Chapter Thirteen
(1)
www.earlygraveblogspot.comJuly 21, 1959. After a long, brave battle, Dr.
Julius Mackler succumbed on Tuesday to cancer.
The Morrison Planetarium has lost one of its
brightest stars.
Rima was on the second-floor computer, where connection to the wireless was automatic. She’d decided to check out the Wikipedia Holy City entry, but accidentally found herself on the Holy City Zoo entry instead. Apparently someone had taken the sign for the zoo to a 1970s San Francisco comedy club, which was then given the same name. Any number of famous comedians—Robin Williams and Margaret Cho—had performed there.
Rima spent half an hour googling the Holy City Zoo, reading postings about its closing night and also a reminiscence from one of the emcees about how he once bought a drink for a beautiful woman, only to have some other comic move in while he was fetching the second drink, so he told the interloper to reimburse him for the two drinks he’d already bought, and the club owner backed him up, but the woman left during the ensuing kerfuffle over the six dollars, so in the end nobody got any value for the money spent. It was all quite sad.
Eventually Rima remembered what she was about and that it had nothing to do with San Francisco stand-up or the expectations of men who bought women drinks. She found then:
From 1919 to its disincorporation in 1959, this was the site of a religious community founded and run by William E. Riker, a salesman turned palm reader turned cult leader. During his 96 colorful years, Riker was charged with numerous crimes—bigamy, tax evasion, murder, and, in 1942, after writing several admiring letters to Adolf Hitler, sedition—but was never convicted of anything. The philosophy on which Holy City was based was called The Perfect
Christian Divine Way. Its defining principles were celibacy, temperance, white supremacy, and segregation of the races and sexes. Followers turned all material possessions over to Riker, who was known to his flock as “The Comforter.” Exempt from his own rule of celibacy, Riker lived on the property in a private house with Lillian, one of his wives.
The town incorporated in 1926, with all property and income held in Riker’s name. Its heyday came during the 1920s and 1930s, when it was a popular stop for motorists on their way to and from the beach. Holy City offered the traveler a place to gas up, grab dinner or a soda (William Riker claimed to have invented Hawaiian Punch), see a peep show, look through a telescope, and visit a petting zoo. The annual take from this sideshow is estimated to have been around $100,000.
From July 1924 to December 1931, Holy City operated its own radio station under the call letters KFQU. Though the call letters appear obscene, they were simply sequential. The programming featured several musical offerings, including a popular Swiss yodeler. Its license was later revoked for “irregularities.”
In 1938, Riker ran for governor of California for the first time. He ran again in 1942, despite the sedition charge. His defense attorney was the famous San Francisco lawyer Melvin Belli, who won an acquittal by reason of insanity. In lieu of payment, Riker offered to procure a seat in heaven for Belli. When Belli demanded cash instead, Riker sued him for defamation of character—Belli had named Riker the “screwiest of the screwballs”—but lost. Riker ran for governor again in 1946 and 1950.
In the 1940s, Highway 17 was opened and traffic on Old Santa Cruz Highway dropped suddenly, sending Holy City into rapid decline. The town disincorporated in 1959 after Riker lost the property in a complicated real estate deal. This was followed by a season of arson, in which several of the buildings mysteriously burned.
Riker died on December 3, 1969, at Agnew StateHospital, having converted to Catholicism three years before. There were, at the time of his death, only three disciples still living in Holy City.
Holy City promised a world of perfectgovernance. A sign welcomed all visitors. “See us if you’re contemplating marriage, suicide, or crime,” it said.
The popular fictional detective Maxwell Lane, creation of mystery writer A. B. Early, is widely believed to have grown up there.
(2)
Addison was working at the breakfast table on a speech for the library; the studio was reserved for her real work, her books. She scribbled on a yellow pad, writing a few words, striking them out, writing a few more. Rima had come downstairs to ask her about the reference to Maxwell Lane on the Wikipedia Holy City entry. Instead she found herself listening to a story about Addison’s uncle, who was her father at the time, and how he worked on a commercial fishing boat but sometimes borrowed a friend’s boat and took little Addison out fishing or whale-watching or something.
In this story he shot a sea lion. Addison had all the tender feelings of a child toward sea lions, their faces so much like dogs’, intelligent, unfathomable. With a look at Berkeley and Stanford, who were sitting at her feet hoping for crumbs, because it was the breakfast table, even though no one was eating on it just now, Addison clarified that dogs weren’t unfathomable, dogs were all too transparent in their hopes and dreams, but a sea lion had the sea in its eyes. So to see such a creature shot, especially by a man she loved, was horrible to her. Yet so ordinary to him that he hadn’t even stopped to think how Addison would take it. To this day, she told Rima, she could still see the body, blood floating on the surface of the water like a veil.
Rima recognized the veil image from H2Zero and also Absolution Way. It was an image Addison was fond of.
In Addison’s story, her father/uncle woke her before dawn the next morning. They drove to the wharf and cast off, and there, in the dark, a hundred pairs of glowing orange eyes opened around them. Demon eyes.
