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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... cc&d magazine (v212) (the September 2010 Issue) |
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Twinkles
Brian Duggan
The summer Marilyn Monroe was staying at a farm in Westport was the summer that our mysterious next-door neighbor, Evelyn Patton, became a problem. It was 1956 and I was fourteen, Marilyn was residing at the home of her new business partner, photographer Milton Greene, while attending classes at the Actors’ Studio with Lee Strasberg in New York City. I met Marilyn only once, but that’s all it took.
I was visiting my aunt on Ocean Breeze Walk in Ocean Beach, a mostly weekend community on the western end of New York’s Fire Island. Cars were not allowed on the island, which added to the closely-knit community’s charm. My cousin Peter, Bill Adie Jr. and I were talking in Adie’s grocery store as I selected the biggest limes I could find for the grownup’s gin and tonics.
Marilyn came down the aisle and to my surprise nodded a quick hello pulling pink sunglasses to the tip of her nose. Blue eyes sparkled in a lightly tanned face as blonde pigtails swayed behind a black silk scarf. She was wearing a red bikini under a white blouse and people were staring at her. My eyes followed her shapely legs with a sugarcoating of white sand to brown leather sandals; later that summer I would get a glimpse of her naked. She passed me on the way to a pyramid of oranges whose scent was blending with her warm coconut butter. She turned, moved closer, and asked, “Aren’t you the boy I saw through that fence today with a red wagon?” Her voice was low and breathy with something playful in it and people turned away as if it were a private matter.
“I don’t know.”
“You met the Fire Island Belle from Bay Shore at three-thirty. I watched you from the deck; your face was all wrinkled up. Were you docking that boat in your head?”
“How’d you know that?”
“I notice people lost in thought. I listen in to help them think, but I may give it up if somebody doesn’t start returning the favor.”
“I wouldn’t need help docking that boat, I could do that in my sleep,” I bragged.
Her eyes lit up and a wonderful smile erupted. “Is that so!” She blew me a kiss saying, “So long Captain.” I waved goodbye, but she didn’t see it from the counter where a line of shoppers had stepped back in astonishment, and in seconds she was gone. The store fell silent and like the others I already missed her.
I should have kept that encounter to myself, but it flashed through the neighborhood after my telephone call home. The day after I got back home to Fairfield our seldom seen next-door neighbor appeared outside our screen door insisting that I call her Evelyn. No one knew much about her then except that she had lost her husband during the Second World War. We’d heard she’d been a photographic model and dancer, she was said to be in her mid-thirties. The early morning breeze tousled auburn hair in front of a serious face. She wore no makeup, nail polish or shoes. A simple blue pullover and matching skirt clung above a narrow waist supported by slender legs. I took in the white gold earrings, necklace and bracelet that gave off a dazzling blue color as she stood in place. My sister later informed me that those topaz gems were a big deal, but she was wrong, it was her skintight pullover. As I repeated my conversation with Marilyn she committed it to memory. She stood silently with emerald eyes adrift as if rummaging for misplaced memories. After that Evelyn began appearing while I struggled through morning piano lessons with Mr. Dwyer on our screened-in sun porch.
Albert Dwyer claimed to have been a well-paid musician in an earlier life, but he was now consigned to the piano keyboard at the Ships Lantern in Westport on weeknights across from the Y.M.C.A. where a downstairs room, an upright piano and a meager life awaited. Jules Munchin, the Westport Playhouse’s founder, offered a limited paycheck, but only if the summer stock production was a musical. On special occasions Mr. Dwyer would show up wearing white, fingerless gloves in front of the organ at Trinity Church in Southport or behind the Baldwin piano across the street at the Pequot Library. He was fifty-something with a grey fringe of circling hair that was kept short above red-rimmed eyes. A five o’clock shadow covered sunken cheeks ending at a chiseled chin. His swanlike neck flexed at odd angles behind the keys; he looked at everything with a sideways glance.
His drooping shoulders were always packaged in a worn, blue sports coat covering a wrinkled short-sleeved, white shirt. His hands appeared to have evolved for keyboards. The fingers would abruptly cease activity to lay in wait. They remained at the piano’s edge hidden under flattened palms until the very last second at which time they would pounce on black or white keys from memory. Grey slacks showed white sock and hairless, skinny legs above scuffed penny loafers. Vocal accompaniment was out of the question; a rasping monotone was all tobacco-stained vocal chords could muster.
