a petty mishap, soluble in soap and water. Until that day I’d been one among a high school full of teenagers who believed that adults lived largely in a world of convenient illusions, yet all it took was my mother chanting “Jam?” to make me see that it was I who was holding on to the illusion that my parents’ marriage was a good one, and furthermore, that thinking anyone could live a life exempt from such illusions was the biggest and most common illusion of all.

  Had my father known I’d written about—or alluded to—his infidelity, he certainly wouldn’t have let me interview him for a book. And so I kept quiet about why the editor from New York had called me in the first place.

  The tape made a faint hiss as it spooled from reel to reel, like the sound of waves breaking in the distance. “Tell me more about the boardwalk, Dad.” He sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. He folded his age-spotted hands in his lap and sighed because remembering was work. From within the depths of recollection my father asked, not unkindly, “What do you want from me? Seagulls or something?”

  Until he retired, at the age of seventy-five, my father worked on the top floor of the Continental Building, twelve stories of weathered brick in downtown Los Angeles. A frosted-glass door stenciled with his name and profession stood at the end of a long, dimly lit hallway, which made it seem like a door of last resort. He specialized in divorce law. Even as a child I sensed that our family’s prosperity bore some connection to the dissolution of human relationships, the money in my father’s billfold payment for a grim yet necessary service: unburdening people of each other. In the 1950s, two decades before California’s no-fault divorce law, a couple needed to prove they had reason to be granted a divorce, that in fact they had no recourse but to seek one, and so my father became adept at inflaming his clients’ sense of betrayal, at making their perfectly ordinary spouses seem insufferable and cruel, the couples’ love a blunder from the start. By the time I was old enough to grasp what he did for a living, my father had earned a reputation for handling cases whose tawdry details often made it into the pages of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He collected his clippings in a black scrapbook that lay atop our coffee table. I’d mull over those strips of newsprint for hours, trying to decipher the how and why of love gone wrong.

  The Case of the Baking Newlywed told of Mrs. Beverly C. Cleveland, a woman who cooked continually during the first ten days of her marriage, filling the couple’s small refrigerator with an uneaten banquet of pies and roasts and casseroles. Had I not read otherwise, Mrs. Cleveland would have struck me as a typical, even ideal, homemaker, since cooking was a skill that husbands seemed to covet in a wife. What had Mrs. Cleveland done that was any different from what my mother, and my friends’ mothers, and the mothers on TV did every day of their lives: chop, mash, fry, whip, grate, freeze, and reheat? I imagined the Clevelands’ warm apartment perfumed with simmering dinners. According to my father, however, Beverly Cleveland’s culinary marathon was a ploy to avoid her “wifely obligation.” In the article he referred to Jake Cleveland as his “kissless client,” whose “connubial crisis” was due to the couple’s ten-day “hell-moon,” the hellish specifics of which weren’t mentioned in print. The newspaper photograph showed Mrs. Cleveland wincing from the glare of a flashbulb and raising a hand to shield her face from the camera—a mug shot of shame itself.

  At ten years old I was too young to articulate, but not too young to sense, that somewhere beneath this case lay Beverly Cleveland’s avoidance of sex, or at least of her husband. Jake Cleveland hadn’t been photographed for the article and I couldn’t help wondering if he was ugly. No matter if he was the Creature from the Black Lagoon; the verdict fell in his favor, and this put his wife on par with the thieves and forgers and other criminals whose pictures also appeared in the Herald. “Don’t be an idiot,” said my father when I asked if there were laws about cooking too much food, and if mother could get arrested for it.

  While thumbing through the scrapbook, I could never quite decide whether my father acted as an agent of fairness, or of petty revenge. Just being in the position to make such a decision gave me a heady sense of omniscience, since my father—who laid down the law in our house—was suddenly subject to my judgment, instead of the other way around. I mean omniscience literally, for in trying to determine whether my father’s livelihood was noble or corrupt, I sometimes envisioned his cases as though I were floating invisibly near the courtroom ceiling, up where lightbulbs hummed in their sockets and the California flag drooped from its staff. Below me, an avuncular, black-robed judge sat in a kind of private balcony and watched as my father and another attorney tossed blame back and forth like a hot potato.

  Another headline read, Case of “the Captive Bride” Ends in a Blaze of Poetry. Here, my father defended the right of a Mr. and Mrs. Nunez to keep their sixteen-year-old daughter, Florence, virtually locked in her bedroom until she turned eighteen, forbidding her to live with her husband, Peter Ramos, with whom she’d eloped. To prove his devotion, Peter stood on the sidewalk outside the Nunez house day and night, reciting the love poems he wrote for Florence, which he read loudly enough for her to hear through the walls. Worried that his clients might have to listen to lovesick couplets for the next two years, my father applied for a restraining order that would, if not silence the poet, keep his verse at a distance. “The boy won’t let up with the moon and June,” was how he put it to the reporter. “Peter may be standing on a public sidewalk, but he’s no better than a peeping Tom, what with the way he’s invading my clients’ privacy.”

