Chapter 52

 

Bombshells

 

 

Ludwig Ferdinand Loderhauser, descended from Alpine ancestry, was a lowly apprentice to a stingy engraver when he got caught up in (and washed out by) the failed Revolution of 1848.  Escaping from Salzburg to America, he settled in The City and became a well-to-do lithographer, pledging that “Wir werden Currier und Ives in den Boden stampfen”: “We will stamp Currier and Ives into the ground.”

 

His sons followed him in this impressive trade; their sons went into its embossed offshoots.  The prosperous family shed its residue of Kultur during World War I but defiantly retained Teutonic personal names.  Johann Gerhard Loderhauser, manufacturer of Linotype machine parts, dubbed his firstborn child after himself though scarcely a year had passed since the Armistice.  J.G. Jr. would nullify Sr.’s bravado by winning the title “Juice Jerker” as an Army Air Force electrician during World War II.  In peacetime he held onto that designation by [a] working to develop implantable cardiac pacemakers while [b] preparing and imbibing countless vodka screwdrivers.

 

Before the latter became innumerable, “Juiced” wooed a Coronet magazine art assistant who’d been christened Hortense O’Neill but generally went by “Tency.”  She had a knack for great charm, flipping this on and off like a searchlight, plus persistent acumen for any game dealt at a card table.  Tency was willing to gamble that getting Juiced would help her sweep the board; Juiced hoped Tency would lend steadiness and regularity to his hectic heartbeat.  People who knew them predicted their marriage wouldn’t last a month.  But when they honeymooned in Vegas at the Sahara hotel-casino, Tency made a killing playing blackjack and Juiced invested much of the proceeds in an Abbott Laboratories nest egg; so nertz to the dubious.

 

Since both newlyweds excelled at their chosen professions, employers condoned sporadic lapses from the straight-and-narrow for quite a few years.  Juiced and Tency were able to buy a fine suburban home on Bedeguar Way in Vanderlund and engage a respectable housekeeper/nursemaid named Alice Schultz, who may have looked like Ann B. Davis but comported herself like Fräulein Rottenmeier in Heidi.

 

This had an ineradicable impact on little Francine Loderhauser, born the same day in 1955 that Theda Bara died; which Alice Schultz took to be an ill-starred omen.  Fran was not a vamp but eager to lavish affection on everyone around her and have it returned in kind.  Her father, though, habitually got lost in thought about wiring diagrams or chess conundrums or (as time went on) anxious schemes to defer the next cocktail.  If Fran tugged at his hand and went “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!,” Juiced would quietly shush her and say “Daddy’s thinking.”  (Too often about drinking.)  Her mother frequently sketched Fran’s sweet winsome likeness for use in illustrations and advertisements; but Tency’s list of maternal catchphrases led off with “Hold still!” and “Run along now.”  And Alice Schultz forever held an Ideal Child over Fran’s head, remonstrating about not measuring up to the Ideal’s benchmark.  “A good girl wouldn’t have done this.”  “A good girl would know better than to ask that.”  “A good girl would say her prayers, repent her sins, and seek forgiveness in her shameful heart.”

 

Little Fran tried her level best.  Praying as dictated, she’d slip in a beseechment for a living person (pets being prohibited) to whom she could give her heart—who would love her back unreservedly.  Fortune seemed to smile when Fran turned five and a new baby brother was brought to Bedeguar Way—though Tency’d been griping for months that they didn’t need another nuisance in the house, and Alice Schultz let it be known that a significant increase in her wages would be necessary.

 

Of the grownups, Juiced alone was pleased (and not just because he now had a son).  Salvation for his daughter might finally be feasible.  From the day of her birth, needs to be taken care of had been stamped all over Francie (and not just because she was a girl).  As the past five years went by, Juiced felt less and less sure he was fit for this task.  But even in infancy it was easy to see that Avery Loderhauser would soon stand unaided on his own two feet (and not just because he was a boy).  The question then was how to preserve the caretaking status quo till Avery could start to look after Fran—not just in childhood, but always.  Do his brotherly duty just as J.G. Sr.’d done for poor Aunt Leopoldine—saving her from a recommended lobotomy, though not from years of electroshock treatment.

 

Fran’s brain jumped for joy whenever she was allowed to play with her beloved Baby Bumblebee.  Fran was very fond of bees, responding obediently to Romper Room’s Do Bee and Don’t Bee, reciting stanzas of “How Doth the Little Busy Bee” and so on.  (She got stung more than once by the actual insect, and told by Alice Schultz that a good girl would have better sense than to try fooling around with bugs.)  “Lookit Bumblebee, he knows me!” she’d buzzed when baby Avery, beholding her for the first time, gave her a half-hooded once-over.  Many more of these would sting Francie throughout their siblinghood.  No googoo gaga between us, know what I mean?

 

And yet—again, right from the start—he tolerated her embraces and caresses and dressing him up as a bumblebee; then as a bum (Avery preferred the more adventurous term “hobo”) when he grew old enough to go out trick-or-treating on his own two feet.  All through the Sixties Fran would hover closest over Avery’s home life, eclipsing Alice Schultz whose wage rate began to lag behind the cost of living.  Tency was seldom on the premises; she’d reached the apex of her career as art director of the Geyer & Gimbel ad agency, detouring by Arlington Park to test various systems (few of them profitable) for betting on ponies.  Juiced taught Avery the rudiments of electrical engineering and how to play chess, but theirs was a taciturn relationship.  Like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart, they kept their mouths shut if they had nothing to say while at the chessboard or working on a Remco science kit.

 

Sadly, Juiced did open his mouth to pour in more Smirnoff, tempered with an ever-decreasing proportion of orange juice.  On his fiftieth birthday he drove the family Eldorado through the back wall of their garage; coverup rumors had to be spread that Avery’d blasted out the wall with a Science Fair project gone haywire.  Avery manfully took the rap, but from then on most often traveled by skateboard (on which he was a daredevil).  He also quit playing chess with his father, and set aside other games of skill or chance for six months out of every year.  Those months belonged to baseball season.

 

His talents with bat and glove were discovered by the big-kid ballplayers of the neighborhood: Porkchop Fairbanks (a two-hundred-pound seventh-grader with a solid .500 average at the plate) and Sockless Joe Joplin (who started dipping Skoal before his first day of junior high school).  They shared their find with Coach Royce Erle (Diesel and Skully’s dad) who honed Avery’s prowess to a fine degree in the Vanderlund Little League.  Coach Royce was a devout disciple of Hit ‘Em Where They Ain’t, which Avery could do with vigorous accuracy by the age of ten.  Before long he was outslugging Sockless Joe and even the almighty Porkchop; by the time he moved up to the Babe Ruth League (which local Boys-in-Blue fans renamed “TEC” for Tinker-Evers-and-Chance) at age thirteen, Avery’d become known as the Bedeguar Way Bomber.

 

Every scratch and scrape he got on the diamond or in the outfield horrified Fran.  She begged him not to endanger his handsome breakable self when he ought to be a sheltered chess champ, the next Bobby Fischer.  But “Don’t fuss at me, Francie,” Avery would tell her—with the unspoken stinger Haven’t you got enough to fuss about?

 

Yes: Fran had.  Her father kept tripping over the twelve steps of AA.  Her mother’d run out of luck at Geyer & Gimbel and begun to descend out of commercial art into text-only secretarial jobs.  The Abbott Labs nest egg had to be sucked dry so mortgage installments and insurance premiums could be paid, along with pari-mutuel clerks at Arlington Park.  And Alice Schultz’d departed (without saying goodbye) when her paychecks started to bounce; so Fran was now doing much of the housework.

 

She aspired to stage stardom and audience adoration, but had only her lovely looks to bank on; she couldn’t really sing, dance, or act that well.  Worse yet, Fran got repeatedly discarded by girlfriends and boyfriends for being “too needy,” “too clingy.”  Over and over she’d sob But WHY? into the phone at an ex-bosom chum or sweetheart.  Then Avery (sometimes after being awakened from a sound sleep) would have to hold and console her so she could blub and bawl on his shoulder.  “Okay, Francie... okay now... take it easy...”

 

Look after your sister.  That’s your job, not just now but always.  You hear me?

 

A couple of times Avery confronted predatory upperclassmen who’d exploited Fran’s guileless gullibility to a nasty end.  Both of these scoundrels derided him as a stubby bowlegged VW runt, till they received power jabs—one to the jaw, the other to the gut—from barely-teen fists with welterweight vindictiveness.  Pick on some asshole your own size, Mister Backdoor Casanova.

 

Alas!  Pugilism would be of no avail when Fran, soon to graduate from VTHS, was told her college fund had long since been tapped out.  “You’re on your own, kid—we’ve got to cut you loose” didn’t quite get said aloud; yet those words hung heavily over Fran’s eighteenth birthday.  Thus a white knight, deus ex machina or benevolent sugardaddy were among her semicoherent wishes as she blew out the candles atop the raspberry bundt cake she’d had to bake for herself.

 

Enter an honest-to-God rich uncle.

 

Linus Loderhauser (foremost among those who’d cast doubt on big brother J.G. Jr.’s marriage lasting a whole month) had been largely absent from family affairs for the last two decades.  There was mutual abhorrence between “Lecherous Linus” and “High Stakes Hortense,” not pacified by the waxing and waning of their respective fortunes.  Linus had built up a burglar alarm business into Leading House Security Services Inc., innovators in electronic surveillance.  There were unconfirmed reports that Hugh Hefner’d hired Linus to fortify the Playboy Building, if not the Mansion; certainly Linus was a Club keyholder and pursued a swinging bachelor lifestyle as prescribed by Hef’s Philosophy.

 

But hedonistic womanizing tends to curdle after you hit the half-century mark, even when you’re blessed with as much dough as Linus the Libertine.  No way would he consider “settling down” anytime soon; still, some space might be cleared for a dab of domesticity.  When the shamefaced Juiced called to ask for a desperately-needed loan that no bank would approve, Linus invited himself to dine at Bedeguar Way.  Tency abruptly concocted a previous commitment elsewhere, but her children met and broke bread with their uncle for the first time.

 

Francie he ogled, more-or-less avuncularly; Avery merited more-in-depth observation.  Linus bade them both visit Leading House’s downtown HQ one Saturday, treating them to lunch at Twin Anchors where his niece hoped to spot regular customer Frank Sinatra and hear him order “Ribs—keep ‘em coming.”

 

“Too early for the Chairman, even if he’s in town,” she was told.

 

“Oh but he isn’t retired any more Uncle Linus haven’t you heard? he just sang the other day at the White House and they’re saying he’ll be in a brand-new TV special this fall and after all the man’s got to eat so why not here ‘n’ now with us?”

 

“Finish your ribs, Fran.”  This from her little brother, with a half-hooded glare that reduced the babbler to stillness—except for dutiful gnawing on baby backs.

 

A week later Linus told Avery to drop by his high-rise bachelor pad.  “Gonna speak plain to you, Bom” (an abbreviation of Bomber that Francie liked because it recalled Bumblebee and Halloween Bum).  “Your old man can’t manage his affairs any longer.  I wouldn’t trust your old lady not to gamble away her last dime.  Your sister’s a nice gal, a real charmer, but a bad risk.  You’re the only one I’d invest in.  You and me could try to take care of the others, maybe help them help themselves.  What do you think?”

 

“Could be,” said thirteen-year-old Avery.

 

So Linus made arrangements with his banker Mr. Bramah, his attorney Mr. Sargent, and his accountant Mr. Soref to securify the J.G. Loderhauser Jr. household.  All Bedeguar Way bills were forwarded to this triumvirate for processing; any that involved bookies were automatically rejected, no matter how cunningly they’d been camouflaged.  Francie was staked to a semester at Oakton Community College, which might lack a permanent campus but gave no failing grades.  Fran thanked her uncle profusely, yet shed tears over not going away to college where she’d be sure to enjoy a worthwhile sorority life.  Come January she approximated this by dropping out of Oakton, seeking a waitress job in the middle of a recession, and moving into a new coworker’s apartment for the entirety of their friendship before returning to Bedeguar with a wide fixed jobless smile.  (This sequence would be recycled several times over the next four years; Fran’s old bedroom was always kept ready for her when she wasn’t currently occupying it.)

