Riggs Park Part 4

Now the alley was full of potholes, the chain-link fences that had enclosed our yards were falling down, and most of the lawns had been partially paved to make room for cars people must not have wanted to leave out front.

"Look." I pointed across a sea of trash cans to the window of the room where the Warners had slept, directly across the alley from my childhood bedroom.

"She was such a hussy!" Marilyn laughed.

Younger than our own mothers, more carefree and daring, Jessie Warner had often left the light on while she undressed, and had never closed the shades. The spring we were ten, Marilyn and Penny spent the night at my house as often as they were allowed, where the three of us crowded in front of my darkened bedroom window and spied.

"She's so flat," Penny whispered as we examined Jessie Warner's nude form, her narrow torso rising toward small, perky b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"I bet she was a ballet dancer," Marilyn observed. But though her body was more graceful than those of our own curvaceous mothers, we decided it was less interesting, too-a fact that made us feel superior and secure, suspecting as we did that we ourselves would probably grow into versions of our mother's bodies and not Jessie Warner's.

A week or two before school let out, we were regaled by the sight of Mrs. Warner's husband entering the room during our Sat.u.r.day-night spy session, where he shed his clothes and took his wife in his arms. It was the first time we had ever seen a naked man with an erection. We screamed, then clapped hands over each other's mouths so my mother wouldn't hear us, and whispered for hours afterward with horror and delight.

"I never thought Jessie Warner was a hussy," I told Marilyn now. "I always thought it was because she wasn't Jewish."

"The way she looked, or getting undressed in front of the window? Or giving her husband a woody?"

"All of the above."

Marilyn snorted, but I had actually believed this. Since my family didn't keep kosher or go to services, for me Jewishness was essentially a social matter like belonging to a club. Almost everyone in Riggs Park was Jewish. We followed a certain code of behavior. Jessie Warner didn't. Though I'd been glad for the few Christians who'd decorated their houses in the dark of December, who'd opened their curtains so everyone could view their spangled trees from afar, I'd seen them as exotics with strange and unusual customs. Like Jessie Warner, they might all believe not only in Christmas trees but in leaving the blinds open while they undressed.

Marilyn nudged me and pointed toward a yard farther down the alley. A white dog with a black patch around one eye was jumping against the fence, trying to get our attention. It was the first animal we'd seen.

"A pit bull," Marilyn announced as she marched over and stuck her hand through the chain-link fence to pet it.

"A pit bull! Leave it alone!" I jumped back even though the beast was only slavering on Marilyn's hand.

"Oh, Barbara, relax. It's harmless." Marilyn had always been the expert about dogs. Sometimes she'd owned three at a time when her boys were small, to make up for her parents never allowing her more than a parakeet. "Feel it," she ordered. "Pit bulls feel tough, like a pig."

Gingerly, I extended my hand. Sure enough, the hide was steely, as if strung over one long muscle. The dog wagged its whole hind end with happiness.

"I guess it's supposed to be fierce and bark at us, but it's just a puppy. Fine watchdog you are," she crooned as she leaned over to let it lick her face. Marilyn's last dog, a black Lab, had died just after her first diagnosis of cancer.

"If you like dogs so much, why don't you get another one?"

"Bernie and I are both at work so much. It would be alone."

"That never bothered you before."

"You're not the one who has to walk it. Who feels guilty." Marilyn wiped her s...o...b..ry hands on her slacks as we headed back to the street.

"You have a fenced yard," I persisted. "It might be nice."

Marilyn tossed her head, annoyed, but then we were diverted by the sight of a young woman wrestling a toddler toward a house down the hill and across the street. The little boy wriggled and fidgeted until she put him down. Not much more than twenty, the mother was solid-looking and stylish, in jeans and an imitation leather jacket, hair pulled back into cornrows around her head, then hanging down her back in dozens of braids.

"The people around here look better than the houses do," Marilyn whispered as I unlocked my car.

