7

Backstory

My mother was the first Chinese person I ever knew. Odd how random events strike you. You may not suspect a misfortune is on its way, or that anything is going on besides a lost sled when you’re a child, a car running out of gas, a wave bigger than the others. Each may seem a mere curiosity, ominous only if you have a gift for prophecy. The stain, though unsightly, did not upset me at the time.

“Little Owen come with me, Little Owen come to me, Little Owen let us see How we can spend our century.” She crooned to me at bedtime. My father beamed.

Do my three syllables carry the visual resonance of something you may once have noticed, if scarcely, as you would passing a billboard or lonesome scarecrow when you were out for a drive in the country? Well after the stars, before the director. Do the syllables seem to have flashed by? A trivia question? What a fate. Yet the little trio of sounds—oh-when-jant—prove my existence.

By the same author: Gun for Hire; The Scarlet Letter; Bleak House; The Last Train; Low Sun at Durango; Richer Than Mr. Mellon; Holiday in Havana; The Sun Also Rises; Troilus and Cressida; Barchester Towers; Meet Me at the Waldorf; Playing Hooky. Lastly, my collected essays, Articles of Faith, which I hope you have seen.

You will have surmised that up through Barchester Towers I refer to pictures I worked on. Never mind the bastard producers didn’t give me credit on all of them, or got away with an Additional Dialogue By designation that meant nada. The next two after Barchester are misbegotten plays. On the first of these I collaborated with George S. Kaufman while flying solo on Playing Hooky. They lasted a total of ninety-three performances on Broadway, ninety two of which were due to the Kaufman name.

I’ve been a dependent clause long enough, the occupational hazard of screenwriters, supporting players who push the action along, then wait in the wings until needed for some plotty errand.

The famous screenwriter Ben Hecht called himself a child of the century, but his claim was bogus. I was its true offspring. Though it was a decade old when I made my debut, I paralleled the century, taking personally its wins and losses as Ben never did. The Panama Canal was my first triumph, the tearing down of the Berlin Wall my last. In between came all the wars. Did a hundred million die in the most killing century in history? Christians were the champions, creating the most dead, but Communists and other religions did their share. In my view, not because I’m more sensitive than anyone else but simply because I have lived so vicariously—voyeuristically when possible, eavesdropping on history the rest of the time—I was killed a hundred million times. All the while amassing credits and debits and discredits. I collect in order to recollect.

Flashing forward, I trotted into the motion picture industry as a derivative option, doomed morally and temperamentally to live in the shadow and on the nourishment of others. Owen the parasite. Always looking to become my own self.

Between scripts I dipped my quill in thicker ink with essays on the passing scene, the motion picture business, its politics, and an occasional portrait of an obsessed filmmaker or producing tycoon. After teaching a course on writing at San Quentin during a slow period, I produced a little corsage for the Threepenny Review called Prose and Cons. Although a couple of the portraits found their way, as grievously abbreviated Talk pieces, into The New Yorker, most of my writing was for the little known Contempo Reader, a now-vanished quarterly that devoted itself to fiction and essays from or about the Left. When there was barely any Left left, after the blacklists of the Fifties, Contempo Reader began to trumpet the Thirties. I was a natural for them. I profiled some of the old Lefties—the usual suspects: McGurney Harris, Hy Soifer, Evelyn Wilberg deForest, Ripley Link, Jeremy Mah Silberman—and finally did one on Ring Lardner, Jr. for Esquire. This last came to the attention of an editor at the also now-defunct Summit Books, and before you knew it out came my collection, Articles of Faith.

I left off essays—having loved journalism a while, if only adulterously—when David Begelman hired me to do a script on the narcotics trade. Early Seventies. I knew nothing about it, went downtown to East L.A. and found some pretty strung-out kids, Cal and June. They told me they were on speed when they met. “Stopped for a week so we could ball,” June said. Then they went back on. “After a bit we found horse,” Cal said, “or horse found us.” When they told me about this, I was curious: was the sex so inferior to the drugs that ruined them that they actually preferred the narcotics? “You don’t get it,” June said, “the sex was the drug and the drug was the drug but the drug was the better drug.” I scratched my head and went home to work on this, and then Panic in Needle Park came out. Begelman dropped me as if he’d been toting a boulder.

But my childhood. When did I notice the stain, coffee or ink? It meant nothing.

“Why does the sun go to bed in one corner of the sky and get up in another?” “Mind your owen business, chuff chuff,” the gruff one said out of his mustache with a twinkle when asked a question while he was busy. “Oh no, blink blink,” said the gentler one. “He is his owen curious self and owenly seven years old.” Nauseatingly precious, but they believed themselves lastingly blessed. My mother would call me her little magpie, tell me it was time to stop chattering and wash for supper. To which my father would gruffly reply, “I didn’t think we needed a magpie around here. I thought we were rearing an eagle.”

