DUKE WANTED IT TO BE A STORY ABOUT WHITE SLAVERY, AS HIS FATHER’S TRUCK APPROACHED, HE TRIED TO IMAGINE GIRLS IN LOCKED, WINDOWLESS ROOMS WHOSE ONLY ESCAPE WAS WHAT THEY COULD SEE THROUGH A KEYHOLE. HIS FATHER SLOWED DOWN, BUT DUKE SIGNALED HIM TO KEEP MOVING SO THAT HE COULD DO A DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS INTO THE BACK OF
the truck. Clyde Morrison watched his son vault the side panel, and he picked up speed once he could see that Duke was settled in the back.
No, Duke thought, I don’t like a story that starts in a locked room. It lacked the potential for fistfights. It was his experience that fistfights occurred out of doors unless they were between a man and his wife. No locked rooms.
Duke dragged a sack of sand against the cab, where his father’s head bounced along with the truck. He leaned back to watch the disconnected sky pass above him. Eucalyptus trees rushed by. He’d been running through the Verdugo Hills in preparation for football season, and the only thing he liked about road-work was when it was over.
It might be better if it were a cabin on the edge of a wilderness, the kind of place that was good for stories. It could be about a woman who had escaped from white slavery. She’d met a man who didn’t care about her past, and now they lived in a wilderness cabin. When trouble came, the brave family would meet it in the open. The wife would stand behind her husband. The husband would brandish a rifle. The intruders—the same men who had locked her in the windowless room—would be defeated from the height of a hill after a fierce and bloody battle in which maybe even the husband was wounded. But the intruders would never dare return. No, better than that—they’d all be dead.
When they stopped at the railroad tracks for a southbound train, Duke leapt from the truckbed and got into the cab beside his father. Duke loved his father—that was what all his daydreams were ultimately about.
“Decided to move up with the grown-ups?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What were you dreaming about back there?”
“I don’t think you want to know.”
“Thinking about a girl at school?”
“Something like that.”
As the train passed them—a yellow-and-red Southern Pacific, big as a dinosaur—Clyde smiled and returned his attention to the road.
“Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“She was wrong last night. Everything she said was wrong.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, son.”
“She blamed you for the farm not working out, and she made it sound like the drugstore was a bad idea, too. It made me mad.”
“Have you spoken to her about this?”
“No.”
“Does she know you were listening?”
“No.”
“Good. Keep it that way. There’s no sense in her hating both of us.”
“I think it’s too late for that,” Duke said.
Clyde opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Absurdly enough, she did hate both of them.
“I didn’t mean that,” Duke said. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, when you get married, maybe you’ll be smarter than I was.”
Sometimes Duke wanted to be more like his father, but this wasn’t one of those times. There was a flaw in Clyde’s thinking, and when Duke found it, the whole structure of his father’s personality would fall like an old shack in the wind. Duke knew where the problem started, though—it started with his father’s tremendous ability to forgive: forgive his wife, forgive his parents, forgive his bad lungs, forgive this crowded town which had brought him no less trouble than Iowa or Lancaster—the places they had lived before.
He watched his father drive toward Glendale, and he remembered the times when Clyde had become another kind of man. When his father drank too much—a seasonal occurrence, like rain or windstorms—he found a part of himself that was entirely bitter, as bitter as his wife had ever been. That was when he broke the furniture and threatened her and she shook with fear. That was when he blamed her as much as she blamed him. That was when Duke had to stand between them. He could count on one hand the times this had happened.
“You know what your coach told me this morning?” Clyde asked.
“No, what?”
“He said, ‘There’s nothing ailing Glendale football that five more Duke Morrisons wouldn’t cure.’ ”
Duke adored his father, but lately he’d been disturbed by the differences between them—which Clyde often brought to his attention. At sixteen, Duke was already the darling of the local papers, a young man whom mothers wanted for their daughters, a young man who made older men ashamed of their indolence. Clyde, on the other hand, was a man with a respiratory disease who ran a pharmacy owned by the bank.
When they arrived downtown, Clyde asked Duke to unload the sand near the back of the drugstore. Why he needed sand, Duke didn’t know and didn’t care. He’d watched his feelings turn this way before, and it was never pleasant. As Clyde’s head disappeared into the darkness of the pharmacy, Duke couldn’t help thinking that he’d been cheated, that this wasn’t the kind of father he deserved. The more he thought this way, the more ashamed of himself he became.
His father’s drugstore, near the corner of Harmony and Vasquez, was a peaceful place that attracted the older men and the younger women. Clyde teased Duke that the girls only came around to catch a glimpse of him, but Duke knew it had more to do with Clyde. Clyde understood the trick of making young girls feel attractive but never threatened.