 

Avery went to work at Leading House as soon as he turned fourteen, learning about electronic surveillance from the ground up.  By sixteen he’d saved enough to buy a Mustang Boss and start augmenting its sound system.  Uncle Linus always allowed him time off for baseball and a few extracurricular activities—the Audio-Visual Squad, the Stage Crew—since Avery was more dependable than any other part-timer on the L.H. workforce, and some of its full-timers as well.  The triumvirate opened a trust fund for his higher education, with the understanding that Avery would continue earning his way as much as possible.  Tency tried more than once to wheedle some venture capital from him, wailing But I’m your MOTHER when Avery’d refer her to Mr. Bramah (who treated her requests for “a teensy-tiny advance” as Mr. Mooney had with Lucy Carmichael’s).

 

“Chicks,” Linus sagely remarked.

 

About Tency; about Francie; about Avery’s own love interests, such as they were.

 

The first of these edged into Ms. Grimes’s 8‑Y Science class in September 1973 with an aura of awkward hauteur.  She was a tall girl, well-dressed, precociously shaped; the sight of whom validated beyond any doubt that Avery had an active adolescent reproductive system.

 

Gabrielle Sundheit, inclined since nursery school to throw her weight around and belittle less attractive classmates, had gotten cut down to size at Dopkins Elementary by dry-as-dust Lesley Ogilvie.  But the lesson hadn’t stuck: at VW on 7‑Z she’d had run-ins with Mercedes Palmieri, Cindy Ryder, and (most painfully) Penny Stone.  Transferred to the Y Team where she knew hardly anyone, Gabey felt angst-ridden self-pity mingled with grandiose conceit.  Such vanity wasn’t unwarranted: she had a beautiful face and form, using the latter to win medals at swim meets, using form and face to do a lot of professional catalog modeling.  This included bathing suits far removed from the plain maillots Gabey wore at competitions, where her wavy brunette coiffure was tucked inside a swim cap and not AquaNetted into visible rigidity.  Many boys in 8‑Y Science paid visibly rigid attention to bikini-wearers in the Sears Junior Bazaar, and focused more clinically on Gabrielle (even fully clothed) than on Ms. Grimes’s lectures.

 

For her part, Gabey spent weeks filling a notebook with woe-is-me sentiments and ugly caricatures of Penny Stone, till Old Sourpuss (aka Ms. Grimes) partnered her with ace pupil Avery.  Though done to boost her sagging GPA, Gabey thought this tantamount to being compelled to kiss a toad.  Avery Loderhauser only came up to her collarbone, for pity’s sake, when they stood side by side!  “Yeah, but you give me an extra six/eight/twelve inches” some boys might’ve leered.  Avery did not; nor was he ashamed of being short; nor would he have let Gabey flirt her way (which she wouldn’t deign to try) into making him do all their work.  He didn’t even act privileged to be in Gabey’s spectacular proximity!  Bomber just made it bluntly clear that he’d help her if she’d put in an effort; there’d be no carrying or coddling, so take it or leave it.

 

“You’re mean!” went Gabrielle.

 

“Your choice,” went Avery.

 

Grudging graceless compliance till Gabey had to bring a literal stiff neck to one of their study sessions.  She admitted to having lifted her chin too high too often while practicing the breaststroke—and choked on this inopportune word, which further hurt her neck.  No crude reaction by word or glance from Avery as he stepped behind Gabey, laid unasked-for hands on her physical person, pressed rugged fingers through her polyester double-knit blouse, and began to knead her trapezius muscles.

 

“What do you think you’re DOING??” Gabrielle started to explode—

 

—but only got as far as a Sensuous Woman “Wuhhhhhhh...”

 

Result: one body part relieved of stiffness.  Though that didn’t apply to the rest of her physical person.  Or to Avery’s either.

 

She: “...where’d you learn to do that?”

 

He: “Playin’ ball.” [cough]  “Let’s get started.  ‘Changes in the state of matter’—”

 

He droned on about condensation, evaporation, vaporization.  She stayed fixated on how an unkissed toad could transform into such a potent masseur.

 

Question: how could she get Bomber to perform more rubdowns elsewhere on her physical person, without explicitly throwing it at him?  Answer: do enough independent research to feign believable cricks and twinges (don’t say “kinks” or “cramps”) in her limbs and along her spine.

 

Avery remained outwardly stoic when called upon for amateur osteopathy, never sneaking in a squeeze of anything unmuscular.  Yet he wouldn’t ease off till Gabey called a halt to hands-on contact; and during his ministrations she sometimes had to bite her tongue to keep it from making embarrassing noises.  Eventually it loosened to the point where she could confide another discomfort—this one wholly authentic.

 

Gabrielle’d always loved playing dress-up, but had to be pushed into doing it in front of catalog cameras.  The pushing was done by her vicariously-living mother, who fantasized about strutting down fashion show runways.  For Gabey any glamour’d long since worn off modeling, with its hot lights and boring delays and brusque photographers.  The creepiest one had begun “persuading” her to pose in garments she really truly didn’t want the general public to take a gander at.

 

“Underwear?” guessed Avery.

 

“None of your business!  I know what you guys ‘get up to’ with those pictures!  As if bikinis aren’t bad enough—and besides, it’s called ‘lingerie.’”

 

Anyway: this creep of a photographer had broadly hinted that all modeling offers would cease if Gabey didn’t agree to wear the... unmentionables.  Which frightened her vicarious-dependent mother into urging unconditional surrender.

 

“What’s your dad think?”

 

Flatly: “Forget him.  He doesn’t care.”

 

“You’re what, fourteen?  Call the cops on the creep.”

 

“My mom’d kill me!  And he’d just explain it away or maybe even deny it, his word against mine!  How could I prove it, all by myself?”

 

“We could wire you.”

 

“Hunh?”

 

“I can borrow a microcassette recorder from my uncle.  Rig it like this—”

 

Flipping to a blank page in his notebook, Bomber quickly drew Gabey from head to waist with modestly-bared midriff, on which the miniature recorder was strapped.  A very topical proposal, given how current news was dominated by Watergate and the White House tapes.  Gabrielle’s electric blue eyes (her loveliest feature) got supercharged as they stared at the sketch.

 

“...is this supposed to be me?”

 

“Who else?  You start to record by pressing this—”

 

“...can I keep it?”

 

“What, the diagram?  Sure.  Now, to get the clearest recording—”

 

“Hunh?  Oh—never mind.  I’ll just tell my mom and Old Creepo NO, once and for all.  Let him cut me off—I don’t care about catalogs anymore...  You draw pretty good.”  (Gabey herself could wield a mean pen, as shown in those libelous renditions of Penny Stone; she hoped to become a fashion designer after hanging up her swim cap.)  “Would you... draw some more of me?”

 

Sardonic pause.  “Dressed how?”

 

“With everything on!  Gahd, Avery!  Don’t you start getting fresh!”

 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he lied.

 

And did make more sketches of her, commissioned by Gabey in a variety of pretty outfits.  Each sketch was done rapidly, in ink, without penciled drafting or any attempt to butter her up.  But she saved them all, taping some inside her locker, telling inquirers they were contributed by “a fan.”  Meanwhile her mother reluctantly called Old Creepo’s bluff—and Gabey’s modeling career proceeded unimpeded, in nothing more revealing than decent teen swimwear.

 

Come May she casually mentioned five guys (two of them ninth-graders) who’d asked her to the Cicada Dance; adding that she hadn’t yet accepted any of them.

 

“Good.  You need to study for the final exam—”

 

“Hey!  Aren’t you even gonna think about asking me?”

 

“Would it be worth it?”

 

“I think so!”

 

“Okay, you twisted my arm.”

 

“OH!!”  As she got up to stomp away, he seized her wrist (and felt her pulse leap and pound).  Sliding his hand down to clasp hers, Bomber stood too: somewhat taller than the previous autumn, but still at Gabey’s shoulder-level.

 

“This wouldn’t bother you?”

 

Lifting her chin, she looked down her nose at him with those lovely electric blue eyes at their brightest.  “Why should it?”

 

“It wouldn’t bother your mother?”

 

“I don’t care” (that Mrs. Sundheit had expostulated at length about the difference in their heights).  “She may want me to date basketball players, but I’m... a baseball fan.”  Who slowly leaned far enough forward and downward to present her lips for a seal-the-deal kiss that completed the toad’s apotheosis.

 

Avery then zoomed to the head of the Cicada Dance class, thanks to Uncle Linus bankrolling a limo, a tux, and a corsage the precise shade to complement Gabrielle’s gown.  All of which earned Bomber more kisses and an after-dance chance to do the breaststroke through the bodice of her gown, just below the quivering corsage.

 

Having consummated their second-base relationship, Gabey “went with” Avery for almost a full year.  But not exclusively: she had no intention of being taken for granted while he spent the summer immersed in baseball and the autumn busy with his new job at Leading House.  Every so often Gabey would date other guys their freshman year at VW, including basketball players like Tab Tchorz and Creaky Locke.  She was increasingly peeved by Avery’s lack of overt jealousy, since her feelings got ruffled anytime another girl showed interest in him.  How could he treat her so lightly?  Was he just toying with her, because she let him do pectoral massages through layers of fabric?

 

Their breakup occurred on a March evening in the Sundheit living room, as they watched an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man that introduced a Bionic Woman (who would get killed off, temporarily, a week later).  While Steve and Jaime dallied onscreen, Avery diagrammed a robotic Gabrielle specially adapted to function underwater.  This caused the real-life Gabey to blow her spout:

 

“Oh you’d like that, wouldn’t you?  A Rosey-the-Robot that looks like me and is built like me that you could program to do whatever you want—even at the bottom of a pool!!  Well, you can just get the hell outta here and forget about ever coming back—and if you think for one minute you’ll be giving this or this or this” [costume jewelry he’d created for her on gift-type occasions] “to some other girl or Rosey-the-Robot, you can just forget that too ‘cause I am gonna keep ‘em all!!  Now leave!!”

 

Hands-on thrusting him off of the couch, out of the room, out of the house, down off the porch, and onto the sidewalk to hear her front door get slammed.

 

(Chicks...)

 

Gabrielle went to the 1975 Cicada Dance with Creaky Locke, who didn’t wear a tux or rent a limo, and gave her an absolutely-wrong-color corsage—which explained (to Gabey) why she wasn’t crowned Queen or put on the Court.

 

For Avery, it was back to baseball for another summer season.  His girlwatching went on with much less girltouching till a sultry August afternoon when no game or practice was scheduled.  He spent it tending to the Loderhauser lawns on Bedeguar Way, and was shutting off the mower when he found a luscious little dark-haired garden-sprite perched right at his elbow.  The top of her unruly head wasn’t much higher than his collarbone as she stood very close, but not so close as to hide caramel-colored curves from plentiful view above a skimpy haltertop and below scanty short-shorts.

 

“¡Hola!  I’m Una Lobita!  Just thought you’d like to know that my best friend—across the street there, see her? wave at him, Ceese!—is too bashful to say she’s fallen in love with you—”

 

“Beeeea-neeeey!” from across Bedeguar.

 

“—but now that I’ve checked you out way up close like this, I might just keep you all for myself!  How ‘bout that?”

 

Rubbing retroussé nostrils on his sweaty upper arm, she reached behind Avery without the least hesitation and cheekily pinched his butt.

 

Her real name was Bianca Luisa Giovanna Panucci; her bloodline was undiluted Bolognese.  Yet thanks to tanning so delectably brown, she liked to impersonate a Latina or lightskinned black girl (“Call me Coffee O’Lay!”) when her complexion made this plausible.  She lived in the Petty Elementary attendance area but had gone to Archbishop Houlihan till now, as had her best friend Mamie Gatto.  Both were transferring to VTHS next month—Bianca because her father “Peanuts” Panucci admired its high standards; Mamie because she’d thrown Cecil-the-Seasick-Sea-Serpent tantrums at being separated from “Beany” till her folks gave up and agreed to the shift.  They’d watched Bomber play baseball (Beany and Ceese that is, not Mr. and Mrs. Gatto) but he sure was a whole lot cuter way up close, and definitely smelled more exhilarating—as testified by Beany’s pigletlike snort-snort-snorts in his armpit.

 

“Now look here—” he spluttered.

 

“Glad to!  Now you look here”—clapping a tiny hand with a vise-like grip on the nape of his neck, then dragging his head down toward an amazing amount of cleavage for such a petite girl.

 

“Beeeea-neeeey!  Quit it!” from across the street.

 

“Just showing him my pendant!”—a gold crucifix whose attached Redeemer seemed to wear a rictus of ecstasy at His succulent cushioning.