My childhood was as full of trains as other people’s is of relatives, as full of trains as Poor Jim Bicker’s nomadic Depression would be.

I came of age enjoying things, American bred and born, a child of western Ohio, which gave us cash registers and aviation. Cyclones of paint, congenial yet dizzying, inevitable as loose teeth in a five-year-old, lifted me off my hinges every few months, depositing me in a new spot where I’d be treated well but in essence left, as my parents said, to my owen self. We were always moving on, six or seven places every couple of years.

If my parents had been animals, my father was an amiable moose. “Chuff chuff, every boy should climb a mountain, shoot a gun, memorize the presidents, read the classics, know how to fish.” While my mother leaped into and out of interests with the excited, nervous grace of a deer. Syrilla and Barnett. “Blink blink, it’s time for a new city, blink blink, why don’t we see what Indians are really like, surely their humble abodes need a coat or two, Barney.” “Whoever heard of educating a boy, chuff chuff, without some experience of the Continent?” Syrilla, née Stedman, and Barnett Jant. With a blink and a chuff, they said in unison, “We’ll try Paris as soon as the Armistice comes.”

No one who was rich would have called us rich.

No one who was poor would have called us anything but rich.

Yet we didn’t fit snugly in the middle either because we moved so much more than the people who came home from jobs to sit in their chain-hung rockers, swinging on their porches as they watched their generation mount the offensive called the twentieth century. The moose wasn’t leisured; he was in paints, a middleman, not a manufacturer. Wherever we went people were building offices, homes, schools, bowling alleys, dance halls. When they finished building, they needed color. He gave them that. In his three-piece suit with his gold watch fob and polka-dotted bow tie and the monocle he affected, he marched over to construction sites. He’d go up to contractors in Saginaw, Omaha, Wichita, and he’d offer them colors for what they were putting up. “Here, Mr. Kenniston, chuff chuff, let me show you samples, that’s the line I’m really in, the showing business, I’ll show you how you can beautify this handsome structure.” “Mrs. Midgley, wouldn’t you like to try a muted peach in your parlor?”

Back East, he had connections with the Standard Varnish Works. “We have a painter already,” the contractors would say. “Fine, let me see him.” No matter where we were, Barnett Jant was able to get more paint at lower prices than the local suppliers. “It’ll come right out on the same train that brought me here, be in town by Monday,” and so it was that on the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, or the Santa Fe, the paint would flow in rivers out across the country to wherever my father found customers.

He wasn’t interested in building a paint empire, only in leading the life he and my mother charted. “You can hear the air, smell the light out here,” my mother said in South Dakota. A life on the move, a life of planting ourselves in a teeming little metropolis followed by transplanting out across the loamy plowland to another temporary center, a life of exploration. The moose himself hailed from Chicago while the deer started out in New York. They met at a travel agent’s exhibit in Madison Square Garden.

An early mind’s-eye mezzotint when we visited the deer’s deer, in New York, probably around 1912, has my maternal grandmother, Ursula Stedman, herself blinking and telling my mother she was the luckiest mother alive as they bathed and powdered me. Looking down late the other afternoon at the sun striking my creased pantleg and Church’s wingtip I was reminded of my paternal grandfather, Fielding Jant, the moose’s moose removed from England to Chicago and to northern California by the time we visited him in 1915 or 1916. The smell of his pipe tobacco mixed with the heavy scents from his capacious box elder, which shaded us as my father and his father spoke of the war. My father said, “Do you think we should go in?” My grandfather said, “You’ll have to but it’s rubbish. America thinks it’s under this box elder. It’ll see soon.” “See what, Pater?” “We’re all cannibals and always will be.” While my father drowsed in the garden chair I sat on my grandfather’s lap and asked him to tell me anything. The sun through the box elder sprinkled us with dots of itself. Can it be the same sun on my pantleg?

“Say hello to Albuquerque, Owen, and as soon as your father fetches our things from the baggage car we’ll get him to take us out to a pueblo like the one we read about.”

It didn’t last long. Though it is with me now in the way time has of becoming still, collapsing in defeat, admitting it is only an artifice we impose to bring form to the disorderly tumble of things that happen. Time and I have made a separate peace.