It was obvious from that first day that those two didn’t like each other. Evelyn would sit in our living room shuffling newspaper and magazine clippings running the gamut from laughter to tears as she chronicled Marilyn’s early life, which I learned had started with another name. Tidbits of information would sneak in between struck piano keys reminding us that Marilyn’s life had paralleled Evelyn’s. When either life entered into what she declared were the heart’s darkest waters, the pace quickened. Unhappiness that entered Marilyn’s life was first transported on barely audible murmurs, which rose in volume with Evelyn’s own remembered suffering into louder cries at which point Mr. Dwyer would abandon my lesson and throw up his hands. The hands would then descend on keys breaking into what he called, “Twinkles.” These consisted of several bars of Green Eyes, which were masterfully adapted to Evelyn’s present port of call. The range was sweeping; jazzy notes accompanied a merchant ship leaving New Orleans for the Mississippi Delta’s brown, unhurried waters, Hawaiian overtones, a tanker departing a South Seas anchorage and a Boogie-woogie with pumping pedals meant Lady Liberty was surveying a bigger torch.
Twinkles prompted moments of icy silence from Evelyn, and Marilyn’s life would leave the world’s shipping lanes to head for California, but that voice would again seep back into the sun porch rising in volume until another Twinkles arrived. Evelyn declared with great authority that Marilyn would never find happiness until she left Hollywood, and she directed me to tell her to stay put in Connecticut. We laughed at the suggestion, but Evelyn wasn’t amused. After a two-day disappearance she returned, this time with makeup and a midriff that cancelled Mr. Dwyer’s tutoring. Later, my mother, sister and I were glued to her first scrapbook dedicated to Jimmy Dougherty, a neighbor of Marilyn’s whom she married in June of 1942. I discovered that Marilyn had been born Norma Jeane Mortenson that same month sixteen years earlier. Her mother, Gladys Baker, lived in Los Angeles. Nobody knew Norma Jeane’s father, so she was baptized Norma Jeane Baker.
We found out that Norma Jeane’s mother had lost her job as a film cutter due to mental issues that landed her in an institution. According to Evelyn, who jealously guarded her sources, Norma Jeane had passed through an unhappy childhood living with foster parents or in orphanages until at age eleven she had moved in with a girlfriend named Grace something-or-other. There was more bad news, Grace’s husband was transferred to a job on the East Coast in 1942, and Norma Jeane faced a difficult choice, drop out of high school and get married, or return to the Los Angeles Orphans’ Home. She chose marriage and we had the impression this didn’t set well with Evelyn because subsequent misfortunes involving Jimmy and Marilyn brought smiles when she thought we weren’t watching. A newspaper account said the two had been dating for some time and were described as happy until he joined the Merchant Marines and was sent to the South Pacific in 1944. “It was that damn war, their marriage ended the day that fool joined the Merchant Marines; they just had to do it,” Evelyn said.
My whole family became concerned, but nobody knew what to do about her growing urge to reveal Marilyn’s life. Mr. Dwyer banned her permanently from our house during my lessons, while I clung to a selfish interest. The only things that had worked for me over at the Patton place were the cherry trees and an unseen kitchen; no one had ever been allowed inside. If anyone had any doubts about their being welcomed, one look at the two front door locks convinced him or her. Occasionally I would find a few dollars for pruning or bug spraying those trees in a white envelope jammed into an empty milk bottle on the back porch, but usually they wound up in the driver’s pocket who got a real paycheck from Wade’s Diary. Money for delivering The Bridgeport Post never appeared at either door on collection day. There were six trees bordering our yard and I kept an eye on kids who would fly off the street on bikes and cut across her weed patch to strip off ripe cherries.
With the success of her first scrapbook, newspapers, mail and bugs piled up under the porch light as Evelyn glued Marilyn’s years on thick paper. It was a blessing because I finally mastered the piano’s proper fingering; Mr. Dwyer disagreed, “She’s warming up for the same old tricks.” Things were never the same after Evelyn began showing up each night after dinner. The scent of a cherry pie with sugared crumbs on top at the front door would water my mouth and then the scrapbook routine began with the arrival of vanilla ice cream. She’d open her hardcover collection and watch our eyes, delighting in every reaction, and somewhere in her head the three of us multiplied— as she looked beyond us at an unseen multitude— to hundreds or maybe thousands. “I’d let her know straight out, ‘Marilyn you’ve got to figure this fame thing out. Forget that Hollywood’s glitter, its just greedy producers, artsy-fartsy playwrights and lying big shots. You stick to acting lessons, try the stage and practice your dancing or it’ll be the death of you.’” She finished with a puzzling grin, “It’s all so simple.”
As June rushed by I stood behind the sofa breaking in a new outfielder’s glove. I kept the glove with a baseball wrapped in rubber bands in my hands as Evelyn exhibited her completed history of Jimmy’s questionable contribution to Norma Jeane’s earlier life. Later, as I folded papers for delivery at the end of June, I read that Marilyn had entered into marriage a third time with playwright Arthur Miller whom she had met through Lee Strasberg. I hoped Evelyn’s dire warnings wouldn’t hold up, I wanted Marilyn to abandon Hollywood for Arthur’s New York. Maybe this New Yorker would think it through for her, you know, “Start returning the favor.”