 

That September Bianca Panucci won immediate admittance to the party-hearty pack at VTHS, joining fellow sophs Ginger Snowbedeck and Roxie Jenkins and the DoubleCzech Twins, Rula Hradek and Lola Svoboda.  Back at Houlihan she’d been a let-it-all-hang-out heroine to younger girls like Josie Nygren and Sheila Quirk; here she became one of Carly Thibert’s idols and Tess Disseldorf’s attitude-exemplars.

 

Beany played a sousaphone almost as large as herself (“‘cause it makes me look cooo-wull!”) in the marching band, for whose fundraising she offered to organize a strip-poker tournament.  Irked by academic requirements, she became the distaff counterpart to Jeremy Tolhurst by enticing smart boys to be rickshaw-wallahs and convey her through the muddle of sophomore syllabi.  Each wallah got rewarded with a heartfelt hug and kiss, no matter how homely or nerdish he might be.  (“They need smooches too!  They need smooches more!”)  Beany invaded the Auxiliary Gym when it was full of big senior guys and commandeered the weight machine to prove how much iron she could pump without distorting her supergirlish contours.  Then she’d challenge the burliest and beefiest seniors to armwrestle and sometimes beat them, not always because “Uhhhh, I let her win.”  Hence her moniker of Mighty Mouse.

 

But having freakish physical strength like Pippi Longstocking wasn’t all that saved Bianca from being swept off her feet (so to speak) by brutes and thugs.  Her father “Peanuts” cast an ominously long shadow; no Charlie Brown was he, even if his only daughter ran a good deal wilder than he would’ve liked.  Some people whispered that among Mr. Panucci’s numerous directorships was a high-ranking role in the South Side Outfit, and his joke about being “just a legitimate businessman” did nothing to quell this speculation.  At any rate, even a lout like Cherry Picker Tchorz was careful not to tamper too uncouthly with Beany’s tenderness.

 

She was not universally popular among girls.  Cordial dislike simmered between Bianca and Theresa Challis, in spite of (or perhaps due to) their similar physiques and personalities; each dismissed the other as a “show-off.”  Some girls thought Beany was too loud, too brash, too presumptuous.  Gabey Sundheit loathed her to the marrow for “resurrecting” Avery when he should’ve perished of grief (or at least withdrawn to a monastic outfield existence) after being jettisoned.  “Just let him try to turn her into a robot!  I bet she’d run amuck all over him—and serve him right, too!”

 

There are multiple definitions of the verb to serve.  Bianca Panucci did most of them right when it came to Avery Loderhauser—for her wants and needs as well as his.  “You’re my favorite playtoy!” she told him time and again their sophomore year, while snuggling into his armpit or gnawing on his earlobe or clutching a fistful of hinderloin.

 

She was, in short, an altogether different variation on the gorgeous-female theme.  While Gabrielle refused to model lingerie and preferred to leave it unmentionable, Beany openly collected brassieres (including exotic ones from her Nonna in Bologna) and put them on proud display (not just hanging from the washline).  Gabey would permit a specific amount of intimate fondling, buffered by at least one tier of cloth; Beany’d demand that Bomber “shake hands with my babalooeys,” and reach right inside her unbuttoned top to do so.  Gabey was forever on some diet or other, saying “Got to watch my figure” as a prompt for Avery to respond “Like the rest of us” so Gabey could tut-tut disapprovingly as she noshed.  Beany would charge into Deeple’s or Paulsie’s and order “your thickest famiglia-size pie, with every topping on the menu!”—then turn to Avery and ask “What’ll you have?”  She could eat her weight in fatty fast food and not gain an ounce or trigger a pimple—or spend a cent, being a firm believer in the American Graffiti adage “Girls don’t pay, guys pay.”  Cash on the barrelhead for Beany’s pizza and burgers and candy and ice cream and pop drinks and popcorn and movie tickets and concert tickets and dance tickets and sports tickets and so forth.  (The coins of her realm were hugs, kisses, bra displays and babalooey handshakes.)

 

Favorite playtoy though he might be, the frugal Avery couldn’t afford to subsidize Bianca’s appetite or social life on a fulltime basis.  Which didn’t inconvenience her, since so many other guys at VTHS were raring to “serve” Beany and have as widespread a fling with her as would fall short of pissing off Peanuts.  “But I hate to think of you going without lovin’ for two whole weeks!” she moaned after she and Bomber scheduled a distant-future evening out.

 

“I can manage.”

 

“Not without my help!  We’ll line up some cheap dates for you till then.”

 

“Gee thanks.”

 

“Nice girls, just not expensive ones.  You know Ceese’d pay her own way—and yours too, if you’d let her.”

 

“No thanks.”  (Mamie Gatto was almost as tall as Gabrielle but had no trace of electric-blue allure; she gawped at Avery with damply-yearning cow-eyes.)

 

“Oh give her a chance!  You won’t find a more wonderful personality!... okay fine, forget I mentioned it.  Well then, how ‘bout Pebbles Preston?  She’s this freshman I knew at Houlihan who only looks like she needs a blood transfusion but is actually a real great athlete which ought to make her just your type—and hey! we could start calling you Bamm-Bamm!”

 

“I can manage.  Let’s just agree you spoiled me for all other women.”

 

“Awwww, what a sweet thing to say!  C’mere, you!”  (Big hug, big kiss, big close-up bra-display as she transplanted his face down from her lips into her bosom.)

 

Avery was taking Wood Shop that year, and built a tabletop armoire for stashing trinkets and accessories as Beany’s Christmas present.  (Her gift to him was a certosino fruitcake.)  That winter he turned his hand to woodcarving, and whittled a fanciful little head-and-shoulders bust of Bianca (leaving most of her not-so-little bustline to the lusty imagination) as his BMV token.  This made her shriek so earsplittingly some people in the school corridor thought it was the signal for a Friday-the-13th fire drill.  (Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday that year.)  Not only did Beany instantly invite Bomber to the Turnabout, but she insisted he sculpt a life-size statue of her in anatomically-correct detail.  Think of it!  Picture it!  Mighty Mouse in all her glory: Here She Shows Her T&A!

 

Over the next eight days, while other soph girls were negotiating through their first “Meat Market Week” and finalizing dance partner selections, Bianca obsessed about posing el starko for her favorite playtoy and which of several positions to do it in and just how soon would they be getting underway anyway hunhhhh, Bamm-Bamm??

 

She made a pretty expansive start by going to the Turnabout in a gown that decked the halls with décolletage—so much so that a chaperone made her drape it with a pink valentine bandanna.  (Beany kept shrugging this off onto the gym floor for Bomber to retrieve from beneath boogeying feet.)

 

Gabrielle Sundheit came to the dance with Crazy Legs Heinke, a popular junior football player; Mamie Gatto was there too after being BMV’d by Ritchie Lampwich, a senior who’d worn out his welcome with upperclasswomen.  Both girls kept steering their escorts over near Beany and Bomber—Gabey to flaunt her flourishment, Ceese out of sheer envy.  Both heard Bianca babble about getting sculpted in the full-scale nude as if this were a done deal already set in motion.  Neither heard Avery say much of anything; but that was typical for him.

 

Less characteristic was his sense of jeopardy, and not the sort hosted by Art Fleming.  He’d felt it before—the time he’d gone to the Panucci house (whose Desert Moderne design intrigued him) to collect Beany for feedbag-strapping at the nearest Paulsie’s.  Her stepmother Eunice’d let Avery in and sent him up the stainless steel staircase to Beany’s bedroom, saying “Take my advice and leave the door open.”  (She and Bianca were not on the chummiest of terms.)  Avery’d studied the steel handrail and balusters as he climbed the steel treads and risers, reminded somehow of Detective Arbogast ascending the Bates stairway in Psycho.  Ridiculous yet unmistakable as he’d reached the bedroom and knocked on its shut-tight door.

 

“Whoooo issss ihhhht?”

 

“Who do you think?”

 

“Come in, luvvvver!”

 

“You come out, if you want to be fed.”

 

The door had opened far enough for Bianca’s toweled head and one bare shoulder to coyly emerge.  “Just came out of the shower!  You c’mon in and help me decide what to wear.”

 

“We’re eating pizza.  Put on something that’ll wipe clean.”

 

More of Beany’s bareness had protruded from behind the door.  “But I’m already clean—look, see? squeaky-clean—Daddy’s clean little girl!”

 

Out of whose lunge-range Avery’d taken a big leap backward, lest he get hauled into flagrante delicto at a time when Peanuts Panucci (whom he hadn’t yet met in person) might very well be in the house.  Possibly accompanied by bodyguard-goons who could pulverize Avery into scented talcum for Daddy’s clean little girl to powder herself with.

 

“I’ll wait downstairs.  You got ten minutes to finish getting ready.”

 

“Aw, you’re no fun!”

 

“I’m no fool,” he’d retorted while descending the steel steps more intactly than Detective Arbogast had after encountering “Mrs. Bates.”

 

Jeopardy: the game where we give the players the answers and they have to come up with the questions.  Answer #1: Avery Loderhauser was no fool.  Answer #2: he was also sixteen-year-old flesh-and-blood with a self-evident Y‑chromosome.  Answer #3: he was also manifestly aware of this whenever he saw or thought about Bianca Panucci.

 

Question #1: how long could he hold out against one of the hottest girls in the sophomore class (if not at school if not in all of Vanderlund) when she was determined to lay her sizzling self on a plate for him to feast upon artistically?  Question #2: couldn’t a statue be speedily sculpted in basswood segments, and fitted together like a mannequin?  Question #3 (and Cautionary #1): wasn’t it a fact that this wannabe model wouldn’t turn sixteen for another three months and was therefore inescapably underage?

 

Answer #4: damn tootin’ straight.

 

(And the only daughter of a man who might have pulverizers on his payroll.)

 

The resolution was obvious—gain and maintain a firm upper hand.  Beany wasn’t the only one with a vise-like grip in this relationship.  And the time to start gaining and gripping with it was as they left the Turnabout.  So out in the parking lot Avery barked “I don’t want to hear any more about statues, you get me?”

 

“Course I got you, and that’s just it.  I only mentioned the something ‘cause ol’ Pruny Flamingo” [Gabrielle Sundheit] “was eavesdropping on us all night long.  You know she says she’d only have to crook her finger ‘n’ you’d go crawling back to her!”

 

“Well,” said Avery, who hadn’t known this but could easily believe it.  “Even so, enough about the statue.”

 

“Not another word.  I’ll just admire your magnificent car that we’ll be making out in way past curfew!”  (The Mustang Boss was newly-acquired then, its sound system not yet maximized.)  “Can’t wait till I get my license!  Hey, what does this do?”  She poked a random button on the dashboard, got the back of hand smacked, squealed “Ooooh Master Bamm-Bamm!” and tried to slide over the center console onto his lap.

 

“Beany...”

 

Into his ear: “(I hadda show her that you love me best and’ll never go back to her.  ‘Cause I got my brand on you)”—reinforcing this claim with freshly-applied hickeys.

 

So all was well and good (if a bit sore to the touch) till Monday morning when Avery picked up Bianca for the drive to VTHS and her Question #1 was “Okay, when can I start posing for you?  Lookit!  I lay under the sunlamp all Sunday and all over too, so you won’t find a single tan line!  C’mon, you can draw me with most of my clothes on when we get to school, just to prove to everybody that you’re serious about my body!”

 

Answer #5 and Cautionary #2: that firm upper hand just lost its grip.

 

Leaving Bomber on pins and needles if not self-pegged tenterhooks, to withstand getting uprooted and blown away by a tiny jailbait tornado as he made some preliminary mostly-clothed sketches.

 

But a windbreaker came later that week, heralded by a phone call from Uncle Luke summoning Avery downtown to Leading House HQ.  There, with Watch your step written all over his libertine visage, Linus ushered him into the board room for a one-on-one parley with a squat bald man seated alone at the conference table.

 

“Sorry I didn’t get a chance to see you before,” said this person without preamble.

 

“...before, sir?”

 

“When you’d drop by my home.  I’m Pasquale Panucci.”  A large splayed hand adorned with a gold pinky ring waved Avery to the chair opposite.

 

Bomber hadn’t known (but again wasn’t surprised to learn) that Peanuts was a director of LHSS Inc.  More startling was how unlike Bianca he looked, other than depth of chest and lack of height.  Beany had skin like butterscotch (even in February, without using a sunlamp) and abundant dark tresses that resisted conquest by comb or brush.  Her father’s scalp was sallow, seamed, and entirely hairless.

 

“I understand you find it impressive.”

 

“Sir?”

 

“My home.  That you’ve dropped by.”

 

“Oh—yessir.  Desert Moderne architecture.”

