Prose Beau

Beaumonde Blues A novel excerpt

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In the Beginning Prologue

It was the highest of high sales days -- an event on shoppers’ calendars -- when the apparition first appeared in the sky above the Beaumonde Mall. As shoppers would recall, the day was sunny, the sky was blue. A face appeared as if the fleecy clouds had given birth to an angel. Her long, tight locks of rotini curls streamed into the clouds. Her arm swayed – elbow-wrist-elbow-wrist --as she sprinkled blessings over the shoppers who gazed in awe, then scurried into the cool-air-conditioned corridors of the mall, thinking they had been bewitched by the sun. The apparition soon became a familiar sight, always appearing during major shopping seasons directly over the mall. It was only natural that she became known as the Mall Madonna, Patron Saint of Shoppers. Eventually, many would look at the sky and smile as they stepped through the silent, swinging doors. It was good to feel blessed, that purchasing one’s dreams was a benevolent act; even the president of the United States said it was a patriotic thing to do. Some thought mall management had arranged for the angelic visit. After all, it was a planned community. Only good things were to happen in Beaumonde. Traces of the past – the small farms, the shacks of itinerant farm labors and the ramshackle cabins by the beach – were gradually disappearing. Even the original name – Mud Bay – was replaced by the far

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more elegant name, a name chosen by the principal developer, Godfrey Beaumonde More III. Godfrey More was an organized man of undetermined years. He had a Victorian’s proper paunch – a sign of prosperity – and an English gentleman’s beaked nose, combined with the keen, hard-scrabble entrepreneurial spirit of his maternal grandmother’s San Francisco Gold Rush forbearers. It was just after World War II when he began drawing the plans for his city. It was a time when America was bursting with optimism and a flourishing economy. For the first time families owned cars and could easily move away from cities where they worked into newly planned communities. It gave an alternative to urban living or returning to life on the farm. On the East Coast More’s nemesis, the Levitt Brothers, already had plans for 17,000-some Cape Cod homes on Long Island, N. Y., having revolutionized home-building, slapping together pre-fabricated houses. The Levitts were cashing in on the new prosperity that came with the G.I. Bill – low-cost home loans and plentiful jobs. Capitalists everywhere knew it was now possible for everyman to invest in the American dream – a car, a house with a yard, a barbecue, a swing set, crafting a lifestyle around the pursuit of leisure as the world unfolded safely on the television screen, the focal point of every living room. The idea of linking leisure and television intrigued More – after all, he was born to leisure and the thought that some degree of free time could now be enjoyed by the masses was thrilling to his entrepreneurial nature. While generations past could only guess how the rich lived, television and Technicolor motion pictures beamed portraits of fame and fortune directly into new suburbs, inspiring those dreams of luxury living. The Levitts could have

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their Levittown, created out of a potato field, but More would create a West Coast community with the patina of Hollywood. Of course these new settlers would want to live like Hollywood stars but on their budget. They were not poor but they were not rich either. They were something that evolved slowly out of the Industrial Revolution, a middle class. The words send a shiver through More as he thought of the power such a class might wield and the opportunities for harnessing it. Give them the illusion of wealth and privilege. That’s what his grandfather had told him when he took him to Harrod’s in London when he was just a young boy. The world’s greatest department stores brought the democratization of luxury. It was in those great cathedrals of commerce that shoppers could pretend to be royalty as accommodating salesclerks praised their choices and the store offered an escape from humdrum reality. It’s not that his grandfather cared about luxury for the working class. It was that he cared deeply for the financial opportunity it represented. In the department stores housewives could meet for lunch, get their hair done, rest and write letters, buy the latest fashions, purchase take-out dinners and leave their dogs at a kennel for a day of grooming – all the while isolated from the reality of social class by the degree of their purchasing power. But that was London, old, tweedy, genteel, moneyed London. More rejected business opportunities in his grandfather’s London and his father’s New York and his mother’s Paris. Instead, he settled on his grandmother’s West Coast of America, in a beautiful setting called Mud Bay. He would build a new world and call it Beaumonde.