Evelyn was cutting and pasting mostly yellowed pages printed just after the war at a record pace. I say, “mostly” because she had taken to hurriedly skipping past the rare postcard, telex, or dog-eared photo. These were shielded with a protective hand and weak patronizing smile. It was a sticky situation, she designed the scrapbooks and produced a nightly entertainment hour guiding us personally over Norma Jeane’s previous pitfalls and triumphs, but you could see there were some things Evelyn could never share. We flew past Norma Jeane’s divorcing Jimmy Dougherty, but stalled before the happy faces at Twentieth Century Fox on August 26, 1946, when she signed her movie-making contract.
On the opposite page I saw Norma Jeane’s recently dyed blonde hair and her new studio-assigned name. She was now Marilyn Monroe and was given little notice in bit parts for Columbia and Fox. Evelyn seemed pleased when Marilyn was forced to meet expenses by returned to the still camera as a model. Evelyn’s mood changed quickly when Marilyn’s nude photograph on a calendar lead to her being cast in a minor role in a forgettable film, Scudda-Hoo! Scudda-Hay!
The brief connection that this movie star and I had shared on Fire Island appeared to have sparked a neighbor’s obsession, attracting makeup, sexy clothing and chic jewelry. We all agreed, the face seemed prettier; the shape more sculptured, and strange as it seemed, she looked almost youthful. I didn’t want to enter Marilyn’s darker waters and I dreaded the thought that someday there might be millions receiving perverse enjoyment scrutinizing lost innocence. I was in Marilyn’s corner no matter what happened and as the past caught up with the present, I thought about her.
One night as I shut my bedroom window on the tongues of my black and white high-top sneakers for their airing, I happened to look over at the Patton house following darkening rooms that ended with the opening of a Venetian blind. Incredibly Evelyn proudly held up a scrapbook for me to see. The only thing missing was the applause from her unseen audience, but she bowed her head blowing kisses from a cold creamed face so I knew she heard it. She sat on a bed’s edge dabbing her eyes near a growing pile of Kleenex tissues.
The next night I learned the reason, Marilyn’s uncredited minor role in The Asphalt Jungle had rekindled her career. I nodded off before that small-lighted rectangle some sixty feet away and awoke to see Marilyn’s pages flying from the scrapbook and out her window. They floated in midair like movie-screen-stepping-stones. I watched as Evelyn dropped from her window on to the first animated image. A thin nightgown fluttered over a bridge of Marilyn’s grimacing faces. I raced from bed to window, twisted the lock and closed the curtains. After that I sleep on the sun porch.
Other people were drawn to that house. A fat neighbor on the other side of her peeling sanctuary would stop his lawn mower and lost in thought slowly march through knee-high vegetation to weave under my cherries. He arrived with red fingers to add his two cents to my growing knowledge of Evelyn. He knew all about the war’s early years when he said she had left starving cats and quizzical neighbors, seemingly at a moment’s notice, to meet Bobby Patton’s ships in Perth Amboy, New Haven, Brooklyn or even West Coast anchorages. Folding the next to last newspaper and still thinking about that dream, I wandered off.
A sudden gust of wind stirred the branches under the cherries to fan out over the tall grass. Newspaper pages floated in the air just like those stepping-stones, but I kept walking toward her window. Figurines watched as I ignored the frantic hand motioning me toward an opened front door. Turning my back, I walked away. The door slammed and I saw her furious face framed in closing drapery.
Although banished from the nightly melodrama, I stole a slice of pie and listening from the kitchen learning how Marilyn’s appearance in All About Eve after The Asphalt Jungle had prompted another contract from Fox. Evelyn’s envy grew into disgust as rave notices for Let’s Make It Legal and Love Nest signaled growing achievement in 1951. The next night I hid behind the sofa as Clash by Night brought star billing in 1952 and a year later Niagara pleased bosses who had transformed a struggling actress into their own sexpot. I wished that piano had been handy for Twinkles three nights later when appearances in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire triggered mocking snickers from Evelyn for screen work Marilyn had completed in 1953.
Two nights later we all suffered with Evelyn as There’s No Business Like Show Business the following year created a sensation in Hollywood that spread overseas. Overwhelming fame was unavoidable from 1954 when she married one of my heroes, second husband and baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Publicity surrounding this event was too much for Marilyn who now had every reason to question a Hollywood career and the image it had created in people’s minds.
