Massonville 2006
“Okay, can you tell me what that was about?” demanded Randa.
“You mean the warm, fuzzy moment when he tried to say he has a social conscience?” Katie asked.
“That. And why does he have such a case against this opera house?”
“You got that too?”
“It was hard to miss.”
“Do we care what he's thinking?”
“It never hurts to know who you're doing business with.” Randa wandered over to the staircase. There was a faded old afghan folded over the railing, which had probably been lovely a million years ago. Randa picked it up.
“Are we doing business with him?” Katie asked. “It didn't sound that way.”
“You mean what I said to Biceps Man about waiting? That was just poker. When I get back to the hotel room, I'll call him and set up a meeting for Monday to go over the contracts.”
“You think he was for real about the million dollars?”
“A million point two, and he meant it. I don't think the South's version of Donald Trump kids around when it comes to numbers.”
“So we each get …” Katie had to stop for a second, because math was involved.
“That's six hundred thousand apiece,” said Randa, who crunched numbers for a living. She sat on the bottom step of the staircase and began absentmindedly stroking the afghan. “It's a nice piece of change.”
“Yes.”
“I make good money, but I'm still in show business. Every one of my clients could get fired, or they could all fire me. Six hundred thousand dollars would be a nice addition to the safety net.” Katie watched her rub a darned spot in the afghan with her finger. “And Susie's so smart. I've always wanted her to go to someplace like Yale or Harvard. Even if you allow for estate taxes and inflation, that money would cover it. Her tuition would be safe, no matter what happened to me. ” She trailed off, looking at something in space that only she could see. She was probably envisioning her daughter's graduation from Harvard, Katie thought. Randa pulled herself back to reality. “What about you?”
“Everyone says the soaps are dying out, and that's all I've ever written. I've got to find a prime-time job, but you know how the industry feels about people who work in daytime. I'm going to have to do a lot of spec scripts, and a lot of freelancing.”
Randa nodded. “Six hundred thousand would cover you.”
“I could take the time to wait for a gig I really liked.” If there is one out there.
“You'll have freedom and I'll be safe, ” Randa said softly. “Not bad.” She fingered the fringe on the old afghan.
“So you wouldn't want to turn down The Donald and wait.”
“For?”
“To see if someone else wants to buy the opera house.”
Randa gave her a knowing look. “Someone who will fix it up and love it? And do what with it?”
When Katie was seven, a mean kid actor named Johhny Martin who was working on All Our Lives had informed her that there was no Santa Claus. She'd done her best to make him eat his words, but in her gut she'd known it was a lost cause. She felt the same way now. “Randa, the condos Mike Killian's going to build will look like that frigging convention center.”
“That's not our problem.” Randa was hugging the afghan to herself now. “No one's going to want to buy this place and save it. No one with money. Maybe R.B. could find us a group that would take it for free and spend the next thirty years restoring it as a museum or something, but I wouldn't even count on that. And until the preservation geeks came along, you and I would be responsible.”
Santa had died for Katie all those years ago when Johhny Martin had gotten her in a headlock. Now that she was a grown-up, all it took was irrefutable logic to kill a fantasy. She nodded sadly.
“This is a good thing, Katie,” Randa said. “We just won the lottery.”
So why do I feel like crying? And why are you holding that afghan like it's your last link to life?
As if she'd read Katie's mind, Randa stood up and began folding the old relic. “I'm not going upstairs to the apartment. I don't want to see any more.” She placed the afghan back on the staircase railing where she'd found it. The sunshine fell on it and you could see how beautiful it must have been back when the threads were new and the colors were bright. “What's the point in getting to know this old place any better?” Randa asked.
There wasn't one. Since they were just going to turn it over to Mike Killian's bulldozers, why fall in love with it?
They closed up the opera house, put the key back in the lockbox, and walked out to the wasteland that had once been the front lawn. They stood together looking at the rusted white façade and the torn canopy.
“We should celebrate,” Randa said.
“Yes.”
But neither of them moved.
“Maybe later,” Randa said.
“Sounds good,” Katie said.
“I should go back to the hotel and check my e-mails.”
“You go ahead. I'll be right behind you.”
A few seconds later, Katie heard Randa picking her way along the old driveway. Instead of following her, Katie continued to stare at the building that—for the moment—still belonged to her. But she wasn't really seeing it. R.B.’s face as he stood in the lobby came back to her. The man was so … open. How did anyone live past puberty and not develop at least one or two defenses? She flashed back to another memory—a much older one.