As Duke followed his father through the back of the store, he remembered one girl whom Clyde particularly enjoyed cheering up. Her name was Maria, and even Duke recognized that she didn’t belong in Glendale. She was a pretty girl, but not pretty in the way a small town valued. She was also a smart girl. Clyde loved her, Duke imagined, because she was the daughter he would have liked to have had.
When they turned on all the lights, Maria was standing outside the front door. Duke felt as though he had conjured her from the air. It was the middle of Sunday afternoon, but the tinted shades made it feel like dusky evening, and Maria’s face, just beyond the darkened window, was changed from how Duke remembered it. The lines of awkwardness were gone and she was beautiful like a movie actress or a pinup girl. Duke hurried toward the door to let her in.
Clyde shouted from the back of the room, “Hello, beautiful girl!” and Maria blinked to be so suddenly confronted by his attention. She shook Duke’s hand and walked past him toward his father. Most of Maria’s errands to the drugstore were invented, but Clyde would never challenge her. Duke’s mother was convinced that Clyde’s business would thrive without this kind of frivolity, but Duke recognized that this kind of frivolity was his father’s business. There were times when Duke wanted to slap his mother, the depth of her misunderstanding was so great.
Maria assembled fifty cents’ worth of cosmetics and candy and offered them to the bag that Clyde held out for her.
“Okay, sweetheart. Will there be anything else?”
“No, Mr. Morrison. I just wanted to pick up a few things. Thanks for opening the store.”
“What do you hear about my son Duke? Is he a big heart-breaker at the high school?”
Maria turned toward the door where Duke was still lingering, but she stopped herself. She wouldn’t look at him. “I know a lot of girls that like him,” she said.
Clyde smiled and threw a few extra pieces of candy into her bag. “I think you’re breaking a few hearts yourself,” he said.
Duke smiled. If he stood there long enough, he would no longer be ashamed of his father. He knew that by long experience. He watched Maria—she wore a summer dress, she was so much smaller than he was—and he imagined his hand sliding up her dress, over her ass and up her back, to where he could turn her around like a puppet and kiss her the way he’d always wanted to kiss a girl. Not the little pecks of the cheerleaders after a football game, but a deep exchange of everything that was inside them. His father looked at him over Maria’s head, and Duke could feel the erection starting to fill his pants.
“Duke?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why don’t you drive Maria home and get me another bag of sand on your way past the quarry?”
“Sir?”
“I know that doesn’t make sense. I could have picked it up earlier, but it didn’t occur to me. I’ve got about a half hour’s work to do here, so that’ll keep you busy for just the right amount of time.”
Duke didn’t mind driving Maria home. The sand bothered him, though. It was the kind of thing that drove Duke’s mother crazy. Indecision. Forgetfulness. Two trips when one would do. Typically, the waste was wrapped in a kindness that made it hard to criticize him.
Duke put her bicycle in the back of the truck. Maria was quiet for the first mile, but she answered easily when he asked her a question. She watched the neighborhoods pass until Duke asked her another question. “What does your father do, again?”
“He was a doctor, but now he’s retired.”
“Why did he retire?”
“He made a lot of money.”
Maria smiled. Duke rolled down the window and set his arm on the door, just like Clyde.
“What does he do now?”
“He reads books and rides horses. He hunts and fishes.”
“Do you ride horses?”
“I don’t like horses much, but I ride them because it makes my father happy. He thinks it’s something everyone should do for their health. I like cars better. I don’t feel sorry for a car because I’m sitting on its back.”
“Well, maybe you should feel sorry for it,” Duke said. “There’s been a whole lot more on the back of this truck than any horse ever carried.”
“But a truck doesn’t have a soul,” Maria said. “So I’m not going to have to look into its big eyes when I meet it in heaven and it asks me why I spent so much of my life sitting on it.”
Duke laughed. She had a funny way of looking at things, and she was much prettier than he’d imagined. She had a strong, straight nose and full lips. Her dark eyes brightened when Duke asked her a question.
When they reached her address, the gravel driveway was lined with flagstones. The building itself was alone on a long, shallow hillside, a hacienda that might have been older than the state of California. A huge porch covered two sides, and from where he sat, Duke couldn’t guess how big the house itself was. It had the cheerfully decaying surface of a colonial building.
“This is my house,” Maria said. “It doesn’t look like anyone else’s house, does it?”
It hadn’t occurred to him that she might be Spanish. The house itself was no reason to think that, but he thought it anyway.
“Are you Catholic?”
“Yes,” she said. “Are you?”
“No.”
Duke had nothing more to say. He was awed by her home, but unwilling to talk about it. He watched it through the windshield. With all those flat, cool surfaces, it was like a cloud sitting on the ground.
“Would you like to see?”