That night I walked along the shoreline looking at the flickering lights on the trio of tall smoke stacks in Port Jefferson, New York, some sixteen miles across Long Island Sound. Right then and there I made up my mind, no more craziness. I would sell my paper route and be Marilyn’s Captain heading out to sea in an Amesbury dory. Those stacks grew fatter as Mickey Rooney, Freddy Bartholomew, and I plowed through the waves. I knew all about the boat that those Grand Banks fishermen had treasured in
The next day as the newspaper bundle tumbled from the truck to my lawn, I peeled open the top newspaper tearing through to the classified section. I held my arms straight out and sure enough, there at the third column’s top were words blaring it out, “AMESBURY DORY FOR SALE.” When I finished delivering papers I ran upstairs for my passbook saving account discovering I would rarely use an oarlock. Two ads killed time in my pocket, one for the dory and another for a used Evinrude outboard and a five-gallon tank. My father, who’s dream had always been owning a sailboat, had designed and built a wooden model to scale, so it was easy to sell him on mine. I closed my savings account on Tuesday and pocketed ten crisp fifty-dollar bills. A man answered the phone and I wrote the address down promising to stop by on Thursday, I would return his trailer later.
We wrestled with a trailer hitch in the afternoon and the neighborhood spent that Fourth of July on blankets at Jennings Beach watching fireworks illuminate the night from Bridgeport’s Pleasure Beach all the way down to Norwalk. Mr. Dwyer began his own tribute to independence, sandwiches streamed out of his dented Hillman Minx from Angie Mecurio’s market to fight for space in our kitchen with his liquor, which encouraged the lighting of rockets and firecrackers from ladyfingers to cherry bombs.
At two o’clock in the morning I woke up. A flashlight beam was on my face through the screen. Evelyn stood silently outside in her nightgown. Next door I found Mr. Dwyer curled up on her porch behind two uniformed policemen. She retrieved a brass key from a dead-to-the-world hand and stepped over the body giving me a dirty look as she disappeared inside. I left a note for my father and rode up front with a sergeant who stopped at the Fairfield Diner for coffee. I got a chocolate shake and turned on the blue lights as we sped down the Post Road to Westport. The limp body went down the Y.M.C.A. back stairwell to a basement room where it fell to a sagging love seat.
“I’ll take you back home, he can get his British contraption tomorrow.”
Mr. Dwyer ratcheted upright in short bursts to survey the opened door. He staggered to the piano bench, and there on top somehow managed to curl up in greater comfort.
“Suit yourself Albert.”
“Damn right, Sergeant!”
I was all set to leave when I saw them in— the only object he appeared to value— a polished silver frame. Evelyn sat on top, a white long-sleeved shirt covered her torso and black leotards her legs, which were drawn up to her chin revealing metal taps that glistened on silver colored dancing shoes. Mr. Dwyer’s legs hovered over countless pedals: short, long, slender, and cylindrical that branched out above bare shins and drooping white socks within the curved recess of a gigantic organ. Mr. Dwyer’s face, bordered by black hair and a cultivated goatee, beamed above multi-layered keyboards.
“Goodnight, we’ll manage,” he blurted from the bench following a long gasp.
“You alright with that?”
“Yes Sir,” I said, unable to leave that black and white glossy.
Burnt coffee boiled away on top of a glowing electric ring balanced on the edge of a cracked porcelain tank behind a repulsive toilet bowl. Soup and tilting sardine cans were heaped alongside and were even visible in the bathtub’s corners behind the torn shower curtain where a flotilla of soaking underwear, white fingerless gloves and socks floated. Zipping up I held my breath avoiding even one whiff as a remarkably clear-headed narrative continued through the opened door. “That Radio City Wurlitzer was like the second coming of Christ, biggest music box I ever saw. Took up the whole flatbed, Tonawanda all the way down to the Fiftieth Street side door with three gorillas pushing.”
He raised the piano bench lid and slumped— into a ruptured wing chair— handing me a copy of Playboy. He had paid fifty cents to see Marilyn nude in the first December edition three years earlier. He swayed waiting wide-eyed for my reaction, and before chin-hit-chest, he blew a kiss at the picture frame on the piano, “Happy Fourth, Twinkle Toes.” I opened glossy pages, took one look at Marilyn and hid temptation under sheet music. I was lured to lift that lid, but never went near it; I found other things to look at.
It was starting to fall into place. There was a postcard addressed to Bobby’s mother in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, from San Pedro, California, saying Evelyn was sorry, but her son had lost out to an older boy named Jimmy whom she had met with her new friend, Norma Jeane. She wanted all the Japs in America rounded up and sent back home after Sunday’s sneak attack. There was a small photograph of a girl in a tight sweater and overalls in front of a factory whose lettering on the brick spelled out Radio Plane Munitions.
