36
Last Call
Los Altos, 1962
Sometimes the telephone rang in the middle of the night. Christine would hear her mother’s slippered feet shuffle down the hall and the receiver click as it was lifted from the desk phone. “Hello. Yes, what is it?” Then, long silences broken by low monotone answers. Always, her mother would be snappish the next day.
Her father put a stop to it. One night, the mattress creaked a second time in her parents’ room. The floor groaned as he passed Christine’s bedroom door, down the hallway to the living room. There she imagined her mother hunched over the desk telephone, wrapped in her chenille robe, shivering against the cold. Then, her father’s voice on the phone, the receiver settled back onto its base, feet in the hallway, a door scrape against the frame, muffled voices, quiet.
Early in the morning, her bedroom door opened and light from the hallway illuminated the foot of her bed. She was awake anyway, staring up at the ceiling. She sat up in bed. “Was it Leone?”
Her father pulled the door half shut and sat down on the edge of her bed. “Yes.”
“You didn’t hang up on her, did you?”
“No.”
“Well then, what did you say to her?”
He was quiet for a moment. Through the high window, the last of the moonlight transferred its reflection to her father’s tired face. Even with the dark stubble of a night’s beard growth and sleep-mussed hair sticking out from the sides of his head, he looked like someone she could always count on to tell her the truth.
“I told her she was upsetting your mother and not to call here anymore.”
“But …”
“No but.” He stood up and walked to the door. Christine sniffed air into her lungs and held her breath. When he reached the doorway, he turned back to face her.
“You have to understand. When Leone calls in the middle of the night like she does, it’s because she’s drunk. There’s nothing we can do for her. It upsets your mother, and I can’t have that.”
Christine let out the breath she was holding and fell back on her pillow.
“Can you get back to sleep?” he asked.
“I’ll try.”
After he had pulled the door closed, Christine folded her hands behind her head. She tried to picture Leone at the end of the telephone line. Did she prop herself up in a barroom phone booth? Or sit on a sofa in a lonely room surrounded by empty bottles? What did she want to say at three in the morning that she could not say at any other time? To keep the peace, Christine would have to obey her father. There is nothing we can do for her, he had said, but it was his departing words that chilled her.
“We will speak of her no more.”