 

Mr. Panucci shrugged, which struck a chord; Avery almost glanced at the board room carpet to find a fallen pink bandanna.

 

“I built it for my wife.  Men sometimes do things to please a woman, things we may regret later.  My daughter thinks a lot of you.”

 

“...mutual, sir.”

 

“Bianca burns with a bright flame.  I’ve had to prevent her, now and then, from lighting things on fire.  I’m speaking ‘poetically.’”

 

“Sir.”

 

“A father has to be in the security business.  Not using electricity, like your uncle does.  But la forza amorevole.  You understand?”

 

“I think so, sir.”

 

“I think you can help me.  With respect to a project you’re both involved with.”

 

“...respect, sir?”

 

Overhead fluorescence glinted off the pinky ring as its hand scratched a rock-solid jaw.  “This project, I believe, would not benefit either of you in the long run.”

 

“Probably not, sir.”

 

“Bianca’s heart is set upon it happening.  So I need you to help me prevent her from lighting a fire.  She will not be happy with either of us.  She will try to defy us both.  You will have to fend her off.  Can you cope with that?”

 

“...no choice, sir.  Has to be done.”

 

“I agree.  I hope you’ll remain friends, and can continue to look after Bianca.”

 

As if she were my sister, sir? Avery didn’t ask aloud.

 

“But,” added Peanuts, “if this is our only chance to meet, it was a pleasure.”

 

“Mutual, sir.”

 

Mr. Panucci nodded; Avery rose from the table and left the board room.  To be blindsided next morning by Beany’s adorable scowl, like that of an angry Betty Boop.

 

“Okay—listen up—here’s what’s gonna happen—we are gonna ditch school and you are gonna take me someplace we won’t get caught and I am gonna pose for you the way I want and you are gonna draw every inch of me the way you want so you can sculpt my statue the way we’ve both agreed on.  Capisce?”

 

“No.”

 

Replacing the scowl with a pleading pout: “Daddy was just trying to scare you, he’s old-fashioned, doesn’t believe we’re in love—let’s quit wasting time and do this!”

 

“Not now.”

 

“When, then?”

 

“Couple of years.”

 

“A couple of years??  I could be fat as the Goodyear Blimp by then!”

 

“Oh no way!  You’ll look hotter than ever when you’re eighteen—”

 

“You don’t know what happens to the women in my family!  You haven’t ever seen my Nonna in Bologna!  It’s what they call ‘metabolism’—my belly could stick out farther than my babalooeys!  And even if I don’t get fat there’s accidents and illnesses and kidnappings, so doing this now is crucial!  And I know you want to do it too!”

 

“‘You can’t always get what you want—’”

 

“Don’t you quote the Stones at me, Avery Loderhauser!”  She suddenly buried a tearful face and runny retroussé nose upon his shoulder, very much according to Fran.  “Pleeeeze, Bamm-Bamm!  You’re my very, very favorite!  Please don’t let Daddy break us up...”

 

Holding and consoling: “He isn’t.  We won’t.  You just need to forget this, for now—”

 

Back came the Boop-scowl as she threw off his embrace.  “I thought you loved me!  I thought you had guts!  I thought you were a man!  An’ I bet if Pruny Flamingo wanted to pose el starko, you’d sculpt her in a second!”

 

“She wouldn’t ask.”

 

To which Bianca reacted as though he’d thrown a cup of steaming hot java in her Coffee O’Lay’d face.  And though many more words would be exchanged—most of them by her—their breakup could be measured from that moment.

 

It remained sore to the touch for the rest of that winter.

 

Nor was it mellowed out by having to deflect Cow-Eyed Ceese, who kept sniffing around for any leftover legacy lovin’.

 

(Chicks...)

 

Spring came and with it another baseball season, this time playing for Vanderlund Senior High.  Porkchop Fairbanks and Sockless Joe Joplin had both graduated the year before, leaving no noteworthy upperclassmen on the team; but there were a number of promising sophs including Chewy DeWitt and the Schrimpfen twins, Slats and Stretch.  Bomber stole the show, though, taking far more chances and running a lot more risks than Coach Royce Erle’d ever trained him to do.  That had been Little League; this was NESTL(É).  And who the hell cared if he got banged up stealing bases or snagging high flies?

 

Well—Francie still did, when she was around, which wasn’t that often.  In the meantime Bianca kept promenading past the field arm-in-arm with wrestling phenom Corey “Chromey-Domey” Trevelyan.  (Avery had to wonder if she could pin him down, and how Peanuts was reacting to a rival baldheaded man in Beany’s life, and whether Corey’d been given orders to capture her nude splendors in whittled basswood...)

 

Summer came and with it another season of TEC baseball, plus resumption of chess games with his father when Juiced was up to them, as well as assisting Leading House fulltimers on installation and maintenance jobs.  These extended into the new school year, most often alongside Oilcan Harry Hendrick who’d played catcher in the Class B Three‑I League—Cedar Rapids, Burlington, Waterloo—before casting off his chest protector and signing on with security services.  “More’n one way to cover home plate,” he’d tell customers.

 

One Saturday afternoon in September 1976, Avery carried the toolbox and cable roll as Oilcan rang the doorbell of an old abode on Halvemaan Street.  The place needed a fresh coat of paint, extensive shingle repair and a heap of yardwork done, but they were there to put in an audible alarm system.  Most everybody in that once-posh neighborhood could’ve used one; located midway between East Bay to the north and Happel Land to the south, it had gone shabby-genteel and become susceptible to forced entries.

 

The person who opened the door of 234 South Halvemaan appeared to be neither.

 

Avery knew her at once (insofar as anyone could know her at all) as a girl called “Sphinxie,” or less politely as “the Sphinxter.”  Two weeks earlier she’d been assigned the fourth-floor locker next to his at school; she also sat in front of him in First Hour American History.  Since Bomber’s interest in things historical was limited to batting averages and World Series results, he’d taken more notice of the back of Sphinxie’s head and neck and upper torso than whatever Mr. Prout might be dithering about.

 

Her registered name was Rosalind Kuhn.  The initial impression she gave was of top-to-toe black-and-whiteness.  Hair even darker than Bianca’s, cut unusually close and sleek for that Farrahfied era, in one of those long-banged helmet-bobs from the Sixties or even the Twenties.  Blanched skin with a translucent gloss or sheen—“like alabaster,” a versifier might say.  Irises opaque as India ink, matching densely-applied mascara and low-hanging bangs to set off what that same versifier might call “an arresting gaze.”  Opalescent face that was expressionless every time Avery’d seen it, with an overlay of you’ll-never-know-me crypticity.  Evoking Alice Schultz’s doleful memento mori about Fran’s birthdays: born the same day that Theda Bara died.

 

Not that Bomber’d taken particular notice of Sphinxie (apart from the back of her head and neck and upper torso) during the first two weeks of the semester-so-far.

 

But now he’d unwittingly tracked her down to her Sphinxter lair, where he was being indicted by Those Eyes in That Face (otherwise impassive) as if ensnared in an act of transgression.  He probably didn’t do himself any justice by averting his eyes to below That Chin; but it was a hot afternoon and he’d only seen Sphinxie in monochrome wrap dresses that revealed next to nothing—whereas here she stood in a taut zebra-striped tanktop and cutoffs.  Maybe not comparable to swimsuited Gabrielle, with nothing like Bianca’s ample cuppage; still, in a word—whoa.

 

“Who is it, Rozzzalind?” went a deep grande-dame voice over a high-volume TV.

 

“Nobody,” replied Sphinxie, coolly modulated as all get-out, yet not retracting the accusative bayonets from Those Eyes.

 

“‘Scuse me, young lady, we’re here from Leading House Security,” said Oilcan.  “Come to install yer audible alarm, ordered by uhhhh...” (checking clipboard) “Perfesser Carrie O’Casey.”

 

“You’re late.  She had to leave.”

 

“Sorry, lotta jobs today, came as quick as we could.”

 

Noiseless snort by That Immobile Nose.

 

“Have them step into the parlor, Rozzzalind,” rumbled the grande dame.

 

Half-pirouette by their hostess, and a redoubled whoa by Bomber at the sight of the seat of Those Cutoffs as it/they led the tightassed way into what many Citylanders would refer to as the “frunchroom.”  It was crammed to capacity with a grand piano, an oversized davenport, two oversized armchairs, a 25” console color television set (from which the Miss Deaf America Pageant was blaring), an extra-large wheelchair parked before the TV, and its extra-large occupant.  Who turned a gargoyle head topped by a red frightwig in their direction, and broke into a forebodingly roguish smile.

 

“André!  You’ve returned at last!  And not come crawling back—no, I never thought you’d do that, even when you swore you wouldn’t—but straight and proud as ever!  Come give us a kiss!”

 

(None of this was directed at Oilcan Harry Hendrick.)

 

“...the name’s Avery, ma’am.  From Leading House Security.”

 

“You needn’t fear that I haven’t forgiven you, André,” rumbled the grande dame, achieving a ninety-degree wheelchair-twist with a massive grunt.  “But I might forget I forgave you, if I don’t receive my kiss!”

 

Avery, standing his ground as she began to roll toward him, felt a tug on his L.H. uniform sleeve and found Sphinxie’s fingers plucking at it.  “(You better leave and come back another time.  When my mother’s here.)”

 

“(We’d hafta charge you for comin’ by today,)” Oilcan whispered back, blocking the G.D.’s wheelchair-path like the good veteran catcher he was.  “(Mebbe we could at least take some measurements?)”

 

“(What?)”

 

“(For the cables—from your windows and doors—to the control panel,)” Avery hastened to clarify.

 

“I want to talk to André!” trumpeted the G.D., her chair now butting against Oilcan’s shinguardless legs.

 

“(Go! Go!)” Oilcan told Bomber.

 

Retreating from the front room to the front door with Rozzzalind still grasping his sleeve, for further hasty clarification.  “(I work for my uncle—go where I’m told—didn’t know you lived here.)”

 

“(Right,)” she breathed, but did not loosen her grip.  Under an angry roar of “André!  DON’T YOU WALK OUT ON ME AGAIN, sir!” she whisper-added “(Can you please not... say anything... about this?)”

 

He met Those Eyes with his own half-hooded once-over.  “(My old man’s a drunk.  My old lady’s a gambling addict.  My sister’s a sucker for shitheels.  Who’m I to talk?)”

 

She released his sleeve, took hold of his elbow with a cool pearly hand, and for the first time gave him That Sphinxie Smile.

 

Once again, this time threefold: WHOA...

 

Oilcan Harry returned later with a different assistant to finish the installation at 234 South Halvemaan.  “Don’t be too disappointed,” he told Bomber, “but the old lady didn’t ask me nothin’ ‘bout any ‘André.’  ‘F’you want my advice, best go after that grandgirl o’ hers instead.”

 

“Already am,” Bomber admitted.

 

At their adjoining lockers; in Room 419 during First Hour American History; in the cafeteria, after finding they both had Lunch 5D; in the Mustang Boss, after Rosalind consented to be chauffeured to and from VTHS.

 

And little by little as the weeks went by, he was able to assemble That Backstory.

 

The grande dame had been born seventy years ago as Dotty Allard in Wichita, Kansas.  There she’d briefly been a schoolmate and close friend of young Louise Brooks before the latter left town for New York; Dotty’d then avidly documented Brooksie’s career with Denishawn, the Scandals, the Follies, in Hollywood and Europe.  Dotty herself made it into show business to a marginal extent by marrying Phineas O’Casey, who’d been a vaudeville stagehand and theater manager before opening a talent agency.  When Louise Brooks returned to Wichita after short-circuiting her film career and tried to run a dance studio, Phin was keen to represent her but got rudely spurned; nor did Lulu act overjoyed at being reunited with old chum Dotty.  She (Lulu) soon threw in the towel and took off again for New York.  Dotty boxed up all her Brooksie memorabilia and consigned it to the attic of wherever the O’Caseys were living—in Wichita, in The City after World War II, and ultimately at 234 South Halvemaan in Vanderlund.

 

She (Dotty) got to play a stage mother thanks to daughter Carole Rose (Carrie) being something of a piano prodigy.  Carrie graduated with honors from the Kickshaw Conservatory in 1954 and won that year’s Cityland Music Festival piano competition, whose prize was awarded to her by Liberace in person.  Thus blessed, Carrie embarked on coast-to-coast touring as a guest soloist with symphony orchestras; father Phin was her agent and mother Dotty her costumer, scrapbookkeeper and Biggest Fan.

