memory—part of it must have been one of the Daydreams—
and it had happened not to his mother but to him.
As the mahogany doors of the elevator slid away to reveal
a shadowy interior from which his own face met him in a
foxed and peeling mirror, that scene from his seventh year
wrapped around him once again, and he saw one man’s eyes
turn to yellow, felt the other’s hand alter into something claw-like, hard and inhuman . . . he jumped into the elevator as if he had been jabbed with a fork.
Not possible: the Daydreams were not possible, he had not seen a man’s eyes turning from blue to yellow, and his mother was fine and dandy, there was nothing to be scared of, nobody was dying, and danger was what a seagull meant to a clam.
He closed his eyes and the elevator toiled upward.
That thing in the sand had laughed at him.
Jack squeezed through the opening as soon as the doors
began to part. He trotted past the closed mouths of the other elevators, turned right into the panelled corridor and ran past the sconces and paintings toward their rooms. Here running
seemed less a sacrilege. They had 407 and 408, consisting of two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and a living room with a view of the long smooth beach and the vastness of the ocean. His mother had appropriated flowers from somewhere, arranged
them in vases, and set her little array of framed photographs beside them. Jack at five, Jack at eleven, Jack as an infant in the arms of his father. His father, Philip Sawyer, at the wheel of the old DeSoto he and Morgan Sloat had driven to California in the unimaginable days when they had been so poor they had often slept in the car.
When Jack threw open 408, the door to the living room, he
called out, “Mom? Mom?”
The flowers met him, the photographs smiled; there was no
answer. “Mom!” The door swung shut behind him. Jack felt
his stomach go cold. He rushed through the living room to the large bedroom on the right. “Mom!” Another vase of tall bright flowers. The empty bed looked starched and ironed, so stiff a quarter would bounce off the quilt. On the bedside table
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stood an assortment of brown bottles containing vitamins and other pills. Jack backed out. His mother’s window showed
black waves rolling and rolling toward him.
Two men getting out of a nondescript car, themselves non-
descript, reaching for her . . .
“Mom!” he shouted.
“I hear you, Jack,” came his mother’s voice through the
bathroom door. “What on earth . . . ?”
“Oh,” he said, and felt all his muscles relax. “Oh, sorry. I just didn’t know where you were.”
“Taking a bath,” she said. “Getting ready for dinner. Is that still allowed?”
Jack realized that he no longer had to go to the bathroom.
He dropped into one of the overstuffed chairs and closed his eyes in relief. She was still okay—
Still okay for now, a dark voice whispered, and in his mind he saw that sand funnel open again, whirling.
5
Seven or eight miles up the coast road, just outside Hamp-
ton Township, they found a restaurant called The Lobster
Chateau. Jack had given a very sketchy account of his day—
already he was backing away from the terror he had experi-
enced on the beach, letting it diminish in his memory. A
waiter in a red jacket printed with the yellow image of a lobster across the back showed them to a table beside a long
streaky window.
“Would Madam care for a drink?” The waiter had a stony-
cold off-season New England face, and looking at it, suspecting the resentment of his Ralph Lauren sport coat and his
mother’s carelessly worn Halston afternoon dress behind
those watery blue eyes, Jack felt a more familiar terror needle him—simple homesickness. Mom, if you’re not really sick, what the hell are we doing here? The place is empty! It’s creepy! Jesus!
“Bring me an elementary martini,” she said.
The waiter raised his eyebrows. “Madam?”
“Ice in a glass,” she said. “Olive on ice. Tanqueray gin over olive. Then—are you getting this?”
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THE TALISMAN
Mom, for God’s sake, can’t you see his eyes? You think
you’re being charming—he thinks you’re making fun of him!
Can’t you see his eyes?
No. She couldn’t. And that failure of empathy, when she
had always been so sharp about how other people were feel-
ing, was another stone against his heart. She was withdraw-
ing . . . in all ways.
“Yes, madam.”
“Then,” she said, “you take a bottle of vermouth—any
brand—and hold it against the glass. Then you put the ver-
mouth back on the shelf and bring the glass to me. ’Kay?”
“Yes, madam.” Watery-cold New England eyes, staring at
his mother with no love at all. We’re alone here, Jack thought, really realizing it for the first time. Jeez, are we. “Young sir?”
“I’d like a Coke,” Jack said miserably.
The waiter left. Lily rummaged in her purse, came up with
a package of Herbert Tarrytoons (so she had called them
since he had been a baby, as in “Bring me my Tarrytoons from over there on the shelf, Jacky,” and so he still thought of them) and lit one. She coughed out smoke in three harsh bursts.
It was another stone against his heart. Two years ago, his
mother had given up smoking entirely. Jack had waited for
her to backslide with that queer fatalism which is the flip side of childish credulity and innocence. His mother had always
smoked; she would soon smoke again. But she had not . . .
not until three months ago, in New York. Carltons. Walking
around the living room in the apartment on Central Park
West, puffing like a choo-choo, or squatting in front of the record cabinet, pawing through her old rock records or her
dead husband’s old jazz records.
“You smoking again, Mom?” he’d asked her.
“Yeah, I’m smoking cabbage leaves,” she’d said.
“I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Why don’t you turn on the TV?” she’d responded with
uncharacteristic sharpness, turning toward him, her lips
pressed tightly together. “Maybe you can find Jimmy Swag-
gart or Reverend Ike. Get down there in the hallelujah corner with the amen sisters.”
“Sorry,” he’d muttered.
Well—it was only Carltons. Cabbage leaves. But here were
the Herbert Tarrytoons—the blue-and-white old-fashioned
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pack, the mouthpieces that looked like filters but which
weren’t. He could remember, vaguely, his father telling somebody that he smoked Winstons and his wife smoked Black
Lungers.
“See anything weird, Jack?” she asked him now, her over-
bright eyes fixed on him, the cigarette held in its old, slightly eccentric position between the second and third fingers of the right hand. Daring him to say something. Daring him to say,
“Mom, I notice you’re smoking Herbert Tarrytoons again—
does this mean you figure you don’t have anything left to
lose?”
“No,” he said. That miserable, bewildered homesickness
swept him again, and he felt like weeping. “Except this place.
It’s a little weird.”
She looked around and grinned. Two other waiters, one fat,
one thin, both in red jackets with golden lobsters on the back, stood by the swing doors to the kitchen, talking quietly. A velvet rope hung across the entrance to a huge dining room be-
yond the alcove where Jack and his mother sat. Chairs were
overturned in ziggurat shapes on the tables in this dark cave.
At the far end, a huge window-wall looked out on a gothic
shorescape that made Jack think of Death’s Darling, a movie his mother had been in. She had played a young woman with
a lot of money who married a dark and handsome stranger
against her parents’ wishes. The dark and handsome stranger took her to a big house by the ocean and tried to drive her crazy. Death’s Darling had been more or less typical of Lily Cavanaugh’s career—she had starred in a lot of black-and-white films in which handsome but forgettable actors drove
around in Ford convertibles with their hats on.
The sign hanging from the velvet rope barring the entrance
to this dark cavern was ludicrously understated: THIS SECTION
CLOSED.
“It is a little grim, isn’t it?” she said.
“It’s like the Twilight Zone,” he replied, and she barked her harsh, infectious, somehow lovely laugh.
“Yeah, Jacky, Jacky, Jacky,” she said, and leaned over to
ruffle his too-long hair, smiling.
He pushed her hand away, also smiling (but oh, her fingers
felt like bones, didn’t they? She’s almost dead, Jack . . . ).
“Don’t touch-a da moichendise.”
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THE TALISMAN
“Off my case.”
“Pretty hip for an old bag.”