Here is the unhappy ending to my happy childhood. We were at the white wooden marvel on the beach, palatially presiding over surf and sand, my mother and I, when she went to bed early one evening with the complaint of a sharp headache. I always watched her brush her long toffee-colored hair at night, but now she couldn’t stand to touch the brush to her head. My father was somewhere in the northwest with his color samples, coming to join us the next day. Disappointed at not being able to play backgammon with Mama, I wandered alone those wide corridors with their paneling and portraits of dignitaries, descending the stairs while patting the balustrade as if I owned it, seeing myself a prince entering an awaiting ballroom.

It was the prince’s birthday and his young attendants and courtiers would all have to bring him presents, pricey little tributes to his highness. Midway on the staircase, as I spotted the bejeweled guests in the spacious lobby, the fantasy shifted and I became a buccaneer. The Pirate Prince del Coronado prepared the speech that would begin, “Hand over all your valuables, don’t resist, and none of the ladies will be harmed.”

At the foot of the stairs, though shorter than everyone in the lobby, I preened, fancying the hotel guests as my subjects. “Master Jant,” said a servile concierge to me, so resplendent in white tie and green swallowtail that I welcomed him into my masquerade. “Sirrah,” I said. “A wire has arrived for your mother. I shall send it right up.”

Blasted from reverie, I told the man my mother was already sleeping and that I’d give her the wire at the first light of day. Tucking the telegram into the front of my herringbone jacket while regretting it wasn’t brocade or at least velvet, I wheeled and made for the beach. A star-filled moonless night greeted me as I patrolled the strand. Thirsty for every star, I was proud of protecting my mother and of the telegram burning a hole in my herringbone. Cassiopeia’s Chair greeted me, and the friendly Dipper, Polaris, Castor and Pollux, and my new favorite, Jupiter. As far as I was concerned, the sky was eight years old, like me, newly mapped for me by my father, expected the next evening.

My father! The telegram must be from him. Yes, the return address, visible inside the envelope window, was Coeur d’Alene. Fresh fortunes in Idaho from silver and lumber were all of a sudden generating big houses. He’d found ready buyers there a few months earlier and had returned to corral new business.

Mrs. Barnett Jant
Hotel del Coronado
Coronado, California

CHERISHED SYRILLA UNAVOIDABLY DETAINED COEUR D’ALENE STOP EVERYONE NEEDS PAINT STOP SHOULD ARRIVE WEEKEND STOP LOVE TO YOU AND MONKEY STOP BARNEY

They called me monkey? That had never happened in my presence. So I thought of them as animals and they saw me that way too? But Monkey? I couldn’t wait to get to the San Diego Zoo the next day, where my mother had promised we’d go. The star of the zoo was a famous female bear named Caesar, given to the city by the Navy, and I was mad to have a look at her. My mother had started me keeping a diary, and I pulled it out of its hiding place inside a sweater. She’d said to me, engraved in my memory, “We read to learn, we write to understand.” I hoped she didn’t look at the diary. Before sleep I wrote how happy I was to be alone with Mama, how unpleasant the discovery that my parents referred to me as Monkey. What other secrets did they have? But I also wrote how much I enjoyed her laughter, especially if I could cause it. I copied out my father’s telegram and added, “I’m glad we have more days alone. Please keep this a secret.”

But when I woke up the next morning the first word I heard was mercy. My mother was scarcely able to move, with pains throughout her body, a different pain for every joint. While I still slept she had called the hotel manager. “You must go immediately to Mercy,” he told her while I rubbed sleep from my eyes. The car we had hired to take us to the Zoo instead brought us to the hospital run by the Sisters of Mercy in San Diego. The worst of it, for both of us, was the mystery of her pain. She was given morphine at the hospital, which relieved both of us since she slept a little and I didn’t have to watch her features contorted by her pain. By the time the morphine wore off, her pain had eased. Yet as she dressed to come back to the hotel with me, a sudden stab in her stomach sent my mother reeling back onto her bed as if she’d been knocked down.

As for me, I lost my voice. For the first time in my life I had trouble catching my breath. I wheezed, gasped, and briefly felt faint. A nurse had me lie down and gave me something to inhale. “It’s the shock of having your Ma take sick,” she said, “a touch of asthma perhaps.” I was better quickly. “Poor dear,” my mother said. “Poor you,” I said.

The doctors kept her overnight and a small daybed was moved into her room for me. She tried to make an adventure out of her ordeal. “Sorry you won’t meet Caesar,” she said, “but now you’ll see the inside of a hospital instead of a zoo, with the nuns walking around like penguins.” “Indubiterably,” I said, trying out a word I’d heard at the hotel. Each of us, I sensed, was doing a little act to hide our fear from the other.

