I imagine the vault is exactly the same as when Poppy first deposited his important papers. You don’t move vaults around when you remodel. I’ll bet every day for the past thirty years the time lock has clicked at 8:45 a.m. and the manager has spun the wheel, grunting and pulling the door open with both hands, leaving it ajar for the public to marvel at six inches of layered steel. It’s still impressive, the way a mausoleum is impressive; the way you know, from the weight of the granite stones sealed together with mathematical precision, that inside this place nothing will change, ever.
A quiet pensive black woman with her hair pulled back into a ponytail and long crystal earrings checks my signature against a card and unlocks an interior gate. We pass through a massive doorway inlaid with a checkerboard pattern of brass and chrome to a small room lined with burnished gray doors on hinges. I hand her my key. She puts a blue heeled shoe on a stool to reach up and unlock number 638. Behind her is a sign that says “Emergency Ventilation” with a set of instructions. She steps down from the stool and places an oblong box on a desk inside a tiny cubicle with a door I can close for privacy, leaving me alone in the dead air.
I am stilled by a sense of dreadful sadness and it takes many moments to force myself to lift the long metal lid.
I had expected there would be nothing except the will rattling around in a cold empty box, but it is filled with an assortment of household stuff like a drawer casually pulled from a sideboard.
On top of the pile is a yellowed clipping from the
I am that meanest of mean thieves who stole your wheelchair. I would like to offer an explanation if there can possibly be one. Yes, we did it as a practical joke, but I honestly thought the chair belonged to Walter O’Malley and was put there for an emergency. I still realize this offers nothing but a very low sense of humor.
I hope if at all possible you may find it in your heart to forgive me. I think I will have learned a great lesson from this “joke” that backfired. I am really not that sarcastic of an individual and hope that both you and God will forgive me for this prank.
Sorry
Accompanying the article is a photograph of Poppy with one hand on the recovered wheelchair. He looks young and vigorous with his crew cut and dark uniform. You can see the outline of the nightstick and the Smith & Wesson.38 on his belt. The caption explains:
PARALYZED MAN’S WHEELCHAIR, stolen while its owner watched last week’s game between Dodgers and Giants at Chavez Ravine, is inspected by Santa Monica patrolman Everett Morgan Grey. The owner has been offered a new chair by a rental firm.
What a poignant relic of a time when Santa Monica was a sleepy undiscovered seaside town and thieves had consciences and somebody thought that having your photograph in the local newspaper was an event of such importance that they entombed it in the bank.
Digging underneath my grandfather’s moment of glory I find silver dollars worn to the color of pewter and Kennedy fifty-cent pieces wrapped in tissue, still as shiny as new. There is also a series E savings bond from 1960 with the face value of $100 made out to me, a brown photograph with a white scalloped edge of my mother as a baby being held by her parents, my grandfather’s Last Will and Testament (naming me as the beneficiary of his estate), along with his birth certificate, my grandmother’s birth certificate and social security card, insurance policies from 1955, a small notebook embossed
I touch these things and for a few moments my mother comes back to me, her quilted cotton apron, where I would sometimes be permitted to lay my head, woven with splatters of batter and oil, the residue of a hundred meals and a thousand washings — it was like inhaling the essence of comfort. I suddenly remember that her nylons smelled of tannin and autumn leaves, drying on the towel rack in the bathroom with the salmon and black tiles, and at her dressing table in the front bedroom where she kept her rings in a glass ashtray, my God, she used Chanel No. 5. Furniture polish. Meat loaf with green peppers. She wore wool skirts and see-through white blouses with tiny round buttons and demure ruffles when she worked as a receptionist for Dr. Brady, but what you saw underneath was the stern construction of slip straps. They were short-sleeved blouses that revealed the pale fleshy undersides of her upper arms, which now in this stagnant closet I recall with foolish tenderness.
She worked until noon on Saturdays and often she and I would take the Atlantic Boulevard bus past those mysterious landmarks of childhood — Peg’s for Perms, Bardlow Top Shop with a painting of a 1964 Mustang on a revolving oval — to a one-story dental building across the street from the Long Beach Mortuary, where I would spend three hours in a tiny back room, kitchen cum laboratory, waiting while she typed on the IBM and answered the phone, reading Superman comics and finding the hidden pictures in office copies of
But when it was over we’d get back on the bus and continue downtown, where she would pay her bills at the electric and gas company offices, then continue on to Buffum’s and Sears and the tedious business of keeping up a household: getting extra keys made, buying shower curtains and aluminum pots, Mother asking my opinion about every tiny purchase because she could never make up her mind. The worst was Lerner’s, where I remember many excruciating hours playing beneath racks of blouses while she dawdled and agonized.
If I was lucky we’d end up in Woolworth’s or Kress, where I’d wander the flat wooden tables, drawn to cheap beach souvenirs like plastic wallets with photos of palm trees or figurines made of sea-shells, but what I lusted after most — and was never allowed to possess — were the medals of St. Christopher, which they kept in a locked glass case because every kid in Southern California wanted “a Christopher” like the coolest surfers wore.
I suddenly have the sense of sitting at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s spooning a black-and-white ice cream soda while Mother had cinnamon toast and coffee, sharing a guilty pleasure because it was just an hour until dinnertime. My mother rarely indulged either of us, maybe because in a way it would mean robbing Poppy of something, but those Saturday afternoons did provide an indulgence — being alone with her, away from my grandfather, which I now realize was the underlying reason we were so dumbly, unknowingly, happy.
Because at the other end of the bus ride, after carrying those heavy shopping bags past an oil rig that pumped day and night in a fenced lot in the middle of the neighborhood, we’d inevitably arrive at the one-eyed redbrick house on Pine Street. I saw it that way as a child because a loquat bush hid one of the two front windows and the other seemed to stare from between gray shutters with glassy spite.
The house was new when Poppy bought it, the only one on the street made of brick. It was buttoned up, closed off like a bunker, with a square green lawn mowed to anal uniformity, no ornamentation except a black mailbox on a post. One innovation of the sixties was a bright yellow all-electric kitchen with a clock built into the stove that of course ran on Poppy’s time:
I miss her then, I want those freckled arms around me, I want our bond, broken not only by her death but by a mysterious invisibility during my young childhood, to be healed. But how? Instead of coming close, I feel her