 

Until Carole Rose’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958, when she met and fell for two other new-to-nationwide-TV entertainers: Abba Dabba and Blot Slosho.

 

The first of these was the son of Sigmund Kuhn by his second of four (or maybe third of five) wives, remembered only as “Sheba.”  Siggy Kuhn had been a fixture on the Weimar Republic cabaret circuit before fleeing the Nazis and taking refuge in a long string of minor comic roles on American stage and screen.  To help little Amos Baruch (A.B.) Kuhn overcome a childhood stutter via vocal detachment, Siggy’d provided him with hand puppets and a Punch-and-Judy booth to perform in.  The kid went on to master ventriloquism, win amateur-night contests, assume the identity of Abba Dabba, and reach for the brass ring with his free hand while the other operated an intoxicated (or penitently hungover, depending on the audience) dummy.

 

“Say hello to Blot Slosho!”

 

“Thish—thish here’s a holdup, Dabba!”  Did Blot mean a robbery?  Nope.  A delay or postponement of their act?  Nope.  “Thish is you holdin’ me up—‘n’ if you leggo, I’m a-gonna fall flat on my kish... kish... kisser.”  (Blowing a raucous mwah.)

 

Such repartee did not endear A.B. Kuhn to Dotty O’Casey, or spare her from shock when Carole Rose announced their engagement.  Even (if not especially) when A.B. said his only active tie to Judaism was a long-ago circumcision.  Not that long-ago either, what with Abba Dabba being several years younger than Carrie.  Yet that only meant she was of age as well as in love, so the marriage knot got tied over Dotty’s figuratively dead body.

 

Phin minded this less, so long as Carole Rose continued to tour and thrive from her recitals.  But then came pregnancy, and then came childbirth, and then came A.B.’s belated realization he was not cut out for fatherhood (already having to nurture Blot Slosho), and then came separation and divorce and deep depression for Carrie which spread to Phin which did Dotty no good and may have laid the foundation for Rosalind Kuhn’s sphinxophilia.

 

Faced with single motherhood, Carrie pulled herself together and began teaching piano under her maiden name at her Kickshaw alma mater.  Phin O’Casey half-heartedly retired, upped his cigarette habit from three packs a day to four, and succumbed to galloping lung cancer.  Dotty fell prey to osteoarthritis and intermittent dementia; the latter got aggravated by acquaintance with Vanderlund’s ex-choirmistress Rosamond Ambrose.  Though the bearer of an auspicious rose-type name, her tales of liaisons with Borrah Minnevitch and the Marx Brothers sparked tinder in Dotty’s murky mind, kindling “memories” of working in New Orleans at the House of the Rising Sun.  By the time Rozzzalind started high school, Dotty had enrolled in the ranks of Gigi’s Madame Alvarez and A Little Night Music’s Madame Armfeldt: believing herself to be a onetime courtesan raising a granddaughter whose mother was engrossed with The Arts.

 

Rozzzalind suspected she might not be completely mistaken about this.  After all, Allard was a French name; the family had a nebulous tradition of having migrated to Bleeding Kansas from the Sweltering South; ipso facto, New Orleans—ripe for the remembrance.

 

“Do you believe,” Roz asked Avery one morning in his Mustang, “that people can inherit memories?  Like from generations ago?”

 

“S’pose,” he said noncommittally.

 

Roz thought she did (believe) because Roz thought she had (inherited).

 

Exploring the attic at 234 South Halvemaan; disinterring the boxes of Brooksiana; immediately feeling At Home, which she seldom felt at 234.  Restyling her hair in a Dutch bob with bangs; revising her wardrobe along flapperish lines; refining her makeup for chiaroscuro effects; linking up with fellow travelers into this bygone dimension of shadow and substance.  One was Tanya “Tango” Saranoff, whose uncle Vanya owned the Eclipse Cinema where Tango’d first seen her signature dance done by Valentino, then in golden-age Argentine movies.  (The Eclipse—“All Vintage, All the Time”—lost money every month, but was underwritten by Tanya’s namesake aunt’s shoe store at the Green Bridge Shopping Center.)  Another traveling companion was Sabrina Tiggs, called “Blaue” as in Der Blaue Engel or Das Blaue Licht; she put up with Tango’s Spanish-language preferences but swore by anything on German celluloid, from Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari to Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse.  Sabrina helped Roz do research on Sigmund Kuhn, who’d died before she was born and left her nothing but a surname... except, possibly, a legacy of genetic memories.

 

Yet another fellow traveler was Amadeo Camara, a year-older Cuban boy from Athens Grove who went by “I.M.A. Camera” and had formed a punk (or “shitfaced rock”) band known by various names, most often as Lepperzee.  I.M.A. composed most of their original songs, blending—or as he put it, churning—the decadence of Weimar Berlin with that of pre-Castro Havana in songs like “Totenrumbatanz” and “Gemütlich Orgía.”  But no need for Avery to start feeling jealous, Roz said with a Sphinxie Smile; I.M.A. “batted for the other team.”  (Bomber momentarily thought she meant the Athens Grove High School Olympians, before tardily catching on to her idiom.  “Leave baseball out of it,” he growled.)

 

Back to those potential genetic memories—could they be breeding and feeding Rosalind’s vivid dreams?  Cavorting onstage in a pair of lacy pants as she supersedes Sally Bowles at zee Kit Kat Club?  Or takes over as the headliner of Alwa’s variety review in Die Büchse der Pandora, when Lulu refuses to dance for Schön’s fiancée?  “Ich tanze für die ganze Welt—aber nicht vor dieser Frau!” sulks Lulu; so her doppelgänger Roz gets picked out of the chorus line to save the day, night after night, wearing little more than a thin layer of tawdry spangles...

 

“Where can I sign up for this dream?” Bomber wanted to know.

 

“Oh, you,” smiled Sphinxie.

 

In real life she was not the hardcore hedonist of these nocturnal reveries.  No freewheeling foolaround, like Beany Panucci; no bopping in Athens Grove with I.M.A.’s caballeros, like Tango Saranoff; no belting out “Wang Dang Doodle” à la Koko Taylor or the Pointer Sisters, like Blaue Tiggs.  Compared to them Rosalind was reticent and aloof, with That Nose stuck in some old book or other.  Even in the Mustang on the morning drive to VTHS, and not as last-minute cramming for the schoolday ahead.  Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse—all in the original Deutsch.

 

“You reading that for fun?”

 

“Nein, für die Philosophie.”

 

Sheesh.  Bomber’d completed two years of Español in case he ever had a chance to play ball south of the border, but hadn’t kept up with it like big Wayne Rhinelander whose driving ambition was to wrestle in Mexico.

 

So how do you “woo” a Sphinxette whose personal security system was grounded in German metaphysics?  Not by using massage therapy, as with Gabrielle; nor full-body contact sports, as with Bianca.  “Courting” Rosalind Kuhn was more like a chess match against alabaster mystique—or not so much versus as in contrast to, since Roz identified with both black and white.  And don’t forget her talent for stringpulling: no real surprise for a ventriloquist’s daughter, though Roz never spoke of the absent Abba Dabba or Blot Slosho.  (She had a pronounced aversion to the Muppets.)

 

Avery did meet her absentminded mother, Professor O’Casey, who distractedly thanked him for installing their audible alarm and was inattentive when he wouldn’t take credit for this.  She reserved her undivided attention for the Steinway keyboard.  Avery also stumbled across Grande Dame Dotty a few more times, but was never recognized as “André” again.  Instead he’d be told “Tradesmen should only enter a parlor from the kitchen!” or “I expect you’re one of Rozzzalind’s young men.  Chocolates don’t agree with her, so if you’ve brought her a box you’d best give it to me.”

 

“Got a lot of young men, have you?” he asked Roz afterward.

 

“I might have one,” she Sphinxified.

 

Was that remark a chess gambit, a sacrificial move to gain strategic advantage?  He might be that one young man, yet much of her fine self was still withheld from his young manhood.  No babalooey handshakes; no shiatsu massage through wraparound fabric; and for quite a while he was only allowed to kiss her on the cool pearly (facial) cheek.  Avery didn’t ask Roz to justify this prudishness, but she rationalized it anyway as transcending-bodily-impulses-through-ascetic-denial-of-The-Will—or buzzwords to that effect.  In any event, it was a safely reliable chess defense.

 

Yet at the same time she’d hold onto his hand or arm and not let it go even while eating lunch in the cafeteria, or riding in the car and reading one of those Deutsch books (flipping its pages with her other thumb).  She’d sit sideways in her American History desk-chair and rest her left elbow on Bomber’s desktop whenever Mr. Prout didn’t make her face forward.  Was that a gambit?  A tantalizing ploy?  A stringpulling maneuver?  Or simply a gesture of semireticent quasi-aloof attachment?

 

A possible answer came during the long brutal winter, when every journey to and from VTHS turned into a harrowing trek through the Antarctic.  Roz evidently reached a compromise with The Will, starting on that first subzero morning when they made it to school and stood frozenly in front of their lockers, slowly unbuttoning their overcoats.  All at once Roz turned and used both still-sleeved arms to wrap herself around Bomber, pressing against him from top to toe inside those open coats, revitalizing circulation with communal body warmth.  He had no objection to her doing this, and they re-enacted the ritual after each subsequent trip.

 

“Oh, quit shmushing!” sneered passerby Gabrielle, whose locker was not on the fourth floor.

 

“I thought you said I spoiled you for all other women!” grumped passerby Bianca, whose locker was two stories below.

 

But “(You hug good,)” murmured Roz.

 

And “(You hug better,)” replied Bomber.

 

Sometimes you just have to scrap strategy and throw caution on the fire.  (Tency, Francie and Juiced all did so as a matter of course.)

 

On Valentine’s Day, Avery BMV’d Rosalind with a zebra-print ribbony token that she accepted with her first-ever-offered kiss on the lips.  But instead of asking him to the Saturday Turnabout, she invited Avery to a Friday night triple feature at the Eclipse.  There was talk of making this a triple date, bringing Tanya and Sabrina plus a couple of random guys since neither girl was “going with” any individual at the moment.  However, Lepperzee (or whatever they were calling themselves that month) landed a party gig in Multch which Tango decided to go crash, even if it meant her Uncle Vanya wouldn’t offer the others a discount on tickets.  So Roz and Bomber doubled with the Beautiful Blaue Djinn of the Lover’s-Nuts Lamp (as I.M.A.’d styled Sabrina, “strictly from secondhand evaluation”) and Griff Robkin, an obscure senior who played blues-rock guitar in mimicry of the late Paul Kossoff.  Griff was also an alleged peeping tom, most recently of ditzy freshman cheerleader Delia Shanafelt when she’d left her bedroom curtains open while putting on a well-lit stripshow.

 

(Make any preliminary sketches for her nude statue? Avery didn’t ask aloud.)

 

Each of the triple features starred Louise Brooks—Pandora’s Box, Diary of a Lost Girl, Miss Europe.  Bomber was initially thankful they hadn’t been obliged to lug Grande Dame and her wheelchair along.  Then he was far more gratified by how Roz clung to him all through the first film, her cool pearly body generating steam heat all through her outer-and-under winterwear.  As a result he paid even less mind to the movie screen than he did in American History, where Roz didn’t distend his boiler pressure over 30 psi—as soon might happen (fsssss!) at the Eclipse.  And with no relief valve available that polite society didn’t frown upon.

 

“(Hey... how ‘bout we try a little ‘ascetic denial?’)”

 

“(Oh, you!)” she retorted.  “(I just love her so much is all.)”

 

Maybe so, but I’M the one you’re steaming up past the boiling point...

 

“Mmph!  Nowhere near as good as Liza Minelli in Cabaret,” scoffed Sabrina after Lulu got dispatched by Jack the Ripper.  “Welp, think I’ll be splitting—go have a look at Voyage of the Damned.”

 

“Sounds delightful,” groused Roz.  “Take him with you.”

 

“Hunh?” went Griff the obscure.

 

“Yeah, c’mon,” Blaue told him.  “I think they show tits in Voyage of the Damned.”

 

“Cool,” said Griff, his peeper-eyes on Blaue-booty as he trailed after it up the aisle and out of the theater.

 

“Right,” exhaled Roz, re-shmushing herself against Bomber as Diary of a Lost Girl began.  “This is better.  Now it’s just us.”

 

Well and good, and more evenly steam-heated through the next two features.  Yet Avery felt like the odd-man-out in “just us” when Brooksie got bumped off again, this time by her pistol-packing ex at the end of Miss Europe.  Rosalind wept steadily (and her mascara ran messily) all the while she was being guided away from the Eclipse and into the Mustang.  Avery refrained from reminding her It was only a movie, since it was also past teen curfew and he had meager prospect of any more shmush-indulgence.