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So on the first day he parted the land from the sea and called it the Beaumonde Marina. On the second, he designed boulevards and high-rises. On the third day he planned a hospital with a golf course where Beaumondians could stave off aging through cosmetic surgery and surgeons could play a round between births and hysterectomies. On the fourth day, More developed a country club and schools for children to learn to dress for success. On the fifth he created the mall and tasteful businesses for tasteful people who lived in housing developments with respectable names: Regal Woods, Fox Wood and Manor Hill. On the sixth day he created media to spread the message of plenty -- a newspaper, radio and TV station with a perfect anchor man. On the seventh day, he planned a church where the faithful prayed to-whom-it-may-concern, hoping it would eventually replace the old Mud Bay Baptist and Mud Bay Catholic, a brick church of agonized saints and the martyrdom for which it stood. As Sputnik orbited, Kruchev was barred from Disney Land and McCarthy spoke against the danger of communism, More assured the pioneer Beaumondians that soon their planned community would be complete. It would have no litter, homelessness or discord that couldn’t be erased by a shopping trip to Beaumonde Center. Every house would have at least one television where Beaumondians could view the world from the safe isolation of their living rooms. More’s city was complete by the 1960s, and just in time. Race riots exploded in the south; the conflict in Vietnam began; youths took to the streets in massive demonstrations. Sandwiched between the Gilette razor bobsleds, Mrs. Olsen and her coffee and the cartoon calf singing “I love Bosco’’ were 30-minute segments of perfect families where there was always milk in the refrigerator and cookies on the table. And at night was the real-estate

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report where More himself looked into the calm eye of America and with his reassuring smile told of the luxury community with deluxe three-bedroom houses with closets for him and her, rumpus rooms for children, porches straight from Tara, two-car garages – not to mention matching doghouses for the family pets – all on the West Coast of America and for only a reasonable down payment, God bless the G.I. Bill. Everyday, year after year BEAU-TV’s own anchorman, Mort Canard, ushered in the news with calm reassurance that while chaos reigned elsewhere, Beaumonde was an island of calm and nothing in poor taste could happen within its boundaries. Nothing. Mort’s calm gray eyes reassured viewers. As Mud Bay slowly evolved into Beaumonde, three young women grew up, clipping images of ideal families from magazines and pasting them in scrapbooks, gathering around the television sets for Father Knows Best, Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver, deeply longing to live in the television land of perfection where life was orderly and fathers and mothers loved each other and their children forever. For many, life appeared to be so perfect in Beaumonde, that they couldn’t believe it when they heard that women disappeared from Beaumonde Center and ended up in the nearby river well dressed but dead. Life in Beaumonde was reassuringly simple, just like Mort Canard’s smile and his greeting at the end of the late-night news, “Goodnight Beaumonde. Goodnight.’’

Chapter 1 The Magic Kingdom Connie

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If Donna Reed had not worn pearls before 5 p.m., then Marjorie Overmore would not have ran off with the man with the pony. Marjorie often told her daughter, Connie, that it was gauche to wear pearls before evening. Indeed, the Beaumonde News had even exposed a citizen who had violated that rule of fashion and was banned from the country club’s annual fashion extravaganza. So as Connie and her mother sat in the comfort of their Manor Hill living room watching Donna send Mary and Jeff off to school with a kiss on television, Marjorie suddenly clutched at her own throat in dismay. “Pearls!’’ she said. “And it’s only breakfast.’’ “She always wears them,’’ Connie said. Marjorie only looked at her daughter in dismay. One day a tall, dark man with a pinto pony drove up in a truck, knocked on the door of their house on Manor Hill. Would the lady of the house like photos of her children on the pony? It was a solemn little pony, with a stiff, cropped mane that stood like a fin on its small arched neck. The man lifted Connie into the saddle, tied a red neckerchief and placed cowboy hats on her and her brother, Skip, who stood holding the pony's reins. Then the man disappeared behind a cloth over the tripod. "Watch the birdie!" In a flash it was over and she and Skip returned to the Bendix, "Sky King'' and snacking on Sugar Corn Pops, until Connie heard the clatter of a pan lid, the hiss as water boiled onto the stove in the kitchen.. She called for her mother but there was no answer. Connie ran to the door, saw their mother drop her pink, floral apron on the walk and follow the man with the pony to the truck. He offered her his hand and she stepped up and slid onto the front seat. Just as the door slammed, she saw Connie standing at the door. She looked as if she might say