He was trying to make her love them less. There were too many of them, he said. They were picking the ocean clean, and the hungrier they got, the more aggressive they became. They’d follow the fishing boats, swim into the nets, eat their fill, and then destroy the net in the process of escaping it. “You have to take sides sometimes,” her father/uncle said. “The fish or the sea lions.”
You can argue that a fisherman is on the side of the fish, but it’s a nuanced case. “I learned something from the whole episode,” Addison said. “I learned that even the people you love most are capable of murder.”
The theme of Addison’s library talk was supposed to be the impact of the coast on her writing. She wasn’t using the story she’d just told Rima; it seemed dark for the library. (Though Rima’s father had always told her never to underestimate librarians. The Patriot Act, he’d said, had made the mistake of underestimating librarians, and now they were the only thing standing between us and 1984, and they weren’t all spineless the way Congress was. They read books. His money was on them.)
Addison was trying to use the ocean as a metaphor for the imagination. As a child, she’d thrilled to stories about the SS Palo Alto, a concrete ship grounded off Seacliff State Beach in Aptos, and the USS Macon, a dirigible downed during a great storm before her birth. She’d followed avidly in the 1990s, when, with advances in infrared technology, pieces of the Macon were mapped off Point Sur. Every life had its wrecks, either right there in plain sight like the Palo Alto or dimly sensed somewhere below like the Macon.
And then there were those messages the ocean left on the sand—the shells of things long gone, wood from forgotten ships and trees, now polished into something more like stone. Addison made a note of the way that sea birds didn’t sing like land birds, but called and cried instead. The flukes of whales, she wrote. And then, Sea lions = mermaids. With a question mark.
It was all a tangle. Addison was reaching for something lucid—something about living on the edge of an unknowable, unreachable world. A world stranger than anything any writer would ever imagine. A deep, deep place, and you could see only the surface. But she couldn’t make it cohere.
In that old Ellery Queen interview, when Addison was answering questions about Holy City, she’d also tried to talk about the imagination. What she’d said then was that fiction is always some sort of mix of the real and the made-up. “We live in gossipy times,” she’d said. “There’s a type of critic who reads only to search for hidden autobiographies. For whom the story and the writer are one and the same. The imagination gets short shrift. But that’s the interesting part—the part you can’t explain or understand. Or teach or talk about. That’s where the abracadabra is.”
The interviewer had responded that we live in a time of science. “What if,” she had asked, “the imagination turns out just to be those memories you don’t remember?” And then she offered a compromise. “Or it could all be chemistry? Neurons firing?”
“Ka-pow,” Addison had said, another answer best described as evasive.
(3)
Many, many times before and many, many times after that interview, Addison had told the story of her first dollhouse and the unfortunate late little Mr. Brown. She’d told it so often that the story had replaced the memory, and there was, by now, no memory of little Mr. Brown, only the memory of telling the story.
Here is a different story about her first dollhouse: it takes place before Mr. Brown, when Addison was three years old. This was back when they’d lived on Pacific. She’d never told anyone this story, because she didn’t remember it. No memory, no story, no memory of a story.
Her mother had had a headache, so Addison had been told to play outside. She was collecting snails in the plastic bucket she took to the beach. She had vague plans for these snails—something thespian, a family drama they would star in. She’d found five so far by following their slicks into the ivy. When it comes to escaping, the whole game is rigged against the snail.
A black car stopped in front of the house and a man got out, came into the yard. He left the car engine on. Bing Crosby was singing Christmas songs on the car radio. The man knelt beside her. He wore gray wool pants, the knees stained with grass, mud, and motor oil. “I’m here to take you to see Santa Claus,” he said.
Addison knew that she wasn’t supposed to wander off by herself, but to leave in a car with a grown-up to go see Santa Claus was another matter entirely. The man helped her put the lid on her pail and weight it with a rock so the snails wouldn’t escape. Then he put her in the passenger seat. When she rode in the car with her parents, she sat in the back. She had a wooden Budweiser box with crayons and books inside, and she could sit on top of the box and see out the windows. The novelty of being in the front seat wore thin after a while, since there was so little she could see.
The man driving didn’t speak to her, but he smiled and winked and sang along to the radio. The road began to climb and wind. Tree branches slipped by overhead. By the time the car stopped, Addison was asleep.
The man slammed the door, came around, and woke Addison by lifting her out. He carried her through a shaded yard, up three steps onto a porch. He knocked on the door and set Addison down next to a rocker with a spider web between the arm and the seat. The paint on the rocker was peeling. Inside the house, a dog barked.
A woman opened the door. “I got her,” the man said.
“Well, she’s just a little peanut.” The woman’s voice was hearty. She stood aside to let Addison in. “Hello, peanut.” She was wearing stockings that bagged around her knees, and a pair of embroidered Chinese slippers on feet as small as a child’s.
The man saluted Addison smartly as he left. There was no sign of Santa Claus, but an excited terrier danced around Addison and licked her face.