  Peter, however, saw nothing but nobility in his persistence. Florence was his muse as well as his wife, and his longing never flagged in her absence. He hired Arthur Marcus, an attorney who, in a semantic counterattack, dubbed Peter “the banished groom” and claimed that Florence was being “held captive” against her will. (I imagined her in a prison cell with a vanity table and canopy bed). Mr. Marcus immediately summoned Florence to appear in court, where she could testify to Peter’s honorable character and prove herself mature enough for marriage.

  Dad answered the writ of habeas corpus with a poem of his own:

  The court lacks jurisdiction

  To make an order stern,

  The paper filed by Peter

  Requires no return.

  And all the allegations

  Including sigh and cry

  Each of them now Florence’s

  Parents do deny.

  And for the further answer to

  This impassioned plea

  We would remind rash Peter

  That he should clearly see

  A child of sixteen is too young

  To claim a mate for life

  Without consent of her guardians, thus

  Can only lead to strife.

  My father could moon and June with the best. The marriage was annulled.

  Because he was such a laconic man at home—his all-purpose grunt meant yes and no, hello and good-bye—it astonished me to read about the verbal acrobatics with which he so often bent the law to his whims. How else but through supernatural powers of persuasion could he have made a boy’s love poem seem like a brick hurled through a window, or argue that a freshly baked pie was the cause of a husband’s sexual deprivation? Apparently, if Dad insisted the grass was blue, he leadeth you beside blue pastures.

  The marital conflicts I read about in my father’s scrapbook weren’t much different from the fights that broke out every day on the baseball diamonds and jungle gyms of my elementary school playground—“Cheater!” “It’s my turn!” “Stop looking at me funny!”—but enriched and twisted beyond all proportion. Was wedlock simply a larger playground? Were lawyers bullies paid by the hour?

  I overflowed with questions in those days because I was certain the world operated accord
ing to some hidden system that, sooner or later, an adult would explain in the same patient way that Mr. Wizard, the science teacher who hosted an after-school TV show, explained the wonders of water displacement or the magic of static electricity. That adults were wiser than children wasn’t just a homily as far as I was concerned but a belief more tolerable than the prospect that both children and adults were as dumb as rubber balls. Because if no one knew how or why things happened, then no one could stop bad things from happening or make good things happen—a human helplessness I was hard-pressed to accept. Although my father may not have given me the answers I sought, I felt sure he possessed them, just as he possessed a knowledge of the law and would one day give me his grudging guidance.

  Only once did he take my future in hand, hoping to impart a lesson for my betterment. I would have soaked it up in a second had I understood what the lesson meant. He called me into the living room one Friday after coming home early from court. He’d propped our Bell & Howell projector on the coffee table, the reels threaded and ready to spin. Across the room, balanced on a wobbly tripod, stood the home-movie screen, its gritty opalescent surface sparkling in the afternoon light. Dad’s hands were clasped behind his back, his shoulders squared.

  Before entering the room I had to remove my shoes because the carpet was still new and my mother, who hadn’t yet discovered clear plastic rug runners, was determined to get her money’s worth of pure, untrammeled, glamorous white. My father wore black dress socks—men’s hosiery, they were called in the department stores—and his feet looked as dark as holes in a snowdrift.

  “Your father,” he announced, “wants to show you something.”

  This was the first time I’d ever heard him refer to himself in the third person, and it piqued my interest, implying as it did that my father was out of the room and the man standing before me was not who I assumed. But who else could he be? I was a late child, fifteen years younger than the youngest of my three brothers—all of whom had moved away from home by the time I turned ten—and my next thought was that Dad was going to tell me he wasn’t my father but my fourth and oldest brother. What had happened to my real father wasn’t clear in the fantasy, which came over me so fast there wasn’t time to account for his whereabouts. I figured he must be out there somewhere, happy and unharmed.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” my father asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” he said, “have a seat.”

  The couch (my mother called the color salmon, my father, lox) was so plush that it took me a moment to sink down to solid matter. Meanwhile, my father walked toward the picture window, each padded footfall adding to the hush. Even under normal circumstances, closing those drapes was something of a ceremony, for they were heavy as bedspreads and printed with a pattern of mortar and bricks. When Dad pulled the cord, bricks swooped together like the halves of a wall and the room went dark.

  Light shot from the lens of the projector and burrowed through the room. It flickered over the furniture and gave the dark a restless depth. I watched dust motes whirl and collide in the beam, and this bright turmoil, this erosion of countless powdery grains, was proof of a fact I knew all along but hadn’t grasped until that moment: the world was being ground to bits. I was still transfixed when I heard my father tell me to snap out of it and pay attention to what was on the screen.

  In a wood-paneled office, a stout black woman sat across a desk from a white man, whose bony hands were folded atop an ink blotter. A pen holder slanted in his direction, and next to it a name plate identified him as a judge. His lips moved nonstop, but the film was silent and I couldn’t make out a word he was saying. All the while he stared into the camera with the unnatural expression of a person who’d been told to act natural and not stare into the camera. The woman paid respectful attention, leaning forward once or twice in a futile effort to interrupt. She clutched under one arm a leather-bound book that was either a Bible or a volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. On the desk beside her lay an overstuffed purse.

