I parked on the concrete strips that passed for a driveway as if I had every right to be at the former home of the unlucky Templeton family. I got my lamp and a brand-new toolbox and went to the front door. I had a bad moment when the key refused to work, but it was just new. When I wetted it with some saliva and jiggled it a little, it turned and I went in.
There were four rooms if you counted the bathroom, visible through a door that hung open on one working hinge. The biggest was a combined living room and kitchen. The other two were bedrooms. In the larger one, there was no mattress on the bed. I remembered Ivy saying Be like takin your dog on vacation, won’t it? In the smaller one, Rosette had drawn Crayola girls on walls where the plaster was decaying and the lathing showed through. They were all wearing green jumpers and big black shoes. They had out-of-proportion pigtails as long as their legs, and many were kicking soccer balls. One had a Miss America tiara perched on her hair and a big old red-lipstick smile. The house still smelled faintly of whatever fried meat Ivy had cooked for their final meal before going back to Mozelle to live with her mama, her little hellion, and her brokeback husband.
This was where Lee and Marina would begin the American phase of their marriage. They’d make love in the bigger of the two bedrooms, and he would beat her there. It was where Lee would lie awake after long days putting together storm doors and wondering why the hell he wasn’t famous. Hadn’t he tried? Hadn’t he tried hard?
And in the living room, with its hilly up-and-down floor and its threadbare bile-green carpet, Lee would first meet the man I wasn’t supposed to trust, the one that accounted for most if not all of the doubts Al had held onto about Oswald’s role as the lone gunman. That man’s name was George de Mohrenschildt, and I wanted very much to hear what he and Oswald had to say to each other.
There was an old bureau on the side of the main room that was closest to the kitchen. The drawers were a jumble of mismatched silverware and crappy cooking utensils. I pulled the bureau away from the wall and saw an electrical socket. Excellent. I put the lamp on top of the bureau and plugged it in. I knew someone might live here awhile before the Oswalds moved in, but I didn’t think anyone would be apt to take the Leaning Lamp of Pisa when they decamped. If they did, I had a backup unit in my garage.
I drilled a hole through the wall to the outside with my smallest bit, pushed the bureau back into place, and tried the lamp. It worked fine. I packed up and left the house, being careful to lock the door behind me. Then I drove back to Jodie.
Sadie called and asked me if I would like to come over and have some supper. Just coldcuts, she said, but there was poundcake for dessert, if I cared for some. I went over. The dessert was as wonderful as ever, but things weren’t the same. Because she was right. There was a broom in the bed. Like the jimla Rosette had seen in the back of my car, it was invisible… but it was there. Invisible or not, it cast a shadow.
Sometimes a man and a woman reach a crossroads and linger there, reluctant to take either way, knowing the wrong choice will mean the end… and knowing there’s so much worth saving. That’s the way it was with Sadie and me during that unrelenting gray winter of 1962. We still went out to dinner once or twice a week, and we still went to the Candlewood Bungalows on the occasional Saturday night. Sadie enjoyed sex, and that was one of the things that kept us together.
On three occasions we shapped hops together. Donald Bellingham was always the DJ, and sooner or later we’d be asked to reprise our first Lindy Hop. The kids always clapped and whistled when we did. Not out of politeness, either. They were authentically wowed, and some of them started to learn the moves themselves.
Were we pleased? Sure, because imitation really is the most sincere form of flattery. But we were never as good as that first time, never so intuitively smooth. Sadie’s grace wavered. Once she missed her grip on a flyaway and would have gone sprawling if there hadn’t been a couple of husky football players with quick reflexes standing nearby. She laughed it off, but I could see the embarrassment on her face. And the reproach. As if it had been my fault. Which in a way, it was.
There was bound to be a blow-up. It would have come sooner than it did, if not for the Jodie Jamboree. That was our greening, a chance to linger a little and think things over before we were forced into a decision neither of us wanted to make.
Ellen Dockerty came to me in February and asked me two things: first, would I please reconsider and sign a contract for the ’62-’63 school year, and second, would I please direct the junior-senior play again, since last year’s had been such a smash hit. I refused both requests, not without a tug of pain.
“If it’s your book, you’d have all summer to work on it,” she coaxed.
