Daddy Boy

by Carey Cameron

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Daddy Boy is that rare thing--a lyrical novel that rocks with laughter and features a cast of truly compelling characters. Robin D. tells us the story of growning up between her warring, eccentric parents. Daddy was once hardscrabble poor, a wildcatter in the Texas Panhandle. Now he's oil-baron rich and living it up in Hollywood, where he met Robin D.'s mother, a Virginia aristocrat turned cover girl and movie starlet who met Daddy at the peak of her career. Their inevitable divorce sets the stage for Robin's tale, written by Carey Cameron with an exquisite delicacy and deep insight. In Daddy Boy, human foibles are gilded by the California sun, Texas oil, and the glare of 1960s Hollywood.

Release date: January 1, 2013

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

Busy said that after Jennifer was born, she was taken in to see Daddy every morning. Then after Sonny was born, they went in to see Daddy together. Alice—who had been our nurse at Daddy’s house, along with Busy, but who went over to Mother’s house with Mother after Mother threw a candelabra at Daddy because she said she was tired of being lectured about how to wear her hair—Alice and Busy would set them down at the start of the hall. Daddy would stand at the other end of the hall with his hands on his knees, laughing. Sonny and Jennifer would crawl to him. Then, Busy said, after Butch was born, he was taken in to see Daddy. Sonny and Jennifer didn’t have to go in anymore. Then I was born, and I was taken in to see Daddy. Butch didn’t have to go anymore. Then I kept on, having to go in to see Daddy, because there was no one after me.

Jennifer whispered to me that Mother threw a candelabra at Daddy because she said she was tired of being lectured about how to wear her hair and that Daddy said that every woman he’d ever married had a steel plate in her brain, and that he then took Mother by the ankles and dragged her along the rug.

Once I asked Busy if Sonny, Butch, or Jennifer couldn’t go, just once. Busy put her hands together and whispered harshly that Sonny, Butch, and Jennifer had their tennis, swimming, horseback riding, and golf lessons, and Jennifer had her hula lessons, and besides, Daddy loved me. “Oh my Gatt, how he loves you,” Busy whispered, her regular voice coming through on the ‘Gatt,’ so that I jumped, “more zan anyvon in zee werld!”

Jennifer whispered that Busy whispered like that, whispered so that her regular voice broke through, because she was Jewish and had had to hide from Germans during the war. She’d had to whisper the whole time, she was so close to them, but sometimes, peeking out of the place she was hiding in, the things she saw were so awful that her regular voice just broke through.

Jennifer whispered that you couldn’t ask Busy about it, though, couldn’t ask her about Germans or what Jewish was or the war, because her regular voice, coming through, would get shriller and shriller, until it broke your eardrums, like Caruso’s voice. Jennifer whispered that you couldn’t ask most people about most things.

•  •  •  •

Midge always prepared Daddy’s breakfast tray the night before. She would put coffee in a thermos and cover each dish with Saran Wrap so that she didn’t have to be up before it was time to take in Daddy’s tray. Midge was the cook but she slept late so that our breakfasts and sometimes even our lunches, if Daddy was not up before them, were made by Busy.

Carmen or Judy could have made our meals but Busy always said, leaning into the refrigerator, her chipped red nails playing over the dish covers inside it, “Dat’s all rrrrrrright, I’ll be yoost fine!”

“Any-ting you say, Busy Girl!” Judy would say, imitating Busy’s accent. Judy and Carmen would laugh, Carmen’s gold tooth flashing under the buzzing fluorescent light of the pantry, on twenty-four hours a day. Judy had an accent, too, but a different one from Busy’s, and looked kind of Chinese, because she was from Guam.

One of them, Carmen or Judy, would rush back to Midge’s room after Daddy had called them on the intercom to say he was up. Midge would come out ten minutes later, her face shiny with moisture cream, the way Daddy said he liked women’s faces in the morning. Midge would stow her hairbrush in a kitchen drawer, pour the coffee out of the thermos and into a silver pot, take the Saran Wrap off the toast, and, smiling to Judy and Carmen, lift Daddy’s tray.

“Patetic,” Busy would whisper as Midge walked by.