The next day a doctor, who thrilled me by talking about his war service in France, wanted to telegraph my father, but my mother was adamant that she didn’t want to concern him while he was doing business. I butted in to ask the doctor how someone so old would get to go to war, and before my mother could chide me for impoliteness, he asked me if I could tell him how else he could get a free trip to Paris. “Doctor,” my mother said, “you have four days to get me better.” He smiled and sighed at the same time. “We’re going to Paris after the Armistice,” I told him.

My mother’s appetite, always small, now disappeared. Her pains returned, localized in her mouth and stomach. “I saw a lot of this in France with soldiers who had been weeks in muddy dugouts on the front lines,” the doctor told my mother, “but I don’t know where you could have picked up trench mouth.” He had found ulcerous sores in her throat. He thought the trench mouth was combined with severe food poisoning and gave her doses of laudanum and arsenic. The first dulled her pain while the second almost killed her. A day later her temperature rose to 105 but was controlled by aspirin and an ice bath. “You’ve had a bad reaction to the arsenic,” the doctor said, “but it’ll do the trick, scares off the poison, roots out secondary infection before it can spread.” Sure enough, the third day my mother felt better, and the fourth day, Friday, we went back to the hotel. She was weak and still had no appetite but the pains and fever were gone.

My father, arriving Saturday to find our hotel rooms converted into a sick bay, looked more stricken than my mother did. “My word,” he kept saying, “my word, I should have been here, why didn’t you get a message to me, I’ll never forgive myself, how could I not have been here?” He seemed to be talking to himself, blaming himself for my mother’s illness. He couldn’t do enough for her, sending out for flowers, plumping up her pillows, grabbing a tin pail of mine and rushing out to the beach, returning in a few minutes with shells for my mother to look at. Worried about my mother, I wondered if I could ever love anyone so much as I did my father. He was perfect; he’d get her better in no time. Why hadn’t I brought up shells for her to see?

Over the next week, my mother slowly regained her strength. When she had some of her appetite back, we packed our luggage to leave. We were moving on to Kansas City. The morning of our departure my mother was again felled, this time by a pain so severe she couldn’t move. A new doctor saw her in the hospital, a muscular younger one who was a surgeon. After he operated, which it seemed to me took about three years, he came out all in white to speak to my father. I heard two new words, “pancreas” and “tumor.” I wasn’t allowed to see her until the next day, and she was so pale, so white, I was reminded of all the ghost stories I’d ever heard. I was taken back to the Coronado alone, so my father could stay with my mother until dark, but I couldn’t find anyone to play with. I didn’t think of my parents as a moose and a deer anymore.

We stayed at the Coronado another month while my mother recovered from the surgery. The muscular surgeon came several times to see her. Once I saw him in the corridor just before he entered our rooms, and he looked solemn, but as soon as he came into my parents’ presence he put on a happy face as if he’d gone onstage. My father kept very busy, bustling around my mother and, when she didn’t need him, sending telegrams. The day we left my mother developed a cough.

We went up to Santa Barbara to stay with friends of my father’s—the yachting Converses, who saw themselves as pioneers in the attempt to turn Santa Barbara into Newport West—and the sun shone every day. My mother was much better. She read Robin Hood to me in the afternoons, sitting in a gazebo the Converses had at the end of their high-hedged, gravel-pathed formal garden. As we roamed cheerfully through the Sherwood merriment, robbing the rich to give to the poor, chased by the evil sheriff of Nottingham, my mother’s voice faltered a few times, as if she had something in her mouth that wouldn’t go down, and I asked her if she had a sore throat. It was uncharacteristic of me, self-centered as I was, but I recall being anxious about her. “Oh no,” she said, “it just takes time to get all well.” Her soft skin felt as good as ever.

“Syrilla’s a fighter,” I heard my father say to Morrill Converse one morning, though that would be the last way I’d have described my mother, who could hold an opinion firmly but was gently reticent in her presentation, “and by the time you see us in the spring this will all be history.” My father had gone to school in Chicago with Loretta Hibbs, who had, as people said then, married far above her station when she met Morrill Converse while he was married to his first wife and she was working as a waitress on his father’s 150-foot schooner. That kind of situation could easily propel a move from Newport to Santa Barbara in those days. “I don’t know why your father cultivates such a wealthy acquaintance,” my mother said our last afternoon in Santa Barbara, looking up from the budding romance between Robin and Maid Marian. “He’s really not himself around such a person. It may be he wants you to grow up a Republican.”

It was on the train east that I saw the small stain on her cheek. A random flaw, it didn’t seem possible, could she please wash it off? It was like a dark coffee stain, a little yellow around its brown, the rest of her skin the color of milk, the skin I loved to feel with my fingers and my own cheek. I wheezed once on the train when I went to bed but hid it from my parents by pulling the covers over my head. The wheeze went away. Every night coming across the country I went to sleep thinking she’d wash in the morning and the stain, the ink on her cheek below her left eye, would be gone.