The ink was blurred on the back, but if you saw the front you got Evelyn’s message, there was a white patch where she had scratched off a head. That body definitely belonged to Norma Jeane. I shut the lid and sat down. Evelyn was nuts; she hadn’t dumped Bobby Patton for Jimmy Dougherty she had married him. Norma Jeane had married Jimmy and later divorced him; I had seen his scrapbook. Mr. Dwyer would be no help unraveling this mystery; he was dead to the world.
The piano at the room’s center looked as lonely as I felt. The piano’s keys were now a dull yellow and had dirt filled fractures. The worn pedals and the cigarette-charred potholes were silent reminders of a long abandoned musical machine. Lifting the lid exposed a tarnished harp lying on its back below felt-tipped wooden hammers. Suspended cigarette stubs lay above a collection of gum wrappers, beer caps and dissolved tobacco. I was poised for a session of subdued Chopsticks when church bells overhead announced four o’clock. Later the sound of a running shower woke me up.
At nine o’clock we piled into the backseat of my father’s green, four-door, Plymouth Savoy expecting an angry lecture, but Mr. Dwyer wouldn’t or couldn’t stop talking. His head shot back and forth from the backseat as he roamed the dying vaudeville circuit just as the war ended in Europe. When we crossed into Fairfield he was fondly recalling gigs in Greenwich Village. He told us that he had found Evelyn dancing as a Rockette in Radio City Music Hall where he tickled that Wurlitzer’s ivories as heaven danced by. “Just a common hoofer, that one! Him out there floundering on the high seas and her acting like a whore on holiday up in Harlem. Christ! She couldn’t show up for a burial ceremony, he was a good kid?” My father said, “Al, let it pass, it’s not worth the bother; she’s been through a lot.”
My father never shared his knowledge of Evelyn with me, but Mr. Dwyer said Evelyn was originally from Los Angeles and had been working in an aircraft factory before she had married Bobby Patton. I wanted to know just who had attended that wedding. She had moved to St. Louis where her older sister had made her show business debut years earlier with Russell Markert’s Missouri Rockets, and then east to stay with Bobby’s mother while he dodged almost every torpedo and each floating mine. After he died Evelyn had moved to Jackson Heights in Queens and auditioned for Mr. Markert winning the coveted position at the chorus line’s center in the transposed Rockettes’s new home, Radio City Music Hall. Bobby’s widow, if that were true, had used his insurance money to buy the place next door to us.
“What happened between you and Mrs. Patton in New York, Mr. Dwyer?”
“Carried off by a Stage-Door-Johnnie, the worst kind a . . . mechanic.”
The steely-eyed gangster started forming in my mind until I noticed my father’s reproachful eyes. Mr. Dwyer fell silent slumping in the backseat so I would never know which stage door Johnnie she had met, what color he might have been, or if all this had happened before or after Bobby died. The fat neighbor told me when she settled in next-door she was taking the train to New York. She could return the following night or sometimes weeks later and once several months had passed until the lights went on inside and a suitcase disappeared behind the locked front door as neighbors manned their windows. Mr. Dwyer volunteered that she’d frequent Times Square after rehearsals or ride uptown on the A Train to visit familiar haunts, but I didn’t care. She was nuts and my piano teacher was close behind, besides I had a boat to buy.
My father and I headed down the Shore Road through Greensfarms into Westport. Within sight of the recently completed Connecticut Turnpike we turned left over a narrow stone bridge onto a dirt road that ended at a silk-topped wall. Behind the corn, a small brook between an old barn and a new farmhouse made its way towards the marshes at the shore. Birdseed was scattered on wood planking awaiting new paint on the front porch. Bright red-winged blackbirds and drab starlings making the most of shimmering neck feathers were swarming resident chickens. A honey-colored Cocker Spaniel puppy danced behind the opening door. Kneeled down to pat the space between flapping ears, I watched it make a beeline for my father. He had frozen in his tracks. Pawing and yapping went on around his knees; his mouth was wide open.
“Hello, Captain! You’re too late, I sold the last ferry an hour ago.”
Marilyn stepped through the doorway. Row upon row of plastic curlers populated the blond hair over that smile. She wore a white terrycloth robe and walked barefooted relishing the antics on the front porch where birds zoomed, a puppy leapt, and a surprised buyer stood near his immobilized father. She introduced herself shaking a bewildered hand as I moved away toward the barn. There in the open doorway on an aluminum trailer sat the most beautiful Amesbury dory I could have ever imaged.