 

“I just wish...” Roz murmured, wiping teary glop from Those Eyes with a black-smeared handkerchief.

 

“What?”

 

“I just wish I could meet her.  Talk to her.  Ask her about... what it was like.  If it was anything... like my memories.  The ones, I mean... in my dreams.”

 

“She still alive?”

 

“Hunh?  Oh sure—she’s only seventy, same age as my grandma.  Lives in Rochester, New York and writes essays, or at least used to.  They’re not easy to find.”

 

“So you write her.  Send her a letter.”

 

“I wouldn’t have the nerve!  She’d never reply!”

 

“She won’t if you don’t try.  And you’ll keep wishing you had.”

 

Her left glove tightened on his right sleeve.

 

The rest of February and much of March was devoted to agonizing over That Letter.  Draft after draft got written, torn up, restarted; some got burned in the Halvemaan fireplace as Roz’s impulse-denial resurged.  Then caution again got fed to the flames as she launched a new draft.  There was constant consultation with Avery, since Tanya soon lost interest and Sabrina shed all patience.  Should Roz mention being the granddaughter of Dotty Allard and/or Sigmund Kuhn?  Should she merely present herself as a student of late-silent/early-sound Continental motion pictures?  What to do, what to do?? 

 

At last, a full month after the triple feature, That Final Draft was completed and sealed in an envelope addressed to Ms. Louise Brooks c/o the George Eastman House.  It also contained an SASE bearing an absurd number of stamps—so many that Avery guessed whoever opened the outer envelope would ignore the letter and swipe the SASE, labeling over Rosalind’s painstakingly printed return info.  But he kept this guess to himself; his job was to take Roz to the Vanderlund post office (no streetcorner mailbox would do) and hold her upright while she slid this unburnt offering through the outgoing slot, centimeter by centimeter.  Then gently drag her away from the P.O., disregarding Roz’s second-thought regrets and repentances.

 

Distressful, perhaps.  But a cool-calm-dry Secret deodorant commercial compared to the startlingly-soon-afterward afternoon he dropped Roz off at home, only to have her burst out of the house shrieking “AVE! AVE! AVE!” (her abbreviation of Avery, not Latin for hail or farewell).  Flagging down his Mustang with the returned SASE, brandishing it at arm’s length as if it were made of 24-karat dynamite.  By the time he reparked in the Halvemaan driveway she was pounding on the passenger door, hurling it open and herself back into the shotgun seat; bringing not only That SASE and her usual scent of Avon Roses, Roses but a powerful whiff of perspiration, visible on her pallid pearly face and imaginable all over her alabaster body.

 

“Not here! Not here! Not here!” she babbled, so shakily-sweatily he gave serious thought to racing toward St. Benedict’s ER.  But “M’okay—m’okay—m’okay—” she insisted, her nonbrandishing hand flat on her coatfront trying to quell its heaves.  “I just... don’t wanna... open it... around Grandma... so take me... someplace... else...”

 

For the first time, Avery drove Rosalind to Bedeguar Way.

 

They had the house to themselves, yet Roz was abashed by her antiSphinxish behavior and appearance.  “Ooh, I gotta... go ‘freshen up’... where can I...?”

 

Back flashed the image of that alabaster body, which truth to tell was seldom out of Bomber’s consciousness.

 

Clearing his throat if not his mind, he directed her up to Fran’s bathroom which hadn’t been used for a while and hence was the cleanest.  Rosalind entrusted him with the precious SASE, touching it with damp lips before tottering off to perform wonders with the contents of her purse.  Whether or not these included tranquilizers, she returned perfectly groomed and well-balanced and smelling only of floral blossoms.

 

“Sorry about...” she murmured, touching him with darkly reglossed lips.

 

“No need.”

 

“I think I’m ready now.  Will you please open it for me, careful as you can?”

 

One end of the SASE got slit and several pages were extracted.  The topmost was Roz’s letter—a reverent request to interview Lulu by mail about her picturemaking in Europe.  Upon this sheet was an emphatically handscrawled “NO.”  But perhaps because Roz had mentioned her family ties to Dotty Allard and Siggy Kuhn, the other pages were a photocopy of a 1956 article in Eastman House’s Image magazine—“Out of Pandora’s Box: New Light on G.W. Pabst from His Lost Star.”

 

Rosalind’s translucent sheen glowed with beatific exaltation.

 

“She sent this to me!  She wanted me to have it!  And you made it happen!”— shmushing top-to-toe against Avery, apart from one holdout hand preserving That Bequest from crumplement.

 

He countered this move with all ten fingers, lifting Roz by her seat off her feet to support her in midair as well as on earth.  Telling her “My pleasure,” which could be variously construed—such as a thanksgiving reward in Fran’s unoccupied bedroom.

 

But a minute later they had just enough time to disentwine before Tency barged through the door, returning early from a Kelly Girl job.  Roz was at her expressionless Sphinxiest as they were introduced, giving no glimpse of post-shakiness while dishing up a civility or two about the house.  To Avery this made her whoa-ier than ever, and he had to struggle to stay deadpan while managing their getaway.  Redoubling that struggle when Rosalind primly asked to be taken straight home.

 

“Glad to’ve been of service,” he gnarled in the Halvemaan driveway.

 

Looking reticent and sounding aloof in the shotgun seat, she nevertheless took them to a new plateau by saying “I love you.  I really love you, Ave.  I can’t show you how much here and now.  But I will, if you’ll be patient with me.  And that’s a promise.”

 

(This lady was one hell of a good chess player.)

 

So which had the advantage, black or white?  Spring intervened and made the board green: time (on the one hand) for another baseball season, and composition (by the other) of That Soon-to-Be Prizewinning Essay About Lulu and Herr Pabst.  Not till June, when both of these were over and done with, did Rosalind revisit “showing her love”—and choosing to do so in a truly illustrative manner.

 

It happened on a scorching hot Saturday evening.  Puerto Ricans rioted on The City’s West Side while Emerson Lake & Palmer fans overdosed at the Super Bowl of Rock; but Roz, seated with apparent self-assurance in the airconditioned Loderhauser living room, looked pearly-cooler than ever in a whoa-worthy new tanktop and cutoffs.

 

Once again they had Bedeguar Way to themselves.  Juiced was in Minnesota, referred for admission to the Hazelden Rehab Center.  Tency was in Nevada, “wisely” parlaying a small inheritance at Vegas casinos rather than blowing it at the local track.  And Fran was in the Caribbean, having landed a job on a Carnival Cruise ship.  Minimal chance of any of them returning early this time.

 

Rosalind, taking a sip of Fresca that turned into a swig, cleared her throat and asked: “Did you really carve that statue of Bianca Panucci she’s always boasting about?”

 

(To the best of Bomber’s recollection, Roz had never so much as alluded to this touchy topic before.)  “Didn’t get finished.  Hardly got started.”

 

“But she did pose for it, right?  ‘In the altogether?’”

 

Near-snortle at this dainty euphemism; yet a sense that might be hazardous.  “She offered.  But wasn’t even sixteen then.  And wouldn’t wait.  So—no.”

 

Those India-Ink Irises regarded him opaquely.  “Well... I’m over seventeen.”

 

(As Avery already knew, having crafted her an April birthday hairband of metallic white blooms, similar to the confirmation crown Brooksie wore at the start of Diary of a Lost Girl.  Roz was wearing hers here and now above Those Black Bangs: marking this as a Special Occasion.)

 

“...meaning?” Bomber probed.

 

“Would you sculpt a statue of me?  Not out of wood, though.  In marble.”

 

Pretend this is an ordinary business request, such as where to install an alarm system’s control panel.  “Like to, but marble’d cost too much.  And haven’t ever tried doing stonework.  How ‘bout aluminum?—not tinfoil” he quickly appended, to counter her upset-seeming demeanor.  “Sheet metal—it’s a snap to form and weld.  Done a lot with aluminum.  Got all the right tools, too.”

 

Swigging more Fresca, clearing more throat: “There’d have to be two conditions.  One: if I do pose for you that way, I’m not going to be the only one with no clothes on.  And two: if we’re both that way, you’d have to have plenty of... um... ‘precautions.’”

 

“...such as?”

 

“Oh dammit, you know!  For your ‘tool!’”  (Said with as close to a blush as he’d ever seen on That Opalescent Face.)

 

“Ah.  Well.  Just so happens—”

 

“AVE!”  Black eyes blazing: “You better not tell me they’re left over from when you were going with Bianca!”

 

“The truth?  Did get ‘em then, but never got to use any.  Not once.”

 

“...no fooling?”

 

“Definitely.”

 

“It’d be your First Time, for real?”

 

“...with another person.”

 

Almost smiling, and not Sphinxily: “(It’d be mine too.)”

 

“It would, or it will?”

 

Losing the almost-smile: “Well, it won’t if you don’t take precautions, every step of the way!”  Starting alone in a bathroom or bedroom, where Bomber was told to go “relieve” himself before either of them doffed a stitch.  “We’re not taking any chances, right off the bat.”

 

“(Leave baseball out of it,)” he growled again as he went upstairs to unload his tommygun.  By the time he cleaned up and came down, Roz had pulled the blinds and curtains on all the ground floor windows and turned on every lamp in the frunchroom.

 

“You sure you’re done?”

 

“...I ought to know.”

 

“Prove it.  Undress.  It’s only fair.  I’m not taking off anything till you take off everything.”

 

He obeyed, repeating just business nothing personal to himself.

 

“Oh,” was her reaction.  Failing to keep a crestfallen note out of her voice.

 

“‘OH??’  This is what you asked for!”

 

“I know!  I didn’t mean—it’s okay.  I do mean it’s okay—better than okay.  I mean...” (deep breath) “you’re very, very all-that-I-want.  Really, Ave.  I just hope...”

 

“What?”

 

“...that you won’t be... y’know... sorry... when you see me that way.”

 

“Not likely!  You’re all-that-I-want.”

 

“Oh please!  Am I built like Bianca?  No!  Could I be a bikini model like Gabey Sundheit?  No!  I’m only kind of, sort of—”

 

“Beautiful.  More than them.  The most.”

 

“Yeah, well...  (Sigh.)  Suppose it’s my turn to ‘prove it.’  Here goes...”

 

And by the time she was finished, he was fully reloaded.

 

Rosalind turned distinctly pink from bangs to bosom, over which she clapped one arm while using the other hand as a figleaf.  Gasping as though Griff Robkin had popped in with a pair of binoculars: “I, I, I thought it took guys a long time to, to, to um like ‘recover’ after, after, after—”

 

“Not with you that way!  Can’t be helped.”

 

“Oh Gahd...”  The pink turned rosy-red, with evidence of another perspiration-breakout.

 

Stooping for his jockeys: “Want to forget the whole thing?”

 

“No!  Not yet!”  Eyeing his whole thing with wary fascination: “Can you... control yourself, when you’re like that?”

 

“...long as you don’t start dancing.”

 

She bit back a hectic laugh.  “Can you... try to sit down?”

 

He unfurled his jockeys over the seat of a chair, placed his own seat upon them, and opened a sketchpad (awkwardly) over his rampant lap.  Eyeing her Venus Pudica stance: “Want me to draw you like that?”

 

“No...”  Rosiness subsided and sweat-traces vanished.  Letting her hands drop to her sides, then raising them to adjust her flowerlike hairband.  “How’s this?”

 

Living, breathing, supple marble: top-to-toe lustrousness.  “Can’t do better.”

 

“Let’s try,” she told him, striking a pose.

 

Saturday evening passed with bodily impulses essentially transcended.  As soon as the sketching was finished, Roz took her clothes to Fran’s bathroom and emerged wearing them, semireticent/quasi-aloof once more.  “Get dressed,” she told the stymied Bomber, withholding shmush till he was safely zipped.  Only then would she consent to retwine; and only then to a restrained extent for a restricted interval.

 

“(Not too past curfew,)” he informed her ear.

 

“(Not tonight, Ave,)” she informed his.

 

Nor did she act eager to partake in precautions when she returned to Bedeguar on Sunday afternoon.  Avoiding his embrace and even his gaze, Roz flinched and fidgeted at Bomber’s every move till he slapped the sketchpad shut and steamily called a timeout.

 

“Oh don’t be mad!  I’m just a bit scared, okay?”