“Yeah.”
They crossed the crunching gravel toward the front door, which was black with red trim. He didn’t know why he was following her into the house. Every step was closer to a darkness he couldn’t identify, but now keenly felt in Maria’s presence. It was like the darkness of regretting his parents, but more painful.
“You don’t have any brothers and sisters?” Duke asked.
“No, I don’t.”
The main room—he didn’t know what to call it, a living room? an entry hall?—was more masculine than any room he’d ever been in. Every seat was covered in leather and framed in dark wood. The pictures on the walls were scenes of horses and hunting. Even the flowers, which brought a welcome brightness to the table and mantelpiece, were not the flowers a woman would have chosen. The colors were hard and strong and deliberate.
“Where’s your mother?” Duke asked.
“She died when I was a little girl.”
“I’m sorry.” Duke watched her for signs of her mother’s absence. Her eyes were dark and wide. Her lips settled into a thin frown.
“She lived in New York for a long time,” Maria said.
Duke followed Maria through the house. As alien as it first seemed to him—all the wood and leather and nowhere a woman’s touch—he soon realized that it was exactly the kind of house he wanted. If he had dreamed this place, he couldn’t have made it any better.
His imagination of Maria deepened. She was a child who’d probably never had a mother, and that was a freedom he could feel. He could see it in the way her shoulders lifted her dress and the way her arms fell simply away from her shoulders. Of course, she was Spanish. She had the dark eyes of the earliest settlers. She had the softness of a culture that put men above everything.
“I want to ask about your mother. Is it all right to ask about your mother?”
“I don’t think you want to know.”
“Maybe I do.”
“Why?”
“What happened to her? Why did she go away?”
“My mother didn’t like it here. She pretended to like it because it made my father happy.”
“But what happened?”
“One night, she got really mad at me because I had just learned how to fill the tub and I let it overflow—by accident. She slapped me a couple of times. I think she was afraid of what would happen to the house, and I think she would have stopped, but Dad grabbed her and tried to hold her down. She went wild after that. She broke his nose. She never calmed down.”
“Why did she go to New York?”
“My dad put her in a sanitarium there. He said it was the best in the world.”
“You make it sound like it wasn’t.”
“I don’t know,” Maria said. “That was where she died. It couldn’t have been that good.” She turned to face the fireplace. “Dad said that it was heart disease, that it wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
Because Maria wasn’t crying, Duke felt as though he might cry himself. As he watched her try to shake off her emotions, he thought about the houses he’d grown up in. They were comfortable, but filled with humiliation. His parents would fight over money, and sometimes his mother would ask for Duke’s paper route earnings right in front of Clyde. Why did she have to do that? Duke had prayed Clyde would hit her, just hard enough to stop her from destroying everything Duke loved about his family.
Maria’s house didn’t have a mother, and Maria’s sadness would have been Duke’s joy. As much as he wanted to grieve for her, the house still made him happy. The things that surrounded him were the things he would want for the rest of his life. He put his hand on Maria’s shoulder and gently turned her around.
“I want to kiss you,” Duke said.
Her eyes brightened, but she didn’t speak.
“Don’t you want that?” he asked.
“I did a few minutes ago.”
“Did I do something wrong?”
“No, you’ve been the best gentleman. It’s just, it’s strange being here together. It feels too much like his house. I feel like he’s watching us.”
“It’s a really nice house,” Duke said. “I liked it right away.”
“There’s never anyone here but my father and I. Don’t you think that’s kind of sad?”
“I think that’s very sad.”
She leaned toward him and he held her. “Big houses shouldn’t be for just a few people,” she said. “They should be for lots of people. With a big house like this, I think you should have lots of children and lots of friends.”
“I think you’re right.”
Duke looked around again, and it seemed even more like his home. The only things he’d change were what Maria wanted to change. If this were really his house, it would be filled with pictures of the large family that lived here. The noise of children would be everywhere. The smell of cooking would always be announcing the next meal. He would fill the tables with bright flowers.
“Why don’t you just pretend it’s your house,” Duke said. “That’ll make it easier, won’t it?”
He thought he’d seen everything there was, but sitting by itself on a small wooden table beside the telephone stand was a wedding picture, smothered by an ornate gilt frame.
“Is that your mother?”
“Yes.” Maria smiled. “Isn’t it a pretty picture?” Maria picked it up and offered it to Duke.
She was a strong-featured girl, not so different from Maria, but more beautiful in the conventional terms that a camera could understand. She was wearing her wedding gown, and she was three or four years older than Maria was now.
“She must have been beautiful,” Duke said.
“You never visited her in New York?”
“We visited her sometimes. I think he didn’t want me to visit her too much.”
Duke bent down to kiss Maria. He held her carefully between his hands.
