Under the Mansion

You make a lot of small gestures when there’s a big one you can’t or won’t make. My father couldn’t stop drinking and so offered me sticks of gum, changed the channel to what he thought I wanted to watch, brought my shoes to my room when I left them by the couch. His gestures cost little or nothing and were often designed to give him an excuse to leave the house so he could hit Elva’s Liquor: asking did I feel like a hot pretzel from the gas station, offering to take me to the softball field to watch middle-aged men play slow-pitch softball. 

He hit four numbers in the California lotto in the summer and for a while drank Budweiser, but by the time I finished my first week of junior high was back to Natty Ice. It was Saturday morning and he was carrying around the can. During the week he half-ass hid it until sundown (in a paper bag on the floorboard of his station wagon, on a window sill behind a billowing curtain in the bedroom) but on the weekends had it out in the open first thing, the laxness on the weekend meant to prove the strictness during the week. I remember the day I realized how sad it was, his little ruses.

He never looked at me when he spoke, especially if he was offering me something, like he was scared I’d say no, which made it impossible to say no. 

He said, “Want to check out the Mansion? Guy who owns it owes me one. The inside and everything.” 

My dad owed everyone, always claiming to be owed. The Mansion was the only mansion in town, built by the founder of Piru who got rich writing Sunday school booklets. They rented it out for weddings and filming: Murder She Wrote, Atlas Shrugged. When the booklet writer died, the Mansion was sold to Jock Angus, owner of a company that made chemicals for swimming pools. Jock died and his house and business went to his son, Scotty, who ran the chemical business into the ground and supposedly owed my dad. 

“Old Scotty,” Dad said, parking directly in front of the Mansion’s front gate. “Got picked on in school. One time, kid named Squeaker was pushing him down the hall, big crowd, and Scotty turned and yelled, ‘I’m going to go home and watch cartoons!’” 

I hated my dad for laughing at this memory. I too, crazed with fear, had screamed desperate things at tormentors (‘Can’t you just respect me as a person!’) that lived on in local lore. Through the wrought iron bars, the grand entrance (gravel drive lined with lemon trees, palm trees, old-time lampposts) led to a marble fountain (water arcing left to right in discrete bursts over a praying angel’s head), behind which stood the Mansion, white with red-orange trim, one rounded tower of stone, Cross Mountain rising behind it. 

“SCOTTY!” Dad yelled. 

I said, “He doesn’t know you’re coming? Jesus, man!” 

Scotty emerged, scowling and rubbing his bald head, not from the Mansion but from a grim rock house I hadn’t noticed, back and right of the main house. The rock house was half underground so we saw him from only the chest up, his salmon tee shirt and bushy blond moustache, until he climbed to ground level, revealing dark jeans and tan cowboy boots, way taller than I’d expected, a tall annoyed man coming down the drive. 

“No solicitations,” he said. 

“It’s Wayne.”

“Who?” 

“I brought those golf balls you hit into the orchard. Was hoping to see the place. I know it’s for rent.” 

“I told you, I hit those balls to get rid of them.” 

Then I saw Scotty notice me, a familiar sensation, someone pitying my existence as the son of my father. 

Then I realized my father had invited me for this purpose, to get him in.

“Ah, Christ,” Scotty said and hit a button on the gate. “Quick, quick, though. Got a buyer coming soon. A real one.” 

He walked fast up the drive with long strides. My dad followed slowly, doing an exaggerated walk that embarrassed me, feet pointed outward, hands on his belt, looking around nodding, like not bad, not bad.

Over his shoulder, Scotty said, “Classic Queen Anne style home with the asymmetrical façade and dominant gable. Either of you know what a gable is?” 

Dad said, “Scotty used to come to school in a limo.” 

Scotty stopped on the marble steps, exhaled, and kept going. It struck me that he probably went by Scott.

He led us quickly through the breakfast room (purple velvet tablecloth, yellow stained-glass window covered in red and pink roses), the kitchen (a blur of blue tile, farm scenes painted on the cabinet doors), the bathroom with its wood-paneled shower kiosk. 

“This I could get used to,” Dad said, plopping on a pink leather sofa in the sitting room, paintings of white peacocks with stern expressions in golden frames on the walls, view through the bay windows of the orange orchards, which started below the backyard and rose garden, the house being built on a rise, the orchards extending to the west and north, west to the horizon, north up and over two low hills and ending at the base of Cross Mountain, which here on the southeast side was craggy and thick with pepper trees.

“I’ll show you the cellar,” Scotty said. “Kid’ll like that. Then you have to go.” 

He walked to the wall on the south side of the sitting room and pushed the damn thing open to reveal a hidden staircase lit by torch lamps. I straight-up gasped and it hurt my father, who’d never impressed me. The stairs wound down to a bank vault door. Scotty put his back between my father and the lock as he did the combination. The door opened away from us and I stepped over the bottom of the vault frame into a narrow hallway barely wider than my shoulders, the walls made of human-sized gray boulders. Scotty reached back and closed the vault door and I couldn’t see my hand. 

