‘I’m feeling spooked . . . I don’t exactly know why. This bomb at Disney hasn’t made me feel any better, either.’
Mayor Joseph Lindsay was being interviewed outside the archway of Disney Studios. Behind him, Alameda Avenue was still crowded with fire trucks and ambulances, their red lights flashing. The mayor was saying, ‘I think I speak for everybody in the city of Los Angeles when I say that Disney cartoons were a precious part of my growing-up. When somebody attacks the Disney studio, they’re attacking not only my freedom of speech as an adult, they’re attacking my childhood, too. They’re attacking my memories and my values. They’re attacking my cultural heritage.’
Part bored, part edgy, Frank drove round to see Mo, who lived in a split-level house on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica. Mo was obviously hosting a party because there were cars parked all the way along the street and colored lights in the trees outside. Mo came to the door in a voluminous gold kaftan, drunk, with a large glass of whiskey in his hand.
‘Frank! In the nick of time! Look here, everybody! The ship may be sinking fast but the captain’s on the bridge!’
‘Sorry, Mo. If I’d known you had guests . . .’
Mo flung his arm around him. ‘Baloney. It’s the end of the world as we know it, Frank. It’s Armageddon. Everybody’s welcome.’
The hallway and the living room were crowded with people, most of them shouting and arguing, while almost unheard, a gingery-headed man who looked like an overweight Art Garfunkel, played Irving Berlin favorites on the piano. Mo’s wife, Naomi, was in the kitchen serving up tuna knishes and challah sticks and barbecued chicken legs, assisted by seven or eight of her friends who all knew more about serving up food than she did.
‘You should never serve barbecue chicken on a paper napkin,’ he heard one say. ‘It sticks – you want your guests spitting out bits of tissue?’
Mo found Frank a very cold Coors out of the fridge. ‘This is my mother’s seventy-ninth birthday party. I guess I should have invited you, but then I thought, no, I like Frank too much to have him meet my family. Look at them. The Cohens. I’ve seen hyenas with Alzheimer’s behaving better than this.’
Frank was introduced to the birthday girl, a withered woman in a red silk gown, with a mahogany suntan and diamond-encrusted claws. ‘Mo’s told me so much about you. I imagined you taller.’
‘Well, I expect you were sitting down at the time.’
Mo breathed whiskey in Frank’s ear. ‘She doesn’t understand humor. Only discomfiture. The last thing that made her laugh was Naomi’s kugels.’
Frank was introduced to several other Cohens, one of whom owned a local Oldsmobile dealership, another who played cello for the Santa Monica Symphonia, another who was big in tomatoes. Each of them paused for long enough in their arguments to say to Frank, ‘You lost your boy, didn’t you? What can I say?’
He and Mo ended up on the veranda, by the light of a guttering torch. ‘Strange times, you know, Frank,’ said Mo. ‘One day you think you know exactly what the world is all about; you think you got all of your parameters fixed. You got steady work, you live in a nice place, you got your family all around you. Then God comes along and says, “Excuse me, may I remind you that you’re stuck by your feet by an invisible force to a ball of unstable rock which is hurtling around in a total vacuum, and that you’re obliged to share this ball of unstable rock with millions of demented people, many of whom don’t use deodorant, and some of whom would like nothing better than to pocket all of your possessions, torture your pets and blow your head off. Not only that, everything that makes this situation bearable, like cheeseburgers and whiskey and reasonably priced cigars, is going to shorten your life, and in any case you’re going to die anyhow, half-blind, half-deaf, in wet pajamas, in Pasadena.”’
Frank swallowed beer and wiped his mouth with his hand. ‘I guess that’s one way of looking at it.’
He told Mo about the seance. Mo was beginning to sober up now, and he listened and nodded and occasionally patted his sweaty face with a balled-up tissue.
‘You’re sure this wasn’t your imagination working overtime? After all – what – it’s only been ten days now since Danny died. Don’t kid me that
‘I saw him, Mo. Or whatever spirit it is that’s pretending to be him. I just don’t understand what it’s all about.’
‘Not everything in this life has to have a logical explanation, Frank. Look at my family.
‘I never hit Danny, though, Mo. I never bruised him, I never made him bleed.’
‘Of course you didn’t. But look at it this way. Maybe this spirit is using Danny to get your attention.’
‘What?’
‘Your folks never had much money, right, and when you were a kid you didn’t have any confidence, and you kept doing things like the time when you were trying to impress that girl and you sneezed that huge green booger on to the back of her hand. But if you personally went on television and whined about your miserable childhood –
‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Poor old hard-done-by Frank Bell!
‘You’ve lost me, Mo. Maybe you need another drink.’
‘No, no, listen! Maybe this spirit is doing the same thing. If he appeared to you like he really is – some dead guy that you’ve never even met – you wouldn’t be interested in his childhood, would you, no matter how much he was knocked around? But he’s pretending to be Danny, because you care what happens to Danny, like your audience cares what happens to Dusty and Henry. In spite of yourself, when you see Danny, even though you know that it’s not really him, you can’t stop yourself from feeling protective.’
Frank thought about that, and then shrugged. ‘I guess that’s as good a theory as any. But that still doesn’t tell me
Mo raised his glass. ‘“Ah, what is man! Wherefore does he why? Whence did he whence? Whither is he withering?” Do you know who said that? Dan Leno. Do you know who Dan Leno was? And don’t say Jay Leno’s kid brother.’
‘I was right. You
They went back into the living room. The arguing was even louder. The pianist was playing ‘Isn’t it a Lovely Day?’ and Mo’s mother was singing along in a high, breathless screech.
‘My mother,’ said Mo proudly. ‘She could empty Carnegie Hall in three minutes flat.’
He was woken up at six twenty-five the next morning by the telephone ringing. He picked it up and said, ‘Astrid?’
‘Mr Walker? This is your six thirty alarm call.’
‘You have the wrong room. This is Frank Bell in 105.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir! You have a nice day now.’
‘You too,’ said Frank. He turned over and tried to get back to sleep but the room was already filled with sunlight and outside the gardener was noisily hosing down the pool. He had only drunk three or four beers at Mo’s party but he still felt blurry-headed, as if he had a hangover.
He kept thinking about what Mo had said. He could very well be right about this spirit that was masquerading as Danny. But that still didn’t answer the question of why, or what it was that the spirit was trying to tell him.
At six fifty-one he got out of bed and spooned some dark roast coffee into the percolator. Then he took a shower, although he turned the water off three or four times and listened, because he thought he heard the phone ringing. This was ridiculous. Here he was, a grown man, a well-known TV writer, a husband and a father, waiting for some girl to call him and tell him how he was going to spending his weekend.
He sat on his balcony drinking coffee and eating a toasted muffin with apricot jelly. He felt unsettled – not only because Astrid hadn’t called, and he still couldn’t get in touch with Nevile – but because he didn’t have any writing to do. This was the first weekend in three years when he hadn’t been pushed to finish a new episode of