•  •  •  •

On my way down the long, dark corridor that leads to Daddy’s room, I pass Midge coming the other way. I flatten against the wall as she walks by.

Sounds are coming through the open door at the end of the corridor. Daddy is on the telephone.

“How many barrels? One hundred thousand? That’s thirty-five thousand a day, that’s . . . Tommy Boy, that’s . . .”

I walk in.

“. . . O.K. I got to go now. Here’s my precious. Call me later. O.K., Tommy Boy. Bye. Yeah. Bye. Bye. O.K. Bye.”

Daddy hangs up the phone and skips over to me on bare feet, in the Hawaiian trunks and matching sport shirt he wears every morning. He picks me up and starts to swing me, first hugging my chest against his chest, so that it is just my legs flying out, then faster and faster, until he is holding me only by the wrists and I am flying out, all of me, like a flag. “Thirty-five thousand a day. That’s one thousand four hundred fifty-eight dollars and thirty-three cents an hour, that’s twenty-four dollars and thirty-one cents a minute. Twenty-four dollars and thirty-one cents a minute, twenty-four hours a day, for Daddy’s precious! Ha ha, ha ha, ha ha!” Daddy stops swinging me, throws me upwards and catches me in both arms. “We can kiss dry holes goodbye forever, Robin Girl, cause we really made it this time! Twenty-four dollars a minute, twenty-four hours a day! Whee!” Daddy throws me across the room onto his unmade bed. I land on my back.

“Daddy!” I shout, laughing and screaming.

Daddy walks over to one of the windows, opens it, and yells “Whoo!” through it. He goes to another window, throws it open, and yells “Whoo!” through it again.

Startled birds fly from the banana trees.

Daddy spies Alejandro weeding a flower bed. Daddy cups his hands around his mouth. “Another strike, Alejandro Boy!” he calls through the window.

Alejandro crosses himself. “Miracoloso, Senor D!”

“That’s another fifty cents an hour for you, Alejandro Boy!”

“Gracias, senor!”

“Another fifty cents an hour for all the gardeners!”

“Gracias, thank you, Senor D!”

Daddy has prune juice, black coffee, a packet of gelatin, grapefruit, and toast cut in strips. Daddy pours the packet of gelatin into the prune juice and stirs it with his finger, which is long and thin, with three coarse black hairs on the middle joint. He stirs the prune juice until it is thick.

Midge said gelatin thickened the blood. Daddy called Midge “Darlin’” and said it didn’t and Midge shut her eyes and said, “It thick-kens the ba-lud.”

Daddy dips the strips of toast into the juice and flips them rapidly into his mouth, going “Mmh, mmh, mmh,” in the back of his throat.

Daddy also went “Mmh, mmh, mmh,” as he put Tabasco sauce on his soup at Ship’s or after sips of hot coffee or when he walked uphill, rolling one foot over the other because he was pigeon-toed, but then rolling his arms over, too. He went “M-m, m-m, m-m,” like a horse galloping, when he talked to Tommy Boy in Texas and went “Wah!” when I opened the shower door on him and said, “Surprise! Surprise!”

Daddy breathed heavily through his nose when he signed checks, sitting in the projection room off the bar (put in by the movie director who had owned the house before) that Daddy had had turned into an office. He burped silently, blowing out his cheeks, after meals, he sniffed in one nostril and blew out the other on the driving range, he slept with no pyjama bottoms, and after swimming, he pounded one side of his head and then the other to get water out.

Men, really grown-up men like Daddy, were explosive and hairy and full of little holes. Daddy had holes on his nose, little craters, with hairs growing out of them. When they were long enough, Daddy called Midge, gave her some tweezers, and asked her to pluck them. Daddy’s hairs had little wads of white on them after they were pulled out. A tear came out of the far corner of Daddy’s eye and he said, “Midge’s making Daddy cry, uh-hu, uh-hu, uh-hu! Isn’t that funny, Robin Girl? Midge’s making Daddy cry!”

“Niggers,” Daddy says, rustling the newspaper.

At first I think it is just another noise Daddy is making but then he says it again: “Niggers.” Daddy turns the newspaper towards me and rustles a corner of it near a picture of colored people walking in the street. He crumples the newspaper shut and slams it onto the table beside his tray. He bounces forward on the sofa and starts dipping the few remaining strips of toast into prune juice and flipping them into his mouth.

