Forty Four
Now that he was done at the Shoreline, Scootie could bear
down on the Lighthouse gig, mailing releases and photos to every editor in the
area and pursuing stories with the old Fetzle-era weapon of friendly
persistence. When he thought he was all tapped out, he thought of young Stephen
Swan posting flyers for his King Lear
and did the same, attacking every shopping center in a fifty-mile radius. He
then sent out cards to the Lighthouse mailing list and booked the boys on a
couple of community access TV shows. (He couldn’t wait to see them with Ethel
and Rupert, a pair of septuagenarians who tended toward barbershop quartets and
clog dancers.) Finally, he seized an abandoned billboard near the Lighthouse
turnoff and turned it into a roadside monument to things Gelatinous.
By the following Sunday, he had finally run out of work, and
allowed himself a day of rambling, beginning with a bike trip to Davenport and
a couple hours of tidepooling at Bean Hollow. Still possessed by nervous
energy, he hiked halfway to Miguel’s cabin before thinking better of it, then
returned to town with thoughts of food.
He was passing by Derry’s Doughnuts when he caught the
headline of the Hallis Gazette
through the newsbox: Local Philanthropist
Dead at 93. Scootie fished for a quarter and dropped it into the slot. He
wandered inside, feeling strangely weightless in the warm, sweet-smelling room,
ordered six maple bars, and ate them all as he sat in the corner, reading Rip’s
obituary.
Scootie grabbed his navy blue blazer and drove south to
Carmel. The funeral took place in the Carmel Mission, with a burial following
in the mission cemetery. The service was brief and traditional: a few passages
of scripture, a few words from the priest, but no real eulogy. Scootie arrived
at Rip’s plot to find him in a neighborhood of nuns and priests. Dull company,
he thought – and where had all this sudden Catholicism come from? Rip had never
mentioned it.
There fifty in attendance, but most seemed to be maintaining
a sort of professional distance. Aggie was there, with two others from the
Hysterical Society. She gave a barely discernible finger-wave, not wanting to
distract from the sanctity of the occasion. Scootie smiled back, but was hoping
that would be the end of it. He didn’t feel like sharing his small slice of
Rip’s life with anyone.
The priest, young and gaunt, read the rites in a tepid
baritone. Scootie couldn’t see how any of this had much to do with the man in
the coffin, so he took the time to study the surroundings, stripes of fog and
sunshine coming in over the shoreline. He was jarred back by the machine they
used to lower the casket. Just over the priest’s shoulder, further back in the
crowd, he spotted a pair of dark eyes, sheltered beneath a formal black cap, and
knew at a moment what she was doing here. The eyes came his way, then grew
darker and glanced away.
After the service, the dark-clothed strangers filed past the
grave and walked away, exchanging whispered admirations with their cohorts.
Juliana and Scootie strolled along opposite sides of the cemetery, studying the
headstones, harvesting the dead. Fifteen minutes later, when the last trio of
mourners had disappeared around the corner, the two of them took circuitous
routes to Rip’s headstone, a burnished white marble with flecks of gray, lying
face-up on the cinnamon earth. They stood on either side, studying the clean
lines of Rip’s name and years. Finally, the found the momentum to look at each
other.
“You’re the young lady,” said Scootie.
Juliana smiled. “You’re the young man.” The smile faded, the
corners of her mouth twitching with three horizons of loss. Scootie took a step
to the side, the beginning of a waltz, and met her behind the headstone, wrapping
her in navy blue.
“Oh God, Scootie. What have I done to you?”
Scootie laughed quietly. “A lot, Juli. A lot.”
A breeze blew through the eucalyptus, freeing a squadron of
lunar-slice leaves. Juliana recovered and stood back, wiping her eyes with a
black handkerchief. “I have a lot to tell you. About Rip. Can we go somewhere?”
Scootie had an immediate notion, but wasn’t ready to leave
just yet. He guided Juliana to a bench and returned to the grave, where a
couple of Mexican workers had arrived with shovels. Scootie went to the older
of the two, a kindly looking man with a bushy gray moustache, and spoke to him
in Spanish. She could hear momentito
and por favor, then the man smiled
and handed Scootie his shovel. Scootie drove the blade with the heel of his
wingtips, then pulled out a load of coffee-colored soil and let it slide
sideways, marking the percussion of the clods as they fell on Rip’s casket.
They spent an hour of half-conscious browsing through the
gift shops of Cannery Row, then headed for the Monterey Aquarium. They stood at
the otter tank, where Scootie waved at one who reminded him of Rip. Juliana
quickly refocused his attentions.
“Rip was Harlan Fetzle’s nephew.”
Scootie blinked his eyes in reverse. “Pardon?”
“You remember Harlan’s sister?”
“Katrina Marie. Joined a convent and changed her name to
Claire. Spent a week at Harlan’s deathbed, trying to talk him into giving the
estate to the church.”
“Which he declined to do, being not entirely fond of
organized religion.”
“For good reason,” said Scootie, thinking aloud.
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. Go on.”
“Well. The reason Katrina Marie ended up at the convent was
that she took up with a young man from Berkeley, son of a successful gold
miner, who got her pregnant and rascalled off to New York. The Fetzle family
sent her off to Carmel, where she was taken care of by the sisters. She was so
touched by their charity, so traumatized by the cost of her sin, that she
decided to join up.”
“And the baby was a little boy,” Scootie guessed.