Marilyn had bought her from a boat dealer in Cos Cob months ago, but it had never been on Long Island Sound. Between photo-shoots, acting classes, and marrying Arthur Miller the extent of her voyages had consisted of bare-footed harvests and egg hunts on dry land. Somehow she had also found time to finish Bus Stop, which critics would point to as proof that Marilyn was miscast as just a sex symbol. Director Josh Logan’s and acting coaches Lee and Paula Strasberg’s dedicated student had won rave reviews as Cherie. She left Don Murray’s side to sit between oarlocks happily rowing towards recognition as a talented actress. “Four-hundred, Milton will need his trailer back.” I handed over the money and she disappeared inside while we connected the trailer to the bumper’s hitch.
Marilyn returned in dungarees tying the long-sleeved blue shirt’s shirttails in a knot before a flat stomach. Curlers were hitting the ground. Was she planning on going with us? As if she had read my mind, she turned and ran inside shouting, “Don’t you boys dare leave.” Minutes later she returned out of breath carrying a paper bag loaded with vegetables to ask, “Can I go for a ride . . . sometime?”
“Of course she’ll be in the water, we have your phone number. I’ll call you.”
Turning, I opened the passenger door, struggling to think of something cheerful anything as long as it was a million miles from that postcard and headless photo. She stood outside, but I was certain she was inside my head. Behind closed eyes Evelyn and Jimmy walked hand-in-hand beside Marilyn silhouetted against the distant outline of San Pedro. On a storm-tossed Pacific, a torpedo rammed into Bobby’s ship and flames broke out. He sank to his graveyard covered in oil. Opening my eyes, I spat it out, “Did Jimmy love Evelyn?” Marilyn’s stark outline on the sunlit earth seemed to have invaded the car, as a numbing silence grew more painful with each passing second.
“I listened in. She loved Jimmy, but he loved me more. I helped her think “
“Did she really marry Bobby?”
“She was a born dancer, wonderful singer and should have been an actress. It’s a shame, she just couldn’t think, but you already know that.”
She leaned in and my answer to Evelyn’s questionable marriage was a kiss on the cheek. Then she held out her hand for me to admire the latest wedding band. That wonderful smile was on her face and the glow in her eyes matched the gold. She danced with the puppy to the front stairs waving goodbye. We dropped the trailer off two days later. I walked back from the barn alone, hoping she would come out, but Mrs. Miller had left. I spent the first week of August cruising up and down in Southport alone and then I filled the gas tank at the town dock.
The dory’s bow was a foot above the water as I rounded the bell buoy at the harbor’s entrance. The Buxom Lass settled down to plane on a glass surface all the way to Port Jefferson, but blonde hair wasn’t flying in the wind and those pink sunglasses didn’t drip salt spray because my sister had seen her that afternoon opposite Joseph Cotton in the role of Rose Loomis. Evelyn had plastered 1953’s Niagara billboard across two pages. I was getting very nervous as Evelyn’s obsession gathered speed moving ever closer to the present.
When I returned to the harbor’s entrance Tritona’s twin Detroit diesel power plants were pushing the sixty-five foot cruiser closer to Florida. It was a sure sign of an approaching autumn and potential hurricanes. James Milton, the yacht’s owner, sang with the Metropolitan Opera only during the summer season. I had followed in his wake many times passing sailboat keels buried in muck alive with fiddler crabs as he lifted my piano scales above the gurgle of ejected engine water with a heaving chest. We piloted stinkpots to the dismay of Southport’s elite rag-and-stick men, but on windless days our boats would glide down the middle of that narrow channel bordered by stonewalls to explore the shoreline.
We left Trinity Church’s white steeple poking out of green trees tops to cruise by the Gold Coast toward Westport’s seaside mansions. I took my first swim off Cockenoe Island as Mr. Milton’s Funiculi, Funiculi boomed before the faint outline of Manhattan. Fresh oysters from a silver platter disappeared as I learned the history of Peppino Turco’s and Luigi Denza’s 1880 collaborative effort. I had seen enough opulence aboard that craft to last a lifetime, but there was more to come.
As the Tritona’s stern grew smaller I spied a 1952 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, the winning car at the New York Auto show a few years earlier— without a doubt Mr. Milton’s pride and joy— sparkling in the afternoon sun at the bottom of the empty pier’s gangplank. The right-hand drive, four-door saloon’s sable colored top and long hood were encased in wax as was the burgundy colored body curving from a sloping front fender to the stylish truck. Radiating chrome-spoked wheels centered in white-walled tires supported the masterpiece. Mr. Milton had told Howard Burr that H.J. Mulliner, his favorite Rolls-Royce coachwork designer, had, “Eclipsed his own brilliance.”
