My eyes have the expression
Of the cold eyes of statues
Watching their pigeons return
From the feed you have scattered.
'Jesus God,' as Franny has said. 'Who'd want to meet him?'
But Lilly was lovely to know -- except, perhaps, to herself. Lilly wanted her words to be love
ly, but her words let her down.
It's remarkable how Franny and I once thought of Frank as the King of Mice; we had Frank figured all wrong. We underestimated Frank, from the beginning. He was a hero, but he needed to get to that point in time when he would be signing all our checks, and telling us how much we could spend on this or that, in order for us to recognize the hero that Frank had always been.
No, Lilly was our King of Mice. 'We should have known!' Franny would wail, and wail. 'She was just too small!'
And so Lilly is lost to us, now. She was the sorrow we never quite understood; we never saw through her disguises. Perhaps Lilly never grew quite large enough for us to see.
She authored one masterpiece, which she never gave herself enough credit for. She wrote the screenplay for the movie starring Chipper Dove; she was the writer and director of that opera, in the grand tradition of Schlagobers and blood. She knew just how far to go with that story. It was The Evening of the Mind that didn't live up to her own expectations, and the difficulty she had trying to begin again -- trying to write the book that would have been called, ambitiously, Everything After Childhood. That isn't even a Donald Justice line; that was Lilly's own idea, but she couldn't live up to it, either.
When Franny drinks too much, she gets pissed off at the power Donald Justice had over Lilly; Franny sometimes gets drunk enough to blame poor Donald Justice for what happened to Lilly. But Frank and I are always the first to assure Franny that it was quality that killed Lilly; it was the end of The Great Gatsby, which was not her ending, which was not an ending within her grasp. And once Lilly said, 'Damn that Donald Justice, anyway! He's written all the good lines!'
He may have written the last line my sister Lilly read. Frank found Lilly's copy of Donald Justice's Night Light, opened to page 20, the page dog-eared many times, and the one line at the top of the page was circled and circled -- in lipstick, once, and in several different tones of ink from several different ballpoint pens; even in lowly pencil.
I do not think the ending can be right.
That might have been the line that drove Lilly to it.
It was a February night. Franny was out on the West Coast; Franny couldn't have saved her. Father and I were in Maine; Lilly knew we went to bed early. Father was on his third Seeing Eye dog at the time. Sacher was gone, a victim of overeating. The little blond dog with the perky, yapping bark, the one that was hit by a car -- its vice was chasing cars, fortunately not when Father was attached -- that one was gone too; Father called her Schlagobers because she had a disposition like whipped cream. The third one was a farter, but only in this way did he bear an unpleasant resemblance to Sorrow; it was another German shepherd, but a male this time, and Father insisted that his name be Fred. That was also the name of the handyman at the third Hotel New Hampshire -- a deaf retired lobsterman named Fred. Whenever Father called any dog -- when he called Sacher, when he called Schlagobers -- Fred the handyman would cry, 'What?' from whatever part of the hotel he was working in. The whole thing irritated Father so much (and so much, unspokenly, reminded us both of Egg) that Father always threatened to name the next dog Fred.
'Since that old fool Fred will answer whenever I call the dog, anyway, no matter what name I'm calling!' Father shouted. 'Jesus God, if he's going to be calling out "What?" all the time, we might as well get the name right.'
So Seeing Eye Dog Number Three was Fred. His only bad habit was that he tried to hump the cleaning woman's daughter whenever the little girl strayed from her mother's side. Fred would goofily pin the little girl to the ground, and start humping her, and the little girl would scream, 'No, Fred!' And the cleaning woman would holler, 'Cut it out, Fred!' and whack Fred with a mop or a broom, or with whatever was handy. And Father would hear the fracas and know what was going on, and he'd yell, 'Goddamn it, Fred, you horny bastard! Get your ass over here, Fred!' And the deaf handyman, the retired lobsterman, our other Fred, would cry out, 'What? What?' And I'd have to go find him (because Father refused) and tell him, 'NOT YOU, FRED! NOTHING, FRED!'
'Oh,' he'd say, going back to work. 'Thought somebody called.'
So it would have been hopeless for Lilly to call us in Maine. We wouldn't have been able to do much more for her than yell 'Fred!' a few times.
What Lilly tried to do was call Frank. Frank wasn't that far from her; he might have helped. We tell him, now, that he might have helped her that time, but in the long run, we know, doom floats. Lilly got Frank's answering service, anyway. Frank had replaced his live answering service with one of those mechanical services, with one of those infuriating recordings of himself.
HI! FRANK HERE -- BUT ACTUALLY I'M NOT HERE (HA HA). ACTUALLY, I'M OUT. WANT TO LEAVE A MESSAGE? WAIT FOR THE LITTLE SIGNAL AND TALK YOUR HEART OUT.
Franny left many messages that made Frank cross. 'Go fuck a doughnut, Frank!' Franny would scream into the infuriating machine. 'It costs me money every time that fucking device answers me -- I'm in fucking Los Angeles, Frank, you moron, you dip-shit, you turd in a birdbath!' And then she'd make all sorts of farting sounds, and very liquid kisses, and Frank would call me, disgusted, as usual.
'Honestly,' he'd say. 'I don't understand Franny at all. She just left the most disgusting message on my tape recorder! I mean, I know she thinks she's being funny, but doesn't she know that we've all heard quite enough of her vulgarity? At her age, it hardly becomes her any longer -- if it ever did. You've cleaned up your language, I wish you'd make an effort to clean up hers.'
And on and on.
Lilly's message must have scared Frank. And he probably didn't come in from his evening date very long after she had called; he put the machine on and listened to his messages as he was brushing his teeth, getting ready to go to bed.
They were mostly business things. The tennis player he represents had gotten in some difficulty over a deodorant commercial. A screenwriter called to say that a director was 'manipulating' him, and Frank made a fast mental note -- to the effect that this writer needed lots of 'manipulation.' A famous choreographer had bogged down in her autobiography; she was blocked in her childhood, she confided to Frank, who just kept brushing his teeth. He rinsed his mouth, turned off the bathroom light, and then heard Lilly.
'Hi, it's me,' she said, apologetically -- to the machine. Lilly was always apologizing. Frank smiled and untucked his bedcovers; he always put his dressmaker's dummy in bed before he crawled in. There was a long pause on the machine and Frank thought the thing was broken; it often was. But then Lilly added, 'It's just me.' Something about the tiredness in her voice made Frank check the time of night, and made him listen with some anxiety. In the pause that followed, Frank remembers whispering her name. 'Go on, Lilly,' he whispered.
And Lilly sang her little song, just a little snatch of a song; it was one of the Heurigen songs -- a silly, sad song, a King of Mice song. Frank knew the song by heart, of course.
Yerkauft's mei G'wand, I Fahr in Himmel.