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something, but then at last, she blew a kiss and gave a short wave as the truck drove out of sight. Connie would always remember how happy her mother looked, as if she were going off in a gilded coach instead of a pickup, as if she was a woman about to have her dreams come true. Arnold Overmore brought his secretary, Fritzi, home for dinner that night as planned. And when Fritzi saw the chaos in the kitchen she went right in and scraped the burnt potatoes out of the pot and salvaged the roast. "Darlings," Fritzi sighed, taking them into her arms. Marjorie Overmore had simply vanished. Blank, unsigned postcards came from the major cities across the country as she traveled east, ending with Miami Beach where she seemed to have slipped off the continent forever. Yet she had never been more alive. So this is eternal life, when reality vanishes and fantasy takes over? Connie lay in bed many nights, taking the floral apron from under her pillow and rubbing her cheek against it. She would never see her mother grow old, be less than the Swimsuit Queen of Hollywoood High, a woman who gorged herself with the decadent sweetness of a forbidden romance, or had it been that way at all? Connie thought again and again of her mother’s face as she drove away. Waving. Blowing kisses. Embarked on a great adventure. And, she, Connie, at eight years old, had stood and watched in silence. Why hadn't she called out? Why hadn't she questioned? Why hadn't she said, "Please, oh, please don't go!" Because even then, in her heart she understood. Fritzi and father married within a year and nine months later Baby Bonnie and Bobby were born. It was as if Mother had simply changed places with someone else.

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Family life continued uninterrupted. Fritzi treated their scraped knees, ironed Connie's dresses and brushed her hair. Sometimes in the middle of the silliest things -- as they sat and watched Loretta Young twirl her skirts on the new color TV, Connie would momentarily burst into tears. A cloud burst, Father called them. And just as quickly it would be over, no one moving from the sofa or the BarcaLounger, yet everyone in the room linked by the brittle silence, punctuated by Connie's sniffling. Her birthdays passed. Ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelth. Fritzi always made her favorite cake -- chocolate with maraschino cherries on top. As the family gathered around and sang, Connie closed her eyes, tightly and for a long, long time. Then she drew a deep breath and cast her wish. Each year it was the same wish. Each year it went unanswered. Frustrated that Connie had failed to recover from losing Marjorie, Arnold Overmore grew more frustrated with his daughter. “Maybe we should send her to public school and get her out of those girls-school uniforms. Get her around boys. She's too solemn," he said to Fritzi in the whispering hours of night. “She meets boys,’’ Fritzi said. “She goes out with her friends. Connie is a late bloomer. Don’t worry.’’ Through the slightly open door, Connie saw into their room, her mother's room, now swept clean of the framed photograph of her mother as the Swimsuit Queen of Hollywood High, the crystal atomizers trimmed with tassels and ribbons, the ivory hairbrush and mirror, the clutter of earrings and bracelets, all the things that had been Marjorie.

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Fritzi placed her hand on Arnold’s chest. “It's best Connie continue where she is familiar. She's lost the greatest love of her life -- her mother. It may be many years before she adjusts to it --if ever." "You're so good to them," Arnold said, circling her with his arms and kissing her fiery hair. "I had thought of putting her in public school along with her brother long ago. Private school was Marjorie's idea." And then he laughed bitterly and Fritzi lay her most amazing mass of red curls against his chest. From the dark corner of the living room Connie sat over the heat vent in her marshmallowing flannel gown, warming herself before going to bed. Light from the next room glinted off the sharp appendages of Marjorie's huge brass clock speared into the wall like a monstrous insect. It was the only thing that remained of her mother – except for the swimsuit photo which Connie kept buried in her dresser drawer. Everything else that had been her mother was gone, vanished like the days of shopping trips into Seattle, just the two of them driving the two-lane, the artery through the farm lands and over the Beaumonde Bay Bridge that linked the infant suburb with its heart. Someday Beaumonde would be bigger and better than Seattle, Connie’s father said. “Someday, you won’t have to leave Beaumonde for anything.’’ Marjorie smiled vaguely. Marjorie took Connie to Seattle’s Frederick & Nelson for lunch in the Paul Bunyan room with its window display of mechanical elves gliding across ice on bacon skates. While Marjorie always had ice tea and the soup du jour, Connie ordered a grilled cheese sandwich with a pickle on the side. Sometimes Connie had her hair fixed at the store's beauty parlor. She sat on a stack of phone books, the cloth wrapped around her neck as Jean, the beautician, clipped and

