Endless Blind Passions - Chapter 8
“She’s a freak,” says the little boy, peeking out of his bedroom door and pointing at Beatrice hesitantly making her way down the hallway of the ranch-style house, holding on to her walker for support. “What’s wrong with her?”Monty and his family are making a rare visit to one of his father’s cousins, who lives in Pasadena, a right-wing bastion. His wife is Orthodox—another strike against the family in the eyes of the rest of their relatives. She wants to keep a distance, too, fearing that association with her husband’s relatives, all fervent left-wingers, would endanger his career in the military.
Nothing’s wrong with her! thinks Monty, turning red with anger hearing the younger boy’s remark. He’d like to smack him across the face and scream She’s not a freak!“It’s just your cousin Beatrice,” says the boy’s mother, who’s come up from behind and taken hold of his hand. “She’s just short. That’s all.”
That’s a lie, Monty nearly blurts out. He doesn’t like the mother much either. He’d like to smack her too. Beatrice isn’t a just anything, he’d like to shout. And she’s not a freak!
But for the first time he comprehends how truly grotesque she is. It’s inescapable—her monstrosity. The realization strikes at the heart of his sensibility, at his whole ground of reality, at everything he’s taken for granted. But how dare his cousin make such a horrible remark? Beatrice is different, but she’s Beatrice. This is how a Beatrice is meant to be. This Beatrice is a normal Beatrice. The perfect Beatrice.To compensate for the difference in length between her legs, Monty’s father cobbled together a detachable lift for her left shoe. But it’s awkward and heavy. A structural engineer and later a teacher, Leo loves to tinker in his garage, overbuilding everything. Like the gate in the driveway alongside Monty’s house, made of odd planks of salvaged wood bolted together with bulky metal braces like some medieval stockade. A victim of dire poverty in his childhood, Leo wants things to last forever and be perfect. No way can Beatrice be perfect, no matter how zealously he tries to make things right.
His care for his misshapen sister, ten years his junior, is infused with a sense of injustice. “How could life have dealt her such a blow?” he says. “Things aren’t meant to be that way.”
He’s a true believer, believing in the godlike perfectibility of mankind and society while ignoring the imperfectibility of both. How could the world, the ideal world of Marx and Lenin, the new God and his Son, create an aberration like Beatrice, with all her deformities and suffering? Or create a sociopath like Stalin, whose paranoid cruelties Monty’s father won’t acknowledge till the late eighties, when the whole Soviet myth begins to fall apart, not long before Leo’s own demise. “How could it have been so bad?” he’ll ask, his eyes moist. “It was supposed to be perfect.” Like Beatrice should have been.
Leo will also confess to Monty years later, long after Beatrice has died, that he’s sure he caused her deformities. “When my mother was pregnant with Beatrice, I jumped out once to surprise her when she stepped down from the side door of our house. I guess the shock caused Mom to fall. So I never believed Beatrice’s condition was genetic.”
Leo, Leo. All this remorse, all this groundless guilt pent up for decades, all the misplaced idealism, all the faith in human virtue and progress—shattered.
Aunt Beatrice lives around the corner from Monty’s elementary school in a tiny apartment, more like a converted garage, in a low-rent single-story courtyard complex. After Sarah picks him up from school, they often stop by to drop off leftovers from their previous night’s dinner. When he’s allowed to walk to and from school on his own, he continues to visit his aunt, if only to say hello and give her a quick kiss on her sweaty cheek. He’s accustomed to her odd body and clammy smell, a fusion of defective sweat glands and the stale smoke that hangs heavy around her from the unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes she chain-smokes.
Pall Mall, literally a pall, a cloud, of smoke, like other brands with their four thousand or so chemicals—arsenic, benzene, cadmium, lead, styrene. Carcinogenic particles Monty soaks up when visiting his aunt, along with all the hundreds of commercials for soaps and toys and candies he absorbs from TV between the minutes of Looney Tunes, Three Stooges, and Our Gang comedies, which, though made decades earlier, don’t yet seem dated. Life hasn’t changed that radically in America, and it won’t until later, in the sixties, when everything will seem to go topsy-turvy—including Beatrice, who will have her first mastectomy around the same time US authorities admit smoking causes cancer.