"Maybe that's because the people are younger than the houses."

Glancing in our direction, the black woman regarded us suspiciously. She minced her steps to let the toddler keep up with her-a tiny boy wearing new red basketball shoes of the smallest possible size.

Finally she swept the toddler into her arms and opened the gate of a chain-link fence that had been erected, hideously, around one of the minuscule front yards. It wasn't until she disappeared inside that Marilyn and I realized, at the same moment, that the transformed, gated house was where Penny's family had once lived.

"My G.o.d," Marilyn gasped-whether because she hadn't recognized the house at first or because it looked so awful, I wasn't sure.

"I think aesthetics went out when the gate went up," I said.

But Marilyn slid into the car and clutched her hand to her throat more dramatically than seemed necessary.

"Is this why we came here?" I asked. "To see Penny's house? As a sort of lead-in to Penny's big secret?" I turned on the ignition and gunned the gas as I pulled away from the curb.

Marilyn ignored me. "Imagine having four daughters and only one bathroom," she said.

"Everyone was short of bathrooms," I snipped, annoyed at her dodging my question. "We didn't think about it. Anyway, I think the Weinbergs had a second bath down in one of the bas.e.m.e.nts." But when I tried to remember where Penny had showered, where she'd put on her makeup, I drew a blank.

I drove back up the hill, made a left onto Third Street and then another onto Oglethorpe, the next block. I'd do a quick tour and get us out of there. "Remember that snowstorm when Penny bashed her head over here?" Marilyn asked. "How Helen Weinberg didn't even notice?" Whatever this was leading up to, I decided to let Marilyn get to it in her own time. Of course I remembered Penny's accident. It was one of two youthful snow mishaps we weren't likely to forget. We'd been sledding on Oglethorpe Street, feeling daring because it was even steeper than Oneida. Unable to slow down, Penny had plowed her sled into the tire of a parked car and given herself a good concussion. "Don't tell my mother," she made us promise as we helped her up. We didn't think we'd need to. Penny's face had already turned the color of Elmer's glue. We walked her home, me supporting her and Marilyn carrying her sled. She made it as far as the living-room sofa and slumped down, still in her outdoor clothes. A minute later, Helen Weinberg came in from the kitchen, clad in old slacks and rubber gloves, and said, "I thought I told you to stay out until supper. I'm waxing the floors." She looked with distaste from one of us to another. "Why are you in the living room still wearing your boots?"

Chastened, we escorted Penny to Marilyn's and put her to bed for the afternoon. We didn't know concussion victims aren't supposed to sleep, but somehow she survived her nap and by supper time felt steady enough to go home. She wasn't well-not really-for a week. Her sister, Diane, took care of her. Helen Weinberg had never known.

"That's the thing of it, isn't it?" Marilyn asked. "The whole-motherhood thing."

I'd lost her. Puzzled, I opened my mouth to ask what she meant. Then, in the middle of the block, I caught sight of the Wishners' old house, hunkering onto its lot with even more of a hangdog air than the houses on Oneida Street. For some reason, my first thought was of Pauline Wishner, the kind of housekeeper my mother used to call a balabusta, and who would have been horrified at the sorry state of her old home. But it wasn't Pauline I'd ever cared about, not really. It was always her son. "Wish," I whispered, and realized I hadn't uttered that hopeful-sounding nickname for years.

Wish, who would change everything.

For a moment I could hardly breathe, hardly see.

"The name still gets to you, doesn't it?" Marilyn asked, alert.

"I think what gets to me is this neighborhood looking so ratty." Light-headed, I drew a breath, concentrated on steering, headed for the other side of Riggs Road, where the memories were less charged but the neighborhood was no less shabby. Lasalle Elementary School still stood at the edge of the old playground, always a pastel-green monstrosity but now considerably worsened by age. Adjacent to the school grounds, on Madison Street, a wrecked car sat in the middle of a front yard. At the curb, another car was booted. The houses and yards were tumbledown; a surly-looking boy leaned on a mailbox and regarded us with such hostility that all the bones in his face looked frozen.