Kissing her, Duke could feel the life he was about to begin. He would live in big houses filled with lovely people. He wasn’t going to become his father because he would never choose a woman like his mother. Suddenly, that part had become very simple. But he would still lose something he’d always thought he needed. He tried to suppress this understanding, but it just became more powerful. He could enjoy kissing Maria for the rest of his life—he did enjoy kissing her—and he would never know why his mother hated him so much.
He stood back from Maria’s face. There were many lifetimes there. The life she had lived and the life she had yet to live, her mother’s life and her father’s life. Duke’s life, too. He wanted to believe that she wasn’t going to get any older, that he could protect her from all harm, but what he saw instead was the kind of mother she might become: vicious, destructive, drunk, insane, dead. There were too many possibilities.
His own mother’s face began to crowd his imagination. She hadn’t always been a bitch. Even now, she could be kind, and there were days when she made him proud. When it came down to it, Duke was more like Molly Morrison than he’d ever been like Clyde. Duke had watched her raise her family from Iowa to Glendale, but she couldn’t do it without the help of her men, and that fact angered her beyond her ability to control herself. Duke knew how she felt. He wanted to be free of his family as much as she did. After a while, her face had been destroyed by her anger. She wasn’t a beautiful woman anymore. She hadn’t been a beautiful woman for a long time.
Maria was getting frightened. She wasn’t an experienced girl, and the handsomest boy at Glendale High just continued to stare at her.
“Duke, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Something’s wrong.”
Duke watched her eyes. Her eyes were perfect like her mother’s eyes, dark but radiant. She didn’t know him at all, but she knew him better than anyone in the world. She was the first person he’d met in this new life. He held her hand and kissed her again, but he couldn’t feel the passion he’d felt a moment earlier.
“What were you thinking about? Why’d you stop kissing me?”
“My mother was so beautiful.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was thinking about how beautiful your mother was, and it reminded me of my mother, the way she used to be.”
Maria held his hand tightly. Duke gave her a thin smile and narrowed his eyes. He wanted her and he hated himself for wanting her. But in spite of everything, he tried to be adequate to what she felt for him. “I mean, you’re beautiful, too. You’re so beautiful. I’m sorry your mother’s gone, though.”
He took both her hands and placed them between his own hands. He extended his fingers as though his tenderness were compounded by strength. He watched himself, becoming certain as the gesture closed around her that it was exactly right. Deep inside, though, he was breaking like glass.
Maria’s face softened. “We don’t talk about her. My dad believes in all that Mexican stuff. Feo, fuerte, y formal.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“The Mexicans say that a man should be ugly and strong, but have dignity. It means, well, it means that a man shouldn’t be too pretty, that he should work hard, and that he should hide his true feelings.” Maria smiled at the intensity of Duke’s interest. She kissed his big hand. “You’re strong and you’re dignified, but you’re a little too dreamy to be feo. Maybe when you’re older.”
Duke frowned. He narrowed his eyes again, watching to see how she would react.
“You should probably go now. My dad’s going to be back, and I don’t think you’re quite feo enough for him, either.”
He put his arm under her shoulder blade and gently pulled her forward. He kissed her hard on the lips without opening his mouth.
Outside, in the short time they had talked, the sky had deepened. What had been hazy blue was now hard amber. He hadn’t seen a sky like this in a long time. It was as though all the elements of earth and air had conspired to make a sheen so impenetrable that no human thought could get beyond it.
“What kind of doctor was your father?” Duke asked.
“Mostly horses and large mammals.”
“He was a vet? I thought you said he was a doctor?”
“I’m sorry. That’s what he calls himself—a doctor. For a while, he was a rancher, too.”
“My father was a farmer,” Duke said.
“Really?”
“For a little while.”
Before his parents moved to Glendale, they had lived in Lancaster, beyond the San Gabriel Mountains in the Mojave Desert. His father had tried to become a farmer, but as hard as he worked, he couldn’t make the land profitable. In the desert, the sky was often impenetrable, even when it was clear blue and saturated with light. Duke had a horse then. The horse had been skinny because of a disease, but no one had known except his family. As Duke drove away from the hacienda—Maria waved after him—he tried to imagine how that must have looked to the neighbors. His father had been a foolish farmer, and his mother had been mean even then. The neighbors must have thought they were starving the animal. He wished he knew why no one had said anything. It would have been so simple to ask, but no one ever had.
As he drove back toward the quarry, Duke rehearsed the trip home. He would get another bag of sand, return to the drugstore, and put it wherever his father wanted. He still didn’t know what Clyde intended to make with all that goddamn sand, but he felt prepared to become the best version of Clyde’s son that he could imagine. Maybe they would make something good together.