  The judge was still yammering when the purse, without so much as a twitch of forewarning, stood up, wavered on two spindly legs, and walked toward him, though “walked toward him” suggests that the purse had a particular destination, whereas its halting progress was more along the lines of two steps forward, one step back. For a moment I wondered whether it was a marionette, though I couldn’t see strings, and besides, who in their right mind would make a marionette that looked like a staggering handbag? No, the purse’s senselessness hinted at the possibility that it once possessed sense and now was trying to get along without it. This was animal motion, too reflexive with muscle and nerve to be anything inanimate.

  The judge’s mouth stopped moving when the scruffy whatever-it-was lurched into his line of vision. He gave it a wary, sidelong glance, ready to react should something unexpected occur, which, considering what had occurred already, would have to be inconceivably strange. That’s when the camera slowly zoomed in, moving as if it, too, were an animal, a predator hunting its unsuspecting prey. It slid between the woman and the judge, intent on the mound in the middle of the desk. Feathers slowly came into focus. Wings bristled as the creature breathed.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “Watch,” said my father.

  He had been a witness to the actual event, but because I didn’t know this yet, his Watch was like a magic command that caused what happened next to happen. A stump emerged from the thing’s right side, which until that point had looked identical to its left. The stump pivoted toward the camera and paused long enough to reveal its severed end. A tunnel of tendon and pearly bone led inside the creature’s body, the sight no less gruesome in black-and-white. The woman’s fingers descended into view, holding an eyedropper by its rubber bulb. She squeezed until a bead of clear liquid glistened at its tip, then angled it toward the cavity. The stump strained upward.

  The idea of watching the creature being fed made me speechless, queasy. How much closer would the camera zoom? What kind of contractions would swallowing involve? That blind, groping, hungry stump was the neediest thing I’d ever seen. Leaving the room was out of the question; my father would view my retreat as rudeness, or worse, as proof that I was a delicate boy unworthy of paternal wisdom. I couldn’t have fled anyway; sunk in the possessive depths of the couch, I could barely move.

  The droplet wobbled.

  “Sugar water,” said my father.

  Not until later that night, after unsuccessfully begging myself to please stop thinking about the gaping wound, did I realize that sugar water referred to the solution in the eyedropper. At the time, however, my father might as well have said spoon clock or hat bell for all the sense his comment made.

  The pendulous droplet fell into the stump. Then another and another. For all that creature knew it had started to rain, and the rain tasted sweet. As the woman doled out the final drops, words scrolled up the screen:

  There is hope for you too

  when you see how divine power

  keeps Lazarus alive!

  Mrs. Martha Green’s decapitated fowl

  lives to become

  THE MIRACLE CHICKEN!

  This 20th century wonder brings a possibility

  of new life and new healing

  to an army of believers.

  It’s all TRUE!

  This movie is AUTHENTIC!

  The woman’s purse was a headless chicken. I might have uttered this fact aloud since it came as such a great, if short-lived, relief. My father had used the phrase “like a chicken with its head cut off” to describe all manner of frenzied activity, applying it to bad drivers and harried salespeople and even to my mother, who cooked dinner in a state that could be described either as motherly gusto or stifled rage. Every time I heard the expression, I pictured the figurative chicken running around a barnyard in circles and spurting a geyser of blood before dropping dead in the dust. Dropping dead forever, I should add, because it neve
r occurred to me that a chicken might survive its execution, give hope to humans, and star in a film. Wasn’t a head indispensable?

  Dad towered beside the projector, his figure awash in flickering light. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. “There’s your old man,” he said, pointing to the screen.

  A crowd dressed in Sunday finery milled around the front lawn of a clapboard house. People stepped aside to let my father pass, a sea of hats parting before him. Mrs. Green trailed in his wake. She cradled Lazarus in her arms, careful not to let the bird be jostled and also not to hide it from view. Making his way through the crowd, Dad cast frequent backward glances to make sure Mrs. Green and her bird were behind him. Photographers jockeyed to get a good shot. Reporters frantically scrawled on their notepads. Men and women craned their necks, some letting children straddle their shoulders to get a better look.

  Mrs. Green refuses to hand Lazarus over to the S.P.C.A. despite a court order from Judge Stanley Moffatt.

  Her attorney, Edward S. Cooper, claims the bird is

  “an act of providence

  for the benefit of all mankind.”

  The throng of spectators, two or three people deep, waited behind a listing picket fence as my father escorted Mrs. Green into a yard overgrown with blooming hibiscus and bougainvillea. She seemed at home there, so I supposed the yard was hers. It may have been an effect of the grainy eight-millimeter film, but this ramshackle Eden glowed with an ancient, paper-thin light, as if the screen had turned to parchment. It wouldn’t have surprised me if one of the bushes had burst into flame and spoken in a holy baritone.