I stepped on the gas, turned back onto Riggs Road, drove quickly past the building that used to be the neighborhood shul, Shaare Tefila. I wanted to get this visit over with.

"I have to eat something," Marilyn said suddenly. "My head hurts and my stomach hurts and if I don't get this off my chest about Penny I'm going to explode."

"It's about time," I told her.

She pointed toward a combined Kentucky Fried Chicken/Taco Bell coming up on our right. Her expression stayed humorless. "Stop there," she said.

CHAPTER 5.

Taco Bell It was hardly the restaurant I would have chosen, a fast-food emporium sitting where our favorite miniature golf course had once been and just across Third Street from the shopping center where we'd spent half our adolescence trying to attract significant boys. Not a single other white person was in sight. I said to Marilyn, "I saw a bunch of places just across the District Line"-a lie. "It'll take exactly two minutes to get there." She said, "No. Stop."

Both the customers and the help kept their eyes on us as we got our food. I picked a booth by a window and slammed down my tray. "All right, tell me about Penny."

Marilyn unwrapped her straw and inched it into her Diet c.o.ke. She plucked a veggie fajita from its waxed paper wrapper and began splitting open packets of taco sauce. "Well, Steve said something weird on the phone the other day. Not that he doesn't always say something weird-"

"Still jealous of your brother's wealth and fame, I see."

"Yes. All that unresolved sibling rivalry." The strength of Marilyn's relationship with her brother was that there had been no rivalry. She was always the boss. "It was the day I called to tell him about the cancer coming back. We probably talked for an hour. You know, the old, 'whole life flashing before your eyes' routine. Not something we do a lot." Although Steve the superstar now lived in a magnificent house in Pacific Palisades outside Los Angeles, he still spent several months a year on the road singing and was exhaustingly in demand the rest of the time.

"He said-" Marilyn unfolded the fajita and doused it with a packet of sauce. "Remember the time Penny went to see him at college? That last time she saw him?"

"Marilyn, the whole country remembers." It was the subject of the song "Bus Ride" that had made Steve famous. Penny had taken a bus from Maryland to West Virginia where Steve had gone to school. They'd spent the weekend together, and then Penny had travelled back to Washington and dropped out of sight.

"Well, we went over the whole business again, about what happened to Penny after that. Between the last time he saw her at school and before she went off the deep end. Steve said she definitely had a baby."

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake." I heard the shrillness in my tone. We'd been a.n.a.lyzing this subject for thirty-odd years. We'd batted it around ad nauseam, and a baby was the one possibility we'd ruled out years ago, conclusively and finally. "Penny was careful about birth control. Obsessive about it. Determined not to bring more children into the world. If there was one thing she was responsible about, that was it. Don't tell me you don't remember. She wouldn't have let herself get pregnant."

Marilyn leaned across her food conspiratorially. "All I can say is, Steve says he knows it for a fact."

"For a fact? How? I thought he never talked to Penny again."

"He didn't." Marilyn took a long sip of Diet c.o.ke. Fifty years ago it would have been vanilla c.o.ke from the fountain across the street in People's Drug Store, and she would have been drinking just as slowly. I felt as if I'd fallen through a time warp.

"Barbara, listen to me." Marilyn's voice was crisp. "Remember how Steve always said he kept trying to call Penny all the next summer? While he was on that trip with his band? And how n.o.body would tell him where she was?"

"Sure," I said. "Her sisters clammed up because either-" I held up a finger "-one, they didn't know, or two, she was in a mental inst.i.tution and they were embarra.s.sed."

"Barbara, don't."

"Don't? Then if Penny was pregnant and she didn't tell Steve, tell me who did."

"I'm getting to that."

"Well, I think it's bulls.h.i.t," I said. "She always told Steve everything."

