Max Collins - Kill Your Darlings

I rubbed my forehead. “I have noticed.”

“Mae stole Evelyn away from my father, just as Evelyn had stolen him from my mother. My father always had a weakness for a bosomy babe, as Gat might say. Perhaps his lechery is what put me off the girls, that and being a momma’s boy… the old cliche about being raised by your mommy, being your mommy’s bestest friend, all of that was true in my case. Till she died.”

“I, uh… never really heard the circumstances of your mother’s death. Roscoe never got into it. That was one of the things he kept behind that wall I couldn’t get back of.”

“Guilt was back there, too,” Jerome said. “Guilt’s another thing he had back of that wall of his. He blamed himself. But I don’t know that he was to blame, much. It was ten years after he left her that she killed herself.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I didn’t know… I’m sorry…”

“Your condolences are noted, and appreciated,” Jerome said, “if a few decades late. My mother, Winifred Kane, killed herself with a gun my father had given her to protect herself with. One of those Gat Garson guns he had half a dozen of.”

I swallowed. “A long-barreled.38.”

“Yes.” Jerome smiled. “The kind my father posed with on his book covers.”

I felt suddenly cold. “That’s a piece of information I could’ve lived without.”

“One might say the same for my mother. Oh, young lady?”

He stopped the barmaid for another Scotch and tonic. I asked for another Coke-but I had her put some bourbon in with it, this time.

“Jerome, I’m sorry to ask this…”

“Ask, ask.”

“Why… why did your mother take her life? Did-did she leave a note…? What had been going on that-”

Jerome shrugged elaborately. “I was a teen-ager, all wrapped up in my own pubescent angst. I had little time to notice my mother’s troubles. Oh, we were close. Very close. But she wore a mask, for me. A mother mask. The woman beneath was never fully revealed to me. What made her tick is a mystery even Gat Garson could not solve. I do know she had what might be euphemistically referred to as ‘mental problems.’ She was diagnosed schizophrenic, and was in and out of institutions where she had countless shock treatments, back while she and my father were married. My father admitted to me that his heavy drinking began in those days. And I can understand why the prospect of, shall we say, joining with the mentally stable Evelyn was an irresistible one. Besides, she had bigger titties than Mother.”

The bitterness under the poised, Noel Coward exterior was cracking through. I’d known he was largely a pose; but I hadn’t understood the nature of the pose. I hadn’t guessed how sad and angry the real man, behind Jerome Kane’s wall, really was.

I sipped the bourbon and Coke. Let the intense moment subside.

Then I said, “You saw your father last night.”

He nodded. “For supper. We ate at an Italian place on the North Side, Augustino’s, a favorite of his. Quite good. But, then, you saw him, too, didn’t you? Right before he died? That’s why I wanted to see you, Mallory. I wanted to ask you about that final meeting with him….”

“I’ll make you a deal. We’ll get to my story after I hear yours.”

“You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine? Why not. We’re all brothers under the skin. I have seen my father rarely these past twenty years. He took me for a month each summer when I was growing up. But when I moved to San Francisco, after dropping out of college, and he began to get a sense of… my lifestyle… our contact became, well, infrequent.”

“Roscoe never could accept that you’re gay, could he?”

Jerome nodded, looking into the smoky-colored drink. “Quite right. Why, exactly, I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps he saw it as a rejection of him. Gat Garson was an idealized version of himself, you know-oh, Gat was a put-on, a spoof, but still… Gat was macho, and in not a wholly satirical way. Gat Garson was a genuine tough guy, just like Mike Hammer or James Bond. And my father was macho himself, a brawler, particularly in the verbal sense. And, like Gat, he was a womanizer. He loved those blondes with the big boobies-or he did in the early days. I’ve sensed, the few times I was with him in recent years, a declining interest in honey-haired darlings, his lechery fading to but a passing mammary. Speaking of which-miss?”

He asked for a third Scotch and tonic; I kept nibbling at my bourbon and Coke.

Then he went on. “Anyway, my father may have looked upon my life-style as a conscious rejection of everything he stood for, as a man. And of course it wasn’t.” He laughed, raucously. “It was a subconscious rejection.” He laughed again, but softly. “I did feel a conscious bitterness about my mother’s death. I did blame him, at least partially. But I didn’t want him out of my life. He was the only parent I had left. I would’ve liked for him to accept me. That, I would’ve liked very much.”

The third Scotch and tonic came, and he started right in on it.

I said, “I think your father was proud of what you’ve achieved.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Possibly you’re right. I sensed, or hoped I sensed, he was pleased with what I’d accomplished, proud of my fashion designs being shown in major cities here and in Europe, of my name having gained a certain recognizability of its own, of my financial success, especially my financial success. For a Depression child like Roscoe Kane, money is the major measure.”

“You probably got your artistic bent from him.”

“No doubt,” he said. “I didn’t get it from my mother. She had few talents-just her good looks, which started to go on her when her mental problems took hold. But we’ve been down that path before; let’s go elsewhere.”

“What did you and your father talk about?”

“Last night, you mean? We… we made ammends, you might say. I can’t go so far as to say he came right out and accepted me for what I am-admitted he knew I was gay and that he could accept me as such. But he did say something that approximated that; well, two things, actually.”

“What were they?”

He smiled on one side of his face. “First”-and he imitated his father’s gruff voice, to perfection-“Jerome, sex is overrated.”

I smiled. “What was the other thing?”

Jerome shrugged, looked in the drink. “Just that it was nice to have a son.”

I sat and looked into my bourbon and Coke and pretended not to notice him wipe the tear from beneath one china-blue eye.

“He was chatting with Cynthia Crystal,” he said, “when I left him in the lobby around nine-thirty. That was the last time I saw him.”

“Cynthia Crystal?”

“Yes-the author.”

“I know her. How do you know her, Jerome?”

“I don’t-I recognized her from a talk show. Fine writer.”

“Yes, she is.”

“Oddly-when I glanced back, their conversation seemed to have heated up.”

“Really? Were they arguing?”

He thought about that. “I wouldn’t go that far. ‘Having words’ is more like it.”

“How did your father happen to know Cynthia?”

He shrugged, draining the Scotch and tonic. “I don’t know that he did.”

This morning, when I’d spoken to Cynthia, she hadn’t mentioned speaking to Roscoe Kane. From the detached way she’d referred to him, I’d assumed she’d never met the man.

“I know why I envy you,” Jerome said suddenly, softly.

“Why?”

“Not because you were close to him. Nobody, except perhaps Evelyn the Grotesque, was close to him. And then only when they were in their cups….”

Silence.

Then he said: “You were the son he always wanted me to be.”