 

“Again?  You got over that, posing yesterday—”

 

“Not of posing!  Of—what we didn’t do yesterday.  I mean, I want to Do It!  And with you!  But I’m scared It’ll hurt, and It’ll make me pregnant no matter how many thingamabobs you put on, and... I won’t be any good at It... ‘n’ you’ll be disappointed.”

 

He tried very hard to prefix com- to his -passion.  “No rush.  Till you’re ready.  Other stuff we can do.  That won’t hurt.  Or make you pregnant.  As for ‘good at It’... we can keep practicing till we are.”

 

Trepidation gave way to a Sphinxie smirk.  Then: “There’d be one condition—”

 

“—I love you.”

 

“Mindreader!...  (‘Bout time you said so.)”

 

“Haven’t I showed so?”

 

Looking him over: “(You show a lot of things.)”

 

So they tried other stuff, and put Avery’s rugged shiatsu to effective use, and progressed to all-the-waydom while Stevie Nicks sang “Dreams” in the background.  And thunder happened even though it wasn’t raining outdoors.

 

“(...you sure this was your First Time?)” she asked his ear.

 

“(Sure was.  You sure it won’t be my Last?)” he asked hers.

 

“(We’ll see...)”

 

And it wasn’t either of their Last, even on that Sunday afternoon.

 

Through the ensuing summer they found opportunities to replicate, cultivate, and elaborate these innings-and-outings, with little hurt and no pregnancy and disappointment limited to not having more chances to “practice.”  At least that was the letdown-limit till Rosalind’s statue took perceptible shape; then its subject began to feel anticlimactic.

 

Avery labored over the face, striving to capture That Sphinxie Mien in hammered and modeled metal.  The closer he came to attaining this, the less contented Roz grew; doubts were cast, concerns raised, squabbles picked.  “You’re making me look like an android,” she complained more than once during that Star Wars-consumed summer.  Her grievance was uncomfortably evocative of Gabrielle’s Rosey-the-Robot outburst; also of being painted into a corner.  Making the face not look like Roz was totally unacceptable, as was abandoning the project—unless Bomber did what he “should have, right from the start” and carved it in marble.  Roz would not believe his aptitudes were inadequate for sculpting on a Bernini or Michelangelo level.  “I have faith in you,” she’d say with a shmush and/or kiss—both of which diminished in frequency and intensity as the summer wore on.

 

They each had other seasonal occupations: Avery with TEC baseball and more complex Leading House service assignments, Rosalind with a parttime job at the Kickshaw Conservatory and membership in Vanderlund Senior High’s International Club, which engaged in activities between the school years.  One led to her playing a tremendous gambit in August: landing a last-minute AFS scholarship to spend the fall semester with a host family in Hamburg, West Germany.

 

Not an inkling of this option had been shared with the bombshelled Avery.

 

“I didn’t think it’d happen.  I didn’t want to jinx it,” Roz fidgeted, again avoiding his gaze.  “I... didn’t want to make you unhappy... if I didn’t have to.  Please don’t be mad at me, Ave.  I wish you were going too.  I’ll miss you so much.  I’ll need you every minute I’m over there.  But I can’t pass this up—I’ll finally get to chase my dreams!”

 

(By which she doubtless meant those nocturnal-reverie “memories” that darkened the corners of her mind.)

 

Other than bon voyage (which Rosalind corrected to gute reise) there was not a whole lot Avery could say.  Neither he nor she made mention of the unfinished statue, which Avery continued to tinker with after she was gone and senior year commenced at VTHS.  Word about this project must have spread, probably by Tango or Blaue, since Beany and her Boop-scowl marched over on the first day of school to reach up and whack Bomber across the chops.  He partly ducked her open palm—tiny, yet hard-as-nails—but mostly caught the swat and couldn’t entirely blame her for it.

 

From Hamburg came a series of postcards, all irritatingly written in Deutsch; Avery had to enlist the Schrimpfen brothers to translate them.  Not only were Slats and Stretch both taking German (twice as fast as most students, thanks to twin collaboration) but they could be relied on to be discreet if the cards got “intimate”—which apparently they didn’t.  They also stopped coming toward the end of October.  After a couple of weeks the worried Bomber contacted Professor O’Casey at Kickshaw (rather than tip off Tanya or Sabrina) to ask if all was okay.  Roz’s mother seemed mildly puzzled as to why he asked, saying she’d been given no reason to think otherwise.

 

On the 7th of November, That Letter arrived.  Its salutation was a portentously quotemarked „Lieber” Avery in ink as black and dense as Rosalind’s mascara.  Bomber took a stab at deciphering the text with a German dictionary, but had to give up and turn it over to the Schrimpfens.  They solemnly sat him down and said “There’s bad news and worse news.  You want it with the bark on or off, buddy?”

 

Roz had met a “Jan” (gender not specified) who’d opened her eyes as to what her relationship with Avery had really entailed.  He had inexcusably objectified her—treated her as a subordinate recipient of bodily impulses—thwarted her abstinent denial of The Will—and dehumanized her in starkly sexualized aluminum.  So there’d be no point in his sending more cards, letters or cablegrams; any would be left unread.  Auf nimmer wiedersehen—Rosalind (whose final letter was smudged by a blot-slosho).

 

In an English word: checkmate.

 

In another English word: chicks...

 

Which would be heavily underscored the very next day when the proverbial One Phone Call came from frantic Francine, arrested for possession of controlled substances.

 

Avery, with a heroic effort, held back all the words that came to mind and all the gorge that rose to throat.

 

Lacking enough cash on hand to bail out Fran and needing a trusty bondsman, he got hold of Uncle Linus who (most likely) conferred instead with Peanuts Panucci, who (most likely) arranged for all charges to be dropped—since they were dropped, and far more swiftly than Messrs. Bramah, Sargent & Soref could’ve accomplished.  But if Peanuts, it was implicitly understood that this squared things between the Panuccis and Loderhausers: compensating Bomber for having fended off Beany (repeatedly).  Any further favor would result in a Debt.

 

Which Bomber would’ve gladly incurred in order to eliminate Tito Santiago, the bastard asswipe responsible for Fran’s getting nabbed “holding” (without consoling) as well as Fran’s “taking” the same addictive substance in her possession.

 

The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.  Tito Santiago qualified for this distinction in spades.  If a live-action version of Charlotte’s Web were ever produced for a gritty urban audience, Santiago would be (un)natural casting as Templeton.  Streetwise and alleysavvy, he was a heartless hardbitten professional pusher—not some juvenile suburban punk who could be scared off by a power jab to the jaw or gut.  “Teatclamp” exhibited every intention of keeping his rat-bastard hook sunk into Fran for as long as this garnered him a profit; and zealous readiness to sell her down the river if he were to get narked out.

 

So how you gonna stop me, kid?  You can’t do nothin’.  Scram, beat it, get bent, hit the road.

 

Avery did not need additional reasons, on that week of all weeks, to feel like a stubby bowlegged runt.

 

He hinted to Uncle Linus about the practicality of hiring a hit man; Linus indicated that whether lawful or un-, this would be beyond their means.  To him Francie was a bad risk, a foolish investment; he’d made that clear from the start.  And she did nothing to dispel such a notion when Avery read her the riot act about “Teatclamp”:

 

“Oh no Bom it was my fault all mine you know how I make mistakes ‘n’ mess things up but Tito takes care of me when I get out of line you don’t understand him Jesus Bom! quit being so judgmental! it was all my fault ‘n’ I’m sorry I messed up ‘n’ I wish I was dead ‘n’ please don’t yell at me anymore...”

 

So: holding (with consoling).

 

And: getting a pledge to seek therapy (worth the same weight, no doubt, as all the analogous vows obtained from their parents).

 

But: Bomber could not wash his hands of Fran.  He was bound by his brotherly duty to look after her—not just now but always.  With or without assistance from father or mother or Linus or Peanuts or the police.  She needed him, depended on him, would be lost without him.

 

(Even so: CHICKS...)

 

Yet it made Avery rethink his jumped-to conclusion about “Jan” in Hamburg.  Could he/she be another Teatclamp, preying on Roz’s soft spot for German metaphysics?  And what did the blot-slosho on That Letter’s signature signify?  A tear of regret for having bonded with Avery against her more ascetic judgment?  Or for being gulled into trying to make him fall out of love with her?  Either way, he paid no heed to Roz’s verboten condition and sent a Christmas card to Hamburg, saying he’d be seeing her when she returned to Vanderlund in January.

 

There was no return-to-sender with emphatically handscrawled “NEIN.”

 

Instead, Sabrina Tiggs sought Avery out on the 23rd of December to give notice that Rosalind had enough credits to take early graduation from VTHS—as well as an equally early acceptance by Pomona College in Claremont, California, where she’d be heading directly from Germany.  “I’m not sure if that was always her plan,” Blaue confided.  “Anyhow, it is now.  Just wanted you to know.”

 

...insofar as anyone could know her at all...

 

He spent what passed for Christmas vacation carving himself a new façade out of granite.  He’d always had a “stony” disposition; now it was a barricaded bulwark.  His eyelids had always been half-hooded; now they were overhanging parapets shielding incendiary bowmen.  When school resumed on the 3rd of January, Beany and Gabey each sauntered by to gloat over gossip they’d heard about Roz; both were frightened away by Bomber’s flickering glowers.  Mamie Gatto actually tried again to pick him up on the rebound; this time he made no attempt to spare her cow-eyed feelings while sweeping Ceese aside.

 

Stage Crew work began on Follies.  Bomber plunged into design and construction of the Weismann Theater set—a skeletal shell in fragmentary ruins, embodying that bitter winter’s sense of decrepitude.  Leisure time was filled with souping up the Boss’s stereo system (pair of Cricket speakers with a Pioneer Supertuner and two Jensen TriAxials) and playing Moog synthesizer music over it.  Mostly “krautrock”—Kraftwerk, Ultravox!, Tangerine Dream—which’d set Roz’s teeth on edge (she preferring the old-timey jazz of her “memories”) more and more last summer.  Had that impelled her to break things off?  If so—good riddance.  Chicks came and went; ambient music was interstellar.

 

So things stood on the 10th of February, when Avery exited the metal shop with Slats and Stretch and got literally bumped into by what appeared to be a kitten being harassed by a mastiff.

 

Zalman Tergeist, notorious for mistreating females, was “bottom of the bill” in Bomber’s considered opinion.  Now here he was targeting a Stage Crew apprentice, Jenna Wiblitz’s “little sister” (who looked more like Candy Gates).  So Bomber had no problem with rescuing her, if only to zigzag Zal.

 

A day later Jenna brought her into the shop to ask if she (Vicki, her name was) could be provided with rides home after school, since Nancy Sykeman’s Klown Kar had conked out—as anyone with auto-sense would’ve known was bound to happen.  Avery might have suspected Jenna of misguided matchmaking, but she was too sensible for that (despite her outlandish eyeglasses) and also anxious about an ailing grandfather.

 

So: sure, why not?

 

A casual agreement almost immediately regretted, when he had to assure Vicki’s mother—out in the frigid school parking lot, no less—that he wasn’t the Mad Bludgeoner and wouldn’t reduce her kitten-chick to bloody pulp.  By this time he’d been told by Link Linfold that Vicki was the girl who’d fought off a Wannabe Bludgeoner at the Shoreward Club’s Bal Masqué.  So, maybe understandable that her old lady (who drove a cool Town & Country wagon) would be extra protective—but maybe superfluous, if her kitten-chick was such an unanticipated badass.

 

Then, trying to drive out of that same frigid parking lot, the Mustang got leaped at by a Mad Peckerhead (alias Zal Tergeist) whom Bomber should’ve steamrolled into gory purée.  His neglecting to do so was even more lamentable on Monday afternoon when Jenna ran into the shop squawking that he (Zal) was hassling her (Vicki) all over again, this time onstage.  Cue for Rescue #2!

 

The only boards-treading Avery wanted to do was as a crew techie.  He wouldn’t have minded giving Tergeist the power jabs that had been of no use against Teatclamp—but someplace other than center stage, in front of the Follies company.  What an idiotic farce: “Oh, is that SO??” “Yeah, that is SO.”  Just as well they didn’t come to literal blows (Zal would come a lot closer three weeks later with Dexter Rist) since bruised knuckles might’ve interfered with the set construction schedule.

