RAQUEL

by William Allen Anderson

“Guess who lives in the apartment next door to your grandparents?” my father asked palpitatiously: “Marlene Dietrich.”

My father was ecstatic with his news because he was ashamed to be from Thumb, Ohio, a village so full of the Illiterati that he refused to discuss it. We lived in Schenectady, a non-observable improvement over Thumb except for its location north of New York City. I was, and remain, shocked that my father knew who Marlene Dietrich was. His world view was cutely jejune. 

I was 13. The only actress I could name off the top of my head was Raquel Welch because I had a poster of her from the movie “One Million Years B.C.”  Narrow strips of shaved animal pelts barely covered her sweaty black and white body parts.

My step-grandfather Charlie and my grandmother Mabel were renting an apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. Along with Marlene Dietrich their neighbors were Frank Sinatra, who had moved into Cole Porter’s apartment; Herbert Hoover, General Douglas MacArthur, and the chairman of the board of Coca-Cola.

“Zsa Zsa Gabor lives there, too,” my mother said. It was a name that impressed my mother more than the others, to no one’s surprise.

Charlie was president of the Pullman Company that manufactured Pullman sleeper train cars.  He acquired the Waldorf pied-à-terre to be near the New York bankers who financed Pullman. He entertained them often with charming falsiloquence and a lot of single malt Irish whiskey.

He also leased a house in Washington, D.C., near the Shoreham Hotel in Kalorama Heights where he and Mabel honored senators, congressmen, cabinet members, and White House staff with dinners served by waitresses and catered by The Shoreham.

Mabel did not cook and she refused to learn. When they moved in, she had the stove disconnected.

Her smallish dinners also were catered, even when the guests were only my parents. My mother had shown my father how to dip his finger tips into Mabel’s finger bowls filled with warm water and lemon slices. The use of finger bowls was an unspoken rule in Mabel’s house that, sadly, my father had never learned from the arbiter elegantiarum of Thumb, Ohio.

Underneath her place at the dining room table Mabel had a button that was connected to a buzzer in the kitchen. Without skipping a syllable Mabel could touch the button with her knee to summon whoever was working. ‘Yes, Miss Wright?” a servant would ask, peeking into the dining room. Mabel’s system worked perfectly to demand exactly whatever Mabel wanted at the precise moment she wanted it.

My father had called his parents in Ohio to blurt out that Charlie had hired President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s White House press secretary Stephen Early. My father referred to his father-in-law as “Mister Wright.”  He told my grandparents he was eager to talk to Mister Wright to hear about what Mister Early had said so far about Mister Roosevelt. My father was so breathless and awkward he could have been talking about Mister Raquel Welch and the Missus.

After my father’s call, my mother paused at my bedroom door and said, in her gravelly voice quarried from decades of chain smoking Camels, “Would you please hang pictures of naked women in your room so the other boys at your boarding school won’t think you’re a homosexual?”

It wasn’t a question. And I wasn’t in boarding school. I was 13 in the seventh grade in a public school in Schenectady. I raised my index finger to indicate I wanted to speak.

“Yes?” she asked, impatiently.

I pointed to my Raquel Welch poster on my bedroom wall.

My mother turned on her heel and marched down the hall. I could hear squeaky drawers being yanked open. When she marched back, she was carrying my father’s Playboy and Penthouse magazines.  She unfolded two centerfolds and held them up in the air. “THESE,” she said a little too rock-poundingly loudly. “THESE are what you hang on your wall at your boarding school.” 

I seemed to be the only one in my family who knew my going to boarding school was out of the question. The real question was why she wanted me to reassure said theoretical boarding school boys that I was not gay.

My mother thought I was gay because I didn’t watch NFL football, Major League baseball, NBA basketball, NHL hockey, PGA golf, college football, or college basketball on tv with my father. I didn’t watch sports on tv with my father because he was an abusive alcoholic. He routinely screamed at my mother and me in drunken rages. I had despised my father since the age of 5. I was determined to be nothing like him, and that firmly included not watching sports. 

Try, my mother said a million times. Try fishing with him. Try watching basketball with him. Try watching football with him. Try to caddy for him. I tried each of her suggestions once, but only once, because my father was always trying to be an asshole.

Weirdly, my mother wanted me to be just like him, “a man’s man” as she described him. Her ambition was to enroll me in a very expensive New England boarding school where wealthy Connecticut boys would teach me how to be a man’s man by beating the shit out of me. She was forever working to drag me across the Rubicon into a new world of abuse. It made no sense. I was 13. I was already being bullied at home for free.

What the maternus illuminati didn’t know – I had discovered my father’s secret porn stash that was way more fescennine than any photos in Penthouse or Playboy. More, in the sense that my father had a perverted interest in women with hugely distorted body parts. I’d sneak a porn magazine like “Screamers” or “Butt Cheeks” out of my father’s hiding place and show it to my friends Paul, John and Jimmy in the garage.

The cover girl of ”Screamers” was some poor woman who had so many gallons of silicone pumped into her breasts they hung below the belt of her blue jeans cutoffs. We were speechless, not ithyphallic. Then, as if she could be any more of a sad sack, when the woman appeared in profile her breasts looked like two dead pigs hanging from her collarbone.  Her nipples almost pointed straight down. “Eeewwww!” we all said in unison, and much much louder than when we said the Pledge of Allegiance.