“They come from the jungle,” he says, “and now they want rights.”

I looked at Daddy.

People said Daddy was handsome and I thought so, too, Friday afternoons, arriving at Daddy’s house for the weekend, running to him under the porte cochere, after having seen other people’s fathers for a week. By Saturday, though, I couldn’t tell what he looked like anymore, because he had become just Daddy. When he said “niggers,” though, he became ugly all of a sudden. It wouldn’t be that he would change exactly, it would be that I thought I could see things under his skin, bumping and moving, things that made the hairs and holes you saw when you looked up close, things that, in another minute, would change him into a snake or a toad, one of the purple and green spotted toads that appeared in Playboy cartoons (the scary ones, not the dirty ones, the only ones Butch would let me look at long enough to let me see what they were. The other cartoons and the pictures and the fold-out Butch would flash at me for a second. “See?” he would say, then, “That’s enough!” slamming it shut an inch away from my nose). The green swirls of his Hawaiian trunks and shirt looked like toad’s skin.

Mother said that we were never supposed to say “nigger” about colored people, nor “kike” about Jewish people, nor “beaner” about Mexicans, nor “chink” about Chinese people, nor “jap” nor “nip” about Japanese people, nor “dago” nor “wop” about Italians, nor “kraut” about Germans, nor “frog” about French people, nor “greaseball” about anyone who was short or dark or spoke with an accent.

But why would we want to use that word about colored people? We never even saw any! And what were Jewish people exactly?

Mother shut her eyes and said she was just telling us for when we went to school.

Daddy starts to make other noises: “Bee-bee, hm, mh, bee-bee,” softly and gently in the back of his throat. He pats my stomach. My stomach fits comfortably into the hollow of his hand. I can feel the warmth of his hand, reaching all the way into the very middle of me. I can smell his Royal Briar wafting over me. “Bee-bee, mh-hm, mmm, rrrlh, rrlhhhhh. . . .”

I closed my eyes. It was O.K. for Daddy to say “niggers,” I guessed. I didn’t know why but it somehow was O.K.

“Stand up now,” Daddy says, taking his hand away. I stand on the other side of the coffee table, facing him. “Turn around,” Daddy says. I turn around. “Now lift one leg up.” I lift one leg up. “Now lift the other.” I lift the other. “Now touch your toes.”

“Daddy . . .” I say, turning my head to look at him.

“Now touch your toes,” Daddy repeats. I touch my toes. “Now back up here a second.” I back around the coffee table until I am in front of him. I feel one hand on the middle of my back and one hand on my lower back, pressing. “You’ve got to go like this,” he says, pushing in against my lower back. “See?” He takes his hands away. “Now turn around,” he says. I turn around. He puts a hand on either cheek and looks at my mouth. “Now let me see your teeth.” I pull my lips back from my teeth like a dog growling. Daddy pulls his lips back, too. Daddy turns my head from one side to the other.

Daddy’s eyes then drift up from my teeth to my eyes and start going back and forth, from one eye to the other. He tilts his head back and looks at my eyes through lowered lids. I can feel his breath brushing me, like doctor’s breath. His hands, on either side of my head, hold it still. Daddy’s eyes then go from looking back and forth to looking only at my left eye. The thumb of the hand nearest that eye touches my eyelid gently. Daddy wants to know if I am doing O.K. on my bike: he saw me flip over the day before, trying to go straight up a grass bank out of the formal garden. Alejandro, who was clipping bushes nearby, said my head landed two inches from the stone gutter. “Two inches from the stone gutter! Two inches from the stone gutter!” I went from gardener to gardener and from maid to maid, telling them.

Daddy wants to know if it is because of my eye that I flipped over. Could I really see where I was going?

I looked at Daddy’s eyes.

Somewhere on their way between my teeth and my eye, Daddy’s eyes changed. They became like the eyes of people we knew from Daddy’s house, and then saw being actors on TV, eyes that made you feel as if, if you were to climb into the TV and jump up and down in front of them and say, “Hi, Olive!” or “Hi, Florence!” or “Hi, the Lewis kids’ mom!” or “Hi, Mr. Kahn!” or “Hi, Mr. Whatever-your-name-was, who was at Daddy’s house last weekend and taught us how to do the yo-yo trick!”, they would not say hi.