"She probably worried the baby was the other guy's. The one from the 'Bus Ride' song," Marilyn reminded me.

"Not even a possibility. If she actually got pregnant that weekend-which I don't believe-the father could have been either one of them. And no matter who the father was, she still would have told Steve. Penny knew he loved her. She knew he'd forgive her."

Marilyn poured another packet of sauce on the fajita. She didn't look up.

"Or she could have done something else," I continued. "In the unlikely event-the very unlikely event-she was pregnant and not sure whose it was, she could have had an abortion and decided not to talk about it. So she stayed out of touch."

Marilyn shook her head. "An abortion wouldn't have been like Penny."

I had to agree. Horrified as Penny was at the thought of a pregnancy, it was even more impossible to imagine her destroying a life. And "destroying" was exactly how Penny would have seen it-even though the trauma of having an abortion might almost explain what happened to her later. The hideous, almost unthinkable events that, even now, I quickly censored from my thoughts.

"So who told Steve about this theoretical baby?" I asked. "One of her sisters? Who else would know?"

"Essie Berman."

"Essie! When?"

"After," Marilyn said. "About a year after."

"Oh, good lord." I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me. When I could breathe again I said, "Then why didn't Steve ever tell us?"

"Never underestimate the power of guilt." Marilyn doused the fajita with one more packet of taco sauce, rendering it completely inedible. "He's always hated 'Bus Ride' being his first big hit. He's always felt rotten about benefiting from Penny's problems. You know how he is." Marilyn took a deep breath. "He always felt responsible for her. I think he always loved her, but-"

"Was also glad to be rid of her," I finished. There'd been times when we'd all been glad to be rid of Penny.

Marilyn nodded. "So it was easy for Steve to put her out of his mind. Just like it's easy for us. But then when Essie told him Penny had a child-"

"Why did Essie tell him? That's what I want to know."

"Because he bugged her for information for a whole year. You know what a pest he could be. So finally Essie said she'd tell him what she knew if he promised never to ask another question. Never to take it further. To do nothing."

"And he promised? Even though she might have been telling him about his own child?"

"Or somebody else's child," Marilyn said. "Anyway, I think he was pretty surprised to hear there was a child."

"What else did Essie tell him?"

"Nothing. Not even if it was a boy or a girl."

"So he's known all these years. While we were still trying to figure it out."

Marilyn shrugged. "Essie told him not to. But now-I think he's curious. I think that's why he mentioned it."

"Either that or he made it up to take your mind off your troubles." All his life, Steve had been nothing if not creative.

"He wouldn't insult me like that." Refusing to look at me, she stared out the window to the shopping center across the street, where the old Giant had become Tiger Foods and the People's Drug Store was a CVS Pharmacy, and the parking lot was badly in need of resurfacing. Then she inhaled deeply, set her elbows on the table, and dropped her head into her palms, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. When she looked up, her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. "What if the baby was Steve's?" she asked.

"What if it was?"

"Don't you think he'd want to know?"

"Absolutely not."

She c.o.c.ked her head in surprise.

"What would Kimberly think?" I asked. "What about the boys? It would be awful." Steve had married late, in his forties, after he had been famous long enough to get used to his celebrity and grown confident enough to confess on national TV what he thought was a momentous personal secret. His marriage had always been rock solid. After his wife had a couple of miscarriages, they had adopted four learning-disabled sons, all now well-adjusted young men.

Scratching her eyelid with a knuckle, Marilyn smeared mascara across her cheek. "I thought even with all those kids he might still be hoping he had one that was his own flesh and blood."

"Listen. Even a.s.suming there's this long-lost child, it would be an adult, older than Mike and Robin, living some kind of life we don't have a clue about. What happens when all of a sudden it finds out it has a famous father? You'd only be opening Pandora's box."

"We wouldn't have to tell the child."

"Marilyn, it wouldn't be a child. That's just my point."