“I don’t want any accidents,” the woman said. Her voice was less friendly now. She took Addison by the hand into the bathroom, removed her panties, and set her on the toilet, toward the back since she was so little she might fall in otherwise. “You’re a big girl,” she said with an admonishment in her tone. “You wipe yourself and call me when you’re done.” And she closed the door behind her, the dog pawing it from the other side.
Addison didn’t have to go to the bathroom. She slipped getting down, so one of her shoes touched the toilet water, which splashed onto her sock. She dried the shoe with toilet paper and stepped back into her panties, struggling to pull them on. “I’m done,” she said, but a long time passed before the woman came back and held her up to the sink to wash her hands.
“If anyone asks,” the woman said, “you remember it wasn’t my idea to bring you here. You say that if anyone asks.”
The house smelled of hair spray and cigarettes. There were doilies on the backs of all the chairs, and ruffles around the bottoms that hid balls of dust and dog hair. A different man arrived, wearing blue pants with black shoes that tied. He was chewing gum. “Hey there, Buddy,” he said to the dog, and, “Welcome, madame, to our humble abode,” to Addison.
“She’s just a little peanut,” the woman said, all friendly again.
“Come here, little peanut,” said the man. He lifted Addison in his arms, carried her across the room to show her a shelf with a dollhouse on it. He smelled like licorice. Addison had never seen a dollhouse before, and this was an elaborate one—three floors, twelve rooms—a hinge in the back to open and close it like a book. The man pulled up a chair for Addison to stand on, and he showed her how the grandfather clock kept real time. He let Addison hold it up to her ear to hear the ticking.
There were tiny china dishes in the dining room, painted white with blue flowers, and even tinier cutlery. “You could have a tea party,” the man said. “Go ahead and set the table.” He opened the icebox to show her a ham and a cake.
“I want to talk to you,” the woman said, and she and the man left Addison on the chair. There was a nursery with a little crib, and a rattle inside. A dressing table with a mirror and a powder puff. A library with bookcases, only the books were painted onto the shelves.
Santa Claus still hadn’t appeared, and by now it was lunchtime. Addison was called to the table and given a glass of lemonade and a tuna fish sandwich. The man ate quickly and left. Addison drank the lemonade and moved the sandwich from one side of the plate to the other. “I don’t know what the rules are where you live,” the woman said. “Here we stay at the table until we’ve finished our food.”
Those were, in fact, the rules where Addison lived. But her mother toasted the bread when she made tuna sandwiches so it wouldn’t get wet. She cut the crusts off and she didn’t mix in sweet pickles. She didn’t use so much mayonnaise that it soaked all the way through. Even so, there were plenty of times when Addison had to sit at the table until her mother gave up. This woman turned out not to have nearly her mother’s staying power.
“I can’t spend the whole day babysitting,” she told Addison. “You go play outside now.”
“I want to play with the house,” Addison said.
“It’s not for playing with,” the woman told her. “It’s for looking at.”
“I want to look at it.”
The woman sighed. She said all right, then, Addison could look if she took her shoes off so the chair didn’t get dirty, and didn’t touch anything, but then, when Addison took her shoes off, her wet sock left a spot on the chair that the woman saw. She shoved Addison’s foot back into her shoe. “How did your foot get wet?” she asked. “Did you have an accident?”
She made Addison sit on the toilet again, and this time Addison did have to go. “Who lives in the house?” Addison asked as the woman washed her hands.
“They’re all dead,” the woman said.
Which suggested to Addison that the house was maybe up for grabs. The woman dried Addison’s hands with a towel that had little pink-cheeked angels on it. “Play outside,” she told Addison, and Buddy wanted to go with her, but the woman wouldn’t let him; she said he’d get dirty.
Addison sat on the porch steps because there was a spider on the chair. She collected leaves and pinecones to make tables and beds, but they didn’t come out well.
Eventually her father arrived. He drove up in their old green DeSoto and snatched her from the porch. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Did anyone hurt you?” And then he put her in the car, where she sat on the Budweiser box and watched him talk for a long time to the woman. And then her father told her to climb into the front seat so he could see her while they drove all the way home.
There was a great fuss over her at dinner, and she sensed that if she asked at just that moment for a dollhouse she was likely to get it, even though money was tight and she’d been told many times that Santa had already bought her Christmas present.
That night her father and mother both sat on her bed and said that she was never, ever to get into a car with someone she didn’t know, no matter what. Santa Claus would never want her to do such a thing, and anyone who said he did was lying.
The next day she was given a whistle to wear around her neck. If someone she didn’t know asked her again to get into a car, she was to blow hard on the whistle and not to stop blowing until her mother or father came. She was made to practice until the sound came loud and clear.
She’d forgotten about the snails in the pail, and they died. Usually Addison saved empty snail shells if she found them, but there was too much guilt associated with these. They were buried in their shells in the backyard beneath the rosebushes. She tended their graves until, within the month, she and her parents had moved to the house on California.
Addison wore the whistle until she was six. She took it off when she started school, since no one else there wore a whistle. By then she had forgotten why she had it. The only residue was an odd suspicion attached to Santa Claus (which made it strange that she had so many of him up in the attic). And, in the backyard on Pacific, the graves of the snails.