“Ripley Bergdorf. Given the made-up name of Scalding by his
Uncle Harlan, who took him in, arranged for him to be raised by his household servants,
and eventually put him to work as a stable boy.”
“Do you suppose he knew Miguel?”
“I’m sure of it. In fact, he occasionally joined his uncle for
expeditions to Villa Califa. Years later, though, he could no longer remember
the route.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Scootie. “How come you didn’t tell
me any of this before?”
“Because I didn’t know. Rip named me the executor of his
estate – most importantly, his literary estate. I’ve been reading his books for
three days straight.”
Scootie cocked an eyebrow. “Books? Plural?”
“Yes. One on Harlan. And one on his marital adventures,
called Old Wives Tales.”
“Ooh! That’s bad.”
“I’m checking with the lawyers to see if we can change it to
something more subtle. In any case...”
“Hold it,” said Scootie. “Go back a second. How did you and
Rip meet?”
“Chamber of Commerce luncheon. He was there with the
Hysterical Society. YOu know my family history – I’m always shopping for father
figures, and who could resist Rip? In any case, I knew you only as the ‘young
man’ he would play chess with on Sundays.”
Just then, the otters spotted their trainers arriving with
buckets of shellfish, and celebrated with joyous somersaults through the water.
Scootie laughed, then returned to Juliana. “He also never mentioned this ‘Local
Philanthropist’ stuff.”
He was pretty private. All his donations were anonymous.
Children’s funds – everywhere. Children’s literacy, childhood diseases, Little
League, 4-H. With one exception: a gay rights group in San Francisco.”
Scootie smiled secretly.
“He had a trust fund from Uncle Harlan, but he gave most of
it away. He seemed to have a strong desire to be his own man.”
“Oh, he was that. By the way, that piece I used to play for
you in the library? It wasn’t Tchaikovsky – it was Liszt.”
“That’s... nice,” said Juliana, puzzled.
They sat before a bust of Steinbeck and three triangles: the
terraces of the Aquarium to their left, a spanking new tourist mall to the
right, and in between, an inverted spike of royal blue ocean. A yellow kayak
came straight down the middle, skimming the kelp beds in a left-right bob.
Scootie inhaled the salt-trace air, and finally felt ready to venture into
rockier terrain.
“So. If we have decided Rip Scalding was his own man... Are
you your own woman?”
Juliana took Scootie’s hand and produced the most gradual
slow-motion smile yet. “Almost.” She tapped a finger on the back of Scootie’s
knuckles, thinking. “After conducting a little controlled burn on my personal
psychic fields – my little euphemism for the unforgivable things I did to
you...”
“Answer the question, please.”
“Okay. I... focused my energies on the Fetzle finances, and
my own troubled marriage. Fetzle is doing okay. My marriage is not.”
“Scott wouldn’t change.”
“Oh, at first he was very enthusiastic. I made him agree to
some counseling, alone and together. He promised to start right after this trip
to Edinburgh, and that trip to Venezuela. The weeks grew into months and I
began to understand who my husband really is. He’s an energetic, beautiful boy,
a son of Apollo, passionately devoted to his art... and not necessarily to the
people he loves.”
The corners of her mouth began to twitch again. She had
resighted one of her three horizons.
Scootie took the crumbs from his sandwich and threw them
into a mob of pigeons circling Steinbeck’s pedestal. “So where does that leave
us?”
“I am legally separated, which implies some hope of
reconciliation, but there is none. For the past month, I have reigned as the
widow queen of Blaze Hill, have even resorted to throwing new paint on those
godawful white walls.” (Scootie smiled secretly again.) “Scott hasn’t actually
moved out, but I don’t believe that man actually requires a home, not in the
usual sense. He is at home in any place on the globe where the lights
congregate and send their glow up to the astronauts.”
“And you can always call room service for a midnight pizza,”
added Scootie.
“Hmm. This is a guy thing, isn’t it?”
“I know a cowgirl in Austin who would tell you otherwise.”
“Okay.”
“But still, your husband is a fool.”
If there were any doubts, these last words erased them.
Juliana lifted Scootie’s hand, opened his fingers and pressed her lips to his
palm. “That’s a very sweet thing to say, Scootie.”
Scootie felt a certain mail pressure to to follow up on this
lead, but he owed it to himself to wait for an invitation. He didn’t have to
wait for long.
“Scootie. It’s pretty outrageous for me to expect anything
from you, but... would you come to Blaze Hill tonight and let me cook you
dinner?”
Scootie smiled as slowly as he could manage. “Only,” he
said, “if you don’t make me hide in the wine cellar.”
Juliana leaned into his shoulder and answered in a low
voice. “You can dance naked on the rooftops, for all I care.”
Their laughter faded into the ring of tourist noises,
families with wandering children, the chatter of foreign languages, Japanese
students photographing each other in front of every available landmark, and a
tall old man in his Sunday best, parading a blazing Dalmatian through the
collective chaos. Scootie watched him go, and found Juliana matching his gaze.
“I’m gonna miss that old man,” he said.
“Me too.”
Scootie straightened up and propped his elbows on the back
of the bench, a familiar motion. Juliana snickered. “You’re going to tell me a
story, aren’t you?”
“Matter of fact,” said Scootie. “I am. John Cage was at this
concert, talking about how he learned to cope with a friend’s death. Years
before, this friend had moved to Buffalo. Cage talked with his friend about
once a week, and eventually got used to his not being in New York. ‘So now,’ he
said, ‘I don’t have to think of him as being dead. I just think of him as being
in Buffalo.’”
Photo by MJV
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