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fussed through the curls from Connie’s last Tony. Marjorie looked up from Modern Romance and smiled as she sat beneath the roaring intergalactic headgear, wrapped in a pink plastic cape. Connie could see only her mother's small face -- disembodied from the rest. Somehow, it made her feel like crying. But then, her mother emerged and Jean freed Marjorie's dark auburn curls and set them dancing with a brush. "Don't you wish you had your mother's hair?" Jean said. Connie's pale sandy wisps circled her head in an unruly halo. She wished for her mother's emerald eyes instead of her own pale brown. She wished to be anything but this "little bit of dandelion down'' Her father called her, easily blown away into a hundred scattered wishes. Not even the blue sailor dress with the white collar helped. Or the white Mary Jane’s, fitted so carefully by Mr. Simons in the shoe department who kept a card of all the shoes they bought throughout the years and always remarked about how much she had grown. Yet, she loved those shopping days with her mother, strolling past the shimmering fragrance counters with their golden bottles, past the pale chiseled faces of cosmetic sales girls, past the candy counter, warm with the smell of caramel corn and wet umbrellas. She loved, too, the elevators that went up and up and up, a chime that rang through the store -- a clear, solitary note – every time the doors opened and the elevator operator announced, “Second floor, ladies’ foundations and ready-to-wear.” And she loved, too, watching Marjorie slip into pastel suits and matching hats. Like women in the magazines, Marjorie was always wanly smiling. Skip never went on expeditions like this. He would find school clothes lying on his bed -- Red Ball Jets, a black leather jacket, jeans. He said it was fine by him. He knew,

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Connie was certain, that he did not exist to their mother. Eventually, Marjorie ceased to exist for him. Skip said he didn't care that his mother had disappeared, that he hoped he would never see her again. Sometimes Connie felt that way herself. Often she wondered how her father felt. She remembered his face when she told him their mother had gone. "Gone?" he said. "What do you mean?" "She blew kisses. She waved.'' Their father had simply sat down on the porch and cried, Fritzi tugging at his sleeve in sympathy. From that moment on he would seem sad and old to Connie, moving slowly in his brown gabardine suit, his hair thinned to a dark horseshoe above his ears. She worried what would become of her and Skip if he were to vanish, too. Those years came back to Connie in time-skewed vignettes: Nickles clinking into a juke box at Biff's Burgers; frosted Pink Passion mouths lip-singing; subliminal kisses across the chocolate-malt miles; French-fry city. The Overmores lived on Manor Hill, “Where dreams come true,’’ or so the real estate brochure told them. They lived there because Arnold Overmore had a good job selling cigarettes, putting up the ads that showed glamorous women and handsome men sharing a smoke. Together Connie, and her friends Rebecca Corbet and Jenna Pickle wove their lives together through long summer afternoons out in the Pickle cherry orchard, smoking stolen cigarettes that Connie brought along, lying on their backs and exhaling long cool streams and reading "Seventeen" and "Life" and "Look" and all about the Kennedys, John in his

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dark suits and blazers, Jackie in her flaired A-line dresses and pillbox hats, darling John-John in short pants, pretty Caroline in velvet. But Jackie, especially Jackie. Television, brought them to the average American family's dinner hour, a gift -Camelot through the airwaves -- a blend of Ivy League and finishing schools, of poise and power, church and family, of high society and charity. The images of Camelot filtered down into the living rooms of the nation. Jackie in her evening gown and cape. Jackie in India. Jackie with children. Jackie the equestrienne. Jackie. Jackie. Jackie. Eternal mystical, legendary Jackie. Queen of the world on the small green screen. Queen of magic. A living fairy tale. The Kennedys were better than Kraft Theater. But everything on the screen seemed like a medley of fact and fiction, as Connie, Jenna and Rebecca draped themselves over the Overmore daveno watching, eating Ritz crackers with Velveeta (the food modern mothers served) and drinking Coca-Cola. Throughout it all, anchor Mort Canard, emcee of the airwaves, ushered in the joyful and the tragic, "The World in a Box," he called it, directing audience response by his own firm-jaw demeanor and honestly handsome face. Grown-up life was so perfect, they believed. There would always be cookies in the jar and milk in the refrigerator. Whenever the question of Marjorie’s whereabouts came up, Connie told her friends Jenna and Rebecca that she and Skip hadn't seen their mother for a long time. "She's a very important person. She buys stuff for Macy’s. She goes to Paris and Rome. Sometimes she sends dresses: Blue-velvet with white-lace collar from France, a mini skirt with sweater from London.'' That was all her mother was -- all lies and fantasy, the producer of a series of make-believe gifts from faraway, less real than the mothers of television fiction.