“Keep walking,” Scotty said, and we did.

My dad must’ve been afraid. He wasn’t talking. I heard another door open in front of me, Scotty flipped a switch and a dull amber light revealed the room where we stood, which was enormous and cold with a low ceiling, empty except for the antler chandelier. The wall I faced was so far away I couldn’t see it. But it wasn’t far at all, I realized as I walked toward it, maybe twenty feet away.

“You noticed,” Scotty said, nodding at me and heading for the winding staircase in the corner of the room.

“Noticed what?” my dad said, hustling up the stairs after me. “What’d you see?”

We emerged on the side of the house near a full-length basketball court with glass backboards. A basketball sat in the grass. Dad jogged over and picked it up. He’d played in high school, a bench player on a championship team, always telling the story of the half-court shot he made in Nordhoff on his birthday. 

“No,” Scotty said. “I’ve gotta get the place ready.” 

“Just a few shots. You’ve gotta see this kid shoot.” 

I couldn’t resist. I drained a jumpshot from the free throw line. Dad led me to my spots with bounce passes. I couldn’t miss. 

“Alley-oop!” Dad said and lobbed a pass near the rim. I leaped and caught it and laid it in.

“Alright, alright,” Scotty said, but he was smiling, too. 

“How much you asking in rent?” Dad said, breathing hard. 

“Too much,” Scotty said. 

“Anything’s better than nothing, right? While you look for a buyer?” 

“Christ, Wayne, I can’t even afford to live here.” 

“What, man, you think I’m broke? How much?”

“Five hundred a night.” 

Back in the station wagon, Dad said, “I’m gonna swing by Elva’s. You want something? A Coke? Or one of them pretzels. With mustard? How many mustard packets you want?” he said. “Two? Three?”

Mortal

We learned about detraction in catechism, lying’s more brutal cousin: the sin of telling an unkind truth.

For weeks, Grandpa stuck to the easy ones: hatred, missing mass, lack of gratitude. The new priest, Father Barney, insisted on making house calls every Friday to hear confession from the old folks who couldn’t make it to church anymore, so they wouldn’t die suddenly with sins. The flood siren blew at noon on Friday. They’d try to finish before the wailing started but inevitably be interrupted, at which point they communicated via toilet paper roll, the ends wilted with spit, a fix devised by my mother, one side marked FB at Father’s insistence. 

“What hatred?” Father asked, tired.

“The neighbors and their damn dogs and peacocks.”

“What lack of gratitude?”

“For the oranges and lemons.”

The siren issued from the fire station so we got it worse than most. An old-fashioned-sounding horn a bit like a kazoo that spun as it blew, the sound always growing or fading, piercing when it hit you head-on. We didn’t have air conditioning, which by thirteen made me ashamed to have people over during summer, so the days were endless so of course I eavesdropped on confession, until the siren started and drowned them out. The bathroom shared a wall with Grandpa’s room. He confessed on his bed. I sat on the toilet with pants on. Grandpa nearly deaf, loud as hell. He was ninety, proud of his strength and energy, still doing pull-ups from the bar he’d nailed into the poisonous cherry tree. Nothing of interest June, July: despair, pride, forgetting to pray. 

“What pride?”

“Thinking I control the trees.”

“What despair?” Father asked and my grandpa just chuckled.

On the first day of August, Father finally asked straight-up if Grandpa was “having relations” with Vera, the blind widow he visited to help with laundry. 

“I’m a man, aren’t I?” 

My grandpa and grandma, Natividad, were neighbors growing up. The only man she ever knew. My mom worshipped her mother, said she wouldn’t be able to keep going if she didn’t believe she’d see her again, in heaven. Grandma cooked three meals a day her whole life and did her own dishes. Enduring Grandpa’s temper, mending his boots. She suffered two strokes, had her left leg amputated below the knee, sat up in bed grinning sweetly, and died. 

They talked about Vera all August, Father trying to convince Grandpa to stop or at least get married, Grandpa doing his patented laugh/grunt and moving onto lesser sins. Detraction, envy, presumption. 

“What presumption?” Father asked on the hottest day of the year, stench of rotting oranges seeping through the walls. 

“Thinking I’ll just confess it later so it doesn’t matter.” 

“What detraction?”

“Told Vera I was ashamed of my grandson, crying all the goddamn time.”

“What envy?”

“The neighbor’s avocado trees.”

I flushed the toilet and washed my hands. Mom was folding laundry on the living room floor. She looked up and saw the tears in my eyes, sighed and grabbed a shirt from the pile and asked what was wrong. 

“Grandpa’s having sex with Vera.” 

The siren started. Father rushed past with bowed head. Mom frowned at the carpet, gritting her teeth so her lower jaw protruded, a face I’d only seen her make around my drunk father. Grandpa came in and reclined in his easy chair, circular indentation disappearing from around his lips, the dogs howling in the yard.