Fifteen minutes later I wheeled my bike into Howard’s tool shed for the night to enter a coveted world. The Rolls was on its way to freight forwarder in New York City, but not before I rode home on fawn tan leather. When we arrived every matched walnut tray table was violated, each monogrammed glass in the recessed bar was smudged, and not one gold-etched dish evaded a scratching fingernail, but I guarded the silver-plated brush and comb inside the felt-lined grooming kit. Mr. Milton’s driver patted heads, returning a gold nib with platinum inlay set in a black resin barrel inside its gold-plated top. His writing instrument, which I had mistakenly called a mere pen, regained its rightful place within the secretarial kit just as the police cars arrived.
A thin man somewhere in his forties marched from the police car through the tall grass parting neighbors. That proud copper face took in what appeared to be familiar surrounding. He was blasé about a Rolls in front of my house and definitely disinterested in my face, which poked out the back window. He wore a red felt fedora hat creased lengthwise down the crown and pinched in the front on both sides. The hat had a purple 4 and one-half inch hatband with a bow at the side. A rust colored business suit, which my sister declared was sharkskin, shimmering in the twilight over suede shoes that matched the hatband. He offered a second key to a white uniform and returned to the patrol car’s backseat. Mr. Dwyer stood on the front steps and hung his head. Minutes later the men in white wheeled a body draped in a white sheet outside.
That first week in September was brutally hot with high humidity and too many disappearing people: Marilyn in Arthur’s care, Evelyn in a coffin, James Milton in the Tritona and that anonymous man who I believed was the piece that would complete Evelyn’s puzzle. Just one week from the start of my freshman year in high school someone else disappeared. Howard Burr shook his head walking from the red telephone booth near the front of his tool shed and waved to me. The outboard sputtered to silence and I ran up the gangway from the dock. Mr. Dwyer in a raspy panicked voice that competed with a fire alarm told me to hop the next local train at Southport and meet him in the last car at Westport. He hopped aboard dropping coffee-stained gloves and underwear, pointing to a column of dark smoke that rose in the sky.
“Sears Roebuck and their bullshit appliances can go to hell!”
We took the only empty seat by the lavatory, which held a chrome tank of passenger waste that had accumulated hours earlier. It reeked, it sloshed, and then utterly vanished from consciousness as he leaned closer on the verge of tears. “She called me, said she had no reason to live— I slept on it— how was I to know she’d do that?” Then he pulled it from the sport coat’s inside pocket. He waved a twisted white envelope with my name written on it in big, hand-printed letters. I had seen that handwriting before.
“Wade’s driver found it, dropped it on my piano.”
“When?”
Mr. Dwyer glared at me as my fingers started opening it and he tried to snatch it back. “Christ not here, not now . . . that’s a will! Don’t screw it up; he put his hooks into her, there’s no telling what he’ll do to you, Hot Shot.” He slapped a one-way ticket to Grand Central Terminal in my hand. We rode in silence after that with him hiding behind The Daily News. When we crossed over the steel bridge into Hell’s Kitchen he tossed a ten-dollar bill into my lap and left. The burned out shell of his basement room at the Y.M.C.A. took shape on the outside of the train’s dripping glass. A piano smoldered near sunken tin cans as the train squealed approaching 125th Street.
Looking beyond the polished northbound tracks, I saw blank eyes look up from a ironing board over the radio, flowerpot, and mattress that adorned a rusting fire escape. Peering between the steamy tenements I saw black people rushing to sample gushing fire hydrants, tambourine-wielding missionaries and air-conditioned bars. I wondered if Evelyn’s taps had been behind that glass brushing sawdust into a jukebox’s curved rainbow.
The car darkened as we dove underground. Distant greens and reds grew bigger flying out of the darkness. We left air-conditioning to trudge up that worn ribbon of steamy concrete into the vast terminal where I hopped the express to South Ferry. Heat from the city’s canyons rose beyond the blurry skyline into a scarlet sky. Bent over the bow of a Staten Island ferry that was rushing across that deep harbor’s cold water, I felt a welcomed chill. The fire escapes were crowed at eleven. I looked but never saw a white face.
One morning, several months I awoke at dawn. Silver frost glistened on fading grass under a canopy of crimson and orange. Someone had heaped trash at the curb before the Patton house during the night and two men were loading it into the back of a garbage truck. Dressing quickly I cautiously approached a man in a full-length black leather coat. Honey red hair had been combed into a high pompadour and when he turned around green eyes sparkled for an instant and then narrowed to focus on a twisted envelope that was inching its way behind my back.
“Real show starts at three, but I’ll give you a peek.”
“You knew her?”
“No. I married her.”