 

Then, after Bomber drove the re-rescued Vicki home, she no sooner got out of the Boss than she slipped and fell on a patch of unsalted ice—retwisting a previously-injured ankle.  Oh crap!  Her father might be a car dealer but also might have a litigious attorney who’d find some way to hold Avery liable for this.  So he carried Vicki into her house, removed her boot and checked the ankle (with an ironic Still got it when he felt her pulse leap and pound at his touch) while confirming she remembered the drill for treating sprains.  Then handed Vicki over to her redheaded kid brother (who recognized him as the Bedeguar Way Bomber) and beat a quick retreat—

 

—though not before she caught hold of his hand and gave it a squeeze.  Staring narrowly at him with eyes that were dark as Rosalind’s, but which shone like black stars through the gloom.

 

Even under the circumstances and through her overcoat, it had felt pleasurable to hold a girl in his arms again.

 

And when Avery entered his bleak spartan bedroom, he took the head of Roz’s statue (which he’d been using, inverted, as a wastebasket) and turned its face to the wall.

 

This was not much solace the next day, February 14th, when VTHS corridors were full of BMVs.  Did Beany still have that head-and-shoulders woodcarving?  Had Roz long since thrown out that zebra-print ribbony token?  Why the hell was he even wondering?  All childish bullshit—which Vicki had to miss, staying at home with her sprained ankle.  And it would’ve been her first BMV, she being a soph.

 

Through the afterschool double-hour he waited for Jenna or someone to say his drive-home services were no longer required.  But nobody did; and on the following afternoon Vicki hobbled into the shop using Jen’s canary-colored umbrella as a cane, giving Slats and Stretch a laugh—and Avery a sensation he wasn’t ready to define.  It was compounded in the car when she bounced (a bit) to the electronic beat of Ultravox!, as if at least trying to appreciate the ambience.  Then sent through the Mustang roof when she laid her small gloved hand on his letterman’s-jacketed forearm—just as Roz used to do—and stammered out a Be My Valentine invitation.

 

According to the childish-bullshit “rules,” girls were not supposed to BMV guys.  Certainly no soph girl would be expected to ask a senior guy to the Valentine Turnabout.  Or to the Red Devil Bowl for bowling, or... um... like... maybe... go to a movie... or something...?  By which point Vicki looked like she might burst into tears of shame, which only made her narrow black eyes shine all the brighter.

 

So: sure, why not?—as Ultravox! beepbooped “Hiroshima Mon Amour.”

 

But instead of the Turnabout or Red Devil Bowl or a triple feature at the Eclipse Cinema, he took her to the Holdahl Dinner Theater on Maine Street.  Fran’d landed a job there as a Kazoochie waitress/chorusgirl, but would be appearing that evening as Lacy Frill in Ready for Teddies—as Bomber’d heard not from Fran but her coworker Tuck, who’d played baseball for Willowhelm before starting college at Lakeside Central.  The stress of stepping up from understudy to featured role was just the sort of thing that could send Francie over the edge; and Teatclamp would make every effort to push her past the brink.  So Bomber wanted to be close by, even if that meant Vicki’d have to miss the Turnabout which she probably ought to sit out anyway given her recently-healed ankle.

 

“You’ll want to doll up,” he acknowledged, “even if you can’t dance.”

 

And doll up she did, in a purple dress that proved a girl didn’t need Beany-sized babalooeys to be the sexiest babe at the table if not in the house.  (As had also been true for Rosalind, of course; though she’d never seemed convinced that Avery believed this.)  Vicki, training for track season, had a trim athletic build with a whoa-worthier seat than Roz or Bianca or Gabrielle.  She pulled off the “Candy Gates look” a lot better than C.G., who minced around as if a film crew were focusing lenses on her and zooming in for close-ups.  Vicki might be just as self-conscious, but in an unpretentious please think I’m pretty way.

 

“You’ll do,” he told her.  (No reason he should gush.)

 

And do she did that night.  Praising Francie when Fran needed it most.  Soothing Bomber when he needed it most—diverting him from rage against Bert Wilbur, of all people.  Bearing up bravely when told that Teatclamp was Fran’s pusher, that Juiced was a drunk, that Tency was a gambleholic.  And participating with unexpected enthusiasm when Bomber took her parking on the Tilton Trail.

 

Badassery...

 

For which he awarded her driving instructions and an emergency road kit for her sixteenth birthday.  She responded by inviting him and Fran to a home-cooked meal of pork ‘n’ taters.  “I love her!  You should love her!  Don’t let this one get away!” Fran told him afterward, sounding for once like an authoritative big sister.

 

Easier said than done.  Or rather, not done.

 

It wasn’t Avery’s fault that Vicki didn’t show up till less than four months before he graduated.  And it wasn’t hers that she was so much younger, which would’ve made an earlier matchup problematic.  (He’d run enough risk with Beany being jailbait, and she was almost his own age.)

 

Whirling Vicki around and around at her Triville Roller Disco skating party, he wanted to catapult the two of them somewhere he could pick up where he’d left off with Rosalind all-the-waywise.  They could call it a different spin on driving instructions—

 

But no: he wouldn’t allow himself to rush her into anything she wasn’t ready for, behind the wheel or in the backseat.  Not only was Vicki a Nice Girl, but one who found reasons to intentionally delay getting her license for months after turning sixteen—almost as unheard-of as a soph girl BMV-ing a senior guy.  And Avery wouldn’t have enough time to properly “court” or “woo” a Slowgoing Nice Girl into bed (or equivalent) before he took off for Arizona State.

 

Yet she didn’t set up any “ascetic denial of bodily impulse” hurdles; she didn’t treat him like a princess compelled to lick a toad.  Nor, for that matter, did she try to entice him behind her bedroom door with just-out-of-the-shower squeaky-cleanliness.  (More’s the pity—he’d be a lot less inclined to leap out of Vicki’s lunge-range.  Guess Bianca hadn’t spoiled him for all other women.)

 

Vicki was jealous of Beany.  Overtly; uneasily; endearingly.  Also of Roz and Gabey and Snickers Paar and even Boomer Wrang at Houlihan, whom only a cloistered monk could lust after.  Picturable, maybe, as a nude marble statue—but one symbolizing antiseptic sterility in some convent or hospice.

 

The far-more-incarnate Vicki came right out (after a tutorial on dissecting worms) and fished for Avery’s reaction to her possibly posing for him to sketch and sculpt.  “I mean wearing like a swimsuit!”—which was further than Gabey the catalog model had ever volunteered to go.

 

“You’d do.  We’ll see,” he told her.  “Don’t let the worms get to you.”

 

And they didn’t, in Biology or on the cindertrack.  Or in the Girls Gym, where the t&f team spent the following Friday after school since their meet at Multch North got scratched.  Avery caught the tail end (so to speak) of this fill-in practice from a corner of the bleachers, promptly spotting Vicki as she ran a two-mile time trial with her rhythmic keister undulating through each lap.

 

(The word to describe it was spelled w-h-o-a.)

 

Avery might be no more of a Smilin’ Sam than he was a Chatty Charlie; but this vista did lend some elongation to his lips (and elsewhere).  Nor was he a Griff Robkin, spying surreptitiously on an unaware quarry; but even if he were, Vicki quickly sensed she was being observed and intuitively located his vantage point.  They traded nods as Vicki ran on, not showing off as Bianca would’ve done (with a lot more bounce to her flounce) but tending to the task at hand, maintaining a steady pace till the final sprint.  Precisely as she ought to do.  Good for her—

 

“Heighhhhdy Bowser Loderhauser!”

 

Greeting and salutation from the only player, so far as Bomber (not “Bowser”) knew, to have been formally banned for life from the Vanderlund Little League: Dennis the Menace Desmond.

 

“Looking after your Chiclet, arrrre we?  Watching over your Chicktette, arrrre we?  Taking care of your Bic-flicking stick-picking treat-tricking Vixteen, arrrre we—”

 

“I am,” Bomber broke in, piledriver-style.

 

“I wouldn’t leave off for a single minute if I were you, Bowser—I wouldn’t wrap it up or pack it in or call it a day just yet ‘cause when it comes to stick-picking, your gracious charming and lovely Chiclet is so very very prone to drop the baton when she isn’t letting the relay rod slip through her fingers when she isn’t mishandling that owl-bowel of a foul dowel as perhaps you’ve had the chance or occasion or opportunity of noticing before now—”

 

“Clam the hell up.”  Said with Bomber’s flattest, hardest, concretest intonation.

 

“Clams on the half shell!” Dennis declared, waving an expansive hand at the girls track team as they practiced fill-in drills.  “Serve ‘em with a zingy cocktail sauce!  Some are cherrystones, large-fleshy-and-tough—some are littlenecks, sweet-mild-and-tender—all of ‘em are appetizing in their own ways-shapes-and-forms, for men of the world with galactic tastes and universal palates!”

 

(This from the record holder of Most Unsportsmanlike Conduct ejections by the Vanderlund Little League.)

 

Some clowns were enjoyable or at any rate tolerable, like Nancy Sykeman with her rusted-out Rambler Rebel; pro baseball had its star oddballs, like Bill “Spaceman” Lee and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych.  But some jokers belonged in an asylum from the goddamned get-go—and Dennis Desmond belonged at the top of that list.

 

Before Avery could recommend that he get his ass committed to the nearest loonybin, Desmond dashed off to the far end of the bleachers for closer scrutiny of Snickers Paar as she attempted high jumps.  Just as well, too—better he should leer at Snickers with those unhinged yellow eyes of his.  She, though hardly a large girl, was something of a “cherrystone”; Vicki was most definitely a “littleneck.”  Snickers could look after her hardboiled self even while dealing with the likes of Desmond; Vicki would try, as she had when hassled by Zal Tergeist, but most likely end up in need of another rescue.  Which Avery would have to undertake, even if it meant racing into a burning building or swimming out to a sinking ship.

 

Vicki, as if sensing this, gave him a Jontue-scented hug when she left the locker room post-practice.

 

“What’s this for?”

 

“Being here on your afternoon off.”  (No baseball game or workout today; no Leading House assignments till tomorrow.)

 

“Well, I’m your ride.”

 

“Yes you are,” she said, following up the hug with a kiss on the lips.  Bolder-than-usual behavior from her; something a fellow could get used to.

 

“Go for a snack?”

 

“Want to try Wag’s again?  I’m hungrier today—no Sweet Sixteens this weekend.  But maybe you lost your appetite, talking to Dennis Desmond?”

 

“Saw that, did you?”

 

“All of us girls sort of have a Dennis-radar when he hangs around.”

 

Escorting her through the corridors and into the parking lot, Avery was vigilant for the miscreant in question.  “Now listen, always be on your guard against that one—”

 

“Don’t forget, I kicked him out of his own International Harvester Wagonmaster.”

 

“...when was this?”

 

“Oh, way last fall.  After I’d got knocked silly by a volleyball to the face and had to stay home, where Dennis drove a bunch of my friends (in his Camaro that time, not the Wagonmaster) and ordered Chinese food for all of us and talked me into going to the drive-in the day of that humongous rainstorm, which he tried to drag me out into the middle of but I kicked him out instead (of the Wagonmaster, not the Camaro) and then he and Rags Ragnarsson sort of did a standup skinnydip while the drive-in flooded and Jenna and I and Isabel Carstairs honked for the police.  Didn’t you hear about this?  I thought everybody at school had.  Well, it was a long time ago.  Incidentally that’s when Jenna became my big sister, so I’m not sorry it happened.  Anyway since then he’s pretty much left me alone, Dennis I mean, but he bothered the heck out of my friend Laurie—do you know her, Laurie Harrison? she’s a lot better now—and Gigi Pyle before they sent her to Peru, and also Cheryl Trevelyan who kind of resorted to voodoo to spook him off.  That blew my mind, Cheryl’s no pushover, though of course she’d just got knocked silly by Stu Nugent dumping her in front of the whole cafeteria.  But she had to use a skullfaced amulet to get rid of Dennis, and all I needed was one good kick with a platform clog.”

 

(The word to describe it was spelled b-a-d-a-s-s-e-r-y...)

 

Slightly dazed, Avery handed her into the Mustang’s shotgun seat.  Full of surprises, this one was.  Her smooth unlined sixteen-year-old face was impressed just below the surface, almost lithographically, by everything she’d ever experienced.  Painful occurrences left no disfiguring mark, but strengthened and tempered her natural prettiness into a resilient annealed beauty—of inner as well as outer nature.  And here she was, seated in his car, eager to be fed.

 

Bomber cleared his throat (if not his mind) as he settled behind the wheel.  “Guess I ought to start calling you ‘Bombshell.’”

 

“Awwww,” went Vicki, squeezing his arm.  “What a sweet thing to say!”

 

 

 * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

 

 * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Return to Chapter 51                          Proceed to Chapter 53