Lionel had his own theory about what had happened to Katrinka: her brain had been pickled by alcohol. This was from drinking beer, beer, beer with the crowd from Pelican in the cellars of Eshleman Hall. That was up at Cal where Katrinka had been a fine student, a leader, an athlete, but had failed to graduate. “Now, Charlotte,” Lionel would always intone at this point, “I am of the opinion that graduation is a very fine thing to achieve—do you understand me?” For emphasis he wrapped the long fingers of one mighty hand around the muscle of her upper arm and squeezed the bicep to the point of pain. He held onto the arm and rocked her slowly, hypnotically. Then he uttered the single word “Drink,” saying it hotly against the skin of the side of her face so his breath made the little hairs move. “Now Pelican may call itself a humor magazine but your grandmother and I have never found anything funny in inebriation.” He rocked her slowly, to let all this sink in.
When the phone rang, it was Lionel who went to answer it. “Hello, Dad,” Katrinka said. “How’s everything? How’s mother?”
“What do you mean, How’s mother? Mother’s asleep is how mother is!” He was shouting, though trying to hold it down to a dull roar. He was standing at the built-in desk in the central hall of the house on Vista del Mar, right next to the bedrooms. He wore his cotton pajamas, worn so thin by laundering that they were nearly transparent. The top was unbuttoned down the front to allow his skin to breathe.
Lionel was staring down at the old, uneven floorboards, one arm held rigidly at his side. From the clenched fist of that hand two fingers extended, pointing straight down, as if holding an imaginary cigarette. The other hand gripped the heavy black receiver so tightly that the muscle of his upper arm had begun to ache and the bones of his knuckles gleamed a yellowish white through the skin. “Wellll,” she was drawling now, “you allllways say Awe-I call only when I need something, so I thought I’d telephone to chawwwwt.”
“CHAT!” he bellowed. “It’s three o’clock in the morning!” He might as well yell—Winnie and Charlotte were both out of their rooms now. Though the night was warm, Charlotte’s teeth were chattering. She wore no robe and stood clutching at her naked arms. Her nightgown, he saw, had suddenly grown too short. Her cheeks were sunken, sucked in, he was irritated to see. She liked to affect this look, he’d noticed recently, that of the starving Armenian.
The two of them were watching him beseechingly. He nodded his head once, then shook it: Yes, it was Katrinka. No, she wasn’t dead yet. Winnie’s own mouth was clamped so tightly shut that the dark of her lips had disappeared. Without her glasses, her eyes blinked huge, black, unfocused, and she seemed suddenly youthful, helpless. He thought of her heavy hair, the weight of it falling onto his hands when he’d unpinned it, when he’d let it down. Her gray hair now was permed into a short and nervous frizz.
“Wellll,” Katrinka was saying, “if you’re going to be la-di-da about it, I’ll be the one to pick the topic of conversation. Let’s be confidential, shall we, Lionel? Let’s talk behind mother’s back. Let’s talk about when you’d quit smoking if I’d quit smoking? Let’s talk about tapering off. You were the one who’d be the boss of the cigarettes, one Lucky each per hour. Remember your strolls after suppertime, uphill under the oaks on El Tovar and how you said the stars did press down so and explode right against your heart? There were thousands of men like you, Lionel, bespectacled, your socks clocked in hunter’s green, still out of work, but still cheerful, still being supported by your wife’s family’s money, still getting a kick out of the Kingfish and Andy Gump. You were the one who was not suicidal, not one of the ones who went off the rooftop feet first after the Crash, one of the ones whose socks didn’t match. The calls drove me boi-ing cuckoo! You and mother too and the way the two of you were together during your last great depression, with the beat-beat-beat of your tom-toms!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about, you lousy fucking hypocrite. I’m talking about your rules for our behavior!”
“I forbid you from speaking to me in that manner!” Lionel told her. “Have you been drinking?” The circulation now having retreated from all extremities, his bare feet and the tip of his nose were suddenly freezing. His blood pressure was building, going up and up. His temples throbbed but the blood could not get through. He would die, he knew, of having this person as his daughter.
“How do you like that?” Katrinka was saying to somebody else, someone behind her in the room. “Awe-I call to be sociable and he gives me that have-you-been-drinking sort of crap.” Hervoice rose. It was now so loud, so shrill, that Winnie and Charlotte could hear it, though they were several feet from where Lionel held the receiver out away from his ear. “HAVE YOU BEEN DRINKING?” she screamed. “Remember, Lionel? It was Prohibition. Your black shoes with their new black heels? When you and Uncle Mac chuckled to yourselves, brewing your beer in the bathtub? I could have you arrested for the things you’ve done.”
“You are insane,” he told her coldly.
But now her voice was softening, growing intimate, humorous. “You know, Dad, you used to be sort of sweet when you were all tanked up. That was when you used to like me. Know what? I liked you too. But never mind awwlll that. They’re telling me I have to get off the phone. Give me Harold’s number, will you. Phone numbers are just exactly the sort of information I cannot retain—the seven series of shock treatments, Dad. Dad? You know, when the brain lights up all at once?”
“You may not,” he said, fighting to steady his voice. “I warn you. My brother has been dead for nearly five years, as you know full well. I forbid you from calling Jessie at this hour and upsetting her. Do you hear? Do you understand me?”
“Sure,” Katrinka retorted. “Give me Uncle Lawrence’s number then. I always was his favorite niece. He’s leaving me all his mun-mun, did you know that? Banks too. I’m going to change their name to the First State La-di-da Bank of Katrinka Elmo Ainsworth. If you are very, very nice to me, I might consider giving you a job. I’m going to start you off as a teller, just like your lousy shitty father did. That man was an absolute bastard to you—can’t you realize that, Lionel?—giving you a single bank in a one-horse town like Montrose, California, when Lawrence and Harold got the entire state of Iowa to divide among themselves. So you drive your crappy Naaaassh while Uncle Harold has his Lincoln Continental.”
“Had!” Lionel choked, his face now purplish red, adding: “I drive a Nash because the seats fold down!”
“Give me Lawrence’s number!” she screamed at him. “And be quick about it! I have to get somebody to bail me out of this stinkhole jail!”
“The squalor we have found her in,” Winnie was saying. She stood at the window of the dining room, looking down through the trees into the street, wringing her hands in a dish towel. “Whatever did I do to deserve it?”
“Nothing,” Charlotte said, automatically. She too was watching the Nash back out of the garage. The dust on the leaded glass windows and the thick clutch in which the oaks held the house made it hard to see the car, but she could feel the vibrations of the motor coming up through the floor from the stone garage. Now she saw the glint of chrome and heard the sound of the engine change as it backed up, then turned around and started forward. The Nash crossed the culvert and went on up the little slope leading out of the gully, before it disappeared under the canopy of trees standing at the back of the lot across the street, the grounds of a large estate. There, nearly a block away, lived the Ainsworths’ closest neighbor.