We entered a bare living room. Not a stick of furniture or a single figurine remained, only closed curtains. The kitchen was cluttered, but organized; it had been put to good use. We walked towards two locked doors, he stopped at the one to the left, which he opened with a key. Inside were three rows of metal pipe racks holding hundreds of dresses, woman’s slacks, sweaters, jackets and coats. Against each wall a brigade of shoes three feet thick standing in formation, each one commanded by a pair of dancing shoes like the one I had seen in Mr. Dwyer’s photograph. We moved up a stairway beside a wall completely covered by Marilyn’s movie posters. At the top of the stairs he paused to take a deep breath, then suddenly he pitched forward.
The bedroom door was painted a pale blue. He turned the key remaining outside and gently pushed me through the doorway. Twin cribs painted white were wrapped in clear cellophane. Blue sheets and baby blankets were folded neatly against each headboard. A bassinette was piled high with stuffed animals. A closet held blue baby dresses and a row of sunbonnets. An overpowering sympathy for Evelyn told me it was time I left.
“Got no time to screw with this. Stuff’s all yours.”
“I don’t want it.”
I dreaded the next door, but he opened it with disgust approaching a circular bed on a raised platform. The walls were white until he hit the wall switch and then a rotating mirrored ball spewed jagged pieces of multi-colored light out onto the mirrored ceiling. Shards of colors raked a single bed with a stained mattress before the window.
“That’s where . . .?”
“Stinks like it, don’t it, Son.”
I heard the Savoy’s horn and hurried down the stairs. “See you at three,” I said darting out the door into fresh air. When I returned there was a black Buick with New York plates and a police car with a familiar sergeant sitting on the hood. Our fat neighbor sat in the police car’s backseat nursing a bleeding nose.
“What’s going on?”
“Lawyer’s inside, get in there.”
“What happened to him?”
“Pissed off the owners’s representative.”
Three heads turned as I opened the door. The attorney sat in a camel’s hair coat reading his copy of the will in a thick accent that belonged to the Bronx. He quoted directly as I followed along reading Evelyn’s handwritten copy. He concluded with a nod to two light skinned teenagers. They were the only twins I had ever seen in person. Both girls had green eyes and auburn hair. The trio departed, but their father barred my exit locking both deadbolts from the inside. I stood uneasily, awaiting my punishment and finally looked past him to see both cars pulling away. He jerked the drapes closed and with a burst of energy and unlocked the door he had avoided before.
“I ought to plant your butt near hers.”
“What did I do?”
“She was doing fine, till your white ass did her in.”
Without a warning, a closed hand grabbed my shirt dragging me past the open door. A large blue circular sheet held my inheritance, that’s right, another scrapbook. There was no time to catch up with Mrs. Miller’s past. He had positioned me in one corner of the room and his hand was inside the coat moving a noticeable bulge. Mr. Dwyer disappointing as he was, had warned me. My life unfolded before me as I held that scrapbook in front of my face.
“Put that crap down, let’s get this over with.”
After agonizing seconds I heard the definite chink of metal pieces being joined, of course a silencer— he’d have needed that. Was his stub-nose 38 already cocked? A stronger hand lowered the last vestige of Evelyn’s obsession as I slid along towards the room’s center. I heard that satin sheet’s hushed descent above my pounding pulse. Was it meant to conceal my dead body? Looking around the scrapbook, I saw him arranging metal tools near a black leather pouch on a polished upright piano.
“Got my trusty gooseneck tuning hammer and stand-by tuning fork. Take a peek at those initials, My Man. Course I got four rubber mutes. Oh yeah! We got us a 5/8 inch muting felt.”
He kissed it as I sighed in relief easing my grip on the piano’s edge. He apologized to the Steinway piano for not having brought higher quality tuning equipment that would make precise adjustments to the tuning pin.
As he pampered the piano, I learned Evelyn’s daughters had become wards of the state after her third stint at Bellevue. Our fat neighbor and the infamous Mr. Dwyer had teamed up to forge a marriage license for a troubled lady who had no idea she owned a house. Neither of us mentioned any upstairs activities, but he locked that sheet in the other room and seemed happy enough with one broken nose to his credit. Minutes later a big moment arrived; the first piano he owned was primed for action. I sat next to him and somewhere; I would like to think just beyond Fire Island’s breakers, my feeble Chopsticks turned into the most moving Green Eyes I ever heard. Both of our spirits were reborn as his tears baptized new ivory.
More summers went by as I endured high school. The twins sold out to our fat neighbor at an inflated price. Arthur toiled repackaging Marilyn, who was again sharing phone calls with Joe DiMaggio, as Roslyn Taber for a role in The Misfits. Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift co-starred with Marilyn who bowed out as Mrs. Arthur in early 1961. As the next summer neared its end, on August 5, 1962, Marilyn died in her sleep at her home in Brentwood, California. Three days later her body was laid to rest in the Corridor of Memories at Westwood Memorial Park in West Los Angeles. I wouldn’t need help remembering that lady, I could do that in my sleep.
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