She was only a name.
Father was killed in an automobile accident during my first year in medical school. He had thought enough of me to name me an executor of his will.
And I was visited in Boston soon after that by a fat and shifty-eyed attorney named Norman Mushari, Jr. He told me what seemed at first to be a rambling and irrelevant story about a woman who had been locked away for many years against her will – in an institution for the feeble-minded.
She had hired him, he said, to sue her relatives and the institution for damages, to gain her release at once, and to recover all inheritances which had been wrongly withheld.
She had a name, which, of course, was Eliza Mellon Swain.
Chapter 21
MOTHER would say later of the hospital
where we abandoned Eliza to Limbo: “It wasn’t a cheap hospital, you know. It cost two hundred dollars a day. And the doctors begged us to stay away, didn’t they, Wilbur?”
“I think so, Mother,” I said. And then I told the truth: “I forget.”
I was then not only a stupid Bobby Brown, but a conceited one. Though only a first-year medical student with the genitalia of an infant field mouse, I was the master of a great house on Beacon Hill. I was driven to and from school in a Jaguar – and I had already taken to dressing as I would dress when President of the United States, like a medical mountebank during the era of Chester Alan Arthur, say.
There was a party there nearly every night. I would customarily make an appearance of only a few minutes smoking hashish in a meerschaum pipe, and wearing an emerald-green, watered-silk dressing gown.
A pretty girl came up to me at one of those parties, and she said to me, “You are so ugly, you’re the sexiest thing I ever saw.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, I know.”
Mother visited me a lot on Beacon Hill, where I had a special suite built just for her – and I visited her a lot in Turtle Bay. Yes, and reporters came to question us in both places after Norman Mushari, Jr., got Eliza out of the hospital.
It was a big story.
It was always a big story when multimillionaires mistreated their own relatives.
Hi ho.
It was embarrassing, and should have been, of course.
We had not seen Eliza yet, and had not been able to reach her by telephone. Meanwhile, though, she said justly insulting things about us almost every day in the press.
All we had to show reporters was a copy of a telegram we had sent to Eliza, in care of her lawyer, and Eliza’s reply to it.
Our telegram said: “WE LOVE YOU. YOUR MOTHER AND YOUR BROTHER.”
Eliza’s telegram said this:
“I LOVE YOU TOO. ELIZA.”
Eliza would not allow herself to be photographed. She had her lawyer buy a confessional booth from a church which was being torn down. She sat inside it when she granted interviews for television.
And Mother and I watched those interviews in agony, holding hands.
And Eliza’s rowdy contralto had become so unfamiliar to us that we thought there might be an imposter in the booth, but it was Eliza all right.
I remember a television reporter asked her, “How did you spend your time in the hospital, Miss Swain?”
“Singing,” she said.
“Singing anything in particular?” he said.
“The same song – over and over again,” she said.
“What song was that?” he said.
” ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come,’ ” she told him.
“And did you have some specific prince in mind as your rescuer?” he said.
“My twin brother,” she said. “But he’s a swine, of course. He never came.”
Chapter 22
MOTHER and I surely did not oppose Eliza
and her lawyer in any way, so she easily regained control of her wealth. And nearly the first thing she did was to buy half-interest in The New England Patriots professional football team.
This purchase resulted in more publicity. Eliza would still not come out of the booth for cameras, but Mushari promised the world that she was now wearing a New England Patriots blue and gold jersey in there.
She was asked in this particular interview if she kept up with current events, to which she replied: “I certainly don’t blame the Chinamen for going home.”
This had to do with the Republic of China’s closing its embassy in Washington. The miniaturization of human beings in China had progressed so far at that point, that their ambassador was only sixty centimeters tall. His farewell was polite and friendly. He said his country was severing relations simply because there was no longer anything going on in the United States which was of any interest to the Chinese at all.
Eliza was asked to say why the Chinamen had been so right.
“What civilized country could be interested in a hell-hole like America,” she said, “where everybody takes such lousy care of their own relatives?”
And then, one day, she and Mushari were seen crossing the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge from Cambridge to Boston on foot. It was a warm and sunny day. Eliza was carrying a parasol She was wearing the jersey of her football team.
My God – was that poor girl ever a mess!
She was so bent over that her face was on level with Mushari’s – and Mushari was about the size of Napoleon Bonaparte. She was chain smoking. She was coughing her head off.
Mushari was wearing a white suit. He carried a cane. He wore a red rose in his lapel.
And he and his client were soon joined by a friendly crowd, and by newspaper photographers and television crews.
And mother and I watched them on television – in horror, may I say, for the parade was coming ever closer to my house on Beacon Hill.
“Oh, Wilbur, Wilbur, Wilbur – ” said my mother as we watched, “is that really your sister?”
I made a bitter joke – without smiling. “Either your only daughter, Mother, or the sort of anteater known as an aardvark,” I said.
Chapter 23
MOTHER was not up to a confrontation
with Eliza. She retreated to her suite upstairs. Nor did I want the servants to witness whatever grotesque performance Eliza had in mind – so I sent them to their quarters.
When the doorbell rang, I myself answered the door.
I smiled at the aardvark and the cameras and crowd. “Eliza! Dear sister! What a pleasant surprise. Come in, come in!” I said.
For form’s sake, I made a tentative gesture as though I might touch her. She drew back. “You touch me, Lord Fauntleroy, and I’ll bite you, and you’ll die of rabies,” she said.
Policemen kept the crowd from following Eliza and Mushari into the house, and I closed the drapes on the windows, so no one could see in.
When I was sure we had privacy, I said to her bleakly, “What brings you here?”
“Lust for your perfect body, Wilbur,” she said. She coughed and laughed. “Is dear Mater here, or dear Pater?” She corrected herself. “Oh, dear – dear Pater is dead, isn’t he? Or is it dear Mater? It’s so hard to tell.”
“Mother is in Turtle Bay, Eliza,” I lied. Inwardly, I was swooning with sorrow and loathing and guilt. I estimated that her crushed ribcage had the capacity of a box of kitchen matches. The room was beginning to smell like a distillery. Eliza had a problem with alcohol as well. Her skin was bad. She had a complexion like our great-grandmother’s steamer trunk.
“Turtle Bay, Turtle Bay,” she mused. “Did it ever occur to you, dear Brother, that dear Father was not our Father at all?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Perhaps Mother stole from the bed and out of the house on a moonlit night,” she said, “and mated with a giant sea turtle in Turtle Bay.”
Hi ho.
“Eliza,” I said, “if we’re going to discuss family matters, perhaps Mr. Mushari should leave us alone.”
“Why?” she said. “Normie is the only family I have.”
“Now, now – ” I said.
“That overdressed sparrow-fart of a mother of yours is surely no relative of mine,” she said.
“Now, now – ” I said.
“And you don’t consider yourself a relative of mine, do you?” she said.
“What can I say?” I said.
“That’s why we’re visiting you – to hear all the wonderful things you have to say,” she said. “You were always the brainy one. I was just some kind of tumor that had to be removed from your side.”
“I never said that,” I said.
“Other people said it, and you believed them,” she said. “That’s worse. You’re a Fascist, Wilbur. That’s what you are.”
“That’s absurd,” I said. “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when somebody tells them they’re superior,” she said.