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When she asked her father about Marjorie, he just shrugged. "Somewhere back East, I guess." He tried to find her. Called her only surviving relative -- a brother. But no one knew where the man with the pony came from. It was as if he had stepped out of a dream, out of the television. And the photos he took never arrived. Once when Connie was looking at the Ladies Home Journal she saw an advertisement of a woman standing in a Hollywood spotlight wearing a long satin skirt and a bra that shaped her breasts into twin torpedos. “I dreamed I was the center attraction in my Maidenform Bra,’’ the ad proclaimed. “It’s Mom!’’ she shrieked, carrying the magazine to her father and shoving it beneath his nose. “Look!’’ He pushed his glasses up and studied the photograph for a long time. Then he looked up at Connie and across the room at Fritzi who sat still – waiting for his answer. He shook his head slowly. “That’s not her, sweetheart.’’ “It is!’’ she replied. “I’d know her anywhere.’’ “It’s been a long time since you’ve seen you’re mother. You’re forgetting what she looked like.’’ Forgetting. That could not be. Connie studied the photo. The proud tilt of the woman’s chin, the hair so neatly coiffed, the glamorous gown, the eyes vivid and beautiful. She would not forget her mother. “Do you remember your mother?" Connie asked Jenna one day as she and they and Rebecca sat on the porch of Connie’s house.

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Jenna had never known her father and her mother died when she was a baby. All she could remember of her was a vague image floating above her like an angel, golden locks of honey hair falling. It seemed far more dignified to be an orphan than to have a mother who is simply gone. Perhaps Marjorie was out there somewhere in a cloud of glamour on the TV Land of Perfection, in love with a millionaire with a yacht, or working as a model or a flight attendant with amnesia. "Maybe she's trying to contact you from out there. My mama says there is nothing as strong as the bond between mother and child. They'll come back -- somehow," Rebecca said, in her soft sultry southern voice, her dark hair bobbing, eyes hopeful. Connie wondered if it was possible after all these years for Marjorie to awake from her dream, the truck traveling back down the street at Manor Hill, the man letting down the ramp and the pony -- his silver-studded black saddle winking in the sunlight -- backing down the ramp. Connie could not remember the man's face -- even when the police asked her -- but over the years she began to think he looked like John F. Kennedy. This TV handsome man would offer her mother his hand as she alighted from the cab, looking relaxed and sleepy as if waking from a warm dream. She would walk up the path to the house, where she had left her pink apron and pause to find it wasn't there. Her beautiful chin would slowly raise and she would look to the porch where Connie and Skip stood, Connie holding the apron in white-knuckled hands. She would not give it back. Never. And as Marjorie's eyes widened in disbelief, she and Skip would return inside and close the door.

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Connie, Jenna and Rebecca were young when Arnold and Fritzi took them to the Magic Kingdom amusement park next to the brand new mall. Appendages of rides careened like insects against the sky. "The Turbulator," Rebecca shouted as she and Jenna dashed to get a seat. "Go ahead," Her father had said. "Hop on with your friends." Fritzi was smiling, clutching an entire book of tickets for every ride in the park. Connie settled between Rebecca and Jenna, who were squirming with excitement. Laughing. Shouting. The iron bar slammed against their laps. With a roaring jerk, they were off, climbing the track. Higher. Higher. Connie could see the clockwork gears, hear the grind of metal against metal, see the sad dirt-covered lights, so star bright when seen from below, see the great network of beams. Her parents shrank smaller and smaller, swallowed up in a tide pool of color and sound. They were nearing the neon star at the very top. So near, she could almost grasp it. Suddenly, the car swung out into space and plunged down. About her were wild crazy screams and she felt herself rise from the seat as it dropped below her. She gripped the iron rail tightly. In the whirling, star-spangled ocean of night air, she was dying, but her lips would not move. She plunged like an arrow straight into the heart of the Magic Kingdom but could do nothing, say nothing. She would slam against it bloodied and broken but she could not speak of her terror. She could only approach her death with eyes wide open, hoping at the last minute to be jerked up, only to climb for the star once again. "Again! Again!" Rebecca was screaming, or was she crying? And Arnold Overmore doled out more tickets and he and Fritzi nodded and smiled.

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At last, it was over and Connie emerged from the car ashen and tearful. Her father and Fritzi swept them away to Cotton Candy Heaven. Rebecca always had defiant courage. All the voices inside her shouted their presence. She mocked the Beaumonde Girls School headmistress and was suspended for a week for turning all the frogs in science class loose in the women's faculty shower. "Don't do it," Connie begged her. "They'll send you back to Louisiana." But Rebecca was on her way, carrying a plastic container teaming with frogs. And Connie was secretly glad. From the container came the smell of country nights and bullfrog choruses, a time before Beaumonde when blue heron glided and fat fish cruised the deep.

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