Monty’s aunt barely gets by on meager government disability benefits and the trivial earnings she makes printing mailers and announcements for a couple of businesses on a chunky mimeograph machine she keeps in her bedroom. Rarely used for sleeping, her bed is a portrait of her life, covered with family photos, boxes of postcards from friends and family traveling around the country, a collection of assorted buttons, costume jewelry, ashtrays of various sizes and colors, an extra set of crutches, and rolls of multicolored yarn she uses to crochet small bags and infants’ bonnets for the auctions that benefit the handicapped association she belongs to, euphemistically named “Indoor Sports.” All this long before the Paralympics, sidewalk ramps, and better job opportunities begin to give dignity to the disabled.
Supported by a cushion under her chest, Beatrice spends most of her time on a sofa in the crowded living room, reclining on her stomach and looking up at a television that’s turned on nonstop. It’s here she usually sleeps or dozes off. The curvature of her spine makes sitting upright or lying on her back unbearable. After she was born, doctors advised her parents to strap her to a board to straighten out her spine, and she spent hours every day undergoing this useless torture.
Monty helps her with the mimeographed announcements. He’s not allowed to touch the machine, but his aunt patiently instructs him how to gauge folding the eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch printed announcements into even thirds, and how to stuff the number 10 envelopes and correctly place the stamps and address labels.
“You see this line of words?” she asks.
“Yes, Aunt Beatrice,” answers Monty, his eyes beaming.
“Okay, take the bottom of the sheet and fold it up to this line of type. Make sure the sides of the paper touch evenly. Press down on the fold like this, out from the center, and then fold down the top part so it touches to the bottom.”
Monty carefully copies her instructions. “How’s this?” he asks, as if executing the most complicated task an eight-year-old was ever asked to do.
A sense of superiority bordering on arrogance is taking root early in his life, shielding him from his underlying fears. Already, back in kindergarten, he made sure he stood out over others, literally. He was the tallest in his class until a lanky immigrant from Norway arrived midterm on a stormy day. Right away Monty cornered the boy in the cloakroom and pushed him against the wall after the other children had hung up their yellow rain gear and gone to their scrunchy little seat-and-desk combos.
“I’m the tallest,” Monty said to the shocked newcomer, glaring at him and shoving him roughly against the wall. “And don’t forget it.”
Now in third grade, his hand always comes up first when his teacher asks a question. “Call me. Call me,” he cries out, squirming in his seat whether he knows the answer or not, coming up with something smart to say. Smart-ass, he’ll later be called by those who resent or fear his dominance.
“Perfect,” his aunt says, inspecting his first stuffed envelope. “Let’s get ourselves each a Drumstick.”
Despite her scanty earnings, Beatrice is always giving things away to her siblings’ children. Years later, when Monty’s at college in Oregon, she’ll send him a check for fifty dollars every month, a fair sum in those days, especially for her.
Beatrice hands Monty two dimes when they hear the ice cream truck approaching, with its indelible jingle dee dee dong dong DEE dee dee deedy, dong dong DEE dee dee deedy … Drumsticks got their name when the wife of one of the brothers who invented the treat observed that they looked like chicken legs. Monty and his aunt adore them, oblivious to their synthetic taste or that ice cream is typically thickened with lard. Who cares or even knows about organic, vegan, or gluten-free in midcentury America?
First you carefully peel off the top part of the Drumstick’s paper wrapping and take a bite out of the crisp nut-encrusted paper-thin milk-chocolate coating, revealing the vanilla ice cream underneath. Then you lick away at the top, with more bites of the chocolate crust, hopelessly taking care that the ice cream doesn’t melt over the side of the cone and drip down your chin, onto your shirt, and all over your hands. When you finish the top, you remove the remaining wrapping and stick your tongue down as far as you can into the sweet honeycomb cone and bite away at it until you get the very last iota of cream and sugary brown wafer.