They were the eyes Daddy had had, I guessed, when he had pulled Mother along the rug. Mother had said, “Cornelius, it’s me, it’s Elizabeth,” but Daddy had just kept pulling.

I had told Jennifer, the first time she told me about Daddy pulling Mother, that I didn’t think that Mother knew Daddy, and Jennifer, whispering the way Busy did, so that her regular voice broke through, said that I had to be the stupidest person in the whole world.

Mother had known Daddy, she had thrown a candelabra at him and then had gone away, leaving footprints in the rug, like Daniel Boone. Indians didn’t leave footprints because they tied twigs to the backs of their moccasins. Twigs didn’t work on rugs so Daddy had had to use Mother’s whole body.

I say that maybe I wasn’t able to see where I was going.

Daddy makes me shut the other eye and keep my head level. He puts a hand in front of my eye and starts to raise it, telling me to tell him when I can’t see it anymore.

When Daddy’s hand is about halfway up I say I can’t see it anymore.

Daddy shakes his hand in front of my eye. “Here, here you can’t see it anymore?”

“Un-uh.”

“How many fingers am I holding up?” Daddy holds up two.

“Four?”

Daddy puts his arms around me and starts rocking me back and forth. Daddy tells me not to worry, just do my exercises and keep going to Mrs. Kiebler and by God, if she doesn’t help me, he will get the finest eye exercise woman in the country to live at the house all the time and help me. Anything can be done with exercise. Franklin Roosevelt was actually walking, for an hour every day, right before he died.

Daddy’s eyes stopped staring and started going back and forth and went from foggy to shining when he said “Franklin Roosevelt,” shining not in the way they shined when we arrived at Daddy’s house for the weekend and Daddy saw us running towards him under the porte cochere—that was only on the surface—but shining deep down inside them. It was a shine I saw even before I knew how I was able to see it; then I realized that I had been somehow taken down into Daddy’s eyes: that was how I was able to see it, because a part of me had Daddy’s eyes all around me, shining, and I felt in that part of me, things being twanged.

I thought it was a good idea to tie twigs to the back of my moccasins, but at the same time, I wanted the Indians to find me.

•  •  •  •

I was born with no muscle in my left eyelid, so that it only opened up a quarter of the way: that was why grownups in supermarkets, thinking I was winking, winked at me, then winked again, then looked embarrassed and walked away. It was called a “ptosis.” It was spelled with a pt, but pronounced just t, like Ptolemy, who was one of the Pharoahs. One in a million people had it with one eyelid or two. Grandaddy Drayton had it and one day, when I was a grandmother, maybe one of my grandchildren would have it, too.

Mrs. Kiebler was German. Mrs. Kiebler would make me sit in a dentist’s chair in her living room and make me roll my eye up as far as it would go, then, with my eyeball still rolled up, she would make me shut my eye, so that it ached and pulled all around. When I had done it five times, she would let me have a pfeffernuss and when I had done it ten times, she would let me have a piece of strudel.

I had sweated, and there was a lump in my throat, the first few times I had gone to Mrs. Kiebler’s, because I couldn’t understand why Daddy would let me go to her, why Busy would. I couldn’t ask Busy about it though, because, answering me, her regular voice, coming through, would get shriller and shriller, until it broke your eardrums, like Caruso’s voice, the parchmenty pieces flapping in the breeze, so that I not only could not see out of one of my eyes, I could not hear, either: it was part of a plan.

•  •  •  •

The telephone rings.

“That must be Tommy Boy calling me again,” Daddy says. “Excuse me now, Robin Girl.” Daddy crosses the room, picks up the phone and sits down in an armchair by it. Daddy leans back and puts a foot up on a knee.

“Hi, Tommy Boy. Now what do you think is the possibility of there being other strikes in that area?”

I went into Daddy’s dressing room.