Katie was eight years old, and Rosalind was throwing her annual Halloween party. The routine for this event was set in granite. Every year before the festivities began, Katie went out with the maid to trick-or-treat in their apartment building. She always wore an outfit whipped up by the All Our Lives costume designer—an acolyte who knew Rosalind expected her daughter to be attired in appropriately childlike Cinderella and Snow White costumes. After Katie had finished begging for Hershey's bars, she would retire to her room with whatever meager loot she'd managed to accumulate in their not-so-kid-friendly co-op and a tray of canapés courtesy of her mother's caterer. It was a ritual she had never questioned. But this year the producer of All Our Lives had hired a new costume designer. The new guy, inspired by Bette Midler's turn as a mermaid in her last concert—this was before Disney's Ariel—had created a glittery sequin-covered mermaid costume for Katie. It had been a bit of a squeeze getting her round little body into the thing—she still had most of her puppy fat when she was eight—but once she had, the sheer gorgeousness of it had swept her away. It had seemed a crime to let so much glamour go to waste. So after Theresa had deposited her in her bedroom, she hadn't changed into her flannel pajamas. She had waited until her mother's party was under way, and then she had made a surprise entrance in the turquoise and silver living room.
Years later, Katie would wonder if her mother had reacted the way she had because she had been surprised—she never checked Katie's Halloween ensembles. Or maybe Katie as a mermaid had been too much of a show-stopper for Rosalind. Or maybe it was just that Katie had given her an opportunity to do a little Shakespeare in front of an audience. Whatever the reason, once Katie had stopped all conversation by teetering into the room on her spangled shoes that were designed to look like a fish's tail, Rosalind had sung out, “There she is! My little Kate!” She had gone down on one knee and had begun to quote from The Taming of the Shrew:
“‘… for you are call'd plain Kate, /And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst; / But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom.’ ”
Her mother meant to be funny, Katie knew. But no one was getting it. They were just bewildered by the strangeness of it. Rosalind never was good at telling jokes—she didn't have much of a sense of humor. Katie knew that too.
The silence in the room was awful. But Rosalind never stopped a scene, no matter how badly she was doing. So she stretched her mouth into a smile, and went on.
“ ‘Kate of Kate Hall,’ ” she quoted, “ ‘my super-dainty Kate, / For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate—’ ”
Before she could finish the line, someone laughed. It was actually more of a nervous little giggle, but it was a response. And it was more than enough for Rosalind. She finally stopped her performance and eyed Katie in all her chubby splendor. Even though she was only eight years old, Katie knew she was in for it. “Although perhaps ‘dainty’ isn't the right word,” her mother drawled. She raised an eyebrow. This time several people laughed. Probably the empty bottles of booze behind the bar and the diminishing pile of joints on the coffee table had something to do with it.
“No, that word doesn't begin to cover my little Kate.” Katie saw that her mother's eyes were red. Rosalind wasn't exactly sober herself. “In fact, that costume doesn't cover you, honey bunch …” Suddenly, Teddy was at Rosalind's side, practically picking her up and setting her on her feet.
“Okay ” he said loudly. “It's time for Katie to go back to bed now.”
It was the wrong thing to do, Katie could have told him that. Rosalind jerked away from him and drew in a breath to start yelling. But then she remembered her audience. She turned to Katie. “Don't be shy, my dainty one. Now that you've crashed the party, take a bow.” When she said “dainty” she might as well have been saying “fatso.”
Katie knew better than to run, but she started to back away, her sequined tail-feet making a funny dragging sound on the floor. Her mother's hand caught her arm in a grip she could still remember as an adult.
“Bow, darlin’.” Rosalind smiled at her with glittering eyes. Katie managed a smile and a bow before her arm was released and she could get the hell out of there.
The next morning she woke up to see Rosalind sitting on the foot of her bed.
“You almost made a fool of yourself last night,” said her loving mommy.
No, you did, Katie thought but didn't say.
“Never let anyone see that they've gotten to you—not even me.” Her mother started for the door, then turned back. “You think what happened last night was so bad. Well, you'll go through worse. And you'll get over it. I did.”
The next day she signed Katie up for ballet class. “You need the exercise,” she said.
Standing in front of the opera house, Katie wondered if everyone had childhood memories that could still make them cringe twenty-four years later. It was a question she'd asked herself often. As usual, she didn't have an answer. But once again, a vision of R.B., with his open face and his unguarded smile, came back to her. She turned away from the opera house and started walking fast toward the historic district.