“You must be the fastest eater on earth,” says Monty when Beatrice finishes the whole cone before he’s halfway through the top of his.
“I can’t stop myself,” she says.
“How’d you learn to eat so fast?”
“I don’t know. It’s how I eat.”
“I wish I could eat that fast.”
“Don’t. It’s a bad habit.”
Wolfing down food is one of Beatrice’s few pleasures in life. Twenty-three years later, after she’s died in county hospital during a second mastectomy at age fifty-eight, Monty will wonder whether she ever managed to gratify herself in other ways. Sex with someone? Unlikely. Surely not those kinds of “indoor sports,” echoing her handicapped organization’s name. But intimate questions, particularly how she feels about herself and her condition, questions he’s too shy and too young to ask, he’ll regret never having explored with her. He’ll imagine he could have eased her sense of self. Made her feel whole and content. But she appeared to have done just fine without his probing do-gooder Zen intentions.
While eating their Drumsticks and later finishing the mailers, Monty and Beatrice continue to watch daytime TV shows he otherwise wouldn’t be permitted to see at home, like Roller Derby and wrestling, with their combative cast of bizarre characters. And Search for Tomorrow, the perennial number one soap opera with its never-ending soft-core serial intrigues. “Soap operas” so named because they’re sponsored or owned outright by the major soap manufacturers.
Their favorite program, though, is Queen for a Day. Its host, Jack Bailey, a mustachioed former world’s fair barker with slicked-back hair, respectfully but firmly extracts the woeful life stories from the day’s contesting housewives: dire health problems, financial crises, emotional tribulations, widowhood with five young children, a child with cancer or Down syndrome. Bailey asks each plain-looking woman in turn what things she most needs, like a hearing aid, a washing machine, or circus tickets to fulfill a dying child’s last wish. Quick cutaways show women in the audience dabbing away their tears. At the end the audience applauds for each contestant in turn, and the one who registers loudest on the applause meter is draped with a robe, crowned queen for a day, and handed a large bouquet of roses.
An assortment of prizes is showcased by scantily clad buxom beauty queen types, the contrast to the homely contestants speaking for itself. The gifts always seem to include the very items the winning housewife singled out—which must have been identified in advance, along with the day’s winner. Nothing in TV land, after all, is for real. Maybe the day’s queen would get a washing machine (a miraculous labor-saving invention Monty’s mother has yet to get herself), family passes to Disneyland (only recently opened), a year’s supply of Coca-Cola, a set of china dishes and silverware for twelve—as if any of these women can afford to give fancy dinner parties.
“Aunt Beatrice, you should enter,” implores Monty, his head quivering with anticipation.
He’d like that, like to boast that his aunt is a queen, her oversize head crowned with rhinestones and artificial rubies, the fake ermine-lined red robe dragging behind her short body as she limps across the stage, victorious.
“Nah, I wouldn’t want to be up there on TV,” she says.
“You’d win for sure.”
But it’s others’ miseries and misfortunes she feels pity for, not her own. And not merely pity but a profound empathy that, combined with a knack for listening, draws people to seek her ear and counsel. Often, on entering the apartment, Monty finds a visiting neighbor complaining to Beatrice about her lazy husband, troubled children, greedy landlord, or mounting debts. Friends and acquaintances from all over regularly phone her for advice. Nothing shocks or surprises her—including Monty’s sexuality when, years later, he introduces her to Jonathan. Her worldliness is more remarkable considering that, since she, her mother, and her older sister arrived from Ohio during the Depression to join Leo in California after he secured a job monitoring boilers at a potash mine near Death Valley, she’s never traveled outside Los Angeles, except for a bus tour once to Baja California organized by her handicapped association.
With no more view on the outside world than her TV screen and her friends’ accounts of their miseries, Beatrice has an uncanny ability to read people’s thoughts and emotions. Her nephew is amazed how accurately she can foretell each new plot twist in the endless soap opera, or which virile lady skater is about to push another one over the side, or who will be crowned queen this day. It’s as if for her these casts of characters portray the whole panoply of human nature.