The dressing room was lined with mirrors. It had a mirrored ceiling and mirrored doors. Every day, when I was at Daddy’s house, I went around Daddy’s dressing room in the same way. I opened one door and walked into a walk-in closet. There were stacks of white shirts with alligators on them, and red and blue golf sweaters, made of squiggly wool. I counted the shirts and sweaters. I opened another door and saw lines of shoes on slanted shelves. Sometimes I even said “hi guys” to them. I opened another door and looked into a shallow tie closet, full of pink and blue and silver ties. The ties were on clips that flipped one way, then the other, in perfect sequence, like a chorus line.

“Well, the fact that Central Western’s got a lease on that shouldn’t stop us.”

There was a mirrored dressing table as well, built into the wall. There was a bowl full of pennies on it. I stirred them with my fingers and took a few every day. There was also an army of little wooden hairy people with signs on them, presents from Daddy’s girlfriends. All you had to say was “Be Mine” or “Love Me and Leave Me” and grown-ups would think you were very funny.

Jennifer whispered that she knew what Daddy did with his girlfriends.

“What?” I said, which meant, not that I wanted to know what Daddy did with his girlfriends, but that I did not think Daddy had any girlfriends. Jennifer had girlfriends: she had Vicki Kay. PePe LePew the skunk had a girlfriend but she was a cat and boys in cars with girls squished up right next to them, when they had all that seat to sit on, had girlfriends, but I did not think Daddy had girlfriends. I thought you had to be thinner to have girlfriends. I thought you had to get dressed up and go out.

“Is Dolores his girlfriend?” I finally asked.

“Was.”

“Is Tamara his girlfriend?”

“Was.”

“Pepita?”

“Was.”

“Ingrid?”

“Was.”

“Shanti?”

“Was.”

“Is . . . was . . . every woman who’s ever been at Daddy’s house his girlfriend?”

“If they’re not now, they were at one time”

“Gosh. . . .”

“I can’t believe how stupid you are . . .”

“Are Midge, Judy, and Carmen girlfriends?” I asked after a while.

“Gol! I just can’t believe how stupid you are!”

Jennifer said they were after Daddy for his money.

Sonny said they were nice.

Butch said they were foreign and had hairy pits.

We didn’t know if Daddy’s girlfriends were always foreign, but they always had accents, and when we would ask them where they were from, they would always say things like, “My father was an Ecuadorian plantation owner and my mother was a Burmese princess but I was raised in South Africa and I’ve lived in Oslo most of my life,” and when we would tell Mother, coming home from Daddy’s house on Sunday nights, about all the amazing places they were from, Mother would say that that probably meant they were from Ohio.

Daddy said they were showgirls.

We didn’t know if they really were or had been showgirls, for Daddy called almost all women showgirls—Daddy hardly ever said “woman,” only said “showgirl”—but when we asked them, they always said, “Yes, well, I’ve done a little kicking.”

“They want what?”

There was also a gold watch on a chain suspended in a glass dome. The thick gold was dented and scratched, the numbers on the face were fine and tapering and there was a sprig of flowers (Daddy said they were lilies of the valley) painted faintly in the center. Daddy said the watch had belonged to his daddy. There was a portrait of Grandaddy in the house that Daddy had had painted by Mr. Fraley. In it, Grandaddy’s eye wasn’t closed at all. The portrait hung in the hall, next to the one Daddy had had Mr. Fraley paint of me, in which my eye wasn’t closed at all either, but was perfectly open and green like the other, and seemed, together with the other eye and Grandaddy’s two open eyes, to follow me when I walked by in the hall, so that I always tried to run by. Grandaddy’s hands were spread out over something that looked like a Graham cracker box but that Daddy said was the edge of a pulpit.

I could have lifted the dome on the watch but I never did. I was afraid the lilies of the watch, on meeting the air, would wilt, the watch would disintegrate and fall down on the wooden base of the dome in a perfect cone of ash, like the blond hair of Guenevere, King Arthur’s wife, when archaeologists opened her casket. Right in front of their eyes it disappeared, like cotton candy in your mouth, the only way to prove that she was she.

Mother drove all the way downtown. It was hot. My thighs stuck to the seat and came away with the sound of cloth tearing. A nurse took me into a room that smelled of sho. . .