Failure To Zigzag. Jane Vandenburgh
just two weeks before the Japanese surrender. The families were not immediately notified that the ship was missing. It sank in twelve minutes. No SOS went out. There was no escort. The survivors were in the waters of the mid-Pacific for four days before the oil slick was sighted, quite by accident, by a single American flier who happened to be off course. It took another day and a half to mount the rescue, by which time three-quarters of the 1153 men on board had perished. Men died in war, Winnie said. It was normal, natural. Children lost their fathers. Charlotte wasn’t to feel sorry for herself, nor to count herself so special.
Charlotte wasn’t all that special. Why, Winnie had herself lost her own beloved father when she was only three. Louis Rutherford had been a great man, a banker, like Lionel, but good at it. Like Robert Louis Stevenson, Louis Rutherford had had a wide and poetic brow. (Winnie invariably thumped this brow in the sepia-tinted photograph she always pulled out to illustrate this point in the story.) Winnie’s father had died alone in Hawaii where he’d gone to cure his TB. He died because of an old man at the bank, a clerk who’d coughed all over the books as they were being reconciled, which was the reason Winnie had always detested sick old men. Louis died at twenty-eight; Charlotte’s father at twenty-six. Louis had had a lovely singing voice and had played a three-quarter-sized Washburn guitar, the one shipped back to Winnie and her mother on the mainland on the same sailing vessel that brought back Louis’body for the burial.
It was Winnie who had suffered, with losing her father like that, then ending up with a daughter so abnormally bizarre she had insisted upon changing her given name when she went away to college. She’d said it was because the registrar had told her there was another girl named Katherine Ainsworth at Cal, but Winnie had never believed that tale for one single second since Charlotte’s mother had always been the type to make up peculiar stories, and was so odd, always, that she’d been the one and only girl on stage crew. Winnie didn’t see why she hadn’t picked “Kitty” for short, rather than going so far as to change it to “Katrinka Lionel Ainsworth!” And why the name Katrinka, a name that clinked and rattled like junk clanking in the wagon of a gypsy tinker?
“I haven’t had a REAL vacation in forty years!” These words would erupt from Winnie suddenly, and always as if the enormity of the injustice had only then dawned on her. Since she hadn’t had a job to go to since leaving the classroom in Power, Montana, to marry Lionel all those years before, Charlotte was always tempted to yell right back at her: “Vacation from what, Winnie?” though she never did. She didn’t ask it as it was just that type of question that was liable to provoke the great sloshes, either the blue-tinted turp or the turkey gravy Winnie’d also been known to throw.
Winnie had as little use for Joe, Jr., as she had for her own daughter. Why had he been so hell-bent on marrying Katrinka when she was only one or two courses short of graduation? If she’d only graduated, Katrinka might have gotten by teaching art in the public school rather than having to resort to ventriloquism. Winnie also bitterly resented a comment Charlotte’s father once made about the shape of Louis Rutherford’s eyebrows. Winnie never mentioned just what this insult was. Still, Joseph Black, Jr., all these long years dead, had never been forgiven for it.
Charlotte imagined that what had happened was this: that her father, who’d married into the Ainsworth family rather than been raised in it, hadn’t properly understood what it was he was supposed to have shouted when Winnie got out the sepia-tinted photo and began then to thump it in front of his nose. “Oh, my God!” he should have said. “Look at that wide and poetic brow! Why, Winnie, your father looks exactly like Robert Louis Stevenson!” He may have mentioned something instead about how Winnie inherited Louis’ eyebrows, which were slightly bushy and were perfectly level, running above either eye without the pronounced arch that Katrinka’s had, the arch she used to give her ironic words an even more exaggerated inflection. Charlotte, like her great-grandfather Louis, like Winnie herself, had ended up with the straight ones, the ones from under which Charlotte would peer out, trying usually to keep her face as plain, as deadpan, as Buster Keaton’s.
What Winnie always said, finally, about Charlotte’s parents was that they were too much alike. They were just alike! and they both made Winnie tired, and so did their artistic Berkeley friends. These friends had had funny names, which had served to encourage Katrinka in her own abnormality. Some had had three names—there was an Alec Something Something—and one of them had gone by his initials only. They had been artistic and they were funny-looking. They’d had drunken soirees and had talked their filthy language. What was wrong with Charlotte’s parents was that they’d both had high IQs and no common sense! This was the type that had always given Winnie the absolute pip. She’d known some like that at the university at Missoula, but had never imagined her own child would turn out that way. She had never thought to worry, and, by not worrying, this very thing had come to be.
Although Lionel and Winnie pleaded with her doctors to keep her, Katrinka was always released from the hospital. One morning she’d been put onto a Greyhound bus at Ventura with a ticket for Glendale. Lionel had spent all the afternoon and on into the evening at the bus station waiting but she had not arrived. The last bus had come without her being on it, so now he was home again, and they were waiting for the phone to ring. Each lay awake in bed in the hot, dark, and ticking house, each listening for disaster.
Though willed to so do, the phone would not now ring. If it did now ring it might be the police, or it might be Sugarman saying Katrinka had found her way to the carnival and so was there safe with him. Or it might be Katrinka herself saying she was near Pershing Square, staying with a very close dear and personal friend of hers, a Negro, a Negro mental patient, a male Negro mental patient, someone she’d met in board and care. “Oh, he may be a little cuckoo,” she’d tell Lionel, “but he’s not as cuckoo as you,” adding: “In the words, Dad, of Johnny Mercer.” If the phone hadn’t rung by morning, Lionel would go for his walk, shower, shave, slop his interminable mush, then begin to notify the authorities. He was very good at notifying the authorities, his voice becoming deeper, more authoritative with each of the calls he made.
Now as the three of them lay in bed, each was listening to the Dodger game to pass the time. Lionel had recently given Charlotte his own Sony portable radio. She’d washed the flesh-colored earplug with soap and water, then had rinsed it with alcohol, but within the plastic she still could detect the smell of his earwax. She now heard the game in three places: from within the scented plug guarded from touching the inside of her ear by the sheath she’d made of Kleenex; from the front bedroom where Winnie was listening on her big radio that had many bands, some that picked up police calls, some calls from ship to shore; and from Lionel’s old Philco console, which stood in the study next to the daybed upon which he always slept. The Philco was imprecisely tuned. At Winnie’s insistence, all the doors within the house were standing open. Since the house had come to contain someone who was so determinedly teenaged these days, Winnie was increasingly suspicious of the kinds of things that might occur behind closed doors.
Charlotte listened but could not concentrate on the events of the game. She listened only to hear the soothing voices of Vin Scully and Jerry Doggett announcing the plays. She loved the modulation of their intertwining voices, the way they did not yell except in joy, how they did not interrupt. She loved the way they were so kindly, so forgiving, even to the opposing players. She loved their intelligence, their godlike apprehension of baseball statistics. She had once loved baseball, too, but had now stopped. She had stopped at the same time she’d stopped loving her grandfather. She had once loved Lionel ardently, to the soles of his feet, loved him as she’d never loved her grandmother. This love had been based, it now seemed, on his good humor and his reason, on the rules of building trashfires and the game of chess, on the sound of his voice reading aloud from the complete works of Charles Dickens. She had loved him but did no longer and she could not really remember why. She thought it might be for the way he smelled after lunch, like coffee and peanut butter, or because of the look of food ever whitening on his working tongue.
Suddenly the crowd roared. On this night, Frank Howard had suddenly hit a homer so far up into the stands of center field that it may well be the longest home run ever. The crowd in L.A. Memorial Coliseum was wild. “Lionel!” Winnie called out excitedly from the front toward the back of the