In New York we stopped, as my father put it, in rooms just below one of the egg-shaped turrets of the Ansonia Hotel at Seventy-third Street and Broadway, which cost under a hundred dollars a month. We went up and up in an elevator with brass fittings and a dark mirror in back that frightened me to look into because it made faces cloudy. My grandmother came each morning to stay with my mother, and I was put into the Horace Mann School in the Bronx. When I came home my mother would be in a chaise longue the Ansonia provided us. “Tell me, my owenly boy,” she would say, “the news of the rialto.” A lump was found on her chest. Grover Cleveland’s cancer doctor—or one of them—was still kicking and he was put on the case. He cut out the lump. I heard the word “scirrhus,” and then I heard the word “malignant.” Another lump was found on her thigh, and they cut again. I turned nine, and my mother insisted on taking me to the Central Park Menagerie and buying me sweaters at B. Altman. She managed this with smiles, smiles all afternoon. My father was holding her up by the time we returned to the Ansonia. I felt I’d had a birthday that wasn’t a birthday though my grandmother also made a kindly fuss.

“Why doesn’t your mother ever bring you up to school?” a boy at Horace Mann asked me. “Where is she?” “She’s at flower,” I answered and that shut him up and mystified him too, as it had me at first. I’d heard my Grandmother Stedman tell a friend that her daughter had gone to flower, and I didn’t know what she meant. Then my father told me she was at the Flower Surgical Hospital.

My teacher at Horace Mann, Virginia Daniels, introduced me to Treasure Island. She smelled like toast with marmalade and always had a question for me—“What do you suppose the Admiral Benbow Inn looks like, or Long John Silver, or his parrot?” I think this is when I began to be interested in moving pictures, though that was hardly what Mrs. Daniels had in mind in 1918. “Adventures of the body,” she said, “will lead you to adventures of the soul. In a couple of years David Copperfield and Little Nell will get hold of you.” But I wasn’t at Horace Mann except for the one semester.

They gave her arsenic again, and again she almost died. She had more pain in her throat. Another stain appeared on her upper leg, which I saw when she got out of bed to go to the bathroom. I stayed home from school one day and read to her and she smiled. “I remember when I first met Long John Silver myself,” she said, coughing. “I never trusted him from the start.” She smiled her little smile again. It was becoming difficult for her to talk. She napped. “How’s Mama?” my father asked when he came back to the Ansonia in the afternoon. “Well,” I said, suddenly feeling grown-up, “she’s sick.”

When my father and I walked to the kiosk to take the subway to the Bronx he showed me newspapers and magazines for every interest—one for sports, one for gossip, another for foreign affairs, a fourth for metropolitan scandal, and many more. “You never get tired of this city,” he said, “but sometimes it won’t leave you alone.” Then we’d be shooting through a tunnel on our way uptown. “Think of the faces on the train,” my father said, “as X-rays that lead straight into hearts if you can read then properly.” We sometimes rode the subway with a scowling classmate of mine, Aidan Pugh, who was accompanied by an Irish governess. He wore knickers and a tight little bow tie while I shuffled around in short pants and a long tie that flopped from side to side when I ran the bases in ballgames. Aidan Pugh always looked as though he was finding fault, and even in sunlight his eyes were overcast.

One day he said to me just as class was starting up after lunch, “Hey Jant, I hear your mom’s going to die.”

“No she isn’t, Pugh, damn you.” Mrs. Daniels, who should have given me a demerit for profanity, instead sent Aidan Pugh to the vice-principal’s office, which I took as a dark augury. But that afternoon my mother was well enough to take me to Rogers Peet to buy some knickers of my own, which gave me hope. The stain on her face was permanent now. I never asked about it. We both liked the red and tan houndstooth checks on the knickers. “I know they’re a little large now,” she said, “but you’ll grow into them.”

In two weeks my mother was back in the Flower Hospital. After school the assistant baseball coach would drop me at my grandmother’s apartment on West Seventy-eighth Street, where I sat on her hearth doing homework and waited until my father picked me up after hospital visiting hours were over. I could beat my grandmother at backgammon.

Three weeks later I said to Aidan Pugh, “Pugh, see what an ass you are. I visited my mother yesterday, and she’s coming home next week.”

Two weeks after that my father returned from the hospital to my grandmother’s and told me he had the worst news in the world. Then he mixed up his tenses. “Mama is died,” he said. That was when my grandmother said, “Think of your mother, Owen, as having gone to the other side of the earth, to China. She’s Chinese now.”