“Preparation is everything,” my mother announced as she handed me a form to sign up to take the PSAT, the standardized test for private school admissions.  But what about money? Wasn’t money important in the world of boarding schools? In 1963, GE paid my father less than $15,000 per year. Could I get an academic scholarship with my C average? No. Could I get an athletic scholarship for my hours sitting on the couch, eating ice cream sandwiches? No. Did my mother expect Charlie and Mabel to pay for a year at the Taft School? Yes.

My mother talked a teacher in my junior high into tutoring me in math for the PSAT. She drove me to the teacher’s apartment three nights a week to study basic math for two hours.

Miss Terneon, the math teacher, lived in a shabby two-room apartment above a garage. Her furniture was eclectic – my mother called it “used” – and her bedroom was dark. We sat at her kitchen table with a math textbook, a ruler, pencils, a pencil sharpener, a protractor, rubber erasers, spiral notebooks, and a sick philodendron. Miss Terneon’s Tang-tinted face was pimply and pockmarked but from the neck down she was the stuff of 13-year-old dreams. Tight upright breasts, long toned legs, and an ass like two Corgi puppies fighting inside a bag. As she talked about common denominators I thought, let’s invert and multiply.

When the tutoring was finished, my mother got out her checkbook but Miss Terneon demurred. She said she was happy to volunteer and it wasn’t necessary to pay her. Ignoring her, the next day my mother bought Miss Terneon a Chanel evening bag and had it shipped to her garage apartment.

“Let’s hope she doesn’t just shove it into a drawer of her used furniture,” my mother said, sighing.

I took the PSAT. Out of 100 I scored a 09 in math. At least it was a double digit score.  My mother was furious. She spent the afternoon on the deck, chain smoking and talking to herself. When she came inside she pointed a finger at my nose and said, “DON’T tell ANYBODY about this.”

I told Myrna Fishlowitz, my mother’s next-door nemesis. Mrs. Fishlowitz often wore a gold bathing suit and high heeled sandals in her yard. “I’m just going for a swim,” was her daily comment about her ensemble. She was tan, slender, smoked Virginia Slims, and kept her bleached blonde hair in a French twist. She had pushed her daughters into local private schools, and she had a highly competitive interest in my mother’s boarding school plans for me. Mrs. Fishlowitz grilled me like a trout.

The letters that flowed in from Berkshire, Taft, Hotchkiss and the Gunnery all said very sympathetically that, while they were sorry they couldn’t accept me, this was an opportunity for me to work on my math skills to prepare for the SATs.

Had I sabotaged my PSAT? No one believed that. My mother called Miss Terneon and reported my results with thinly veiled insinuation.

After her call, I asked my mother to please not insult a teacher again. I had to go to school there.

“Now you DO,” she growled.

As one rug was being pulled out from under my mother, Mabel’s antique Mohatashem Kashan Persian carpets and Steinway baby grand piano were being heaved into a United Van Lines 18 wheeler. Mabel had dropped dead in her third-floor art studio where she painted god-awful landscapes. She had worn a beret and a smock to create her atrocities. She painted with a brush in her right hand and a lit Tareyton in an ivory cigarette holder in her left.

My father was devasted. He had counted on Charlie to die first and leave everything to Mabel. Upon Mabel’s death, my father expected my mother to inherit everything. He fantasized about quitting GE and moving to a house in Bermuda with my mother’s money. And my mother.

After Mabel’s death, my mother spent a lot of time with Charlie. She sent more of Mabel’s things home: opera gloves, monogrammed sheets and pillowcases, embroidered tablecloths, embroidered piano top runners, a sterling silver tea set and gallery tray, jewelry, hats, and mink pelts with claw-bearing feet and toothy heads.

While my mother was pillaging Charlie’s house, Charlie began wooing an exotic widow who was extremely attentive to his whims. She massaged his back and his ego. She trimmed his hair and his sails. She bought Broadway show tickets and introduced him to the finest restaurants. Charlie called her “Mrs. Moonbeam.” During their two-year romance, Mrs. Moonbeam cleaned out Charlie’s investment accounts.

Charlie died, La Moonbeam disappeared with all of his money, and with her went my father’s beach house in Bermuda and my mother’s dreams of prep school boys pounding me into submission.

Mabel’s Mohatashem Kashan Persian carpets remained rolled up in our garage next to her Steinway baby grand. My father had a crew tip the piano on its side to make room for his old Thunderbird. My mother had no interest in forcing me to take piano lessons because “piano’s for fairies like your friend Paul.”

Over the next year, my father took his rage out on the baby grand. He pulled out the ivory keys and all of the piano wire strings and threw them in the garbage can. He removed the lid, the sides, the legs and everything else that was made from mahogany and walnut and took it to his basement woodworking shop where he gleefully put it through his rotary saw, drill press, lathe, joiner, planer, sander and grinder.

In the end, all that was left was a pile of sawdust I called “The Dune” and just enough wood for him to make a small candleholder that resembled a cheesy $3 curio made in the Congo with painted black scrap wood and hammered bottle caps.